That Was the Philosophical Week, October 6th - 10th
Richard Epstein on the battle in the courts between Trump and congress; Gregory Copley addresses the failure of Xi Jinping's economy.
Xi Jinping’s Loss of Power (with Gregory Copley)
I welcome my colleague and friend and mentor, Gregory Copley of Defense & Foreign Affairs and the author of Noble State, a book about constitutional monarchy. We will speak of King Charles in our King Charles report.
But first: the People’s Republic of China nontransparent in the extreme. However, Xi Jinping, an aging tyrant, a man who forced himself on his party for a third term, a man who has regrets from his childhood, a man whose father was one of the heroes of the revolution, though he was badly treated by the revolution and was restored only because he was stubborn, not because they cared about him.
All these decades later, Xi Jinping seeks to imprint upon the party, upon China, upon the world his understanding of the Revolution.
For some time Gregory has been telling very carefully how the party reacted to the failure of Xi Jinping’s economy, and it’s given him enough rope to hang himself. How’s he doing?
Watch the full conversation above, or listen to an audio version below:
Constitutional Conflicts and Executive Power (with Richard Epstein)
As I understand it, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was Congress’s answer at the time to Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, to be able to say what the president can and cannot do in terms of the money allocated by Congress disposing the budget to the president.
One way to control the president is that he can’t go to war because he can’t afford it. Another way to control the president is to say that he can’t withhold funds that have been allocated.
So we come up to date. This is September 26th, 2025. Department of State vs. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition to be decided before the Supreme Court of the United States. The US District Court for the District of Columbia entered a preliminary injunction directing the executive to obligate roughly $10.5 billion of appropriated aid funding, set to expire September 30th.
Of the $10.5 billion, $4 billion was proposed to be rescinded in a special message transmitted pursuant to the Impoundment Control Act.
It would appear that from 1974 to 2025, there’s been very little movement in this contest between what the president’s power is of money and what the Congress’s power is of money.
Is this to be resolved, or the natural consequence of checks and balances?
Watch the full conversation above, or listen to an audio version below:
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