Who Needs Three Branches Of Government Anyway? (SATIRE)

Alexandra Petri (The Washington Post) satirizes the way both Congress and the Supreme Court are "bending the knee" to Donald Trump - effective merging the three branches of government into one (the Trump Branch):

I don’t know who thought that the Senate’s “advice and consent” role was going to survive the Trump Era: Part Two, unscathed. Of course, Donald Trump is opposed to obtaining consent.

This news, like the news that the president-elect will soon be putting a dogecoin in charge of the federal reserve, is disappointing but not surprising. You would think that of all the scenarios in which Trump has to obtain consent, this would be the most palatable: asking consent from a body of older Republican men who already agree with him. But even that is too onerous!

And the Senate seems fine with it. All the next president had to do was post (on Truth Social, no less) that “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments” and bang! all three front-runners for the Senate majority leader gig emitted statements saying that this sounded fine. (Some more enthusiastically than others.)

So, there you have it. How many branches of government do you need, anyway? In theory, we have three, so they can check and balance each other. But that was a long time ago, before we realized that this would just make things more difficult for Donald Trump.

Why is the Senate trying to involve itself in Trump’s plans, anyway? Well, the Senate, for those not paying attention, is a body that was designed by the Founders so that Mitch McConnell could have somewhere to sit and gloat that his plans were coming to fruition. The U.S. Constitution, which is very big on the idea of separation of powers for some reason, came up with lots of fun little tasks for the Senate to get to do. It is supposed to approve treaties and confirm Supreme Court justices and sign off on the Cabinet appointees of each president. This is important because it keeps the senators busy; otherwise, they would just fundraise and filibuster all day long, reading “Green Eggs and Ham” to one another until they lost interest, or sit grumpily on Joe Manchin’s boat.

I’m confused what senators expect to do with their time if they are willing to ditch the advice-and-consent thing. They haven’t declared war since the 1940s, and most legislation is now passed in a fit of blind panic via mysterious bundle in the middle of the night in what is known as the “reconciliation process.” I guess they can hold hearings and convict impeached people, but after they failed to remove a president who refused to accept an election’s results, I’m not sure their hearts are in it.

Do they remember that Congress is supposed to be one of three equal branches of government? Maybe they are tired? This is why it is so bad that our government is, on average, so old! If I only had one job, I would not want to just hand it over to Donald Trump to do. But maybe if you have been in the Senate for approximately 830 years, you just want to lie down and let all the appointments happen during recess. (Recess appointments sound like you’re meeting Katie near the swings to eat sand and fall off the Ominous Metal Structure, but actually, they mean that you have just abdicated your responsibility to the American people to make sure that the president’s appointees are not Way Out Of Line. This makes it easier for him to replace the Education Department with a gun wearing sunglasses.)

And what’s wrong with that? Look, the Constitution was much too hung up on this separation of powers thing, on the grounds that you didn’t want one branch of government acting without checks and balances from the others, lest it start abusing its power and eroding the people’s rights and freedoms. But who needs the people’s rights and freedoms? After all, we can rest assured that as long as Trump is acting in his official capacity as president, nothing he can do is a crime. The Supreme Court, which also used to be an independent branch of government, was very clear on this point!