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About this Episode
Jamelle Bouie has an answer, and it should make you laugh.
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Transcript
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Does the left have a theory of power?
Well, some leftists are confused and think they don't.
Of course they do.
We'll talk about that on this episode of the Brian McLean's show.
It's time to think locally and act locally.
Welcome to the Brian McLean's show.
Welcome back to the Brian McLean's show.
Glad to be back on the program.
Very glad to be here.
Back on the usual schedule this week, I've cleared out some things, gotten some things
done so I can be back on my Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, early morning schedule for release
of the show.
I hope you got through it last week with only two episodes in the afternoon, but, again,
we're back on the regular schedule.
And of course, a great way to kick off a regular schedule week is our old friend, Jim
Mel Bowie.
Now, I just went through a conference where we talked about the impact of the deck
acceleration on the 21st century.
What it means for the 21st century, we know that we have the proposition, nation, people
running around.
We've got those that believe the Constitution, the Declaration are essentially the same thing.
There's all kinds of things, right?
The Declaration means much more now than that.
I mean, it actually means something completely opposite of that.
But regardless, I want to talk about this notion of power because that was something that
was brought up at the conference quite a bit.
Here we are in 2026, and you have people on the left and the right thinking about power
moving forward, thinking about government moving forward.
Trump is transformational in that, and I've said this before, he is the first Republican
since really Abraham Lincoln, but even Lincoln would give lip service to things.
He's really the first Republican to openly say, I don't care about the Constitution.
He doesn't really.
He doesn't really care about the Constitution.
George W. Bush said he kind of cared about the Constitution.
George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon.
They all said in some ways that they cared about the Constitution.
Trump doesn't.
Doesn't really care at all.
In fact, if you look at his actions and also his rhetoric, it's clear.
I say he's the first Republican to do that because the Republican party being the supposedly
conservative party in America has always believed that it needed to refer back to the Constitution
to try to work against the clearly unconstitutional acts of the Democratic Party since the New
Deal, essentially.
Now, we could also say Teddy Roosevelt's one who maybe didn't care.
Let me Roosevelt would again kind of give lip service to the Constitution, at least.
When we know there's Republicans that don't care and all those Republicans I mentioned
really didn't care, but at least there was some semblance of saying I care about the
Constitution.
And generally the people that voted for Republicans said they cared about the Constitution.
No more.
No more.
In fact, young people on the right are now starting to say, we want something.
We want someone who doesn't care about the Constitution.
We want a Caesar.
We want Napoleon.
We want something else.
We want somebody to come in, save the day, and then restore a certain order.
The problem is they're not tearing anything down on the process and they're not going to
win every election.
And I've said this before, the Republicans should go into power and rip everything apart
down to the studs.
You can't do this.
You can't do this.
We're going to gut all this.
Look, they have the opportunity.
They've controlled Congress.
They've had an executive, a Republican president.
They could have done all of this stuff.
It's the greatest betrayal in modern political history.
The greatest betrayal.
You want to get the left tear down the entire apparatus that makes them possible.
It's gone and let the chips fall where they may.
I mean, Trump's willing to do that in the Middle East, not willing to do it domestically
where it's really needed because we could save a lot of money.
The states could do what they're supposed to do.
You want all these social welfare programs, the states can provide them for you, etc., etc.
And you would see your taxes inverted, right?
You'd pay more in the state, less of the feds.
I mean, this is how it would work.
So we've got a situation where we have a president that's essentially following the leftist
playbook.
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That had been established by progressives, beating with Abraham Lincoln, by the way, who
was a progressive, who wasn't conservative, he's a progressive.
And then moving forward through progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, who was a Republican,
Taft, who was a Republican Wilson, who's a Democrat, and then I'll go down the line, really
given a lot of muscle by Franklin Roosevelt.
And then every president sense.
What I find fascinating is that the left is now gaslighting you and making you believe
this was all the creation of Donald Trump.
That the Democrats never had a plan for power before this.
Now I would agree that the 19th century and then early 20th century Republicans are responsible
for the imperial executive.
100%.
I would agree with this.
But the Democrats figured out how to do it better, and they've been as responsible for
the growth of the executive branch, or perhaps even more responsible for the growth of the
executive branch than the Republican Party.
The title of this piece is what is the left's theory of power?
Well, executive government.
It's always been that.
But somehow Jamel Buie makes you think they don't have one.
They don't have a theory of power.
Of course they do.
It's Franklin Roosevelt.
It's Woodrow Wilson.
It's Harry Truman.
It's Lyndon Johnson.
It's Barack Obama.
