Over the weekend, thousands of anti-Trump advocates gathered for “No Kings” protests across the country, but their aims were not directed at constitutional norms; instead, they are engaged in a protest against the President’s authority over the Executive Branch.
The chief issue in Washington since the second Trump inauguration is whether the commander-in-chief is empowered to control the Executive Branch, which houses nearly all federal agencies.
The Vesting Clause answers that question with absolute certainty: The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
In response to the Trump administration’s efforts to abolish the government’s vast censorship apparatus, however, Democrats and judicial activists offer an anti-constitutional alternative for the country: The power to fire taxpayer-funded bureaucrats or reduce their funding shall be vested in no person.
In April, Secretary of State Rubio announced the closure and defunding of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Under Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, the GEC was instrumental in silencing dissent, as it worked to “limit the reach of, the circulation of, and render unprofitable, disfavored press outlets by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press,” according to one lawsuit.
But this week, California District Judge Susan Illston upended the President’s control of the executive branch and ordered Secretary Rubio to halt the abolishment of R/FIMI. According to Judge Illston, not only is the Ministry of Truth permitted to censor Americans for alleged “disinformation,” such as the Hunter Biden laptop, the lab-leak theory, or natural immunity; but the Constitution actually prohibits the president from exercising control over the State Department.
Unsurprisingly, the “No Kings” crowd offered no pushback to the judge’s defense of a censorious cabal’s entitlement to taxpayer funding.
This is familiar territory for Judge Illston. Previously, she issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting President Trump from “reorganizing” or “reducing” staff at 22 executive branch agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (annual budget, $1.8 trillion), the Social Security Administration (annual budget, $1.5 trillion), the Department of Veterans Affairs (annual budget, $350 billion), and the Treasury Department (annual budget, $1.3 trillion).
Illston is not alone. After President Trump ordered “all executive departments and agencies to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS,” the outlets responded that the First Amendment requires the disbursement of taxpayer funds to their operations.
In February, five former Secretaries of the Treasury wrote in the New York Times that the nation’s payment system is “operated by a very small group” of “career civil servants” and that allowing the duly appointed members of the Executive Branch to change that bureaucratic mandate would be “unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”
More recently, judges have blocked the President from exercising control over the Department of Education, the border, the NIH, and the National Guard.
Viewed as a whole, President Trump’s opponents insist that they have an unalienable right to taxpayer funding, control over the citizenry, and deployment of government resources. They fight for a monarchy without splendor, and their aim is to usurp the President’s explicit authority to control the executive branch, as the Constitution makes clear.
So we live amidst the grave irony. Many of the people who came out to proclaim loyalty to no king only recently were pushing for business, school, and church closures without legislation, in addition to wild social protocols, travel restrictions, pharmaceutical controls, limits on gatherings, and forced masking and injections, all forced under conditions of quasi-martial law.
This is the same crowd that is now proclaiming to be against kings. The question is: what do they favor? If the lockdown era is any indication, this is a movement not about freedom and self-government but of millions of Lilliputians – in the public and private sectors, elites with high incomes and job security – throttling, tethering, and restricting the freedom of the people and funding their armies of bureaucrats with taxes and debt.
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