Beware the Great Unbinding

Republicans want to remove all constraint on the executive branch, and we ought to be terrified.

Photo by Connor Tarter

Governing in a constitutional republic is frustrating, since a system like ours is full of rules, veto points, and checks and balances, all of which function as constraints on the ability of the party in charge to do what it wants. What could be more maddening than going to all the trouble of winning an election, only to find that there are a bunch of rules you have to follow and your political enemies still have ways of thwarting you?

All presidents chafe at limitations on their authority, but few were quite as vexed by those limits as Donald Trump, who had trouble wrapping his head around the idea that there was anything he wasn’t allowed to do. This is a man who asked his aides in all seriousness whether he could order the military to shoot peaceful protesters in the legs because they were annoying him. 

Those constraints are on his mind a lot these days, and also on the minds of his most ambitious supporters. They are desperate to liberate Trump and themselves should they win in November; what they have planned is nothing less than a Great Unbinding. 

The tie between constraint and legitimacy

As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John in 1776, “all men would be tyrants if they could,” and that idea lies at the heart of any rules-based order: Since we can’t simply trust people to do the right thing, we set up rules everyone has to follow. But long before Trump was elected, Republicans began arguing that even within those rules, any exercise of power undertaken by Democratic presidents is inherently illegitimate. 

I trace the modern roots of this assertion to Newt Gingrich, who taught Republicans to say and believe that the problem wasn’t just that within the Democratic Party there were criminals and traitors, but that the party as a whole was corrupt and treasonous, and therefore any means were justified to defeat it. Not only that, since Democrats could not take or use power legitimately, the more unsavory the means you deploy to stop them, the more proof it is of your righteousness and commitment to the cause; figures like Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney who respected the rules were contemptible weaklings, quislings even, who didn’t have what it took to fight and win. Once you believe that, it’s a short hop to thinking that when you do have power, you ought to be able to use it however you like. 

When Barack Obama was elected, Republicans took to describing nearly everything he did, no matter how mundane, as “tyranny,” a fundamental subversion of the system and its rules. They railed that he was an “imperial president,” breaking the law willy-nilly. Did he hire White House staff to work on particular policy areas? They were “czars,” un-American and unaccountable! Did he issue the occasional executive order? Truly democracy had ended!

You could argue that this was just ordinary hypocrisy: Our side’s use of power is good, the other side’s is bad. But something different is happening now, as Republicans contemplate a wholesale reorganization of the federal government, which has been articulated in Project 2025, a lengthy plan to undertake nothing less than a revolution. 

Project 2025 is certainly about policy choices — undermining civil rights, enshrining Christian nationalism in government, carrying out mass deportations and closing off almost all immigration, slashing environmental regulations, eliminating abortion rights, and so on. But it is also about removing constraints on power, which is the precondition for the unbound pursuit of those policy aims. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat points out in The New Republic, Project 2025 is a blueprint for both destruction and creation, tearing down existing structures that have been deemed illegitimate so that new structures designed to be of, by, and for the right can be erected in their place:

The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order.  

One might reasonably ask whether Republicans have considered what a future Democratic president would do with an executive branch stripped of constraint, especially given that the public so regularly prefers electing Democrats (Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, a run of success unprecedented in American history). After all, if you turn the civil service into nothing but an instrument of whoever is in the White House, for instance, won’t Democratic presidents be able to use it for their ends too? 

While it’s possible they might not have thought it through completely, I can offer a number of reasons why Republicans wouldn’t be too bothered by this possibility, and why they think only they will benefit from an unconstrained executive branch. 

Why Republicans think the unconstrained executive is theirs and theirs alone

First, at a gut level Republicans don’t take seriously the idea that they’ll ever lose another election. While Democrats are gripped by the fear that the public hates them and so are constantly apologizing for their beliefs, Republicans consider themselves the true representatives of the people, and approach every election with complete confidence that they’re going to win by overwhelming margins. It’s one of the reasons they so readily agree with Trump’s insistence that the only way he can lose is through massive fraud, and any election Democrats win is by definition illegitimate. They also think that they can make future losses less likely through aggressive vote suppression and gerrymandering.

Second, they know that Democrats are institutionalists who might stretch the limits of their authority now and again, but won’t go nearly as far as Republicans will. So if Trump replaces three-quarters of the civil service with his own toadies and lackeys, a future Democratic president might roll that back a bit, but it won’t be a complete reversal and the GOP will still come out ahead. As I’ve been saying for many years, there’s an audacity gap everyone understands: When faced with the possibility of busting through a rule or a norm, Republicans are the party of “Yes we can” and Democrats are the party of “Maybe we shouldn’t.” 

Third, Republicans know they have a backstop against any use of expanded executive authority by a Democrat: the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. The conservative takeover of the courts has been one of the most spectacular political achievements by a party in the last century, and key to its utility is the hackishness of the judges it has elevated. They have almost no commitment to precedent or principle, which leaves them free to advance their own policy preferences and the political interests of the GOP. Republicans know that when Democrats use their power to pass laws or create executive branch policy, the courts will be there to strike it down, or at the very least drastically limit it. With the courts on their side, Republicans can remove constraints on the use of government power yet remain secure in the knowledge that only when they are in charge will the government’s power be truly unconstrained. 

The Great Unbinding they’re after has been long in coming, but now they finally have all the pieces in place: A leader whose contempt for constraints has no limits, a well-thought-out plan for how to make it happen, a party entirely committed to the project, and a Supreme Court that will be a partner in validating and entrenching whatever they put in place. We have never faced a moment quite like this, and not enough people are taking the threat seriously.