Other Random People

There are a lot of high-profile acts of violence in this country. Political assassinations (or attempts at same), mass shootings in schools, mass shootings in grocery stores, mass shootings in churches, mass shootings in night clubs, etc. How do we respond when they happen?

Whenever there's a high-profile act of violence, anywhere in the US, prominent Democrats have a simple, standard response: "this shouldn't have happened, this didn't need to happen, this doesn't happen nearly as often in any other developed nation, what can we do to prevent this happening again?"

Prominent Republicans have a more complex response, depending mostly on the victim(s). If the victims were innocent children, the answer is "We send our thoughts and prayers to the friends and families. Now is a time for unity and mourning; it's too soon to politicize it." If the victims were associated with the political right, the answer is to politicize it within hours, before anything is known about the perp's motives: "The radical left did this; we have to take revenge against the left." If the victims were associated with the political left, the answer is either to blame the victims (e.g. the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings), make fun of the victims (e.g. Paul Pelosi), or forget the episode ever happened (e.g. the shootings of Melissa and Mark Hortmann, John and Yvette Hoffman in their homes, the arson attempt on Josh Shapiro's home, the kidnapping attempt on Gretchen Whitmer).

Probably the least-evil, least-illegal thing Donald Trump has done this week is rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Or rather, he issued an executive order saying it is henceforth to be referred to as the Department of War. Which raises some interesting separation-of-powers questions.

According to Wikipedia, the Department of War was split, by Act of Congress, into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force in 1947; both of those, and the Department of the Navy, were placed under an umbrella organization called the National Military Establishment. In 1949, by another Act of Congress, the NME was renamed the Department of Defense. That Act has not been repealed, so under Federal law it's still called the Department of Defense.

However, it's an agency of the Executive Branch, which means Trump is entirely within his rights to order the department to call itself the Department of War, change its stationery and Web pages accordingly, etc. Likewise, any other Executive-branch agency can be required to refer to it as the Department of War.

Which puts us in the bizarre situation that the entire Executive Branch calls it the Department of War, but other parts of the government (as well as state and local governments) can't do so because legally, there's no such department. For example, a Congressional budget appropriation bill would still have to refer to the Department of Defense, and I suppose court decisions would do likewise.

Of course, the simplest fix would be for Congress to pass a bill renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War, to be consistent with what Trump wants to call it. Which would require Congress to pass a bill. As far as I can tell, Congress has passed 18 bills in the seven months since Trump took office, of which two rename a national park or refuge, one redraws the borders of an industrial park, and two amend the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. And one, slipping under the radar, is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that cuts a trillion dollars from Medicaid, cuts taxes for billionaires by four trillion dollars, makes most court orders retroactively unenforceable, etc. etc.

The other problem with Congress passing such a bill is that even proposing it might be taken as a statement that some things actually need to be done by Congress -- Trump can't do them all by himself -- and few Republicans in Congress want to be on record making such a statement.