In general, people are going to interpret this EO with their own lens. Unsurprisingly, reasonable people may disagree on the merits of the EO as a whole.
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.
Even with a highly sympathetic Supreme Court it is hard to imagine this EO standing.
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.
> 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.
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.
This EO eliminates the concept of an illegal order since the law would be whatever the executive interprets it to be.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s pretty amazing. A few days ago someone posted a comparison of the oath of allegiance for officers before and after Hitler, and it has basically exactly the same change.
Ostensibly, this EO is meant to remove power from bureaucratically controlled agencies in the government. The right have been complaining that real power has been usurped from the institutions mentioned in the constitution, and centered in a professional managerial class, that works below the surface, and has no culpability or exposure to voters.
That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be aimed square at that "problem".
Those agencies were created by law and given a command by law to fulfill a role in the executive branch. The executive branch doesn't get to decide how to organize itself since that would make a mess when the next guy comes up, so laws are there to make sure the structure is kept in a _continuity of the state_, such that just because the head changes, not everything needs to change. You could argue all you want about that, but stability is a desire feature of the state. It not only helps citizens to be able to have long term planning, but also saves the resources by not needing to figure out how things work constantly.
Right, on its face this is simply more of the "drain the swamp" rhetoric from his first term. The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch.
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.
>setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system.
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 three branches of the government are beholden to the Constitution as a whole, and to each other based on the Constitutional roles and their expressions of their roles.
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.
When Congress passes a law saying, "create an agency that sets rules about air pollution, whose director is appointed by the president", the constitution demands that the executive branch do exactly that. Interpreting that to mean "The president personally sets rules about air pollution, using an agency if he likes" is unconstitutional and I think the vast majority of both parties agreed on this for most of the last hundred years.
No, that's not what it says. The part you quoted says that executive power is vested in the president. Legislative and judicial power are vested in other bodies that are not accountable to the president.
The constitution also explicitly sets up formal departments with specific purviews, with heads that need to be approved by congress. It also outlines that the president has the right to get the opinion of said principal offices about their duties (while seemingly failing to state any right to direct said opinions) This implies that the president’s executive authority over the departments is far from absolute, since if it was, why would you need to explicitly bestow a right to merely seek opinions?
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.”
"The Congress shall have Power ... [long list of various government functions and agencies] ...
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.
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.
> setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system.
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.
All of the checks and balances are kind of predicated on the idea that each arm of government who actually bother to protect their own powers, and use those powers to rein in misbehaviour of the other branches.
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.
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.
I took it to mean that agencies no longer have the final say in interpretations of law when it comes to exercising executive power. So for instance if ATF says a banana is a machine gun and the president says "yes", then barring an act of Congress clarifying, it is. I don't see how you go from there to the end of judicial review?
“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“ would seem to rule out, say, accepting a SCOTUS ruling against the President, should he insist it was wrongly decided.
He took it that way because without a charitable interpretation such as yours, the wording leaves power assigned vaguely enough end run judicial review. Given this administration's history with attempts to grab power, I'd say your interpretation is _far_ too charitable.
If the Supreme Court rules against the Executive, they might order an agency to comply with a ruling or - barring that - hold an agency head in contempt. Under this EO, the agency wouldn't comply, since the agency would assume Trump's read of the law is correct - superceding even the Court's. If they tried to enforce a contempt order, the US Marshals would not comply either. Soldiers that swear allegiance to the Constitution would also have to defer to the President, even if the Supreme Court ordered the military not to obey an unconstitutional order.
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.
> 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.
Trump is pretty old at this point. Even if he decided to go full dictator, how long does he have? Maybe 5 to 10 years? I don't think it would be quite as "stable" as Putin's Russia.
That sounds pretty obviously unconstitutional. I don't see how a reasonable person could disagree actually. The whole point of the checks and balances is to prevent this.
