If you wanted to create an authoritarian presidency...
...you could start by neutering Congress. Just ask Steve Bannon.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is leading an effort to threaten Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) with removal, mere months after marshaling a similar campaign that deposed former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the same office last October.
Bannon’s War Room podcast has now served as the staging ground for two successive attacks on the top leadership position in the House of Representatives, which Republicans control with a narrow majority going into 2024. The fights have mostly centered around federal spending levels and Republican attempts to further militarize the U.S. southern border. Bannon and his guests have consistently opposed any attempts by McCarthy — and now, Johnson — to make any compromises at all with House Democrats, the Senate, or the White House.
I have no insight into Steve Bannon’s thinking.
But.
If — hypothetically speaking — one wanted to give one’s favored presidential candidate the opportunity, a year or so from now, to act with relatively unfettered, even authoritarian powers as president, one might…
Try to neuter Congress.
By, say, making it impossible for the legislative branch to even really function
One could refuse to work with other branches to make deals on the basics of governing, like coming up with the yearly budget.
And you could toss out — or threaten to toss out — the person running things every few months ago. At the very least, you’d keep Congress in a state of chaos. And you’d still make it impossible to get that budget deal.
Then rinse and repeat as often as necessary.
Sooner or later, a president might decide to claim powers for himself because Congress is unable to act.
Again, I don’t know what Steve Bannon is thinking. I’m not saying this is his plan.
But I am saying it’s a possible — even likely — byproduct of his machinations.
Now: Congress has done plenty to neuter itself. It’s given the White House the ability to bypass it with the use of emergency declarations. It’s more or less abandoned its warmaking powers to the presidency. And it’s become a branch whose conservative members seem more interested in getting on Fox News than in governing.
All of this was under way before Donald Trump ever hit the scene.
If — a year or two down the road — we find ourselves on the wrong side of the end of our Constitutional crisis, well, the fecklessness of Congress will have helped get us there. Steve Bannon didn’t invent this mess. But he’s sure as hell promoting it.
What I’m watching
I have in middle age become a huge fan of Barbara Stanwyck, whose typical movie role has her playing a sexy shady lady who often drives good men to break bad. Forty Guns is a late role for her, and it’s deliciously strange. It’s the Tombstone story, almost down to the exact beat, except that Stanwyck is cast in the Curly Bill role — part of a seemingly doomed and definitely weird romance with the Wyatt Earp character who is also not named Wyatt Earp. It also has some of the most specatcular black-and-white cinematography of the era, plus racy dialogue that often walks a very fine line given the era’s restrictions. Is this a good movie? Maybe not. Is it interesting? Definitely.
I still don't understand why Democrats in the House aren't just picking random Republican members of the Problem Solvers Caucus to nominate. Don't ask permission, don't warn them, just do what you have to do to get a name on the next Speaker ballot. Make sure there's some Republican vaguely invested in getting things done who is *able to win*. If they play ball, you get to hand Biden bipartisan legislative wins going into 2024. If they don't, then you can say that the squish Republicans in competitive districts are unambiguously unwilling to push back on the most extreme, insane demands from the chaos caucus. If Democrats do nothing, we stay stuck in the Jordan-or-McCarthy paradigm, *as has been obvious since December of 2022*.