Politics in Question
In this episode of the Politics in Question podcast, Colorado State Senator Faith Winter discusses the power of collaborative governance and how residents, activists, and elected officials can share in decision-making power to achieve common goals.
Sunset over cracked soil in the desert. Global warming concept
I want to offer you a different lens through which to better understand the climatological and environmental crises that we—indeed all of humanity—are facing. I would like you to view these crises through the long lens of our planet’s geologic and evolutionary history.
From the beginning of our planet’s formation, some 4.6 billion years ago, to the present there have been five major extinction events which destroyed anywhere from70% (during the Devonian Period) to 95% (at the end of the Permian Period) of all living things on earth. These extinctions were natural events: caused by some combination of rapid and dramatic changes in climate, combined with significant changes in the composition of environments on land or in the ocean brought on by plate tectonics, volcanic activity, climate change (including the super cooling or super heating of earth), decreases in oxygen levels in the deep ocean, changes in atmospheric chemistry (acid rain), changes in oceanic chemistry and circulation, and in at least one instance, a cosmological event—the massive asteroid strike inChicxulub, near what is now the Yucatan peninsula.
Contrary to climate change detractors, science-deniers and those who refuse to acknowledge the climatological and environmental crises facing us, any notion that these do not exist, will not come to fruition, or that humans will somehow subdue the earth is utter nonsense. Rather, it is the earth and cosmos that will, in due course, subdue all living things—as nature has already done, time and time again, for billions of preceding years.
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Indeed, and to that point, our planet is presently in the midst of adverse climatological changes and a sixth major extinction event—in this instance, however, both caused by human beings.
And that brings me to the new apex predator--US.
Humans--homo—evolved from a genus of apes about 2.5 million years ago. Our species, homo sapiens, evolved from these early humans, between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago. Up until a time between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago (12,000 years ago is the date most frequently cited) humans lived in small hunting and gathering groups. It was during this time forward, that various of these hunter/gatherer groups settled in larger units—villages, towns, cities, and empires--planting and harvesting food crops, domesticating animals, and dividing labor as a more efficient way of living. Modern civilization.
If one were to view this geologic and evolutionary history through the lens of a standard 12-month calendar, life first appeared on January 1st; the dinosaurs went extinct on December 25th; humans first appeared at 11:00 pm on December 31st; and modern civilization began at two minutes before midnight on December 31st.
During these two minutes homo sapiens crafted written language, digital technology, and methods to communicate information anywhere in the world in seconds. We split atoms, and harnessed their power. We sent people to the moon. Our presence in space grows more far-reaching and sophisticated each year. With our space-based telescopes, we have observed the light from a few hundred thousand years after our universe’s formation.2 We domesticated animals, and we grew agriculture on a massive scale. We invented treatments and cures for a goodly number of ills that killed many of us less than a hundred years ago. We probed the depths of the oceans. We learned how to change the structure of DNA and genes, ours included. We developed machine intelligence that will in all likelihood, itself, become sentient in not too many years. We explored the particles and forces that comprise time, space, gravity, and the laws that created us and still enable our very existence.
All of that in those two minutes.
However, in those same two minutes we also created monotheistic religions; we wrote sacred texts; and, for good and evil, we empowered priests, pontiffs, prelates, and prophets to institutionalize our sectarian myths. We governed ourselves with warlords, kings, queens, dictators, and presidents, counting among those both the wisest and most evil and ignorant leaders. We warred against each other constantly, and killed billions of us. We explored, and we decimated indigenous populations in the process. We hold on to systemic racism, sexual and gender-based phobia, misogyny, and xenophobia. We discriminate against and punish each other for our differences. And, we have fouled our nests, our waters and our air with allmanner of filth, waste, disease, pollution and, ultimately, the heat from our industriesand lifestyles equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs detonating everyday--four every second.3 Since the start of the industrial revolution we have pumped over 2000 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere—presently, about 40 billion metric tons every year; over 5000 million metric tons by the U.S. alone.
We are the first species with the power to render our kind and most otherliving things extinct; and we are exercising this power to do just that. Homo sapiens has become homo extinctor (man the destroyer, the annihilator).
All in those same two minutes.
We became so smart, so fast, that we outsmarted ourselves. Modern humans have existed but for a nanosecond of geologic time. But, look at the appalling, toxic mess that we have created in our two minutes on earth.
Indeed, if we do not change course, if we do not engage our prefrontal cortex to rein-in our limbic brain, we will not be around for the next two minutes in a new January 1st. If we are to preserve the right of this and future generations to exist in
a clean and healthful environment, then we must act.