Ok, so how would those checks and balances work if the president refuses to obey the courts? Who's going to enforce those court orders? I suppose you could say that the congress could impeach - but what if the majority of the House sides with the president? And if the House does manage to pass impeachment, it still takes 2/3 of Senators to convict - as we've seen that's a very high bar and very unlikely to happen. But let's continue the thought experiment and say that the Senate votes to convict - who's going to enforce the conviction and kick the President out of office?
> Nothing prevents the next president from having a radically different opinion.
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.
I would like to believe(perhaps naively) that the segment of population which genuinely believes in doing away with democracy is pretty small.
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.
Trump has explicitly said it's the last time people will have to vote. I don't know why people are glossing over this. He intends to take full control and never give it up. The time to act is now, not when he announces some emergency that is a thin excuse to cancel elections.
'The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch'
Yes it is trivial for the scope of presidential interpretation to extend over the executive branch. And this excerpt posits nothing about the oversight authority of other branches.
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
But you need to combine it with the fact that a whole bunch of agencies e.g. FCC, SEC are now no longer considered independent from the Executive Branch.
It’s the combination of actions that makes this so concerning.
Before this EO, what happened if a lower level official in the executive branch had an interpretation of the law that was different from the President and Attorney General?
Was junior staff attorney in the Tulsa field office previously able to override the President?
> In general, people are going to interpret this EO with their own lens.
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.
> 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.
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?
My lens is that the military is a federal agency, and our soldiers are federal employees.
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
In the second quote, the phrases "in their official capacity" and "as the position of the United States" are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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
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.
Given that in all cases interpretation is required, are you trying to make the claim that the President (who is elected and can be voted out) should not make the interpretation, and that some employee who is not elected and works for them should?
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.
I see it as notice to the members of the executive branch that insubordination will not be tolerated. The Chief Executive and the Attorneys General set the final executive branch decision on all matters, and all other members of the executive branch are expected to toe that line.
>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'
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.
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.
Did you see Walter Olson's Cato bit? I had the same take you have (I have associates that worked at FTC until recently, were familiar with the process, and pointed out basically the same thing --- that the independent agencies have so many DOJ touchpoints that the administration already has effective control). But Olson says the prospect of all the independent agencies needing to run their rulemaking processes through OIRA would be a big deal.
It's really sad no one just looks up the legal principles conservatives are pushing forward together with Trump.
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.
Ironically, this is reminiscent of Bush-Cheney justifications for a host of programs such as NSA warrantless domestic surveillance, CIA black site rendition flights, Iraqi and Afghan Reconstruction, etc.
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 new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
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.
This is the problem with people being OK with executive overreach when "their team" is in power. Eventually, and in fact about 50% of the time - the OTHER team is in power.. and may just push the overreach further.
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.
You've nailed it. I call this the Galadriel Principle and it can be applied to many things: weapons, executive procedures, etc.:
“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.
This is the crux of the issue. Executive power has been gradually expanded since at least the end of WWII, but things have accelerated since the early 00's. Think GWB's "signing statements" or Obama's "phone and pen." Trump I, Biden, and now Trump II have continued to push the limits, in part because of a desire for more power but also because Congress hasn't functioned as an institution in decades. Congress has passed a budget on time only 4 times since 1977, the last time being in 1997.
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.
While I agree with the essential point you're making, it's pretty clear this overreach was always part of this administration's game plan. At least until Pence delayed it through validating the 2020 elections.
This is an example of what I like to call the "both sides fallacy". There are several reasons why people try and make a both sides equivalence in US politics. For example:
- 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.
> having our judicial branch become openly partisan
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).
Having a permanent bureaucracy that ignores directives from the executive only really benefits democrats (look at the Washington DC presidential vote totals). So this executive order is not a both sides thing, or about executive overreach.
Something like the REINS Act, forcing regulations to be voted on by congress, would be something that hurts both sides & prevents executive overreach.
>This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
Yet GOP senators were more than happy to claim credit for infrastructure funding that they opposed.
Mistaking a well-funded, highly coordinated project that started over 15 years ago[1] for 'those clowns in Congress are at it again!' is a huge part of what has prevented us from digging out of this crisis.
