The primary drivers in the creation of the federal Constitution — James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — saw the several states more as problems to be solved or perhaps obstacles to be worked around than critical features of the new American national government they hoped to create. But that’s not how things worked out. The United States does in fact have a federal system, which chief justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase, just after the Civil War in 1869, described as an “indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.” That is a critical, central fact for anyone thinking about how to defy, delay and undo Donald Trump’s lawless effort to remake the American Republic into an autocracy.

In unitary states, lines of authority go from president or prime minister down to local officials. That’s not true in our federal system. The federal law is superior to state law. But governors don’t work for presidents. Nor do any other officials in state governments, whether they’re governors to state attorneys general or county commissioners or mayors. (The very important exception to this rule are the state National Guards, which in certain circumstances can be federalized and put at the command of the president — a key and potentially ominous detail we’ll return to.) What this means is that there are great stores of legitimate political power and authority in the United States which exist independent of the federal government and the power of the president. Inferior to that power, yes. But independent of it still. And that’s critical.

It’s hard to write clearly when you’re being flooded with new information. But here goes. I’ve heard people arguing the “‘yes’ on cloture” argument, essentially saying, “don’t assume you can shut DOGE down, undo the damage. It’s not a silver bullet.” I can only speak for myself, but if anyone is thinking, based on the arguments I’ve made, that blocking cloture is a silver bullet and if Democrats just do this we can shut this whole thing down, I haven’t been clear. I will further say that while the things I’ve written over the last week or so make it pretty clear where I stand on this, I have several times had a hard think with myself: are you sure you’re right about this? I’m not sure I’d say this is a close call. But it’s a hard call, for me at least. Both options hold out possibilities of calamity and destruction I’ve never seriously contemplated before. That is simply where we are. I wish we weren’t here. But we are here.

As I’ve written, my ask would be, right out of the gate, “we’ll give you the keys, we’ll give you your bill, if we write down the DOGE plan for each department and agency. And we just do an up or down vote. If you can pass it through Congress, that’s all we ask.” (I’ve explained previously why I think this is a good idea.)

In the era that I studied when I was still part of the academic world, one recurrent topic was that of “over-mighty subjects.” This was more a reality of the 15th and 16th centuries, just before my period, the eras of the Yorkists and Lancastrians and the Tudors. But the fear hung over the British Isles and thus over their American colonies well into the 17th and 18th centuries. The term referred to subjects of the Crown who were themselves so powerful that they threatened the sovereign power of the Crown itself. They might command more wealth, hold castles and walled cities. They might command retinues that verged on private armies notwithstanding their notional obedience to the King. (The problem resurfaced in the late 18th century in the different, commercialized form of the British East Indian Company, which used its geyser of cash to quite effectively corrupt the House of Commons.) In the U.S. we have no sovereign; or, more specifically, we have no sovereign head of state. But there is a sovereign, the American people. This architectonic fact of the American order is written into every document that undergirds the Republic, from the founding charters to the simplest phrasings that permeate judicial proceedings where prosecutors appear in court representing “the people.”

(Ed. Note: I go into a lot of detail below. The bottom line is Democrats have about 48 hours to convince D senators to clip Elon’s wings. It’s still totally doable. But it has to happen in the next 48 hours.)

We’re now down to the wire with the so-called “continuing resolution” fight. And just to take this out of Congress-speak, this is a temporary spending bill that will keep the government running, such as it is, until Republicans can pass their full budget in the early fall — that’s the one that will slash health care coverage and other safety net spending to give the Elon crowd a massive tax cut. After almost two months of a criminal wilding spree on the republic, interspersed with lots of “cry more!”s and “sucks to be you”s, Republicans now come to Democrats and say: hey, now we need your help to keep going. The bill is essentially a license for Elon to keep the party going right through the fall.

The bill is being billed as a “clean CR” — in other words, just a continuation of the Biden budget. That’s not true. It’s the Biden-era stuff plus new money for a bunch of Trump priorities. What it doesn’t do is lock in the Musk-illegal cuts. What that also means is that it appropriates a bunch of money for stuff Elon has already shut down. So where’s that money go exactly?

One of Elon Musk’s Starship rockets exploded over the Gulf of Mexico early yesterday evening, creating a spectacular fireworks-like display and disrupting commercial air traffic from Florida up through the eastern seaboard. Flight radar maps showed numerous commercial airliners in the eastern Caribbean scrambling to leave the debris zone. Starship is SpaceX’s new mega-rocket intended for missions to the moon and possibly Mars. I want to flag a couple details.

Musk had a running feud with former FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker and is generally believed to have helped force Whitaker into retirement when Donald Trump was sworn in in January, though the precise details are murky. Musk had claimed repeatedly that he was over-regulated by the FAA, especially after the agency fined SpaceX $633,000 for launching rockets with unapproved changes. He repeatedly called for Whitaker’s resignation and accused the FAA of “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing even after NASA concluded that their spacecraft was not safe enough to bring back the astronauts.” The FAA also had to fine Starlink for skirting safety regulations.