It's Joe Biden.
That's their theory of power.
And they're fine with it.
Because you see the left, the left, has done more to expand the powers of the executive branch
than any other institution in the West, including in the United States, but also around the
world.
In fact, Napoleon was not conservative.
He was a leftist.
Napoleon wasn't conservative.
He gave lip service to the Catholic Church.
He tried to bring back some things that were part of the old aristocracy, but he was a
leftist.
He was an expression of the revolution.
100%.
He was the natural extension of the Unitary State in France.
He was a leftist monarch, but a leftist, nevertheless, French political culture likes authoritarian
government.
And Napoleon was an expression of that.
He wasn't the committee of safety, but he was the left.
And you go and you look at the code Napoleon.
It's leftist.
It's what's open the door to all the leftist nonsense in France.
A continual revolution in many ways.
He's a leftist.
He's destructive.
And so is the left.
There are more.
They tear everything down and don't know what to replace it with, and they replace it,
and it won't have to work.
Well, we've got to replace it with something else that suppose it'll work better.
This is pragmatism.
But they don't really care about tearing stuff out.
They come in, see defense, they rip it out, because they don't like it.
They don't know what to put back there when the things that were holding the fence back
come over the fence line.
We've got to come up with something and then it doesn't work and we've got to come with
something.
And so the fence will never be put back.
We've got to come up with something though, you see.
So the left theory of power is executive government.
It always has been.
Franklin Roosevelt was the white knight riding in the white limousine to save the day in 1933.
It's John F. Kennedy doing the same thing, or Lyndon Johnson again.
I mean, this is the left.
I was just reading a post about John F. Kennedy Jr., and he made a statement that he was
an executive, or, and he was someone, he wasn't a legislator.
He was an executive.
He believed that he was someone who had to have power, not kind of work within the confines
of power.
John F. Kennedy Jr., he's just like his father, not a good legislator.
He needed to be an executive.
Why?
Because these people believe in top down, centralized, unitary, individual power.
That is the left's theory of power.
And when Jamel Bowie writes a piece about Congress, he's gaslighting you.
Back in Congress during World War I, and I've said this before on this program, there was
a bill put forward or they were discussing these bills that were coming out of the executive
branch.
Woodrow Wilson was writing a legislation, and one Republican stood up and said, why don't
we just pass a bill that says the president can do anything he wants anytime he wants,
and we're not going to stop it.
We're just going to agree to it, because that's essentially what you want.
We had executive government at that point.
The president, the Congress was powerless to stop the president.
The president was going to do whatever he wanted.
And the same thing happened during the New Deal.
It's really amazing.
Is that these people somehow believe that the left is not invested or has not been heavily
invested in the singular executive.
So let me go ahead and get into this piece because I think it's fascinating.
Jamel Bowie is delusional.
Now he's correct that Congress does need to reassert its authority.
He wants it to happen because he thinks Congress can reassert its authority and somehow give
us a more a more leftist utopia.
Where was he, would Jamel Bowie have written this article Barack Obama was in office?
Absolutely not.
If the Republicans were controlling Congress, absolutely not.
He wouldn't have said a word about it.
This is Jamel Bowie being the inconsistent hypocrite that he is.
And if you can find a piece where he said that when Barack Obama was in power, I will make
an apology, but I can guarantee you won't.
So again, the title is, what is the left's theory of power?
I mean, it's fascinatingly ridiculous.
Something for the blog of the law and political economy project, whatever the heck that is.
Bo Bowman, a professor at the University of Utah's just SJ Quiny College of Law has a
provocative question for would be left wing political reformers.
What is your theory of constitutional politics?
Now this is funny.
It's very funny because the left doesn't really care about the constitution.
It never really has.
It hasn't for a hundred and eighty years, it hasn't cared about the constitution.
170 years doesn't care.
By constitutional politics, Bo Bowman means a movement or coalition's core aims, core
claims about who should wield state power and on what terms.
Now by state power, he's not talking about the states, but the political entity of the
state, right?
The government, state power.
As Bo Bowman observes the most successful political movements in American history typically
match their political demands with a theory of who ought to wield power.
For Andrew Jackson's democracy, it was a radically circumscribed polity of white men,
whether landowners or laborers represented by a broad-based political party whose leader
Jackson could act as the embodiment of their will.
Now I think that's a little bit that's cartoonish to describe the Jacksonian period in that
way because there are plenty of people that were not interested in Jackson's theory of
power, and of course it's just for white men.
I mean, well, were the Wigs interested in any other thing besides white men know?