And, make no mistake, we don’t have a million years to get our act together—that option is not on the table. We will not have another 40,000 years much less even 12,000 years--another two minutes-- to learn to respect and nurture what our planet has given us, and to try to slow the progress of the disastrous climatologic and environmental Rubicon we are destined to cross within the next six years. As it is, it will take many thousands of years, if not more, for our planet to recoup and rebalance from the excesses and mismanagement already committed in our two minutes of stewardship.
We are at the edge of the abyss. If we don’t change, homo extinctor will have destroyed most living things, and, in the end, will have annihilated our own species.
Our two minutes on earth will be over. And, we will have squandered it.
James C. Nelson is a retired attorney and served as an associate justice of the Montana Supreme Court from 1993 through 2012.
The inauguration of Donald Trump.
Before his inauguration, Donald Trump promised to issue a total of 100 or so executive orders once he regained the presidency. These orders reset government policy on everything from immigration enforcement to diversity initiatives to environmental regulation. They also aim to undo much of Joe Biden’s presidential legacy.
Trump is not the first U.S. president to issue an executive order, and he certainly won’t be the last. My own research shows executive orders have been a mainstay in American politics – with limitations.
Though the Constitution plainly articulates familiar presidential tools like vetoes and appointments, the real executive power comes from reading between the lines.
Presidents have long interpreted the Constitution’s Article 2 clauses – like “the executive power shall be vested in a President” and “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” – to give them total authority to enforce the law through the executive branch, by any means necessary.
One leading way they do that is through executive orders, which are presidential written directives to agencies on how to implement the law. The courts view them as legally valid unless they violate the Constitution or existing statutes.
Executive orders, like other unilateral actions, allow presidents to make policy outside of the regular lawmaking process.This leaves Congress, notoriously polarized and gridlocked, to respond.
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Thus, executive orders are unilateral actions that give presidents several advantages, allowing them to move first and act alone in policymaking.
Every U.S. president has issued executive orders since they were first systematically cataloged in 1905.
In March of 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized President Obama’s use of executive orders.
“Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama – because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him – he starts signing them like they’re butter,” Trump said. “So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
Little in this statement is true.
Obama signed fewer orders than his predecessors – averaging 35 per year. Trump issued an average of 55 per year.
Against conventional wisdom, presidents have relied less on executive orders over time. Indeed, modern presidents used drastically fewer orders per year – an average of 59 – than their pre-World War II counterparts, who averaged 314.
Executive orders have been used for everything from routine federal workplace policies like ethics pledges to the controversial 2017 travel ban restricting entry into the United States.
They have been used to manage public lands, the economy, the civil service and federal contractors, and to respond to various crises such as the Iran hostage situation and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Presidents often use them to advance their biggest agenda items, by creating task forces or policy initiatives and directing rulemaking, the process for formally translating laws into codified policy.
Why don’t presidents always issue executive orders, a seemingly powerful policy device? Because they come with serious constraints.
First, executive orders may not be as unilateral as they seem. Drafting an order involves a time-consuming bargaining process with various agencies negotiating its content.
Second, if they are issued without proper legal authority, executive orders can be overturned by the courts – although that happens infrequently.
Trump’s 2017 travel ban faced several legal challenges before it was written in a way to satisfy the court. Many of his initial orders, on the other hand, didn’t face legal scrutiny because they simply requested agencies to work within their existing authority to change important policies like health care and immigration.
Congress is another barrier, as they give presidents the legal authority to make policy in a certain area. By withholding that authority, Congress can deter presidents from issuing executive orders on certain issues. If the president issues the order anyway, the courts can overturn it.
Legislators can also punish presidents for issuing executive orders they do not like by sabotaging their legislative agendas and nominees or defunding their programs.
Even a polarized Congress can find ways to sanction a president for an executive order they don’t like. For example, a committee can hold an oversight hearing or launch an investigation – both of which can decrease a president’s public approval rating.
Congresses of today are equipped to impose these constraints and they do so more often on ideologically opposed administrations. This is why scholars find modern presidents issue fewer executive orders under divided government, contrary to popular media narratives that present executive orders as a president’s way of circumventing Congress.
Finally, executive orders are not the last word in policy. They can be easily revoked.
New presidents often reverse previous orders, particularly those of political opponents. Biden, for instance, quickly revoked Trump’s directives that excluded undocumented immigrants from the U.S. Census.
All recent presidents have issued revocations, especially in their first year. They face barriers in doing so, however, including public opinion, Congress and legal limitations.
