George Hahn

I have no idea what Musk intends to do with his power, and that's the scary part.

He's unelected and answers to no one, as we now live in a society where billionaires are protected by the law, but not bound by it.

Even scarier, Musk may not know either.

See, ketamine.

To paraphrase Richard Pryor, ketamine is a hell of a drug.

I tried it once under therapeutic supervision.

Shit got real and unreal fast.

As Shayla Love wrote in The Atlantic, excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world.

For most people, the danger of that delusion is contained inside a relatively small blast zone.

The addict, their friends and family, their world.

In Musk's case, his world is our world.

Last weekend, an estimated 8 million Americans participated in No Kings protests.

The rallies speak to the moment, but the demonstrators concerned are as old as America.

As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers No.

47,

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

After fighting a revolution against a monarch, the Constitution's framers split power across three branches of government, devising a system of checks and balances to put each branch in tension with the other two.

Cumbersome by design, we spent the next 230 years reassembling the king.

The Constitution grants the power to tax and regulate foreign commerce exclusively to Congress.

But according to Duke law professor Timothy Meyer, functionally, trade policy has been dominated by the executive branch since the 1930s.