The Next Democratic President Must Declare an Emergency

Forget ideological differences - Democrats need a leader who will act with authority.

Photo by liam ward on Unsplash

Mired as we are in this most corrupt and authoritarian presidency, it can be hard to even imagine that there will one day be another Democratic president. But there will be, and the more prepared the party and its leaders are for what they’re going to do when they take power again, the lower the chances that they’ll screw things up. Again.

So even as Democrats work to resist the Trump administration today, they should begin thinking about what they’ll expect of their leaders in the future. When Donald Trump was president the first time, the Democratic Party had a lengthy debate about ideology and policy that, looking back from today, seems rather absurd. Think of all the time we spent arguing about precisely what sort of dramatic health care reform would be best, with multiple variations of Medicare for All each having their defenders among the 2020 presidential candidates. Even Joe Biden, the moderate in the race, put out a lengthy and remarkably progressive plan for universal coverage. Once he became president, he tossed it in a drawer and never spoke of it again.

There’s a lesson there, which is that while it may be worthwhile to consider what ideological direction the party wants to go in, right now it’s much more important to think about what approach to governing Democrats should take. Any potential candidate who says (as Biden did in 2020) that getting back to “normal” is the objective will be advising weakness and failure. Instead, Democrats should be thinking more about how they’re going to use every ounce of power the executive has, so they can accomplish as much as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Embrace the emergency

There’s a good reason authoritarians claim that everything is an “emergency”: Emergencies require that ordinary rules and norms be temporarily set aside, because the damage from acting normally in an emergency would be too great. For many tyrants and wannabe tyrants, that means declaring emergencies where none exist. But the law itself often acknowledges the necessity of doing things differently in the case of an emergency.

A shared understanding that there is a genuine emergency — we can also use the word “crisis” — opens up the space for a different kind of thinking. It means moving faster to change policy, being more ambitious in the scope of what one is trying to accomplish, and dismissing objections that come in the form of “But that’s not how we’ve done things before.”

The Trump presidency is creating a crisis right now, and we’re only eight months into it; by the end of four years it will be far worse. So making sure the public understands what has happened will be vital. If the next president wants to repair the destruction, there must be a shared sense of urgency. And we must remember this fact: Real progressive change has only come in the wake of an emergency.

The Progressive Era was made possible by years of scandal and corruption that preceded it. The New Deal was made possible by the Great Depression. The Great Society was made possible by the assassination of President Kennedy and the civil rights movement successfully convincing the public that Jim Crow was its own crisis. The good-government reforms of the 1970s were made possible by Watergate.

We’ve also seen how the two biggest crises of recent years — the Great Recession and the covid pandemic — swept Democrats into office but weren’t translated into fundamental change. That doesn’t mean Barack Obama and Joe Biden were complete failures — they both accomplished a good many worthwhile things — but neither was a transformative president in the way Obama hoped he would be and the way Donald Trump is.

So as Democrats begin thinking about who they want to lead them, they would do well to worry a lot less about fine-grained ideological distinctions and a lot more about who they think will act as though the country faces a real crisis, and the will and skill to navigate it to maximize the change they can bring about.

At a minimum, any Democratic candidate should promise to utilize every bit of power Donald Trump grasped for himself and was granted by the Supreme Court, except this time for good and not for evil. For instance, the Supreme Court says the president can fire members of what were previously understood to be independent commissions and panels, not for cause but just because he wants to? OK then — on January 21, 2029, every appointee Donald Trump made to every one of those commissions should be fired, period. Civil service protections have been destroyed by the Trump administration and the Supreme Court? Fine then — the next Democrat should purge the government of every MAGA goon and Trump crony who wormed their way in between 2025 and 2029. Then the civil service can be rebuilt, with a new system of job protections and union representation.

The Supreme Court is part of the emergency

You might say that the conservative Supreme Court majority will not allow the next president to act with anything near the aggression Trump has displayed, because they have made amply clear that there are two different sets of rules for Democratic and Republican presidents. And you’d be right. When a Democrat is in office, they move quickly to restrain that president’s power, while today they essentially say that Trump can do whatever he wants, an approach Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accurately called “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” the twist being not just that there are no rules, but that “this Administration always wins.”

The court’s Calvinball approach has, over and over again, produced this sequence of events:

1. The administration does something illegal

2. Lower courts rule that the administration has done something illegal and tell them to stop doing it

3. The Supreme Court steps in on the shadow docket and nullifies the lower court ruling, telling the administration that it can keep breaking the law indefinitely while the case is still pending, which could be months, years, or forever

On Monday, the court issued two shadow docket rulings signing on to illegal administration actions, one involving the firing of an FTC commissioner and the other concerning the administration’s racial profiling policy, under which immigration agents are harassing, detaining, threatening, and sometimes physically assaulting people based on little more than their apparent ethnicity and what kind of job they seem to be doing. Those decisions are indicative of just how lawless the court’s conservatives have become. This is its own emergency, and one the next president must confront.

We know exactly how the court’s conservatives are going to handle themselves in the next Democratic administration, because we saw a version of it under Biden. Where today they say that Trump can do whatever he wants, they will restrain the Democratic president’s power at every turn.

When that happens, the Democratic president has to make the court part of the emergency. Not by saying “I disagree in the strongest terms” or penning an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, but with a real attack on the court, using all the practical and political weapons at his or her disposal. Denounce them for being the corrupt hacks that they are, demand that every Democrat join in the condemnation, begin pushing through Congress a bill to put six new justices on the court. Maybe throw in impeachment proceedings, too. Convince everyone that the court has created a constitutional crisis, and something must be done.

Oh my goodness, that’s so extreme! Yes it is. But in a crisis, you have to do some extreme things.

The danger is that in 2028 we will elect a Democrat who promises to return things to “normal,” spends four or even eight miserable years trying to undo only a portion of what Trump has done, and is then followed by another Republican who takes Trump’s lawlessness and authoritarianism as a model, starting the cycle all over again. We’ll wind up taking one step forward, then ten more steps back.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that Democrats promise they’ll be just as corrupt or lawless as Trump. But they should be required to convince their voters that they are committed to using whatever power they have to undo the damage of the Trump presidency, in a manner that meets the enormity of the challenge. That will require them to go against their incrementalist, institutionalist instincts. But it’s the only way the country will stand a chance of recovering from this unfolding nightmare.

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