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.
> 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
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.
That "essentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Please point me to a specific Executive Order issued during Biden's administration that resulted in "forced speech."
On the other hand, the current administration has issued Executive Orders, memoranda, and other official communications that very explicitly direct government agencies to engage in censorship, with the National Science Foundation going as far as to compile a list of sensitive words, flagging any materials including words such as "woman", "female", "disability", and "LGBT."
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.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
I have never read this, but I really really enjoyed it. It is a great and succinct explanation of the circumstances leading up to a civil war. Very applicable to the situation in the U.S. today.
"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" - ah, one of those Government things where the title is exactly what it is not. "Department of Justice", there's another.
They put out a whole playbook called Project 2025, developed by a bunch of insane people at the Heritage Foundation. Trump lied and said he didn't know anything about it. Now they're doing it.
Not only did they put out a playbook, they actively recruited and screened people to take government positions. I read a post on Reddit from someone who went through the training. The whole idea was to find ideological supporters. Trump's problem in 2016 was that he wasn't prepared and relied a lot on existing government supporters and established GOP figures, who weren't completely loyal. This time, they were prepared. That's the reason why he's been able to move so quickly in the first month.
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 other words, "I will interpret the law for you, from now on. Don't attempt to read the law yourself."
In short, Trump is claiming full and direct authority and control over any and all federal agencies, with the express directive of "The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. "
> Section 1. Policy and Purpose. [..] Since it would be impossible for the President to single-handedly perform all the executive business of the Federal Government [..]
Yup. You gotta have some time left to golf with your cronies..
“ Sec. 7. Rules of Conduct Guiding Federal Employees’ Interpretation of the Law. The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. 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.”
This does not bode well for that country’s democracy.
I think a lot of people that are freaking out are missing that this applies to the executive branch, over whom the President has already perfectly well established. Literally the first statement of article 2 of the US Constitution (which lays out the power/rules for the executive branch) is "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."
The main point of this executive order is likely part of the ongoing issues related to the chevron deference. [1] Chevron deference [1] was a (IMO very weird) legal standard that was overturned in 2024. It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous. When this was overturned, the judiciary regained their independence and were once again able to hear and independently judge cases around these executive departments.
This order is now stating that the executive branch departments themselves will no longer be independently interpreting the law at all, but instead defer to the legal opinions of the head of the executive. The order itself also makes it clear that it does not allow rejecting or unreasonably redefining the laws applying to the various departments - instead the main issue is where potential ambiguities and related limits/allowances will be determined. And of course those determinations could then be challenged by either the judiciary or the legislative (by passing overriding laws).
The short version of this is "Executive departments will now be directly accountable to all three branches of government - executive, legislative, and judicial."
This is just a statement of the unitary executive theory. Unitary executive theory is controversial, and the controversy there did not (until, oh about last month) align with party lines.
We’re not “missing” anything, your interpretation of the Constitution is incorrect. You may want to scroll up and read Article I, which constrains Article II (that’s why it comes first).
Your understanding of Chevron deference is also incorrect, for what it’s worth.
> It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous.
Why doesn’t congress do its job and write laws that do things?
You're misunderstanding the EO. It has nothing to do with the Chevron deference (and you are also misunderstanding the impact of the Chevron deference)
This has nothing to do with "democracy" in any way. This is the equivalent of a CEO publishing a memo telling employees how to interpret things that happen outside of the company (e.g., new laws, social trends, etc.) It's the CEO's job to align their workforce to have the same interpretation of information. Federal judges can still rule on issues brought before them but the judges have to provide Constitutional- or precedent-related rulings.
Why are Americans acting so surprised that the President has this authority? That is his job, as it was for all presidents before him. This executive order is saying that the "employees under the CEO" do not have the authority to usurp the "CEO's" interpretations of law. Checks and balances still apply, of course; Congress can intervene if the President is acting in ways that Congress doesn't like. That's what impeachment is for--and impeachment is a process regardless of whether the President is issuing "illegal" executive orders or doing something else like what Nixon did.
The process works; blame Congress for not holding the President accountable in the ways outlined by the Constitution.
Let's say we have a democracy where the only rule is highest vote wins. Let's say 51% of the people vote to enslave/oppress the other 49%.
Maybe they vote for literal chattel slavery. Maybe they vote for healthcare for themselves but not the others. Maybe they vote to tax the others at the maximum possible or implement tax policies that dis-proportionally affect the 49%. Maybe they vote the 49% cannot own homes and therefore must pay rent to a landlord. Maybe they vote that the 49% must register for the draft, but not them. Maybe they vote that the 49% aren't eligible for public school while they are. Maybe they vote that the 49% is not able to own stock or register for a company. Let's pretend those are legal, it is definitely possible. Slavery at one point was constitutionally allowed.
Is that a Democracy? A Liberal Democracy? A Democratic Republic? A Constitutional Democratic Republic if the law were enshrined on paper?
Would you want to live in that country? Would you want to live in that country if you were in the 49%?
What is the key ingredient that makes something a "Democracy" rather than tyranny of the majority, "mob rule," or "might makes right"?
If you ignore all context, their support of the unitary executive (anti-american) theory, and the recent comments that "if a president does it, it isn't breaking the law" and "going against the will of the president is going against the will of the people"...
If you ignore ALL of that then you have a talking point worth debating.
This EO, combined with his proclamation that "He who saves the country does not violate any law" paint a very concerning picture. This has, historically speaking, been the language of tyrants. No President is above the law, nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary.
you are mixing up different meanings for the word "interpret". "Authoritative Interpreting law" (or in general interpreting law) doesn't mean "trying to understand what it means" but means "deciding what it means in practice"
especially if you add a "authoritative" in the front it in legal language means they gave themself the right (i.e. authority) to decide (i.e. interpret) how law should be interpreted, i.e. what the meaning behind the written word is in practice
this is 100% without doubt or question not compatible with any democracy (including the US constitution) and is pretty much one of the default approaches Dictators use to get unchecked authority
It means that in practice (assuming people comply with the EO) means they can do whatever they want as they can just willfully absurdly, but with authority , misinterpret laws. Including to e.g. persecute judges which "step out of line", or members of the senate which don't vote for whatever he wants etc.
The Supreme Court literally said that Trump has absolute immunity for criminal use of presidential power. Combined with the statistical impossibility of a 2/3 senate majority for impeachment, this is a license to grab as much power as that same court will allow.
What's kind of fascinating is the way they've introduced things like the Major Questions Doctrine (MQD), which asserted the importance (really, necessity, in their view) of Congress's explicit delegation powers, as a way to curtail agency actions. But then faced with something like this EO, they seem quite obviously faced with something that runs up against the fact the Congress gave explicit statutes for how and what they should do. As far as I'm aware, the statues creating these agencies don't explicitly give the president this power...which raises a clear MQD consistency issue for the supreme court.
I don’t think that’s an accurate description of the decision. I think that it stated that when the President exercises core constitutional power (e.g. the pardon power, or the veto power) then the exercise itself cannot be illegal. I’m not sure if the decision of the Court left open the possibility that the conduct around the exercise of such power can be illegal. If so, then this could be a distinction without much difference: for example, issuing a pardon may not itself ever be criminal, but taking a bribe to issue a pardon is separate from issuing the pardon itself. To some extent, I think that some of this does flow from the structure of the Constitution itself, but I’m not convinced that phrasing it in terms of immunity is particularly helpful.
Then there’s a rebuttable presumption of immunity for more conduct. I don’t see that this flows from the Constitution, but perhaps it flows from judicial decisions over the past two centuries? ‘When the President does something official, he probably is immune, but maybe he’s not, and he could still be prosecuted from crimes he commits around the immune act’ doesn’t seem terribly meaningful.
It sounds a bit to me like saying that a citizen is immune from prosecution for his vote, but not for selling it or whatever. But I’m not a lawyer, and I could be wrong.
Well, yes, that's how the system works: a determined President can, in fact, grab as much power as the Supreme Court will allow. That's literally what the Supreme Court is there for.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how legal immunity equates to legal authority.
If you are a government employee and Trump orders you to do something that exceeds his authority, can't you still say no? It seems like the Supreme Court only said that Trump can't get in trouble for asking. I don't think the court said that you have to answer yes.
I'm not trying to say that we're in a great position here or that immunity doesn't have some very destructive effects. But I am saying that we shouldn't act as if he has powers that the Supreme Court hasn't given him.
A competent Joe Biden would've taken that ruling, said "thank you very much" and "cleaned house" with Seal Team Six of select judges and politicians and then pardoned everyone involved.
The fact that SCOTUS wasn't even slightly concerned about that happening belies the problem: the Democrats are ineffectual by design. They knew Biden would throw his hands up citing "norms" and "institutions" as an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
SCOTUS completely invented a concept of presidential immunity out of thin air to derail the criminal prosecutions. They also deliberaly took their time. Remember when Jack Smith tried to appeal directly to SCOTUS because everyone knew it was going to end up there? Instead, SCOTUS put everything on hold for another 6 months as a delaying tactic.
Even then, the opinion is rushed and haphazard and not at all well thought out. Some in the conservative supermajority allegedly wanted to punt the issue to the next term.
The presidential immunity decision is so brazenly political. The Roberts court will go down in history for the kinds of awful decisions in the 1840s and 1850s that led up to the Civil War.
“Criminal use of presidential power” is a bit of an oxymoron, which is why people are getting wrapped up in knots here.
The Supreme Court said, if the Constitution authorizes the President to do it, then he can’t be criminally prosecuted. That doesn’t mean blanket immunity!
Donald Trump is trying to be dictator. He has been doing all but wearing a sign around his neck saying so for a long time. Please don't act surprised. It is not the time for quotes or being shocked at his actions.
He's saluted Kim Jong-Un's generals.
He's bent the knee to Vladimir Putain
He's whined that it's not fair that he doesn't have the powers that Xi Jinping does.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, it was widely known that Donald Trump was a fraud and a complete clown. It will be studied for decades how many people just willingly gave up their ability to call a spade a spade and ignore reality when it comes to Donald Trump. How did people become so fucking stupid?
> No President is above the law, nor does the President "interpret" the law
On paper, but not in practice, sadly.
The meaning of the Constitution has been bent to serve Trump's will. He violated the law constantly during his first term, was not held accountable for the electoral violations or coup, and is now violating the law again. He's gotten away with it every single time.
I'm sorry to say this. You are describing an America that no longer exists. We live in a new country with new rules that we don't quite understand yet.
Just remember, none of this was a surprise. It was advertised ie Project 2025. It is the culmination of the 50+ year Republican Project.
