Happy Constitution Day

Democracy Means No Kings!

September 17, 2025

Happy Constitution Day to everyone living in the United States! On this day, September 17, all the way back in 1787, the final draft of the US Constitution was signed, and would slowly make its way to the Congress of the Confederation, being ratified by the 13 states a year later, replacing the Articles of the Confederation.

By the way, if you've never the Constitution in full, or you haven't done it recently, I highly recommend you take today as an excuse to do so. It's fairly short, and can be easily read in a single sitting. It's one of the most important documents that relates to our current legal system in the US.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240930125328/https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

During deliberation over whether the US should accept this new constitution or not, there were 2 factions that emerged on the issue. The Federalists, who promoted the constitution (which enacted a "federalist" system of governance), and the less creatively named Anti-Federalists, who were weary of potential structural dangers that might come associated with this new system. In order to quell some of the fears by the Anti-Federalists of authoritarian rule and the trampling of civil liberties, Congress passed the Bill of Rights — 10 amendments, codifying certain basic liberties as constitutional rights. The Federalists felt as though this was unnecessary, claiming instead that the structure of the Constitution itself serves as a bill of rights. In Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton wrote this on the subject:

And the proposed Constitution, if adopted, will be the bill of rights of the Union. Is it one object of a bill of rights to declare and specify the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government? This is done in the most ample and precise manner in the plan of the convention; comprehending various precautions for the public security, which are not to be found in any of the State constitutions. Is another object of a bill of rights to define certain immunities and modes of proceeding, which are relative to personal and private concerns? This we have seen has also been attended to, in a variety of cases, in the same plan. Adverting therefore to the substantial meaning of a bill of rights, it is absurd to allege that it is not to be found in the work of the convention.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1404/1404-h/1404-h.htm#link2H_4_0084

Hamilton was right in some ways. He's saying that the Constitution dictates how the government can operate. The government is to be a body composed of publicly elected and liable individuals consisting of varying constituencies from one representative to another. On top of that, it was specifically engineered to create contradictions of power between the different bodies of government, so as to prevent any individual body becoming too over-zealous with power. It creates limitations on which bodies, if any, can conduct certain types of actions. It bans certain actions altogether, such as retroactive application of laws (called 'ex post facto laws'), while at the same time guaranteeing certain rights to citizens, such as the right to trial, (called the right to a 'writ of habeas corpus'). It is a system that has been engineered to prevent tyrannical takeover.

I want to go over that point again, because I think it's important. Our government was designed, in our Constitution, to prevent wannabe tyrants and dictators from trampling over the people, and to prevent them from seizing too much power. Our Constitution was designed with an adversarial threat model for its own leaders. The way the Founders saw it, one of the biggest threats to The United States was our own elected representatives. They designed an entire system, explicitly in order to prevent those representatives — Congressmen, Judges, Presidents — from becoming too powerful.

Testing Our Efforts

Right now, our country is getting a real life test of those safety measures. We're only 9 months into the second presidency of Donald Trump, and he's already ran through a number of structural barriers that have never before been circumvented. Structural barriers considered to be load bearing supports for a functioning democracy.

He's suspended the right to trial for suspected immigrants, making it impossible for a legal citizen to prove that they are not, in fact, the immigrant that ICE thinks them to be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia

He's ignored court orders from judges because he didn't like their rulings, and had to be fought hand over fist to actually obey them finally:

https://apnews.com/article/aclu-trump-deportations-el-salvador-boasberg-e447c61de031150669d01687edc4b11b

He's been found to have illegally deployed National Guard troops on Los Angeles, with public plans to deploy on other big US cities (more specifically, big cities whose local politics swing left-wing or anti-Trump):

https://apnews.com/article/trump-newsom-los-angeles-national-guard-d6c8450a3ac2de34e669ef0836d22cbc

He's fired certain public officials even when Congress has passed explicit laws insulating them from being fired by the President, such as members of the NLRB. He's discussing doing the same for members on The Federal Reserve, despite there being laws preventing such thing unless there is good cause to remove (not just partisan disagreement).

