Extra

On April 13, with little fanfare, and in an offhanded way, Vice President Michael Richard Pence remarked to the press that at this time, and in any national emergency, the President's powers are "plenary": absolute and supreme. 

Minutes later, President Donald John Trump reaffirmed this, describing his authority over the nation as "absolute", and telling a reporter that the rights of states (and by extension, other Constitutional rights as well), are henceforth enjoyed only at the President's discretion. 

Both remarks came at the White House daily briefing. At this meeting, the administration speaking through Secretary of the Treasury Steven Terner Mnuchin, announced the formation of a presidential advisory commission comprising a cross-sector and "vertical" selection of capitalists nominally in charge of the national capital. These advisors are said to be there to formulate a detailed plan for "re-opening" the nation: attempting to restore the circulation of capital and accumulation of profit which are currently suspended in response to the global public health crisis. 

Medical experts can give no firm guidance as to when on the calendar it will be safe to human life to relax social distancing rules and return fully to public life and work. From their perspective, it is easily foreseeable that the shut-down must continue well into June, at the least. Realistically, there is no good reason to assume it will be safe to reopen schools, churches, marketplaces and so forth anytime this year. 

Though accurate unemployment numbers are increasingly more difficult to report, official figures already have unemployment of 25% in Michigan, and well over 10% nationally. The St. Louis Federal Reserve has estimated in by the end of June, national unemployment will top 30%, a figure greater than unemployment during the Great Depression. GDP is anticipated to fall this year by a similar quantity - perhaps one third. 

Similar figures apply across the entirety of the developed world. In the developing world, the economy is no less grim with millions and soon some billions of workers tossed aside in the catharsis of a halt to capitalist social relations. 

The circulation and accumulation of capital, the social process that has defined our social lives in living memory and beyond, has ground to a halt, for the most part. Payment of wages and purchases of most consumer goods has simply stopped. Entire segments of the economy are not merely suspended: they are ruined and unlikely to return even when the public health crisis abates.  

Capitalism, in short, is dead. It lies flat-lined and blue-lipped on the table and the embers of its carcass will no doubt soon be replacing recently curtailed auto emissions with a fetid stench of a new sort. This is why the White House has convened the mob bosses of capital - the cross-sector and "vertical" representation of the entire national capital - to meet with capo di tutti cap Trump and ask, "What is to be done?" 

The President's - indeed, the unified administration's - assertion of absolute power over the nation should not be dismissed as Presidential puffery. It is not vacuous. Rather, it is the culmination of decades of careful work by the right wing establishment. We can trace its origins to the Nixon administration, and the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. In the views of many on the right, Nixon did nothing wrong. Nixon got a bum rap. 

Trump's claim of absolute authority rests on the notion that, especially in times of national emergency, the full authority of the state becomes vested in the personage of the Presidency: the theory of the Unitary Executive. This interpretation of the Constitution is perfectly defensible, from a scholarly perspective. It is grounded in ample historic precedent: The suspension of Habes Corpus and other Constitutional guarantees by Abraham Lincoln in the face of civil war. The suspension of Congress' sole authority to determine whether and when the U.S. goes to war by President Dwight David Eisenhower. The fiat nationalization of industry by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The internment of Japanese Americans and the state seizure of their property. The suspension of the Breton Woods agreement by President Richard Milhous Nixon. Indeed, the Unitary Executive theory can be traced back to the founders attempt to overcome certain military incapacities of the nation under the Articles of Confederation -- the right wing can quote the Federalist Papers and similar founding documents extensively on this topic. 

The Constitution has been suspended. 

It is firmly established in U.S. law that, outside of some theoretically possible impeachment trials, "It's not illegal if the President does it." At least it is a version of such theory, dressed in quasi-academic pomposity, that has animated decades of recent work by far right think tanks, and informed all GOP appointments to federal courts, including the Supreme Court. 

In the extraordinary times we live in. 

The Constitution has been suspended.  

It's on record and official now.