And yet we had no opposition to it. The Biden administration and Kamala Harris were more interested in defending and providing material support for war crimes than stopping any of this.
The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.
It’s quite literally “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” They throw their hands up and surrender. You want a playbook? Look at what the Republicans did at any point from 2010 to 2016 and just do any of that.
I think it was definitely bad that Joe held on so long before letting Kamala run but incumbents lost globally[0], not just here in the US. People aren't happy with the effects COVID had, which is valid, but misplaced the blame which is how we got here.
No. Since 2016, leftist democrats have promised that if only the democratic party moves far left enough, they will unlock some kind of secret progressive majority. This has been repudiated at every turn, most resoundingly in the last presidential election. The demographics that the leftist democrats had appointed themselves the saviors of went over to Trump, along with the tech industry which had formerly been a huge source of monetary and intellectual capital for the democrats.
Unfortunately, the democratic party seems to be unable to make the necessary adjustment and return to the winning formula of the Obama years because the political hobbyists and professionals that make up the core of the party have purity-tested out anyone with more mainstream views. If they aren't careful, they will end up as a party representing only university HR administrators.
> The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.
It's been like this for decades, and is why I haven't voted for a democatic party candidate for president in that time. Living in California, it doesn't even matter, all of the electoral votes go to the dems anyway.
This is all a consequence of the US still governing with an organization that was designed in 1776. After WWII european contries reorged their governments as well as their physical infrastructure. The wswitched to propotional representation with parlamentary style governments. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot closer than what we have in the US.
With presidenatial electrions decided by 7 states, and by a small minority of the voters in those states, something like 1% of the US population is deciding the outcome.
Neither dems nor reps want to change this. There is no real hope for actual democracy in the US...
The Dems were more afraid of the Israel lobby than they were of an actual Nazi movement seizing power over the country. Money has totally erased any semblance of morality from governance in the United States.
> and I am not really worried that he might do a lot of damage
"His" "policy" of firing a large portion of the federal workforce is going to come crashing into the private sector very shortly when it comes time to renew contracts. That's not even mentioning what's about to happen to the job market when the unemployment rate skyrockets all at once and the private sector only has low income positions to offer - or none at all. Republicans are flirting with defaulting on US debt too, which will damage the value of USD - catastrophic when he's throwing tariffs around like confetti. That people keep posting things like "I'm not too worried" is mind-boggling. That's _only_ discussing the financial disaster to the economy and not the plethora of other problems Republicans are signing off on.
I see him more as a Caesar. In this analogy, Musk would sort of be Augustus. The senate still existed, and there were still consuls and all the trappings of a republic, but he was made princeps. It was a title with no significant official power, but he had the real power. At this point, it seems to me like Musk is more powerful than Trump. He owns Trump. Trump only wants power. He doesn’t care what it’s for. Musk is on a mission.
I don’t see how anyone could NOT be concerned that they’d do damage. They’ve already done irreparable damage. All the norms we used to have in place are gone. It’s anything goes.
I don't like using the Hitler comparison because it makes people have a kneejerk reaction and tune you out, but it is plainly undeniable that Trump makes many statements that could be attributed, word for word, to any number of authoritarians and tyrants throughout history.
He seems more like Pinochet than anything (maybe without the murdering). Neoliberal deregulation, privatizing state owned assets, etc. while consolidating power to himself. Which ended up in extreme economic inequality and fear of opposing the ruler.
This EO says nothing about the Judicial branch and presents a perfectly reasonable policy statement about how legal decisions and interpretation should be made within the executive branch. What specific language in this EO do you have a problem with?
I’m no fan of Trump, but this pattern of people hallucinating that Trump said something he didn’t and then freaking out about their nonexistent hallucination, is getting very tiresome.
Consider this hypothetical: a federal judge rules against the Trump administration's firing of the inspectors general and must offer the fired employees their positions back. The Attorney General says the judge overstepped his constitutional power and calls the ruling invalid. What should the person who would've rehired the employees do?
Continue that hypothetical further: the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, who agrees with the federal judge. The executive branch continues to ignore the order. The Attorney General is held in contempt of court and fined a large amount of money. Who's going to collect it? Any executive branch employee trying to carry out that fine would be violating this executive order, and be dismissed. So the fine would never happen.
Considering the president and vice president's recent disdain for judicial rulings against them, this may happen.
I'm not sure what hallucinations you're talking about, given that this whole catastrophe has been one big "I told you so" thus far. By a bit of inductive reasoning we can predict that it will continue. (And it's not like it requires any special predictive abilities given that they told us during the campaign what they were and are planning to do.)
What is it that you think this EO says? The first Trump administration went all the way to the Supreme Court to establish that he could coerce ALJs. There are already extensive internal checks on FTC, SEC, and FCC --- places where to exercise independent power those agencies still need the cooperation of DOJ.
There's a clear norms violation happening here, but I don't see the power grab everybody else is seeing. These are powers the Presidency already had.
> In order to execute a law, one must interpret it.
I mean, yes, but in a non-judicial sense. The judiciary has the constitutionally assigned duty to give binding interpretations in the course of adjudicating cases.
Is anyone still doubting that what's happening is the actual death of American Democracy? Anyone still willing to argue that this is about freedom and cutting waste?
As Americans that believe in the Republic, what exactly are we supposed to do about this? Should we continue to implore congress to take action against this lawless behavior?
I called both my senators' offices yesterday, because I still haven't gotten a response to my emails from a few weeks ago. Still waiting to hear back.
I also told them that working on legislation for protecting George C Marshall's house, and protecting bourbon, are not valuable uses of their time given the destruction currently being waged on the US Government.
I think that the most effective way to get change would be if the economy tanked, that's the one thing the electorate seems to be motivated by. A general strike would be one way to do that, but I doubt that one could be organized on any meaningful scale. I'd love to be wrong about that.
I'm trying to restrict my spending as much as possible. No new car, no vacation (or at least nothing big), limiting eating out, etc. I'm cutting back on as many unnecessary expenses as I can, and being mindful of what businesses I do spend my money on.
I’m gonna be straight with you. I used to think this way — that living small was a form of protest against the ills of society. But life is too short. For many of us, that cardiac arrest, car accident, or pandemic-related terminal illness is right around the corner. Don’t say no to things that bring meaning, joy, purpose, and expansion to your life. You only have one life to live.
First, don't listen to the "we're so f*cked" posts on reddit. Only actions lead to results.
If you are a Republican but don't approve of how the GOP majority has basically rolled over and abdicated its duty as a check on the president, remind your congresspeople that they owe loyalty to their constituents, not to other politicians. Taxpayers pay their salaries.
The Democratic party is also in desperate need of repairs if you are interested in direct political action. They have been self-destructing over the past couple of years, plagued by infighting, deer-in-the-headlights paralysis, political tone-deafness, and incompetence in messaging.
In addition, the increasingly authoritarian shift by the Federalist society ought to make room for a new counterpart promoting the rule of law. IANAL but have always wondered why the Federalist society had no similarly prominent opposing organization.
I am furious at the Democratic Party for bringing this about. They are the only organization capable of losing to this guy TWICE. With everything at stake, they actually thought it was a good idea to put up an unpopular president who had dementia, and tried to sneak him past the electorate like this is Weekend at Bernie’s 3. Then when that idea collapses, they just give it to the default next person in line. This should have been an easy win.
> As Americans that believe in the Republic, what exactly are we supposed to do about this?
If you are in a red state/district, first step would be to contact your elected federal rep(s) and tell them that you're displeased.
Use language like "Trump was elected to correct Biden's overreach, but he's now overreaching in a much worse way." Put it in language where you frame things like a 'Constitutionalist' and 'limited government'. The stereotypical small-government, Originalist GOPer.
If you come off sounding like a Democrat they'll probably ignore you, but if the (so-called) 'grass roots' MAGA folks are thought to be upset then you'll probably get more traction.
There is no social cohesion or solidarity in the US, that's the biggest problem
In France if they'd raise the price of baguettes by 10% you'd have strikes from teachers, public transportation drivers, dock workers, train drivers, doctors, trash truck drivers, &c. all at once, after a week it would be complete chaos and the government would have no choice but to negotiate
In the US everyone is playing their little game on their side, decades of free for all capitalism at work
Honestly, I donate enough money to politicians to make them stand up and take notice when I email or call them and share my thoughts, which leads me to the conclusion that people in the middle and lower class are going to need to find ways to pool money in such a way that they can change their party politics. It's not that all politicians are completely motivated by money, but IMO you unfortunately have to aim at the lowest common denominator.
You can only donate $3500 to any politician. (legally, if you do something illegal and are not caught...). There are complex limits notice when you say something. (for a small city that limit will make them listen, but nothing national or even a large city)
What you can do is get out votes. People knocking on doors is still one of the largest drivers of votes so if you organize those systems they will listen to you.
In my personal life, I have resolved not to be silent if confronted with a pro-Trump opinion being voiced. To state unequivocally and without needing to elaborate that what is occurring is something un-American and goes beyond partisan differences, that Trump and his lieutenants are destroying our Federal government for a generation or more while permanently damaging our place among democracies in the world. That the people who voted for him are making America a worse and weaker country for their children.
I'm going to write essays to those I care about and also coordinate action plans with like minded individuals to be ready for scenarios of neo-nazi rallies or certain extreme behaviors, should they occur in my city.
I'm debating protesting solo with signs along our roads; someone did that recently in my city and said they had to flee because Trump supporters surrounded him and threatened him. But it needs done.
The actual answer here is to exercise actual power.
Oligarchs are always greatly outnumbered.
The only thing that is genuinely effective is mass movement. A coalition of labor unions could shut down all of Elon and Trumps businesses in hours. Block the entrances to the factories. General strikes, boycotts, that kind of thing. It’s not actually that complicated.
Instead the modern Democratic Party is in love with appeals to the referees. They think that if they can just convince some court or The NY Times editorial board or a 75 year old former republican special prosecutor they’ll win.
As we have seen that approach is a total and complete failure.
If someone in opposition was able to generate mass collective action however the change would be swift. Nobody is really trying that though.
What the modern Democratic Party knows, but understandably doesn’t go around trumpeting, is that they cannot organize mass collective action because there’s not enough people on their side. You talk about “a coalition of labor unions”, but even union members barely lean Democratic these days. There’s very few groups outside of the Democratic Party infrastructure which are polarized enough to take a side.
I hope it doesn't go that far, but it is always an option. It only has a chance of working if the army either goes with, or at least is so divided they won't stand against you.
Trump is bringing up the point that this Republic's constitution only provides for three branches of a government, not 4.
