Trump was a very specific kind of disaster: a chaos agent, who lacked the wit, patience and executive function to recruit the powerful institutions of the US military-industrial complex to fight his corner.
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The kind of guy who demands the impossible and then fires and publicly humiliates any allies who fail to deliver - or dare to contradict him - is not the kind of guy who can build new, enduring, evil institutions.
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The best he can hope for is to get some trumpalike goblins into positions of power (where they will replicate his chaos, but without the broad impunity of the presidential office, resulting in a series of resignations and prosecutions), back by executive orders.
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The last months of the Trump admin were an orgy of executive branch rulemakings that dismantled public safety, health, labor, anticorruption and (especially) environmental protections.
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Trump is a debt kingpin. His MO is running across a river on the backs of alligators, hoping to move so fast that none of them takes a leg: borrow, refinance, restructure, borrow, blow town, borrow, restructure, bribe, blow town.
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He's an improviser, a bullshitter, a pantser and not a planner. That's why so many of his worst ideas got turned into regulations at the very end of his term, and that's why they are vulnerable to being swiftly undone by the obscure, rarely used Congressional Review Act.
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The CRA allows Congress to void administrative-branch regulations and to prohibit any substantively similar regulation from EVER being enacted. It's powerful, but it's almost impossible to invoke, as Jan Ellen Spiegel writes in @CC_Yale.
yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/ins-an…
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yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/ins-an…
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Indeed, the CRA is so baroque that only an absolute dunderhead of a president need fear having their administration's signature achievements being undone by it.
Cometh the hour, cometh the dunderhead.
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Cometh the hour, cometh the dunderhead.
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It would be delicious irony to see the CRA used to undo Trump's planet-destroying environmental regulations. Obama, overconfident of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, waited too late to pass many of his regulations, leading to Trump invoking CRA against his end-of-term rules.
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Unlike Trump, Obama spread out his regulatory agenda over his whole term, only exposing a fraction of his rules to his successor. Still, the CRA has only been successfully invoked 17 times, and 16 of those were Trump undoing an Obama reg.
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1,350 of Trump's regulations are vulnerable to being permanently overturned. In combination with the barrage of firings of high-level Trump swamp-gators and henhouse foxes, using the CRA on these would go a long way to erasing Trump's policy legacy.
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