Dana Milbank, formerly of the Washington Post, now of NOTUS, thinks that he has unlocked a brilliant new One Weird Trick, which will allow the next Democratic president to impose unilaterally a whole host of policies that the party cannot get through Congress. Milbank writes of a “nascent Democratic effort” that:

contemplates something far more consequential — and it should be even scarier to Trump’s enablers: ways to use the all-powerful, unitary executive that Trump has invented (and the Roberts Court has blessed) to launch a new Progressive Era, in which a Democratic president imposes by executive fiat government run health care and many other ideas liberals have long dreamed about but lacked the votes to enact. Virtually all of it can be done without Congress, using powers Trump has unlocked.

contemplates something far more consequential — and it should be even scarier to Trump’s enablers: ways to use the all-powerful, unitary executive that Trump has invented (and the Roberts Court has blessed) to launch a new Progressive Era, in which a Democratic president imposes by executive fiat government run health care and many other ideas liberals have long dreamed about but lacked the votes to enact. Virtually all of it can be done without Congress, using powers Trump has unlocked.

Reading this, one honestly has to wonder whether Milbank has read any of the Court’s recent opinions — and, indeed, to wonder whether he has ever looked, even casually, at the text of the Constitution itself. That supposedly “all-powerful, unitary executive that Trump has invented (and the Roberts Court has blessed)”? It has absolutely nothing to do with substantive presidential power, or, contrary to an assertion by Neera Tanden that Milbank subsequently prints, to do with “the aperture of the powers the federal government has.”

The “unitary........

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