This reminds me of a supreme Court ruling a few years ago where the rights of native Indians had been trampled on in Oklahoma for 100 years. The court said something like "well, now that you bring it up--stop it!"
Trump is bringing up the point that all employees of the executive branch owe fealty to him, and must act directly in accordance with is directives above Congress.
In Germany the legal executive branch is “Weisungsgebunden” which mean it follows the lead of the politicians instead of acting on own behalf. Because of this international warrants which come from Germany do not get followed since they can’t be trusted.
It would be better to have independent judges but hey it doesn’t lead to a dictatorship and the end of the world directly as propagated everywhere.
Judges are independent in Germany. Prosecutors are not.
> Because of this international warrants which come from Germany do not get followed since they can’t be trusted.
I think you mean the European Arrest Warrant[1], and you are right that it is not accepted when issued by German prosecuters, because they are not indepepndent[2]
You say these things as if the very frameworks of our country were not under attack. I think it's hard to describe how far beyond our constitution we really are here. Our constitution and especially our institutions are no match for what the right wing is doing.
Judges in Germany are independent and most of the time appointed for life. German state attorneys are not independent. Their warrants are not recognized internationally, not even in the EU in fact.
This will probably get flagged, but if you read this, spent a few minutes trying to understand the gravity of this specific EO. Every federal employee even in independent agents must and will jump when Trump says so. Even if he asks them to do something illegal (close the congress! Jail a democrat!), they must follow his orders. Because HIS interpretation of the law cannot be superseded.
If he wanted to fire anyone who disagreed with him, this EO wouldn’t have been necessary. With very few exceptions, executive branch employees serve at the pleasure of the President.
This is how it is, how it has been, and is entirely consistent with the Constitution.
So, if not that, then why issue this EO?
First of all, it’s a statement: “Resistance to this agenda from within the executive branch will not be effective”
Secondly, it helps ensure that when the President issues a statement, it’s not immediately met with bureaucrats making statements to the contrary.
You’re wrong, many jobs are protected by congressional law. The executive branch can’t do just anything he wants. Sure some agencies he can but now all. This shit was decided a long time ago and there are several laws covering it. Congress is not doing their job and impeaching and firing this president. GOP don’t care if he’s a criminal as long as he is their criminal
> If he wanted to fire anyone who disagreed with him, this EO wouldn’t have been necessary.
Nonsense! This is the exact opposite! This is EO shows Trump trying even harder to fire all the people who refuse to go along with his crimes.
He is asserting that when the Judicial branch concludes his firings are illegal, he's going to ignore it, and then fire anyone else who refuses to help him illegally fire people.
It's the democracy-destroying version of a Monty Python sketch: The people who followed the law have been sacked. The people who didn't sack the people who followed the law have also been sacked.
I dunno, it makes sense that the federal branch that manages interest rates is independent of the president. Didn't we have a whole thing where Trump couldn't force rate increases or decreases back in 2020? Do we really want Trump to declare interest rate changes via tweeting or whatever?
What about things like drug approvals? I don't want Trump to ban certain drugs just because they didn't donate to his campaign. I don't want Trump to approve Elon Musk's brain chips just because Musk told him to.
So disappointed by the irrational and hyperbolic comments from my fellow nerds. Why are folks reading into this so much!? Clearly folks aren’t actually reading the content and just reacting based on a headline. Read, contemplate, compose. This really shouldn’t be an inflammatory exec order - from what I can tell this is precisely within the purview of a POTUS and precisely in line with historical exec orders. Why the cray cray reactions? Just cause Trump I guess. For shame. Be nerds. Look stuff up. Stop with the hyperbolic “fascist” “coup” business. If you disagree with strategy, fine!! But at least recognize that these ideas aren’t new - nor fascistic - they’re inherently American and we’re in the midst of an adjustment cycle where these old ideals will be expressed in new modalities that we don’t all agree with. Doesn’t make it “fascist”. Ugh. So juvenile.
Rather than gesturing generally at all of these "irrational" and "hyperbolic" comments, why not take the time to thoughtfully rebut any specific comment that you believe is engaging in irrationality and hyperbole?
I would also cool it with the dismissive tone and avoid saying things like "cray cray" before accusing anyone else of being juvenile.
Kushner said it best. "Noone goes as low as Trump." So you also get to deal with what politics looks like when it reaches its lowest, nastiest form.
Trump's a hero to the right, but on the left there's a pretty reasonable sense that Trump's actions have already amounted to literal treason if you consider him to have an obligation to uphold the oaths he has taken.
He attempted to get Zelensky to go on US TV and execute a political attack on Democrats as a condition of the US helping Ukraine.
He attempted to get the 2020 election flipped by making mafia-don style calls to Georgia asking them to "find" precisely the number of votes which would have made him win that election. He next asked Pence to change the result for him. All of these were acts of open treason against the People of the United States, so long as you count the People of the United States as including people who didn't vote for him.
To make it crystal f**ing clear: him changing the policy of the US isn't treason. Cozying up to Russia or trying to reduce the size of the government are his prerogative as elected leader in a way that trying to change the result of an election is not. Ohh yeah and I forgot that he tried to get everyone to stop counting the votes while he was ahead! That also goes in the treason most foul bucket.
Progressives are using words like Nazi and fascist, purely as a slur against a political rival, without really understanding what those words mean nor the attrocities they represent.
What the Nazi's did was horrifici, and it's incredibly insensitive, inappropriate, and, yes, juvenile, to water that down by using it for political point scoring.
This whole situation really goes to show that both the judiciary and the legislature need to be greatly expanded -- probably by 10 fold or more. Even if you greatly reduce the size of the federal government.
The executive employs approximately 3,000,000 employees. The federal judiciary only employs about 30,000 total, and the legislature about 20,000 total. The sheer velocity with which the executive can ram through questionable directives *and have them executed upon* (despite the law) means the other "co-equal" branches of government are always potentially on the back foot. It's just a personnel game. Trump has only highlighted how absurdly easy it is to abuse this imbalance.
And after the Chevron and Trump decisions, it's only going to get worse and worse. I do think these Federalist Society types who pushed these unitary executive theory ideas have now created a monster. They've created a situation where the executive has immunity to simply apply the law however it wants, clogging up the judiciary with civil and federal suits, and where the Congress cannot pass laws fast enough or with great enough specificity to avoid defying Chevron or avoid executive misapplication. Meanwhile the executive has long since moved on from the original issue to the next 10 issues, and the next 10, and the next 10, while the courts and the Congress are still only getting started on the first few problems. And the executive will never really get "punished" for these actions because of its supposed immunity.
And presidential elections don't really help with this problem. Because one president has 4 years to drastically reshape everything, and the next president will spend all of their 4 years reverting it, dropping all the previous suits, creating its own litany of new suits, and rinse and repeat. The hysteresis of this process is too long and leads to instability and chaos.
What about Chevron is a problem in this particular case, though? My understanding is that ditching the doctrine of Chevron deference puts more power back in the hands of the judiciary.
When the history books are written, this executive order, along with the past few weeks of actions, will be seen as the seeds of the 2nd American revolution.
The USA had a solid 250 year run but technology, money, and greed have unfortunately undone the very core of what America stood for.
We cannot know at this point where this is going, but it seems like fascism is the inevitable course. My fear is that if you combine that path with the power of the US military, the world is in for a very scary time.
SCOTUS bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for Trump's power grab. Its immunity-granting ruling means that it's extremely difficult to stop a President who decides to simply ignore the law.
Even if you think Trump is a "good guy" who is "doing the right thing", he's setting precedents whereby a President who is a "bad guy" could turn dictator, and then what? Literally the only option is impeachment, but the Senate has never convicted because there are enough senators who are afraid of a highly vindictive politician (and now his billionaire BBF) who __will__ go after them and whip up his base against them. If only they were more concerned about the country than their own re-election, but too few are willing to make that sacrifice.
(this couldn't be farther than the truth from all I've seen Trump do, but just entertaining the thought here)
I'm not sure that SCOTUS's immunity ruling is all that important here. It mainly served to delay Trump's federal criminal trials until it was too late to get anywhere. In the absence of that ruling, a president could still -- in collusion with their VP -- obtain immunity by:
1. While in office, relying on the DoJ's policy of never indicting a sitting president. (Not to mention the fact that they control the DoJ.)
2. On the last day of their presidency, they resign. The VP is sworn in as president, and pardons the now-former president for whatever they've done. (The former president can of course, before resigning, pardon the VP for anything they might have been involved in as well.)
It’s important because it gives him 100% immunity from all actions that even slightly be adjacent to “executive branch” . Almost unlimited spectrum of activities are allowed including killing Americans for no good reason. Short of him walking out the door of the WH and gunning down a tour bus of tourists with his own machine gun, the SCOTUS gave him cover to say “whoops, I thought that was ok”
‘Executive order’ is starting to sound like the compilation of Garrett calling out ‘emergency crisis’ in Community in the two worlds with the Model United Nations, S3E02 iirc.
Is it" hysterical" to point out this section of the EO?
> The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.
Because, to put it in plain words, this is ordering all members of the executive to obey exclusively the President and the Attorney General when it comes to how all law should be enforced. That includes the U.S. Marshals Service that provides enforcement duties for federal courts and the Supreme Court.
I think everything has to be voluntary and well-informed, except in self-defence.
I may be wrong, but I think in the US enough voters have been deceived by Donald that they were not well-informed, and so elections are no longer valid.
By this, he is in power, and Congress and Senate have been subverted.
I also see Donald looking to have complete and untrammeled control, and this is one more act in that direction.
When inflation starts to be a problem again (it's already rising) they'll still blame him. Fascism requires scapegoats. Ironically, that is their downfall too, because they are utterly incapable of introspection and self-improvement.
It may be a good time to study how Stalin came to power in the USSR. It wasn't through the political establishment, but by taking absolute control of the bureaucracy.
Yes, it was a single party government, but not consolidated under a dictator until Stalin. Even Lenin, until he basically retired (was very sick and died soon thereafter), didn't have the iron grip on the government that Stalin did.
My high level take on this saga is: welcome to the Chinese century.
It's very common for companies that are failing to adopt uncreative reactive strategies that hasten their collapse. Look at the history of Kodak for some good examples. MAGA is that for the United States -- respond to the challenges of the new century by going back to the 1950s. MAGA (and Project 2025) is going to turbocharge American decline.
The pathetic thing is that while the US (like everyone else) has significant problems, it was not "failing," but we decided to do this anyway largely because of culture war panic bullshit.