This is the key point. This dysfunction was _by design_. The Republican party has been working on this since Nixon was impeached. Through redistricting, Fox News, and changing politics to "warfare" by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk, through McConnell stonewalling Congress and refusing to hear judicial nominations.
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.
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.
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.
Most dictorships started by the people in power streamlining decadent processes and burocracy, by putting into place the new regulations that would improve everything.
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]
> the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
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.
This is the thing that drives me nuts, especially when someone smugly trots out the "Democrats and Republicans are the same" nonsense.
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.)
Right, democrats were ALWAYS looking for compromise. Hell, democrats have to compromise with their own party!
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.
I recently watched a 2 hour congressional committee session, with 5 minute talking points per member. BOTH sides of the aisle used their entire 5 minutes to spout one-sided rhetoric and talking points obviously designed for re-election rather than anything resembling debate or conversation.
I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.
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).
No, it's the lack of representation. We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries, worst representation in the free world. Even Communist China has better representation. The U.S. in the 1790s had representation in line with Nordic countries today.
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.
> This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
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.
> 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.”
Gridlock, disfunction, and completely incapable of governing are a bit loaded, but other than that, a slow moving legislature was a feature built into the system — not a bug.
> 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.
A bit hyperbolic on my part but I think Trump and Elon are quite a potent combination for the money and media influence they have between them. Members of congress and senators with opposing views are very unlikely to stick their heads up for fear of the immense amount of money that could be used against them in the midterms and beyond.
Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it is that the checks and balances -- embodied by the legislative and judicial branches -- are only effective if a) they take action against the executive branch, and b) the executive branch respects them.
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.
It is telling that you have that interpretation of executive power but not the same of regulatory power.
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.
The people are intuiting this. I think the next election cycle will see a left wing strongman put in. That one will do damage after cleaning up the damage from the current one. So we’ll yoyo back and forth between strongmen to get shit done because the legislative is useless. Because it’s better to yoyo between extremes than to sit in stagnation. We need some reform or we’re going to be stuck on this roller coaster for a long time.
The "strong" man and his allies are the ones that crippled the legislative branch, except for tax cuts for the rich and appointing unqualified SC justices.
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. ;-(
> 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.
this is quite similar to anyone familiar with prussia, berlin and the constituent national assembly of 1845 in the context of the historical power struggle between vichy merchant classes and their royal monarchs during the advent of the steam era.
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.
Can we drop the "tech" prefix from our neo-feudalism?
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.
This is the sad reality of oligarchy. Red/blue culture wars appeal to some people because they would prefer an authoritarianism that at least pretends to have their back 50 percent of the time over rich people (their employers) who have their back 0 percent of the time.
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.
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.
I want bipartisanship. Consensus and a willingness to concede are the only way to govern fairly. Anything else is just naked fiat, which is another word for authoritarianism.
Completely incapable of governing is quite some hyperbole. IRA Act, CHIPs Act that got a TSM fab up in record time on American soil, Operation Warp Speed.
This kind of rhetoric really just feeds the beast.
The CHIPS and Science Act is a U.S. federal statute enacted by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 9, 2022.
The only rebuttal I see in the media is that congress set these up to be “independent”. But our government doesn’t have independent branches. In fact that sounds a lot like “unelected and unaccountable”.
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?
Congress makes lots of rules about how the executive can wield power:
* 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.
They aren't 'independent' they are 'a mix between executive and legislative'. The Supreme Court decisions are Meyers v US and Hunters Executor v US. And I'm not a constitutional scholar but my reading of it is that the protections in question come from the legislative delegating some of their power to the executive, think legislative actions (researching laws, etc) but retaining their constitutional prerogative to protect them from executive control.
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.
“ Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), was a United States Supreme Court decision ruling that the President has the exclusive power to remove executive branch officials, and does not need the approval of the Senate or any other legislative body.”
If your question is whether the “independent” agencies are Constitutional, the answer is yes. Congress makes the laws and the laws can constrain the behavior of the President. If the law says the President cannot fire someone, or interfere in an agency’s work, then the President cannot.
