The coup has already happened

Elon Musk had a lunch with Republican Senators yesterday followed by a meeting with House Republicans in the evening to discuss concerns the lawmakers had with complaints they've been getting from constituents about some of Musk’s cuts to government programs they hadn’t seen coming. Musk handled the situation by giving out his phone number and telling Republicans they could call him with any complaints they had about what his DOGE team has been doing out of sight of the public.

The Washington Post reported on the two meetings between Musk and Republicans as if they are the normal course of business in this new era when the Congress, given the power of the purse in Article I of the Constitution, has sat back and watched an unelected multi-billionaire seize their constitutional authority and do with it what he wants. Listen to this little gem: “Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would ‘create a system where members of Congress can call some central group’ to get problematic cuts reversed quickly,” the Post reported yesterday. “Musk told members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee that he would set up a similar line of communication for them to reach his team,” the Post story continued in matter of fact prose, as if meetings between billionaires and lawmakers to hash out what to do with the public monies have been happening since the Republic's founding.

Okay, let's take a moment and examine what's going on here. First of all, the meetings Musk had yesterday were with Republicans only. The Post used the title “House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee” as if this thing had existed forever, and it is just an acceptable fact of life in the new Washington D.C. that the committee has only Republican members, or at least that only Republicans matter on Capitol Hill, and certainly only Republicans rate a meeting with the wizard behind the curtain that is running things these days.

The Post also reported that Musk “urged Congress to codify the cuts his group is making unilaterally, telling lawmakers that he realized that the cuts are not permanent if they are not made into law.” The Yale Law School educated senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, was good enough to confirm Musk’s understanding of constitutional law, telling the Post, “He said unless Congress takes action on this, none of it is permanent.”

Got that? Hawley had to be told by Elon Musk, not Article I of the Constitution, that the Congress has the power to appropriate money and establish the departments of government that are authorized to spend the citizens’ taxpayer dollars in ways that the Congress directs. Boy am I glad that good old fist-in-the-air Hawley got at least that much straightened out before Musk moves forward with the rest of the disassembly of the government which Hawley's branch nominally controls by providing the funds to run it.

Rather than make his changes by what we might quaintly call regular order, Donald Trump with his addiction to chaos decided that he would take apart all at once the government he was elected to head as the executive. He could have taken his time and done it by proposing legislation to eliminate the Department of Education, as it was reported yesterday that he intends to do by executive order, or put forth legislation to change the number of people employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, rather than just have Musk and his teenage ninja warriors do it for him with a post on Musk’s social media site X announcing firings of 80,000 VA employees.

What Trump has done is to essentially launch a coup to seize control of the government by administrative fiat with a series of executive orders and utterly illegal closures of entire governmental departments like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being treated by the media and by the Congress as a fait accompli, even though a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order, backed up by the Supreme Court, ordering the reinstatement of all the foreign aid monies that USAID and other departments administered according to laws passed by the Congress.

So, what we're confronted with is an ongoing administrative coup that is being challenged by lawsuits, and at least in some cases stopped by court decisions. In the meantime, the toothless Republicans in Congress who have turned over their constitutional responsibilities to an unelected civilian, have begun hearing from their constituents that they are not all-in with the firing of the guy down the street who has worked for 15 years at the VA, or the closure of the Social Security office that has answered their questions and handled their complaints since the day they turned 65 and became eligible for the meager benefits they spent their working lives earning the right to receive.

The Washington Post quoted a couple of congressmen and senators expressing reluctance to go along with Elon Musk’s plan for them to codify in law the raping he is doing to the federal government and its employees. Here is where that quaint idea about regular order comes into play. The way the Congress operates when it is not frozen by Republican fear of and obeisance to their dear leader Donald Trump is to bring forth bills, and put them through the process of hearings by relevant committees, during which public testimony can be held and debate can be engaged in before the bills come to the floor of the House and the Senate for votes.

Here's the problem with that old fashioned way of doing things: the votes taken by members of the House and the Senate would put Republicans on the record as having voted to, say, slash the budget of the VA, or eliminate the Department of Education that was providing funding for rural schools in their districts as well as the money to fund educational programs and facilities for disabled children. Who wants to take those votes? We're starting to get the answer to that question with yesterday's story in the Post reporting on Republicans basically getting down on their knees and begging the richest man in the world to tell them what he's doing with the money they appropriated to pay for things like agricultural subsidies, Social Security offices, VA hospitals, and Medicaid, a federal program which the New York Times reports today covers 70 million of our fellow citizens.

These are not small matters. The money that Trump and Musk are ripping out of the National Institute for Health, the CDC, the FDA, and the Department of Agriculture is our tax dollars that we paid to the IRS so that responsible custodians would take care that our money went to pay for programs that we voted for by electing our representatives to Congress to do our bidding.

This process of electing people to the congressional and executive branches of our government is what the founders wrote into the constitution to carry out the will of the people. Remember that old phrase we learned in junior high, that ours is “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people?” Well, those words no longer describe our government so long as Elon Musk is running amok in Washington D.C. carrying out the executive orders of Donald Trump. That's why we're starting to hear reports of people saying, “Hey, I didn't vote for that!”

No, they didn't vote for a lot of the stuff that's being done in their name, and that's what a coup is: a small number of people seizing power that wasn't given to them by the democratic process that is supposed to run things in this country. The Republican Party in the person of members of the House and the Senate is sitting by while Trump and Musk shred the Constitution they swore on a Bible to uphold and defend when they took the offices they were elected to. Unless and until these spineless Republicans decide to uphold their oaths and do their jobs, the coup will continue to erode our representative democracy and turn this country into an authoritarian dictatorship. That's where we're at in the the alleged United States of America on March the 6th, 2025.