Before this, America was in a place where it could credibly have continued to hold onto its global power. Its higher birth rate combined with a high immigration rate from all over the world meant its demographics were much better than China's. It was the world's #1 destination for high skill immigrants. The dollar is the global reserve, and that's hard to unseat due to network effects. Its military is still the most powerful. It still has an edge in many areas of high technology. Its universities are still arguably the best. It's still arguably the center of global pop culture.
Now it looks like we will systematically forfeit all that. We'll close our borders to general migration and will no longer be an attractive destination for skilled immigration. By removing reproductive rights I predict we'll actually decrease the birth rate by driving people to sterilize themselves (already happening) and driving a further wedge between genders (see the Korean 4B movement). The dollar will start losing ground. Our military may stay dominant for a while but will gradually slip with everything else. We'll gradually lose our technological edge to brain drain and lack of high skill immigration. We're going to run some kind of culture war purge on the universities or maybe even defund the best higher education system in the world. We'll lose our cultural edge because right wing culture warriors will drive away all the artists.
Imagine Germany without Naziism where they drove away or killed all their intellectuals. Imagine if Weimar Germany with its incredible intellectual and cultural scene had recovered economically and remained functional. They had the greatest minds in physics, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and many areas of engineering. It's likely that without Hitler Germany would have developed the microprocessor, ArpaNet and Silicon Valley would have been German, the Germans would have landed on the Moon, etc.
Muscular reactionary politics is a cult of what looks strong, not what is strong.
Here is the crux. If during this time they also dismantle the checks and balances that allow a stable democracy to exist then they transition into chaos. Chaos creates a very convenient excuse to establish martial law. This is accelerated if the people rise up to protest the dismantling of democracy. Martial law leads to suspension of elections, ipso facto, the loss of democracy.
Agreed -- which will vastly accelerate the collapse of the US empire since everyone around the world will start diversifying away even faster. If this kind of scenario happens then USD hyperinflationary collapse is on the table.
The Heritage Foundation might get their Gilead LARP in the form of a hollowed out declining US whose young and high-skill people are pouring across the border in the 'out' direction. Meanwhile China is cracking AGI and fusion and landing on Mars with an improved clone of Starship built for 1/2 the price.
The Nazi term Gleichschaltung (German pronunciation: [ˈɡlaɪçʃaltʊŋ] ⓘ), meaning "synchronization" or "bringing into line", was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazi Party in Germany—established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".[1]
There is no direct counterpart in Englisch Wikipedia for:
Machtergreifung
Mit Machtergreifung (auch Machtübernahme oder Machtübergabe) wird die Ernennung des Nationalsozialisten Adolf Hitler zum Reichskanzler durch den Reichspräsidenten Paul von Hindenburg am 30. Januar 1933 bezeichnet. Hitler übernahm an diesem Tag die Führung einer Koalitionsregierung von NSDAP und nationalkonservativen Verbündeten (DNVP, Stahlhelm), in der neben ihm zunächst nur zwei Nationalsozialisten Regierungsämter bekleideten (Kabinett Hitler); dies waren Wilhelm Frick als Reichsinnenminister und Hermann Göring als Reichsminister ohne Geschäftsbereich. Zusätzlich zur eigentlichen Ernennung umfasst der Begriff die anschließende Umwandlung der bis dahin schon seit 1930 durch Präsidialkabinette geschwächten parlamentarischen Demokratie der Weimarer Republik und deren Verfassung in eine nach dem nationalsozialistischen Führerprinzip agierende zentralistische Diktatur.
Nachdem am 1. Februar das Parlament in Berlin, der Reichstag, aufgelöst worden war, schränkten die Machthaber in den folgenden – von nationalsozialistischem Terror gekennzeichneten – Monaten die politischen und demokratischen Rechte durch Notverordnungen des Präsidenten ein. Als entscheidende Schritte auf dem Weg zur Diktatur gelten die Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Reichstagsbrandverordnung) vom 28. Februar 1933 und das Ermächtigungsgesetz vom 24. März 1933. Der Reichstag verlor damit praktisch jegliche Entscheidungskompetenz. Neben vielen anderen wurden nun auch Parlamentarier ohne Gerichtsverfahren in Konzentrationslagern eingesperrt und gefoltert.
If people think that we are safe because it is a democracy, and Trump was somehow elected, let's not forget that Russia is also a democracy and Poutine was also elected and re-elected.
Now we can be scared because it shows that "votation" doesn't prevent dictators to grab the power to abuse if it for their own good.
An independent regulatory agency are established by law and function outside direct executive supervision. That’s the whole purpose: they’re supposed to be non partisan.
But there’s a loop hole - this independence isn’t codified. Rather an executive order from 1993 (12866) required federal agencies to submit proposals to OMB but exempted regulatory agencies. Today Trump is closing that loop hole.
So if that’s not congress’s intent (which I’m sure is not) then they will need to pass a law soon making these agencies independence from the president explicit
The President of the United States, of course. Or one of his subordinates, who, according to this missive, has the full authority same as the U.S. president, of course.
"An assault on the king's men is the same as an assault on the king" and all that...
We have a government that has been completely capture by the elite. Democrats are the oligarchs good cops offering performative resistance while ultimately consenting to anything that boosts their brokerage accounts and re-election budgets, while republicans are the oligarchs bad cops, directly weakening regulation of those with power, protections for those without, and systematically destroying any force that can stand up to the insanely wealthy. Republicans are setting the wealthy up for the mass privatization of public property and services as well as the purchase of all the assets firesold to sustain life during a disaster, like your parent's house when social security/medicare doesn't cover the cost of living, or like farmland that isn't profitable to farm because it's too expensive to import fertilizer.
The elite capture is multiplicitively damaging because the elite own nearly all major media outlets. WaPo, NYT, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Neutrality is implicit support for power over justice. Justice requires challenging those with power, because those with power are the default victors in conflict. Evil wins when good men do nothing.
The Hacker News algorithm is easily gamed. Downvoting and flagging will sink any post, but resigned consent to a fait accompli is the win condition for this coup. The less they are publicly challenged, the easier it is to seize power without resistance. The easier it is to keep exercises of power unchecked.
State AGs and members of the house of representatives are making public official statements with the power of their office that we are experiencing a coup. This is historic.
I really wish dang would privilege more of these discussions about the end of constitutional rule from the automatic downward moderation of controversy and flagging.
The number of largely independent media platforms which allow for open and public discussion without major algorithmic influence is few. Failing to challenge power, submitting to it, or protecting yourself from attention is the easy thing to do, and right now we all have the privilege of doing so, but this slow moving disaster will seep into every area of our lives as the scaffolding of trust is eroded and the lack of consequences for those who exercise arbitrary power will make it a winning strategy to take advantage of people.
I understand hacker news is a place for curiosity, but curiosity is not allowed when obedience is demanded, and that is what authoritarians do, demand obedience. Maintaining one day's curiosity at the cost of tomorrow's defeats the goal of being a place for curiosity. The right to question authority... the right to be curious must be defended.
I still don't buy the bothsidesism. You say at first they are part of the coup, quietly approving of what is happening, then pointing out the commentary by state AGs that this is a a power grab.
We agree this is a catastrophe, but I don't think that media and the liberal political parties are willful codefendants.
One would think then I saw an NYT article that basically went up for bat for RFK jr. and danced entirely around his rhetoric on research cuts. So that ship is certainly lost at this point.
I think there is a need to distinguish between AGs who write such letters and party organizations (i.e., democrats) that have allowed corruption such as insider trading within their ranks. A non-complicit to oligarchy democrat party would never have allowed nancy pelosi to be a completely unchecked insider trader.
Statistically, Trump will be in charge for about 10 years max, before the Grimm Reaper creates a power vacuum. (I can't wait for his creative interpretation of the 22st.)
I have been asking myself: what needs to happen until US citizens wake up and finally take it to the streets? In countries like Iran or Syria people have been protesting despite the danger of being tortured and/or killed. People in the US do not need to fear any of that, so what's holding them back?
> I am independent and not a Democrat or a Republican because they are two sides of the same coin.
The only sense in which this is true: the GOP are fascist, racist authoritarians who have waged a decades-long war on the middle and lower class; the Democrats aren't.
If you think the Democrats and GOP are equally bad, you're out of your mind.
I agree that they are not equally bad, and-
Democrats since Carter have bowed to influence from neoliberal capitalists, and capitalism is is a "boom-bust-quit" cycle, which I see as narrow-minded and selfish. Clinton got away with undoing the 1933 Glass-Stiegel Act (separating stock market and banking? financial regulation to reduce boom-bust amplitude, anyway) in 1999 by selling a "third way" that was really just watered-down Reaganomics (neoliberal capitalism, following the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership). Neither Obama nor Biden did enough to prevent oligrarchy, eithe, though under Biden the value of future lives was increased a bit. All the Republican presidents have done more harm, though.
I'm really disheartened by this trend, and one little upside is that I'm bonding & bridging with local people, because it gives me a sense of meaning and efficacy. HN is my only social media outlet, and I only dip my toes in now and then.
One of those sides is milquetoast and piecemeal kowtows to corporate interests, but still generally belives in the rule of law. The other side has been busy making Nazi salutes and illegally giving complete read-write access to the entire government's payroll to random twentysomethings who work for a South African billionare.
I think that's an overoptimistic judgement of the fate of Ukrainians left stuck under Russian control. Russia doesn't even care about its own people dying.
This is not unlike saying that rape ceases to be rape when the victim stops resisting.
We have every reason to think that "ending the war" under Chief Cheeto will mean "capitulate to the aggressor," and Russia has already shown its eagerness to commit genocide against Ukraine and eradicate it culturally.
So he is indeed complicit. The unacceptable terms he wants or likely will suggest (and the unacceptable manner in which he pursues those terms, by negotiating without Ukraine's involvement) -- essentially Ukraine's surrender -- amount, by corollary, to a justification of further Russian aggression when Ukraine rejects them.
> Utter nonsense. He's trying to end the war. That may not happen on terms that make you happy, but people will stop dying which is quite the opposite of what you said
I was going to say just like Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler - but realised that would be grossly unfair on Chamberlain as he never tried to exploit Czechoslovakia for half of its mineral resources.
He is trying to "end the war" on terms that enrich himself, in vainglorious pursuit of a Nobel peace prize, and in a way that will almost inevitably result in a wider conflict very soon. Please don't pretend this is about "people will stop dying". That is utter nonsense.
Putting aside every instinct I have to join the choir voicing every issue I have with blaming the victim and cozying up to the agitator, or to challenge your charitable view of Trump's motivations...
