However this part of the EO is pretty concerning
> 'The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch'
and later
> 'No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law'
This can potentially enable an end run around congress and the courts in that the President can easily choose to interpret laws in a manner inconsistent with the intent of congress and courts. Now, we can argue the point and say that presidents have already done so in the past and that congress/courts should have been more specific. However it quickly gets into the issue of the impossibility of congress or the courts anticipating and specifying every detail to avoid a 'hostile' interpretation.
This part of the EO says the president's opinion is the law as far as the executive branch is concerned. Given that the executive branch implements the law, this would imply that the president's interpretation is all that matters. The other two branches have no real role left to play. Given the supreme court's ruling on presidential immunity, this is a dangerous level of power concentration.
Even if you support the current president's goals and objectives, setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system. Nothing prevents the next president from having a radically different opinion. There is a very good reason why the founding fathers built in an elaborate system of checks and balances.
It goes against the foundation of not only US law, but couple of hundred years of international democratic tradition in which allegiance is not to a person, but to the nation itself.
US civil servants and military alike swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution not the president or their commander. Illegal orders are not only expected, but required to be disobeyed.
This EO eliminates the concept of an illegal order since the law would be whatever the executive interprets it to be.
There are many things that I thought would not survive the scrutiny of good people within the system of checks and balances.
But here were are. It seems that "good people within the system of checks and balances" were the only obstacle to absolute power.
The United States had a spoils system of government administration until at least the late 1800s. The spoils system was still prevalent in many state and city governments until the mid 1900s.
This didn't mean officials were permitted to violate the law, but self-dealing and bald partisanship in administration was rampant, and of course violations of the law often went unpunished as administration officials had (and have) discretion to prosecute.
Chicago, NYC, the entire state government of New Jersey....
That stuff still goes on today.
Isn't this exactly how it works? They interpret it and that stands unless challenged in court.
If you combine this EO with the Supreme Court immunity decision, there may very well be a situation where a rank and file employee acts illegally based on the president's interpretation of the law. This would create a situation where there is a legal challenge about whether a member of the executive branch should be granted the same immunity privileges as the president since they are an extension of the president. You can imagine where things will head if we end up on the wrong side of this decision.
At first glance, it seems like it's a positive thing for all members of the executive branch adhere to the same interpretation of the law. It's the definition of "arbitrary and capricious" if one executive agency interprets the same law differently than another. As others have commented, the president or AG's interpretation is still open to judicial review.
Or conditional enforcement, say for those who don't buy enough Trump meme coin.
How do you come to that to conclusion, especially in the context of the EO?
This EO doesn't change the Constitution's requirement that the President "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed".
I'm not a lawyer but I would interpret this EO to say "it is the job of the President to execute the laws passed by Congress" and "the President may employ subordinates in that execution", however "these subordinates must still execute based on the President's interpretation, not their own".
The EO has a long section on "independent agencies which operate without Presidential supervision". This is what the EO clarifies.
> This EO eliminates the concept of an illegal order since the law would be whatever the executive interprets it to be.
This isn't true at all. This EO doesn't change the fact that President is held accountable by the judicial branch for following the law.
Yes, this is a problem, because it would mean that if the President (for simplicity, the order also specified the AG, but it doesn't really change the issue) had an opinion on the law, and the courts issued an order to an executive officer such as a department head in a lawsuit contrary to that interpretation, the department head would remain bound by the Presidential interpretation until the President relented, since the meaning and effect of a court order is no less a matter of interpreting the law than the meaning and effect of a regulation, statute, or Constitutional provision.
Sec. 7 is so ridiculous on its face that, while I am sure the Administration seriously does want to impose as much of this control as it can get away with, I think it was largely included as a lightning rod to distract from the rest of the order moving control of all independent agencies internal spending allocations into OMB and the Executive Office of the President and otherwise purporting to transfer effective control of the functions assigned by law to the independent agencies to be exercised by their boards into the White House.
I don't know what you mean by "bound"?
The President, EOs and the exective branch are not immune from court decisions.
If a court rules again an EO, the President would need to abide by that court decision. As per this EO, the department head would do what the President wanted (align to the court order), and would thus be in compliance with the court order.
In the case the President decides to ignore the court order, the department head has an option - do what the President says or do what the court says. If they decided to do what the President says they would also be in violation of the court order. If they did what the court said, they would likely be fired.
It's not like this EO really changes the situation? Before this EO a department head would have the same choices and face the same risk of being fired.
> Sec. 7 is so ridiculous on its face that, while I am sure the Administration seriously does want to impose as much of this control as it can get away with
I'm not sure what you mean? Why is it ridiculous that an agency which derives it's authority from the executive be able to ignore the head of the executive's interpretation of the law? Who would they be accountable to if not the US President? Nobody?
There are no "independent agencies" under the US Constitution. All agencies exist under the purview of the President. What Section 7 says is "no executive agency employee may make an independent interpretation of a law outside that determined by the head of the executive".
This is entirely aligned with prior US Supreme Court decisions that the US President has sole authority over the Executive Branch.
I'm not sure we'd want to have an unelected executive agencies that is unaccountable to head of the executive branch. That just wouldn't even make sense.
What this means is that the President executes Congress' will. Reading the Constitution, there's just no argument for anything else. You have to dig into subsequent history, acts of Congress, and Supreme Court decisions to reach the justifications for the wild increase of presidential power. I'm not saying this is bad per se, just that the Constitution argument is absolutely bankrupt and ahistorical: there was zero appetite for a powerful executive in the Continental Congress.
That's what's so radical about this EO: it's antithetical to the very founding of the US where we rebelled against a king and ultimately adopted a constitution with a very weak executive. It supplants the will of Congress with the will of the executive, undermining the separation of powers, plenary powers, and the very underpinnings of our government.
No, this is completely false. The President doesn't have the authority to fire a department head for following a court order, and if they tried they would get sued and clearly lose, and be forced to reinstate the fired person, and other employees would follow this pattern.
With this EO, the President does get this exact authority, and the courts would be forced to side with the president in the matter of the firing, if the EO is allowed to stand by the SC.
Accountability does not require absolute control. A subordinate official can be permitted (even mandated) to exercise independent judgement and still be accountable for mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance to a higher authority.
And this has, with different precise parameters, long been the statutory model governing the President’s relations with much of the executive branch, with different specific rules applicable to civil service employees generally, Inspectors-General and a few other specially-designated employees in regular departments, and independent agencies.
Sure they are, if they want to be. Federal courts don't have their own enforcement arm. Even if they find specific officials in contempt of court, and order them arrested, Trump can simply order the US Marshals service to just... not arrest them.
Yes. Or even more perniciously, just note the arrests have been put on the long “to do list”, to be studied fully, and carried out with special care, all of which takes time…
Because of course the arrest order is being taken seriously and the courts decisions respected.
Independent agencies, that execute their mission rather than the whims of one man (and are accountable to the law) don't make sense to you?
Anyone who knows even US Civics 101 would recoil at such an idea.
The president can settle any issues between their view, the agency head’s view, and the agency’s guiding laws, in the courts.
The courts are their specifically to settle disagreements.
That’s how the law works for agencies. That’s how the law works for all laws.
Three branches checking each other.
What I'm talking about is accountability for interpretation of the law.
Let's say the head of an agency decides their interpretation of the law is X, but the President thinks it's Y. You can't bring them to court because X and Y fall within the interpretation of law.
If agencies were not accountable to the President, you basically have an unelected/unaccountable (when it comes to policy within interpretation of the law) bureaucrat that the voters are unable to hold accountable.
With this EO, the voters can elect a President who can then direct the agency head to execute interpretation Y.
That seems like the more idea scenario?
Also, settling the ultimate interpretation of the law is indeed the prerogative of the courts. This has actually changed quite recently in some ways - the SC has recently struck down the Chevron Doctrine, which held that the courts would defer to the executive when a law could be interpreted in different ways. So right now if Congress passes a law that says "the EPA shall insure that American citizens have potable drinking water", it is ultimately up to the courts to decide if the level of lead in water set by the EPA makes the water potable or not.
But however you slice it, the president shouldn't be the one to decide if the level of lead in water being enforced by the EPA is too little or too much. If the head of the EPA and the courts believe that a certain level is good enough, than that's that. After all, the president chose this head of the EPA. The next president can choose another head.
Uh, who is “you” in this scenario? Because for most reasonable values, yes, you can.
Differing interpretations of the law by different executive branch officers have never stopped outside parties from suing those executive officers over their execution of the law, with the courts ultimately deciding the correct interpretation (sometimes with some degree of deference, but never absolute, to executive interpretations.)
If a law is too much subject to interpretation, anyhow, the congress, which is the branch deputed at making the law, can change it at any time.
And most of all, I'm not sure in the US case, but when there are interpretation disputes you typically can have courts declare what's the correct interpretation.
It's something extremely common in normal democracies, and if it's really antithetical to US civics, that's just another proof that the US were only a pretence of a democratic system.
It doesn't mean the agency isn't a part of the Executive branch with the President at it's head and it doesn't mean the President can't fire them for specific reasons.
I don't think that's true? Court orders are orders, not laws, and the two are very different.
But the same question remains. Who’s going to enforce it?
Whoever did or didn't before. It's got nothing to do with this executive order as far as I can see.
Do you see it now?
The executive shall enforce orders, because it is bound by laws to do so, which for the executive can only be interpreted by the president?
Sounds like a power grab to me.
No? They don't do their job because the law compels them to do (often it doesn't, e.g. the police don't have any positive legal obligation to make arrests or what have you). They do their job because it's their job.
Didn't the judicial branch say that presidents have broad(or near total) immunity for their official acts? Then how is the judiciary going to hold the president accountable when they choose to interpret the law based on personal whim?
With this EO, every federal worker has to adhere to that whim or face dismissal at best or prosecution at worst.
That's the big question, though, isn't it? Will current SCOTUS actually pass down rulings based on the law and constitutionality, or will they defer to Trump on many/most/all things?
And if they pass down a ruling that Trump doesn't like, will he obey the court? Or will he just instruct his people to ignore it? Federal courts and SCOTUS don't really have much or anything in the way of enforcement power, if the executive branch wants to ignore them.
The only real backstop to this is Congress' power to impeach. Which won't happen. And even if it did, would Trump actually leave office? And if he didn't, who would have the ability and willingness to step in and force him to leave?
If the answer to all this is "the military", whoooo boy, are we in trouble. And even that assumes all the military leadership hasn't been retired by then, with Trump loyalists installed in their place.
Seems like a major reach to compare the two unless you are rationalizing backwards.
Yes. It does.
But there is an older Big Man tradition where loyalty to the nation is indistinguishable from loyalty to the person, the Big Man).
I naively thought that that was a stage that democracies passed through (we see it a lot in the South Pacific - the Big Man.
So sad. So terribly sad. We all like to tease Americans for being this and that, but now it feels like punching down.
Good luck to you all - Dog bless.
And yeah, it's about time we (I'm from the USA) got off our high horse and accepted we're a collection of humans with cultures, traditions, languages, habits, and messy traumatic history like everywhere else.
Whether it is as overt as a soldier refusing to follow an illegal order knowing they are risking court marshal, or as clandestine as mid-level bureaucrat slow-walking damaging policies, or people actually voting in local-to-national elections.
Democracy is not a passive form of government.
https://apnews.com/article/guatemala-protest-indigenous-giam...
More up than many. There is no other way to prevent power grab. You can see it in post-USSR space what happens when there is no push-back from public.
Or stealing papers from the President's desk in order to prevent him from signing them.
By "we" here, it seems you mean bureaucrats. But what if your opinions, as an individual, unelected bureaucrat are bad? I don't care what a mid-level bureaucrat's opinions on what policies are damaging is. He could be a neo-nazi for all I know. Constitutionally, we should go with the opinions of the people who won an election, instead of some random dude. I was taught that was what "democracy" was, not some random person taking advantage of their position to advance their personal goals.
When the guy paid to guard the door starts making his own decisions about who should get to come in, it's not good. It's corruption.
That’s a slightly silly stance to take. Modern developed countries live and die by the quality of their bureaucracy. Making every bureaucratic role an elected position would be insane.
How on earth would you organise elections for every single DMV employee? Or every single park ranger? Or every single government accountant or secretary? Every single civil servant involved in collecting the data used to drive policy decisions.
To get rid of “unelected bureaucrats” you would basically have to turn every federal role into an elected role. The federal government employees around 3 million people, even if we say that only 10% of them are “real unelected bureaucrats”, that’s still 300,000 elections you would need to hold every X number of years. How on earth would anyone ever manage any of that?
Thats before we get to the insanity which is Musk, the epitome of the “unelected bureaucrat” who seems to be the one leading the charge on many of these “policy decisions”, and publicly lambasting “unelected bureaucrats” as being corrupt and “undemocratic”.
You can't. Which is exactly why the civil service is supposed to impartially implement the policies of the elected government rather than making their own judgements.
IMO the increasing partiality of these bureaucrats (who are drawn from the professional-managerial class and have the views of that class, which are increasingly out of step with those of the average citizen, especially on social issues) was one of the big contributors to Trump getting elected.
"The Congress shall have Power ... To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof" - Article 1, §8, United States Constitution.
Don't stop there, carry on and read Article 2: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America...he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". Nothing in there about anyone else taking the faithful execution of the laws upon themselves.
I agree. Everyone else must follow the law as stated in the U.S Code, as codified by Congress, as stated in article 1, section 8.
But yes, everyone has an obligation to follow the law, which is what exactly this EO is about. Federal agencies don't get to pick and choose their own creative interpretations of the law, they have to follow the actual law. The president literally has a constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and this EO is him doing that.
The government agencies' powers come from the legislature and must follow U.S. Code, derived from the legislature's laws. Agencies hire their own counsel to make guidelines and regulations from U.S. Code.
As a technologist, you have the confidence to interpret the law and the Constitution from your version of reasoning from first principles. However, the Supreme Court and other courts repeatedly disagree with your interpretation, which willfully ignores the first article in favor of the second.
It doesn't say that. It says that agencies must follow interpretations published by the President and the Attorney General and may not publish contradictory interpretations. And even if it did say that, how would that contradict the constitution - which says nothing about who is supposed to interpret the law and charges the President, and only the president, with ensuring the laws are faithfully executed?
Do you think massively cutting government grants that go to all kinds of social services in order to pay for 4.5T in tax cuts that mainly go to the wealthy, is going to help the working class?
Moreover, inter-term government workers are hired to be explicitly non-partisan. You want them to be non-partisan in order to guarantee continuity of government between administrations and to enforce the law as determined by the courts, non-politically. This is what actually guarantees your rights under the constitution. The minute you introduce political bias into this process is when you begin to deviate from the rule of law and actually abridge peoples’ rights.
And I’m sorry, but your “team” is going to have to face a reckoning if they continue to take power unconstitutionally. That abridges my rights as a citizen of the republic and forfeits their mandate to rule. We will all have the moral right and duty to use force if necessary against any politician who upholds this illiberal order. I hope you like violence, because that’s what you’re asking for.
Wealth is not the same as class.
> Do you think massively cutting government grants that go to all kinds of social services in order to pay for 4.5T in tax cuts that mainly go to the wealthy, is going to help the working class?
Yes. I'd've preferred raising the minimum wage or actual proper public-funded healthcare, but apparently there's no party you can vote for that will make a serious effort to do those. Cutting a bunch of PMC email jobs will at least reduce competition for housing, and while there are some well-intentioned individuals at the low levels of those agencies, overall they're often useless or even counterproductive.
> inter-term government workers are hired to be explicitly non-partisan. You want them to be non-partisan in order to guarantee continuity of government between administrations and to enforce the law as determined by the courts, non-politically. This is what actually guarantees your rights under the constitution. The minute you introduce political bias into this process is when you begin to deviate from the rule of law and actually abridge peoples’ rights.
Right, and this is where your "team" has been gradually going astray for decades, and what has lead us to this point.
> And I’m sorry, but your “team” is going to have to face a reckoning if they continue to take power unconstitutionally. That abridges my rights as a citizen of the republic and forfeits their mandate to rule. We will all have the moral right and duty to use force if necessary against any politician who upholds this illiberal order. I hope you like violence, because that’s what you’re asking for.
Lol. Your "team" is all about non-partisanship and rule of law as long as things are going your way, and then the moment the people elect someone who actually tries to implement the policies he stood on, it's time to declare him illegitimate and threaten violence. I fully believe you have the temerity, but you don't have the balls.
And no, I’m sorry, but grossly violating the constitutional foundation of this country going back to 1880 is not a matter of just “implementing policies”. We can do all that through acts of Congress already. Don’t like it? Then don’t vote for a party that’s made it their mission to obstruct all legislative progress.
What you’re trying justify here is the elimination of the balance of powers itself—the very thing that keeps this country free. If your family has multiple generations in this country then you are disgracing their legacy as Americans. One of us is an actual patriot willing to take a risk and defend both of us against tyranny (and you should be grateful that there are millions more with that intention). The other just traded away his own liberty to a wannabe tyrant, like a coward. So step out of the way.
No, this changes nothing about the relationship between the branches. The judicial and legislative branches still have exactly the same roles and responsibilities they've always had. Individuals can still sue and Congress can still impeach. There was never supposed to be a secret fourth branch of bureaucrats accountable to no-one; bureaucrats in the executive were always supposed to be accountable within the executive, topping out at the President. And now they are.
> If your family has multiple generations in this country then you are disgracing their legacy as Americans.
Right back at you. How many generations of your ancestors do you think would say that random staffers in NOAA or MBDA or BLS or BoIE or MSHA should be deciding they know better than the President and the Attorney General and making up their own interpretations of the law to follow instead?
> One of us is an actual patriot willing to take a risk and defend both of us against tyranny (and you should be grateful that there are millions more like me).
Real internet tough guy huh.
That's blatantly false. You need to educate yourself on how our constitutional order actually works and how this EO attempts to claim illegitimate power.
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1isvzgu/the_full_execu...
>deciding they know better than the President and the Attorney General and making up their own interpretations of the law to follow instead?
Also false. The courts interpret the law and dictate what is legal to the bureaucrats. Under that executive order, the president -- rather than the courts -- interprets the law, which clearly violates separation of powers. You have thrice ignored this most basic fact.
If you're being truthful, then you are grossly misinformed. If you are not, then you're opposed to a free America. Either way this needs to be explained to anyone else reading this thread.
>Real internet tough guy huh.
Yep, it's all a big joke until you find yourself sitting in federal prison because you said something the president didn't like. That's where ignoring the courts will take us.
The judicial branch doesn't interpret the law prospectively, it rules on cases and controversies. This EO doesn't affect court rulings, it's about interpretation as done by (from your own link) "agency lawyers, inspectors general, and independent counsel". It puts those people in the executive hierarchy and makes them accountable to someone.
They've always been out of touch in the same way they are now. They just used to align more closely with your own political beliefs.
Individuals with appointment power attach appointees to their ticket like vice presidents. You get the option to write in anyone, but the tickets are defaults.
Unless you’re suggesting that every bureaucrat role should be an appointment, and part of X years elections, is having people with appointment powers turning up with a list of 300,000-3,000,000 people to fill every bureaucratic role, and somehow the general public are going to scrutinise that in some meaningful manner.
All of that is of course ignoring the problem that comes with throwing away all of your bureaucracies institutional knowledge every X number of years. Do you really want the issuance of driving licences, fishing licenses, gun licenses, international visas, customs enforcement, immigration enforcement, to all grind to a holt every 3-5 years while the new folks figure out how stuff works? You would basically end up with a bureaucracy that fundamentally couldn’t achieve anything, and silly things like the rule-of-law would simply cease to exist in the U.S.
Why would anyone want to trade with, invest in, or ally with, a country that effectively lobotomises its government every few years, and has zero continuity of governance at even the most basic day-to-day items of modern life?
God bless our world now, as the change is coming and it will not be pretty
If I'm the guy guarding the door (and I have been), I damn well make my own decisions to the best of my ability, to where I would be willing to explain the what and why of my actions.
That's already protected and the executive order doesn't claim otherwise.
>> No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance [...]
That’s literally not how the constitution has ever worked.
One[0] answer is, the former was vetted by someone knowledgeable and (at least allegedly) non-partisan who had the power to stop it if it was wrong. That's it. If the president really wants to fine Facebook he can - he can replace the SEC Director with the "My Pillow" guy if he wants, who can replace SEC employees with randomly chosen members MAGA types until the desired fine is eventually issued - but at least going through the bureaucracy confers the possibility of impartial and informed oversight. Vesting the power with the president directly doesn't do that; presidents are biased and partisan by design.
0: Another answer is the SEC has been granted the power to do that by Congress and the president has not; but I get that people on the "unitary executive" train disregard this, and
It's clear the American people (again, majority speaking - I mean, I certainly care) don't care about what is going on with the federal government right now. The only thing that will make them care is if the economy tanks or if inflation spirals out of control.
22.73% of Americans voted for Trump.
22.06% of Americans voted for Harris.
Not true. A majority of the Americans who chose to vote voted for Trump.
Not true. A plurality of the Americans who chose to vote voted for Trump. Trump: 49.8% Harris: 48.3%
Judiciary has more power than you'd think too. It's just that they try to act in good faith and generally do not want to throw people into civil contempt that often. The SCOTUS can even re-re-interpret the presidential immunity that Trump has abused to a pulp if they are angry enough. That was their call after all.
Will they do this? Highly unlikely, at least for Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if Musk flies too close to the sun, however.
<Sad clown laughing noises>
Regarding the power of the judiciary in this, Trump's team is arguing right now before the Supreme Court that the judiciary has no power to constrain the President's power when he's acting solely within the Executive branch (which is basically all the time...) Oh, and as part of that filing he reminded the Supreme Court that they just granted him full immunity from prosecution.
For the cherry on the cake, the official Whitehouse X account tweeted out "GOD SAVE THE KING" with a picture of Trump with a crown on his head (I thought this was fake when I first saw it).
Sorry, the Republic is toast.
>Sorry, the Republic is toast.
So what's your next action in life?
Live it? There are plenty of people who live under dictatorships. I wasn't planning on being one of them, but perhaps this is what it was like in the Roman Republic at the transition to dictatorship.
Interesting decision. Unfortunately I am a minority and I don't like my survival nor QoL odds. Not even in California. so I am slowly looking into figuring out what EU country would mesh best with me should the worst happen. I don't think Canada will be far enough and I don't think their immigration sentiments will calm down in the next few years.
Heck, maybe I learn enough Japanese in the next few years and put up with more discrimination in Japan if I'm let in. Fits better with my career overall if I can get hired there.
But yes, we're in unprecedented times and maybe SCOTUS will lock step over it. It's sad that I can't say with confidence that judges will respect the first article of the constitution.
>The Presidential immunity decision was already crazy cookoo land
It has a semblance of sense in a good faith governmental system. You don't want a president punished for their hard decisions in office.
Now with context: it's stupid because so many of his actions happened before he was president. At the very best, he maybe would have been excused for the Jan 6th riots. Trump should indeed be in jail, even before dissecting this month of of a circus.
I completely disagree, this is a very ahistorical take. The reality is that not a single US president has ever faced a single legal consequence for a decision they took while in office, for over two hundred years.
But, the possibility has always existed, as a check on the powers of the president. Parts of the decision making process for any president have always been "is there a chance this might put me in jail later?". The Supreme Court decided that's done. They have explicitly acquiesced that the president may order Seal Team 6 to assassinate the opposition leader, and the courts would have no right to condemn them for that (if the president pulled out a gun and shot the opposition leader themselves, there might be a trial, since it could be argued this wasn't an official act as presidnet, it was a personal act of the person holding the office; but that would still have to be settled in court before any kind of evidence or injunction against the president would be allowed on the shooting charge).
so the question is why?
The point about what they're legally allowed to do, and could do, is moot, if there's no will.
Congressional's reasons: your guess is as good as mine. Their majorities aren't that wide. moving 3 senators can affect policy, moving half the senators can get an impeachment trial. We'll see how things proceed there.
While maybe not practical for the president, but at least for various cabinet Secretaries or Directors: if they do not follow court-issued orders could be found in contempt and jailed until the corrective orders are implemented?
That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be aimed square at that "problem".
In theory, at least. If Trump and his minions decide to do something else, there isn't really anyone with the power to stop him, absent impeachment.
Legal questions aside, I think that's an overly simplistic take; a certain amount of stability is desirable, but it's possible to be too stable as well as too unstable.
This sounds truthy and even casts instability as somehow heroic, but it's an oversimplification and hides similar fallacies. It also implies that instability for the sake of instability is default-positive.
The best way to avoid capture is via law / regulation. There should be term limits, campaign finance reform, more regulation against lobbyists and the revolving door, etc. We can't have Citizens United then wonder how capture happened. And, no amount of instability will address that.
In fact, instability in this environment can serve as cover for increased capture, as there is no bulwark against reassignment of winners. This is likely what we're seeing with Musk right now.
Stability here doesn't mean nothing changes. It means things change in an orderly, reasoned manner to include thoughtfully preventing capture.
On the contrary. We tried to reform and improve the system through the normal channels for decades. We failed. The system is evidently already captured and something a little more radical is warranted.
Did we though? I don't remember the last time campaign finance reform was on the national ballot or lobbying regulation or term limits. People aren't even talking about it.
The problem is that the majority of the voting public is easily distracted and not clamoring for these things that can bring about constructive change.
But, that distraction is not random. The people who push for and benefit most from this distraction (and subsequent failure to change) happen to also do things like donate $250M+ to help buy a president, then convince followers that something "a little more radical" is needed to help seal the deal.
Oh, and they happen to also have billions in government contracts.
But, they are eliminating capture? If ever there was a fox guarding the henhouse. "The Onion" couldn't make this up.
The motivation of the EO was clearly articulated all throughout the campaign that, as you say, even within the executive branch there's a large swath of career bureaucrats who kind of do their own thing. And so if the people vote for something else, there's kind of a limit to what any new administration can actually accomplish. Arguably, this is by design and provides valuable stability, but I think you have to at least acknowledge that it's there, and people aren't crazy for noticing it and trying to change that if the career bureaucrats aren't actually on their side.
I thought Trump was laughably ineffective his first time around. I chalked it up to all the Russia Manchurian Candidate stuff and Trump's constant flailing and hiring and firing of staff. But I'm wondering now how much of it really was this large bureaucracy in the executive branch not really moving in step with the new administration, which is interesting to me. I think there was a JD Vance interview (maybe with Ross Douthat in NYTimes?) where he says people throw around "constitutional crisis" a lot, but that he felt we were already in one because Trump was asking the generals stuff about troops in Afghanistan and they weren't answering.
I know people here are primed to read the worst into everything, and there's some seriously apocalyptic predictions in this discussion. But my first impression is that the EO reads fairly mundanely and is meant to sound like it's addressing the "hostile bureaucracy" situation that folks on the right have been talking about for years. I guess we'll see in a couple years, how it all plays out. I wish people predicted stuff more and then looked back to calibrate themselves based on the results.
Then maybe you need to get an understanding of human organizations in general and the US government in particular that goes beyond your high school civics days.
The president has no power or authority to interpret the law, not beyond the implicit power of every citizen to interpret the law for themsleves. The president has the power and authority to execute the law as written, mostly by appointing other people to do so in specific areas. The power to choose those specific people is already huge, directing their every move is neither needed nor desirable.
There are literally tens of thousands of laws, if not hundreds of thousands (when including regulations and binding court precedents) that need to be followed by the federal government. The president simply can't be an authority on all of them, it's not even remotely close to humanly possible.
Not to mention, very tight, military-style control is a a horrible feature. The President may get to command the army, but they are not commander-in-chief of the executive branch, civilian agencies don't and mustn't work that way. Government employees must uphold the law, and fulfill the role of their position. If they're not following the law, they should be fired, and a court may get involved to reach this conclusion. The president doesn't get to dictate what the law is and fire government employees who are upholding the law instead of the president's interpretation of the law.
Putin does not try to hide the fact that he wants to restore the Russian empire and reconquer the former soviet bloc - a group of peoples who want nothing to do with him.
Ho Chi Minh wanted an independent Vietnam, got it, and never really expanded from there.
We either help the Ukranians stop Putin now or we fight a much bigger fight later. Hitler could have easily been stopped at the Rhineland, or at Czechoslovakia. But instead we got "Peace for our time".
But that is what the Constitution specifies (Article II Section 1):
> The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
I find it funny people either don't know this or are intentionally ignoring it. The entire power is vested in one person, who can delegate the enforcement of it to lower officers.
> Nothing prevents the next president from having a radically different opinion. There is a very good reason why the founding fathers built in an elaborate system of checks and balances.
