“No Kings: How America’s Education Divide, Omnibus Rulemaking, and Executive Power Collide”
October 2025 - by Jared Likes
1. A New American Fault Line
For much of the past decade, the American electorate has arranged itself around a single, glaring divide: education.
Donald Trump’s coalition is dominated by voters without a college degree — working‑class, rural, pragmatic, and distrustful of elite institutions.
Kamala Harris’s base skews almost perfectly the other way — highly educated, urban, professional, and confident in bureaucratic problem‑solving.
Education now predicts partisanship more precisely than income or religion ever did.
That polarization has created two incompatible narratives of legitimacy: one valuing will and authenticity, the other expertise and process.
The collision between them is reshaping the Constitution itself.
2. The Rise of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”
When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed in early October 2025, it was marketed as a cure to congressional paralysis.
Bundling 40 policy areas into one omnibus “renewal” package, it gave the executive branch authority to “harmonize” and implement the provisions with minimal oversight.
On paper, it promised efficiency; in practice, it replaced deliberation with delegation.
Congress did not surrender because of ideology but exhaustion. Lawmakers from both parties admitted relief at passing anything that would keep the government open.
Yet in doing so, they blurred the core American distinction between law‑making and law‑executing.
For the first time in U.S. history, the president became the originator of a comprehensive legislative text — a feat celebrated in rallies as “Trump’s beautiful bill.”
The very branding told the story: legislation not as deliberation but as personality.
3. How the System Broke Down
The OBBBA immediately produced a constitutional crisis.
When the White House reallocated funds under its sweeping “harmonization” powers, both chambers of Congress cried foul.
Federal courts enjoined the new spending, freezing thousands of salaries and programs. Within days, the United States faced a shutdown not of insolvency but of authority — the system pausing to ask who was actually in charge.
This “constitutional shutdown” wasn’t about money; it was about ownership of the purse strings.
And it cemented what the No Kings protests had warned about: a government living at the pleasure of one man’s signature.
4. The No Kings Protest: An Old Idea Reborn
On October 18, as agencies darkened, citizens poured into city squares under hand‑painted banners reading “No Kings, No Cults, No Crowns.”
They weren’t radicals; exit interviews found teachers, engineers, and parents quoting Jefferson and Madison.
Their grievance was cultural, not just political — a conviction that America was learning to associate legality with charisma.
The movement’s name deliberately echoed 1776: having fought off monarchy once, participants refuse to watch one grow through the machinery of democracy.
Where MAGA rallies chant “Make America Great,” the No Kings crowd chants “Make America Ours.”
5. Signs of Personal Rule
Several developments since the bill’s passage highlight why constitutional scholars are nervous:
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- Department of Justice capture. Career prosecutors replaced by political lawyers; public statements by the president treated as binding investigative directives.
- Budget reallocation without vote. Executive “harmonization” memos override line‑item appropriations
Troop deployments into opposition‑governed cities. The Insurrection Act stretched to send National Guard units into Democratic jurisdictions that hadn’t requested help.
Health and Human Services’ due‑process shortcuts. Undocumented residents transferred without hearings, sidestepping statutory asylum and child‑welfare protection
- Campaign‑finance intimidation. Republicans who opposed the bill reportedly warned that party funding would desert them.
Each event remains technically legal under some strained interpretation, but together they form a pattern: the centralization of coercive, fiscal, and narrative power in a single executive office.
6. Why the No Kings Movement Sees an Existential Threat
The protesters’ fear is less of Donald Trump as a personality than of the system becoming habitually monarchical.
Every emergency measure, every omnibus bill, every “temporary” deployment rewires public expectation toward one decider.
Political science calls this personalist rule: formal democracy continues, but institutions exist mainly to ratify the leader’s will.
In such regimes — Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela — collapse happened slowly, under applause, and always “by law.”
7. How It Could Escalate
If left unchecked, five mechanisms could harden temporary overreach into durable autocracy:
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None of these require abolishing the Constitution; they work because citizens become accustomed to convenience over complexity.
8. What Can Still Be Done
For institutions:
Congress can restore line‑item appropriations, strengthen inspectors general, and daylight all executive funding transfers.
The judiciary can fast‑track challenges on the Insurrection Act and due‑process cases, reasserting limits on “emergency management.”
States can assert their federalism prerogatives, refusing unauthorized troop cooperation or detention mandates.
For citizens:
Continue non‑violent protest, vote in every local election, support investigative journalism.
Demand transparency: every executive order or spending memo should be public, searchable, and open to comment.
Reject personality politics even when it benefits “our side.”
Democracy isn’t defended only at election time; it’s defended any time people insist that procedure matters.
9. The Deeper Lesson
The American Republic was designed on the assumption that ambition counteracts ambition — that no man should hold all cards simply because he promises to play them well.
When exhaustion or fear leads us to value decisiveness above deliberation, monarchy returns not in name but in spirit.
The No Kings movement is, at core, a secular prayer:
that citizens remember our freedom depends less on whom we elect than on how willingly we limit those we elect.
Author’s note: This essay integrates public information and political‑science analysis through October 2025. It’s intended for civic education, not partisan persuasion. Readers are encouraged to verify sources and participate in lawful democratic engagement.
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