The political opposition in America has a "new" manifesto. It's our best hope.
Why a 200-year-old document is the only real answer to Trump's abuses of power.
Cory Booker was pissed. Over the weekend, the New Jersey senator watched in horror as the president invaded Venezuela. And he noticed something familiar: his Republican colleagues were once again mute about a law-breaking White House. Trump hadn’t gotten congressional approval to invade any country, anywhere. But once again, his drooling dullards on Capitol Hill didn’t care.
So Booker went off.
In an explosive statement that ricocheted across social media, the New Jersey senator indicted Congress itself for abandoning its constitutional duty to check a president who is steadily shredding the rule of law. He wrote:
Time and again, Congress, now led by Republicans, has chosen spineless complicity over its sworn responsibilities…
No hearings. No serious investigations. No enforcement of checks and balances. No accountability. Again and again, the president has exceeded his authority, defied congressional intent, trampled the separation of powers, and broken the law — while Congress looked away in cowardice and submission.
Republicans in Congress own this corrosive collapse of our constitutional order. With only a handful of honorable exceptions, they have bent themselves to the will of Donald Trump, afraid to state in public the feelings they often communicate privately. That submission, this abandonment of independent judgment and constitutional courage, now stands as one of the greatest dangers to our nation and to the global order America claims to defend.
Buried inside the senator’s fury was something bigger than outrage over the unapproved invasion of Venezuela. He was voicing a realization that’s been dawning across the political opposition in recent months. There is one — and only one — real manifesto for opposing Donald Trump, and that’s the Constitution of the United States.
To be clear, there are many reasons to despise (and oppose) Trump. I would know. In his first term, I witnessed his indiscretions up close and was repulsed. His lack of character. His cruelty. His proud ignorance and impulsive thuggery. His willingness to dehumanize entire groups of people with a shrug or a sneer. It’s all on display.
But being a bad man with bad policies is not an impeachable offense. In a free country, voters can elect a president who governs like a fool. They can choose policies that many of us find morally repugnant or deeply wrong. That’s the price of democracy, folks. We’re paying the price.
What voters cannot do is authorize a president to break the law. That is where Donald Trump crosses the line again and again. It’s also where we are likeliest to constrain him, counter him, and keep him from destroying our republic.
By any objective measure, Trump is the most Constitution-defying president of the modern era.
I don’t mean this rhetorically or metaphorically. Legally speaking, Trump has pounded America’s founding document harder than any of his contemporaries. While it’s difficult to say exactly how many constitutional violations have been committed in total (indeed, there is so much we have yet to uncover), we at least have a baseline thanks to the judicial branch.
The sheer volume of rulings from federal courts show that Trump is statistically in a category of his own. Dozens of judges — appointed by Republicans, Democrats, and yes, by Trump himself in his first term — have ruled that Trump’s actions have flagrantly violated the U.S. Constitution.
Judges have found that Trump violated the First Amendment by revoking security clearances against his personal enemies as “political retribution.”
They have ruled that he violated the Fifth Amendment by deporting immigrants without due process — attempting, as one judge put it, to “read an entire provision out of the Constitution.”
They have determined that he violated the Sixth Amendment by blacklisting law firms that represented his critics, calling it a “shocking abuse of power.”
They have labeled his attempt to end birthright citizenship via executive order a “blatantly unconstitutional” assault on the Fourteenth Amendment.
Those are just a few of the individual-rights violations. Structurally, the damage is even worse. By that I mean the systematic violations of the separation of powers and actions that far exceed what a president is even allowed by the Constitution to do.
Judges have found Trump unlawfully dismantled entire agencies created by Congress without congressional approval, branding it a “gross usurpation of power.” They have rejected his claim that emergency authorities allow him to arbitrarily slap tariffs and taxes on goods, saying his justifications are “a semantic game” to move the power of the purse from Congress to “a single desk in the Oval Office.” They have warned that deploying troops into American cities as a personal police force would, as one federal judge declared, “wholly upend the federalism at the heart of our system.”
Again, in his first year alone, dozens of federal judges have ruled Trump violated the Constitution. Indeed, he’s notched more constitutional violations than any of his recent predecessors have committed during their entire time in public office. The next closest case? Trump himself, in his first term. Meanwhile, hundreds of additional rulings from federal judges have found his administration acted unlawfully even where constitutional questions weren’t directly reached.