Right, thats why they included a legislative branch and a judicial branch. The problem is the legislative branch delegated much of what it does to the executive, and the judicial said it was okay.
All government actors individually are also responsible to the Constitution and its expression by all three branches first, before any loyalty to anyone else. In the same branch or not.
Even before the current top office holders of the executive branch, congressional majorities, or Supreme Court justices.
Saying that a President’s personal interpretation of Congress’ laws or the courts precedence, completely overrides any individual executive employees good faith understanding and responsibility to the Constitution, laws, and judicial rulings is madness.
There will be disagreements within a branch that will need to be worked out. The president certainly has more power and deserves special respect. But his helpers must stand firm with the constitution first.
Settling Constitutional level disagreements within a branch is a desirable process. The president, and all government actors, need pushback when they start running into the weeds, and vetting when their take seems Constitutionally risky or outright invalid. Taking into full account all valid standing orders, laws and rulings.
The Presidents most important advisors are subject to Senate approval precisely because they are supposed to be loyal to the Constitution and laws first.
If the president says he believes arresting disagreeable members of the Supreme Court is Constitutionally supported because yadda, yadda, yadda, you don’t do it.
If the President directs the Vice President not to certify an election, because he interprets that role as active and worthy of pauses and delays to settle issues the President deems Constitutionslly important during an election…
But you the Vice President, after careful thought and consultation believe your role is ceremonial, you fulfill the ceremony.
But it's not madness based on the intended structure of government? The EO isn't saying "ignore Constitutional violations". It wouldn't be valid if it did.
If Congress passes a law that say "tobacco is banned", and the US President says "I will direct my agencies to follow this new law" and you have agencies saying "I'm not a lawyer, but I feel like this law is unconstitutional so my agency is not going to follow it!"?
How would the government even function if you have 100 agencies with 50 of them having the power to come up with their own interpretation of the law? How is that even workable as a branch of government?
The executive branch of government is more accurately viewed as a monolithic organization which derives 100% of it's authority by delegation from the US President. This is why the president personally selects the heads of each agency (with the Senate approving). Authority moves down from the president all the way to the most junior government employee - they are acting on behalf of the president.
> There will be disagreements within a branch that will need to be worked out.
What does "worked out" mean?
For legal issues the President will consult the US attorney general. If it's complex, the DOJ might create a white paper determining the constitutionality of a law or not.
To have an agency head disagree with that determination seems like a rogue agency. Why would that agency head know better than the attorney general?
Now if Congress passes a law that say "tobacco is banned", the president can say "This law means that tobacco isn't banned and has to be sold in schools, and I will direct my agencies to follow this new law". Before, the president had the option to refuse to enforce the laws as written (and risk getting thrown out on his ass) and now the president has the option to rewrite laws according to his whim and enforce that instead. He also has immunity too so he can't even get into trouble for just doing whatever he wants.
An agency head that is disobeying the law can be fired by the president. An agency head who is not disobeying the law can't be fired (assuming there is no other cause, such as poor management, of course). If there is disagreement on whether the agency head was upholding the law or not, that's not up to the president, it's up to the courts to decide.
Having the president be the ultimate authority on the interpretation of every law and regulation, even within the executive branch, is not only unconstitutional, but also unworkable. A single man can't physically review every single aspect of the American government, they have neither the time nor the mental capacity to be the ultimate authority on every single aspect of the federal government.
So not only is it normal that the president defers to agency heads on the interpretation of the applicable law that they are experts in, it is the only way the system can function. The president has plenty of control over the agency by naming the head, they don't need and can't have more control than that.
[Emphasis mine.]
Yes, well said. This is the ultimate bottom line argument!
The Constitution might as well not exist if individual actors with expertise the President does not have, are not expected to put their specialized understanding of previous orders, laws and precedent (and reality!!!) ahead of who they report to.
If all executive actors must bend for the president’s orders, regardless of previous orders, laws and precedent, then nobody’s views in the executive branch matter, any time the President chooses.
They are now effectively sworn to a particular human, not the Constitution.
The President is now the “Constitution” for the executive branch.
(You might counter with the argument that they are sworn to the President’s Office first, but who actually gets to decide what that means? The human in that role.)
It is madness because a president whose will is unassailable within their own branch is also unassailable across all three branches.
The President has all the levers of practical coercive power.
Neither Congress can put any law into effect, or the Judiciary put any ruling into effect, without the cooperation of the executive branch. Without that, their existence is decorative.
What if the President says "I interpret [irrefutably unconstitutional action x] to not be in violation of the constitution"? Then anyone in the executive branch has to behave as though that action were constitutional, no matter what it is, don't they?
That is inaccurate. Almost all federal departments and agencies derive their authority from acts of Congress. The President has very limited authority to create and empower agencies.
The strongest argument against the CFPB is that is was not created by an act of Congress. Trump could not create a DOGE so he renamed the USDS. He cannot shut down USAID, but he can mismanage it.
The president is required by law to execute the laws passed by Congress even if he strongly disagrees. The mass firings and funding holds have the legal fig leaf that he is managing them to the best of his ability.
Partially, as we need to be precise in our language.
Congress can design an agency, determine what powers it has, determine agency procedures and fund agencies.
It's up to the President to execute the law within those boundaries, including selecting the head of that agency (with Senate approval), and determining how the agency executes the law which can be incredibly broad if Congress wasn't proscriptive.
Thus the authority to execute the laws is delegated to the President by the Constitution who then delegates that power to the head of the agency which acts on the Presidents behalf.
More broadly, the Supreme Court has made clear that the Constitution imposes important limits on Congress’s ability to influence or control the actions of officers once they are appointed. Likewise, it is widely believed that the President must retain a certain amount of independent discretion in selecting officers that Congress may not impede. These principles ensure that the President may fulfill his constitutional duty under Article II to take [c]are that the laws are faithfully executed.9
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C2-3...
Improved on that, just a tad, for this discussions context. Not disagreeing.
Without that balance Congress couldn’t delegate anything with any expectation of its will being carried out.
And the President couldn’t ensure the agency acted competently and with respect to the President’s good faith understanding of the agency’s guiding laws.
With the courts ready to step in to settle any differences.
Agencies can only work reliably with the differing participations and limitations of all three roles.
As with all expressions of law.
No they did the opposite when they overruled Chevron. They said Congress cannot delegate that amount of its plenary power to the executive.
This of course lays the whole thing bare. When it comes to regulating markets or companies, or minority rights, conservatives think the president has no power. But when it comes to immigration or Christian social issues, the president is all powerful. This translates into laughable double standards like "the Biden admin even sending a single email to Twitter is pressure and censorship, but Trump suing media organization after media organization for defamation to the tune of billions of dollars is not pressure and not censorship". None of this is principled; it's entirely us vs them.
That wasn't the conclusion of the decision that overturned Chevron. You can read the decision here.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Overturning Chevron only impacted the purview of the courts. It changed nothing with regards to Congress delegating power to the executive - Congress can continue to do so.
All it does is make ambiguity in the law the responsibility of the courts to decide, not the executive.
But Congress can still pass a vague law that says "a new agency X will regulate this product in order to protect public safety". The executive can then interpret what "protect public safety" means, but if challenges, the courts won't defer to the agency for the interpretation any more.
I will say it's super unclear how our government works now. SCOTUS is like "sure, go ahead and delegate" but what they mean is "only as much as we let you... looking at you Democratic administrations". MAGA has--through half statements and gaslighting, made it clear that the only principle is that they have power and their opposition doesn't. If that means the Executive is powerful when it's Republican and weak when it's Democratic, well he who saves his country breaks no law.
This is a very extreme version of unitary executive theory, which is highly controversial even in its weaker forms.
What is the purpose of having cabinet secretaries swear an oath to defend the Constitution if the President has the sole authority to decide what this means?
Why do you support Trump being an autocrat?
But unless the dems get 2/3 the senate that will never happen.
If the Dems ever got more than 2/3 of the Senate, then precisely the number of Dems necessary to vote against their party would do so. The party would loudly bemoan the result, and then point out that the defectors had to be DINOs so that they could win their district.
In other words, that will never happen, and was never gonna happen; even if Dems could win a 70% majority without war breaking out over perceived election theft.
Personally, I can't have any faith in a party which armed and supported genocide to defend either democracy or checks and balances. They 'accidentally' dropped the ball many times on this exact issue [0] over the last four years, when heading all this off at the pass would have been far simpler.
0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
If anything, the constitution implies that department heads SHOULD have independent opinions related to the purview of their departments.
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
In practice, government agencies are primarily required to adhere to U.S. Code (list of laws compiled from bills passed in Congress). Then they consider executive orders.
Your mental model of the executive branch is a commonly held one. However, you should adjust your model to incorporate this information which may have been omitted from your initial training data set.
You clearly do not understand how the American system of governance is supposed to work. Every department has enabling legislation. Below is a link to a law passed by Congress and signed by the President establishing the DOJ.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/...
Congress can design an agency, set it's processes and procedures, and give it money to run.
But the President is in charge of it within those bounds. The President can't decided DOJ doesn't need an Attorney General (Congress already decided that), but the President gets to pick the AG and the AG reports to the President.
With the Senate’s approval. You dont understand how the interplay between the branches work.
Executive power is derived from the President.
No!
It’s blindingly obvious that they are here merely to gum up discussion in endless loops that go nowhere under the guise of politesse and question marks, as if they’re just confused and asking clarifying questions.
The thing about assuming good faith, which I agree with in principle, is that you have to be willing to accept your own judgment of when someone is arguing in bad faith and disengage.
Autocracies can be very stable... for a while depending on how much people are able to protest (or not). You could argue that N Korea has been "stable" (from the standpoint of the ruling family) for over 60 years.
> There is a very good reason why the founding fathers built in an elaborate system of checks and balances.
Sure that's what we were all taught in school. But it turns out that the whole system is heavily dependent on the executive branch "doing the right thing". But what good is it for the Judicial or Legislative branches to rule against the executive when the executive is in charge of enforcement? Even Nixon was eventually able to be shamed into doing the right thing, but if we have a president who can't be shamed into doing the right thing... well, I suspect we're about to find out, but my guess is that the checks and balances aren't going to be effective.
But both congress and the supreme courts seem to have decided that personal ideological principles are more important than the maintenance of the U.S. democratic foundations. The Supreme Court has basically ruled that the president is above the law, and congress has refused to use its powers of impeachment to prevent the president from running roughshod over congresses laws.
Nixon wasn’t shamed into doing anything, he was threatened with very credible impeachment, and decided that getting out fast on his own two feet, was better than being taken out slow by the ankles via impeachment. But the modern Republicans have demonstrated time and time again, that as long as they’re “winning”, they don’t give two hoots how much damage they do to US democracy.
I mean, sure, that's the Schoolhouse Rock version. But I'm talking about something else: The executive branch is the branch that controls military, FBI, CIA, BATF, US Marshals - the law enforcement agencies with guns, tanks and planes. Congress and the Courts don't have any similar enforcers. In a showdown where the courts order the executive branch to do something the executive branch can just ignore the order and continue doing what they want. The fact that this hasn't generally happened much in our history is because the executive generally had some kind of respect for the constitution and the institutions that it instantiates. If you get an executive who doesn't give a damn about anything other than maintaining their own power there's really no way to get him/her to comply.
> Nixon wasn’t shamed into doing anything, he was threatened with very credible impeachment, and decided that getting out fast on his own two feet, was better than being taken out slow by the ankles via impeachment.
Ok, but wasn't that at least partly due to the shame that he would incur if he had been impeached? He was afraid of history's judgement - though it was a bit too late for that. In other words, on some level he didn't want the impeachment stain - at a certain level he cared (again, he should've cared earlier, but he thought he was going to get away with it). Now we have a guy who has been impeached twice and he knows he's got enough toadies in the senate so that he won't ever be convicted. Even if the House goes to the Dems in '28 he's not afraid of the threat of impeachment that would likely entail. Nor does he feel any shame over any potential impeachment.
military and law enforcement also swear an oath to uphold the constitution of the united states and to defend the nation against threats, including domestic ones. I think it's reasonable that they would defy a president who went totally off the rails to the point where he became a threat and violated the constitution.
Sure, if you kill all dissenters , keep population terrified and into the dark, remove all sources of information with propaganda then things could stay like that for a while.
It all starts with distrust of institutions, (silent) support of majority and power consolidation under executive branch. It's very hard to get out of it, and propaganda and terror just one part of it, and I'm not even sure the first.
Just to be clear I lived in Russia.
Only if there is a transition of power. If power stays in the same hands, the system can be very stable - and not in a good way.
I don't think it actually can be that stable. I think I see what people are getting at when they say this, but it seems to me that authoritarian governments are generally quite unstable, because power never stays in the same hands. Power always changes hands, because we are mortal. Non-authoritarian systems are built to handle this, and ensure that it happens frequently enough that the wheels stay greased. Authoritarian systems are built around ensuring that the concentrated power stays only in the hands of certain people, and this is not possible.
To put it another way, non-authoritarian governments have less variance because they are taking some (very) rough average of all the people. Authoritarian governments are much more subject to the significant variance of individuals.
Of course we don't actually have that much historical data on non-authoritarian governments.
Chavez was kind of a thug, but he was also immensely popular with the commons. The people supported him, in a lot of his goals, and he was able to have a light touch, on a lot of the authoritarian stuff.
When he stepped aside, and Maduro took over, Chavez had established what was basically a dictatorship, and Maduro took the reins.
However, Maduro does not have the base support that Chavez had, and has had to use the stick a lot more. That sort of sets up a negative feedback loop, where more stick, means unhappier people, pushing back, which needs more stick.
Even if the current GOP really does have the best interests of the people in mind, if they dismantle the checks and balances, it's highly likely that a successor will use the power badly.
Note that the Chavez/Maduro distinction you drew was not about “best interests of the people in mind” but the former being immensely popular and the latter not. The current Administration, whatever intent may exist in their minds, is very much not “immensely popular”.
You will not need to wait long, but you do not really need to wait at all.
Well, it depends, the Kims and the Chinese Communist Party have been in power for almost 80 years. We do have a lot of history of pre-democratic regimes tho, and many of those lasted longer than modern the democratic states.
Trump is a known quantity. His destructiveness is limited by his inability to maintain focus. I'd be much more worried about who follows him. Will they represent a return to decency, or will it be someone just as destructive but far more disciplined - like Putin?
This same assumption of good faith was wholly present in peoples' responses to project 2025 prior to the election.
They are not acting in good faith.
Try restating the problem: Why is this EO being issued? What problem, other than judicial review, does it solve for the executive branch?
EDIT: For those who do not think this contributes anything: can you answer the question?
It’s fairly obvious on its face the concern of the EO is not judicial review but about agencies that nominally are past of the branch the President heads determining interpretations of law contrary to what the head of the executive desires.
And, it does genuinely seem weird to have an executive branch where the head of that branch doesn’t actually control things.
The negative reaction is entirely because of the current executive head, but no one would bat an eye if this were Barack Obama reigning in some executive agency interpreting, say, immigration law in opposition to DACA.
Is the head of the executive an expert in all things? And capable of communicating those expert desires with perfect clarity?
Why have courts if the executive head can sort out all legal nuance themselves?
It's not their job to be the expert, it's their job to be the decisionmaker. That's why you have a head. If two federal agencies want to interpret the law differently, it's more important to pick one interpretation and apply it consistently than to get it perfectly right.
> Why have courts if the executive head can sort out all legal nuance themselves?
Checks and balances are important but so is the ability to actually do things occasionally. Independence for the court system is good. Independence for every individual federal agency isn't.
Article III courts can “sort out all legal nuance”, but the power remains with the president.
I would react the same way to anyone who had announced we would never need to vote again, who had previously pardoned felons convicted in an attempted coup, and who was now centralizing governmental oversight and power. There is no comparison to another president in the last 150 years or more.
It's not weird at all, and it's not true that the head of the executive doesn't have control over those agencies. The head of the executive names their leadership - that is a huge amount of control. And it is enough control - the government isn't some top-down system serving at the pleasure of the president. It is a system for implementing the rules set out by Congress and the courts (subject to the President's judicial review powers), that the president coordinates.
The very title of "president" was chosen by the founding fathers to evoke the largely bureaucratic role they had in mind. It's not supposed to be a position of prestige or control like a dictator or ruler, it's similar to the role of a committee president: someone who oversees the functioning of the committee, and steer the general agenda, but who doesn't otherwise get to decide for the committee.
Obviously a counterfactual we can never truly know but I'd remind you that the right were offended when Obama wore a tan suit and was using Dijon mustard. I'm pretty sure they'd "bat an eye" if he were attempting even 1% of the shenanigans that Trump is pulling.
It is saying that for all matters where a law is not explicit and prescriptive, the WH shall provide the interpretation for the agency to follow.
The WH is correct that (aside from judicial review, which is not at issue here) they have final authority over how to implement open-ended laws, and not the agencies that function under the WH.
It doesn't say "some of the executive power", nor does Article I mention anything about being able to create new executive powers vested in other entities. So if the president is the only one who has been vested with the executive power, how can a functionary of the executive promulgate a regulation that disagrees with the president? Ultimately the House can impeach and the Senate convict, possibly disqualifying them from federal office.
And “vested” does not mean exclusive. Many U.S. laws grant executive power, including the power to promulgate regulations, to persons in the executive branch other than the president. For example, the Communications Act of 1934 creates the FCC and gives the commission the power to “perform any and all acts, make such rules and regulations, and issue such orders, not inconsistent with this chapter, as may be necessary in the execution of its functions.”[1]
There is no authority in the statute for the President to override these determinations made by the Commission.
[1] 47 U.S.C. 154(i) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/154
The enumerated powers in article 2 along with the implied powers that are necessary to carry out the constitutional responsibilities of the president make up the executive power.
> Article 2 Section 1 does not confer power beyond what the laws provide.
It does not confer power beyond what is enumerated and implied within article 2 which vests those powers into a single president. Laws are subordinate to the constitution and have no way of limiting, modifying, or expanding it unless the amendment process is used.
> And “vested” does not mean exclusive.
Can there be two commander in chiefs?
> Many U.S. laws grant executive power, including the power to promulgate regulations, to persons in the executive branch other than the president.
How are they granting executive power? I see nothing in article 1 to suggest they have such a power. Congress was given explicit powers to create lower courts though, "To constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court". It seems odd that the framers would forget to mention that congress can also vest executive power into entities of their own creation.
> There is no authority in the statute for the President to override these determinations made by the Commission.
So according to you argument congress can create an enabling act wherein they vest all executive power into the newly created agency head and require the president to nominate a specific person by a specific date and the president would be obliged to execute that law?
It explains itself in Section 1; pretty much all the above the fold material is on exactly that topic. Trump & friends are taking the interpretation that the US presidential election is a vote on how the executive government is to be run.
As an extension of that, they're pulling power away from the unelected bureaucracy back towards the office of president - because a vote can't change the direction of the executive if parts of it are on autopilot independently of the president.
> What problem, other than judicial review, does it solve for the executive branch?
It doesn't change anything about judicial review. The thing they're targeting is parts of the executive acting independently of the president; which given the behaviour of the intelligence services is probably targeted at them but might be aimed at any of the bureaucrats.
Whether it is a good idea long term is a complex question though. This looks like an area where the separation of powers gets to murky territory. It is hard to have separation of powers given how much of it has been given to the president over the last century - the small-government strategy was a better approach than what the US has set up here.
That's only mildly true, and the belief of micromanagers everywhere. Ultimately, you need to set an overall direction and then let people execute within that framework, or you're going to get something that's badly run and slow as molasses.
With a nuanced interpretation, this EO even might make some amount of sense (a bit more overview/stricter guidelines). But wherever you stand politically, you can't accuse the current administration to have a sense of nuance.
And, of course, if you want to assume the worst, it's fair to point out that the EO removes all independence without having to spell out any guidelines, which means a world without guidelines and on-a-whim decisions is well possible. That's not a good thing for a regulatory environment. Or a democracy.
And that's the biggest problem - because even if the current administration has only noble goals (and I really don't want to debate this either way, let's skip that comment stream), this XO is massively ripe for abuse for people with non-noble intentions.
The example that is top of mind to me, because it hits pretty close to home, is stuff like the Environmental Protection Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The laws direct designated agencies to come up with rules to accomplish whatever the act is meant to do, but it does not get into specifics, because lawmakers rightly recognized that they are neither environmental scientists, nor economists of the industries those acts regulate. So if an administration says "holding hands and singing Kumbaya in the commissary is sufficient to accomplish the goals of our mandating legislation", and neither the legislature nor the courts are unwilling to call the executive on it, that's the ball game.
The problem that this EO may be trying to address is that environmental scientists and economists aren't any more above moral reproach as presidents or legislators. Therefore, the status quo was such that if some unelected career civil servant working at an agency decides to interpret stuff under their expertise in one way or another that may be wrong, there was little possibility of redress on the part of the people.
Vote for a different president? No matter; career civil servants can't be fired because the president isn't king! Vote for a different Congressperson? No matter; they aren't experts so they'll defer to the civil servants! And therein lies the "deep state".
The correct answer, in my opinion, is that lawmakers need to sit down with the domain experts and write specific legislation with that expert input. That way, policy remains accountable to the people, who are the ultimate legitimate source of power.
It has always been the case that you or I could sue to overturn a rule from the EPA or the BATF or the FDA. At which time, you assemble subject matter experts to buttress whatever claim you might have, and the regulatory bodies present their experts and then a judge and jury decides. It’s pretty far from perfect, and it has some of the same flaws as the legislative approach, but the important strength is that national defense spending policy is not held up on where the sustainability of dolphin bycatch for tuna lays: 15 or 16 dolphins killed per 100,000 tons of tuna harvested.
I think the underlying premise to requiring the legislature draft all regulations is “the legislature should not be making rules about things they don’t understand”. But 1) that sure as hell hasn’t slowed them down before, and 2) the fact that e.g. airplanes are very complicated is why we want regulations around their manufacture and operation in the first place. It’s confusing to me that the conclusion folks seem to draw here instead is “it’s too complex for the legislature to engage with in a timely fashion, so I guess we just have to accept all these plane crashes”.
(Same way firing L3s doesn't help with execs setting a bad direction)
If that work is nowhere close to the perceived will of the people (again, please, let's not debate "what's the actual will though"), it's a failure of executive and legislative to create clarity.
You're right, ultimately this is about legislative and/or executive having conversations with experts to set the right goals and guidelines.
But you'll need it to be a conversation, and you need to leave room for independent decisions within a larger framework. The EO does squash all discussion or feedback down to "president's always right, ask the president". This makes redress harder, not easier.
Centralized command and control looks appealing because it simplifies a lot of things, but it breaks down because it assumes a single person has all the answers.
And this particular EO makes it worse, because it also directs agencies to ignore judicial decisions unless the president says so. Maybe. The writing's very unclear: "No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General."
What's "positions advanced in litigation"? Does it include injunctions/restraining orders? If it does, there is no judicial redress at all. Which means accountability is reduced, not increased.
I don't disagree with you that there need to be limits to regulatory authority of a bureaucracy. But this EO is very much not it.
Instead of just dismissing things out of hand like this, maybe you could provide a "less naive" interpretation? Your statement is not helpful either.
So this EO is not just declaring "the Executive Branch will obey me", but also saying "the Executive Branch has been so disobedient that I need to take immediate action to quash that"
If you are saying that latter sentence, you should be able to justify it by pointing at the disobedience that caused this issue AND explain why the usual mechanism of "Congress passes a law to address the problem" is insufficient (AND congress is currently aligned with the President politically, so that's a fairly uphill battle to argue)
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As an example, no one should ever need to write an EO declaring "the sky is blue." If you're familiar with history, you might remember that smog used to turn the sky yellow. If someone wrote such an EO back then, you could reasonably conclude the actual purpose of the EO is to declare "it is now illegal to notice that the smog is so bad that it's changing the color of the sky."
I mean, bureaucrats literally lied to Trump in his first term about troop numbers in Syria so that he wouldn't take action to pull them out (and then bragged about it after Biden got in): https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-troop-levels-syria-jeffre...
I'm also not sure why something from 5 years ago is in any way urgent, much less so urgent that he needs to bypass a favorable Congress.
First they marginalize, then they alienate, then they never have to take the extreme action that people like you would recognize as a problem.
> "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
If the President orders the exec branch to ignore the courts on this argument, he hasn’t ordered the judges to do anything, but he is fucking with their power nonetheless.
They are openly contesting the authority of the courts in various statements.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gx3j5k63xo.amp
> Vice-President JD Vance has suggested judges do not have authority over the Trump administration's executive power, as the White House responds to a flurry of lawsuits that aim to stall its agenda. "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power," he wrote on X.
Not a positive model to emulate.
AFAIK the only other time this has been done was during the US civil war.
Today? It’s no longer a given. Trump, Vance, and Musk have all indicated a willingness to ignore court orders. Whether they will go they far is yet to be seen.
It's not even hypothetical, they've already refused to follow court decisions. For example, when Trump seized funds already allocated by Congress, and ignored a court-order declaring it was unlawful.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/trump-unfreezing-feder...
It's as simple as that.
What could happen is that a federal agency follows an EO in a manner contrary to law, and that action causes some sort of harm or loss to a person. That injured party could then bring a legal action against the agency and the Court could order the agency to cease that action. But it still wouldn't invalidate the EO.
"But it still wouldn't invalidate the EO." Truman and the steel mills would disgree.
Any employee obeying a SCOTUS ruling is in violation of this EO, unless the President agrees to that ruling.
No EO may say that SCOTUS can override them, but no other EO blocks federal employees from obeying SCOTUS.
You forget the entire framework for EOs. No EO has "except when a court says otherwise". The EOs are subject to checks and balances, such as judicial review. If the EO exceeds its authority (not based on congressional or constitutional means) then it won't be valid. Meaning you can't grant yourself powers that you don't have the authority to grant under the framework. There's case law you can go look at for a history on it.
There are some powers the executive has that can't be overruled by the courts. Now the question is - what?
If Congress or the SCOTUS says do A and the President says do B then the Executive Branch are required to do B.
That’s an unprecedented situation.
It's simply untrue is what it is. EOs are subject to judicial review and are only valid if there's a congressional or constitutional basis. You can't grant yourself extra powers outside of the existing framework, which the EO doesn't even claim to do. Again, other EOs don't have the framework enumerated in them and have been found to be invalid. There's plenty of case law one can look at.
Funny, I could say the same about you...
https://www.fjc.gov/history/administration/judicial-review-e...
This is just nonsense.
Trump, for example, recently signed an EO to end the use of paper straws.
Where is your justification that there is a valid congressional or constitutional basis for this ? Of course there isn’t. Executive Orders allow the President to interpret existing laws as they see fit. Even in ways they were never intended to be interpreted.
Trump is continuing this trend, and while we should all be concerned as to where he takes it, congress and the judiciary share the blame for not reigning in prior presidents.
https://www.fjc.gov/history/administration/judicial-review-e...
The problem is the EO commands absolute subservience to the President's view of the Constitution, which makes it impossible for them to comply with Court orders.
This order tells executive branch employees, including the police and court officers, that they are required to follow POTUS interpretations over all others. Implicitly that includes over court interpretations.
Why? The Marshals enforce blatantly wrong court judgements all the time. Court judgements are court judgements, contempt orders are contempt orders, both can say almost anything. There's no interpreting the law part of enforcing a judgement or order - the court judgement is just as valid whether it's legally correct or not.
The President is Commander in Chief of the US armed forces.
That's pretty much the fate of all dictators: a coup.
In that case, congress is serving as a check on the court's power.
It should be the trigger for country wide protests until the president is overthrown. It won't be of course. But it should.
It sucks that the constitution died this way. RIP USA.
We're spread, but IIRC the 10 most populous metro contains half the population. It'd more be a matter in making sure each major hub has around 500k-1m people gathered. As a matter of scale, the Montgomery march was 256k.
>Most people are too apathetic to be bothered and by the time some final straw makes them care it'll likely be too late.
I suppose we'll see soon enough at this current rate.
Even in the worst police state, the dictators power ultimately depends on enough of the people going along with it.
Americans could change this, if enough people cared beyond pressing like on facebook
I think it's an open question at this point whether the military leadership would deny Trump's request.
The legislative and judicial branches are the checks to executive power.
That's not entirely correct. All civil servants and military swear an oath the Constitution and are required to disobey illegal orders. This EO attempts to largely eliminate the concept of illegal orders.
Of course, this is only relevant if they are interested in having a 'next' president, something which it seems a segment of society is less than open to.
