DO GOOD SHIT

Rafael Leonídas Trujillo Molina, "El Jefe", of the Dominican Republica, Image via TuVez.

¡JEB! last March on the president's executive order to protect millions of people brought to the US as children from deportation (adding maybe $230 billion to GDP and something over 30,000 jobs per year over the next ten years), currently under legal suspension while the federal courts decide whether Texas is entitled to sue over the program on the grounds that it will cause the state to "suffer irreparable harm":

“Let’s give them priority to be citizens. But by the law, not by decree, because that’s like a Latin American dictator,” Bush said.

And ¡JEB! this week on how he'd go about getting Congress to do what he wants if he were president:

Because nothing says "I am not like a Latin American dictator" like ignoring Article 1 Sections 6 and 7 of the Constitution and the 27th Amendment, which make it very clear that the compensation of Congress is a matter for Congress and Congress alone to decide.

Not that there's any real danger that a president ¡JEB! would actually carry out such a threat. It's so illegal that you wouldn't even be able to find a way to write the memo out, if you could find a lawyer willing to do it.

Nor is there any danger that a President Huckabee would really personally redefine the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to include protection for fetuses and use federal police or military forces to put women in preventive detention to stop them from getting abortions, as he was suggesting last week. Lunatic reinterpretations of the Constitution (to make sense out of Huckabee's idea you'd kind of have to suppose the fetuses are being accused of a capital crime and need to be indicted by a grand jury) are the Supreme Court's job, and they really don't happen all that often either, and while preventive detention seems to be not exactly unconstitutional according to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments its use is pretty narrowly circumscribed, and would not include rounding up women on the point of undergoing a medical procedure that has been ruled legal by the Supreme Court or using federal forces to enforce state law.

The real danger in this kind of yahoo bluster isn't that it's going to lead to any dreadful action (though the arbitrary racial-profiling detention of thousands of Arab Americans by a Republican administration after 9/11/2001, which I regard as patently illegal, was pretty bad), but that it's such a deep distortion of what presidential power is, spreading around the country by means of these intemperate speeches and giving people really bizarre ideas of how the Constitution works.

As in the current belief among practically all the Republican presidential candidates that a presidential order can get all 11 million undocumented immigrants out of the country with one blow, presumably on cattle cars, though they refuse to get specific enough to say how they plan to do it; but can't ask the immigration authorities to prioritize the deportation schedule, focusing on getting rid of convicted criminals first and leaving US-educated DREAMers for last. Or regarding it as an impeachable offense to ask the environmental regulators to deal with a kind of air pollution that Congress didn't happen to know about when they passed the Clear Air Act (kind of like saying it's unconstitutional for the Center for Disease Controls to study AIDS, because the virus didn't exist when the CDC was founded in 1946).

It's giving people the idea that the president has a kind of unlimited ability to bully people, but none to fine-tune and prioritize to make the laws work well. To do what Obama has called Stupid Shit (send ground troops to back up what are basically Al-Qa'eda forces in Syria, as people like Lindsey-Woolsey Graham continually implore) but not to do anything smart.

How much better to adopt the relaxed and informed position of traditional American pragmatism as propounded just now by Jared Bernstein making the case for all the cool things the president has been doing recently without waiting for Congress to help him out:

We can waste years arguing the science of climate change with ideologically motivated non-believers, or we can act, by fiat in this case, to change practices that will then become embedded in the system as the new normal.

I’m not suggesting I’ve figured out change theory. In essence, this approach says forgot theory, just act. Just do your best to implement useful changes where they’re needed and stop noodling over esoteric theories and gridlocked politics. And yes, that raises the question of who gets to decide what’s “useful.” I’d amend [Michael Grunwald's injunction "DO STUFF!"] to say “DO GOOD STUFF!” but I readily recognize the cul-de-sac at the end of that road.

Still, when it’s something that the vast majority of us feel similarly about, like environmental sustainability, rewarding work, even preventing guns from falling into the wrong hands, the key to change is to push through the noise and make the change where you can. As my Iranian friend tells me, “the dogs will bark but the caravan goes on.”

Or maybe DO GOOD SHIT, a better maxim than the negative one for the way Obama is spending the end of the term.