COMMENTARY
As echoes of 1933 grow louder, will Congress act or must the American people shut the country down?
Published February 16, 2025 5:45AM (EST)
Mike Johnson, Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
Nearly one month into Donald Trump’s second term, the courts, the Congress, and the American people are facing the denouement of our democracy’s power. Each will have to decide to either enforce the Constitution or succumb, as Germany did, to dictatorship. The president has faced several court rulings that question whether his actions and policies are consistent with the Constitution of the United States that he swore to defend and uphold. The question now is, will he be prudent and begin to follow court orders, will Congress act, or must the American people shut the country down?
One court has ruled that he defied the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that defines citizenship and two other courts – so far – have put on hold his freeze on congressionally-authorized spending, his attempt to usurp the Article 1, power of the purse, rights of Congress. Here we see an ongoing parallel with how Hitler chose to govern, a parallel that must inevitably lead to a denouement in which we will learn whether Trump’s America goes the way of continued democracy or the hellish way of Hitler’s Germany.
Two months after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he, like Trump today, disregarded his country’s Constitution. In March of 1933, with the National Socialist Party shy of a majority in the Reichstag, Hitler sought and obtained a two-thirds majority vote in the chamber that passed what we know as the Enabling Act. That act stripped the Reichstag’s members of the authority given to them by the voters. The Enabling Act allowed Hitler to override laws passed by the legislature; it allowed him to make laws himself; it allowed him to ignore the Constitution; it allowed him to ban and jail his political opponents. It made Hitler the dictator of Germany. All of this was done with proper procedure and behind the veil of the seemingly best of intentions. Hitler did not unilaterally declare himself dictator. Rather, he and the Nazi Party said that all they wanted was to restore Germany’s lost stature and its people’s well-being. The National Socialists, put plainly, wanted to make Germany great again.
The Enabling Act was known at the time as “The Act for the Removal of the Distress of the People and the Reich.” The Reich’s distress originated in Germany’s surrender in World War I and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The reparation payments imposed by the treaty drove Germany’s economy into hyper-inflation and massive unemployment. The German currency became nearly worthless. Employment, standing at about 20 million in 1929, dropped to 11.5 million by the time the Reichstag voted to endorse the act. These were, of course, the very distress of the people that the legislation was purportedly aimed at alleviating.