However, in case such an event comes to pass, what is far more important is the segment which actively opposes such a power grab. Authoritarians reply on the passiveness of the majority coupled with a small but very vocal and rabid fan base.
It's quite possible that a slow and gradual slide in that direction is underway, but the minute even a small faction of people actively oppose that, strongmen tend to find the limits of their power pretty quickly and mostly in ways that are pretty detrimental to their health.
The civil rights movement is a pretty good example of the power of a small set of people being enough to have critical mass.
https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv
https://www.thenumbersarewrong2024.com/across-the-us/swing-s...
Then combine that with all the election interference we know Elon was doing, and previous years of being concerned about the security of voting machines.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlnjzzk919o
https://apnews.com/article/election-security-voting-machines...
There are reasons to think the votes may have been tampered with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994293
This was previously discussed on HN before getting flagged like most political topics.
The list of equipment is long:
https://verifiedvoting.org/equipmentdb/
I guess if someone comes up and shows these same discrepancies everywhere where a particular manufacturer had a footprint, I'd probably be more on board with screaming election interference.
The fact this anomaly only happens in swing states under commonly identified conditions for foreign elections with widely accepted interference isn't suspicious enough? You can recreate the Russian tail yourself with the available data. A commenter in the HN thread I linked even posts the code to do so.
I feel like suspicious voting patterns should be investigated, not that I have any belief that will happen. We already have proof of a consistent statistical anomaly.
I'm very much of the opinion there's going to be a violent civil war before the decade is over.
(and I'm not even implying anything. He's turning 79 this year and clearly not in top mental nor physical health).
That's basically what EOs are already.
The more interesting phrase is about the AG. While the AG is already constitutionally understood to serve at the president's pleasure, this EO curtails any informal independence that the AG is afforded from past norms.
So I suppose it's declaring that AGs under a Trump administration shall serve as rubber stamps with no independent authority to interpret the law, granted via his claimed constitutional supremacy over the executive branch.
Perhaps it is a edict to AGs who've resisted orders from the President recently, to notice them that job title is the most supreme form of legal analysis in this executive branch. IANAL
Where does it say that? What existing EOs explicitly say congress needs to overturn it?
That means that if Congress passes a law with an implicit/explicit interpretation the Executive Branch can simply ignore that.
And there are no existing EOs that say Congress needs to overturn it. It has been the rule since forever that Congress makes the laws. Executive Branch implements it accordingly.
This is basically a tightening of the "major questions doctrine". The idea is that Congressional law must be explicit or leave it up to the executive.
If law isn't clear, this states the executive decides, and it isn't a matter of supposing what congress intended, or would have wanted but didn't define.
It’s the combination of actions that makes this so concerning.
Yes, the expanse of power is concerning. Historically, all three branches have substantially expanded their powers since inception. People in power always seem to take more of it.
And what is happening is unprecedented and right to be concerned about it.
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is a good example of this. Congress didn't vote on the EPA regulating CO2.
Was junior staff attorney in the Tulsa field office previously able to override the President?
This EO combined with the "he who saves his country breaks no law" quote points towards an eventual attempt at a coupe or similar use of force to retain power. Thankfully there are currently no partisan militias in the DOD, but I could see an attempt at a Saddam-style seizing of Congress
Good.
I hope they do so. Because if trump and friends do it it'll get struck down and precedent will be established. It will likely be too late to stop them, but it will stop the next guy. And the next guy may very well be some establishment swamp creature that would never have encountered any resistance from the other branches doing the same and worse.
How does it potentially enable that? The executive branch has always served under the delegated authority of the president. The executive branch has always been able to operate outside the laws as written and ruled on by the other branches, because they have practically no hard power.
Presumably the citizen militia are supposed to be the check and balance for that. The people have always been the ultimate deciders of the government's power.
The EO is going out of its way to broadcast that its purpose is to establish a unitary policy position of the executive branch that stems from the President, rather than having "independent" agencies providing contrary position from within "in their official capacity" "as the position of the United States." The logical leap from there to "the President's (unrestricted) opinion is the law (without reference to Congress or the Courts)" is vast.
The EO does not bear on the balance of powers between branches of government, but on the ability for the executive branch to function as a single entity within that balance, rather than a multiplicity of quasi-"independent" agencies.
The disincentives that have always prevented the executive from blatantly violating the law are still in force and unchanged. They have been functional through 250 years of Presidents testing the limits of their authority.
Can you elaborate on what those disincentives are? I am thinking:
- Impeachment
- Charged with a crime, found guilty, sent to jail. It seems like this one is no longer possible due to Trump v. United States
- Killed by opponents
Without the criminal charges being on the table, those disincentives look a lot weaker to me.
The 4th one is us getting a retroactive watergate effect where republicans wake up and approval plummets. There's a non-zero chance Trump steps down if he pisses off everyone.
This only happens with some truly heinous actions that can't be spun. Like, bombing american soil or a ulta-blatant conspiracy with China/Russia. Or you know, him killing Medicare/social security (the most likely actions, given the budget proposal).
_Who_ would charge him with a crime? Prosecution is the responsibility of the Executive branch via the Department of Justice. The only option the court would have is Contempt, and I don't see that being particularly effective.
The only legal avenue this order leaves open is impeachment, and because that requires a 2/3rds majority in the Senate, there's all sorts of ways to prevent it. Even if the republican senators started to oppose him, the DoJ could be used to threaten and investigate senators who step out of line. Or a violent mob could be used to interrupt the impeachment vote.
He only needs to piss off two SCOTUS's to start to have the entire book thrown at him. Unlike Congress, Judges tend to be somewhat resiliant to the political atmosphere. That's a lot more viable than congress. Less people to squabble with and people less concerned about losing their job. I woudn't even count out the entire DoJ on this either.They've been denying some of Trump's craziest EO's.
>Or a violent mob could be used to interrupt the impeachment vote.
Good. I'm tired of being blamed for "rebellion" everytime someone stands in front of a building with a sign. Let Jan 6th repeat while all eyes are on the Capitol looking at Trump.
During the Presidency, impeachment and judicial review are the important checks. During the transition of power, state-controlled (as in, not federally controlled) elections and Congressional certification are the important checks.
While many people are disappointed with Congress' hesitation to impeach, impeachment as an institutional protection still works as a protection against blatant disregard of the law. Congress faces the threat of re-election practically constantly, and obvious disregard of the law without impeachment is not in Congress' best interest.
Judicial review is clearly working. I don't need to recap the large number of cases that have be brought against the Trump administration this term. The administration is abiding by stays/injunctions, and the Courts are issuing opinions independently. The Supreme Court, even Trump-appointed Justices, has ruled against Trump before and will likely do it again.
State-level control of Presidential elections and Congressional accountability to the public during certification protect against the spectre of a third Trump term or end of democracy. This scenario is extremely unpopular even among Trump supporters and would be a disaster for those in Congress.
The recent Supreme Court opinion about Presidential immunity in his official capacity explicitly defers and leaves to the lower Courts to determine the precise limits of that official capacity. It is beyond belief that the entire judicial branch would collectively enable dictatorship "bEcAuSe iMmUnItY".
We’re just gonna pretend Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) doesn’t exist, are we?
It was a clever but blatant way to give their side immunity without giving it to Biden
To get there, we would need to assume that the Supreme Court, including only 3 Trump-appointed Justices, is both unwaveringly partisan and unwaveringly supportive of dictatorship.
There is absolutely no standing up to our military if it is actually deployed against you as a regular citizen without equal military backing.
In the corporate world, when you’re unsure about something legal, you go to your in-house counsel and ask how to interpret the law, you don’t decide for you or the whole company. Same thing is happening here: if in doubt, speak to the AG.
This isn't the corporate world and the worst-case scenario here isn't being sued or taking a trip to bankruptcy court, it's the potential downfall of a nuclear-armed superpower.
Which is why business leaders, at least ones like Trump, need to be kept far, far away from government. The goal isn't to maximize value, it's to administer a society in a sustainable way.
The US needs to come with some new checks and balances for presidential power. With every new election the president asserts more and more power, and the Congress sits idly by.
That, or they're hoping that someone will sue so that SCOTUS makes this sort of EO precedent.
IMO if you could look at this executive order in a blind test somehow not knowing who signed it and can ask yourself "would this be incredibly concerning even if it were passed by the political side I agree with?" and the answer is no then you're not looking through a lens, you are drinking kool-aid.
So i think this is all insane, and a power grab, to start out. But not because of these parts of this EO
I think people are trying to assume this says "the president gets to ignore the courts and congress", but it, uh, doesn't actually say that anywhere. I would very conservatively guesstimate at least 50% of people assume trump will go that route, and so they assume this is the method by which he will do it. But unless i missed something, he's actually said the opposite consistently - he wants absolute power over the executive agencies, but will follow court orders.
If he was going to start not following court orders, i don't think he would have any trouble saying it. I don't think he would issue an EO, either, since those can be challenged. I think he would just continue to fire anyone who doesn't do what he says, or he otherwise disagrees with, and let each individual decision spawn a new court case, rather than give a really large EO that can be challenged and give him a much broader setback.
As for this order itself, I really hate taking a side I hate here, but there is almost nothing interesting in the parts you quote:
To start - AG opinions (and OLC opinions) were already binding on the executive branch. So they already provided authoritative interpretations of law.
Heck, the entire FBI is guided only by AG opinions and guidelines on how to conduct investigations, and has been since it's creation. There are no separate rules - it's just the AG guidelines and opinions. (There is also a secret set of AG guidelines for classified investigations, and they release a heavily redacted version of it)
I don't point this out to say it's awesome, i point it out to show that this state has existed roughly forever. It's just not commonly known i guess.
The part about the president was also already true in exactly the way it is described here. This is what caused things like the saturday night massacre - in the end, the president does get to say what they want to happen, and what they think is legal and people can either resign, or do it. That was always the choice.
This is all secondary to whether courts can say the president/AG's authoritative interpretation is wrong - they can and do already.
Nothing in this EO says otherwise.
>No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance >an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that >contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law'
This is also well within their power to request and enforce. It was also already true in practice in the vast majority of cases, and most importantly, before the highest courts of the land.
At the highest court level (SCOTUS), the US is represented by the solicitor general's office, which is part of the DOJ and controlled by the AG. They also look at appeals court decisions and get involved where needed to direct positions.
In lower level civil matters, the US is generally represented by the civil division of the DOJ, and therefore controlled by the AG.
The only thing this order theoretically changes is to say that the agency counsel who would represent the US at lower levels for various agencies can't take positions that contravene the AG or president.
That is, the counsel for the EPA can't decide they think the president is an idiot and that they are going to take a position that is the opposite of what the president wants.
There is actually little to nothing controversial about that - they shouldn't be doing so in the first place, regardless of who is president or AG[1]. The president always had the power (though rarely exercised) to tell the EPA in the case above to change their position, and fire every single person who refused. It has even happened that they have forced agencies to change positions at the district court level, fired people who refused to follow their interpretations, etc. All upheld since the days of the founding fathers. There is and never was a 4th branch consisting of independent agencies.
The issuance of regulations and their interpretation to flesh out the law is something congress is delegating to the executive branch when they set up executive agencies. The executive only has the power delegated to it here, and congress isn't even allowed to delegate significant power here.
To see why it's not controversial at all, if they moved all the agency counsel to the DOJ, you would have the same effect as this order. This would not be illegal for most agencies, though some have interesting appropriation and other restrictions that require consulting with congress prior to reorging them and whatever.
Put simply:
Congress has the power to restrict or direct agencies through legislation (and the EO even mentions this), and the Judiciary has the power to say everyone else's legal interpretations are wrong.
In between, the executive has always had the remaining power to direct the agencies and how they operate, and have done so, just not as clearly as you see here.
What this order explicitly forbids actually has also been a practical problem before, and the AG's and solicitors end up having to explain to a judge why they changed their position from the lower level one, and get made to look stupid. Not that i believe they are doing it to fix that, but it has abeen a real problem.
So like I said, while I think there is a huge power grab going on, this part of the EO isn't it.
[1] The office of the inspector general is basically the one agency that exists in part to audit and investigate the other parts of the executive branch, and so would normally take contrary positions. But those positions are not taken in court, they just issue reports and inform congress. The agencydoesn't, and has never had, any rulemaking power (except to the degree necessary to carry out it's own function), any disciplining power, and any authority. That is why it is legal for it to be independent and why it was illegal for the president to fire the head of the agency.
https://www.cato.org/blog/white-house-independent-agencies-m...
He agrees that most were never really independent but points out some and goes into a chat about the UET. The UET seems mostly irrelevant here. There is no 4th branch. They are either executive agencies or not.
They are further either exercising power delegated from Congress, or exercising power delegated from the executive. If the former, Trump can’t control them, even under most interpretations of UET, but then you have non delegation problems to deal with. This is the OIG case.
If they are exercising power granted to the executive, it’s literally his right to control them.
The constitution doesn’t give a third option where congress can establish agencies that have power from the executive but the executive can’t control them. They can only establish agencies with no real power that the executive can’t control
I can believe after ~250 years we have some weird edge cases, but it seems fine to clean that up
It might not be a wise change for him or his party, given that all changes to the practice and structure of government ought to be viewed through the lens of your worst opponent wielding them...
What role did the other two branches of government ever have in the executive branch? You're describing the normal state of affairs as if it were a shocking escalation. Actually, it's any deviation from this that is a constitutional problem. The elected president is the head of the executive branch. If he is not the head, then the executive branch has no connection to any democratic process at all. Who is a bureaucrat serving if not the president? An inner sense of fairness or fashion?
I think trumps legal strategy is basically, putting the quiet part into writing. It’s as you already said, what has been the norm
If trump doesn’t like how the departments are executing his policy he has the power to steer it. It makes sense he is the ultimate authority for the executive branch.
Blame congress for ceding their oversight duties to departments. Which IMO is the root of the issue.
What's your job?
Here, it's the unified executive theory, which is based on how the US system had worked for its first century.
Same with the birthright citizenship. The conservative argument is actually to a degree fairly reasonable. If I say this, then the current SC will surely rule in favor.
Just read the Wiki for an intro on the details.
Method-wise, GW Bush used signing statements on more than 100 laws in collaboration with his AG to express executive control over interpretation of laws. The language of some of these is interesting, eg Dec 17 2004 on an intelligence reform bill:
> "The executive branch shall construe the Act in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch, which encompass the authority to conduct intelligence operations."
(Which was a long-winded way of saything were doing warrantless surveillance of US citizens, also circumventing the courts)
The other method was Office of Legal Counsel memos, eg Yoo's torture-is-OK letter for the CIA, etc.
Curiously, Cheney, the main advocate of unilateral executive power, was campaigning for Harris - but Trump can now use the Bush era as precedent, which is equally odd as Trump ran directly against some of those Bush-Cheney policies in 2016...
As to why this is a bad idea, look at King Lear and Macbeth, both being examples of unitary executive power gone wrong.
This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
We should desire that the legislative side actually legislates and each branch of the government holds the other two in check, regardless of partisan control.
Further having our judicial branch become openly partisan while remaining lifetime appointments despite younger appointees with longer lifetimes, is really the finishing touch on this slow rolling disaster.
“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
Oppression when Galadriel is on the throne may be better than that for Sauron; it's still oppression.
Presidents are elected based on promises made to various parts of the electorate, and if/when Congress won't act (often even when Congress is controlled by the president's party, nearly always when controlled by the opposition), no one generally makes a fuss if the president pushes through a popular-ish thing by executive authority. Republicans may be happy now but they won't be when a Democratic president ups the ante in a few years, just like Democrats were perfectly happy with Obama and Biden's overreaches but are furious at Trump's.
All for reps expansion. Remember that we haven't expanded in nearly 100 years because "we were out of room in the building". Meanwhile we have 435 people representing 330 million people (average of 760k people per rep), when the population representation was roughly 250k/rep the last time it expanded.
We should have at least 1000 reps by these numbers.
And reason has prevailed again.
But sarcasm aside, its a difficult question who controls parlaments, when democratic participation is not enough. Maybe oversight or veto rights by randomly picked citizen councils are a better way then blindly trusting anything that happens in-house.
Yes, we have tons of bad legislators: some just not good at their jobs, some actively harmful (leaving that vague on purpose—I think all partisans can agree that they exist, even if we disagree on who they are). In theory, they can be excised via the ballot box. However, we don't want to kick out the good ones just as they're getting to be their most effective—not only do we lose their direct skills, but we lose their ability to mentor the promising up-and-comers.
I place more blame on the way we do primaries and general elections: in most districts, the only thing that matters is the primary, and that produces some truly rotten results.
As long as things are staggered, senior legislators will mentor junior legislators, and that institutional knowledge will be passed on.
And I don't think we're talking about limiting representatives and senators in the same way we do for the president. I would say it would be fair to allow them to serve for something on the order of 15-20 years.
But sure, I think there are many other problems that matter more: winner-takes-all elections that essentially require you have only a two-party system, the electoral college, and (as you mention) the primary system.
While we're at it, let's put terms on the Supreme Court, too: rather than for life, make an appointment last 18 years, staggered every two years.
Who cares? They don't get to cast the votes.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/dian...
Related gripe: How both houses of congress prioritize "seniority", so that changing a representative indirectly harms the interests of the people being represented. (Though possibly not as much as keeping the wrong representative in office.)
In other words, State X benefits more when their seats are _not_ competitive and subject to turnover, the quality of candidates being equal.
Are you sure this is going to be a fact, in the future? How likely is it, that the next elections will still be (somewhat) fair?
In Virginia, I get to participate an incredibly professional and structured process that makes it easy for everyone who can vote to vote and makes sure there are many checks that the process is being followed correctly.
Women who changed thier last name to their husband's.
Naturalized citizens who come from places where the language requires non ascii characters.
Anyone without a passport.
Anyone from a place where the courthouse burned down taking thier original birth certificates with it... Copies don't count.
To name tens of millions. Maybe trump will interpret the law in a way that lets people vote, or maybe he'll decide that correct interpretation is to limit voting to people more likely to vote for his third term.
Trump doesn't execute those laws, though. The states do, as they are in charge of running elections. Certainly Trump's DoJ could bring lawsuits against states that don't comply in the way Trump wants them to, but it's far from certain that the courts (even Trump's stacked SCOTUS) will agree with Trump's interpretations.
> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators
For president it just says states will send electors chosen by the state legislature. This has been the source of immense fuckery for decades... state legislatures often want to ignore the popular vote and just send their party's electors and it's unclear how the current court would sway if that actually happens (particularly if the state's constitution doesn't bind their legislature to send electors based on the popular vote). Further, federal laws like the voting rights act have often been held to apply to presidential election as well as congress.
The conditions for this are being set as we watch. Dictators always prize loyalty above competence, which is exactly what our current leader is doing.
I don't doubt that nearly everyone involved in managing our recent elections are conscientious and professional, but what are they going to do if a bunch of troops with guns show up to change the results?
There is no one waiting in the wings to take over popularly if this happens. Previous people who have at various times looked like they might, have fallen mightily from grace in the eyes of the party, such as DeSantis.
It all falls apart without Trump. And Trump is an old man, doing a stressful job.
The current problem is that Trump is happy to implement the policies that all these hard-right lunatics have come up with. It's not like Trump writes those executive orders. He just agrees with them and signs them.
Certainly Trump is a problem. He's the one that has united the party around this horrifying agenda, and who is amenable to letting others like Musk dismantle the federal government. The question, after Trump is gone, is if there is anyone else that can motivate the party to vote for someone who will continue to do things The Trump Way (that is, let other, smarter people do things).
I don't know. Like you say, people like DeSantis seemed to have a shot for a bit, but they've fallen out of favor. But it's unclear if these people need another Trump, or if someone with even half of his weird... charisma... will do.
(All of this is of course the standard hypocrisy: Trump and his cronies run on the whole "drain the swamp", "eliminate the deep state" nonsense. But of course Trump just immediately installs a different unelected deep state to run things.)
Obviously I would prefer if these morons on the right wouldn't fall for Trump's conspiracy bullshit, as democracy functions much better when everyone has faith in the integrity of elections. But as long as the elections are fair, that's still something in the "plus" column.
There were a bunch of people who are easily tricked who latched onto the election fraud claims by habitual liars. That doesn't make the claims true.
I really don't understand what you are trying to do other than distract.
Would you be open to a $10,000 bet that the 2028 election is, as decided by unbiased international publications (BBC, Reuters, etc.), fair?
Yes, if there was some sort of prediction market around that, I would absolutely make that bet. My rationale:
Elections are run by each individual state, not by the federal government. The federal government certainly has the ability to set standards for those elections (and something like the SAVE Act, if passed, will disproportionately disenfranchise likely-Democrat voters), but election integrity is managed by the states. The states don't really have an incentive to mess with their elections. Deep blue and deep red states will get the outcome that likely-of-the-same-party election officials expect/want without the need for any meddling. Swing states generally have enough people in power from both parties that those elections are going to be watched very closely by people who will call out irregularities and provide actual evidence of such, if it truly exists.
The only thing I'm worried about is legal disenfranchisement, but it's unclear if anything new there that happens in the next 3.5 years could meaningfully swing an election.
Regardless, I am less worried about 2028 than I am about the mid-terms in 2026. Not worried election-integrity wise... just worried about the Democrats getting their shit together and retaking at least one of the houses of Congress (and if they can only take one, preferably the Senate, even though that will likely be the more difficult one, as usual).
Being ignored would be a blessing here.
If anything the democrats were the party to get rid of some of their democratic process. They didn't even vote on their parties candidate, and no, that doesn't scare me either.
Not to mention the democrats had far more private money spent all three times fighting Trump and yet he still won democratically twice and lost once democratically.
The system isn't great or even good, but it's still functioning.
If it was, we wouldn't have unelected kids breaking and entering in some of the most sensitive government organizations, getting access to private data and dismantling institutions without congressional oversight.
How many more alarms before you start taking the situation seriously? Complacency like what you suggest will be the order of the day right until things break, and then everyone will forget they thought this way and talk about how obvious it all was. Granted I don't have any solutions at hand, but better to start thinking about them now than later.
1. Trump and his cronies didn't seem like they actually expected to win in 2016. They weren't prepared. Now we have Project 2025 and DOGE.
2. Trump's first-term cabinet picks and other political appointees (hell, even his VP) were not chosen all that well, in that they weren't fully bootlicking Trump loyalists. Many of them pushed back on some of the crazy things Trump wanted to do. This time, everyone has been hand-picked for their loyalty and agreement with advancing the agenda in Project 2025.
3. Members of the civil service also pushed back during his first term in ways of their own, slowing things down, and making the more destructive things hard to do. Now the civil service is being gutted.
4. In 2017, Trump hadn't yet packed federal courts and SCOTUS with hard-right loyalists. That's done now, and more will come.
5. There were Republicans in Congress during his first term -- even if not many -- who disagreed with Trump, and were willing to do so publicly. They voted against the more destructive things that Trump wanted. Some even voted to impeach/convict him! But today, Congress is stepping back and letting Trump do what he wants. Certainly what he wants in the executive branch will only get him so far; eventually he will need Congress to pass things to advance his agenda. But many of those uncomfortable Republicans who were present during his first term have retired or been replaced with card-carrying MAGA members.
If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028 (which I think is certainly possible; one thing that I'm not that concerned about is the integrity of our state-run elections), I'm worried that there won't be much of an executive branch left for that president to be in charge of, and will spend nearly all of that 4-year term rebuilding what was destroyed, if they're even able to do so, both logistically and legally.
Oh, like, he wasn’t really informed nor involved in January 6, 2021?
And he never mentioned, several times in 2024 that you Americans wouldn’t have to vote anymore?
- As a way of not having to know anything while appearing intellectual or somehow "above it all";
- Genuine and fundamental misunderstanding of the political forces in the US. Example: thinking there's such a thing as "socialism" or "the far left" in America;
- To knowingly deflect from the excesses of the conservative movement.
Here are the two political forces in American politics:
1. The fascist party who has had a 50+ year project to take over and subvert every aspect of government to destroy any aspect of democracy and create a neofuedal dystopia masquerading as a Christian theocracy; and
2. The controlled opposition party who loves nothing more than to be out of power and, when in power, to do nothing. It's why Democrats not in office are suddenly for progressive policies like medicare-for-all (as Kamala Harris was in 2019) but when on the cusp of taking power, they have a policy of no longer opposing the death penalty, capitulating to right-wing immigratino policy, arming a genocidal apartheid state and the only tax breaks proposed are for startups.
Look at how successful progressive voter initatives were in the last election compared to the performance of the Democratic Party. Florida overwhelmingly passed recreational marijuana and abortion access (~57% for, unfortunately you need 60%+ to pass in Florida) while Trump carried the state by 14. Minimum wage increases passed in deep red Missouri. In fact, abortion access has never failed to garner a mjaority of votes whenever it's allowed to be put in front of voters, no matter how deep red the state.
So why if progressive policies are so popular, are the Democrats so opposed to them as a platform? Really think about that. The Democratic Party doesn't exist to abuse power. It exists to destroy progressive momentum at every level of government above all else.
A lot of the decisions that have been flagged as "openly partisan" are just the Supreme Court saying exactly what you're saying: the executive branch and judicial branch don't have the authority to write laws and both branches should really stop writing laws and force Congress to do that.
We will see this year and in coming years whether this Supreme Court is partisan or just activist in tearing down executive authority. If they uphold this administration's opinions about executive power, then yes, they're blatantly partisan and have no integrity. If they stand in the way, then maybe they just finally had the numbers to rein in the executive branch like conservatives have been arguing for for generations.
I don't think we have enough information at this point to judge which is more likely (though I know most here will disagree with me on that point).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024...
(A nit: the word you're looking for is "rein", as in the thing you hold when riding a horse, not "reign", the ruling period of a monarch.)
I would hope that, in this hypothetical reality, a judge and jury would still find that laughable.
Even if such a ruling would have kept Nixon safe from prosecution, Congress still could have impeached him, and at least that would have kicked him out of office.
Of course, Nixon was preemptively pardoned, so we didn't even get to see how that would have played out in the reality of the time.
Something like the REINS Act, forcing regulations to be voted on by congress, would be something that hurts both sides & prevents executive overreach.
Something tells me presidential vote totals around Fort Bragg or Oak Ridge—both home to notable numbers of career federal employees—might give a different impression.
E.g. https://news.clearancejobs.com/2025/01/18/the-data-shows-whe...
Most federal civil servants live in Maryland or Virginia, not in DC.
[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
The Democrats are complicit by trying too hard to play by the rules and take the high road, but it's not a fair comparison of culpability in the slightest.
Yet GOP senators were more than happy to claim credit for infrastructure funding that they opposed.
A good example is immigration policy. Setting immigration policy is an enumerated power of Congress. The executive branch has no say at all. Congress failed to revise immigration policy when it got out of sync with facts on the ground. That led to the current mess.
The last attempt to overhaul immigration policy was in 2006.[1] Arguably, this was more workable than what we have now. It combined tough enforcement with a path to citizenship. It had supporters from both parties. The House and Senate did not agree on terms and no bill was passed.
So, instead of reform, we had weak enforcement, now followed by strong enforcement. What we have isn't working.
We need something like that bill now. Has anyone introduced a comprehensive reform bill in Congress? No, as far as I can see from reading through the immigration bills in the hopper. The current bills are either minor tweaks or PR exercises.[2]
Beat on your congressional representatives. We need an immigration law that works. It's Congress' job to argue over how it should work, and to come up with something that, when enforced, still works. We don't have that now. Immigrants are screaming about being deported, legal residents are screaming about being caught up in raids, and farmers are screaming about losing their labor force.[3] This is the moment to do something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Refo...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-bills-republicans-congr...
[3] https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2025/01/27/business-lead...
How so? I don't really have any confidence that the current Congress (regardless of which party we're talking about) could agree on anything but what you pointed out -- minor tweaks.
Until a couple years later on average, a state protection organism gets put in place to check those organisations are working as expected.
Eventually, the state protection organism gets a bit carried away on what they are supposed to be checking on.
"Nearly half of dictatorships start as a military coup, though others have been started by foreign intervention, elected officials ending competitive elections, insurgent takeovers, popular uprisings by citizens, or legal maneuvering by autocratic elites to take power within their government. Between 1946 and 2010, 42% of dictatorships began by overthrowing a different dictatorship, and 26% began after achieving independence from a foreign government. Many others developed following a period of warlordism." [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship (see "Formation")
Maybe worth considering:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
Also "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days":
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
do you see jan 16 as a military coup? Coz i do. Just because the people involved are poorly equipped, and badly organized, doesn't mean it isn't.
