Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There were a number of proposals on the table that would have significantly restrained presidential power that had been put forward in response to some of the abuses of the first Trump administration. Not very many of them move forward. And a lot of the reason for that, I would argue, is that Democrats in Congress didn't want to go against a Democratic administration in restraining the executive.
Now, to be clear, I think the dereliction of constitutional duty on the part of Republicans in this Congress and in the previous Trump administration is above and beyond that. And you see that in all kinds of ways, the sort of
level of silence or, you know, token protests only as the Trump administration just tramples all over Congress's constitutional authority to decide how the executive should spend funds. Last night, Republicans voted to confirm Russ' vote as the head of the Office of Management and Budget.
Vote is really the kind of intellectual architect of a lot of the ideas we've been discussing in terms of this really aggressive vision of executive power. The fact that Republicans voted to confirm someone who has explicitly said that the executive has the power to impound funds is an astonishing abdication of duty.
And there was an incredible quote, actually, from Susan Collins that I saw just before I came in here, where she essentially said, you know, I'm voting to confirm Russ' vote, and I hope that, you know, the litigation succeeds in showing that the executive does not have the ability to impound funds.
She's very concerned. But the thing about that that's astonishing is that she's concerned. She has the power to stop it. And she's saying, oh, actually, I hope that the courts can deal with that. And I think this is consistent with a broader kind of trend in how we think about the separation of powers, where people have really come to think of Congress as...
weak and as the courts, as the kind of strong institution that can provide a check here, to the extent that even the chair of the Appropriations Committee is saying that.
And so I think that there are a lot of different components to the sort of crisis that we're currently in, but the unwillingness of Congress as an institution to really step up and play its role in the constitutional order is one of the major issues that we are facing right now.
Americans often think of ourselves as exceptional. There's a whole term for it, American exceptionalism, as sort of, you know, outside of history, right? But we're not. And because of that, I think it's useful to compare what's happening now in the United States to other instances of democratic backsliding around the world.
One comparison you often see is with Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been very, very effective in dismantling Czechs and turning Hungary from a democracy into functionally an autocracy. An important area where that comparison, I think, actually breaks down and obscures more than it reveals is how Orban was able to do that.
The particulars of Hungary's governmental structure were such that he was able to sort of sweep into power the second time around with overwhelming majority support. And immediately amend the Hungarian constitution, which was very easy to do because of the way that the system had been set up. To, you know, give himself all kinds of powers and really cement his party fetuses hold on power.
In the U.S., as you say, it's the opposite problem. The problem is that it's too hard to amend the Constitution. And I think that there's an argument made by, among other people, Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, that part of the issue here is just the U.S. was kind of first out of the gate when it comes to written constitutions. We were, early on...
We didn't have the opportunity to learn from everybody else. And because of the way in which our Constitution was drafted, it is really, really hard to amend. And that means that there is a fundamental inflexibility to our political system in a way that is not true today. in many other places of the world, there are all kinds of examples of what you could do.
You could have multi-member districts in the House. You could have proportional representation. You could turn the Senate into kind of an advisory body. You could abolish the Senate altogether. My favorite ridiculous proposal is an incredible student note in the Harvard Law Review, I believe, that proposes not admitting D.C. as a state, but admitting every neighborhood in D.C. as a state.
And then using that to amend the Constitution and change the composition of the Senate. So, you know, dream big. But there are all kinds of fixes that you can imagine. The problem is that because we don't actually have the political ability to amend the Constitution in that way... We can't make them. And so the question is, how long can we stay in this brittle system before something breaks?
Or even if something breaks and whatever that looks like, what happens then?
We're in the very early stages right now, and so I think it is a little difficult to tell. There was a lot of writing... After Trump's election, in the first days of the new administration, saying, you know, the resistance is over. No one's in the streets. No one's doing the women's march. No one's, you know, wearing their pussy hats or whatever. engaging in sort of ostentatious acts of defiance.
I thought that that was premature. I think it looks particularly premature now that we are seeing real public pushback. Like I said, it's a little hard to say. A lot of this is a kind of a, let's call it a vibes-based check, and I would really love to see some numbers. But there were huge protests in front of the Treasury Department in D.C., This week, there were protests in front of the Capitol.
There were protests in front of the Labor Department. The Doge folks were supposed to have a meeting at the Labor Department in person one afternoon this week. It was moved to a Zoom meeting reportedly, possibly because there was a huge protest organized by a bunch of unions standing out front. That really matters.
I believe I saw a statement from Lisa Murkowski saying that she's been getting 40 times the amount of calls to her office that she usually receives on any given day. We now have Brian Schatz saying that he is going to put a hold on all State Department nominees immediately. until USAID is put back.
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