Which is largely why presidencies do not mess with the order they inherit too much (subjective statement I know). Most institutions and projects are not stressed and the government branches just keep doing what they always did. The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.
More to the point, it's why our political system does not give unilateral control over most of this stuff to the executive branch. That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place.
> That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place.
Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
> The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
Its not quite that high of cases (21 out of 25 where the administration is a party in 2025, per [0], with one additional loss since the beginning of 2026 (Tangipa v. Newsom [1] seeking an injunction barring the CA redistricting map, where the administration wasn't in the heading but was a party as a plaintiff-intervenor.) Note that all of the decided cases at issue are interim orders (orders concerning actions before the final decision on the case, where the Administration either wants an injunction or wants to not have an injunction against it, mainly), and reading the track record of the cases that actually get decided on the interim docket neglects the effect of the Administration's losses there on which cases it could appeal it chooses not to so they never reach the docket at all, as argued in [2].
The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws, which is insane and not supported by the Constitution in any way, but directly lead to what's happening. If you tell somebody they won't ever be held accountable for breaking laws, why follow them (except for your internal moral compass, and we've established that Trump doesn't have one).
> The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws
This is factually untrue; the Court, in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), held that the President has:
(1) absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of core constitutional powers,
(2) presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts,
(3) no immunity from criminal prosecution for unofficial acts.
This is—while still problematic—very far from the President being “immune to all laws”.
Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.
Federalist society is supporting textualist interpretation of the law. If you want the law to be different, then change the constitution. Having overly expansive interpetations of the constitution to make the law what you want is being an activist. Textualism is just going by what the law says.
They decided that the 14th amendment prohibition on insurrectionists being able to hold Federal office did not apply to Trump because he is not an officer of the United States (despite the fact he holds the "Office of the Presidency"). If that isn't deliberately misreading the actual words of the statute to get the result you want, what is?
This was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court and I think a large part of it was that an individual state could use this for political gain. As Kagan said during oral arguments: "I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States..."
They're interpreting the law based on how much they can contort the constitution to divert as much power to King Trump as possible while not completely thrashing their credibility.
Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially, as that would bind their hands with a future Democratic administration.
Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?
> Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially
The Supreme Court doesn't choose which docket to “use”; the interim docket (sometimes calls the “emergency docket” or “shadow docket”) is where applications for immediate action on cases that have not reached a final decision in lower court are handled. Decisions on the interim docket are more likely to be unsigned orders, but that's as true of the ones the administration has lost as the ones it has won.
The fact that it’s possible at all to inject plausible doubt, for even a few weeks, means that counterparties will be much more wary.
They will simply have less goodwill when an American team is on the other side of the table, and give less benefit of the doubt. (as compared to say if a Swiss team is on the other side of the table)
It doesn't matter I'd they hold back or not. The perception of political instability is enough.
If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.
You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)
And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.
(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)
Which is exactly why Orsted will now focus on European wind projects instead. American projects will have to be that more profitable/expensive in the future to compensate for the political risk. But I guess this is exactly the desired outcome for big oil, no outside competition.
Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.
But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.
This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?
And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.
So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.
Political instability is a bad thing regardless of what is being invested in. It's just as bad for everything, not just windmills or sea windmills or whatever.
nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.
And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.
There is a historical tide rolling in and out of presidential power. We’re currently in a high-power executive moment that began with the AUMF for Bush 2. The courts and Congress can act to curtail that authority somewhat and hopefully will. But a lot of the EO activity is ultimately just performative unconstitutional action that will be reversed, damaging as that process may be.
Indeed, the post-Trump period will have a choice to make. Either they continue the chosen path and dont regain trust no matter the next president, or congress and court add some serious limitations to the presidential powers so future dems and reps will never go Trump again.
I wonder if both parties see the need for that at this point. There still seems a lot of 'but we are the good guys' in both partys blocking deep reform. If I'm honest, it took 2 world wars to partially whack that attitude out of Europe, and it's slowly coming back.
> The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.
No, it isn't. This administration is a rupture. It is the beginning of a new normal. Future presidents will try to emulate this guy.
You could say "outlier" when he lost in 2020. You can't say that after he came back. The American people wants this authoritarian populism. The SCOTUS enables it. And the world shouldn't trust both the American people and its crumbling institutions.
The thing is that wether the ruling party is right or left there are limits to what they can do based on the real world we live in. For example there is a limit to how much they can lower or increase the tax. There is a limit to how much they can save on one thing and invest in another.
Often when a new party takes power, no big real changes are seen as it is not so easy to implement considering the real world. They have to go down some kind of middle path.
Disagree. There are effective strategies for creating more sustainable economies and societies. Affordable housing, education, universal healthcare will make us all happier and healthier.
We know how to fix lots of problems, and money is orthogonal to the issue.
Sentences like "They have to go down..." are really a symptom of a static "there is no alternative" view.
>Affordable housing, education, universal healthcare will make us all happier and healthier.
The past ~100yr of state policy has made a lot of economic winners out of people in these industries by putting it's thumb on the scale in their favor.
Any reversion to a "natural market state" or perhaps beyond, where the government weighs in to the advantage of those who do not make money on housing or healthcare would necessarily make loser out of all the people who right now benefit from the government having its thumb on the scale where it is currently positioned and they will fight tooth or nail to prevent this.
Its harder to implement change than to promise it, of course.
However, historically it made a lot more difference which party was elected.
In the UK in the 80s you knew that if you voted Labour things would bet nationalised, and if you voted Conservative things would get privatised. Since the centrist consensus (e.g. Blair and Cameron) emerged it makes a lot less difference.