We, as a nation, did not punish them hard enough. We as a nation, did not cut the hydra at their head, and allowed it to fester. It is done, perhaps, as a form of peace keeping and appeasement.
But history has taught us that appeasement does not work. So once again, those who failed to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Sure, some people were private militia members, but that is not the same thing.
They governed well enough until January 20.
> This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
Creating gridlock and dysfunction is an intentional (and well-known) strategy to create a strongman. Most of the gridlock and dysfunction are on one side. You can call that partisan but even they oppose even the most simple, inescable issues such as paying debt. Back under Obama, the GOP in Congress openly said that their goal was to make government a failure under Obama.
Even when Republicans are in power, Democrats don't resort to blatantly obstructionist measures to mess with a Republican administration.
Democrats don't refuse to consider judicial nominations because "it's a presidential election year", and then hypocritically rush through a SCOTUS appointment right at the end of a presidential term.
Sure, they do things like vote down a debt ceiling increase when it's paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they don't agree with. But when the power balance is reversed, Republicans will vote down a debt ceiling increase if it's not paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they want.
(I wish there was something in the constitution that required that each bit of legislation be single-topic. Certainly that would still be open to interpretation. But I think at the very least it would eliminate the more obvious examples of abusive brinkmanship.)
Isn't this a direct result of "no compromise" policies on one side of the aisle?
I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.
If you doubt me, simply go read votes from the past 20 years, and compare it with say 1960-1980. Republicans do not cross the aisle anymore.
The interesting part is that at some point republicans had so propagandized their voters against the very concept of governance that "Elect me to office for the next 6 years and I promise nothing will get done" was a decades long strategy that worked! The more republicans obstructed, including preventing republican voters from getting things they claim to want, the more republicans got voted in. For decades now, republicans that compromise with democrats have been primaried by less collaborative republicans.
Imagine a judge getting elected for insisting they will never hear another case!
None of this should be controversial, republican politicians have literally stated this as their goal and promise.
For some reason the people who keep saying government doesn't work are working very hard to make government not work.
Fairly obvious what that reason is.
It's the same reason Putin supports Trump -- if you yourself are threatened by something (democracy) then you need to go make that thing a joke.
Some key examples: Reagan saying "the government is the problem", Newt Gingrich starting the modern obstructionist movement in congress with the Contact with America (also backed by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind project 2025), and Mitch McConnel breaking norms to practically shut down congress under his leadership, openly stating his intent several times.
Republicans don't want to lead in any practical sense. They want to break the government and privatize the pieces so they can buy in and profit off of them. Anyone who can't buy in gets screwed, because services will cost more to pay for the investment and profits that the investors demand.
Trump's biggest achievement last term was a massive tax cut for the rich. So to balance to budget, they now want to destroy as many government services as they can, using "efficiency" as an excuse.
Breaking things is great when you run a social media company. Worst case scenario, your website goes offline for a few hours. When you start breaking the government, people die. Of course, if you're richer than God, you don't have to worry about the fallout. It doesnt matter if the FDA falls apart and leads to massive food contamination when you only eat Wagyu beef from your private ranch. People will die, you pay less taxes, and you only see it as a success.
There are many other critiques to be made, but this is just the surface.
The founding fathers envisioned the legislature be slow and deliberate, so it was never intended to move quickly.
One major party doesn’t think government solves any problems, so it’s not incentivized to use it to solve any problems. In fact, a generation of Republicans have tried to stifle fixing any of the large problems.
The other party is frequently torn between a wide spectrum of “do everything for citizens in a wide swath of policy areas” and “neoliberal free market capitalism”, so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
The rest is usually downstream of sound-byte media (stripping out nuance and polarization of media outlets), paid advertising scaremongering voters (money in politics), and electoral engineering like gerrymandering (legislators picking voters instead of the inverse).
I'd also put out that the lessons of the Tea Party (Gingrich style) have not been lost on modern people with political goals -- a fairly small group has used the heavy party whipping that the Republicans use to become an important swing vote / caucus -- and the republican party was more amenable/vulnerable to this sort of tactic, precisely for cultural reasons embedded in the Republican party's history, governance and setup.
"Weird" is a presumably a typo there, but I think it actually works as-is. As long as we allow for the verbing of adjectives, anyway.
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.
It is bonkers to me that legislative districts are drawn by whatever party is in power once every ten years. Not only should the census be more frequent (real-time/ongoing, really, and more lightweight than the system we have now), but districts should be redrawn yearly, and it should be done by a non-partisan committee.
And we really need an objective, quantitative measure of gerrymandering, and comprehensive law against it.
But really I don't think all of that is it. Making representation more proportionate might make Democrats win the House (and possibly presidency, since electoral college votes are apportioned the same way) more often, but the Senate will still be broken, and political polarization will still rule the day.
We need more than two viable political parties (which would require a major overhaul of each and every state's election process, at the least), and they need to govern through coalition-building, more like how parliamentary systems operate.
And ultimately it's just the tone of the whole thing. Legislators need to stop with this all-or-nothing approach, where the biggest hot-button issues don't see any measure of compromise. But that's a culture thing, and you can't fix that with laws or process.
My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.
(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))
Originally there were about 35k constituents/rep. Today it's an average of ~750k constituents/rep, with some districts at over a million.
This is because of the Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of reps. If we had the same constituent/rep ratio, we'd have ~10k reps total.
If instead we went back to the constituent/rep ratio that existed originally, a lot of our structural problems go away, via a mechanism that's accessible via US code rather than a change to the constitution.
For instance, the electoral college is based on federal representation. If you expand the house by ~50x, that dominates the electoral college by nearly two orders of magnitude, and creates a very close to popular election.
It's also much much harder to gerrymander on that scale.
That scale would also have a return to a more personal form of politics, where people actually have a real chance to meet with their reps (and the candidates) face to face.
It also feels that by having a much larger, more diffuse legislative body, we'd better approximate truly democratic processes in a representative democratic model.
Wow, that's a lot! I recall reading a piece, I believe in the Washington Post, sometime within the past few years, on this topic. They didn't run the numbers for such a dramatic increase, but I think talked about a House size of around 1000 representatives. And I was surprised to find out that this didn't shift the balance of power as much as I expected it would.
But regardless, as much as I would like for it to be easier for Democrats to win elections (in what would be an entirely fair way for them to do so!), that just puts one party in power more frequently. It doesn't fix the underlying dysfunction.
Almost all change in biology happens to populations, not individuals. In order for that to apply to governments, we would need to have massive churn and rapid experimentation of government policies and structures. These are not conducive to voter feedback (eg. Democracy) and would be so disruptive to business and life as to make governments useless until they reached some steady state.
I remember hearing that Italy had 52 governments in 50 years. It’s suffering from all of the same problems as the rest of western countries, perhaps somewhat worse than average.
Some articles which were written a few years ago, but were re-upped recently:
> In a presidential system, by contrast, the president and the congress are elected separately and yet must govern concurrently. If they disagree, they simply disagree. They can point fingers and wave poll results and stomp their feet and talk about “mandates,” but the fact remains that both parties to the dispute won office fair and square. As Linz wrote in his 1990 paper “The Perils of Presidentialism,”[1] when conflict breaks out in such a system, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” That’s when the military comes out of the barracks, to resolve the conflict on the basis of something—nationalism, security, pure force—other than democracy.
* https://slate.com/business/2013/10/juan-linz-dies-yale-polit...
> Still, Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved.” The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: “the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/amer...
When it has come to presidential systems, the US has been the exception as most others with something the same have not worked out over the long term.
Thats what happened. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Well... most of them are.
I wonder which of these two commonly happened in the past.
The real problems with the DNC campaigns are complex. They have a poor model for how to run national campaigns, clearly. All this equities wealth was made under Democrats, including Elon’s wealth, so it’s not so simple as to say, chasing money. There is some consensus that Democrats need to run media personalities instead of experienced politicians. But not enough consensus to move away from demographics-based election modeling. Suffice it to say this thread could be an interesting conversation about anything but has become a magnet for fringe theories.
The DNC didn't even have a primary last election. They just propped up Kamala and said "here's our candidate" and expected the sheeple to vote for her. Meanwhile one of their best candidates was kicked out of the party a while back and is now Trumps DNI. And if you want to say "they didn't have time" well that's because they figured it was OK to leave a declining old guy in office beyond his sell-by date - yet another poor choice by the DNC.
You know who was? Senator Mark Kelly.
Maybe most electable (though I'm not sure I buy that either), but certainly not best. The simple fact that she's now Trump's DNI makes it clear that she'd been playing for the other team even before her official party switch.
Yeah, and the fact she's working for Trump now is proof that was the right call.
Congress is sitting on its hands and seems to be enjoying the view so far, for the most part. Republicans in Congress seem to think it's fine that Trump is usurping power vested in the legislative branch. Or at the very least they're afraid to speak up; every time they do, Trump threatens to primary them during the next election cycle. (I'm honestly not sure which is worse.) Democrats are "waiting for the right pitch to swing at" (paraphrasing Jeffries), as if doing nothing is some sort of strategy. And it's not like they can do anything anyway; certainly they have the power to get proposed legislation passed/not passed if Johnson loses a few GOP votes, but they can't get new legislation on the floor (y'know, like something that says "get DOGE out of the government's computer systems, right now") without the permission of GOP-controlled committees and Mike Johnson.
The courts are doing some things so far, but by their very nature, they're slower to act. But even if they tell Trump he can't do something, Trump doesn't actually have to listen. The executive branch is responsible for the enforcement of laws... and court orders. Let's say a court orders Musk to stop doing something, and he ignores it. Let's then say the court finds Musk in contempt, and orders him jailed. Who is going to arrest him? Not Trump's US Marshals Service, not Trump's FBI, etc.
As proof, this isn't an American problem, it is nothing to do with the US constitution or "gridlock". In most English-speaking countries you have seen: massive increase in power by unelected officials, the vast majority of these officials have identical political views and operate with a political agenda (to be clear, at no point did anyone ask whether this was legal, whether these were "strongmen"), and this effect has paralysed government function in every country.
Even worse, this appears irrespective of clear limits. For example, the US system of political appointments of judges is clearly a bad idea, the incentives are awful, the results are predictable. But the same issue with judges overriding elected officials is occurring in countries where selection is (in theory) non-political.
The reason why is simple: there has never been a greater difference between the lives of the rulers and the ruled. The reason we have democracy is to resolve this problem.
But the US is a particularly extreme case of this: if you look at how government operates in the US, what is the actual connection with people's lives? The filth and decay in US cities is incredible given the amount of government spending...the answer why is simple: the spending is for government, the people don't matter.
Also, US-specific: it is extremely strange to characterise the US as a system of checks and balances if you look at actual real world political history rather than some theoretical imaginings of someone in the late 18th century. Checks and balances have always been dynamic. The reason why the outrage is so vitriolic (and the comparisons to Hitler so frequent...imagine if Hitler fired civil servants or changed regulatory policy, definitely the worst thing he did) is because the people being hit are the people who believed they would always be safe from oversight.
He did. It's called "Gleichschaltung", we learned about it in school. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zgtyvcw/revision/4
There was bipartisan (Republican-ish) immigration legislation with enough votes pass until Trump told people to vote against it, because he knew that he could blame the problem on his opponents and many people would believe him.
Note that none of this would be possible with Citizens United and dramatic media consolidation in the hands of a few oligarchs. ;-(
FIRST Interesting how, if true, the GOP Political class is now beholden to Musk:
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxTKZoZe_AzdNF8w7X0HO19w6xxH5rGinI...
> Congress is supine because Republicans are in charge, and Musk has also become Trump’s hatchet man — threatening Republican members of Congress if they deviate from Trump.
> Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst was firmly set against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense until Musk hinted that he’d finance a primary challenger to Ernst, who’s up for reelection next year. Presto: Ernst supported Hegseth.
> Indiana’s Republican Senator Todd Young expressed concern about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence until Musk tweeted against him. A besieged Young spoke with JD Vance, who arranged a call with Musk. Presto: Young announced he would back Gabbard.
> Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.
> A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”
SECOND And Interesting how some Media, Wa Po in this case, coincidentally blocked Paid Advertisement advocating an Anti-MUSK Political takt.
> Musk’s financial and political power have been enough to intimidate even the mainstream media. An advertisement set to run in The Washington Post yesterday calling for Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to Common Cause, one of the groups that had ordered the ad. When asked why the Post had pulled the ad, the Post said it was not at liberty to give a reason.
it seems the same play is being made in 2025 at the advent of AI and Tech supremacy as it comes to a headroads with the death of traditional US neoliberalism. Tech is more interested in the monarchy, as was the feudal lords of old, and seeks a neofeudalism while the parliament of our time, the house and senate, prattle on like the Diets and assembly promulgating edicts and regulations that are either wholesale ignored, or gridlocked bike-shedding; fiddling whilst Rome burns.
Technology is necessarily a progressive force, and feudalism is necessarily a stagnatory conservative structure. The "Tech Supremacy" group is visibly opposed to technology, and it's reflecting more and more on society as they gain power.
Technology is a tool. It is not a culture or a system. In fact, I think state and corporate use of technology for things like surveillance, censorship, frankly pointless jobs that somehow attract VC money, mass propaganda and social media access, data tracking and advertising and behavior modelling to a T, hypothetical pointless-job-destroying-AGI, etc. that are currently in vogue are part of the conservative structure. Technology means moving, but is this outwards or inwards movement?
It can be progressive towards any amount of things, good or bad. But conservatism requires not developing it.
Consider reading Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills as a great display of this difference in the context of reproductive rights[0].
In absolutely no place in either comment I mentioned political movements, parties, or anything like that.
And yes, I know that it is. It's just, can we drop the Orwellianism and change the name?
You're mistaking: - bureaucracy with democracy - checks and balances with a neo-priesthood
But hey, who needs a functional government when you have a neo-priesthood to keep things 'holy'?"
No one wants (and I don’t think anyone should want) bipartisanship, not really. Bipartisanship means the rich get everything they want—efficiently. It means the meetings of the club we aren’t in happen on time and no one ends up with a black eye. That’s also an unacceptable outcome. Of course, it can be argued that the outcome we are getting is basically the same thing, but with cheap depressing entertainment and widespread governmental dysfunction.
Of course, anyone who thinks voting for any of these right-wing figures will end oligarchy is delusional. Their charisma comes from the fact that, because they hate basically everyone, they also incidentally hate many of the other oligarchs. But nothing good happens when people vote for hate, and none of these pricks will ever end oligarchy since they are all part of it. The Nazis truly did present themselves as somewhat socialist (it was in the name) in the early 1920s to gain their first followers, but as soon as they were in power, they realized they had more to gain by siding with the industrialists and against labor, which is of course what they did.
It’s this loss that plagues Congress.
Bipartisanship is what was jettisoned by the republicans to ensure that they would always be able to blame democrats for the failure of the government.
Even during Obamacare, when they adopted a Republican plan, Romney had to distance himself from it. Despite all the efforts for Bipartisan outreach - for all the concessions, the republicans couldn’t stand with the dems.
The Dems must always be wrong.
Bipartisanship means you have to spend more effort to get more people on your team.
Partisanship means you just have to get on board with one party.
So how is bipartisanship the problem?
I'm so glad we have a consensus democracy. We're a small country but I don't see any reason why a more moderate, consensus based system couldn't be adopted by larger ones. In fact I think this centralization of power around one person doesn't scale.
I'm also glad that we have the direct vote in order to reign in our government whenever they overreach or turn too far away from our interests. That seems much harder to implement in larger countries, but it's an excellent tool to course correct a government.
> political systems with single-member districts and the plurality voting system, as in, for example, the United States, two main parties tend to emerge. In this case, votes for minor parties can potentially be regarded as splitting votes away from the most similar major party
If a third party grows it will either shrink again as voters realize they are splitting their vote against their biggest common opponent, or the third party replaces one of the two existing parties. Either way, you get two main parties.
The most effective single thing to promote a multiparty system is to switch to ranked-choice or approval voting (if staying with single-member districts) or to switch to multi-member districts with some kind of proportional representation. That would be where, say, everyone in Texas votes for their preferred party, and the 34 seats get allocated proportionally to party results.
Honestly, implementing Ranked Choice is the best compromise.
* Meaningfully improves the ability of minor parties to succeed
* Removes the concept of "wasted vote" so that citizens can vote their conscience
* Electoral results are more informative of the positions of the electorate
* Candidates have to compete more on ideas and policies than attacking opponents
* Conceptually easier to understand than other systems
* Maintains single-member districts (I don't like this, but I think trying to change the House to multi-member districts is too radical for us)So we're stuck with this joke we call democratic elections. Also seen in the UK with its abysmal first-past-the-post system.
FPTP isn't sufficient to get a two party system. The US has such a system because it combines FPTP with open primaries. In the UK the right is trying to rebuild a new party from scratch, because the Conservative party has no working mechanisms that would allow it to have its direction changed by its members. Whereas in the US open primaries give members a great deal of control, and that kills the incentive to create new parties. The current Republican administration is run by a group of former Democrats who came into the GOP from the outside - this isn't possible in the UK system.
The single best is to switch to multimember proportional for the legislature (which can remain candidate centric using, say, 5 member districts and STV), and that gets even better (though procedurally more difficult to adopt in the US) if you were to switch the Presidential election from a single winner two-seat President and Vice President to ranked choice two-sequential winner system (e.g., IRV or Bucklin, but after you pick a winner, eliminate that candidate, and tally again without them for a second winner as VP) where each party is structurally incentivized to compete for both spots. These not only make more parties viable they also each offer more election-day choice among candidates of the same party, denying incumbents of favored parties an uncontested sinecure.
It hasn't happened anywhere in the US as far as I know, despite being adopted by various local governments.
Ranked choice's major benefit is that it reduces the effect of spoilers. Third parties are the spoilers.
Because I can't find an example in any country, yet it is appears to be taken as an article of faith that it will happen by proponents of ranked choice voting.
The evidence for switching from single member to multi-member elections is far more clear. Of course, you obviously can't have multi-member elections for President, the Senate because the Constitution staggered elections and courts have ruled against multi-member districts for the House in the past for violating the VRA.
Approval voting is the better compromise IMO. It has most of the same benefits, except that it's even easier to understand, and attacking opponents is even less valuable. You don't get as much information about opinions from the result, but you do still get more than the current system (assuming statistics are made available). You don't have to worry about people wasting their vote because they don't understand the new system, voting for only one candidate is a valid approval voting vote, it simply implies a higher threshold.
This kind of rhetoric really just feeds the beast.
So which branches are these agencies under? Is it in the judicial, legislative, or executive - and if it’s in the executive why can’t the chief executive manage business?
On the other hand, one of the issues brought up in the Obama years was whether a president can choose not to enforce a law like immigration. If congres’s laws can be ignored than what power do they have?
Genuine question. Does anyone have a constitutional framing for the duties of the executive branch in prioritizing enforcement or implementation of law?
* FOIA tells the executive branch when/how to share documents.
* APA tells executive agencies what they have to do to make a rule.
* Congress gives line item budgets, and the executive doesn't get to reassign funds.
* Executive agencies must submit to audits from GAO (within congress)
It's perfectly reasonable for congress to limit how executive agency heads can be hired/fired too. After all, it's agencies that congress enacted and gave power too, and for legitimiate reasons that congress has.
In some limited employment law sense , maybe. The question is who gives these people orders? Who do they work for? And the answer can’t be themselves.
That isn't necessarily the case for all officials. For example, I believe Congress can't prevent the president from firing a member of the cabinet. But that doesn't mean the president can do whatever he wants to anyone.
[1] https://www.commondreams.org/news/cnn-foia-office-of-personn...
This is something that has existed for a very long time but has been changing lately and will almost certainly show up in the Supreme Court again.
It limits that power when it comes to the quasi-legislative agencies.
That was the unambiguous law of the land for nearly 100 years until the current court whittled down the exclusion in Seila in 2020.
So who are such agencies accountable to? Congress. Just like the president is accountable to Congress.
The Court distinguished between executive officers and quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial officers. The Court held that the latter may be removed only with procedures consistent with statutory conditions enacted by Congress, but the former serve at the pleasure of the President and may be removed at his discretion. The Court ruled that the Federal Trade Commission was a quasi-legislative body because it adjudicated cases and promulgated rules. Thus, the President could not fire a member solely for political reasons. Therefore, Humphrey's firing was improper.
Sounds like what the parent was saying, so not flatly incorrect.
“If the law says the President cannot fire someone, or interfere in an agency’s work, then the President cannot.”
This is, indeed, flatly incorrect. Congress cannot pass a law requiring that the Secretary of State or Defense or Treasury be fired only for cause. The SCOTUS case knocking it down would likely be 9-0.
“Congress writes the laws and can make them say whatever they want” totally ignores separation-of-powers concerns that the Constitution and its guardians in Article III courts take very seriously.
No one is saying Congress can restrict the President from firing political appointees or his Cabinet.
We're talking about the quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial agencies here. In the case you cite, Humphrey was on the FTC, and Roosevelt tried to fire him. The Court said the President couldn't him because Congress wrote it in the law. That's exactly what the other poster was saying, so how are they flatly incorrect?
The oral arguments in Selia Law v. CFPB may be enlightening here:
The other poster was right and you posted case law proving their point.
Congress can’t reorganize the Treasury as an independent agency. Why not? Making the sole director of the CFPB dismissible only for cause was ruled unconstitutional. Why?
Taking the claim made by the original poster as accurate would lead you to get both of these important questions wrong.
The Court ruled that the Federal Trade Commission was a quasi-legislative body because it adjudicated cases and promulgated rules.If it’s that clear will it be easy to take this to the Supreme Court?
You can’t even say that Congress is solely the source of those constraints since the laws creating and governing these agencies were signed by… the president!
Most of these agencies have already been challenged in court and the Constitutionality of their structure and governance affirmed.
Unless someone can make an argument that they actually report to congress.
How? Judicial branch is independent.
Certainly that's not universal. Some Trump appointees will likely balk when Trump goes too far in their estimation. But this is what happens when the GOP politicizes their judicial appointments.
All three branches are now run by ideologues. There is no independent thought. There may be independence on paper, and on that we would agree. But the situation here in reality isn’t really related to what’s on paper. In fact these folks mean to ignore all the current laws and just do whatever the fuck they want and I’m not making that up. I’m reporting what I see.
The reason for this is stability. Congress, businesses, international allies, and most US citizens typically don't want things to dramatically change every new presidential administration. And the primary way to ensure that stability is to make it so the same people are working in various government offices from administration to administration. And I think people are quickly learning why that stability is desirable, as the current administration attempts to dismantle it with no consideration for the consequences.
So the upper management is composed of political appointments. And like any other organization, the upper management has considerable discretion in setting priorities.
re: "politically selective law enforcement" is not a good thing, because laws are one of the things that are supposed to constrain politicians.
The president has a lot of constitutional protection to run the executive branch, though obviously congress has ways to pass laws and influence that, too.
The president isn’t accountable to congress but there are checks and balances both ways
Cooperation which has been deemed too transparent, too vulnerable to actually caring about what is being destroyed.
So maybe congress has a kind of veto power here?
But we need to get through the first few months before any of this will play out. And after that there is still a long time before the 2026 elections.
But the cynic in my knows that a big chunk of a legislator's job is figuring out how to get re-elected next term. If (when) Trump does things unpopular with regular Republicans, and legislators are seen to be doing nothing to help their constituents, they'll start to worry they won't get re-elected.
It'll be the same thing that's happened with Democrats: Republican voter turnout will suffer because the candidates in front of them aren't doing anything useful for them.
I guess there's a chance Trump will do something so horribly unpopular that there will be extreme bipartisan support for limiting his power in some ways. But I'm not sure I'd rely on that either.
In some ways he was even harder than Bush during the post 9/11 response.
www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not
It’s astounding the regularity over the last 100 years that conservatives have used immigration narratives to fire up their base regardless of what statistical data shows.
Perhaps you should view this through the lens of the Biden administration.
It's astounding the regularity that people bring Obama when they want to avoid discussing reality.
Here's a link for some numbers that include Biden: https://www.newsweek.com/immigrant-deportations-removals-tru...
tl;dr: Biden seems to have deported more than any other president
Obama may have deported lots of people, but Trump famously used the same institutions to detain and torture minors indefinitely... Which of those is "harder" against immigration?
It's the same issue that is happening now. Biden deported a lot more people, but he focused on people entering the US or caught doing something. Trump is deporting a low fewer people, but he randomly taking people from their homes, workplaces and schools. Which one do you think appears "harder" on TV?
Are you talking about the "cages" that were built under Obama and continued under every president thereafter, including Biden? Or what?
The "cages" are the same whether you keep people there for a couple of days waiting for a flight back into their country or for months for no good reason.
Maybe it's more a case of rampant mathematical illiteracy all over the press and people paying more attention to extraordinary events. I really don't know.
In theory it does, that is the whole idea and genius of the constitution.
In fact at the moment it does not, because Trump has so captured the Republican party that the legislature has almost no power to stand up to him. The Supreme Court has a long history of judges aligning with the political party that seated them, and Trump put 3 of them into their seat.
The Administration is required to follow the law and to implement it with due care as the legislation intended.
The Legislature can impeach the Administration, it can hold it's officers in contempt, and it can pass laws constraining the Administration.
It's a simple problem: NO ONE IS DOING THEIR JOB. This is because they can get away with it and you don't actually have the power to vote them out. The media is part of the problem and is no longer serving the interests of the citizens. The monopolized corporations ensure you cannot use the Internet to meaningfully solve this problem. Look at this garbage thread. Look at all these garbage threads on here every time some political problem comes up. It's all compromised claptrap designed to appeal to corporate American but in no way to connect and govern in a modern fashion with each other.
Look at turn out on voting day when a presidential election is not slated. It's typically less than 25% of the voting age population that turns out. If you sit and think about this for one minute you will see why we are where we are.
The problem here is that if you impeach Trump, then you get Vance, who will do the same stuff Trump is doing. You impeach Vance, and you get Johnson, who will do the same stuff Trump is doing. And so on, down the line. Eventually you run out of people in the presidential line of succession, and then you have a real problem. I suppose eventually you get to the point where you have a president who doesn't feel like getting impeached? But by then the damage to the institution has been done.
> it can hold it's officers in contempt
Who is going to enforce any orders (fines, imprisonment) around those contempt rulings? Congress and federal courts don't really have much law enforcement personnel to speak of. Trump controls federal law enforcement, and he can instruct them to ignore contempt rulings.
I guess the House (for example) has the Sergeant at Arms, but their law enforcement staff is limited, and I don't think they're going to want to get into a conflict with, say, the Secret Service, if they go to arrest a cabinet member, but Trump says no.
> and it can pass laws constraining the Administration.
There are already laws constraining the administration, and Trump and Musk are running roughshod over them. Why would they obey new laws they don't like?
Yes, it does, by the nature of them existing and Congress establishing them. Show me where in the Constitution that they can't do that.
It would be strange if congress can designate untouchable officials. Why don’t they just grant themselves office for life?
So yes, Congress has wide leeway to create agencies to administer particular executions of laws passed by Congress and signed by the President.
Furthermore, we don't have untouchable officials. What does that hypothetical have to do with anything?
The heads of these agencies that Trump is removing are protected from being fired immediately, fired without Congressional notification, and from being fired without cause.
Rank-and-file civil servants are protected from being fired unrelated to performance precisely so we don't revert to the patronage systems of the 1800s.
That cannot be true. They do not get a lifetime claim to the treasury which is not revocable by elected officials.
The members of the executive branch work for the chief executive.
If the law is that that an official cannot be fired without cause, then that's that, if there's no cause. Maybe they have a term of employment in that position, and when it ends, they leave. Maybe Congress can fire them via some other appropriate mechanism. But if the law says the president cannot fire them without cause, then that's just not a power the president has.
This simplifies some things (like the fact that congress can beat the executive by overriding a veto), but I think generally captures the essence of the system. And a key point here is that judicial beats executive. The executive can interpret a law however they want, but if the judiciary disagrees then the judiciary wins. So nothing needs to be "used" to disregard the judiciary's interpretation of laws - it simply doesn't matter what the executive's interpretation of a law - that's the role of the judiciary.
The reason for this law is simply to bring the various agencies under executive authority in line. Instead of each individual organization interpreting the law (generally around the limits of their powers) at their own discretion, those interpretations will now need to pass through the attorney general.
Which is important considering that Chevron doesn't exist anymore, where the judiciary found itself out of their water, so to speak, about how to implement the law (note I say implement here, meaning that what the law says, the org does, but the details or ambiguous terms are up to the org). So, this actually re-implements Chevron in a forceful way, because it says that the judiciary, which tasked again with overseeing how laws are implemented by the executive whenever they are ambiguous.