Were the Federalists no, I mean, nobody was in the 19th century.
This is just stupid.
This is what these people do.
For the radical Republicans of Reconstruction, the locus of state power was an almost imperial
Congress, which wrote the political and ideological settlement of the Civil War into the Constitutional
Order.
So it was Congress during the Reconstruction era.
That's because they didn't have a president that would work for them, but they were fine
with it if Lincoln was there, and when Grant became president, they were fine with the imperial
presidency.
Grant could do whatever he wanted.
That was the issue.
Congress took power because, well, that's the only power that they had.
They didn't have somebody in office that would work with them, and Andrew Johnson.
They thought Johnson was going to be better for them than Lincoln turned out he wasn't,
so they tried to get rid of them.
But the left just goes wherever they can get power, and that's really the left's theory
of power, wherever they can get it, and of course, where they can get it most of the time
is to the executive.
You think their theory of power in Virginia right now is anything other than the executive?
Or in California?
I mean, you've got control of the entire government, but that's where their theory of power is.
You think if Kamala Harris was president right now, their theory of power would be anywhere
besides the executive?
No.
When Joe Biden was there, and the Republicans controlled Congress, was their theory of power
Congress?
No, it was the executive.
And then he says this.
And Franklin Roosevelt's new deal centered in power, centered power in both a quasi-independent
administrative state, and a vastly empowered managerial presidency, which also sought to
represent the will of the whole people, a vastly empowered managerial presidency.
Well, Franklin Roosevelt was the power.
The man was elected four times.
The only person to have that.
You want to know where the left's theory of power is is Franklin Roosevelt.
That's what they really want.
They want Franklin Roosevelt every single election cycle.
That's what they need to get their agenda through.
And he says the MAGA right and its Tribune, Donald Trump, has also has his constitutional
politics.
The right, bombing rights, has chosen to treat the presidency as the authentic embodiment
of popular will.
Well, what's different from that from Franklin Roosevelt?
You just said, and let's assent ends before this, that the presidency was to represent
the will of the whole people.
How was that different than Roosevelt?
It's not.
It works systematically to sideline Congress.
Again, how is that different from Roosevelt, who also, you know, sideline Congress, and
if they did anything against him, he'd need cat people.
So what he's describing is, well, I don't know, Franklin Roosevelt.
Selectively we can administrative capacity and subordinate the bureaucracy to executive
control.
I don't know, Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, that he's just
described the leftist apparatus of the last nearly 100 years.
And yet he's saying this is the right's constitutional order.
I mean, this is exactly what the right's even saying this.
What they're trying to do right, what we're trying to do is adopt the leftist playbook
and play by the left's rules.
That's the new, that's the new right politics.
We're just going to be the left with our own agenda, and they can't stand it.
Not trying to gaslight you to think that this is somehow the creation of the right is fascinating.
It's fascinating.
They don't want to have any accountability for what they created, because Donald Trump
is their creation.
Donald Trump in the new right is just the left with a different agenda.
And in some ways the same agenda.
But that's it for them to for this law professor shows you up, not very bright law professors
are for this law professor to sit there and say, oh, this is all about this is new.
This is their constitutional politics.
These people are just taking the left's playbook and using that against them and they don't
know how to react to this.
So we got to go back to Congress and the Constitution.
I'm going to tell you what.
If a Democrat wins in 28, you'll never see a piece like this for four years, what that
person's in power ever, they're not going to sit there and say, we need Congress.
We need Congress.
No.
And if the Republicans are in power that they're, you're never going to see that.
When the Republicans won the Congress in 1994 and then took power in 95, where was the
left out there saying, you know, we need Congress, we need Congress to do these things.
No.
Of course, the right was saying that.
And then when they get their guy in office, then that all goes away.
You see, who he says, the maggurized constitutional politics are essentially a neo-bonapartism with
Trump as the man on horseback.
You mean kind of like Franklin Roosevelt riding in the white limousine, which was neo-bonapartism.
In fact, even said it, we're going to war with the Depression and we're going to get on
a wartime footing and we're going to act like we're at war at all times.
And then we're going to get a war with the Germans and the Japanese and that's going
to be even better.
And then we're going to have a war that lasts for another 50 years in the Cold War.
Of course, he was dead when that began, well, in earnest, he laid the groundwork for it.
Then we're going to have that war as a perpetual war.
And then you know what?
When that one's over, we're going to get another one because all these people are just
FDR clones in many ways.
And we're going to get another one.
It's called the war on terror.
And we got to go to war with all these terror states.
And we have to stay on a wartime footing for our economy because we're always at war
with poverty, we're always at war with the Depression, we're always at war with some group
in America.
