Pearl River      It’s sort of a key rule in life that it’s important to remember, good times and bad today, that there is always tomorrow.  These days, I sometimes wonder if anyone in Washington, in the White House, in the various departments and agencies, in this unrestrained attack on institutions, traditions, and norms today, spends any time imagining what might happen tomorrow.  There will be life after Trump.  Power today is never guaranteed to be power tomorrow, at least as long as there are still elections.  Control of either or both houses of Congress not only can change, but inevitably will change.  The President definitely won’t be Trump in 2028, and even if we are clueless now, it could be a Democrat or not a Republican, and if not then, eventually.  What happens when turnabout is fair play?

Reportedly, the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has been a huge blessing to Trump in his second term thus far, is poised to move forward on this cockamamie “unitary executive” theory to further concretize an “imperial” presidency, giving Trump the right to fire any and all in 50 currently, congressionally authorized, independent agencies.  They may or may not allow him to dictate to the Federal Reserve.  At least temporarily, they have allowed him and his administration to fire legions of federal employees, block appropriations, unilaterally dictate tariffs, and order military actions without authority or accountability.  Some of this might unravel when, and if, it actually comes to court and decision, but we’ll see, and, currently, the odds aren’t good.

These folks seem giddy with impunity now and impervious to the notion that what “goes around, comes around.”  Despite the new elimination of independence and the separation of powers, implemented by fiat and approved by the highest court, the tables will turn.  When the pendulum swings back the other way, as inevitably it will, then the “new boss will be like the old boss” and, coupled to a new mandate, there will be many demands to use all of these new and sweeping powers to impose the new statement of the people’s will.

Without the separation of powers and even the fragile hope of countervailing powers, the US will have a something more like the parliamentary form of government more in Canada and Britain, where the party in power with a majority can dictate all policy, programs, and legislation, as it wishes, as long as it holds that majority until an election changes their numbers.  Maybe the presidency will not be quite as imperial as we see in France or other countries where elections can be called willy-nilly and whole parliaments frozen or dismissed, but it will be close.  In short, winners take all.

Despite the hope we have held onto about the power of institutions and the much-vaunted separation of powers, that Trump has proven is a fiction with the support of his party control of Congress and the Supreme Court, now that is gone, so are the restraints.  If there are cries for moderation now, they are lost in the storm.  The occasional reversal from the lower courts is backstopped by the Supremes.  The refusal of Republicans in Indiana to redistrict for the president, is a mosquito bite on an elephant’s ass.  Individual ambitions may get in the way, but they won’t alter the direction of the future being plotted by decisions today.

There will be a tomorrow, sooner or later, and then we will see the same deluge that is drowning us now, drown others as fully.  If as the saying goes that “absolute power, corrupts absolutely,” it seems a new understanding of the quest for absolute power should include the fact that it is blind to the future.  Yet the certainty of tomorrow and power changing in the future, as Eugene Debs argued “…is as vain to resist it as it would be to arrest the sunrise on the morrow.”  Here it comes, like it or not, and no one in charge now, seem the wiser.