So who are such agencies accountable to? Congress. Just like the president is accountable to Congress.
This is just flatly incorrect. Humphrey's Executor (which may not be long for this world as precedent, anyway) lays out specific cases where "for cause" requirements on termination are Constitutional, but otherwise the President's power to dismiss subordinate officers of the executive branch is absolute.
Congress can only make laws if they don’t infringe on the constitution. If they want laws that aren’t constitutional, they have to make constitutional amendments, which is probably never going to happen ever again because of how dysfunctional they are and have been for decades.
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
In a democracy the three branches are independent. Democracy is not just 'you get to elect the guy on top', it also attempts to preserve the rights of the population. If the population does not have rights, democracy soon becomes very fake. E.g., I don't like this or that party so I throw anyone in jail during election day if I know that they would vote for the wrong party. The general principle is that if a person/organization has too much power they will generally find a way to abuse it. The famous split-up in three branches is employed to a greater or lesser extend in all countries where the rights of the population are respected.
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.
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?
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?
I think you’re right… impeachment is the main mechanism by which they can complain that he’s not enforcing the law. I’m struggling to think of what else they can do.
> But our government doesn’t have independent branches.
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.
This is obviously alarming, and if used to disregard the Judiciary's interpretation of law, unconstitutional. But I'm puzzled by the exemption of the Federal Reserve and FOMC. He's previously beefed with them, and would presumably find the additional leverage useful. Why explicitly exclude them?
The way the US political system works is that the legislative passes laws, the executive enforces laws, and the judicial interprets laws and ensures the constitutionality/legality of it all. This is relevant because in this scenario each body plays a critical role, but they 'beat' each other in different ways, almost like a game of rock, paper, scissors. The executive beats the legislative by vetoing laws, the judicial beats the executive by blocking/halting orders/enforcements of laws, and the legislative can beat the judiciary by passing new laws or even changing the constitution (though there you'd also need the states' approval).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is the key, there is a reason why the Fed Chairman doesn't ad-lib any of their public speeches. They read a carefully prepared statement and that's it.
Just a small wink, nod or a pause somewhere might cause panic on Wall Street.
His project2025 handlers (lets be clear hes not that smart) have calculated exactly how much opposition each outrageous thing can stand, beyond which there would be too much coordinated pushback. So its all about divide everybody against their own little thing to try and get as much fuckery through as possible
His approval rating is quite high considering the circumstances. Will take months to really understand, but at least half of America abhors the federal government.
They're not fully exempted, the order does apply to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in connection with its conduct and authorities directly related to its supervision and regulation of financial institutions.
In other words, when it comes to banking regulation, the President has the final say.
The Fed is statutorily independent, and organized in a manner that the current Court has validated (unlike the CFPB). Just like Trump can't assert legislative superiority over Congress, he cannot unilaterally compromise the independence of the Fed.
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.
The only reason supermajority is required in the current Senate is because a Senator can hold a "pocket filibuster" which in practice gives any single Senator the power to veto any legislation at any time for any reason for as long as they are in the senate. Were they to change their procedure and require Senators to actually speak in order to exercise a filibuster you would see this change pretty quickly. Strom Thurmond spoke for days to filibuster the civil rights laws, and he eventually had to stop because he got tired. He had aides holding buckets under the podium for him to relieve himself at times.
I mean, yes, technically it's "not new" for the President and Judiciary to disagree at this level. But doing so results in events like the Trail of Tears, which is pretty bad.
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)
> Trump isn't exposing new weaknesses in our system; the weaknesses have always been there.
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
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.
> Money is by definition zero sum, otherwise the word "inflation" would have no meaning.
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.
But capital gains - and business income taxes in a way, given how profit is calculated - do pay an inflationary tax since they're calculated on nominal gains, so I'm not at all convinced that the wealthy don't care about inflation since it erodes their wealth.