We're at war.
That's Franklin Roosevelt.
That's Bonaparte.
That's what we've had.
For Booy to say he's projecting here, this is exactly what the left has done.
Since Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, like I do, he's read Edward Mandelhouse's book,
Philip Drew Administrator, and you see the blueprint for, well, the modern presidency.
J.D. Vance has said as much, here he has quoted in a 2022 vanity fair profile of the
new right intellectuals who would eventually coalesce behind Trump in the 2024 presidential
election.
Quote, we're in a late Republican period, Vance said later, evoking the common new right
view of America's Rome awaiting its Caesar, if we're going to push back against it, we're
going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a
lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.
What is he saying there?
We're going to adopt the left's playbook because they've wanted their Caesar for years.
They had it.
And Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt was their Caesar.
This is fascinating.
It's all projection.
The left by contrast has no clear vision of constitutional power and authority.
Really?
I mean, can you believe he wrote that statement?
Can you believe he wrote that statement?
The left has no clear vision of constitutional power and authority.
They don't care about the con.
I mean, in one way, that statement is true because they don't care about the constitution.
They never have.
They do have a vision of authority.
It's, well, the all power for executive.
And of course, just, I'm old enough to remember when Jamel Buies writing articles, you know,
we need to do the Supreme Court needs to say that, um, needs to let every, every piece
of federal legislation go and declare every bit of state legislation unconstitutional.
That was the, I mean, so we're going to use the courts.
Now that doesn't work.
Now we're going to use the Congress.
Well, we're going to use the executive branch when Joe Biden, we're going to use the executive
branch when Biden was off his, he wasn't squawking for Congress to do anything.
No, it was the Supreme Court.
It was or the federal courts.
It was Congress.
It was Joe, I'm sorry, it was Joe Biden, not Congress because, well, these are the things
that they wanted.
Their clear vision of constitutional power and authority is the presidency.
It's whatever thing they have at their disposal.
If anything, it remains tied to the new deal vision of expertise based authority and legal
liberalism, which, Bob and calls the dead gods of the new deal, essentially closed off
by a Supreme Court, whose members are deeply hostile to the administrative state.
Well, how do we get the administrative state through, um, the presidency?
And of course, Congress, you know, being locked step with the presidency, but that's
how we got it.
We had dictators during the Wilson administration and, you know, ZARS and anything else.
We're appointing all these bureaucrats.
I mean, that's Roosevelt.
That's what he wanted.
And he is directing it all like a puppet master, like Louis the, Louis the 14th.
I mean, what we see now is Franklin Roosevelt's America without Franklin Roosevelt and charge
of it.
The 14th was in charge of the French unitary state, but when he was gone, it didn't work
quite as well.
Even though I could say it suggests that the left has done pretty good with it and neat
capping and doing whatever they want to get what they want.
We're in their, their America.
What we have right now is the left's America.
Just with somebody that don't want power in power.
The problem is that to center a theory of power around the executive branch would be to
leave a future left oriented, oriented political project vulnerable to conservative reaction.
So this is, you have a problem, as he's saying, we, if we focus on the executive, which
we've done since, I don't know, World War One, well, then we can get an executive to come
in and do exactly what Donald Trump is doing.
You can't make this up.
Have I not said this is exactly why the Trump administration should have ripped all this
stuff out because that's exactly what the left is going to do.
It's exactly what the left is going to do.
Look, I'm going to agreement with Bowie that we need to have Congress reassert his authority.
That's not the problem.
It's the gaslighting to make you think this is some new theory for the left and they're
coming up with this and this is what it needs to be.
I can guarantee you.
And I've said the problem with Bowie is inconsistent.
He's inconsistent.
The left is never cared about the Constitution.
They can't because it doesn't work for them.
So where does the left find power and how does it root this authority of the in the constitutional
order?
What again, or the constitutional politics of the left?
Bowman's answer is Congress and so is mine.
Last year I wrote a briefly of the need for an imperial Congress.
Last year I wrote this last year.
I came up with this thing last year when Donald Trump was sworn into office.
Let's see.
This is October 29th, 2025.
Last year I wrote this.
I came up with this last year, but you know, in 2024, I didn't say anything about that
or 23 or 22 or 21 didn't say anything about that when Obama was in office.
No.
In fact, I'm writing about, you know, how the presidency needs more power and how the Supreme
Court, the federal courts need to just completely undo the will of the states, which is legislative
government, by the way, government of the people, by the people and for the people.
But I mean, I'm writing about these things.
