Zach Beecham

I've talked to a law professor about this.

It's kind of tortured, but you could do it legally.

That would force executive orders to expire without affirmative congressional approval.

Now, not only is that good just for giving Congress more power over the presidency,

It's good because it would then force individual legislators to be accountable for executive actions if they approve them.

Right now, you hear this from Republicans in Congress all the time.

They'll say, oh, what Trump is doing, it's out of my hands.

It's the president's decision.

I don't have anything to do with that.

But if they have to actually vote to approve those decisions and they won't take effect or won't continue to take effect without their approval, they can be held very literally accountable for those choices by voters.

And that might shift the way that they act in certain cases.

Yeah, look, this is a really pressing question because there isn't an obvious democratic playbook to counter the playbook that authoritarians around the world have developed for weakening democracy.

You know, they concentrate power on the executive, weaken checks on their authority, start monkeying with the way that elections are administered, go after the free press.

It's a pretty well-established playbook at this point.

And we don't have a sort of set of rules that work for democratic oppositions who, small d here, who want to be stopping that from attacking democracy.

So I've been doing a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.

And as part of that, I convened a bunch of experts on democracy from around the world to try and talk about the specific question.

We sat down, we spent a day locked in a conference room discussing lessons from Brazil and other places.

And one of the big takeaways that I got is that the conventional wisdom about fighting for democracy is wrong.

The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't talk about democracy.