Trump, the Wall, and Ruling by Emergency Decree
As President of Weimar, Paul von Hindenburg ruled by emergency decree, becoming a proto-dictator. Is America heading down that road?
W.J. Astore
In the Weimar Republic of Germany during the early 1930s, the President of that time, Paul von Hindenburg, ruled increasingly by emergency decree due to a hopelessly divided and ineffectual Reichstag (parliament or congress). In 1932, for example, Hindenburg issued 66 emergency decrees while the Reichstag itself succeeded in passing only five laws. Even before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Hindenburg had emerged, in a supposedly democratic Germany, as a fuhrer or dictator, issuing decrees in the name of getting things done. A time-limited "emergency" executive power, in sum, became Weimar's new normal, setting the stage for a much more malignant autocracy in the future.
As Donald Trump contemplates declaring a national emergency to enlarge America's preexisting wall along the border with Mexico, Americans would do well to remember the Weimar example. Ruling by emergency decree is the path to authoritarianism, and Congress, no matter how divided or ineffectual it is, should act to stop executive overreach before it finds itself neutered and irrelevant.
Of course, the U.S. Congress has already largely refused to exercise its "power of the purse" over the military as well as its power to declare (and control) America's wars. Whether America's elected representatives have the collective guts to stop Trump's potential usurpation of power remains to be seen.
One thing is certain. Americans are growing accustomed to a divided, dysfunctional, even a shutdown, government. And we're growing accustomed to presidents acting like dictators, especially under circumstances couched as "wars" or other national emergencies (as determined by that same executive branch). No matter your political party or allegiance (or lack thereof), this is not how democracy works -- it's how democracy dies.