The Daily Dose: Checks and Balances

In Trump's authoritarian regime, the real power lies with us.

Over the weekend, several Congressional Democrats were barred from performing their Constitutional oversight duties at ICE facilities nationwide. Reps. Maxine Waters, Jimmy Gomez, and Norma Torres were denied entry to the Metropolitan Federal Detention Center in Los Angeles. Reps. Gilbert R. Cisneros Jr., Judy Chu, and Derek Tran were blocked from an ICE facility in Adelanto, California. Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Nydia Velázquez received the same treatment at a Manhattan facility.

Congressional oversight is essential to the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. It is designed to prevent the executive branch from abusing its authority. However, the system only works so long as there are actual people in positions of power who are committed to its preservation.

But if the president, his officials, and the leaders of his party do not give a damn, the system ceases to function. This is the situation in which America now finds itself.

All of this underscores a point I have made repeatedly in this newsletter, which is that the traditional guardrails that once reined in executive overreach have become obsolete.

On paper, Congress has oversight powers. In practice, the president is not letting it exercise these powers and no one in any position of authority is willing to make him.

On paper, the judiciary is empowered to review the executive’s decisions. In practice, the job of enforcing the judiciary’s rulings falls to the same executive branch that is defying them.

Now that the United States has transitioned to authoritarianism, there remain only two loci of power. The first and most obvious one is the executive branch. These are the guys with the guns, and they serve at the president’s behest.

But there is a second locus of power, too: civil society. What civil society lacks in guns, it makes up for in something much more formidable: the power to determine whether the president has legitimacy.

Legitimacy, you may recall, is the belief among the members of a society that the leader has the right to govern them. Legitimacy is a far more effective means of commanding obedience than are the other available methods, coercion and rewards. When the people believe that you have the right to rule, they will continue obeying even when you are not bribing them or holding a gun to their heads.

Just as legitimacy is given, however, so it can be taken away. If the leader breaks the rules that determine the lawful scope of his authority, the people might decide that he has lost his legitimacy. At that point, they can remove him by any available means, legal or not.

But who, specifically, decides when a leader has lost legitimacy? It is not the guy sitting on his couch eating pizza. Instead, it is civil society—the organizations, activists, trade unions, business associations, and everyday protesters who represent the people vis-à-vis the state. The guy on the couch might have an opinion, but his opinion does not matter—unless and until he goes out and mobilizes with the rest of civil society.

For this reason, Trump's authoritarianism will be only as repressive as civil society allows it to be—no more, no less.

Right now, in Los Angeles, we are witnessing the most important showdown to date in Trump's presidency. On one side is Trump and the brute force he commands. On the other is American civil society. This showdown, and others like it in the coming years, will determine the particular shape of his autocratic regime—and whether it will survive at all.