Vanderbilt fancies itself the “Harvard of the South,” but perhaps we’ve let the institution skate on that epithet for a bit too long.
Earlier this morning, Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia took to the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter to tag Donald Trump and request an “Executive Order” to reconfigure the college football playoffs to add another four qualifiers. Such an expansion would, in theory, bring 10-2 Vanderbilt into the playoffs.
Man, the poor ReliaQuest Bowl getting marked for executive action like it’s an elite Am Law firm.
Pavia has been playing in college for six years now, and is currently finishing up his Masters at Vanderbilt. Is Civics education completely broken in this country that people getting graduate degrees from elite institutions still don’t understand that executive orders aren’t royal decrees?
The problem is actually deeper than that, but yes. Professor Lindsey Cormack, author of How To Raise A Citizen, conducted research on American Civics education and it’s bleaker than you’d imagine. The country spends pennies on Civics compared to other subjects. Not a great recipe for a healthy Republic when just watching Schoolhouse Rock reruns would move students into the top percentile in the subject.
But the abject failure of American Civics education only sets the table. The entree of toxic sludge is the byproduct of the Trump administration’s attempt to normalize executive action that a sixth grader in the 1980s would’ve instantly recognized as — to use the technical term — bullshit.
Since the Donald Trump returned to office, he’s aggressively issued executive orders purporting to take all sorts of action through monarchical edict. While presidents enjoy considerable power to issue orders that instruct executive agencies how to perform their jobs, these orders can’t change laws because that’s the exclusive job of Congress. Executive orders ARE NOT legislative edicts capable of performing an end run around the Constitution. Just as Trump cannot wake up and sign an order functionally repealing the Fourteenth Amendment in between proving he can still distinguish between a tiger and an elephant, he cannot unilaterally command the NCAA, universities, the athletic conferences, ESPN, and Notre Dame reconfigure their playoff agreements.
You can’t force Notre Dame to join a conference let alone blow up its role in the playoff agreement.
The flurry of illegal orders have — mostly — failed in court. And the administration and its media allies have taken those failures and converted them into their own grievance campaign, attacking the federal courts for issuing an historic number of injunctions blocking executive action as though it’s the fault of the courts that Trump has issued almost as many executive orders in 11 months as Barack Obama did over 8 years. The administration knows that most of Trump’s orders have all the constitutional authority of a napkin doodle, but that doesn’t matter for the strategy.
It’s about acting as though these orders are legal. If powerful institutions acquiesce and act as though this is all legal, all the better. Attack the judges who hold the line as radical outliers. Wait for the Supreme Court to shrug and rip the guts out of lower court injunctions. Flood the zone with enough orders, and people will start to believe that maybe presidents can just change the law with a memo.
And let’s not put all the blame on business students like Pavia. Here’s a Miami Law School graduate — who absolutely knows better — peddling the same argument that a president can possess authoritarian power over college football.
In the grand scheme of things, college football isn’t the biggest issue in this country, but this conversation has grave ramifications. A lot of America cares deeply about college football and almost all of them think it’s broken. Along comes a cabinet secretary casually suggesting that the sleepy strongman sitting next to him has the power to wave a wand and fix it. And people, like Pavia, start to act like that’s actually possible instead of a dementia dream turned official policy.
This is how authoritarianism actually gets mainstreamed. With lower stakes issues that nonetheless enflame the passions of many. And then it works from there.
The post College Quarterback Asks Trump For Executive Order Expanding Playoffs, In Case You’re Wondering About The Quality Of Civics Education appeared first on Above the Law.