Author: Redactor

Though Paul Jacob has defended Donald Trump’s attacks upon the bureaucracy and Elon Musk’s DOGE operation, as well as found a silver lining to the president’s protectionism, the reader of Common Sense can be assured that not everything the president says or does is cheered at ThisIsCommonSense​.org.

Take the new administration’s rhetoric that “we are the federal law.”

That was in response to Maine’s Democratic governor’s objection to the Trump administration’s tying federal education funding to that states with the states’ compliance with the new policy prohibiting boys and men from participating in girls’ and women’s sports even if they call themselves women and “identify” as women.

The administration is not the law. Executive powers are limited constitutionally, and if it attempts to merely dictate policy without congressional legislation, the new administration will be breaking the law, effectively going rogue.

Of course, one way or another every administration does this on some issue, and the problem of an imperial presidency is a major concern. And has been. Since the time of Andrew Jackson!

But in this case, the Maine governor may have no legal leg to stand on in objecting to the new policy — for the policy appears to be based on existing law. Elon Musk re-​tweeted this post by Sarah Parshall Perry in response:

Maine will lose in court. Title 9 protects biological women, period. In order to get $250 million in federal funding, Maine entered into a contract with the Department of Education, promising to follow that federal civil rights law. Her reliance on contrary state law will prove fatal to any continued recalcitrance.

But Mr. Musk is nevertheless prone to the kind of loose talk that the president is. Here is a quotation of Musk, courtesy of Fox News:

Mr. Musk provides us with an argument that falls apart in at least two major points:

1. The president is not the representative of the people. He is the executive of the general government. Big difference.
2. The test of a democracy is not that “the people’s will” is implemented, at least not if that will is figured to be any given policy determined by voting. One election doesn’t give any voting bloc carte blanche to do any thing it wants. Majorities have limitations, minorities still have rights, and a system of checks and balances and state limitations circumscribes what all participants do in a democracy.

Trump and Musk both talk as if they have some sort of mandate to break the law, or embody the law. But even good things, like reducing government power, must be done in the right way.

But talk about action isn’t action as such, and each act in government should be judged on its constitutional merit.