That, IMO, is evidence that what has changed is not that the two parties are constrained from pursuing very different policies, but that they no longer wish to.
I think they have adopted a common ideology. The people in the parties have become more similar over the years, as have the voters they appeal too.
A few decades ago a very high proportion of Labour politicians were former trade union leaders, for example. Conservative voters tended to be more rural and more affluent.
Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.
> Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.
I really dislike that this is a thing. Politics should not be a profession. That being said, the obvious way of fixing this (term limits) would just end up giving more power to the civil service bureaucracies, which has problems.
A healthy state is an oil tanker - slow to steer, predictable in its direction, and it's broadly steered by public opinion rather than voting. With a large mandate you get to push a few polices through. Ideally if you get a leader pushing through a policy against his party's natural proclivities it's more likely to stick.
If you have a jetski which changes direction every 5-10 years that's terrible for long term investment, and terrible from a personal point of view too. Legalise gay marriage, then 5 years later it's oh no, lets make that illegal again.
Best to move to a stable country which isn't run by the whims of a dementia-laden madman.
This applies to the UK particularly as a result of privatisation. Utilities, pensions and transport are completely dependant on previous government agreements that commit the public to long term expenses that sit outside tax. It takes debt of the government books, but also defuses responsibility. And becomes a necessary evil for getting anything done.
The US occasionally has mayors & governors who spitefully or corruptly trap their successors contractually in long-term commitments with private parties which are obviously bad financial decisions.
I argue that we have a reasonableness standard we can apply here - "Lack of consideration" is what might void a contract indenturing a 20 year old idiot in an unpaid MLM scheme.
Consideration of the public is a factor.
> "Chicago's 2008 parking meter deal, a 75-year, $1.16 billion lease to private investors, is widely criticized as a lopsided, "worst practice" agreement. The deal, pushed through in 72 hours under Mayor Daley, forces the city to pay "true-up" fees for lost revenue, resulting in over $2 billion in revenue for investors [so far] while the city continues to settle costly disputes."
I am getting the feeling that Americans love "leadership without oversight". In my country we have a parliament on the national level whose single job is to make life miserable for whoever is in power and on the local level there are city councils who do the same.
The pattern I’ve observed throughout the US is that we have all those same things as well as citizens who can go to speak at various council meetings.
People are ignored, councils seem to rubber stamp things and the tactic at higher levels is to make a terrible decision and then attempt to use courts to delay any attempt to stop whatever the decision was. When it’s finally stopped, it will be done again slightly different and restart the lengthy court process.
I do not think it is those big and visible privatisations of utilities and transport that are the real problem (I am not sure what you mean about pensions though).
The big problem is long term outsourcing contracts, that serves to get the debt off the government’s books. If anyone else did it they would be required to show the debt under off-balance sheet financing rules, but the government gets to set its own rules and gets away with hiding the real situation. Gordon Brown did a lot of this so he could pretend to have balanced the budget.
Apart from central government a lot of local authorities have done this too. Sheffield's notorious street management contract (the one that lead to cutting down huge numbers of trees) is a good example.
Political parties are mostly relatively small and under-funded huddles of second-rate individuals, who get told what to do by billionaire-owned media.
It's interesting how many and varied "minor parties" which are more genuinely grassroots have persisted in the UK despite the difficulty in scrounging up funding from the actual public, and despite FPTP being theoretically stacked against them. It's very different to the US, which despite all the talk of Federalism doesn't seem to have local parties at all?
The US seems to restrict the ability of minor parties to stand for election far more than the UK does. It varies by state but from what I have read you need thousands of signatures just to stand in many states.
FTTP does also favour parties with a geographically concentrated base such as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the NI parties. Geographical variations in the US seem mostly to be about which of the two big parties people back.
>Its going to take decades to recover from the whims of the US population (the plurarity of whom voted for this)
What does "recover" even mean?
Are we supposed to back to the good ol' days when the <pick federal agency> could hold a press conference announcing some grand new plan with <pick industry group> key person and <pick billionaire> standing in the background smiling because they know their people ghost wrote it to their benefit and the press would unanimously gush about how good it is if not copypasta the press release entirely?
Institutions are basically bankrupt of trust in the eyes of the public. Between that and the modern information distribution landscape the status quo circa like 1930something-2010something where the administrative parts of the state could "just do things" without organized resistance by the parts of the public that were on the losing end is likely never coming back.
Whatever you, and everyone else, wants to use state power to accomplish will likely have to dial back their ambitions and prioritize in accordance with the new reality of how much you need to fight for each thing, basically realign policy targets to be closer to the fat part of the "what everyone wants" bell curve. Maybe from there there will be a decades long re-accumulation of trust, but we don't know what the world will look like in the future and that may bring us to a very different status quo than the one we're exiting.
I know we all like to whine and screech about billionares and moneyed interests, but I think the new status quo is probably a bigger problem for them and other "string pullers" than the median member of the public who's getting shafted by it. Remember, the "status quo" of the last 100yr is what created the problems we have to clean up today and in the future.
Yes, let's go back to when BigCo just removed mountains to get at coal, Dick Cheney's friends all got rich in Iraq and the Sacklers sold us all pills because they had convinced the relevant agencies that doing so was in accordance with the laws, rules and policies and well, the rest is history.
All this crap has been happening forever. It may very well be happening more now (probably is, IMO), but it's happening in the open. It's all being litigated. Every capricious decision that would have sailed right over the heads of the non-thinking morons with a simple stamp of approval, maybe a small lawsuit in particularly offensive cases, is now being scrutinized and seriously litigated, because the agencies and other "legitimizers" involves have burned through their stored trust, and now everyone is watching everything they do.