Just to be very clear, since it actually matters... this is an executive order, not a law. No one voted on it, it was just declared to be true.
If he were to mess with the Fed it would impact Wall Street, particularly by making the market indices go down.
For whatever reason he cares about that in ways he doesn’t care about his approval ratings or the historical norms of the office. See how fast he reached a deal on tariffs earlier in the month when the markets reacted to them? Since then they’ve been slowly leading tariffs to get the message out so when the tariffs come the market will have priced it in.
He’ll get to the Fed. But it won’t be overnight. The administration will start messaging it and choreographing the change long enough before so it won’t spook Wall Street.
Just a small wink, nod or a pause somewhere might cause panic on Wall Street.
And its dropping from the low point it started at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/dona...
I don't know what "considering the circumstances" are but his approval ratings are historically abysmal, not quite high.
If Tesla crashed, so would Elon’s power.
Also Tesla won't collapse because it's investors are the most brain damaged investors, and frankly their self-fulfilling prophecy has kept them repeatedly buying any dip back up. It's been extremely profitable to be a mindless Tesla investor.
I hate "fictitious" valuations as much as the next guy, but at the end of the day it's what people are willing to pay for equity that determines value, not what it's books look like.
What a weird way to say that. He “gave” us spacex or Tesla.
No, he founded them.
Tesla technically existed on paper before Musk, but they didn’t even have a working prototype, and their facility was a home garage. In all practical terms he founded Tesla as well.
Twitter he bought obviously, which is why I didn’t mention it.
… also I was looking at your comments, your rate of Elon glaze per min is really impressive.
You seem to be acting in bad faith here.
https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-fou...
"No, Elon Musk did not found Tesla; the company was originally founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk became involved later as an investor and eventually took on leadership roles, including CEO, after a legal battle over the title of founder."
That is a complete and utter lie. Even Hannity made this obvious in his interview yesterday and the look on Elon’s face was priceless.
It doesn't suck that SpaceX or Tesla exists. It sucks that the person who has profited most from those entities is using their power to destroy government agencies that oversee his companies, and more broadly, to constantly lie and try to destroy the federal government.
He’s given society new products and services that didn’t exist before, the option to purchase from those companies, and the tax revenue from those companies (to the tune of hundreds of billions)
In other words, when it comes to banking regulation, the President has the final say.
I agree with Kasey, too, but I think the exception here is mostly legalese.
> The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.
conveys respect to the judiciary branch, and states that this only applies to situations where the executive branch is interpreting laws in isolation during their enforcement of them (which happens quite often).
However, following that line:
> No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.
Feels weirder, because it implies that when executive branch employees find themselves between a rock and a hard place on when a law is interpreted differently between the President and Judicial branches they must follow the Presidential interpretation; or they'll presumably be fired.
The way I see it: This isn't a broad departure from the behavior of the system two weeks ago. The office of the President, especially under Trump, has regularly taken the action of replacing employees who are unaligned with the President's agenda. When the rubber hits the road and we get to a material matter that the President and the Judicial branch disagree on, what it might come down to is: the Judicial branch can bring a suit against the employees to follow their interpretation, but the President could fire them if they do, and the President could pardon them if they instead follow the Presidential way. That's, essentially, the same situation the American system has been in for hundreds of years; the only difference right now is that we have a President who might actually do that.
Which draws back to something I've said a few times: Presidents from both parties, over the past 50 years, but especially Bush and Obama, have been relentless in interpreting the law in a direction which centralizes power into the Executive. The "normalcy" of the office until Trump was never enforced through legality; it was only decorum. It was only a matter of time before someone rejected this decorum, born out of congressional deadlock and the dire state of many Americans' wellbeing, to make the government and executive branch actually do something about it.
This isn't the first time America has had to face this question; not even close. Trump isn't exposing new weaknesses in our system; the weaknesses have always been there. Worcester v. Georgia (1832) is a great example. It ended with the President saying F.U. to the Supreme Court, refusing to enforce one of their interpretations, and, well, the Trail of Tears happened.
"Weakness", however, is an interesting term to deploy for this; it implies that the default state of the American system is that you need supermajority alignment for the government to accomplish anything, and if actors in the system find a legal way around that requirement, its a "weakness". Phrased more simply: Strength is inaction, Weakness is action. Of course, many Americans would disagree with any assertion that this is desirable, especially in the unstable geopolitical and economic situation we're in. Trump was elected, by majority electoral and popular vote, to take action; most Americans would not call the cracks he is cleaving open to accomplish his agenda a "weakness" of the system.
People are alarmed and concerned because they know it's not new. It's not difficult to find horrors in American history. Decorum and norms exist for the purpose of attempting to smooth over these stress points and make a safer power structure that hopefully prevents tragedies like this. The relative peace and safety we've enjoyed for the half century or so has been largely based on a modern era of good feelings and respectful norms.
When those norms go away and the authoritarian president dares the court to enforce the laws he breaks, people, rightly, get scared. The courts don't control the army, he does. I hope the generals remeber their oath, but oh yeah, he's been replacing them with loyalists too.
We know it isn't new. We've seen the horrors of history. That's why it's scary.
Yeah yeah, America lived on and stuff after all of that. But a lot of oppressed minorities didn’t. And if you're any minority group that the ruling party doesn't like right now, you are totally justified in being deathly afraid.
(For the record, I was against centralization of executive power under Obama and Bush too. But open and blatant disrespect like this is as especially alarming and should be treated as such, not normalized or justified)
If you've followed Trump for long enough, one of the things he talks about a lot are the "unelected bureaucrats" in the government making the real laws that end up impacting Americans day-to-day, more than Congress oftentimes. That's who this is targeted at; subordinates within the executive branch. This isn't a law, or even an interpretation of an existing law, or an expansion of executive branch powers, or even an expansion of the powers of the office of the President (because legally, as far as I know, the President has always had this power); its best described as a memo elaborating a process.
One example that might be applicable here is Net Neutrality. FCC enforcement of Net Neutrality goes back and forth; it was about to happen, until Trump in 2017 when the ruling was cancelled, and then in 2023 it came back, and now it probably won't happen again. What you're seeing there is, in the most accurate sense, something this action would expressly cover. There's zero congressional law dealing with net neutrality. Every time the FCC has touched the topic, its been the unelected bureaucratic appointment of the latest elected President making a new rule that can just as quickly be overturned or interpreted differently by the next President. Trump's new action just recognizes a process that's already been happening, basically forever.
What net neutrality really needs is the same thing a ton of these bureaucratic agencies need: a law, passed by congress. Write it in stone.
But, this is a rare thing in modern America, and maybe it always has been. Our legislative branch sucks. Seems like our Founding Fathers may have wanted it that way, but I doubt they fully understood the consequences. Getting it to do anything is like pulling hair, and that's why Executive Actions (read: authoritarian rule) have become so common. Trump, to some degree, through his mass layoffs, the defunding of various parts of the government, and now the codification of the process that the President makes decisions on-behalf-of the executive branch, is trying to scale the bureaucratic state back. Is that a good goal? Will it be successful? I don't know. But that is, under my interpretation, the best description of his aims.
exactly there; the system relies on everyone following the rules and doesn't have much in the way of remediation, other than impeachment, if the president just decides to ignore the other two branches. possibly SCOTUS, but they've hamstrung themselves with their recent decisions
At the end of the day, you can build safe-guards, and the American system of safeguards is among the best in the world. But, we also need leadership that can and will act to solve emergent problems, lest we cannot adapt to an evolving world. And, honestly, America has struggled for the past 20 years, especially since 2008. Our solution to everything has been "throw money at it", when we don't have the money we abuse our position as global reserve currency to just print more, and no one in charge has had any desire to think critically about how we get out of that hole, or how we solve any of the other problems the country faces smarter not richer.
I don't know if Trump and his team will make the problem better or worse. I feel pretty confident that they'll make it worse for some already-marginalized people, and I wish that wasn't the case, but the world that is likely to happen should we not solve these problems will not be kinder to them than the one they're in right now. Someone like Trump was guaranteed to happen after our insane, elitist, kick-the-can-down-the-road response to the GFC and COVID. There were saner voices in the room at those times. No one listened to them.
Money is by definition zero sum, otherwise the word "inflation" would have no meaning. There are good questions around what an over leveraged loan is, but fundamentally, the supply of money is to some degree fixed at any given moment.
The wealthy and powerful keep their money in tax benefited, inflation tracking assets. Many of those assets are stocks, and a major business cost is labor. Wages are generally not inflation tracking. That amplifies the benefit of inflation to the wealthy. So the buying power lost by suppressed wages and devalued savings, as well as the devaluing of all money currently in flight such as paychecks, is exactly gained by those with wealth/ownership. Inflation also makes loan's cheaper to pay off, further benefiting those with enough assets to get a loan.
When the market stagnates or companies freeze hiring or do mass layoffs, it puts employees in an even worse negotiating position resulting in even more suppressed wages past the first order effect of inflation.
So what's even better for the rich than tax breaks is inflation.
The fed is the beating heart of the economy, it pumps money through its sluices.
The fed is in many ways the Balrog deep in Moria.
Oligarchs do answer to other oligarchs, even if they don't answer to law, and there's a good chance that many of them see the impending potential disaster of either stagflation -- people won't have enough money to buy goods and the economy stalls and maybe doesn't restart, or hyperinflation -- the definitive end of American hegemony as countries move to a different reserve currency and America is no longer able to fund its military. The economy is also directly tied, if not most directly tied, to the legitimacy of the ruling regime, so a policy of choosing loyalists over qualifications or letting it be corrupted by someone selling out tomorrow for today is likely to lead to actual civil unrest instead of performative civil unrest.
My guess is that the finance business oligarchs see it as a red line because the moment the fed is corrupted, it's no longer their fed, but Trump's fed, and that will be equivalent to the moment Putin gathered all of Russia's oligarchs, with one of them in a diminutive cage in a court room, and then said "half" and held out his ring with the implication of the power relationship being clear (part of the greater story of the Magnitsky act).
It's also worth noting that normally you would get capital flight once the wealthy get scared, but the US has told every foreign country that American citizens in that country are under American jurisdiction and therefore all wealth must be reported to the US government, so while in the past an oligarch might have been happy to cause civil unrest with their unchecked greed, America's deep financial reach means that many will pay a hefty price, if they are even allowed exfiltrate the majority of their fortunes at all, binding them to the outcome of fed decisions as well.
But I'm very far from an expert, so probably wrong about some of that.
Debatable.
But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder.
It was deflation, the gold standard, and the insistence of balanced budgets that caused revolutions all over the world:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
It was dropping prices that caused ferment in the US:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
It was FDR getting off the gold standard and balance budgets that helped the US recover:
* https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-money-makers-how-roosevelt-...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945314-the-money-maker...
> Money is by definition zero sum, otherwise the word "inflation" would have no meaning.
I have no idea what this even means.
The only debate I see is about whether the Austrian school has a point and merely printing money is already harmful or if harm comes only when prices increase.
Also,
> But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder.
Yes. Two different things can be true.
The debate is about the alternatives / counter-factuals: would <0% inflation (read: deflation) be better or worse for poor people than >>0% inflation? How do those two compare to ~0% (e.g., 2%, the Fed target) inflation?
There's a reason why I linked to articles on the topic of the 'cross of gold' and austerity. We've had other ways of doing things in the past and are on the current system for a reason.
A lot of folks seem to want to get rid of the Fed, get back to gold, mercantilism (which is basically what Trump's tariffs are attempting), and generally go back to the 1800s way of doing money/finance:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
Try reading Project 2025's chapter on the Federal Reserve:
> Free Banking. In free banking, neither interest rates nor the supply of money is controlled by the government. The Federal Reserve is effectively abolished, and the Department of the Treasury largely limits itself to handling the government’s money. Regions of the U.S. actually had a similar system, known as the “Suffolk System,” from 1824 until the 1850s, and it minimized both inflation and economic disruption while allowing lending to flourish.[23]
[…]
> As in the Suffolk System, competition keeps banks from overprinting or lending irresponsibly. This is because any bank that issues more paper than it has assets available would be subject to competitor banks’ presenting its notes for redemption. In the extreme, an overissuing bank could be liable to a bank run.[!] Reckless banks’ competitors have good incentives to police risk closely lest their own holdings of competitor dollars become worthless.[24]
* https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...*
Yay! Bank runs!
> Debatable
Wait how is this debatable. We saw wealth inequality explode in ‘20 ‘21 ‘22 and ‘23 as the wealthiest Americans navigated rapid inflation and then rate cuts by strategically buying everything they could and then turning into activist investors and forcing RTO and mass layoffs despite record profits.
Wealthy people can take advantage of economic turmoil by selling high and buying low, the greatest example being Buffets mass sell off and subsequent repurchasing.
What am I missing?
Wealth inequality was previously at its highest point in the US during the Gilded Age, when the US was still on the gold standard and inflation was not as much of a thing (and deflation often reined):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression
During the 1970s, US inflation was quite high:
* https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832
and yet during the same time period the wealth ownership of the top 0.1% went down:
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i...
US wealth inequality only really started rising in the 1980s—as inflation went down. Further, as The Guardian graph shows, concentration has gone up from the 1990s up until now, even though the last few decades have had the lowest, and most stable, inflation numbers in history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
So the link between inflation and wealth concentration does not appear to have any correlation according to the historical data.
I would hazard to guess that a more promising link to wealth concentration/inequality would be the cutting of tax rates (both corporate and personal) starting during the Reagan administration, and how it reduced redistribution of money to the lower- and middle-class.
What "rapid inflation"? Inflation was right around the historical average for 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024. The only outlier was 2022 with 8% inflation, but that's still far from "rapid" historically speaking: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/infl...
Not sure that I agree, nor that the one follows from the other.
Without having the advantage of an Economics degree, I have witnessed when rising tides have lifted all boats and a majority of U.S. society benefited. Perhaps "wealth" is not a zero sum.
And if that is case, talking about "money" is orthogonal. We should talk instead about disposable income, standard of living, etc.
It might seem like it would sound impressive to say that someone has $20k/month of disposable income, but not so much if the housing market has gone crazy and groceries have become scarce and they have to spend $15k/month on a small apartment and barely enough food to feed themselves.
It’s also why there’a always some level of inflation: Modest inflation is a sign of a healthy economy.
This effect can be minimized or neutered if their assets grow in real terms, but that only works in a growing-pie world, too
But what happened is that a small subset of elites managed to capture the flow of new fiat money, creating even more concentration. Some social mobility was made possible, but only at the behest of this tiny number of elites... And now it's looking like we're reaching the end of that cycle and social mobility is screeching to a halt... The sheer, grotesque misallocation of fiat money has become hard to ignore. The misallocation appears to be unlimited and serves political agendas. Unlike in the gold-backed era where the elites had to provide actual value to earn their scarce gold, the elite of the current era (and their hand-picked minions) got their wealth mostly through rent-seeking and monopolization of government institutions which provided access to unlimited streams of money.
So now we have no social mobility, inequality is worse than ever (and accelerating) and we have an elite class which is ill-equipped to run any kind of economy which creates value. We are in a situation even worse than the gold-backed money era. At least then, the money was in the hands of people who COULD leverage it to deliver real value out of it. People could dig themselves out of their poverty by providing value which was worth its weight in gold. It was a level playing field. The only people who had priority access to gold were those who dug it out of the ground at great risk/expense to themselves. Nowadays, there is no heuristic or logic that you can use to dig yourself out of poverty. There is no logic behind social mobility aside from social scheming; to be chosen/funded by the elite; which produces no economic value for anyone, not even the elite. They don't even know what they want anymore so they use their money to engage on wild zero-sum political manipulations; billionaires throwing huge amounts of money against each other; going mostly into the pockets of lunatic 'activists' and nothing gets done either way; all the billionaires agendas cancel out; it just creates more crazy people with money roaming around, creating intense divisions over nothing. At the end of the day, all these 'ideological' lunatics (aka experts) funded by billionaires just care about money and they're making up all kinds of nonsense arguments to justify their paychecks... Pretending that they actually care about all this stuff when really, it's all 100% about paychecks. They're literally fighting over money, using all sorts of other ideas and social agendas as pretexts.
The people who have all the money to decide the direction of our economy and society do not have the ability or even the desire to improve it to make it work efficiently in any broad sense; they are only skilled in terms of wealth concentration, not wealth creation.
At this stage, I'm convinced that the economy would work better if the government just started handing out millions of dollars of free money to everyone and let global hyperinflation happen.
We've been in a state of national emergency since 1979.
> The order was first declared on 14 November 1979 (EO 12170). At least 11 executive orders were based on this emergency state. The emergency, which was renewed in 2023 for the 44th time, is the "oldest existing state of emergency."
This is like agencies investigating themselves and inevitably finding themselves clear of any wrongdoing.
There is very little difference between the president saying "there's an emergency until I say there isn't", and repeating every year, "there's an emergency for the next year".
Though that Wikipedia article does say that Congress is supposed to review emergency orders, but in practice they just let the president do whatever.
Here's some good reading:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/27/democrats-biden-som...
They successfully argued the President can just attack other countries whenever he wants, so long as it's part of fighting "terrorism".
Quoting from History.com: "When Donald Trump started his second term on January 20, 2025, the United States had around 40 active emergency declarations (no really, we are serious), including the national emergency George W. Bush declared in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks".
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/27/democrats-biden-som...
A lot of them thanks to the results of blatant gerrymandering.
Both parties[0][1] in fact do engage in gerrymandering.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional...
[1]: https://thefulcrum.us/electoral-reforms/worst-gerrymandered-...
Out of the 25 examples in your second link, it seems like 23 of them are GOP gerrymanders?
The minute Democrats control more of the state legislatures, you'll see that more examples will be of them.
But uh yeah "both sides"... uh huh
If there are better third-party reports, let me know and I'll add to this list. The above is just the first one bestowed by Google.
Which is a shame because this is certainly a topic it's possible to do that on (e.g. this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105417 ).
Are the good comments really worth the large amount of heat?
Are there any parts that you think violate the guidelines specifically?
Trump is not an obscure topic. "Trump lies all the time" is not a novel statement people won't have encountered and considered before, if someone already believes "Trump lies all the time" then that sentence tells them nothing new and if they don't believe it the post is hardly going to change their mind.
Love him or hate him, I would argue that there are indeed words Trump has spoken which are not lies made through his teeth. I would put that level of hyperbole within the realm of "dubious basis in truth".
Trump absolutely lies a lot. He doesn't lie _all the time_. I don't think that's an inappropriate level of nuance for someone to acknowledge.
HN is split between users who passionately want more political discussion and users who don't want HN to be overrun with politics (or flamewars). The former are more vocal but the latter are more numerous. (How do I know that? Because if it weren't the case, i.e. if the majority of HN wanted all these political threads on the front page, the pressure to do this would be far greater than it is, intense though it has been.)
The community is always split between readers who feel like "all stories on $Topic are being suppressed, this site is censored!" and readers who feel like "Hacker News is overrun with $Topic! This site should change its name to $Topic News!". How to balance out these conflicting vectors is an interesting optimization problem. I say interesting because the obvious solutions don't work. For example, some people feel like the moderators should just declare politics off-topic on HN—but that would actually politicize the site even more (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637).
Fortunately we worked out a strategy that has held up well over the years. Here are a couple recent posts that cover it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614703
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
... and there's lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43092856.
and here's one of many answers I've been posting in recent weeks to users who have the opposite perception, that the political stories are being unfairly suppressed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
Between those two coconut halves I hope there's a fairly complete coconut, but if you (or anyone) still have a question, let me know!
Experts across the political spectrum say what is happening at the moment is unprecedented in US history.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum...
Please point me to a specific Executive Order issued during Biden's administration that resulted in "forced speech."
On the other hand, the current administration has issued Executive Orders, memoranda, and other official communications that very explicitly direct government agencies to engage in censorship, with the National Science Foundation going as far as to compile a list of sensitive words, flagging any materials including words such as "woman", "female", "disability", and "LGBT."
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1388501/dl?inline
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-s...
I'm an outside observer, and I want to to believe your side, but I can't any more than I can believe the comment you responded to. Regardless, nobody wants the discussion to descend into unsubstantiated "you're lying" ... "no _you're_ lying".
You can engage in the Gish gallop if you like, but to the original comment: extraordinary claims require....
The system works, go us!
Wow. Literally installing political officers in agencies.
But there is one difference which is that the Leninist model also involves party loyalists being appointed to corporations. The US isn't there yet.
Seems fine that the bureaucrats to whom executive power is delegated should be answerable to the executive.
Trump is doing another end run around the confirmation process with his "liaisons".
How else is the executive supposed to align fed bureaucrats to his goals?
It makes sense to me, as a worker bee, i know I have to do what the boss says
I am very confident that you probably do understand that.
BTW, it's not Trump we're going to have to worry about. It's the next guy, who will have Trump imprisoned or executed for treason. This one won't be a blunderer, though, and will seize these levers of control much more firmly and competently.
Do they all originate by the President saying "I want X" in reaction to something, and lawyers figuring out how to do X?
Do some of them originate with a wishlist of some extremist think tank or powerful people, and they finally found a President who'll rubberstamp them?
Other?
> “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said in the ABC News Presidential Debate. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-i-have-nothing-t...
It seemed like Trump was genuinely surprised he won the first time. They were completely unprepared. But now they are very, very prepared, and they know exactly who to put in various positions in government, people who will never balk at what Trump wants to do.
This does not bode well for that country’s democracy.
The main point of this executive order is likely part of the ongoing issues related to the chevron deference. [1] Chevron deference [1] was a (IMO very weird) legal standard that was overturned in 2024. It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous. When this was overturned, the judiciary regained their independence and were once again able to hear and independently judge cases around these executive departments.
This order is now stating that the executive branch departments themselves will no longer be independently interpreting the law at all, but instead defer to the legal opinions of the head of the executive. The order itself also makes it clear that it does not allow rejecting or unreasonably redefining the laws applying to the various departments - instead the main issue is where potential ambiguities and related limits/allowances will be determined. And of course those determinations could then be challenged by either the judiciary or the legislative (by passing overriding laws).
The short version of this is "Executive departments will now be directly accountable to all three branches of government - executive, legislative, and judicial."
Your understanding of Chevron deference is also incorrect, for what it’s worth.
What in Article I imposes constraints on the presidency? It's almost all about the legislature itself, and hardly mentions the executive. Specifically, I don't see anything that lends credence to the idea that Congress can control the workings of executive departments.
That's because the executive does not have the power to create those departments (Article II does not grant that power).
It's an undeniably weird setup: the departments are staffed and run by the executive branch, and they report up into the president, but they are still accountable to Congress, which is where their power to do anything is derived from.
Instead, the president is responsible for faithfully executing the laws. So if the law defines how an agency is staffed and makes policy, the president is bound by that.
If this seems like an imposition upon the president, please remember that the president agrees to these impositions in advance by signing the laws.
Strongly contingent upon this, right? Wasn't the whole "administrative state" / "Chevron deference" argument that Congress did the bare minimum in defining what an executive agency is supposed to do, left it up to the executive to direct it as it sees fit? And worse, the supposedly apolitical career civil servants in charge of these agencies may from time to time thwart the will of the democratically elected head of the executive?
Where is the people's recourse then?
The recent decision to formally overturn this precedent was a reduction in power for the executive branch, since it greatly expanded the scope of when a judge could overrule agencies. However, judges were mostly already doing this, so the big headline ruling was more like a funeral than a murder.
Along with what others have said, you might want to recognize that Congress controls the purse. They dictate how much the executive should spend on each item, though that can be nuanced (as in "up to this much" vs "exactly this much")
So he gets to tell police what the law is and who to arrest within the "law" that he proclaimed.
Why doesn’t congress do its job and write laws that do things?
Even right now, congressmen have been threatened with being primaries if they don’t toe the line.
There has been multiple decades of very public efforts to degrade and break the American system. Ever since watergate.
Congress was broken.
I think the question is when that pressure to obey is coming from the people and when it's instead coming from the party. In the ideal scenario the party and the people (at least the constituency) would be in lockstep. In any case term limits would help. If you're going to be out of office in at most two terms, it eliminates any point about sacrificing your values for some sort of long-term favor/benefit with the party.
Post watergate, Conservatives built FOX, they laid out their plan to break the american system, and take over to push their agenda.
No one took it seriously, and now when its happening, people are still unable to look at it.
You have the pantomine of a party. They have debates. They have primaries. They have a media organization which is 'independent'.
For a contemporary example, part of the CDC's power comes from Section 361 of the Public Health Services Act [1], which grants them the power to execute orders to prevent the spread of disease into the country or in between states. Examples included inspection, pest extermination, fumigation, and so on. The CDC invoked this power to prevent landlords from evicting delinquent tenants during the COVID stuff.
That was a gross enough (and also, critically, harmful enough) violation of their mandate that it was able to be challenged in the courts and eventually tossed even in the Chevon Deference era, but a lot of scenarios are much more ambiguous. So now their actions will be fully subject to oversight from all branches of government. The end result is that executive departments will have a much harder time overstepping the bounds of authority granted to them by Congress.
[1] - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8773/pdf/COMPS-877... (page 405)
You could’ve fooled me.
I’ll choose stale democracy over striving autocracy each day every day.
It wasn't always so. In 1979, when Chrysler wanted federal loan guarantees, Congress passed a specific act to do so. Contrast that with what's now a blanket check to agencies thru an Omnibus
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...
Why are Americans acting so surprised that the President has this authority? That is his job, as it was for all presidents before him. This executive order is saying that the "employees under the CEO" do not have the authority to usurp the "CEO's" interpretations of law. Checks and balances still apply, of course; Congress can intervene if the President is acting in ways that Congress doesn't like. That's what impeachment is for--and impeachment is a process regardless of whether the President is issuing "illegal" executive orders or doing something else like what Nixon did.
The process works; blame Congress for not holding the President accountable in the ways outlined by the Constitution.
Let's say we have a democracy where the only rule is highest vote wins. Let's say 51% of the people vote to enslave/oppress the other 49%.
Maybe they vote for literal chattel slavery. Maybe they vote for healthcare for themselves but not the others. Maybe they vote to tax the others at the maximum possible or implement tax policies that dis-proportionally affect the 49%. Maybe they vote the 49% cannot own homes and therefore must pay rent to a landlord. Maybe they vote that the 49% must register for the draft, but not them. Maybe they vote that the 49% aren't eligible for public school while they are. Maybe they vote that the 49% is not able to own stock or register for a company. Let's pretend those are legal, it is definitely possible. Slavery at one point was constitutionally allowed.
Is that a Democracy? A Liberal Democracy? A Democratic Republic? A Constitutional Democratic Republic if the law were enshrined on paper?
Would you want to live in that country? Would you want to live in that country if you were in the 49%?
What is the key ingredient that makes something a "Democracy" rather than tyranny of the majority, "mob rule," or "might makes right"?
Balance of the three branches of government and the rule of law and protection of minorities are the complementary requirements to the majority vote, to qualify for a democracy.
Also, the word 'democracy' does not appear in either the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so it's weird to make the argument you are making. The Founding Fathers never envisioned a party system to begin with. Women and obviously slaves could not vote. The US has only been getting more democratic over time. Your argument looks a bit like historical revisionism to me.
The earliest "democracy" (demokratia) dates back to the Greeks (and for free men, anyway), and Aristotle's Politica will tell you a bit about it.
There are variants (especially executive and legislative work more closely) but please list those where there is no constitutional or customary such a balance between executive, legislative and judiciary?
Thanks for suggesting I don’t know my classics, you seem not so certain about modern European democracies.
The Constitution of the USA was especially a model of its kind. Until we realized its implementation went lacking from true believers, for what we can witness since January 20th.
Check also the constitutions of modern democracies throughout the world.
Something that depends only on the rule of the majority, without constitutional guarantees of the respect of the law, without a self-defense system against abuse of power is a relic of the past prototype democracies.
> The Constitution of the USA was especially a model of its kind.
Then how is it that the US in its inception, like Greece, did not allow neither women nor all men (slaves) to vote? Clearly not much progress had been made by then. Much of the progress was made in the Civil rights movement, for example. That was last century, not "several centuries".
To be clear, summarizing my other replies to your comments, I am 100% with you that all of the things you mention are good things, and that they should be defended. But your redefinition of democracy (and American democracy in particular) doesn't parse and seems to be the product of historical revisionism.
What I was (unexplicitly enough) implying is that I don’t see how a stable democracy, going forward, could work, without implementing those improvements mechanisms that emerged through time and experience.
