Opinion | Trump ignoring H-1B visa rules is part of a pattern - The Washington Post
The Trump administration’s announcement last week about the new regulations for H-1B visas, including that most will now require a $100,000 fee, made headlines. But few pointed out that, as usual, the president played fast and loose with the rules, which in this case require a prior period of public notice and comment, while invoking national security to levy the fee.
This pattern has been followed since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. One of his early actions was to fire more than a dozen inspectors general, disregarding the law that required citing specific reasons for each firing, as well as granting 30 days’ notice.
The administration seems to be ignoring and flouting laws and rules purposefully, to erode the checks on its authority. It could have pushed Congress to pass legislation raising tariffs to whatever Trump wanted — the Republican majorities there have denied him practically nothing. Similarly, it could have asked Congress to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, because foreign aid has rarely been popular. Instead, Trump took unilateral executive action. The administration is deliberately refusing to play by the rules, in ways that look to most observers like usurpations of authority and accumulation of power. Some are deeply troubled by this; others brush it off. But the question I want to ask is this: Why has America’s vaunted system of checks and balances proved so weak?
When you look at Western democracies today, the United States stands out. Amid the widespread rise of populism, discontent with various establishments and angry political rhetoric, the U.S. appears to have moved further than any other down the path of illiberal democracy, where constitutionalism and the rule of law are being steadily undermined. Hungary is the obvious other example, but Hungary is a very young and fragile democracy, scarred by decades of communism. The United States is the oldest constitutional democracy in the world. And yet, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which measures the condition of democracies around the world, has described the erosion of American democracy as “unprecedented” in scale.
Any one of the administration’s actions might have, in a previous era, provoked public outcry. But today, we routinely see regulatory threats and lawsuits against media companies, threats to deny law firms government business or access to federal buildings, the use of the Justice Department to target political opponents and the use of military forces within the United States. Some laud these moves as necessary exercises of executive authority, but almost no one would disagree that the breadth and number of these actions are unprecedented, certainly in the half-century since Watergate.
Follow Trump’s second term
Ironically, part of the problem stems from the longevity of the Constitution, which is in many ways an enduring success. America’s political framework dates back not just to 1776 or 1789, but to the structures of government put in place by early English colonial settlers. This system was modern for its age, but that was 300 years ago. Today, to give one salient example, many Western democracies have departments of justice and electoral commissions that are independent of the elected government. But in the United States, neither prosecutors nor elections are reliably insulated from politics or elected politicians.
Since Watergate, certain norms have developed around the executive not interfering — but they are merely norms, as the Trump administration has shown by breaking them without consequence. Similarly, other democracies have more nonpartisan ways to pick judges and fixed terms for them, unlike America’s partisan mechanisms to appoint federal judges who then sit for life. Other nations learned the basics of many of their checks and balances — such as a supreme court that has the ultimate power of review over laws — from the United States, but then fine-tuned them as they were enacted.
Steven Levitsky, one of the foremost scholars of democratic collapse and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” told me that perhaps the most important reason for the institutional decay is that America has been so successful over the years that it has never seen the need to change. It’s a truism in business and life that one rarely learns from success, only from failure. And America has won the Cold War, pioneered the information revolution and continues to stand atop the world by many material measures — so we don’t see the need to examine our own system, consider its flaws and improve it. “American exceptionalism has blinded us to weaknesses in our constitutional and political system,” Levitsky said.
Alongside this lack of introspection, Levitsky described as crucial the failure of leadership. “We have no memory of democratic collapse or authoritarian rule,” he noted. “In places like Poland and Brazil, generations know what it is like to have lost the rule of law and constitutional safeguards. But Republican leaders, business leaders, Supreme Court justices don’t seem to think that we could actually watch democracy decay and even die. This is America, they seem to think. We’re different.” That failure of imagination is creating a complacency that might prove deadly.