This article from the Post is just one jaw-dropper after another. Musk met yesterday with Republican senators and then the House GOP caucus. Notionally it’s about communication. The folks on the Hill are getting a bit unhappy there’s a “lack of communication” about DOGE plans to shut down departments and unilaterally rewrite the federal budget. The Republicans want more details about what Musk’s doing, which — setting aside the infinite absurdities of this moment — would seem reasonable enough. They’re Congress after all. They’re literally in charge of this stuff. Read this graf …

Musk told a group of Republican senators in a closed-door lunch that he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns, senators said. Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get problematic cuts reversed quickly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said.

There’s a budget, appropriated money that defines what the government does and provides the money to do it. But Musk, absent any visibility even for much of the executive branch, is simply changing everything. But wait … he’s going to set up a system where Republican members of Congress can call and ask to “get problematic cuts reversed quick.”

What the fuck?

Democrats need to be on the ground in states like Iowa, supporting local Democrats who can start building the case now against Sen. Joni Ernst (R) and other pro-Trump politicians, whoever ends up winning the right to challenge her as the Democratic nominee. I’m not saying Ernst will lose. It will be a very difficult race. Iowa has rapidly gone from a textbook swing state to a reliably red one in presidential elections. But people forget how rapidly things can change in a political climate in which visible, core political decisions by elected officials have tangible and deep impacts on ordinary people’s lives. People forget what happened between 2004 and 2006. They forget what happened between 2008 and 2010, though I think the first is the more relevant analog. There’s 2018 too. But I think we’ll find 2018 isn’t that true an analog.

For almost a year I’ve been thinking through an idea that now seems especially timely and relevant in the last six weeks. I think of it as a form of civic sede vacantism. The reference is, ironically, to a strain of hyper-traditionalist Catholic thought which held (still holds) that none of Vatican II canons or the successive Popes counted because they were heretical and heretics. A bit more complicated than that. But details of that really aren’t relevant for us. I just found the defining metaphor or concept helpful. The key is their idea that the papal throne was empty. That’s the meaning of the Latin phrase, sede vacante. My interest and concern with this grew out of my belief that civic democrats in the US have far too great an essentialism about the law and constitutional jurisprudence, especially under the corrupted federal judiciary as it now exists. It breeds a kind of fatalism and passivity which casts a pall over thought and political action.

I know I’ve thrown around a lot of big and perhaps obscure ideas. So let me get down to concrete specifics. In Trump v. United States last year the Supreme Court claimed that Presidents have wide immunity from criminal law after they leave the presidency. For many people this was an ‘everything changed’ moment. It did in effect end Trump’s prosecution. But now that’s the law, as so many people I know put it. Only it’s not. This isn’t a decision I disagree with. It’s simply wrong. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments. To me, among all the other areas of flawed and disingenuous reasoning, we have the simple fact that the authors of the constitution knew precisely how to confer immunity on public officials. They did it with Congress. But again, I’m not trying to rehearse the specific arguments. Others have already made them on the particulars better than I can. I’m saying that we must disengage from the idea that this is what the law is. It’s not. These are fraudulent decisions.

The Atlanta Fed has again lowered its projection for first quarter 2025 GDP. It had been predicting growth of 2.3%. At the end of last week that was revised to 1.5% contraction and this morning they were again down-revised 2.8% contraction, or in other words 2.8% negative growth. To be clear these aren’t final or official stats. We’re only two-thirds of the way through the quarter. They are a prediction based on current indicators. But if it’s not clear that would mean a steep move into recession. And the numbers which presage that outcome are largely tied to general economic uncertainty and various collective economic decisions based on the expectations of a dramatic ramp up in U.S. tariffs and tariff retaliation.

There’s such a sea of chaotic information we’re all drifting through in these days that it is terribly difficult to find out precisely what is going on, to find the patterns that can bring the larger story into focus. I want to point to one of those patterns I noticed or which was brought to my attention last night. I think I’m the first to highlight this, though I may be wrong about that. Not trying to claim an exclusive; I want to point to the significance of the detail.

Let’s start with my story from last night about the abrupt and reckless cancelation of upwards of a thousand VA contracts totaling roughly $2 billion and covering a huge variety of work VA does, everything from funeral care to doctor recruitment. As I reported last night, VA contract officers were sent an Excel spreadsheet of almost a thousand contracts in the early morning of February 21st, told that all of these contracts should be canceled and that if anyone wanted to make a case to spare individual contracts they had until the end of business that day (February 21st) to make their case. My sources noted that the contract code on all of these contracts was NAICS – 541611, which is “Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services.” It’s very clear the DOGE people pulled up everything under that label and slated it to be cut. My sources’ impressions are that the DOGErs making these decisions read that label as basically, McKinsey/MBA consulting type bullshit, easy stuff to cut. At VA, most of it wasn’t that at all. But they didn’t seem to make any attempt to look under the hood at what those contracts were.