I'm genuinely interested to hear your take on the likely and potential repercussions of rewarding Russia/Putin for their aggression. What makes you confident that they won't reasonably perceive this outcome as tacit permission to start coming for other territory?
Putin loves working off maps from the 1800s. Finland, for example, is a likely future target.
Not to be hyperbolic, but there's a good reason you aren't supposed to negotiate with terrorists.
> He is making himself complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Ukraine
There's no need for hyperbole. Trump is bad but there's been less than 100,000 Ukrainian deaths (troops and civilians combined) since the beginning of the war in 2022, let alone under his reign.
It might be 100,000 by now: “A confidential Ukrainian estimate from earlier this year [2024] put the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 80,000 and the wounded at 400,000, according to people familiar with the matter.”
[https://archive.ph/5wRcT]
And today Trump blamed the Ukrainians for the war going on for that long, saying they could have stopped it three years ago.
While that might be true (there's a whole ball of wax about whether or not that's true), it's probably not true for combined deaths. No doubt well more than hundred thousand, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than two hundred thousand.
The deaths are tragic. And no matter how many there are, Trump's actions will certainly make the number go up before it stops.
"The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. "
Of course down below it says something like "subject to applicable law".
Nevertheless I think the scary sentence will be stricken by the supreme Court
What it says is bad enough. Those agencies are independent for a reason. They're not supposed to be the president's political agents. Loss of that independence is a serious, damaging thing.
Next question: Why does Trump want control of those agencies? General principles? People around him told him to? Ego (proving that he's the Big Man In Charge)? Or does he actually intend to use that power? If so, for what?
This is a big deal. This is reducing the US federal government's ability to competently govern, and that's going to hurt, in concrete ways, before too long. If this stands, we're going to regret it.
If. I still have hope for the court system to overturn this.
“Attacked” what does this even mean? The courts have zero power in the first place, and never have. The judiciary, all the way back to Marbury v. Madison, has had to rely on the assent from the other branches that its rulings matter.
> and if it goes beyond the scope of executive powers, it will be curtailed or shut down.
The position of the executive order is that only the President can interpret laws, including executive orders about interpreting laws.
That is to say, if the courts try to stop it, Trump may try to say "the courts don't have that power" and order the DoJ and/or military to block anything they do.
Thank you for your comment. Overall, this lifted me up and helped me learn some more about what was in the Declaration. (I went and read it for the first time after seeing your comment.)
> deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Unfortunately, unlike 1776, today's king was given power by the governed, and the majority (of those who care enough to vote) still support him. So I don't know where those of us who are horrified go from here.
With absolutely no malice intended: you step back a bit, lick your wounds, and try to figure out why your message and candidate failed - just like the GOP did for the past four years.
Four years feels like a long time when it has just started; it isn’t so long at all in hindsight. Moreover, you have two years before the next opportunity you have to disempower Trump (midterm elections). The campaigns for those start in a year or so, so if you’re going to cripple Trump by taking back Congress now is the time to be introspective.
The electorate is not irreconcilable, but change doesn’t happen when you double down on the same course.
I enjoy discussing politics, but flagged this because the title is so absurdly far beyond sensationalized and links to a friggin Reddit post which then amps the hyperbole up even further. It's not going to be conducive to interesting or informative discussion for anybody, and seems mostly intended to mislead.
Donald has direct control of entire Federal Gov, controls their budgets, has installed his men in every agency, and will now decide interpretation of law.
Congress and Senate both wholly passive (subverted, I would say).
That leaves the States and the courts. I think the courts will go next.
This is sadly one of the last few places online where rational discussion of the topic by at least some mostly smart people is at all likely to happen. It's also one of the last few places where discussion will get pretty instantly shut down if it devolves into chaos, so let's all at least try our level best to keep those discussions either productive or interesting.
Considering that Silicon Valley exists within the US, it's significant that the US has turned into a dictatorship — the implications are beyond political on this one.
I think it's highly likely that the Democratic party will never govern the United States again.
Every single move the current government is making increasingly seems to be a clever way to stack the chips in their favor in perpetuity.
We seem to be living though the backstory of how some far-off sci-fi civilization came to be, replete with greedy tech corps in the ears and pockets of narcissistic leaders.
The irony is that it's impossible to say if this will ultimately play out as a dystopian horror or a utopian fantasy.
>I think it's highly likely that the Democratic party will never govern the United States again.
I think they will when climate change comes knocking (I'm assuming the US will double down on carbon for some incredible short-term profit). Or at least some version of the democrats i.e. whatever is on the other side.
Propaganda via Xitter successfully got the orange turd elected and the propaganda machine will only get worse (TikTok, deep fakes etc).
Democrats will never hold the presidency again. At best they will occasionally get the House, and I'm not sure until when that still will be a possibility.
It's the equivalent of the cops pulling you over and using a slightly dim tail light to search your entire car, make you get out, spread your legs, and get a pat-down.
Every large government department in every country in the world has some waste. All of them. All of the time.
This is why it's so disingenuous for Trump/Musk supporters to point at tiny bits of waste or whatever and scream "See! See! We found it! They deserve what they got!"
It's not coincidentally one of the justifications used by Russia to invade Ukraine. They claimed they were after Nazis. So what if Ukraine has Nazis!? So does every other damned European country! American has Nazis! Russia has Nazis!
It's the drill sergeant making you do 100 push ups because there was a barely visible scratch on your boots. His boots have scratches too. That's not the point. It's an excuse to make you jump.
My advice is: Any time anyone uses such a claim, or anything like it, always ask yourself: Okay, but what is the base rate for this thing they've suddenly decided is objectionable? Is it higher or lower elsewhere?
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 is hard to imagine this EO standing
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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> This EO eliminates the concept of an illegal order since the law would be whatever the executive interprets it to be.
Isn't this exactly how it works? They interpret it and that stands unless challenged in court.
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> 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.
Good luck to you all - Dog bless.
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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.
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One can hope…
If the Supreme Court and Congress has no enforcement power, though, what recourse is there?
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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.
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This is not up for debate. It is settled law.
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Yes, and as a harmless side effect also ensures Trump's word is law.
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.
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>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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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> Autocracies can be very stable...
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.
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> setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system
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.
> 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.
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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.
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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?
Naive interpretations like this one, of bad faith actions is how we get there.
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?
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“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.
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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.
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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?
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The employees of the executive branch are not intended to be a check on the executive branch's powers. They are the agents of the executive.
The legislative and judicial branches are the checks to executive power.
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> 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.
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There is no next legitimately elected president. They are going to disenfranchise us.
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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.
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I'm still betting Trump does not survive his natural term.
(and I'm not even implying anything. He's turning 79 this year and clearly not in top mental nor physical health).
'The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch'
That's basically what EOs are already.
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
No. EOs can be overturned by congress. This EO says that they can't - ie: there's no checks or balances on the President
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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.
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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?
They're trying to leverage the immunity the Supreme Court gave him to extend to people following his orders.
> 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
I don't read it like that.
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 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.
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> The disincentives that have always prevented the executive from blatantly violating the law are still in force and unchanged.
We’re just gonna pretend Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) doesn’t exist, are we?
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If they were able to follow through on this absolute power would California succession be on the cards?
Realistically, not unless the military fractured and there was a coherent alternative government that some of them aligned with.
There is absolutely no standing up to our military if it is actually deployed against you as a regular citizen without equal military backing.
> 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.
Why would the next guy abide if the current guy won’t?
I still don’t see how this changes anything.
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.
No concept of constitutional supremacy and an end to legal precedent is what you consider to be the norm in USA?
What's your job?
who could have seen this coming
>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.
Difficulty:
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.
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A self-coup.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
Ultimately, I expect this to be taken to the Supreme Court and reigned in.
Don't be surprised if the administration says something to the effect of "the court has made its ruling; let us see them enforce it."
That, or they're hoping that someone will sue so that SCOTUS makes this sort of EO precedent.
The president is the executive branch.
Lawyer here.
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.
https://www.cato.org/blog/white-house-independent-agencies-m...
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What are the real power grabs/most insane things happening now in your opinion?
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.
Just read the Wiki for an intro on the details.
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.
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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.
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What you want is a parliament with proportional representation. Parliaments don't experience gridlock nearly as often.
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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.
If you are going to build a machine that can damage you, build it so that you aren't afraid of it being operated by your worst enemy.
> Eventually, and in fact about 50% of the time - the OTHER team is in power.. and may just push the overreach further.
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?
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That’s why the current administration is going to make sure the other side doesn’t get in power again.
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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.
Yeah, it's the higher-amplitude wobbles of a complex system before it snaps and finds a new equilibrium.
> 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).
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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.
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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.
[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
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.
>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.
Trump also rubbished the trade deals that he himself signed!
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Yes.
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...
> 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.
I don't think so.
"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")
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> 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.)
> legislative gridlock and dysfunction
Isn't this a direct result of "no compromise" policies on one side of the aisle?
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.
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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.
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Yes, and the filibuster.
The causes are more complicated.
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).
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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.
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> 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.
* 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.
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.
I don't think they are a bit loaded at all. What have the last several congresses done that has actually helped the populace?
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> 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.
Well... most of them are.
Or this opened opportunity for dictator to arise.
I wonder which of these two commonly happened in the past.
Was with you 100% until the second half of your final sentence. Can you clarify?
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.
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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.
> imagine if Hitler fired civil servants
He did. It's called "Gleichschaltung", we learned about it in school. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zgtyvcw/revision/4
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. ;-(
(NOTE: Largely reposting a Robert Reich bit of writing in the Quoted areas)
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.
I'd rather have gridlock than Hitler.
Hitler was popular before he became famous as "hitler".
Power abhors a vacuum.
So your interpretation of "give the elected official oversight" is that "checks and balances" and "democracy" are "mere suggestions".
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'?"
Bureaucracy is what happens with _any_ large system. It's unavoidable, and the best you can do is to build institutions that know how to manage it.
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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.
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Always have been.
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.
Bipartisan efforts are what makes Congress work.
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?
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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.
> It's perfectly reasonable for congress to limit how executive agency heads can be hired/fired too.
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.
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There's no more FOIA - Musk had their entire office fired and disbanded.
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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.”
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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.
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So your understanding is that these agencies are part of the legislative branch and the senate/house would have the power to do this?
If it’s that clear will it be easy to take this to the Supreme Court?
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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.
Not unaccountable, just requiring the cooperation of multiple branches to remove.
Cooperation which has been deemed too transparent, too vulnerable to actually caring about what is being destroyed.
What other constitutional procedures require cooperation between branches to make a decision?
