“Today, Congress is evidently unembarrassed about being mostly a spectator in the bleachers at the game of government. And it probably regrets the court’s major questions doctrine, which is: If Congress intends to authorize executive agencies to make decisions with large economic and political consequences, it must clearly say so. The court can further discomfit Congress, constructively, by curbing its power to delegate its core powers. The vexing problem, inescapable when power is vested in a single executive, is how to circumscribe his or her discretion. Hence, the title of Harvard political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield Jr.’s 1989 study of executive power: ‘Taming the Prince.’ Today’s challenge is to ‘recage the executive lion,’ says University of Virginia law professor Saikrishna Prakash in ‘The Living Presidency’ (2020).” (03/21/25)
“This week, here at Common Sense, we did not celebrate the birthday of Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), whom some of my friends regard as the last great president of these United States. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tuesday’s Today feature. Is there any reason to devote a column to him? Sure …” (03/21/25)
“During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised many things: streamlining the federal government, securing borders, mass deportations, lowering prices, and imposing tariffs on rival countries. Yet, among these promises, he never mentioned annexing Canada or Greenland. For voters who chose Trump as the lesser of two evils — and even for hardcore supporters — his recent rhetoric comes as a shock. This was not on the ballot. … Whether he’s serious or just tossing out red meat to his base, the idea’s been lighting up social media and dinner table debates. But let’s cut through the noise: Could he actually do it? And if he pulled it off, what would happen next?” (03/21/25)
“I took office as secretary of Education with a mission unlike any of my predecessors: to oversee the responsible and permanent closure of the very department I now lead. This is not a routine mission. It is a transformation, driven by the clear will of the American people to return education to the states — and the decisive election of President Donald Trump. This is not my first experience leading a federal agency. In Trump’s first term, I was at the helm of the Small Business Administration, an agency established in the 1950s to support entrepreneurial startups and privately owned companies. Both on my watch and in years previous, the SBA delivered measurable success for job creators and workers. Small businesses have doubled in number since 1980, creating two-thirds of all new jobs in the past 25 years.” (03/21/25)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nick Cleveland-Stout & William Hartung
“President Trump is working on delivering what could be a big win for U.S. arms contractors. Politico Pro reported on Thursday that the White House is currently ‘drafting an executive order aimed at streamlining the federal government’s process of selling weapons overseas.’ The text of the executive order has not yet been released, but a source familiar with the order confirmed it will boost arms contractor interests and reduce congressional oversight by stripping down parts of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), the law that governs the arms export process.” (03/22/25)
“Many people, including some free-market advocates, think Americans are materially worse off today than they were in the 1970s. Some subscribers to that view blame globalization, that is, free trade in goods, which means in labor services. By any reasonable measure, those people are wrong. Stagnation is a myth. Living standards have never been higher. That goes for an increasing portion of the rest of the world too. After thousands of years, extreme poverty has plummeted to under 10 percent in just a few decades.” (03/21/25)
“Critics of right-wing populism, whether in the U.S. or abroad, have emphasized its minoritarian tendencies and diagnosed them as the most prominent symptom of ‘democratic backsliding.’ But there is a problem with this account, which is that almost no one who studies how public policy has actually been made in the United States over the last half-century would characterize the status quo from which we are supposedly backsliding as mostly majoritarian. In fact, the most salient changes in how we make public policy – changes that were mostly driven by the center-left — over the last half century — have made policymaking pervasively less majoritarian. It may thus be best to understand right-wing populism as a reaction to minoritarianism, at least as much as an instance of it.” (03/21/25)
“On April 1, Wisconsin voters will decide the ideological bent of their state’s Supreme Court in an election that has drawn the attention and cash of Elon Musk. The two candidates vying for a ten-year term are liberal trial court judge Susan Crawford and former Republican attorney general and current trial court judge Brad Schimel. The election is technically apolitical—the candidates don’t run as Democrats or Republicans—but in reality it’s anything but. The election comes after the retirement of liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley last year. Since a 2023 Supreme Court election, the court has had a liberal majority for the first time in over a decade. Now, Justice Bradley’s retirement and the upcoming election threaten to throw that balance back to conservatives. The consequences of a conservative majority on the court would be wide-ranging, potentially handing conservatives victories on abortion, elections, and organized labor.” (03/21/25)
“President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: ‘The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.’ That is interesting language: to ‘take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure’ is not the same as closing it. And what is ‘permitted by law’ is precisely what is in dispute. It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.” (03/21/25)
“In most southern states prior to the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, teaching a slave (or, in some cases, anyone with dark skin) to read and write was punishable by fine or imprisonment if the teacher was white, flogging if the teacher was black. As relatives of antebellum slaveholders go, the jealous beneficiaries of ‘intellectual property’ laws aren’t especially distant. The former claimed to own their subjects’ bodies first, and secondarily, as the anti-literacy laws demonstrated, minds. The latter merely reverse those priorities. Nor are their reasons dissimilar. Slaveholders believed that, absent a property rights claim on other bodies, their plantation-based economic model would collapse. Copyright holders believe that absent a property rights claim on other minds, the journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and actors of the world might have to find other jobs.” (03/20/25)