A pure Athenian democracy today at the scale of a country, with the complexities of the day, wouldn’t hold for more than a few years, at best.
Also, no need for the ad hominems, there is no reason to accuse me of not understanding something or it being "embarrassing," that is not helpful to any sort of conversation.
I’m not saying you do not understand. I am implying that in a discussion in the XXIth century about the concept of democracy as it has evolved in both the littérature and the history, and has been demonstrably stable and efficient, “democracy” is understood in the modern acception, and especially here, in the context of the USA Constitution - and there it has the requirements I laid out.
Turning any country today into an antique democracy rule would make no sense, unless you accept a peculiar instability. We have experienced, in many nations, how to adjust and balance how a democracy can work and self-sustain. However, we also still experience how fragile they stay.
And the disappointment is abysmal. Hence, perhaps, me being a tad tense in my words, for that I present my apologies.
If you ignore ALL of that then you have a talking point worth debating.
And for all the stupidity of congress, if the fail to protect against a self-coup, that doesn't make it any less likely.
I have no doubt that these people know exactly what they are doing, and are intentionally lying and spreading these "very reasonable" arguments as a blueprint for others to copy.
Their goal is to fluster and confuse the situation.
But hey, the president is like a CEO, right?
Calling someone a dictator is an accusation, something every American was taught was wrong in school. Calling someone a CEO is a compliment, something our collective media has taught us to aspire to.
CEO is just a softer word that makes submission easier, or even logical, while it hides the truth of that power structure which is functionally the same for both.
"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."
This is a very effective manipulation technique.
https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...
What? Trump has just asserted that the Judicial Branch's interpretation of federal law--almost its entire job under our US Constitution, and widely understood to include laws authorizing and controlling how government programs work--is entirely void in places where it's mattered for generations.
The correct response to that is: "That's an unprecedented assertion contrary to established principle, and arguably unconstitutional."
Not: "Gee golly willickers, I just can't see why you're all overreacting, it's not like the justices have to obey his interpretation of the law when they do things every day, so it's all fair-n-square!"
> [I]t seems clear to me that the prevailing narrative is both consistent and being constructed in bad faith.
The bad-faith here is your willful blindness, where you construct textual apologetics by dismissing the consequences of what's being said. (Compare: "He only said Big Mickey should wear concrete overshoes and sleep with the fishes, you people are all making bad-faith arguments against someone just trying to give honest lifestyle advice!")
If the attorney general says this law says [x] and the judiciary disagrees with an action based on that interpretation, they still have the exact same powers to halt/block said action.
Next sentence:
>"I want to point out that everything that the Left is breathlessly calling fascism has immediate and direct corollaries even in the most recent Democrat administration"
Could have fooled me.
As for your statement; no, you're wrong. Everything was (D)ifferent last admin, Biden didn't go for gutting the SEC's independence when they went for his billionaire right-hand man that's going around gutting other agencies with unchecked power.
In short, Trump is claiming full and direct authority and control over any and all federal agencies, with the express directive of "The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. "
Basically : L'État, c'est moi.
Yup. You gotta have some time left to golf with your cronies..
All bets now off.
God help us all.
“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins”
The GOP has been ramping up their support of unitary executive theory since the 80s yet no democratic president has been able to take a piss without cries of tyranny.
If you’ve put yourself in a place where this arrangement is literally fascism, prepare to be disappointed by the courts.
With current supreme court nothing is sacred for sure, but overturning this and granting universal executive power into hands of president would be a disaster leading towards either authocracy or revolution. And yeah - that's all very similar to how fascism started, whether you would like to see it or not.
Is the EPA, at the direction of the sitting president, making rules about coal power plants not an example of the use of "all executive power. All of it."? Or does A2S1 carve out exceptions for the EPA, even if it doesn't for those other agencies?
Whatever you think about Chevron deference or the specific EPA case I'm alluding to, the point is: The balance of power between the executive and legislative branches is nowhere near as clear cut as your comment suggests. Congress frequently legislates the structure and responsibilities of executive agencies. Presidential administrators cannot legally change those responsibilities unilaterally.
That’s certainly not the way things have been run for a long time, but it doesn’t seem irrational to argue that’s the proper constitutional structure.
Good thing Congress establishes independent agencies then. Their entire point is to receive rule making delegated to them by Congress.
It would be pretty surprising if a law passed by Congress delegating to Charles Windsor its power to write the laws about taxes, borrowing money on the credit of the United States, regulating international and interstate commerce and so forth were constitutional.
That may be what you believe, and there's been a lot of debate over that, but courts have time and time again ruled that the legislature can delegate power. Maybe current SCOTUS will reverse a lot of that, but that remains to be seen.
What is executive power? Well, it's what the constitution says it is. But a lot of things in the executive branch aren't spelled out in the constitution. A more strict interpretation of it (one that SCOTUS seems to be moving toward, at least when it's convenient to achieve conservative policy goals) is that Congress should not be delegating so much rulemaking power to the executive branch.
So let's say you're the SEC. You're an executive branch agency, but you essentially write laws. You get to write those laws because Congress delegated that power in some reasonably specific ways unique to your agency. So who do you really report to? Nominally, day to day, seems like the president. But you only exist because of an act of Congress. Congress can dissolve you tomorrow if it wants to. Congress can also give you more power and more latitude (within some limits, of course). So while you report to the president, you're accountable to Congress. That might mean that the president isn't allowed to fire your people without cause, if Congress specified so.
That's not an interference of executive power if the power you wield actually flows from the legislative branch.
This is a tiring way to speak to other reasonable people.
part of the supreme court hasn't exactly been known to defend the constitution in word and spirit but find excuses to reinterpret it
and worse by giving themself the right to authoritative misinterpreted law they can prevent any such cases ever appearing in front of the supreme court and/or very effectively blackmail people into not making or dismissing cases
and Trump abusing power to blackmail people to get changes in of court related proceeding (to ironically black mail someone else to force them to fall in line or a court case against them gets reopend/not dismissed) did already happen, openly in public just a few days ago
Whereas what we saw instead was them blocking everything they could, government shutdowns etc.
Unless "Unitary Executive" means something a good deal more nuanced than the president being king, that is.
Think of it this way. I may be against paying taxes. That doesn't mean I just stop paying them. The best I can do is try to get the government to lower the taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
"Congress granted this power to the president by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to control "pork barrel spending", but in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act to be unconstitutional in 6–3 decision in Clinton v. City of New York.
The court found that exercise of the line-item veto is tantamount to a unilateral amendment or repeal by the executive of only parts of statutes authorizing federal spending, and therefore violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. Thus a federal line-item veto, at least in this particular formulation, would only be possible through a constitutional amendment. Prior to that ruling, President Clinton applied the line-item veto to the federal budget 82 times."
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1140320828992...
Then there’s a rebuttable presumption of immunity for more conduct. I don’t see that this flows from the Constitution, but perhaps it flows from judicial decisions over the past two centuries? ‘When the President does something official, he probably is immune, but maybe he’s not, and he could still be prosecuted from crimes he commits around the immune act’ doesn’t seem terribly meaningful.
It sounds a bit to me like saying that a citizen is immune from prosecution for his vote, but not for selling it or whatever. But I’m not a lawyer, and I could be wrong.
Anyway, the whole discussion is moot because Trump is turning America into a authoritarian state, so rules and laws and elections soon don’t matter anymore.
If you believe the Supreme Court is an effective guardrail against tyranny then you're deeply mistaken. The only true safeguard against tyranny is the American people refusing to comply and responding with force of arms if pushed.
We'll see how that goes.
And if the US military doesn't remain loyal to the president, then on top of a fascist dictator seizing power, then we'll have a military coup.
“Instead”, not “on top”. (I mean, unless the military installs a different fascist dictator, which is certainly not unheard of in military coups that are notionally countercoups.)
Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam
And still won in Iraq, first against Saddam’s regime, then the post-regime pre-ISIS insurgency, and then the later fight against ISIS, so I’m not sure why Iraq is included, absolute immorality of the decision to go to war there and its cost to the war in Afghanistan aside, since those are irrelevant to the discussion here.
If you are a government employee and Trump orders you to do something that exceeds his authority, can't you still say no? It seems like the Supreme Court only said that Trump can't get in trouble for asking. I don't think the court said that you have to answer yes.
I'm not trying to say that we're in a great position here or that immunity doesn't have some very destructive effects. But I am saying that we shouldn't act as if he has powers that the Supreme Court hasn't given him.
The fact that SCOTUS wasn't even slightly concerned about that happening belies the problem: the Democrats are ineffectual by design. They knew Biden would throw his hands up citing "norms" and "institutions" as an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
SCOTUS completely invented a concept of presidential immunity out of thin air to derail the criminal prosecutions. They also deliberaly took their time. Remember when Jack Smith tried to appeal directly to SCOTUS because everyone knew it was going to end up there? Instead, SCOTUS put everything on hold for another 6 months as a delaying tactic.
Even then, the opinion is rushed and haphazard and not at all well thought out. Some in the conservative supermajority allegedly wanted to punt the issue to the next term.
The presidential immunity decision is so brazenly political. The Roberts court will go down in history for the kinds of awful decisions in the 1840s and 1850s that led up to the Civil War.
In many situations, those who have morals and scruples will be ineffectual when faced with an adversary who has none. Biden didn't "clean house" because he believes in the rule of law, and believes that if he'd done that, he should go to jail, even if he wouldn't.
Not everyone has an ethical code that only exists because they're afraid they'll go to jail if they break it. Some people just don't think it's ok to do the wrong thing.
Put another way: if you become the monster you're trying to fight, that's often not materially different from the monster winning in the first place.
Having said that, I do think that Democrats should fight a little dirtier sometimes. I think that would be possible to do without becoming that monster.
The Democrats are people who believe in the rule of law, and they act like it. When pitted against people who have no qualms to win at all costs, even it means breaking the law and destroying the constitution, Democrats lose; if you value those things you can't preserve them by destroying them yourself. We are where we are because Republicans convinced themselves they deserved the power they have taken. The people who voted for them were convinced as well. That's the only failure we should be talking about right now. The Democrats, flawed as they are, did the right thing.
That said, they will not be the people to lead us out of this. They know how to fundraise, campaign, and maintain the status quo. They're not built for this, so it's time to just look for someone new rather than try to reform people who are clearly not made for this moment.
Congress does have some law enforcement personnel, but I doubt they'd be interested in getting in a standoff with the Secret Service.
The Supreme Court said, if the Constitution authorizes the President to do it, then he can’t be criminally prosecuted. That doesn’t mean blanket immunity!
On paper, but not in practice, sadly.
The meaning of the Constitution has been bent to serve Trump's will. He violated the law constantly during his first term, was not held accountable for the electoral violations or coup, and is now violating the law again. He's gotten away with it every single time.
I'm sorry to say this. You are describing an America that no longer exists. We live in a new country with new rules that we don't quite understand yet.
Everyone tasked with enforcing a law must necessarily interpret its meaning. The judiciary gets the final say though.
especially if you add a "authoritative" in the front it in legal language means they gave themself the right (i.e. authority) to decide (i.e. interpret) how law should be interpreted, i.e. what the meaning behind the written word is in practice
this is 100% without doubt or question not compatible with any democracy (including the US constitution) and is pretty much one of the default approaches Dictators use to get unchecked authority
It means that in practice (assuming people comply with the EO) means they can do whatever they want as they can just willfully absurdly, but with authority , misinterpret laws. Including to e.g. persecute judges which "step out of line", or members of the senate which don't vote for whatever he wants etc.
https://adata.org/interpretation-letter
Nobody complains about this though.
In theory the military is sworn to defend the constitution, but if the DOD is headed by a Trump loyalist (it is), then what?
Congress through impeachment. If they don't do that, all bets are off.
especially if you yourself could get a part of the pie and don't think it will negatively affect you
I mean don't get me wrong if they would do so literally tomorrow it would work.
But as the majority of senate likely feel they have little to loose it won't be tomorrow.
And when they realize that maybe they won't get part of the pie (they are mostly now useless for him) it will be to late and the fear of repercussions will have set in.
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/123-what-vice-president-vance...
Donald Trump is trying to be dictator. He has been doing all but wearing a sign around his neck saying so for a long time. Please don't act surprised. It is not the time for quotes or being shocked at his actions.
He's saluted Kim Jong-Un's generals. He's bent the knee to Vladimir Putain He's whined that it's not fair that he doesn't have the powers that Xi Jinping does.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, it was widely known that Donald Trump was a fraud and a complete clown. It will be studied for decades how many people just willingly gave up their ability to call a spade a spade and ignore reality when it comes to Donald Trump. How did people become so fucking stupid?
How a real estate & brand "billionaire" from NYC who wears orange makeup and lifts and speaks in the most basic of generalities became the rallying symbol for disenfranchised rural white working class conservatives speaks to the absolute degeneracy of our society. Awful.
[0]: Trump got a higher share of nonwhite votes of every stripe in 2024 than he did in 2016, so it's clearly more about class than race.
>absolute degeneracy of our society
And there it is. The people who ended up voting for Trump have been feeling increasing alienation and hatred from the rest of the country, and they finally found their political power. No amount of insulting them is going to stop it.
The people who voted for him deserve to feel alienated and hatred, because it's not like he didn't have a track record. He's already been president. He has been a grandstanding loudmouth for the better part of the last 50 years if not longer.
It's one thing to vote for an outsider. It's another thing to say "Gosh, times are tough, and Biden's not making them better. Let me vote again for Donald Trump, a guy who sucks at business and politics, who made things awful in his first term."
Donald Trump's handlers at the Heritage Foundation put out a memorandum of what they'd do if he was re-elected. Most of these things were dangerously stupid, and a majority of them would make the country's average citizen worse off economically. Surprisingly, people believed Donald Trump's words when he claimed he'd never heard of Project 2025. Unsurprisingly, his entire campaign staff was filled with people who quite literally were the ones that wrote the memorandum and plan....and then got themselves installed as agency heads or cabinet members.
Donald Trump has always stood for Donald Trump making money by any means possible, and screwing over everyone else in the process. It's quite transparent. Yet somehow even after he was already president, people somehow overlook all his traits and say "that guy stands for the average man, he's for Main Street not Wall Street, he's going to lower my bills". Folks, he's a NYC real estate dude that wears makeup. He shits in a gold toilet and has never worked a day in his life. He lied and lied and lied about COVID. He's not for Main Street or the average American citizen, not at all. Why do people not see that?
And yet we had no opposition to it. The Biden administration and Kamala Harris were more interested in defending and providing material support for war crimes than stopping any of this.
The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.
It’s quite literally “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” They throw their hands up and surrender. You want a playbook? Look at what the Republicans did at any point from 2010 to 2016 and just do any of that.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/global-elections-2024-incumbents-...
The movements like these did not just happened because people were unhappy. They are result of long political project that was enabled, excused and defended for years.
...
> No one seriously ran against him
> Then he dropped out and endorsed Harris no credible person attempted to run against her.
Unfortunately, the democratic party seems to be unable to make the necessary adjustment and return to the winning formula of the Obama years because the political hobbyists and professionals that make up the core of the party have purity-tested out anyone with more mainstream views. If they aren't careful, they will end up as a party representing only university HR administrators.
It also exists in the 2024 election results
Basically, our elected representatives picked social media news sources as preferred trusted sources, and the groups interested in getting information and misinformation to them followed suit.
Democratic party systematically promotes centrists and measured politicians.
It's been like this for decades, and is why I haven't voted for a democatic party candidate for president in that time. Living in California, it doesn't even matter, all of the electoral votes go to the dems anyway.
This is all a consequence of the US still governing with an organization that was designed in 1776. After WWII european contries reorged their governments as well as their physical infrastructure. The wswitched to propotional representation with parlamentary style governments. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot closer than what we have in the US.
With presidenatial electrions decided by 7 states, and by a small minority of the voters in those states, something like 1% of the US population is deciding the outcome.
Neither dems nor reps want to change this. There is no real hope for actual democracy in the US...
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/trump-executive-o...
But that's the problem here: no amount of evidence short of an admission from Trump is going to "prove" it to you, and Trump will deny this, all while Project 2025 is enacted by the people who wrote it with the unspoken blessing of the GOP.
A spade is spade.
Agenda 47 and project 2025 have very different approaches to matters like abortion. So far the evidence has been that the GOP supports the GOP‘s own platform in this regard, for example there’s no federal ban on abortion pills, which is part of project 2025 but not part of the GOP’s platform agenda 47.
If you are alleging a conspiracy that agenda 47 was the smoke screen in favour of the heritage foundation’s project 2025 then you will need to provide some kind of evidence for this conspiracy.
I'm sure Trump wasn't lying when he said he hadn't read Project 2025 and didn't know what's in it. He doesn't care, none of that matters to him.
But he damn well knew what it was, where it came from, and who was involved, given he brought several Project 2025 / Heritage Foundation people into the administration.
Also, no one is even pretending. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/republic...
You are arguing something even congressional Republicans don't bother arguing.
"His" "policy" of firing a large portion of the federal workforce is going to come crashing into the private sector very shortly when it comes time to renew contracts. That's not even mentioning what's about to happen to the job market when the unemployment rate skyrockets all at once and the private sector only has low income positions to offer - or none at all. Republicans are flirting with defaulting on US debt too, which will damage the value of USD - catastrophic when he's throwing tariffs around like confetti. That people keep posting things like "I'm not too worried" is mind-boggling. That's _only_ discussing the financial disaster to the economy and not the plethora of other problems Republicans are signing off on.
I don’t see how anyone could NOT be concerned that they’d do damage. They’ve already done irreparable damage. All the norms we used to have in place are gone. It’s anything goes.
See perhaps "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days":
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
One of the most significant similarities is the prominent use of the eagle as a national symbol, which deeply reinforces American patriotism. This motif is prominently showcased in iconic films and features in imposing architecture, such as the U.S. Capitol and various government buildings. Though rooted in ancient Rome, its invocation in modern America serves to solidify a sense of unity and national pride.
Moreover, the practice of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in schools is a powerful tool for instilling civic identity among students. This act fosters a strong collective loyalty to the nation, echoing how Nazi Germany indoctrinated its youth. Mass gatherings—be it political conventions, presidential inaugurations, or significant events like the Fourth of July—serve to invigorate the populace and create a palpable emotional connection to the state.
Nazi Germany revered the military as the backbone of society, exemplified by uniforms and grand military parades showcasing their might. The United States mirrors this sentiment through events such as Veterans Day, honoring those who have served by prioritizing them in boarding processes and glorifying military prowess during flyovers at major sporting events.
Uniforms and visual identity are crucial in both contexts. Nazi Germany was obsessed with uniforms—whether the imposing SS black or the earthy brown of the brownshirts—which represented discipline and loyalty to the regime. Similarly, in the U.S., uniforms convey a range of services, from military camouflage to police blue and even political campaign attire. While Nazi uniforms symbolized rigid hierarchy, American uniforms reflect a diverse array of service and community; both utilize attire to assert belonging and authority.
Leadership cults flourish on both sides of the political spectrum. Nazi ideology unflinchingly fixated on racial and cultural “purity,” scapegoating and vilifying groups such as Jews and Romani people. In modern America, incendiary debates over immigration, “American values,” and “law and order” revolve around preserving a cohesive national identity, often at the expense of marginalized communities.
The glorification of physical fitness plays a vital role in both societies. The Nazis showcased Aryan athleticism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, weaponizing athletic success to promote their ideology. Likewise, America celebrates its sporting champions across football, basketball, and baseball, intertwining national pride with athletic excellence.
Color schemes serve as powerful symbols in both contexts. The swastika flag’s black, white, and red colors were deliberately designed to evoke the ideas of blood, soil, and purity—central tenets of Nazi ideology. In contrast, the U.S. flag’s red, white, and blue represent foundational ideals like valor, purity, and justice. Both nations skillfully leverage bold, simple color schemes to provoke visceral emotions and establish a coherent identity, despite starkly different histories and narratives.
The narrative of an "enemy from within" was fundamental to the Nazis and continues to resonate today. While the U.S. is not engaged in genocide on its own soil, political rhetoric often frames “elites,” “socialists,” or “extremists” as existential threats to the nation. The Nazis exploited this fear to justify horrific purges; in America, similar dynamics fuel extremism and exacerbate partisan divides, tapping into deep anxieties of betrayal.
Additionally, monumental engineering feats—like the Autobahn and V-2 rockets—were proudly showcased by the Nazis to assert their technological superiority and national prowess. The United States boasts monumental achievements like the moon landing, groundbreaking innovations from Silicon Valley, and advanced military technology. Both societies firmly link innovation to national greatness; however, while Nazi pursuits were driven by warfare, America aims to enhance its global image and achieve broader ambitions through its technological advancements.
The groundwork for a potential dictatorial state has been meticulously laid over the years. Trump is not merely facilitating change; he is actively pushing for a fundamental shift that could redefine the very fabric of democracy.
I’m no fan of Trump, but this pattern of people hallucinating that Trump said something he didn’t and then freaking out about their nonexistent hallucination, is getting very tiresome.
Continue that hypothetical further: the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, who agrees with the federal judge. The executive branch continues to ignore the order. The Attorney General is held in contempt of court and fined a large amount of money. Who's going to collect it? Any executive branch employee trying to carry out that fine would be violating this executive order, and be dismissed. So the fine would never happen.
Considering the president and vice president's recent disdain for judicial rulings against them, this may happen.
That would be completely paralyzing.
It would be completely paralyzing were the executive largely staffed with those that wanted to paralyze it. Usually that's not the case.
I don't think that'd be case unless the orders were completely outrageous, in which case, yes, we absolutely want them disobeyed until adjudication could happen.
You can certainly say that these people are right to try to resist the changes Trump is trying to make. But, like it or not, Trump is the democratically elected President, and it’s quite a challenge to come up with a conceptual model of American government that prevents him from exercising his constitutional authority over the Executive branch.
The majority of what he's doing is "merely" unheard of norm violations. But much of the authority he's exercising do not clearly appear to be legal, or constitutional. There are tendentious arguments for much of it being legal, of course, but they're not slam-dunks -- precisely because they would put the entire the executive branch effectively above any law or constraint.
In any other organization it would be clear that even when the head gives you an illegal or an ultra-vires orders, you're not supposed to actually follow them.
“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.
“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.
Sounds way too familiar.
This is what Germans must have felt like in 1933.
That is incorrect, the president’s responsibility is to execute the laws of the United States. In order to execute a law, one must interpret it.
The exclusive domain of the judiciary is the power to adjudicate cases. In order to adjudicate a case involving a law, one must also interpret.
This isn't true.
> The exclusive domain of the judiciary is the power to adjudicate cases. In order to adjudicate a case involving a law, one must also interpret.
This is actually true.
I mean, yes, but in a non-judicial sense. The judiciary has the constitutionally assigned duty to give binding interpretations in the course of adjudicating cases.
There's a clear norms violation happening here, but I don't see the power grab everybody else is seeing. These are powers the Presidency already had.
Then what, in your mind, is the purpose of this EO?
This was a live question in Trump's last administration, but I don't think it is anymore after cases like Lucia?
I concur with GP; you are arriving at the conclusion through your own logic but somehow not seeing the conclusion. See intermerda's point below.
Nothing in my comment is comparing them or suggesting they are comparable.
This i learned from a discussion between a magistrate and legal scholar.
This means that a norm violation, practically speaking, is a law violation. Which i guess is a crime. But that has to go to the courts to be judged.
I also told them that working on legislation for protecting George C Marshall's house, and protecting bourbon, are not valuable uses of their time given the destruction currently being waged on the US Government.
I'm trying to restrict my spending as much as possible. No new car, no vacation (or at least nothing big), limiting eating out, etc. I'm cutting back on as many unnecessary expenses as I can, and being mindful of what businesses I do spend my money on.
If you are a Republican but don't approve of how the GOP majority has basically rolled over and abdicated its duty as a check on the president, remind your congresspeople that they owe loyalty to their constituents, not to other politicians. Taxpayers pay their salaries.
The Democratic party is also in desperate need of repairs if you are interested in direct political action. They have been self-destructing over the past couple of years, plagued by infighting, deer-in-the-headlights paralysis, political tone-deafness, and incompetence in messaging.
In addition, the increasingly authoritarian shift by the Federalist society ought to make room for a new counterpart promoting the rule of law. IANAL but have always wondered why the Federalist society had no similarly prominent opposing organization.
They got us here. The party needs to be gutted.
Democrats did screw up by not allowing the people to choose the candidate. They also screwed up again by not preemptively creating safeguards in case Trump won, and by not strengthening the elections. Too many ballots were thrown out.
Now they are further enabling this by basically displaying no opposition.
If you are in a red state/district, first step would be to contact your elected federal rep(s) and tell them that you're displeased.
Use language like "Trump was elected to correct Biden's overreach, but he's now overreaching in a much worse way." Put it in language where you frame things like a 'Constitutionalist' and 'limited government'. The stereotypical small-government, Originalist GOPer.
If you come off sounding like a Democrat they'll probably ignore you, but if the (so-called) 'grass roots' MAGA folks are thought to be upset then you'll probably get more traction.
Or you'll just be ignored regardless.
What you can do is get out votes. People knocking on doors is still one of the largest drivers of votes so if you organize those systems they will listen to you.
I think more people would benefit from forming Super PACs and using that as leverage in pushing political change with parties.
In France if they'd raise the price of baguettes by 10% you'd have strikes from teachers, public transportation drivers, dock workers, train drivers, doctors, trash truck drivers, &c. all at once, after a week it would be complete chaos and the government would have no choice but to negotiate
In the US everyone is playing their little game on their side, decades of free for all capitalism at work
That was an unexpectedly good turnaround vs the first statement. Damn, I was not expecting to have such a hard laugh.
You should also add "social" media to your picture. I think that has ravaged whatever was left of social cohesion over here.
I'm going to write essays to those I care about and also coordinate action plans with like minded individuals to be ready for scenarios of neo-nazi rallies or certain extreme behaviors, should they occur in my city.
I'm debating protesting solo with signs along our roads; someone did that recently in my city and said they had to flee because Trump supporters surrounded him and threatened him. But it needs done.
Oligarchs are always greatly outnumbered.
The only thing that is genuinely effective is mass movement. A coalition of labor unions could shut down all of Elon and Trumps businesses in hours. Block the entrances to the factories. General strikes, boycotts, that kind of thing. It’s not actually that complicated.
Instead the modern Democratic Party is in love with appeals to the referees. They think that if they can just convince some court or The NY Times editorial board or a 75 year old former republican special prosecutor they’ll win.
As we have seen that approach is a total and complete failure.
If someone in opposition was able to generate mass collective action however the change would be swift. Nobody is really trying that though.
I think they need to split their approach into two.
One for to keep Their base energized.
One to use the system and protect itself. The courts, the local elections.
What is being taken out are the systems that run the country. The dems have to be the one to defend it.
But frankly, I think the battleground is a media battleground.
And I'm not sure it's a fair assessment to say union members 'barely' lean Democrat https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/17/key-facts...
> There’s very few groups outside of the Democratic Party infrastructure which are polarized enough to take a side.
The last 2 presidential elections saw the highest turnouts since 1968. It seems like people aren't having a problem picking sides.
* Supporting the Democratic Party against its main opponent is very different from supporting it in its own right. There's a lot of people in the US who would prefer for Chuck Schumer to be the majority leader, but very few who look to him for cues on what they ought to believe or fight for.
* There's very few spaces where the Democrats are dominant enough to form a nucleus of mass resistance. 50-43 among union members is a nonzero lead, but if you go to your union local to organize an anti-Trump protest, that 43% represents quite a lot of voices who won't agree with the premise that there's anything to protest.
The problem is the actual leadership of the Democratic Party isn't on the side of working people at all, and is actually actively hostile to those in favor of classic labor policies.
Don't get me wrong the other side is absolutely not on the side of working people either, that's more than apparent.
The entire dynamic we're seeing right now is a battle between two competing groups of elites. More on that concept here: https://www.compactmag.com/article/doge-as-class-war/
But with those caveats out of the way, a bona-fide labor movement could make short work of all this bullshit. Unfortunately the purpose of the modern Democratic Party appears to be to occupy the place in our system where a labor party is supposed to reside.
It's also not obvious to me that a bona fide labor movement would take a particularly strong stance on an executive order curtailing independent agencies. Being invested in the details of how paper-pushing agencies are structured is a very elite concern.
To some extent yes. But also those issues have big implications for working people. It's possible to talk about them in a way that inspires and builds a movement, or in a way that makes people feel stupid and excluded from the conversation. Often they choose the latter.
