No kings. And no puppets
- Rich Moniak
- Oct 24
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
The day after seven million Americans attended "No Kings" demonstrations, House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that if “President Trump was a king,” the demonstrators “would not have been able to engage in that free speech exercise.”
But he shouldn’t mistake the “No Kings” as being merely about Trump. It implicates almost every congressional Republican who is willingly ceding their constitutional power to him.
“The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47. With that in mind, the Framers purposely built the separation of powers doctrine into the Constitution.
“Congress alone bears the constitutional responsibility for funding our government,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said last month. “And any effort to claw back resources outside of the appropriations process undermines that responsibility.”
But Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Nick Begich III don’t care about that. They’ve aligned themselves with the party’s leadership that’s passively watching Trump erode their power.
In 2021, Congress passed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Almost immediately after being sworn in, Trump signed an executive order that put a hold on a significant amount of previously authorized spending, including about $70 million earmarked for Alaska.
He’s blocked spending on congressionally approved education grants, about $45 million of which had been appropriated for Alaska schools.
Sullivan and Begich joined their party’s majority to give Trump the authority to rescind $1.1 billion previously appropriated for public broadcasting, including $20 million slated for Alaska’s 27 public radio stations.
That’s just the tip of the appropriation laws he’s violated.
The Constitution gave Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. Trump isn’t the first president to seize some of it, but he is the first to levy massive global tariffs with no sense of the negative impact they’ll have on American businesses, farmers and households.
Murkowski supported two Senate resolutions aimed at blocking them. Sullivan voted against both.
The president isn’t supposed to go to war without the approval of Congress. But since early September, Trump has ordered eight U.S. military strikes on speedboats off the coast of Venezuela, killing almost all the people on board. Without evidence, he claimed they were cartel members smuggling drugs into the U.S. Earlier this month, he advised Congress that America “is in a noninternational armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations.”
On Oct. 9, the Senate voted down a war resolution act aimed at preventing further attacks without congressional authorization. Murkowski was one of just two Republicans who supported it.
In addition to usurping Congress’s constitutional powers, Trump has failed to uphold his Article II responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Here’s two prominent examples.
He issued executive orders that imposed punishment on several high-profile law firms representing clients or causes he doesn’t like. The four firms that sued him all prevailed in court. In the most recent ruling, the judge said Trump’s order was "unconstitutional from beginning to end."
As are the military deployments he ordered in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. The administration claims it’s about putting down rebellions. But finding no evidence to support that, the courts determined that they’re actually constitutionally protected political protests.
Republicans of prior decades actually revered the Constitution. Now, they won’t use their constitutionally protected freedom of speech to defend it because they’re afraid of Trump.
But the more striking irony regarding Johnson’s cheap dismissal of the "No Kings" protests relates to his pre-demonstration characterization of them as “hate America rallies.”
We should be thankful that the colonists weren’t led by self-serving cowards like him and his fellow Republicans. In order to protect their own wealth and relative power, they would have bowed to King George and the loyalists he appointed to enforce his arbitrary and capricious rule. There wouldn’t have been a rebellion.
Instead, courageous colonists fought for America’s independence. After prevailing, they bequeathed to their descendants a radically new liberal form of government. And because that’s worth saving, there will be more patriotic demonstrations against the tyrant in the White House and his Republican puppets in Congress.
• Rich Moniak has been a resident of Juneau since 1990. He retired in 2014 after a 35-year engineering career. He was also a regular contributor to the Juneau Empire for 18 years.