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It’s a false narrative that Obama was soft on immigration and even earned the nickname “deporter in chief”.
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.
Obama left office more than a decade ago.
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.
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It's complex.
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?
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The Constitution has the "Due Care Clause."
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 Legislature can impeach the Administration
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?
There’s prosecutorial discretion. If Congress doesn’t like it, impeachment is the remedy.
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.
>But our government doesn’t have independent branches.
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.
Powers are enumerated in the constitution. So it’s not a question of what the constitution says they can’t do.
It would be strange if congress can designate untouchable officials. Why don’t they just grant themselves office for life?
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How many executive functions can they seize?
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.
> The reason for this law is simply to bring the various agencies under executive authority in line.
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.
> 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.
Because including them would cause an immediate worldwide economic crisis as everyone pulls their money from US bonds.
Why aren't they pre-emptively doing that?
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He’s scared of them.
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.
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It begins: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/musk-looks-at-auditing-t...
The new Commerce secretary controls massive amounts of Tether.
Elon Musk’s entire net worth is tied up in stocks.
If Tesla crashed, so would Elon’s power.
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The "Federal Reserve" is not a government entity is it? I thought it was a private banking cartel?
NO and yes. The federal reserve is complex, technically a private banking cartel, but there is a lot of government control over it.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/musk-looks-at-auditing-t...
It seems to me that the operative line:
> 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)
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> 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
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Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy.
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.
> Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy.
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.
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> 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.
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The money supply is not zero sum. Private lenders create money when they lend and are paid back the loan with interest.
It’s also why there’a always some level of inflation: Modest inflation is a sign of a healthy economy.
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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
Inflation is a tax on the value of money. Those who can get a return on their money best can avoid some of the tax. Those people are the wealthy.
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.
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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.
Emergencies must be renewed annually by the President. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12170:
> 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."
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There’s a lot of common sense “should” statements that are true and will never happen
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.
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".
Wow thanks man for sharing! This is so unexpected, I thought you're trolling! But google search doesn't lie: https://www.history.com/news/national-state-of-emergency-us-....
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".
For anyone interested in some more reading about the exact nature of the powers and Congress's attempts at limiting it, I found this link to be a decent introduction: https://protectdemocracy.org/work/presidential-emergency-pow...
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.
It's mostly the Republicans fault, but it didn't help that Biden supported it too, in spite of how other top Democrats felt:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/27/democrats-biden-som...
> Republicans won a lot of elections
A lot of them thanks to the results of blatant gerrymandering.
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Would that be from Iran?
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).
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There's a bit of background at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5152723-donald-t....
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.
Honestly dang, I'm seeing mostly not thoughtful substantive commentary here, just ideological battling.
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?
I'm seeing a lot of helpful discussion, and I'm learning a lot. It's been easy for me to skip over the hyperbole.
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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://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
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Here's a recent answer about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
Between those two coconut halves I hope there's a fairly complete coconut, but if you (or anyone) still have a question, let me know!
American Politics = world politics unfortunately.
"run of the mill"
Experts across the political spectrum say what is happening at the moment is unprecedented in US history.
It’s not your imagination, political articles that are normally flagged are being unflagged manually by dang. He discussed this recently.
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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.
I've never read an explanation of gender that couldn't be summed up as "one's personality".
Heh, I can't tell if the downvotes are pro-gender studies, anti-gender studies, or just don't want to hear about gender studies.
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That "essentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Please point me to a specific Executive Order issued during Biden's administration that resulted in "forced speech."
On the other hand, the current administration has issued Executive Orders, memoranda, and other official communications that very explicitly direct government agencies to engage in censorship, with the National Science Foundation going as far as to compile a list of sensitive words, flagging any materials including words such as "woman", "female", "disability", and "LGBT."
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1388501/dl?inline
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-s...
This is untrue
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>A White House Liaison is to be installed in every independent regulatory agency to enforce direct presidential control
Wow. Literally installing political officers in agencies.
How very Soviet; installing political commissars to spy on renegades and ensure everyone on the right side of the Politburo^w President.
Sounds about right. Trump worships Putin, and Putin misses the Soviet Union.
Incidentally, this is still how it works in China today.
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.
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Political commissars
> The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
Seems fine that the bureaucrats to whom executive power is delegated should be answerable to the executive.
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".
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Yeah this is a key tenant of the MAGA 2016 and 2024 campaigns: draining the swamp, fighting the deep state, etc.
How else is the executive supposed to align fed bureaucrats to his goals?
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It works for red China, why not the USA too?
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?
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My understanding is that politicians are elected whereas bureaucrats are not.
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.
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“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum...
I have never read this, but I really really enjoyed it. It is a great and succinct explanation of the circumstances leading up to a civil war. Very applicable to the situation in the U.S. today.
Wait DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is real?? I live an ocean apart from the U.S and all this time I thought it was a meme.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...
Depends who you ask. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-scores-win-suit-chall...
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"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" - ah, one of those Government things where the title is exactly what it is not. "Department of Justice", there's another.
The phrase you are looking for is "Orwellian doublespeak".
Who is actually behind all these executive orders?
Do they all originate by the President saying "I want X" in reaction to something, and lawyers figuring out how to do X?
Do some of them originate with a wishlist of some extremist think tank or powerful people, and they finally found a President who'll rubberstamp them?
Other?
They put out a whole playbook called Project 2025, developed by a bunch of insane people at the Heritage Foundation. Trump lied and said he didn't know anything about it. Now they're doing it.
Actually, he said during the Kamala debate that it had "some good ideas and some bad ideas" to my recollection.
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Not only did they put out a playbook, they actively recruited and screened people to take government positions. I read a post on Reddit from someone who went through the training. The whole idea was to find ideological supporters. Trump's problem in 2016 was that he wasn't prepared and relied a lot on existing government supporters and established GOP figures, who weren't completely loyal. This time, they were prepared. That's the reason why he's been able to move so quickly in the first month.
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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 other words, "I will interpret the law for you, from now on. Don't attempt to read the law yourself."
There are no laws in Oceania, only crimes.
Direct link to the order : https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu...
In short, Trump is claiming full and direct authority and control over any and all federal agencies, with the express directive of "The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. "
Basically : L'État, c'est moi.
> Section 1. Policy and Purpose. [..] Since it would be impossible for the President to single-handedly perform all the executive business of the Federal Government [..]
Yup. You gotta have some time left to golf with your cronies..
Nuclear-armed dictatorship, and the strongest military power on the planet, run by Donald Trump.
All bets now off.
Well he is talking about disarming US nukes
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“ Sec. 7. Rules of Conduct Guiding Federal Employees’ Interpretation of the Law. The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. 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.”
This does not bode well for that country’s democracy.
I think a lot of people that are freaking out are missing that this applies to the executive branch, over whom the President has already perfectly well established. Literally the first statement of article 2 of the US Constitution (which lays out the power/rules for the executive branch) is "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."
The main point of this executive order is likely part of the ongoing issues related to the chevron deference. [1] Chevron deference [1] was a (IMO very weird) legal standard that was overturned in 2024. It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous. When this was overturned, the judiciary regained their independence and were once again able to hear and independently judge cases around these executive departments.
This order is now stating that the executive branch departments themselves will no longer be independently interpreting the law at all, but instead defer to the legal opinions of the head of the executive. The order itself also makes it clear that it does not allow rejecting or unreasonably redefining the laws applying to the various departments - instead the main issue is where potential ambiguities and related limits/allowances will be determined. And of course those determinations could then be challenged by either the judiciary or the legislative (by passing overriding laws).
The short version of this is "Executive departments will now be directly accountable to all three branches of government - executive, legislative, and judicial."
[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/chevron_deference
This is just a statement of the unitary executive theory. Unitary executive theory is controversial, and the controversy there did not (until, oh about last month) align with party lines.
We’re not “missing” anything, your interpretation of the Constitution is incorrect. You may want to scroll up and read Article I, which constrains Article II (that’s why it comes first).
Your understanding of Chevron deference is also incorrect, for what it’s worth.
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> this applies to the executive branch
So he gets to tell police what the law is and who to arrest within the "law" that he proclaimed.
> It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous.
Why doesn’t congress do its job and write laws that do things?
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You're misunderstanding the EO. It has nothing to do with the Chevron deference (and you are also misunderstanding the impact of the Chevron deference)
No - it’s a statement that the executive branch will (as a matter of policy) ignore Judicial and Congressional oversight. Unless it wants it, anyway.
This has nothing to do with "democracy" in any way. This is the equivalent of a CEO publishing a memo telling employees how to interpret things that happen outside of the company (e.g., new laws, social trends, etc.) It's the CEO's job to align their workforce to have the same interpretation of information. Federal judges can still rule on issues brought before them but the judges have to provide Constitutional- or precedent-related rulings.
Why are Americans acting so surprised that the President has this authority? That is his job, as it was for all presidents before him. This executive order is saying that the "employees under the CEO" do not have the authority to usurp the "CEO's" interpretations of law. Checks and balances still apply, of course; Congress can intervene if the President is acting in ways that Congress doesn't like. That's what impeachment is for--and impeachment is a process regardless of whether the President is issuing "illegal" executive orders or doing something else like what Nixon did.
The process works; blame Congress for not holding the President accountable in the ways outlined by the Constitution.
I have a puzzle for you:
Let's say we have a democracy where the only rule is highest vote wins. Let's say 51% of the people vote to enslave/oppress the other 49%.
Maybe they vote for literal chattel slavery. Maybe they vote for healthcare for themselves but not the others. Maybe they vote to tax the others at the maximum possible or implement tax policies that dis-proportionally affect the 49%. Maybe they vote the 49% cannot own homes and therefore must pay rent to a landlord. Maybe they vote that the 49% must register for the draft, but not them. Maybe they vote that the 49% aren't eligible for public school while they are. Maybe they vote that the 49% is not able to own stock or register for a company. Let's pretend those are legal, it is definitely possible. Slavery at one point was constitutionally allowed.
Is that a Democracy? A Liberal Democracy? A Democratic Republic? A Constitutional Democratic Republic if the law were enshrined on paper?
Would you want to live in that country? Would you want to live in that country if you were in the 49%?
What is the key ingredient that makes something a "Democracy" rather than tyranny of the majority, "mob rule," or "might makes right"?
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If you ignore all context, their support of the unitary executive (anti-american) theory, and the recent comments that "if a president does it, it isn't breaking the law" and "going against the will of the president is going against the will of the people"...
If you ignore ALL of that then you have a talking point worth debating.
Because people in independent agencies are by act protected from exactly these things. Think for a bit, why were they not just called "agencies"?