> It's also not obvious to me that a bona fide labor movement would take a particularly strong stance on an executive order curtailing independent agencies
It should be absolutely obvious why the labor movement might be opposed to what is literally the largest layoff in American history.
I have no idea how you even propose that to happen
And the US military doesn't answer to the people at least not directly. I don't think it should be swayed by public opinion like that. I mean, we're talking about a military coup here. I despise Donald Trump and would like nothing more than to see him drummed out of office, but the military making that happen means we don't have a democracy anymore.
This reminds me of a supreme Court ruling a few years ago where the rights of native Indians had been trampled on in Oklahoma for 100 years. The court said something like "well, now that you bring it up--stop it!"
checks notes
Castrating the other 2 in an effort to consolidate the third! Yeah!!
The executive employs approximately 3,000,000 employees. The federal judiciary only employs about 30,000 total, and the legislature about 20,000 total. The sheer velocity with which the executive can ram through questionable directives *and have them executed upon* (despite the law) means the other "co-equal" branches of government are always potentially on the back foot. It's just a personnel game. Trump has only highlighted how absurdly easy it is to abuse this imbalance.
And after the Chevron and Trump decisions, it's only going to get worse and worse. I do think these Federalist Society types who pushed these unitary executive theory ideas have now created a monster. They've created a situation where the executive has immunity to simply apply the law however it wants, clogging up the judiciary with civil and federal suits, and where the Congress cannot pass laws fast enough or with great enough specificity to avoid defying Chevron or avoid executive misapplication. Meanwhile the executive has long since moved on from the original issue to the next 10 issues, and the next 10, and the next 10, while the courts and the Congress are still only getting started on the first few problems. And the executive will never really get "punished" for these actions because of its supposed immunity.
And presidential elections don't really help with this problem. Because one president has 4 years to drastically reshape everything, and the next president will spend all of their 4 years reverting it, dropping all the previous suits, creating its own litany of new suits, and rinse and repeat. The hysteresis of this process is too long and leads to instability and chaos.
It would be better to have independent judges but hey it doesn’t lead to a dictatorship and the end of the world directly as propagated everywhere.
Judges are independent in Germany. Prosecutors are not.
> Because of this international warrants which come from Germany do not get followed since they can’t be trusted.
I think you mean the European Arrest Warrant[1], and you are right that it is not accepted when issued by German prosecuters, because they are not indepepndent[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Arrest_Warrant [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europ%C3%A4ischer_Haftbefehl#D... [2]
Exactly! It's the same in Austria btw. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_(Deutschland)#Dienstau... and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staatsanwaltschaft_(Deutschlan...
I would also cool it with the dismissive tone and avoid saying things like "cray cray" before accusing anyone else of being juvenile.
Trump's a hero to the right, but on the left there's a pretty reasonable sense that Trump's actions have already amounted to literal treason if you consider him to have an obligation to uphold the oaths he has taken.
He attempted to get Zelensky to go on US TV and execute a political attack on Democrats as a condition of the US helping Ukraine.
He attempted to get the 2020 election flipped by making mafia-don style calls to Georgia asking them to "find" precisely the number of votes which would have made him win that election. He next asked Pence to change the result for him. All of these were acts of open treason against the People of the United States, so long as you count the People of the United States as including people who didn't vote for him.
No, that function is within the purview of the legislature, not the executive branch.
(For the record, I don't agree with GP, and do believe that we'll have free and fair elections in 2028.)
At what point are your personal thresholds crossed?
I dont understand personally, how any conservative could tolerate this man.
Nor any techie lose their minds when someone without a security clearance gets access to sensitive national networks.
I’ve seen more complex plans used by spies to break into state secrets.
Yet, people are surprisingly chill.
So perhaps I am wrong. And perhaps there are other signs I should be looking for.
At what point should I or anyone say “major redlines have been crossed.”
There's something peculiar about how liberals are now so offended by "security" when the federal government has showed complete incompetence over the past decade or even more.
All the security clearance data was leaked from federal servers. What else do we have to lose. Never mind that countless federal employees see your social security info. It's regularly fraudulently submitted by illegal foreigners too.
None of the criticisms I've seen from you or others are alarming.
What was alarming was watching Biden for 4 years completely non compos mentis and a media filled with liberals who would censor and ridicule ANY mention of this obvious fact. That's the GRAVEST national security threat, everything else PALES in comparison, and not a peep from the people who lit their entire political capital on fire over the ridiculous patently-false charades to never admit fault.
What are your personal red lines? I am serious. Sure. Biden may have been whatever, But you will still have some personal lines you wouldn’t cross.
You have values, you have things you would like to know you stood up for.
What are they? This isn’t a gotcha. If you think the line is not crossed, no problem.
But tell me what your lines are.
- there are non Republican candidates to vote for
- the right to vote hasn't been crippled somehow
- elections are fair
Have you done your nerd research on how Nazis dismantled the democratic state? If so, at what step would you have gatekept calling it fascist?
Blanket calling worried people as "juvenile" as a dismissal is in itself pretty fucking juvenile, hope you can see that.
What the Nazi's did was horrifici, and it's incredibly insensitive, inappropriate, and, yes, juvenile, to water that down by using it for political point scoring.
It seems like you get butthurt from reading people calling moves very similar to fascism done by politicians you support, fascism takes many flavours, Italian fascism was different from German fascism. The way it's going the past month looks like to be shaping an American flavour of fascism.
There's no watering down, you are seeing with your own eyes a movement happening where the leader of the executive is attempting to snatch power, it never happens at once, it's always through salami slicing. What will be the breaking point for you, specifically? What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?
You are all around this forum whining about "progressives" trying to heed a call about a dark path being traced. You never seem to acknowledge there are very worrying moves happening, for some reason you do not want to hear it, you want to shut off the discussion at every turn by using progressives as a slur, and anything said by that out-group as wrong or hysterical a priori. Can't you see how stupid it is? You are always attempting to throw a wrench into these discussions with vitriol, as a non-American I really ask you to inform and educate yourself better, to learn about the process of fascism before coming with knee-jerk reactions because you don't like "progressives".
Go read "Hitler's Beneficiaries", read any book on historical recounts of the process of fascism unravelling from the 1920s to the 1930s, you are behaving exactly as the citizens enabling Mussolini and Hitler. American Fascism will not be Nazi or Italia Fascista, it has its own shape and form (such as not being anti-semitic, completely different to Nazis) but even though the topography differs, the core principles are pretty much the same.
Don't be an enabler, you won't like to be on the wrong side of history.
I think that speaks for itself and I need not to comment on this.
Americans, why? Why are you so keen on dabbling with a homegrown fascism of yours? Why are you so keen on setting the world aflame?
I think some people just know a few images from the Nazis at the height of their power. Or the death camps, that were only discovered because the Nazis lost the war (the plan was to erase all traces, after all). No concept of the 1920s, not even "Mein Kampf", nothing.
No, that's the fucking end point of it, after all is done and the wheels have been far gone from the wagon, the process itself is much more nuanced and step-wise but the uneducated ones never ever heard of it. Feels like they live in a world where someone turned on a switch and everything changed at once...
Worst: it's coming from people who have lived through a pandemic, watched the social strife and divisions unfolding right in front of their faces, how can those same people not see that massive social movements aren't ever clear-cut? It's all just so stupid and ignorant.
Most Americans couldn't tell you much about how Hitler came into power. (Or Mussolini? Forget it.) The majority of what Americans know about it all are exactly what you said: black-and-white scenes of SS officers, Hilter giving speeches, and swastika armbands.
There's no lingering WWII war damage in the US. We don't have monuments dedicating places where major battles were fought. The war wasn't fought here. We don't see reminders of what all that was like.
When I was born, WWII was only 35 years behind us. Many of the people who were involved in it at the time (politicians, soldiers, etc.) were not only alive, but still active in public discourse in major ways. But today, WWII ended 80 years ago. Most everyone who experienced it is dead. Awareness of all of it is still present in Europe because it was all literally close to home. Not so in the US.
This honestly shouldn't be all that surprising. History repeats and rhymes, over and over throughout the decades and centuries. All it takes is a couple generations to forget its lessons.
I see comments in these threads from people who lived through the forming of dictatorships in their countries. I wish more people would listen to them.
> "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
> "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
> "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
> "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatint...
Nazis never nationalised any industry and rather used corporatism to take hold of them while those were still private entities, same in Italy, industry and fascist regimes walked hand-in-hand.
Saying those are equivalent to socialism just due to populist rhetoric is misleading and historically wrong...
This complaint is also like saying communists weren’t authentic because the government withheld power from the Soviet’s and used the Soviet narrative to gain popular support.
We compare ideologies on a political spectrum. It’s harder to compare implementations because they all look like corruption. Hitler is one person in a political movement. He did write the platform I linked to though.
They did actually implement many of these things, such as universal healthcare (for their race).
On Hitler about the Socialist moniker, I posted this earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101676
If you have some specialized definition of socialism that this doesn’t meet. That’s fine. But this is nothing like the libertarianism or small government conservatism.
I don't know that “when the working class democratically (either via democratic control of the state, through democratic control at the level of individual firms or industries, or otherwise) control the means of production” is actually a “specialized” definition of socialism.
Socialism is not centrally about the state providing goods, Its about who controls the means of production. Provision of public goods by the state is an expected outcome of the kind of socialism where a democratic state is the vehicle of proletarian control of the means of production, but it is not the production and delivery of those goods, independent of the nature of the state and who is empowered to control the means of production through it, that makes the system “socialist”
Führerprinzip is about as opposed to socialism as any element of any real or hypothetical system can be.
Sturmabteilung occupied all trade unions, arrested union leaders and threw them into concentration/labour camps.
Go read about the Nazi creation of the German Labour Front a little before spewing this absolute bullshit.
Why are you trying to rewrite history?
Seriously, why would you believe the stated goals instead of their actions? Do you trust Nazis?
Even if you think Trump is a "good guy" who is "doing the right thing", he's setting precedents whereby a President who is a "bad guy" could turn dictator, and then what? Literally the only option is impeachment, but the Senate has never convicted because there are enough senators who are afraid of a highly vindictive politician (and now his billionaire BBF) who __will__ go after them and whip up his base against them. If only they were more concerned about the country than their own re-election, but too few are willing to make that sacrifice.
(this couldn't be farther than the truth from all I've seen Trump do, but just entertaining the thought here)
1. While in office, relying on the DoJ's policy of never indicting a sitting president. (Not to mention the fact that they control the DoJ.)
2. On the last day of their presidency, they resign. The VP is sworn in as president, and pardons the now-former president for whatever they've done. (The former president can of course, before resigning, pardon the VP for anything they might have been involved in as well.)
Easy peasy.
This is how it is, how it has been, and is entirely consistent with the Constitution.
So, if not that, then why issue this EO?
First of all, it’s a statement: “Resistance to this agenda from within the executive branch will not be effective”
Secondly, it helps ensure that when the President issues a statement, it’s not immediately met with bureaucrats making statements to the contrary.
Nonsense! This is the exact opposite! This is EO shows Trump trying even harder to fire all the people who refuse to go along with his crimes.
He is asserting that when the Judicial branch concludes his firings are illegal, he's going to ignore it, and then fire anyone else who refuses to help him illegally fire people.
It's the democracy-destroying version of a Monty Python sketch: The people who followed the law have been sacked. The people who didn't sack the people who followed the law have also been sacked.
Where?
… and preceded by “The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch”
Nothing in that says anything about countermanding a judicial ruling. If anything, it says that the President should set the strategy during litigation rather than one federal case making one argument while another makes a contradictory argument in reference to the same law.
What about things like drug approvals? I don't want Trump to ban certain drugs just because they didn't donate to his campaign. I don't want Trump to approve Elon Musk's brain chips just because Musk told him to.
Supreme Court Judges are appointed by elected officials, but then don’t report to anyone. Maybe a fed chairmen is like that? But there is no constitutional office like that. Surely congress can’t make up offices which are then untouchable?
I don’t want trump playing transactional games with the FDA either, but I don’t see how that can be balanced with the powers. He is the chief executive.
I mentioned in another comment that one angle that would make more sense than arguing that agencies are “independent” is to argue that trump is not enforcing the law already written by congress, so taking away the power of the legislature. That seems like a more fruitful take.
This is established in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
Delivering reports to is different than them being able to hire and fire. Presidents appoint fed chairmen.
Congress put in a process for a fed chairman to be appointed in a way that jointly incorporates president, house and senate. Similarly firing them also needs joint cooperation, then the people have some say by electing/unelecting a congress or president that fucks it up. Same for FDA, USPS, etc etc. I definitely want a formalized process to hire and fire these guys and not just up to whims of individual executives.
But sure, Trump could absolutely instruct the FDA to rescind certain drug approvals. There are of course processes that legally need to be followed in order to do that, but he could do it.
You left out who the federal reserve is controlled by. It's not completely independent right? In its current form, it is owned and controlled by regional federal reserves which are controlled by the banks.
You are advocating for the corporate bank control of the money supply (and interest rates). One definition of fascism is the merger of corporate and government power. One sign of oligarchy is when corporations control the regulation of their industry.
"Independent government agencies" is just a code word for industry controlled government agencies (which are a form of fascism or oligarchy).
Literally DOGE
Literally DOGE
When the history books are written, this executive order, along with the past few weeks of actions, will be seen as the seeds of the 2nd American revolution.
The USA had a solid 250 year run but technology, money, and greed have unfortunately undone the very core of what America stood for.
We cannot know at this point where this is going, but it seems like fascism is the inevitable course. My fear is that if you combine that path with the power of the US military, the world is in for a very scary time.
In other words, "I will interpret the law for you, from now on. Don't attempt to read the law yourself."
You'd disagree, I trust?
You'll have a new president in 2028, be it Vance, Shapiro, or Oprah Winfrey. Either way, it won't be DJT.
Now, with additional concentration of power, that increases the possibility of a successful overturning (in favor of a new conservative candidate), or simply a biased election.
Dictatorships often have elections and are supposedly democratic. The question is whether those elections reflect the genuine, informed self-interest of the people.
And US elections have been very tight, and the electoral college means that only a few states being controlled is enough.
We also lack an apparatus to overturn a fraudulent election. Even if a judge rules that an election was fraudulent, that's not the same as certifying another vote total nor can it physically remove someone from office.
Remember when Trump said "we wouldn't have to vote ever again"? That was 3 months ago, so maybe your memory doesn't go that far.
That said, I also remember when Trump said he'd build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it. A remarkable amount of what Trump says isn't true, I think everyone's in agreement on that.
If the country is happy with the state of affairs in 2028 then I expect you'll have JD Vance as your president. If not, maybe Newsom, Buttigieg (my hope), or Shapiro. Either way, if you truly think that 2024 was the last election Americans will vote in, respectfully, I think you're a little bit deluded.
You fall in the common liberal trap of putting too much faith in the strength of our institutions and democracy. The president is already quite literally above the law, Congress remains passive in the face of obvious unconstitutional acts and the supreme court is on board with it all. Why would they acknowledge the results of a losing election? If it wasn't for the (relative) moral integrity of Mike Pence last time, who knows what would have happened.
And if we do switch to democrats, then cool, I'll be happy to eat my hat and give you my five mea culpas. In the meantime, please don't shoot down any worry about the current distressing concentration of power :)
What a coincidence
> The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.
Because, to put it in plain words, this is ordering all members of the executive to obey exclusively the President and the Attorney General when it comes to how all law should be enforced. That includes the U.S. Marshals Service that provides enforcement duties for federal courts and the Supreme Court.
Forget the police, I thought the US president actually has much more direct and undisputed power over the military than some other executive agencies, which could be much more dangerous in the wrong hands, yet that is still is not considered a dictatorship (e.g., not even when Obama ordered the extrajudicial execution of a US citizen and was protected by presidential immunity, nor when past presidents have launched undeclared wars of aggression or interventions and bombing campaigns against sovereign nations), at least not in mainstream political thinking.
This EO seems like just shuffling responsibility around within the executive, moving interpretation of laws directly under the president rather than delegating it out to various unelected bureaucrats in different agencies making their own interpretations. I'm sure there are argument for and against it but it doesn't seem outlandish, or an kind of crazy power grab beyond what the executive branch already has.
I may be wrong, but I think in the US enough voters have been deceived by Donald that they were not well-informed, and so elections are no longer valid.
By this, he is in power, and Congress and Senate have been subverted.
I also see Donald looking to have complete and untrammeled control, and this is one more act in that direction.
Are you talking about the 2016 election or the 2020 election?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
The Nazi term Gleichschaltung (German pronunciation: [ˈɡlaɪçʃaltʊŋ] ⓘ), meaning "synchronization" or "bringing into line", was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazi Party in Germany—established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".[1]
There is no direct counterpart in Englisch Wikipedia for:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machtergreifung
Machtergreifung Mit Machtergreifung (auch Machtübernahme oder Machtübergabe) wird die Ernennung des Nationalsozialisten Adolf Hitler zum Reichskanzler durch den Reichspräsidenten Paul von Hindenburg am 30. Januar 1933 bezeichnet. Hitler übernahm an diesem Tag die Führung einer Koalitionsregierung von NSDAP und nationalkonservativen Verbündeten (DNVP, Stahlhelm), in der neben ihm zunächst nur zwei Nationalsozialisten Regierungsämter bekleideten (Kabinett Hitler); dies waren Wilhelm Frick als Reichsinnenminister und Hermann Göring als Reichsminister ohne Geschäftsbereich. Zusätzlich zur eigentlichen Ernennung umfasst der Begriff die anschließende Umwandlung der bis dahin schon seit 1930 durch Präsidialkabinette geschwächten parlamentarischen Demokratie der Weimarer Republik und deren Verfassung in eine nach dem nationalsozialistischen Führerprinzip agierende zentralistische Diktatur.
Nachdem am 1. Februar das Parlament in Berlin, der Reichstag, aufgelöst worden war, schränkten die Machthaber in den folgenden – von nationalsozialistischem Terror gekennzeichneten – Monaten die politischen und demokratischen Rechte durch Notverordnungen des Präsidenten ein. Als entscheidende Schritte auf dem Weg zur Diktatur gelten die Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Reichstagsbrandverordnung) vom 28. Februar 1933 und das Ermächtigungsgesetz vom 24. März 1933. Der Reichstag verlor damit praktisch jegliche Entscheidungskompetenz. Neben vielen anderen wurden nun auch Parlamentarier ohne Gerichtsverfahren in Konzentrationslagern eingesperrt und gefoltert.
But there’s a loop hole - this independence isn’t codified. Rather an executive order from 1993 (12866) required federal agencies to submit proposals to OMB but exempted regulatory agencies. Today Trump is closing that loop hole.
So if that’s not congress’s intent (which I’m sure is not) then they will need to pass a law soon making these agencies independence from the president explicit
Now we can be scared because it shows that "votation" doesn't prevent dictators to grab the power to abuse if it for their own good.
No one left to investigate Trump himself or his followers, no control, no means of ensuring a fair election…
"An assault on the king's men is the same as an assault on the king" and all that...
Can we work on our definition of "Independent Agency"?
The founders of this country intentionally did not create a "King" role.
This is America's Gleichschaltung. The president is now the absolute authority of the entire administrative state.
Unless he makes a series of public orders that says he will install Apparatchiks in every independent agency and law enforcement agency for compliance, will (and does) fire anyone who goes against his will, then states that he is the sole arbiter of law for all law enforcement and military members.
Then he very much can have that authority if enough people comply. And, if you look around, it's pretty obvious the police and executive are complying.
At the end of the day, there is no true forcing function that forces people to comply if they don’t want to. It can all come crumbling down. Trump is playing a dangerous game.
Signed
Your neighborhood dictator
The elite capture is multiplicitively damaging because the elite own nearly all major media outlets. WaPo, NYT, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Neutrality is implicit support for power over justice. Justice requires challenging those with power, because those with power are the default victors in conflict. Evil wins when good men do nothing.
The Hacker News algorithm is easily gamed. Downvoting and flagging will sink any post, but resigned consent to a fait accompli is the win condition for this coup. The less they are publicly challenged, the easier it is to seize power without resistance. The easier it is to keep exercises of power unchecked.
State AGs and members of the house of representatives are making public official statements with the power of their office that we are experiencing a coup. This is historic.
I really wish dang would privilege more of these discussions about the end of constitutional rule from the automatic downward moderation of controversy and flagging.
The number of largely independent media platforms which allow for open and public discussion without major algorithmic influence is few. Failing to challenge power, submitting to it, or protecting yourself from attention is the easy thing to do, and right now we all have the privilege of doing so, but this slow moving disaster will seep into every area of our lives as the scaffolding of trust is eroded and the lack of consequences for those who exercise arbitrary power will make it a winning strategy to take advantage of people.
I understand hacker news is a place for curiosity, but curiosity is not allowed when obedience is demanded, and that is what authoritarians do, demand obedience. Maintaining one day's curiosity at the cost of tomorrow's defeats the goal of being a place for curiosity. The right to question authority... the right to be curious must be defended.
We agree this is a catastrophe, but I don't think that media and the liberal political parties are willful codefendants.
It's very common for companies that are failing to adopt uncreative reactive strategies that hasten their collapse. Look at the history of Kodak for some good examples. MAGA is that for the United States -- respond to the challenges of the new century by going back to the 1950s. MAGA (and Project 2025) is going to turbocharge American decline.
The pathetic thing is that while the US (like everyone else) has significant problems, it was not "failing," but we decided to do this anyway largely because of culture war panic bullshit.
Before this, America was in a place where it could credibly have continued to hold onto its global power. Its higher birth rate combined with a high immigration rate from all over the world meant its demographics were much better than China's. It was the world's #1 destination for high skill immigrants. The dollar is the global reserve, and that's hard to unseat due to network effects. Its military is still the most powerful. It still has an edge in many areas of high technology. Its universities are still arguably the best. It's still arguably the center of global pop culture.
Now it looks like we will systematically forfeit all that. We'll close our borders to general migration and will no longer be an attractive destination for skilled immigration. By removing reproductive rights I predict we'll actually decrease the birth rate by driving people to sterilize themselves (already happening) and driving a further wedge between genders (see the Korean 4B movement). The dollar will start losing ground. Our military may stay dominant for a while but will gradually slip with everything else. We'll gradually lose our technological edge to brain drain and lack of high skill immigration. We're going to run some kind of culture war purge on the universities or maybe even defund the best higher education system in the world. We'll lose our cultural edge because right wing culture warriors will drive away all the artists.
Imagine Germany without Naziism where they drove away or killed all their intellectuals. Imagine if Weimar Germany with its incredible intellectual and cultural scene had recovered economically and remained functional. They had the greatest minds in physics, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and many areas of engineering. It's likely that without Hitler Germany would have developed the microprocessor, ArpaNet and Silicon Valley would have been German, the Germans would have landed on the Moon, etc.
Muscular reactionary politics is a cult of what looks strong, not what is strong.
The Heritage Foundation might get their Gilead LARP in the form of a hollowed out declining US whose young and high-skill people are pouring across the border in the 'out' direction. Meanwhile China is cracking AGI and fusion and landing on Mars with an improved clone of Starship built for 1/2 the price.
Statistically, Trump will be in charge for about 10 years max, before the Grimm Reaper creates a power vacuum. (I can't wait for his creative interpretation of the 22st.)
At this point, options will be open again.
May some real lawyers have a jab at this.
Good luck.
Perhaps you should try it?
I have been asking myself: what needs to happen until US citizens wake up and finally take it to the streets? In countries like Iran or Syria people have been protesting despite the danger of being tortured and/or killed. People in the US do not need to fear any of that, so what's holding them back?
He is making himself complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Ukraine because he believes Putin more than his own country's intelligence.
I am independent and not a Democrat or a Republican because they are two sides of the same coin.
The only sense in which this is true: the GOP are fascist, racist authoritarians who have waged a decades-long war on the middle and lower class; the Democrats aren't.
If you think the Democrats and GOP are equally bad, you're out of your mind.
Eliminating the electoral college would of course require amending the constitution, and of course GOP-led states will never be in favor of that, since they benefit from it, and most of the time have not / will not win the popular vote.
For example, who wouldn't support anti-fascism? That morphed into "antifa" which became the source of all the worlds ills according to the orange goblin. Yet only a fascist could be afraid of anti-fascism.
Because when hyperspaces of political positions are projected onto a one dimensional binary, to choose to form a new party guarantees that one half of the hyperspace loses for a generation until there is a full party realignment. It is game theoretically sub-optimal in the short and medium terms, and depending on the effectiveness of your opponents, the long term as well.
Politics is attractive to people with psychopathy. I'm not gonna say they're all that way, but a significant enough chunk of any political apparatus in the US is. If you want to have any chance of getting elected - much less having a real career - you have to play by the rules of those who see humans as means to ends and gamble that their opponents won't go as low to stop them.
But in the same regards, Democrats have a similar struggle. It's clear trust is also very low right now within the party and that some people would rather have a party more focused on socialists causes a la Bernie. But is that worth risking a blue wave through the 20's and part of the 30's ?
The other comments do a good job of explaining why an alternative party hasn't emerged, better than I probably can, so I'll skip that part. To some extent I do wish (and I gather you share the wish) that the US political system worked more like Europe's multi-party parliamentary democracies, relying on shifting, unstable coalitions rather than monolithic, monopolistic party machinery. On the other hand, I think it was Europe's parliamentary system that preceded, and produced, the Third Reich and other fascist regimes in the early 20th century.
In fact, I wonder whether two-party systems, like the US, on average produce worse outcomes than multi-party parliamentary systems. I'm not sure they do. But I also don't know enough about politics, political theory, or modern history to answer the question myself. I'm not even sure which other political systems are, or were, two party.
Edit:
On second thought, I'm not sure I agree at all with the other comments that explain why alternative parties haven't emerged. The comments all take for granted that there's a desire for an alternative but also that the alternative wouldn't be viable. I'm not sure there is such a desire. Most polls show that GOP voters approve of the party, if I'm not mistaken. So the answer to your question may be a lot grimmer than the one already offered here: there's no third party, very simply, because the overwhelming majority of GOP voters really do want a fascist regime.
On that note, this article is worth reading: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism . It makes a great case against the materialist explanation of authoritarianism's rise in the US (i.e. the claim that Trump voters are angry about their worsening prospects, declining fortunes, and deteriorating communities, often related to the opioid epidemic). Instead, it explains support for authoritarianism as a result of disposition and psychology. That rings true to me. American authoritarians really do care about the things they say they care about -- above all, "woke" politics, transgender people in bathrooms, immigrants, Muslims, people of color receiving preferential (i.e. fair) treatment. They really are fighting a cultural and religious war, not struggling against unfair, challenging economic conditions. They really are just hateful.
They hate secular progressives and want to shut them out of the political process -- and want to brainwash their children.
They hate LGBTQ people and really do want to push them back into the closet -- and ideally wipe them out.
They hate people of color, or those who seek equality, and see nothing wrong with the disadvantages people of color face. Out of one corner of their mouths they'll scream about tradition, their pride in "their" country, and how hard their parents and their parents' parents worked -- and then out of the other corner of their mouths they'll reject that America's history of slavery, Jim Crow, racism, and the like have any continuing relevance or consequences for people of color.
They hate immigrants (or rather brown immigrants) and really do want to close the borders.
They're driven, in short, by a primitive xenophobia triggered by anything different from themselves -- which is why Fake Tan President is their God emperor. He's one of them.
I wouldn't apologize for this; GP was using "two sides of the same coin" in a way that is not mainstream. That phrase is usually used to say "even though these two things seem different, they're really the same thing".
(I like GP's use of that phrase better, to be honest, but that's not what it means.)
The two major parties stand for nothing and have no morals to guide them.
For example, Lincoln was a Republican and ended slavery. The new Republicans are now embracing racism and xenophobia. 180 flip.
> under Biden the value of future lives was increased a bit
Could you explain this?
One of those sides is milquetoast and piecemeal kowtows to corporate interests, but still generally belives in the rule of law. The other side has been busy making Nazi salutes and illegally giving complete read-write access to the entire government's payroll to random twentysomethings who work for a South African billionare.
That an aggressor nation can walk into another country's sovereign territory and annex it with the blessing of a sitting US president is a disgrace.
"Make Annexing Great Again"
They did that first in 2014 under Obama, and again under Biden. The current situation has no criteria for an end - it's an endless conflict. Trump is going to move towards resolution of that and the fighting.
There's still quite a bit of Europe that Russia wants to plunder for resour... I mean... influence. All of Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, the Balkans - anywhere that used to be a part of the Warsaw Pact - is a target.
