Fighting Fire With Fire: Impoundments Go Both Ways
We are in a full blown constitutional crisis of the highest order. Unless Democrats fight back as viciously and firmly as the opposition, they and the vast coalition they represent risk extermination.
Now is not the time for hyperbole.
We must confront the challenges facing our nation with sober and measured responses. Overreaction and underreaction are twin dangers to be avoided at all cost—lest either dip us into regretful tragedy. With that clarity, and in spite of it, we have no choice but to declare our country in deep Constitutional crisis. The Congress has, since the time of Washington immemorial to the prior Trump administration and even through to the most recent Biden one, had the ultimate power of the purse, that is: only our elected representatives have the authority to collect taxes and decide how they are spent. That this has been immutable and respected even during the times of highest treason (Buchanan, for instance) is of key note.
Of course, Presidents have claimed the power of impoundment (that power to stop revenue disbursements from the Treasury) before, but Trump’s threats go far beyond the temporary cessation of expenditures. They instead form a core, illicit and illegal overhaul of the executive branch absent any authorizing legislation.
To be blunt: what Trump and his pet oligarch Musk have done is nothing less than an illegal seizure of power. More than the power of the purse, they have attacked the very core legislative function of Congress. For Congress has, in each and every case, from the assaults on core Treasury payments, to even the USAID, prescribed very specific limits to the president’s power. The President shall take care to, as per his Article II prerogative in the Constitution, “execute the laws of the land”. An absence of a law, an implication of a law: that alone does not make it so. If a law directly orders the President to do a thing: the President must do that thing. Else, to borrow a phrase Trump so adores, “we don’t have a country anymore”.
And yes: again and again, Presidents have willfully went against the wishes of Congress. Recall when Biden, in the very nadir of his Presidency, directed his various departments not to enact the ban on TikTok. That was a Constitutional affront against a specific law Congress had passed, worthy of impeachment and condemnation if not outright prosecution. But we must be honest with ourselves and recognize the brazenness and rapidity of Trump’s coup. This is nothing like Biden, or even Trump’s past incarnation! This is something worse. Trump has threatened the very core of the Constitution: he has seized direct control of the Treasury at its roots, and thus of every single executive agency, even ones he does not directly, under law, control.
The danger here makes sense if you understand how machines work, which, admittedly, many of the ‘elite’ in the Democratic Party haven’t the slightest clue about. And the US government is nothing if not more than one of our world systems’ most complicated machines. The way our government works can best be understood by means of a metaphor: the Jenga tower. Except imagine upon the tower’s stability rests the continued existence of every single living human—and then imagine, what if the tower became a chessboard, or backgammon—or nothing at all?
This is not hyperbole. Earlier in February, Trump’s lackeys dismantled a key pillar of what makes the US financial mortgage markets work—i.e. what makes average, ordinary life day-in and day-out the same (see: https://prospect.org/economy/2025-02-11-vought-restores-cfpb-procedure-that-sustains-mortgage-markets/). That they restored everything quickly proved only that they didn’t immediately want to destroy the world economy and yet! That they did so, even for a moment, betrays the truth that everyone should recognize: that every single individual, from Trump to every other person on down he has installed into our federal payments system are nothing less than rank amateurs deserving of immediate censure and ouster.
Yet Democrats find themselves both speechless and powerless to confront this crisis. Perhaps this should not be surprising, considering the Biden debacle, but still: one cannot help but both pity and demand life from those who said in the past they would defend us, and crucially, think that at minimum a sense of self-preservation might be stirred within them. Thus: if Democrats do care to act, they must fight fire with fire.
The challenge to the constitutional order is plain, and so the demands must be as well. Democrats should demand thusly:
that every single spending decision the federal government has made in contravention of existing legislation since January 20, 2025 must be reversed
that every single federal employee dismissed, put on leave, or otherwise had their employment status change as a result of merely political decisions on the part of Trump and his non-Senate confirmed accolades must be returned to office
that the President must submit to Congress a justification for his past actions, as well as an explicit and clear budget outlining the executive’s position on upcoming appropriations, as per regular order
Abrogation of the above must be seen as a direct violation of Article I of the Constitution, and given the direct threat to the core Articles, an Article III remedy alone is not reliance enough. In addition, Trump and his allies both have expressed a desire to ignore Article III Judges, including the Supreme Court in this grave matter—to say nothing that the Court itself has been taken over by cronies of like-minds with Trump.
Should Trump decide to render moot the Constitutional order our entire way of life is predicated upon, then the various states should render their own verdict in kind. If Congress is to have no say, no voice, in the federal Budgeting process, then the states, which send representatives and senators to the Congress, should immediately impound all federal tax revenues indefinitely until all the above demands are met.
This is not a plea for secession or rebellion: it is a demand for a constitutional government, justly elected under the well-established rules and orders, prescribed long before any of us were ever born. When the Federal government under Trump agrees to these demands, then any and all revenues will be immediately disbursed to the Treasury, pursuant to preexisting law.
Of course, this will be logistically challenging. Income taxes, a large chunk of the federal revenues, are currently sent by individuals to the IRS. Well: no more. All states wishing to take action against this illegal and anti-constitutional inequity must declare a Federal tax moratorium: with a pen stroke as brash as the President’s own, declaring that all of their citizens are hereafter indemnified from paying the Federal income tax. States may even, and perhaps should, collect the taxes themselves under their own revenue services, to hold in trust and for immediate delivery for when the President agrees to the above demands. Regardless: the states’ authority to act in such a counter-Constitutional action rests solely in the President’s own illegal seizure of authority: power can only ever surrender to power.
To do anything less is to declare that the President has the power alone to not only spend the public revenues and debts, but to make law unto himself—to make the power of Congress moot. And since we are not the United President of America but rather the United States of America, the course of action is clear. Democrats control several state houses, several governorships. They should declare in each, in every: boldly no. This too shall not pass.
Do not panic.
There is one core essential truth about Trump: he is nothing more than a degenerate gambler. He bluffs as easily as he assaults women and violates the public trust. With a whiff of this, he will back down, and surrender, like the dog he is. Even if his accomplices jump in front of this geriatric buffoon and call the bluff: Democrats should not back down. Show backbone, show resolve! That’s how you get a predator mammal off your back. Here then is how to win against not just Trump but the entire GOP: show them the edge of the abyss they are wringing.
The primary way the IRS can enforce timely federal revenue services is through federal law enforcement. But law enforcement is not a wholly federal affair. States possess their own ways of enforcing the law and defending their citizens from any illegal and unjustified kidnapping—what any federal injunction would in effect be in this scenario. Thus, by any means necessary, including but not limited to calling up a state national guard loyal to the US Constitution, they must resist.
Would this bring America to the edge, and perhaps beyond it, to the gaping maw of endless violence? Only if the GOP continues along this route. They alone own it. For they started us down this dangerous path by Trump’s decisions, and by their own partisan loyalty, above that even of the Constitution. For again, if this is not willfully challenged, then a GOP-led Article II tyranny shall have been installed into the core root of our constitution, and we shall never exorcise ourselves from it. No: rather, we shall never have free elections again, and all political power will instead devolve to the cherished of Trump, for this generation and for ten generations to come. Is that the future you want?
Thus: for my sake, for the sake of those I love and cherish, for the sake of all our lives, for the sake of your own damned life: fight back! Stand up! Resist!
IT’S HAPPENING HERE