Regardless, executive orders are not as durable as laws or regulations.
Some of Trump’s executive orders, particularly those focused on the economy, will require legislation since Congress holds the purse strings.
Though Trump inherits a Republican House and Senate, their majorities are marginal, and moderate party dissenters may frustrate his agenda. Even so, he will undoubtedly use all available legal authority to unilaterally transform his goals into government policy.
But then again, these directives may be undone by the courts – or by the next president with the stroke of a pen.
Sharece Thrower is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on how both Congress and the courts constrain the president’s use of various policy instruments such as executive orders, signing statements, rule making and regulatory review.
President-elect Donald Trump, Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
With his loyalists lining up for key law-enforcement roles, Trump is fixated on former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who helped lead the January 6 congressional investigation. “Liz Cheney has been exposed in the Interim Report, by Congress, of the J6 Unselect Committee as having done egregious and unthinkable acts of crime,” Trump recently said. Then he added: “She is so unpopular and disgusting, a real loser!”
This accelerates a dangerous trend in American politics: using the criminal justice system to settle political scores. Both the Trumps and the Bidens have been entangled in numerous criminal law controversies, as have many other politicians this century, includingScooter Libbey,Ted Stevens,Robert Coughlin,William Jefferson,Jesse Jackson Jr.,David Petraeus,Michael Fylnn,Steve Bannon,Bob Menendez, and George Santos.
Some of these cases represent legitimate law enforcement work. Some don't. The overall trend is clear: the bloodlust to imprison political rivals is intensifying.
The implications are profound. First, criminalizing politics undermines the fundamental principle that the rule of law applies equally to all people. Entangling the passions and biases of politics with the criminal law leads to different prosecutorial standards depending on someone's political affiliations—instead of evidence regarding their guilt or innocence. In American politics, the messenger matters more than the message; the actor matters more than the act. With the rule of law, the opposite is true: all individuals must be treated equally, and their specific alleged misdeeds—alone—are what counts.
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Second, criminalizing politics accelerates a disturbing trend toward ever more polarization. It ramps up the stakes from treating opponents as political rivals to treating them like personal enemies.
Hardball politics is, of course, nothing new. It's woven into the fabric of our democratic system. But ultimately, we are one nation in a dangerous world. Our internal disputes shouldn’t consume too much national bandwidth. According to Trump, “I always say, we have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”
This is a dangerous perspective and he couldn't be more wrong. Trump's mentality undercuts Americans’ ability to respond to the myriad international threats we face together. If looked at from a global perspective, Americans’ interests overlap far more than they diverge. Our energy should be focused on understanding and addressing big global challenges, not sending officials we don't like to jail.
Finally, criminalizing politics deters quality people from even entering the political arena. The United States government already has a personnel problem. Look no further than the presidency. We will soon transition from a man with obviously declining mental facilities to a man who tried to reverse the previous presidential election. This is neither normal nor the way it's always been. We shouldn’t further dissuade talented people from entering government over concerns that imperfections and ambiguities in their past will be twisted into politically motivated criminal accusations. The downside of winning office should be losing the next election and not going to jail.
These concerns must be understood in context. It's, of course, true that entering government should neither absolve someone from past crimes nor serve as a license to commit new ones. And even-handed justice requires prosecuting not just the weak and anonymous but also the powerful and well-known.
Striking the right balance is hard. But there should be a strong presumption in favor of leaving politics—and its inherent passions and prejudices—outside the courthouse.
Politicizing the rule of law doesn't just undermine our government and poison our justice system. It imperils our nation as a whole.
William Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.”
Firefighters continue battling Palisades fire as flames rage across Los Angeles, California, United States on January 09, 2025.
An almost unimaginable tragedy is unfolding in Los Angeles, California. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported, "Four active fires in the Los Angeles region have burned over 40,000 acres — an area bigger than San Francisco … with flames claiming more than 12,000 structures and displacing tens of thousands.” Twelve people have lost their lives because of the fires.
Donald Trump’s response has been stunning, though not surprising. Instead of steadiness and solidarity, he has offered falsehoods, fictions, and blame. As in other things, he has departed from democratic traditions to which other Republicans have committed themselves.
Last week, even Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who has in the past used California and its Democratic Governor, Gavin Newsom, as political foils, demonstrated respect for that tradition. On January 8, he said: “Our prayers are with everyone affected by the horrific fires in Southern California. When disaster strikes, we must come together to help our fellow Americans in any way we can.”