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5277103/nlrb-trump-wilcox-abruzzo-democrats-labor

The Power of the Pen

In the more abstract, his slew of Executive Orders in the first months of his second presidency have been very explicitly clear grasps by the president for legislative power. The reason why this in particular is worrying is that the Executive and Legislative branches are setup in very structurally different ways, so as to create two very different modes of operation.

I'd like to draw once again upon The Federalist Papers, this time Federalist 70, another one of Hamilton's:

In the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in that department of the government, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority. When a resolution too is once taken, the opposition must be at an end.

What he's describing here is the inherent innefficiency of Congress. That inefficiency is the point. We shouldn't be passing laws in a "move fast and break things" kind of way. Laws are universally applicable, and if passed without much consideration, could have disastrous ramifications for all kinds of people. The great innovation of our legislative system in the United States is that it is so darn easy to prevent a bad bill from getting passed. This way, disadvantaged minorities can leverage that ability to stop the bill in order to force the majority to add concessions to the bill before you allow it to go through and become law.

In all of this fighting, a great amount of thinking about the bill must occur, and it will continuously go through various improvements, shedding off bad provisions, and perhaps even gaining new good ones that couldn't have been imagined until it came to the debate floor.

On the other hand, once the bill has passed, Hamilton notes that it must be enforced without this same level of deep introspection. The law is the law, and once we've slowly decided what the law is, we must now move to quickly enforce it with haste and vigor. Thus, he argues, the Executive branch must have much energy. This forms the basis for the Framer's argument to have a single person at the head of the Executive branch — The President.

Now, all of this talk about energy in the Executive might seem to support everything Trump is doing in all his vigorous actions as President. The Framers never argued against an energetic Presidency, so this is in line with their vision of America, surely?

The issue is that Donald Trump is not just merely applying the laws that Congress has passed in an energetic manner. If he were simply executing the resolutions which had already gone through intense debate and compromise before becoming law, then the vigor would be appreciated. But Donald Trump is largely creating his own new plans for this country entirely independent of Congress or that deliberatory process. In many cases, as already stated, he is going directly against policies mandated by Congress. What we are witnessing is not 'Energy in the Executive', but rather, legislative energy, which just so happens to originate from the Executive branch.

Is This What America Needs Right Now?

There's an argument going around right now that our country needs all of this. That we need somebody like Trump to come in, destroying and subverting all limitations on his power, in order to actually accomplish important change in our country which has been tied up in governmental gridlock for the past 2 decades. Then, at the end of his 4 years, he's going to be all done with his title of supreme leader, and he's going to leave. Then, when the next President is elected, they'll just never be able to pull the same power plays as Trump, because apparently it's only possible for Trump to do it, and nobody else is charismatic enough to repeat the process after he's already set the precedent.

The idea that "Too Much Democracy is hindering America, and is at the root of all our problems" is a common idea in the minds of a lot of Conservatives right now. Not to say that they don't believe in Democracy, it's just that I've personally seen a lot of complaining about "too much red tape in the system" coming from that side of the aisle. I mean, that's kind of what the whole DOGE project with Elon Musk was about. But it's also an underscore of the entire way Trump 2.0 is behaving.

This is a recent turn of events for Conservatives. Traditionally, Conservatives have believed strongly in the core mission of the Constitution, or at least if they didn't, they pretended to. Back in 2011, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — a famous Conservative justice who was appointed by none other than Ronald Reagan — sat before the Senate to talk about the role of Judiciary in today's world. He spoke about the way that the US is uniquely set up to contradict power.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0

In the United States, a bill must pass before two legislative bodies, with the same wording, before it is allowed to become a law. Those two bodies are elected in very different manners. Then it is passed to the President, who can veto it if he doesn't like it. Again, the President is elected in a very different manner than either legislative house. There could be immense ideological disagreement between all 3 of them. Scalia explains that to people living in Europe, and sometimes even those within the United States, this entire system seems to amount to nothing more than a big machine that creates endless gridlock. That we can't get anything done.

