Around 100 BC, the Roman Republic had become an Empire, capturing a vast swath of territory including all of north Africa aside from Eqypt, all of Canaan and Mesopotamia, much of Anatolia, all of Greece and the Balkans, all of Italy, Cisalpine Gaul and Spain.
As was the practice of the time, conquering a place meant selling much of its population into slavery so Rome was suddenly awash in slaves. People who were farmers or tradesmen were put out of work by the much cheaper slave labor.
Tiberius Gracchus, a plebian, got himself elected Tribune of the Plebes, an office that had been established much earlier after the Social War. Gracchus pushed a radical program of land and financial reform to help those who had lost their jobs to slaves. The patrician class was agitated by this and caused the election of competing tribunes to veto Gracchus' reforms. Gracchus responded by overruling the competing veto and vetoing the functions of government, shutting the government down.
Sound familiar so far? The Senators eventually accused him of wanting to be king, something the Republic had a visceral hatred of, and a gang of Senators beat him to death with any clublike object that came ready to hand. Ten years later, when his brother Gaius revived the reform program, he met a similar fate. Outcomes were more brutal then.
The Gracchi had arguably noble motives, but they engaged in extralegal means to achieve them. The lesson that later politicians took from this episode is that laws don't really make you do anything at all. You have to agree to obey them and you can choose not to, and get away with it if you are a better politician than the Gracchi and on the side of the wealthy rather than the plebs. Sound familiar?
This ultimately led to first Gaius Marius and then Lucius Cornelius Sulla leading armies on Rome in civil war to install themselves as dictators. They, especially Sulla, argued that they were acting to restore the Republic from those who had abused it. Largely what they did was enrich themselves and their cronies. They both engaged in murderous purges of, let's call it the Deep State, those people appointed by the previous government who are, of course, making all decisions based solely on their partisan leanings. Sulla would publish lists each morning of proscribed citizens and by evening they would be dead and their property confiscated. Citizens began making it onto the list BECAUSE someone wanted their property. Ultimately, people would be murdered and then retroactively put on the list to justify the murder.
One of Cicero's first famous legal cases was defending someone whose family had suffered this fate. A wealthy crony of Sulla had murdered his father to get his estate, and then accused the murdered man's son of having done the murder of his father.
Julius Caesar was one of Sulla's targets but he escaped. Sulla is reported to have regretted the lost opportunity.
Sulla was a patrician, a member of the Optimates. He hated the Plebian Council and the Plebian Tribune. He attempted to reverse the Gracchi reforms, but he also reformed the courts, provincial governorships, and especially the membership of the Senate. He codified the Cursus Honorum (the Course of Honor) which required passage through a ladder of offices to get into the Senate or become one of the two yearly Consuls. The notion was that people should reach a certain age and level of experience before assuming certain powers.
Sulla also wanted to make it unlikely that anyone else would follow his path to power by seizing it at the head of an army. To this end he reaffirmed the requirement that any individual wait for ten years before being reelected to any office. Sulla then established a system where all consuls and praetors served in Rome during their year in office, and then commanded a provincial army as a governor for the year after they left office.
Sulla, somewhat surprisingly, resigned his position and retired to write his memoirs, believing that his reforms had saved the Republic and set it right. The one thing he had not fixed, however, was what the Gracchi brothers had first demonstrated -- the law doesn't make you do anything, and it doesn't punish you as long as other members of your party support you. Julius Caesar would later mock Sulla for surrendering his dictatorship.
Cicero reports that Pompey once said "If Sulla can, why not I?" Sulla retired in 86 BC. Pompey and Caesar both subsequently used their armies to gain advantage against the Senate. In 49 BC, just 37 years after Sulla's retirement, Caesar crossed the Rubicon against the express orders of the Senate and touched of a civil war, Caesar against Pompey. Caesar won a decisive victory against Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus in Greece and Pompey fled to Egypt. Caesar was made (or had himself made) dictator, and pursued Pompey. When he arrived, Pompey had already been assassinated by a confederation of Egyptians and some of his own officers.
Rome would never again be a Republic.
This story is driven by an ever more blatant course of simply ignoring inconvenient laws, targeting your political opponents for suppression, and ruling by decree. As Julius Caesar is credited as saying, “All bad precedents begin as justifiable measures.”
And so we arrive at Donald Trump today. The Constitution provides Congress and Congress alone the power to decide what money will be spent and how. Congress considered the President*'s claims about border security and the wall and decided not to spend money on that. Trump has decided to sign the bill in order to keep the government open and then issue a royal decree to empower himself to reprogram money allocated by Congress for purposes for which Congress did not authorize the expenditure.
Sound familiar?
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