That same day, the president-elect responded in a very different way. He posted on Truth Social that “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water…to flow daily into… “areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
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Using a demeaning nickname for California’s chief executive would have been bad enough. But to make matters worse, Trump’s reference to a “water restoration declaration” was pure fiction.
As Newsom’s Office pointed out, “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration.” Independent news sources agreed.
An ABC News station in California suggested that Trump might have been confused. It speculated that he may have been referring to a 2020 memorandum he signed aimed at “directing more water from northern California to central and southern California, which never took effect.” And even if it had, it “would not have made a meaningful impact on the water supply in the Los Angeles area.”
But from the start, Trump was not content just to spread misinformation. His January 8 post pointed the finger of blame at Newsom. As he put it, “He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California…He is the (sic) blame for this.”
Lest anyone missed the point, one day later, Trump called on Newsom to “resign” and repeated this is all his fault!!!” On Thursday, he called Newsom an “INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR.
Comedy Central’s Desi Lydic, among others, called out Trump, labeling him “one of the country’s leading blame producers.” She also tried to correct the record while taking a swipe a la Trump himself: “(T)he LA fires,” she noted, “have nothing to do with smelt. But in Trump’s defense… words are hard, and smelt only has one syllable, while climate change has three.”
Democracy is damaged when politics becomes a blame game, and presidential leadership in a democracy is always important, but never more so than when the nation confronts catastrophe. In such times, unity, not division, is the order of the day.
Presidents should rise above partisanship to provide it. Presidents of both parties have done just that, even if their efforts have sometimes misfired.
In fact, previous Republican presidents have set a high standard for what leaders should do and how presidents should talk to the nation when disaster strikes.
For example, recall President George W. Bush's words after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. In a televised address on September 16, 2005, Bush called on the nation to come together and made clear that his and his party’s “first commitment” was “to meet the immediate needs of those who had to flee their homes and leave all their possessions behind.”
“In the life of this nation,” he explained, “we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force and that all life is fragile….Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew …These trials …remind us… that we're tied together in this life, in this nation.”
At no time did Bush, whose own handling of the disaster was roundly panned, try to score political points. He refused to defect criticism or blame New Orleans’ Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin or Louisiana’s Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco.
Instead, he did what democratic leadership demanded and promised to “listen to good ideas from Congress and state and local officials and the private sector…(and to) work with members of both parties.”
Bush followed the example set by his father in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that struck San Francisco in 1989. It “damaged an estimated 18,300 houses… Another 963 were destroyed. The shaking also damaged nearly 2,600 businesses and wiped out 147. Tremors caused a portion of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge to collapse…. Forty-two people were killed.”
Even though San Francisco’s progressive Democratic Mayor Art Agnos had referred to a quick visit by Vice President Dan Quayle as a ”publicity stunt,” President George H. W. Bush did not fire back or criticize the Mayor.
In fact, he said, “I want the citizens of the San Francisco Bay area and its neighbors first to know that our hearts are with them as they face this terrible tragedy. And words can't adequately convey our sentiments… but I can say that we will take every step and make every effort to help the Bay Area in its hour of need.”
The president visited the city to be seen and photographed with the Mayor and other Democratic officials and praised the city and state of California for “pulling together." Bush committed the federal government to do all that was “necessary” to help a city that, thirty-five years later, President-elect Trump would dump on during the 2024 campaign.
In 2018, recalling what Bush did, Agnos called him a "true statesman" and a “president who cared about the entire country, and he showed it in the… (1989) earthquake.”
Finally, among modern presidents, Ronald Raegan set a high bar for how to behave during and speak about disasters big and small.
In 1982 when, as the Washington Post notes, “Northern Indiana's worst flooding in nearly 70 years had washed away crops, inundated houses and businesses and left more than 7,000 people homeless….” Raegan did not hesitate to show that he cared.
He went there and “clad in white shirt, crisp black suit and low-cut, rubber boots borrowed from a farmer…(stood) in a line of people to help pass sandbags up to the river's edge.” He quickly promised disaster aid.
Four years later, in the wake of the Challenger space shuttle explosion, Raegan did not blame NASA for the disaster. Instead, he quickly expressed his “great faith in and respect for our space program” and reassured them that “what happened today does nothing to diminish it.”
Raegan concluded his remarks by uttering truly memorable words about the astronauts who lost their lives: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’''
In our time, the most memorable thing about Trump’s response to the Los Angeles fires will be his eagerness, as he returns to the White House, to resume the role of “the Blamer in Chief.” Blaming may sometimes be necessary, but, in a democracy, people of all political faiths should do less blaming and more working together.Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