He says that's the wrong way to look at it. That we're supposed to love the gridlock. The gridlock is the point. He's echoing the same point that Hamilton was making in Federalist 70 where he wrote about the deliberation that was supposed to occur in Congress before a bill could get passed.

Scalia was a staunch Conservative. And his beliefs on this topic are part of what made him a hero to the Conservative side of politics. What I'm trying to demonstrate here is that there's nothing inherently Conservative about believing that we need to brush through this whole system of intentionally engineered friction and lather it in lubrication in order to expedite the process. We do not want the process to be systemically expedited. We want the laws of this land to have been passed before the great machine of debate and deliberation that is our Legislative process. And so if these ideas are not inherent to Conservatism, then I've shown that I'm not attacking Trump for being Conservative, or rapidly instituting Conservative policy. I may dislike those things, but it is what it is. What I'm criticizing him for here — and in the strongest way I know how — is for subverting America's founding principles of contradiction of powers, of checks and balances, of everything that the drafters of the Constitution were fighting for.

He Fancies Himself a King

Trump has decided that his preferred method of governing in this country is to ignore laws passed by Congress, and when Congress has decided not to act in a particular area (perhaps because their deliberation has led them to the conclusion that it would be improper to do so), he finds ways to inaccurately interpret laws that were never meant to serve for those purposes in order to create a legal basis to enforce his private policies.

His basis for trying to invade US cities with the National Guard are prime examples. No law allows him to do this, except for if he claims there to be some kind of national "crime emergency" going on in these cities, a fact that is simply not true. He's also used a similarly faulty basis in how he's announced there to be a "foreign invasion of immigrants" into this country, which is the basis for which he is suspending the right to a fair trial before being deported. Without this trial, there is no way for legitimate citizens to prove that they are in this country legally. If you don't give immigrants a right to a trial before deporting them, it means you're fine deporting US citizens without a trial, since they will have no basis upon which they can prove their legal status if they're denied a court trial.

The fact of the matter is that our President is governing by creating his own legislation. That is the way that kings of old ran their kingdoms. That's not how Democracies run, and it's definitely not how The United States of America runs. We do not have kings in this country, but it seems that our President disagrees with that fact.

We're in a very scary place right now. I don't want to minimize the threat, but I'd like to point out the fact that this is the one thing that this country was designed for. We're seeing a lot of fights right now legally against the president. Culturally, every time Trump gets held up for breaking the law, he decries it as a moment of a "rouge judge" trying to be a dictator over him. So he simply refuses to accept the role of checks and balances, so he tries to delegitimize it. He's ignoring and going against large portions of the law right now, but it's important to remember that he's still being held up. Courts are finding his actions to be illegal and forcing him to stop. There are still moments where Trump does not ultimately prevail.

Just this month, a federal judge found that Trump's use of the California National Guard in Los Angeles was illegal. This is of course coming after most of the damage has already been done, but the ruling sets a useful precedent that this kind of thing will not be allowed to happen in other cities, such as Chicago, which the President has boldly asserted that he will be sending troops to at some undisclosed point in the future.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5481178-judge-rules-trumps-use-of-us-military-in-la-was-illegal/

People are fighting back against the administration, and some of them are actually winning some ground, even if it is an entirely unfair uphill fight against authoritarianism. The point is that as terrible of a predicament our country is in right now, we are not helpless!