While many of these cases have been appealed, the initial rulings aren’t just from a cabal of “activist” liberal judges, as the White House asserts. Many of the harshest statements have come from conservative judges, including some Trump put on the federal bench. Taken together, their message screams like a siren: this is the most lawless administration in modern American history.
Which brings me back to the political opposition and what its manifesto must be.
I say political opposition, not just Democrats, for a reason. The coalition that must confront Trump’s abuses is larger than any party. It includes former Republicans (like me), independents, lifelong Democrats, and a vast swath of ordinary Americans who may disagree passionately on the issues — whether it’s healthcare, taxes, or foreign policy — but who understand something more fundamental.
The Constitution is not optional. It’s not partisan. It’s the governing compact that makes all other political disagreement possible. And that’s precisely why it must be the opposition’s unifying manifesto.
In my view, focusing on the Constitution does three crucial things.
First, it claims the moral high ground. The argument is no longer about whether Trump is offensive or unpopular. It’s about whether the law applies to the president.
Second, it’s unimpeachably unifying. You do not have to agree on policy to agree that presidents should not ignore Congress, defy courts, or deploy military force at will. Knowing that their team won’t always be in the White House, this is a sentiment that is shared across party lines.
Third — and most importantly — it puts Trump and his enablers permanently on the defensive. They are forced to explain why constitutional violations are acceptable. Or they are forced to pretend they didn’t happen. In either case, their positions collapse under any serious scrutiny.
This is why Booker’s message mattered and why those of us in the growing defiance against Trump have fallen back on America’s foundational document.
We’re not calling for a new ideology. We’re calling for obedience to the old one.
What has become glaringly apparent (even to some of Trump’s most hardcore supporters) is that his governing philosophy is authoritarian in nature. It relies on the consolidation of power in the hands of one man — and a cauldron of distraction, escalation, and exhaustion to keep it that way. He wants the opposition chasing every outrageous statement and provocation so that his real constitutional violations get lost in the swirl of controversy.
That’s a trap. The winning strategy against Donald Trump is not to oppose everything he does. It’s to stand against the blatant illegality.
So far, one branch of government is up to the task. The courts have held. For the time being, judges are doing their jobs and calling out the administration for breaking the law and for attempting to torch the Constitution. This is crucial, and it’s giving the opposition time to mobilize in order to retake another branch of government.
Voters will have a choice to remake Congress later this year in the midterm elections. For the opposition, that means a chance to shift the legislative body out of the “cowardly and submissive” crouch that Senator Booker says it’s in — and into a more assertive, pro-constitutional role. With any luck, Trump will find himself 12 months from now back in his rightful place: boxed in by courts, Congress, and the people.
For now, the streets of America are alive with defiance. The opposition is waking up in the New Year to the realization that we don’t need a fresh slogan or new manifesto — just the old one, because it’s the last best hope for democracy.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. WHAT’S HAPPENING ON DEFIANCE.NEWS
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Miles, I agree with this in the main but a couple of other posters have already touched on the weakness in this otherwise strong argument - we have a Supreme Court - designated by the Constitution as the final arbiter of what is constitutional, that is making rulings that even a non-lawyer can clearly see are clearly opposite to the meaning and purpose of the constitution. I am referring to presidential immunity.
There is no way to accurately describe the SCOTUS majority as anything but monarchists based on this ruling. But the whole purpose of the constitution was to set up checks and balances intended to prevent the emergence of a monarchic situation.
We are in this situation because, as much as the framers tried to put fail safes in the document, they were insufficient to the malevolence, lack of personal integrity, cowardice, and consolidated financial power of the corporate sector that has bankrolled this, harnessed to the power of digital mass disinformation campaigns using modern psychological warfare techniques.
Michelle H asked below, "Does the immunity given to him by SCOTUS include defying the Constitution? Or just things like indiscriminately murdering innocent fisherman? "
To that I add the question of the Supreme Court defying the Constitution under the pretext of enforcing it. I wish I had the answer. All I know is that this seems like a big fucking problem.
It’s good to have you back. I like the sound of this new direction.
Does the immunity given to him by SCOTUS include defying the Constitution? Or just things like indiscriminately murdering innocent fisherman?