Appeasing Putin now will likely see another military action in the next decade, especially if the US significantly reduces or totally ends its commitment to NATO.
To be fair, the US has done nothing but harp on its allies in the organization to increase their g_ddamn defense spending for the better part of three decades now, and only some of them have truly taken it seriously since 2022. Even if spending levels are increased now, it won't have enough of an effect to see battlefield dividends for several years, if not at least a decade. The end result is that the US will be the security backstop for a Europe that has taken American willingness to get into a possible thermonuclear war for granted, in the face of more Russian incursion, no matter how poorly handled that incursion might be.
This is absolutely not the case. The French nuclear arsenal is controlled separately to the joint NATO command and the French have traditionally made it very clear it is for the protection of France, not NATO. Indeed France left NATO for years partly over this and only rejoined in 2009.
Macron has opened discussions about a "pan-Europe" nuclear shield, but be very clear: if Russia was to use battlefield nuclear weapons in say Poland, there is no expectation that France would respond. There is an expectation that NATO would respond (or there was last year.. who knows if NATO is reliable now?)
...seriously, if I were Finland I'd be looking at starting a sovereign weapons program.
They do not have enough to create an exchange that could wipe out human society, which is the deterrent that the US brought to bear.
If you are Vladimir Putin, with enough infrastructure to possibly protect yourself and your ruling class from an attack of 120 warheads, but not 1700, your calculus for the use of nuclear weapons - particularly the tactical type, of which Russia has many - changes considerably if the people with 1700 warheads are no longer going to use them against you.
Absolutely disgusting
I think that's an overoptimistic judgement of the fate of Ukrainians left stuck under Russian control. Russia doesn't even care about its own people dying.
We have every reason to think that "ending the war" under Chief Cheeto will mean "capitulate to the aggressor," and Russia has already shown its eagerness to commit genocide against Ukraine and eradicate it culturally.
So he is indeed complicit. The unacceptable terms he wants or likely will suggest (and the unacceptable manner in which he pursues those terms, by negotiating without Ukraine's involvement) -- essentially Ukraine's surrender -- amount, by corollary, to a justification of further Russian aggression when Ukraine rejects them.
I was going to say just like Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler - but realised that would be grossly unfair on Chamberlain as he never tried to exploit Czechoslovakia for half of its mineral resources.
I'm genuinely interested to hear your take on the likely and potential repercussions of rewarding Russia/Putin for their aggression. What makes you confident that they won't reasonably perceive this outcome as tacit permission to start coming for other territory?
Putin loves working off maps from the 1800s. Finland, for example, is a likely future target.
Not to be hyperbolic, but there's a good reason you aren't supposed to negotiate with terrorists.
Putin has approximately zero interest in territories and annexations. The entire war with Ukraine is exclusively a reaction to the Maidan in 2014, an attempt to prevent something similar in Russia.
Talks about "rewarding Russia" - is literally Putin's propaganda to hide his complete failure. There is no reward, the whole current situation in which Putin put himself, when his authority and influence is lower then ever - was planned as a short two week campaign with no downsides.
Frankly, that's just horseshit.
He annexed Ukraine. He's taken territory in South Ossetia. His actions in Ukraine are a response to the lack of international community stopping him in his prior expansionist plays, and he will continue to push the boundary until he is stopped. Accepting Putin's claims about his motivations at face value is the height of naivety.
There's no need for hyperbole. Trump is bad but there's been less than 100,000 Ukrainian deaths (troops and civilians combined) since the beginning of the war in 2022, let alone under his reign.
And today Trump blamed the Ukrainians for the war going on for that long, saying they could have stopped it three years ago.
The deaths are tragic. And no matter how many there are, Trump's actions will certainly make the number go up before it stops.
It's not hyperbole.
Of course down below it says something like "subject to applicable law".
Nevertheless I think the scary sentence will be stricken by the supreme Court
Next question: Why does Trump want control of those agencies? General principles? People around him told him to? Ego (proving that he's the Big Man In Charge)? Or does he actually intend to use that power? If so, for what?
This is a big deal. This is reducing the US federal government's ability to competently govern, and that's going to hurt, in concrete ways, before too long. If this stands, we're going to regret it.
If. I still have hope for the court system to overturn this.
a. Congress and Senate are wholly passive and unable to act.
b. The courts will be attacked, and so be unable to act.
c. If the courts act, by the time they act, it will be too late; the harm will have been done and will be irreversible.
The position of the executive order is that only the President can interpret laws, including executive orders about interpreting laws.
That is to say, if the courts try to stop it, Trump may try to say "the courts don't have that power" and order the DoJ and/or military to block anything they do.
> The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.
"The executive branch" includes the DoJ and the United States Marshals Service, who do all the actual boots-on-the-ground work for the judiciary.
This is an obvious lead in to "the President's interpretation is that the courts can go screw themselves", at which point the deciding factor becomes entirely whether law enforcement listens to the courts or listens to the bosses who pay them.
This is entirely focused on aligning the executive branch, that’s it. This is the kind of confusion that comes with trusting a Reddit post instead of getting your news from a reputable source.
Here, read this before going any further: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/18/trump-order-power-i...
It’s bad because it’s an attempt at removing independence from certain independent organizations such as the SEC and the Federal Reserve, but it is not about claiming all legal authority rests with the executive. It will fail as an EO because the executive can’t violate the law, which has set out the independent nature of these organizations.
> It will fail as an EO
It will fail as an EO if members of the executive branch follow the Constitution rather than the boss who pays them. The EO itself is explicitly ordering boots-on-the-ground federal law enforcement to follow the President instead of the courts.
Congress has the power of the purse, the executive has the power of the sword, and the judiciary has… the hope that the other two branches will listen. Federalist 78 would be a good read for you now, if you think this has any relevance at all towards the judiciary’s ability to enforce anything.
Perhaps we should refrain from calling the US a de facto dictatorship until that point then?
Awesome false equivalence, exaggeration, and straight disinformation, considering that 60%-70% of Republican respondents in multiple surveys believed that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election [1].
> Two Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polls conducted in February and July 2021 found that two-thirds of Republican respondents believe Biden was illegitimately elected in 2020.
> A January 2021 Morning Consult survey of 1,990 registered voters nationwide showed 65% responded that they believe the 2020 election was "free and fair." But when those results were broken down by party affiliation, only one-third of Republicans were in agreement with that statement. When asked what sources helped lead them to believe the election was fraudulent, a majority of Republicans cited former President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly claimed without evidence that his loss was not legitimate.
The 60%-70% figure persisted as late as June 2022 [2].
> With remarkable consistency, a scant one-quarter of Republican voters tell pollsters that Biden won legitimately. That was the view they shared in the spring of 2021, and the fraction remains about the same today.
> Agree that Biden was legitimately elected
> Poll Date All Democrat Republican Independent
> Economist/YouGov Jun. 1, 2022 60% 90% 25% 57%
Both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris conceded defeat in a day, Trump has been complaining about the 2020 election for years (still does), and Trump voters prepared for months to avoid certifying the 2024 results if they were to turn out badly for Trump [3]. Trump also attempted a fake electors plot to overturn the 2020 election [4].
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/02/viral-imag...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jun/14/most-republic...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/2024-election-certificati...
> deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Unfortunately, unlike 1776, today's king was given power by the governed, and the majority (of those who care enough to vote) still support him. So I don't know where those of us who are horrified go from here.
Four years feels like a long time when it has just started; it isn’t so long at all in hindsight. Moreover, you have two years before the next opportunity you have to disempower Trump (midterm elections). The campaigns for those start in a year or so, so if you’re going to cripple Trump by taking back Congress now is the time to be introspective.
The electorate is not irreconcilable, but change doesn’t happen when you double down on the same course.
> try to figure out why your message and candidate failed
I don't like Harris' message. I probably disagree with her on a majority of political debate topics. I am a centrist and would agree with her on some things, but I would have considered myself a right leaning centrist more than a left leaning centrist. Her message failed for me too. I am just dismayed that the country elected _this_ man. A convicted felon who has provably lied more than any other person on record in the history of humanity, who already tried to overthrow an election, is only self interested, a bully, a sexual assaulter, a conman, a swindler: _this_ man? And now he's doing what you knew he would do, and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it.
I don't want to know how to get Kamala 2.0 to win an election. I want to know how to get back to Bush v. Gore.
In my limited view Obama was very centrist, as was Hillary, and with some notable exceptions it looked like Kamala would continue the trend (while expediently skewing left and sometimes even slightly right when necessary).
I think if you were to pie chart policy even into Trumps first term you’d see presidential action being both majority in volume and majority in impact as centrist.
So while I agree that Kamala’s messaging failed to point this out during the election, and DEI rhetoric and action being a notable exception to my argument, Kamala was at the end of the day the centrist candidate IMO and thus the 2.0 correction would be more transparency to that reality.
Yep, 100%. My biases are showing :)
> I am more concerned about the potential for the complete capitulation of American democracy to totalitarianism than any particular platform issues. What's happening right now is only a small part standard disagreements between parties (the GOP banning trans athletes, rebalancing the budget, approaching foreign relations differently) and much more about half the country being entranced by a cult of personality while the leaders in a position to stop a president from becoming a king instead are bowing down to him.
Yes, I’m concerned about the risks I’m seeing too. Where I’m really struggling is in trying to connect that emotion to facts. So far, every headline, article, and statement I’ve seen has turned out to be somewhere between “misleading” and “outright malicious falsehood” upon closer inspection.
Still, I read and give each one a fair chance to change my mind. The accusations being made are so extreme it would be wrong for me not to.
What really concerns me is that this extreme partisan rhetoric would make it much easier for Trump or someone near him to actually take control. When people have seen months and months of these sorts of assertions being made, only to investigate them and discover that isn’t what was happening at all… at some point, people are going to stop listening. That’s when things get really dangerous IMO.
My biggest fear with this administration is that they’ll actually do the things they’re being accused of, I’ll see it for what it is, and I won’t be able to get anyone to listen to me because of “outrage fatigue”.
ETA: a second response is coming for the last section :)
I disagree that there is an excess of hyperbole going on.
I truly believe that Trump/Musk/Vance and the unitary-executive/techbro-cult, if they are not soon stopped in their tracks, will have subverted American political and economic power for generations.
Europe and Canada and the world can no longer trust the United States as a long-term partner. This isn't about subtle pivots and diplomacy. This is betrayal of values on our closest political, military and economic allies.
He is actively destroying the apolitical civil service and trying to gut the pipeline of young, skilled workers into federal government. The only motive for the actions they are taking are to destroy our government. I would not be shocked to hear reports in the coming months of military officers being asked who they voted for in 2024.
He is claiming (and trying to exert!) levels of executive power that generations of Americans were taught by Nixon were forbidden.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
"If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented and that means we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”
These quotes should frighten every American.
I live in Canada and let me tell you we're not covering ourselves in glory when it comes to democracy either. Between laws like bill C-63[1], which would effectively criminalize "bad" online speech and the prime minister suspending parliament[2] for political expediency we're not looking too good.
[1] https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2024/06/viranis-failed-human-rig...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/court-challenge-prorogue-pa...
> I truly believe that Trump/Musk/Vance and the unitary-executive/techbro-cult, if they are not soon stopped in their tracks, will have subverted American political and economic power for generations.
I actually agree with this statement. The difference is that I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. From my perspective those power structures have been in the control of the left[†] for my entire life; they've had near-complete control since at least FDR, and substantial influence back to ~1900.
[†]: "the left" isn't a great descriptor here, but I don't really have an objective way to name the group I'm referencing. I think you know what I mean, if not feel free to ask and I'll expound on it.
--
Note: I wrote this section by doing my best to empathize with Trump and put myself mentally in his position. I'm assigning my own perceptions of his motivations and perceptions. Please don't take statements made here as my attesting to them being fact. When I make an assertion here, it's because I believe Trump himself would make it, not because I necessarily agree with it or believe it to be true.
Trump intended to "play ball" and steer the federal government through the normal mechanisms in his first term. He was met with far more substantial resistance than he expected and had little success. Then he lost a hotly contested election for a second term, hurting his ego - and I think we all agree that ego is a powerful motivator for Trump.
... but then the Biden administration took control of those same levers of power that Trump had difficultly moving, and turned them on Trump. He was smeared by the media, continued to be mocked even after serving as President, spied upon, and ultimately was the target of multiple political prosecutions. His wealth and his very freedom were directly threatened. This was an extreme escalation. His options in 2024 were binary: he could win the Presidency or have his life destroyed. He won, and now his actions are being driven almost exclusively by righteous indignation.
He's going scorched earth. He's using every available lever of power and pulling them as hard as he can. He's doing things he knows are going to get shot down in the courts and taking actions he knows are "gray" at best, and he's doing as many things at once as possible in an attempt to saturate both the other branches of government and the attention of the electorate.
His goal isn't to leave a legacy in the traditional sense, or to implement a typical policy agenda - he's trying to dismantle century-old entrenched systems of power that have cloaked themselves in the mantle of democracy in an attempt to take control of the same.
--
All of that said, I believe the American people elected him for the same reason I voted for him: because the status quo is unjustifiable, and no other path toward reform is apparent.
I want Trump to destroy the majority of government power and authority. My reasons for that are different than Trump's, and different from most Republicans I've met. Trump voters by and large are framing this as a fight against the "deep state", while I want to see a continuous, gradual reduction in government through redundancy. I'm an anarchist, but not "that kind" of anarchist - I don't want to murder the government, I want it to die of neglect because it's no longer necessary.
The methods he's using scare me. He's pushing the boundaries of Presidential power without question, and almost certainly exceeding them already in some ways. I fully expect that he will continue to do so in larger and more impactful ways.
Even if I'm 100% correct in inferring Trump's intentions, it's still a very dangerous approach. Those power structures are so entrenched because they have inordinate (and inappropriate) influence on the process in place to change them. They'll fight for their continued existence. However you want to phrase it, Trump is subverting, suspending, relaxing, ignoring, or destroying the protections built into our system of government.
The bet that we are making as a country right now is that Trump intends to use as little of that seized power as possible, that his intentions are what we believe them to be, that he has the honor necessary to release those levers of power, and that those he allies himself with along the way either don't attempt to or are unable to take over the movement.
Trump's actions are making us vulnerable to the destruction of the American system of government - but things have gotten to the point where a majority of voters feel that risk is justified when considering where we are today and where we're heading otherwise.
> Europe and Canada and the world can no longer trust the United States as a long-term partner. This isn't about subtle pivots and diplomacy. This is betrayal of values on our closest political, military and economic allies.
I think Trump believes this is larger than domestic corruption - that the US is so powerful economically, militarily, and culturally that the cancer in our government has spread to other Western governments.
As for the US as a long-term partner, that ship sailed long ago. Our system is structured so that the party with the power to set our foreign relations agenda changes every four years. A promise made by the US is only guaranteed for the current Presidential term. It may be honored by the next, or it may not.
> He is actively destroying the apolitical civil service and trying to gut the pipeline of young, skilled workers into federal government. The only motive for the actions they are taking are to destroy our government.
Agreed. That is his explicit stated intent. I believe him, and it looks like most voters agree with him, too.
Let's all just hope we're correct in inferring his motivations for doing so.
> I would not be shocked to hear reports in the coming months of military officers being asked who they voted for in 2024.
I'd be shocked if there aren't reports. I'd be more shocked if those reports turned out to be both true and directed by the administration rather than overzealous individuals or not explicitly intended to generate those headlines in an attempt to sway opinion - but as I've said elsewhere, the accusation is of a magnitude that I'll investigate them with an open mind.
> He is claiming (and trying to exert!) levels of executive power that generations of Americans were taught by Nixon were forbidden.
Yep.
> “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
> "If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented and that means we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”
> These quotes should frighten every American.
I agree - but I think the disconnect is in whether we believe the risk is justified.
Our Founders did things that were illegal. They even did things that were objectively vile - they deprived loyalists of their property. In some cases they tortured or even killed them. They didn't do so without justification, or without trying every other option available to them. They weren't enthusiastic for those things; they saw them as a duty. Their actions led to the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch, the creation of a truly revolutionary system of government, two centuries of relative prosperity, and ultimately the creation and maintenance of the longest period of relative peace the modern world has ever seen.
Some other quotes that would be just as frightening as the above in a contemporary lens:
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." ~ James Madison
"If this be treason, make the most of it!" ~ Patrick Henry
"But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever." ~ John Adams
"If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable." ~ Thomas Jefferson
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive." ~ Thomas Jefferson
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~ Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson in particular is a treasure trove of quotes that illustrate this idea. Let's just hope that Trump is a better man than many believe he is. Personally, I think it will be a near thing, and am hoping he clears that bar - because if I'm wrong, we're in for a rough ride indeed.
The Founders fought and bled and sacrificed together for the free principles that this country was founded on. Trump has done none of these things. In fact, he goes out of his way to show contempt for large swathes of the citizenry on a regular basis. The man is famous for refusing to pay his bills. Why would one expect this nakedly self-interested man to show a shred of honor at the eleventh hour when he has the chance to become a powerful tyrant for the remainder of his life?
I’m an extremist without question, just not the popular type. Think less “Donald Trump” and more “Ron Paul” :)
> I am just dismayed that the country elected _this_ man. A convicted felon who has provably lied more than any other person on record in the history of humanity, who already tried to overthrow an election, is only self interested, a bully, a sexual assaulter, a conman, a swindler: _this_ man?
The alternative was someone with no obvious positions other than her predecessor’s, who was not elected by her party, and who was honestly just unlikeable as an individual for most people.
Of all the things you listed about Trump, I’d only really take issue with two: I’m not convinced he sexually assaulted anyone (though I also don’t have sufficient evidence to believe he definitely didn’t), and I don’t think “only self interested” is quite right. I think his motivations are a bit more complex than that, and are more rooted in personal pride and revenge than anything else. I don’t think he intended to win the first time, and I don’t think personal financial enrichment was really a goal of his either time.
I think his initial run was mostly on a whim, but (Hillary) Clinton offended him and he doubled down in response. His second run was personal - he felt personally attacked on both socially and legally, and has basically made it his mission in life at this point to destroy everything those who did that to him care about.
I don’t believe for a moment that he’s being selfless or altruistic. He’s acting out of self-interest, but not in the way most people would mean that statement.
> And now he's doing what you knew he would do, and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it.
As best I can tell, he’s mostly doing what the people who elected him expected him to do.
> I don't want to know how to get Kamala 2.0 to win an election. I want to know how to get back to Bush v. Gore.
I’d be happy with Obama v. McCain at this point.
> Of all the things you listed about Trump, I’d only really take issue with two
So then you agree that he tried to overthrow an election? This is the wild part to me. I don't know whether his actions after losing the 2020 election were technically illegal or not, but in my opinion this was the clearest threat to America's peaceful transition of power I've ever witnessed. I thought "okay, this is at least 50x worse than Watergate, even Trump won't survive this." Then amazingly (to me), he won in 2024. My only hypothesis for how that happened is that 99% of people who voted for him believed his unfounded claims regarding the 2020 election. But you seem to be an interesting counterexample.
> As best I can tell, he’s mostly doing what the people who elected him expected him to do.
The one thing I'd like to pick at tonight is this. I don't think many of the people who voted for him would have agreed with all of this a year ago, but they get stuck agreeing with it now out of confirmation bias and because he's on their team, and they want their team to win. It seems more like everything Trump does is approved by the vast majority of his base, no matter what that ends up being.
Before the election I enjoyed the debate between Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris[1]. Shapiro's main point was that though he didn't like a lot of what Trump said, he liked a lot of what Trump did in his first term. Shapiro was of the opinion that Trump wouldn't do all the things he said and that his second term would look a lot like his first.
It is my opinion that, a month into it, Trump's second term now looks nothing like his first, and Trump is making good on all the things he said he would do during his campaign. Everyone isn't Shapiro, but a lot of people listen to him and think like him. Taking Shapiro as an example, I would say he was clearly wrong. But if you watch Shapiro today, he accepts what Trump is doing full stop. He's not out there saying, "I didn't think Trump would actually do all of this." He's acting like this is what he wanted. And, thanks to Shapiro's confirmation bias and a good healthy dose of audience capture, it is what he wanted - at least the part about Trump being right, now that "right" has changed.
Anyway, I typed way longer than I intended to. Thank you for a good civil discussion.
> I’d be happy with Obama v. McCain at this point.
Fully agreed.
Good night.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTnV5RfhIjk&t=3s&pp=ygUWYmVu...
Example during the first term was the "Lock her up" talk about Hillary. He didn't do anything about her at all. And people just accepted it as big talk. Hi supporters (mostly) didn't really expected him to go after her with the DOJ or whatever. It was just campaigning bluster. But today he says he's going to start unnecessary trade wars with allies and people said "its just bluster, he's not really going to do it", immediately to "of course he's going that, he said he would".
When he said that people would not need to vote again if he's elected a second time, was that bluster? Taken out of context? Not to be taken seriously? That's what his supporters said then. But what he starts making moves to actually make that happen? Then its "he said he would do that and was voted in, so that's what america wants". It's a wild to say its what people want when they didn't believe he would do it.
It is what people want. Just look at how many people on HN are aggressively carrying water for Trump and DOGE in these threads. They aren't the minority, they're the mainstream. You can't simply pretend the majority of Trump voters who absolutely do want him to do the things he says either don't exist or didn't vote.
A few days ago I was worried they might pull all their troops out of Europe. Today… I think I’m more worried they won’t.
But people have been warning about this all the way back during the alt-right/Tea Party days of Obama, which Trump was a direct response to.
It's been like watching the slowest train crash in progress, all while half the country accuses the other half of derangement for believing trains are even real.
We used to live in a democracy, not a dimocracy. There were more options than the 2 major parties. Always have been.
> I’m not convinced he sexually assaulted anyone
Yeah, and his name totally didn't show up in Maxwell's black book, and he totally wasn't a pal of Jeffrey Epstein. /s
You're fucking kidding me.
> I don’t think personal financial enrichment was really a goal of his either time.
My brother in Christ, financial enrichment has been the only goal of Donald Trump, ever. He ran in 2016 expecting to lose so he could use the base as viewers of the new Fox-alt media platform he was trying to raise money for.
This is a guy whose life mission is to convince everyone else he's a billionaire, while simultaneously threatening to sue anyone who claims he isn't, while also simultaneously avoiding lawsuits that would open his finances up to discovery. He tried to sue his own biographer when said biographer claimed he wasn't a billionaire. Trump dropped the case when it went to discovery.
>I think his initial run was mostly on a whim, but (Hillary) Clinton offended him and he doubled down in response. His second run was personal - he felt personally attacked on both socially and legally, and has basically made it his mission in life at this point to destroy everything those who did that to him care about.
His first run was in 2000. His second run was 2012. Third run got him elected. His fourth run saw him defeated. His fifth run got him re-elected. Get your facts straight.
If a scientist going up against a fraud, and the fraud wins the debate, then it’s not a debate.
This is what happened back when experts went to Fox and talked about climate change in the 90s.
They were simply obliterated. Even if a point was made, it would be killed and something else floated during the evening shows.
Because it’s not a debate. It’s not about truth, or democracy.
Trump dodged every debate after Harris came on the scene. He was not humiliated for this.
One team wants to win. The other team wants a functioning nation.
The electorate is functionally irreconcilable if the message never gets to them, and their party punishes bipartisan behavior.
And this is not what america was set up to survive. It was assumed that people would reach across the aisle.
Even if you win the next election. The ground work for Trump 3.0 and beyond remains.
People need to look at Fox News, and develop ways to get past their censorship and message curation.
Congress and Senate both wholly passive (subverted, I would say).
That leaves the States and the courts. I think the courts will go next.
The Constitution gives Congress a great deal of oversight over how the executive branch is run. The President is supposed to execute the laws that Congress passes, spend the money that Congress appropriates in the way that Congress says it should be spent, etc. The President can't even appoint his own officials without the Senate's approval.
Beyond the Constitution, there is a long tradition of independent agencies running according to certain laws and principles that are laid out to them. The President is not supposed to directly order the people at these agencies what to do. Think the Department of Justice: you don't want the President ordering prosecutions. You want those decisions to be impartial. Trump just crossed a massive red line in dropping the prosecution of Eric Adams, and he did so purely in order to gain political leverage over Adams. Now, the NY mayor has to do what Trump says, or else Trump can order the DOJ to start prosecuting him again.
Trump has now openly declared on social media that he does not have to even follow the law, because he's "saving the country." He's trying to establish an elective dictatorship. Americans vote every 4 years, and whoever wins runs the entire government however they want, regardless of what the courts or Congress say.
The Constitution disagrees with you, since it expressly directs the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". It's literally not possible to "take care" of this without issuing orders to that effect.
"Independent" agencies are supposed to function with a high level of autonomy. The president does not have to give individual orders to underlings at the DOJ in order to ensure that Congress' wishes are faithfully executed.
But "without prejudice" which is how they have the hold over him (because they can refile any time he's not doing their bidding). If it was truly dropped, they'd have no leverage.
> "The order is for all charges against Adams to be dismissed, and the dismissal is without prejudice, the official said, meaning charges could be refiled in the future."
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Don't be on the wrong side of history.
There is one, it’s called “vouch”. If this was flagged, it’s not anymore.
Edit: Spoke too soon, it’s flagged again.
For a site primarily intended to be about computer tech, the funding and business of tech startups, with explicit guidelines suggesting to reject US politics there are still large numbers of active threads on US politics, DOGE, Musk, et al daily.
.. and that's after 9x decimation.
So, throttled back to allow room for other submissions is largely what happens here, "hidden" is a tad hyperbolic.
many with more than 100 points, some with > 1000 points and >1000 comments.
[flagged] just pushes them off of the front page, they're still highly active and [showdead] can show you the comments being killed - largely they're hyper-partisan (either side), full nazi, crazy kill the rich, etc. Not many polite reasoned comments being killed regardless of stance.
I'm Australian BTW - it's all a sideshow to me, aside from the crazy tariffs and nuclear threat parts, etc.
So it’s all a sideshow to you, apart from the threats to your life and way of living? Those seem kind of important to wave off.
I’m also not American, but I have no illusions that what happens there won’t have consequences for the rest of the world.
minor at best given my age, location, and general setup.
I was probably in more danger in Rajasthan on 11 May 1998 when India suprise detonated three nukes within our visual horizon and impounded our aircraft on landing.
Risk is relative.
My father is down the hall watching TV ATM, he was born in 1935 and caught rabbits and such to feed his younger borothers and sisters when his father went off to WWII, Singapore fell amd trade in and out of the state ceased for a few years.
Considering all the environmental protections being rolled back, you and your family will be affected sooner than you think.
What, specifically?
> but I can still empathise with fellow human beings struggling elsewhere in this globalised planet.
Good for you. What makes you think I can't?
> Considering all the environmental protections being rolled back
in the US?
> you and your family will be affected sooner than you think.
You're a few generations late to the game for that now.
Every single move the current government is making increasingly seems to be a clever way to stack the chips in their favor in perpetuity.
We seem to be living though the backstory of how some far-off sci-fi civilization came to be, replete with greedy tech corps in the ears and pockets of narcissistic leaders.
The irony is that it's impossible to say if this will ultimately play out as a dystopian horror or a utopian fantasy.
I think they will when climate change comes knocking (I'm assuming the US will double down on carbon for some incredible short-term profit). Or at least some version of the democrats i.e. whatever is on the other side.
Every large government department in every country in the world has some waste. All of them. All of the time.
This is why it's so disingenuous for Trump/Musk supporters to point at tiny bits of waste or whatever and scream "See! See! We found it! They deserve what they got!"
It's not coincidentally one of the justifications used by Russia to invade Ukraine. They claimed they were after Nazis. So what if Ukraine has Nazis!? So does every other damned European country! American has Nazis! Russia has Nazis!
It's the drill sergeant making you do 100 push ups because there was a barely visible scratch on your boots. His boots have scratches too. That's not the point. It's an excuse to make you jump.
My advice is: Any time anyone uses such a claim, or anything like it, always ask yourself: Okay, but what is the base rate for this thing they've suddenly decided is objectionable? Is it higher or lower elsewhere?
You'd think they'd be able to scour the Federal budget and find a few real examples of waste to crow about, but instead they give us things like: $50 million in condoms sent to Gaza so that Hamas can make bombs??? And of course, that instantly turned out to be fake news.
DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million
The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team appears to include an error.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
All the same, try not being distracted by the smoke and noise of the circus, it's all just a massive dead cat on the table to distract while other quieter changes are made.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Personally, it seems better to have elected oversight of such powerful (and expensive) organizations rather than non-elected oversight.
These LLMs score pretty highly on reading comprehension