At the same time, I want to urge people to realize that the words coming out of Trump and his supporters mouths are explicitly anti-American and unpatriotic. To break so many of the institutional limits within our Constitution, to decry the concept of checks and balances, it is to spit in the face of our founders and the American promise of freedom. The MAGA party loves to call themselves patriots, and to criticize Trump's opponents on supposed unpatriotic grounds. But the issue is that MAGA stands for values that are antithetical to America and our values laid out in the Constitution. Donald Trump thinks that anyone who stops him from assuming complete and utter control of the government is a rogue agent scheming to become their own dictator. Donald Trump believes that anybody in power who stops him from carrying out his illegal plans has overstepped their bounds. Donald Trump believes that he is entitled to do anything he wants. If you agree with him, you do not believe in America. I'm tired of pretending that the MAGA faction that is destroying the infrastructure of checks and balances in this country isn't un-American.

Fighting Back

If you're a concerned citizen who is scared of the way Trump is proceeding, might I perhaps persuade you to do something about it! If you feel like Trump has massively overstepped his bounds as President, I can't urge you enough, please, we need to go out and get organized! So, what on Earth can we do to stop this man from tearing up our Democracy?

No Kings

If you remember the 'No Kings' protests that took place all across the country in June earlier this year to protest Trump, you might like to know that another day of protest has been planned, this time falling on October 18. If you're tired of President Trump acting as a dictator, you should go to this event. There are so many of these going on across the country. Even in my small, relatively Conservative town within California, there's a local event, so I don't have to drive to a big city to partake. You can check out different locations on the map they provide on their website:

https://www.nokings.org/#map

If you do go, one thing I must urge you to do is to represent an energy of peace. In addition, don't allow them to label you as insurrectionists who hate America. We do not hate America. We love America, and we're showing up to this event because of that. We're showing up to protest Donald Trump because his actions ring in contradiction of this country's founding principles. We say No Kings because we believe that Donald Trump represents everything that this country is not.

Bring American flags, bring printouts of the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence. Don't burn flags, don't hang them upside down. Even if your intentions are patriotic or pro-American, that's not how it gets interpreted when those who disagree with you see it on social media. Do your best to represent what the anti-Trump faction really is.

Call Your Representatives

I know you've heard this a million times before, but I'm serious, call them. You can send emails too, though I've heard that phone calls tend to be more effective. Pressure them to take action against Trump. Pressure them to speak out publicly on an issue that they're neglecting, even if the Conservative majority in Congress prevents them exerting much direct power against the administration. If your representatives are Conservative, especially make a point to call them. Tell them that their support of Trump's undemocratic actions makes you lose faith in them. Tell them you want them to stop standing in line behind a man who hates this country. Tell them your vote is only cast for people who love this country.

If you've never called your representatives before, it's super easy. Here's a really good video tutorial on how to do it, if you're nervous. Don't worry, your representatives aren't going to be the ones picking up the phone, it'll just be an office secretary who takes down your information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX_ERS7U_WQ

Vote

This is a little preemptive, but it's important. The November 2026 Congressional election is going to be crucial if we want to stop some of the worse effects of the Trump takeover. It's common for there to be a blue wave in midterms during Republican presidencies, and vice versa. At the same time, there's an ongoing effort, initiated by Trump, to get red states like Texas to Gerrymander their district map outside of a census year, in order to squeeze out some extra Republican seats in the House. There's talk about a counter effort being taken on by various blue states, including California, but in either case, the vote for Congress incredibly important this midterm. If you want Congress to be able to actually fight back against this takeover, having a Democratic majority is going to be vitally important, since we know at this point that Republicans will only ever comply.

I recommend making sure that you're registered to vote, even if you've registered already. Databases can become corrupted, and you might need to register again. You also might need to update some information like your address or vote-by-mail preferences. You can check your registration in just a few easy clicks here. Just click 'Voter Registration Status', select your state, and it will take you to your state's voter registration website. If you'd like to register, click 'Register To Vote,' and proceed in the same manner.

https://www.nass.org/can-I-vote

You might not love Democrats, I sure as hell don't, but don't let that stop you from voting against a Republican who is only ever going to bend the knee to Trump. Vote for somebody who is not happy with the way things are going on right now in DC. Be a single-issue voter, where that issue is the maintenance of Democracy and our Constitution.

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