No. of Recommendations: 6
I can't see the original post, but there are indeed some apt parallels to FDR.
We've kind of lost the sense of it, with the passage of time, but FDR also was a President who was heedless of the traditional assumptions of how the federal government should operate, what its constraints were, and what was an appropriate exercise of federal (vs. state) authority. He was also reviled by his opponents as a tyrant who willfully smashed through all the "guardrails" of what a Republic should be and his unrestrained political broadsides at the judiciary - the anti-New Dealers were just as appalled by his court-packing plan as we are today of Trump's political attacks on the lower levels of the judiciary.
FDR fundamentally changed what America regarded as the appropriate way the federal government should work and what powers should be vested in the Executive. He basically created the modern administrative structure. His opponents were aghast that he was not honoring how things had always been done before, or what the Supreme Court had previously said were the appropriate limits of the federal government. Because the federal government then proceeded to work that way for the next century, we don't have a "feeling" of how dramatic that break was at the time. But it was revolutionary (small "r"), a fundamental change that was shocking and dramatic at the time....but came to feel normal because it was the way things were going forward.
I think Trump is doing much the same thing, here. For most of the last 80 years - the life of the Administrative state - we've had a particular practice of how the federal government operates in executing the laws. I guess we can think of it as a "shared priorities" system. Basically, all the folks in the Executive Branch worked for the federal government - and since the federal government was run by both the President and Congress, the federal employees would work to implement the priorities of both the President and Congress.
The consequence of that is to force/allow federal employees to "serve two masters." They listen to what the President wants them to do (through the Department secretaries that are their bosses), and they listen to what Congress wants them to do (as expressed through direct conversation and interaction with Congressbeings through oversight, budget, and other meetings). This puts the federal employees in something of a difficult position when those masters have different priorities, as often happens. It also gives them a lot of power and discretion, for when Congress and the President want different things, there's a legitimate basis for the federal employees to do either of those things.
Trump is changing that entirely. His approach is that while the federal government is run by both the President and Congress, they have entirely different roles due to their different functions. Congress makes the laws, the President executes the laws - and since the President executes the laws, federal employees are supposed to implement just the President's priorities. Only the President "executes" the laws. Congress gets to make the laws under the legislative power, and then they have to butt out and let the President run the government.
For those who think that Trump will have a negative place in history because of this, I think FDR is a caution against that. FDR's opponents were relegated to the dustbin of history, not FDR, because FDR's changes lasted. So FDR isn't remembered as a person who "broke the Republic," but a person who created the modern national government. Trump might equally be remembered not as a person who broke democracy, but as the President who reformed the Executive to make it responsive to the election choices of the people rather than the "dead hand" of Congress as wielded by federal staff.
