A federal judge has ruled that the President of the United States cannot give his own appointees access to Treasury Department information systems, even though Trump has publicly maintained that during his first term he was denied access to information he needed to do his job effectively by insiders working to neutralize him. The ruling was so broad that another judge had to clarify that the Secretary of the Treasury can access the Treasury Department's data. How can the head of the executive branch be barred from accessing executive branch information through people he trusts? If the President believes the bureaucracy is malfunctioning, how can he reform it without first understanding how it works, if the bureaucracy persistently denies him or his advisors the information they need to evaluate it?

This is certainly not how the government of the United States of America was originally constituted in 1787, nor does it correspond to any of the Constitution document's formally written and ratified amendments. Rather, it demonstrates that since the drafting of the written Constitution, the government has in some other way been reconstituted to create a fourth substantive branch of government, alongside the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

Yassine Meskhout asked for an explanation of the recent emergence of anti-Zionism as a left-wing litmus test, especially salient in the aftermath of the October 7th attack in late 2023. In an unrelated conversation, a friend asked me what recourse ordinary people are likely to adopt as the state breaks various promises to them. My answer to the latter developed a surprising answer to the former.

Our system of government has two interlocking features: it refuses to hear an individual making a reasonable argument, and it systematically disrupts collective threats that fall outside mainstream coalition politics. The result is that reasonable arguments about individual circumstances get drowned out by a competition between acceptable collective identities threatening their rivals.