And for all the stupidity of congress, if the fail to protect against a self-coup, that doesn't make it any less likely.
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This EO, combined with his proclamation that "He who saves the country does not violate any law" paint a very concerning picture. This has, historically speaking, been the language of tyrants. No President is above the law, nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary.
“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins”
"He who saves the country" sounds suspiciously close to the "Founder Mode" thinking that Valley CEOs have been bandwagoning behind.
It’s a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte. The funny part is that Napoleon soon found out he was completely wrong.
> nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary
Everyone tasked with enforcing a law must necessarily interpret its meaning. The judiciary gets the final say though.
you are mixing up different meanings for the word "interpret". "Authoritative Interpreting law" (or in general interpreting law) doesn't mean "trying to understand what it means" but means "deciding what it means in practice"
especially if you add a "authoritative" in the front it in legal language means they gave themself the right (i.e. authority) to decide (i.e. interpret) how law should be interpreted, i.e. what the meaning behind the written word is in practice
this is 100% without doubt or question not compatible with any democracy (including the US constitution) and is pretty much one of the default approaches Dictators use to get unchecked authority
It means that in practice (assuming people comply with the EO) means they can do whatever they want as they can just willfully absurdly, but with authority , misinterpret laws. Including to e.g. persecute judges which "step out of line", or members of the senate which don't vote for whatever he wants etc.
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At least on criminal matters, pardons over-ride the judicial branch.
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Who will enforce following the law if the executive branch ignores the judicial?
In theory the military is sworn to defend the constitution, but if the DOD is headed by a Trump loyalist (it is), then what?
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The Supreme Court literally said that Trump has absolute immunity for criminal use of presidential power. Combined with the statistical impossibility of a 2/3 senate majority for impeachment, this is a license to grab as much power as that same court will allow.
What's kind of fascinating is the way they've introduced things like the Major Questions Doctrine (MQD), which asserted the importance (really, necessity, in their view) of Congress's explicit delegation powers, as a way to curtail agency actions. But then faced with something like this EO, they seem quite obviously faced with something that runs up against the fact the Congress gave explicit statutes for how and what they should do. As far as I'm aware, the statues creating these agencies don't explicitly give the president this power...which raises a clear MQD consistency issue for the supreme court.
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Republican Senators want this. It's not about statistics. They believe in this stupid Unitary Executive thing (aka, we should have a King).
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I don’t think that’s an accurate description of the decision. I think that it stated that when the President exercises core constitutional power (e.g. the pardon power, or the veto power) then the exercise itself cannot be illegal. I’m not sure if the decision of the Court left open the possibility that the conduct around the exercise of such power can be illegal. If so, then this could be a distinction without much difference: for example, issuing a pardon may not itself ever be criminal, but taking a bribe to issue a pardon is separate from issuing the pardon itself. To some extent, I think that some of this does flow from the structure of the Constitution itself, but I’m not convinced that phrasing it in terms of immunity is particularly helpful.
Then there’s a rebuttable presumption of immunity for more conduct. I don’t see that this flows from the Constitution, but perhaps it flows from judicial decisions over the past two centuries? ‘When the President does something official, he probably is immune, but maybe he’s not, and he could still be prosecuted from crimes he commits around the immune act’ doesn’t seem terribly meaningful.
It sounds a bit to me like saying that a citizen is immune from prosecution for his vote, but not for selling it or whatever. But I’m not a lawyer, and I could be wrong.
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Well, yes, that's how the system works: a determined President can, in fact, grab as much power as the Supreme Court will allow. That's literally what the Supreme Court is there for.
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I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how legal immunity equates to legal authority.
If you are a government employee and Trump orders you to do something that exceeds his authority, can't you still say no? It seems like the Supreme Court only said that Trump can't get in trouble for asking. I don't think the court said that you have to answer yes.
I'm not trying to say that we're in a great position here or that immunity doesn't have some very destructive effects. But I am saying that we shouldn't act as if he has powers that the Supreme Court hasn't given him.
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A competent Joe Biden would've taken that ruling, said "thank you very much" and "cleaned house" with Seal Team Six of select judges and politicians and then pardoned everyone involved.
The fact that SCOTUS wasn't even slightly concerned about that happening belies the problem: the Democrats are ineffectual by design. They knew Biden would throw his hands up citing "norms" and "institutions" as an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
SCOTUS completely invented a concept of presidential immunity out of thin air to derail the criminal prosecutions. They also deliberaly took their time. Remember when Jack Smith tried to appeal directly to SCOTUS because everyone knew it was going to end up there? Instead, SCOTUS put everything on hold for another 6 months as a delaying tactic.
Even then, the opinion is rushed and haphazard and not at all well thought out. Some in the conservative supermajority allegedly wanted to punt the issue to the next term.
The presidential immunity decision is so brazenly political. The Roberts court will go down in history for the kinds of awful decisions in the 1840s and 1850s that led up to the Civil War.
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Your courts and judiciary don't have any power - he'll just write an EO to release people. Senate and Congress likewise - meaningless talking shops.
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“Criminal use of presidential power” is a bit of an oxymoron, which is why people are getting wrapped up in knots here.
The Supreme Court said, if the Constitution authorizes the President to do it, then he can’t be criminally prosecuted. That doesn’t mean blanket immunity!
>paint a very concerning picture
Donald Trump is trying to be dictator. He has been doing all but wearing a sign around his neck saying so for a long time. Please don't act surprised. It is not the time for quotes or being shocked at his actions.
He's literally said he wants to be a dictator.
He's saluted Kim Jong-Un's generals. He's bent the knee to Vladimir Putain He's whined that it's not fair that he doesn't have the powers that Xi Jinping does.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, it was widely known that Donald Trump was a fraud and a complete clown. It will be studied for decades how many people just willingly gave up their ability to call a spade a spade and ignore reality when it comes to Donald Trump. How did people become so fucking stupid?
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> No President is above the law, nor does the President "interpret" the law
On paper, but not in practice, sadly.
The meaning of the Constitution has been bent to serve Trump's will. He violated the law constantly during his first term, was not held accountable for the electoral violations or coup, and is now violating the law again. He's gotten away with it every single time.
I'm sorry to say this. You are describing an America that no longer exists. We live in a new country with new rules that we don't quite understand yet.
I mean, he's been using dictator language for years now. This is certainly concerning, but it's nothing new.
Just remember, none of this was a surprise. It was advertised ie Project 2025. It is the culmination of the 50+ year Republican Project.
And yet we had no opposition to it. The Biden administration and Kamala Harris were more interested in defending and providing material support for war crimes than stopping any of this.
The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.
It’s quite literally “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” They throw their hands up and surrender. You want a playbook? Look at what the Republicans did at any point from 2010 to 2016 and just do any of that.
I think it was definitely bad that Joe held on so long before letting Kamala run but incumbents lost globally[0], not just here in the US. People aren't happy with the effects COVID had, which is valid, but misplaced the blame which is how we got here.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/global-elections-2024-incumbents-...
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No. Since 2016, leftist democrats have promised that if only the democratic party moves far left enough, they will unlock some kind of secret progressive majority. This has been repudiated at every turn, most resoundingly in the last presidential election. The demographics that the leftist democrats had appointed themselves the saviors of went over to Trump, along with the tech industry which had formerly been a huge source of monetary and intellectual capital for the democrats.
Unfortunately, the democratic party seems to be unable to make the necessary adjustment and return to the winning formula of the Obama years because the political hobbyists and professionals that make up the core of the party have purity-tested out anyone with more mainstream views. If they aren't careful, they will end up as a party representing only university HR administrators.
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> The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.
It's been like this for decades, and is why I haven't voted for a democatic party candidate for president in that time. Living in California, it doesn't even matter, all of the electoral votes go to the dems anyway.
This is all a consequence of the US still governing with an organization that was designed in 1776. After WWII european contries reorged their governments as well as their physical infrastructure. The wswitched to propotional representation with parlamentary style governments. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot closer than what we have in the US.
With presidenatial electrions decided by 7 states, and by a small minority of the voters in those states, something like 1% of the US population is deciding the outcome.
Neither dems nor reps want to change this. There is no real hope for actual democracy in the US...
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The Dems were more afraid of the Israel lobby than they were of an actual Nazi movement seizing power over the country. Money has totally erased any semblance of morality from governance in the United States.
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> and I am not really worried that he might do a lot of damage
"His" "policy" of firing a large portion of the federal workforce is going to come crashing into the private sector very shortly when it comes time to renew contracts. That's not even mentioning what's about to happen to the job market when the unemployment rate skyrockets all at once and the private sector only has low income positions to offer - or none at all. Republicans are flirting with defaulting on US debt too, which will damage the value of USD - catastrophic when he's throwing tariffs around like confetti. That people keep posting things like "I'm not too worried" is mind-boggling. That's _only_ discussing the financial disaster to the economy and not the plethora of other problems Republicans are signing off on.
Napoleon was a tyrant too.
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I see him more as a Caesar. In this analogy, Musk would sort of be Augustus. The senate still existed, and there were still consuls and all the trappings of a republic, but he was made princeps. It was a title with no significant official power, but he had the real power. At this point, it seems to me like Musk is more powerful than Trump. He owns Trump. Trump only wants power. He doesn’t care what it’s for. Musk is on a mission.
I don’t see how anyone could NOT be concerned that they’d do damage. They’ve already done irreparable damage. All the norms we used to have in place are gone. It’s anything goes.
> I don't really want to agree to it, and I am not really worried that he might do a lot of damage, but it is difficult to see it otherwise.
See perhaps "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days":
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
I don't like using the Hitler comparison because it makes people have a kneejerk reaction and tune you out, but it is plainly undeniable that Trump makes many statements that could be attributed, word for word, to any number of authoritarians and tyrants throughout history.
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He seems more like Pinochet than anything (maybe without the murdering). Neoliberal deregulation, privatizing state owned assets, etc. while consolidating power to himself. Which ended up in extreme economic inequality and fear of opposing the ruler.
This EO says nothing about the Judicial branch and presents a perfectly reasonable policy statement about how legal decisions and interpretation should be made within the executive branch. What specific language in this EO do you have a problem with?
I’m no fan of Trump, but this pattern of people hallucinating that Trump said something he didn’t and then freaking out about their nonexistent hallucination, is getting very tiresome.
Consider this hypothetical: a federal judge rules against the Trump administration's firing of the inspectors general and must offer the fired employees their positions back. The Attorney General says the judge overstepped his constitutional power and calls the ruling invalid. What should the person who would've rehired the employees do?