Now it's all about Congress.
Now he is fully invested in centralized authority.
He doesn't really want Congress.
He don't want the states to do anything.
But this is it.
You know, this is what he's going to do.
Now I, I mean, I agree.
I wrote this last year.
Hey, Pooey, welcome to the party, but I can guarantee you.
I can guarantee you, if Kamala Harris is in office right now, you would not be squawking
about Congress having more power.
In fact, you'd be talking about the imperial presidency, getting what you wanted to have.
He wrote about this by which I meant a legislature that claims the full suite of powers and
prerogatives granted to it under the Constitution.
That will be a Congress that could radically reshape the executive branch, seizing power
back from the president.
A Congress that could curb, curtail, and discipline the Supreme Court.
It could marshal public support behind a broad-based political and economic agenda and take
a leading role in governing the nation.
Oh, that's a very good idea.
Why don't you write that in 1995?
Why don't you write that in 2009 or 2010?
Guaranteed you went back in Jamilboe's archives.
If you can find stuff that he's writing back then, he's not talking anything about an
imperial Congress when Barack Obama was in office.
I mean, this paragraph sounds great, but to gaslight you to think that first of all, he
came up with this notion.
And second of all, that this is the left's theory of power is laughably, laughably ridiculous.
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It's a fight to say that it would take an exceptionally heavy lift to make this transformation
reality.
Yeah.
Let's just a few of the obstacles.
There is a problem of congressional dysfunction fueled by arcane rules.
And this is where Booey has said he wants to get rid of this.
I mean, look, Booey has said he wants to abolish the Senate, wants to get rid of it.
But now he's all for Congress.
There is a steady deterioration of Congress's institutional capacity, its ability to do research
to investigate the state of things in the United States and make laws.
There is a deeply corrupt campaign finance regime, which gives the wealthiest Americans
the most influence over our politics.
And there is the fact that all of this, in call case, members of Congress, with habits
that are more conducive to argue on TV or are posting on X than to working on legislation.
Beyond the issues that Congress has also the way that the public itself has grown acclimated
and accustomed to uncontested presidentialism and judicial supremacy, the idea that Congress
could lead the nation isn't just foreign to us, it sounds like a fantasy.
Well, yeah, and who created that?
Well, the left.
The left, entirely.
But somehow, this is all about Trump.
This Trump has made this new.
This is all new.
He's gaslighting you, making you think this is entirely a creation of Trump.
It's not enough then to divide an agenda around a hypothetical imperial Congress.
It has also necessary to rebuild the institution, enhance its esteem and transform the public
expectations of the sources of political leadership.
This is what we have to do.
If you get Congress back involved, look, I'm all for it.
Now, why is he saying this?
This is the real question.
Why is he saying this in March of 2026 because he believes Congress is going to win 2026 midterm
elections?
And at that point, this is going to be great for Congress.
This can be great for the left because now they can rally around Congress and Congress
can come in.
Well, I mean, can't you say, well, what happens when I don't know, the right takes control
of Congress and they use all these powers against the executive?
No, no, we got to have executive government at that point.
This is what these people will do.
They don't know.
Their soul, look, the title is telling, theory of power, power, that's what they're interested
in.
They're, they're telling you what they believe in, not restraint, not limited constitutional
government.
No, this is their theory of power and he's searching.
If it's not the executive, can't be the Supreme Court, well, we'll go to Congress and try
to get power.
When we get power there, then we're going to have power.
It's not about the Constitution, it's about authority, where can they get it because
that's the left's game and they're trying to find it right now.
This is what they want, it's about power, you see?
They're searching.
Now, it's laughable, I came up with this last year and oh, by the way, I mean, all that
stuff the left did, yeah, we didn't do any of this, this old Donald Trump, by the way,
you know this.
If you read the comments on this, this is at New York Times, you read the comments, oh
my gosh, it's so funny, it's so funny, all the TDS in the comments, Trump did all this,
Trump is so responsible.
Jamel Bowie can write a piece like this because he knows Americans are historically ignorant.
They'll never put two and two together.
That's the problem.
It's funny.
He says the constitutional politics for the left must in other words be backed by a mass
politics of legislative supremacy, largely atomized society of shattered civic bonds that
is much easier said than done.
I mean, what a silly piece, what a silly piece.
I mean, I agree with them that Congress should have its authority.
I'm 100% on board with that, but he wouldn't be saying that if his guy was in power right
now, that's the issue.
All right.
Great way to kick off the week.
It's always fun to have Jamel Bowie piece.
See you tomorrow on the Brian McLean handshow.
See you then.