This effect can be minimized or neutered if their assets grow in real terms, but that only works in a growing-pie world, too
The way I see it, the excuse for moving to a fiat currency was that the rich people owned all the gold and social mobility had stagnated, so they decided that an elastic money supply would provide some social mobility and could go towards rewarding and building up an intellectual class.
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.
If you're wondering why the President can essentially write his own laws when that's not how our system is supposed to work, it's because the President gets extra powers whenever we're in a state of national emergency.
We've been in a state of national emergency since 1979.
States of emergency should at least go to congress for renewal every 3 months as a measure to be voted on individually (cannot be tied, for example, to budgets). If that's not enough to kill it eventually, it should automatically become a ballot measure on the next Presidential Ballot after some number of renewals.
> 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."
The national emergency declared in 1979, against Iran, was done under the IEEPA which grants the President the power to block transactions and freeze assets against foreign threats. It doesn't grant the power to make laws.
You're delegating powers to the President that would normally require an act of congress. The sanctions against Iran are a relatively tame example, there's 46 other national emergencies that give the President far more power.
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".
Yeah. Dude. I don’t like the outcome, but he has “extra” powers because Republicans won a lot of elections and are a majority in all three branches of government and in many statehouses.
No, presidents can kind of claim national emergencies all the time. Usually they're used for sanctions, but they can also be for economic or security reasons (security being interpreted as times of war and in a very broad sense).
In this case I think the answer is probably yes, it's worth it. This thread turned out to be better than the median for political threads these days, which of course is a low bar. (I agree with you that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43103830 is the opposite of what we want here).
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:
this is impacting scientific research to the point that people are scrubbing the word "gender" from their papers to avoid their research programs getting flagged by the doge gestapo
Given that it took about two centuries for the public to accept the heliocentric model, some patience may be needed. A great number of people only learn about gender through undergraduate education. And, iirc, only 25% of the population have undergraduate degrees.
It's the Leninist model of governance which was the reason China was able to defy Western expectations that economic freedom would eventually lead to political freedom.
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.
They already are, via cabinet members and their deputies/undersecretaries. Those people are appointed by the president, but need to be confirmed by the Senate as a check on the president's power.
Trump is doing another end run around the confirmation process with his "liaisons".
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.
Stephen Miller worked the DHS and HHS the way you described in the first Trump administration. Presumably Biden had ample time to “seize these levers” no?
I don't see the point you are making? It isn't politicians that are getting elected to be White House Liaisons, they will almost certainly be appointed.
Readit News
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.
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.
Isn't this exactly how it works? They interpret it and that stands unless challenged in court.
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.
Dead Comment
That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be aimed square at that "problem".
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The legislative and judicial branches are the checks to executive power.
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.
(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
It’s the combination of actions that makes this so concerning.
Was junior staff attorney in the Tulsa field office previously able to override the President?
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.
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?
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
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.
We’re just gonna pretend Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) doesn’t exist, are we?
There is absolutely no standing up to our military if it is actually deployed against you as a regular citizen without equal military backing.
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.
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.
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?
I see it as notice to the members of the executive branch that insubordination will not be tolerated. The Chief Executive and the Attorneys General set the final executive branch decision on all matters, and all other members of the executive branch are expected to toe that line.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
That, or they're hoping that someone will sue so that SCOTUS makes this sort of EO precedent.
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...
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.
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?
Deleted Comment
- 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.
Deleted Comment
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).
Something like the REINS Act, forcing regulations to be voted on by congress, would be something that hurts both sides & prevents executive overreach.
Yet GOP senators were more than happy to claim credit for infrastructure funding that they opposed.
[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.
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")
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?
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.
I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.
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).
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.
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.
Well... most of them are.
I wonder which of these two commonly happened in the past.
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.
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'?"
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.
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?
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.
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.
So who are such agencies accountable to? Congress. Just like the president is accountable to Congress.
If it’s that clear will it be easy to take this to the Supreme Court?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If Tesla crashed, so would Elon’s power.
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)
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
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.
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’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.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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."
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.
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?
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....
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Wow. Literally installing political officers in agencies.
Deleted Comment
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?
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.