Continue that hypothetical further: the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, who agrees with the federal judge. The executive branch continues to ignore the order. The Attorney General is held in contempt of court and fined a large amount of money. Who's going to collect it? Any executive branch employee trying to carry out that fine would be violating this executive order, and be dismissed. So the fine would never happen.
Considering the president and vice president's recent disdain for judicial rulings against them, this may happen.
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I'm not sure what hallucinations you're talking about, given that this whole catastrophe has been one big "I told you so" thus far. By a bit of inductive reasoning we can predict that it will continue. (And it's not like it requires any special predictive abilities given that they told us during the campaign what they were and are planning to do.)
https://archive.is/g6ElI
“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.
“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.
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Imagine finding absolutely no issue with an EO that uses phrases like “so-called independent regulatory agencies”.
This is what Germans must have felt like in 1933.
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What is it that you think this EO says? The first Trump administration went all the way to the Supreme Court to establish that he could coerce ALJs. There are already extensive internal checks on FTC, SEC, and FCC --- places where to exercise independent power those agencies still need the cooperation of DOJ.
There's a clear norms violation happening here, but I don't see the power grab everybody else is seeing. These are powers the Presidency already had.
> These are powers the Presidency already had.
Then what, in your mind, is the purpose of this EO?
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The terrifying thin i learned recently is that norms are how laws work.
This i learned from a discussion between a magistrate and legal scholar.
This means that a norm violation, practically speaking, is a law violation. Which i guess is a crime. But that has to go to the courts to be judged.
Uncommon tptacek L. "extensive internal checks" that's laughable given what's been going on lately with the executive overreach.
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nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary.
That is incorrect, the president’s responsibility is to execute the laws of the United States. In order to execute a law, one must interpret it.
The exclusive domain of the judiciary is the power to adjudicate cases. In order to adjudicate a case involving a law, one must also interpret.
> In order to execute a law, one must interpret it.
This isn't true.
> The exclusive domain of the judiciary is the power to adjudicate cases. In order to adjudicate a case involving a law, one must also interpret.
This is actually true.
> In order to execute a law, one must interpret it.
I mean, yes, but in a non-judicial sense. The judiciary has the constitutionally assigned duty to give binding interpretations in the course of adjudicating cases.
More firings of those who refuse to break the law...
From a person who watched a single man taking over a whole country over, US is going down the same path.
Is anyone still doubting that what's happening is the actual death of American Democracy? Anyone still willing to argue that this is about freedom and cutting waste?
I would argue that this is not the end of your country's democracy and that in 2028 a new president will be elected.
You'd disagree, I trust?
What's your argument?
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A new president, sure. But an opponent? We'll see I guess.
Remember when Trump said "we wouldn't have to vote ever again"? That was 3 months ago, so maybe your memory doesn't go that far.
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I think a lot more American need to read the Constitution.
The reading levels for the average american are not fit for that really.
A lot more Americans need to read beyond the Constitution and read case law.
As Americans that believe in the Republic, what exactly are we supposed to do about this? Should we continue to implore congress to take action against this lawless behavior?
I called both my senators' offices yesterday, because I still haven't gotten a response to my emails from a few weeks ago. Still waiting to hear back.
I also told them that working on legislation for protecting George C Marshall's house, and protecting bourbon, are not valuable uses of their time given the destruction currently being waged on the US Government.
I think that the most effective way to get change would be if the economy tanked, that's the one thing the electorate seems to be motivated by. A general strike would be one way to do that, but I doubt that one could be organized on any meaningful scale. I'd love to be wrong about that.
I'm trying to restrict my spending as much as possible. No new car, no vacation (or at least nothing big), limiting eating out, etc. I'm cutting back on as many unnecessary expenses as I can, and being mindful of what businesses I do spend my money on.
I’m gonna be straight with you. I used to think this way — that living small was a form of protest against the ills of society. But life is too short. For many of us, that cardiac arrest, car accident, or pandemic-related terminal illness is right around the corner. Don’t say no to things that bring meaning, joy, purpose, and expansion to your life. You only have one life to live.
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First, don't listen to the "we're so f*cked" posts on reddit. Only actions lead to results.
If you are a Republican but don't approve of how the GOP majority has basically rolled over and abdicated its duty as a check on the president, remind your congresspeople that they owe loyalty to their constituents, not to other politicians. Taxpayers pay their salaries.
The Democratic party is also in desperate need of repairs if you are interested in direct political action. They have been self-destructing over the past couple of years, plagued by infighting, deer-in-the-headlights paralysis, political tone-deafness, and incompetence in messaging.
In addition, the increasingly authoritarian shift by the Federalist society ought to make room for a new counterpart promoting the rule of law. IANAL but have always wondered why the Federalist society had no similarly prominent opposing organization.
I am furious at the Democratic Party for bringing this about. They are the only organization capable of losing to this guy TWICE. With everything at stake, they actually thought it was a good idea to put up an unpopular president who had dementia, and tried to sneak him past the electorate like this is Weekend at Bernie’s 3. Then when that idea collapses, they just give it to the default next person in line. This should have been an easy win.
They got us here. The party needs to be gutted.
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> As Americans that believe in the Republic, what exactly are we supposed to do about this?
If you are in a red state/district, first step would be to contact your elected federal rep(s) and tell them that you're displeased.
Use language like "Trump was elected to correct Biden's overreach, but he's now overreaching in a much worse way." Put it in language where you frame things like a 'Constitutionalist' and 'limited government'. The stereotypical small-government, Originalist GOPer.
If you come off sounding like a Democrat they'll probably ignore you, but if the (so-called) 'grass roots' MAGA folks are thought to be upset then you'll probably get more traction.
Or you'll just be ignored regardless.
Where are the mass protests? Are there even any people in the streets?
They're happening. And they're not getting much media coverage. It may be that we're at the point where this isn't an effective tactic.
I'll assume you weren't there on Monday then? It was even a day off for a lot of people.
There is no social cohesion or solidarity in the US, that's the biggest problem
In France if they'd raise the price of baguettes by 10% you'd have strikes from teachers, public transportation drivers, dock workers, train drivers, doctors, trash truck drivers, &c. all at once, after a week it would be complete chaos and the government would have no choice but to negotiate
In the US everyone is playing their little game on their side, decades of free for all capitalism at work
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Honestly, I donate enough money to politicians to make them stand up and take notice when I email or call them and share my thoughts, which leads me to the conclusion that people in the middle and lower class are going to need to find ways to pool money in such a way that they can change their party politics. It's not that all politicians are completely motivated by money, but IMO you unfortunately have to aim at the lowest common denominator.
You can only donate $3500 to any politician. (legally, if you do something illegal and are not caught...). There are complex limits notice when you say something. (for a small city that limit will make them listen, but nothing national or even a large city)
What you can do is get out votes. People knocking on doors is still one of the largest drivers of votes so if you organize those systems they will listen to you.
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In my personal life, I have resolved not to be silent if confronted with a pro-Trump opinion being voiced. To state unequivocally and without needing to elaborate that what is occurring is something un-American and goes beyond partisan differences, that Trump and his lieutenants are destroying our Federal government for a generation or more while permanently damaging our place among democracies in the world. That the people who voted for him are making America a worse and weaker country for their children.
I'm going to write essays to those I care about and also coordinate action plans with like minded individuals to be ready for scenarios of neo-nazi rallies or certain extreme behaviors, should they occur in my city.
I'm debating protesting solo with signs along our roads; someone did that recently in my city and said they had to flee because Trump supporters surrounded him and threatened him. But it needs done.
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You should probably stop believing. The fiction of government checks and balances brought you here.
It is winter, come springtime the protests will be huge
The actual answer here is to exercise actual power.
Oligarchs are always greatly outnumbered.
The only thing that is genuinely effective is mass movement. A coalition of labor unions could shut down all of Elon and Trumps businesses in hours. Block the entrances to the factories. General strikes, boycotts, that kind of thing. It’s not actually that complicated.
Instead the modern Democratic Party is in love with appeals to the referees. They think that if they can just convince some court or The NY Times editorial board or a 75 year old former republican special prosecutor they’ll win.
As we have seen that approach is a total and complete failure.
If someone in opposition was able to generate mass collective action however the change would be swift. Nobody is really trying that though.
The modern Dem party, is sadly boring and correct.
I think they need to split their approach into two.
One for to keep Their base energized.
One to use the system and protect itself. The courts, the local elections.
What is being taken out are the systems that run the country. The dems have to be the one to defend it.
But frankly, I think the battleground is a media battleground.
What the modern Democratic Party knows, but understandably doesn’t go around trumpeting, is that they cannot organize mass collective action because there’s not enough people on their side. You talk about “a coalition of labor unions”, but even union members barely lean Democratic these days. There’s very few groups outside of the Democratic Party infrastructure which are polarized enough to take a side.
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That "guidance" is not so easy when the tyrant has control of the most powerful military the planet has ever seen
I have no idea how you even propose that to happen
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I hope it doesn't go that far, but it is always an option. It only has a chance of working if the army either goes with, or at least is so divided they won't stand against you.
Trump is bringing up the point that this Republic's constitution only provides for three branches of a government, not 4.
This reminds me of a supreme Court ruling a few years ago where the rights of native Indians had been trampled on in Oklahoma for 100 years. The court said something like "well, now that you bring it up--stop it!"
Trump is bringing up the point that all employees of the executive branch owe fealty to him, and must act directly in accordance with is directives above Congress.
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Yeah, way to go Trump! Nothing better than securing the Lockean virtue of the unspoken 4th branch of government by...
checks notes
Castrating the other 2 in an effort to consolidate the third! Yeah!!
In Germany the legal executive branch is “Weisungsgebunden” which mean it follows the lead of the politicians instead of acting on own behalf. Because of this international warrants which come from Germany do not get followed since they can’t be trusted.
It would be better to have independent judges but hey it doesn’t lead to a dictatorship and the end of the world directly as propagated everywhere.
> independent judges
Judges are independent in Germany. Prosecutors are not.
> Because of this international warrants which come from Germany do not get followed since they can’t be trusted.
I think you mean the European Arrest Warrant[1], and you are right that it is not accepted when issued by German prosecuters, because they are not indepepndent[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Arrest_Warrant [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europ%C3%A4ischer_Haftbefehl#D... [2]
> Judges are independent in Germany. Prosecutors are not.
Exactly! It's the same in Austria btw. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_(Deutschland)#Dienstau... and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staatsanwaltschaft_(Deutschlan...
You say these things as if the very frameworks of our country were not under attack. I think it's hard to describe how far beyond our constitution we really are here. Our constitution and especially our institutions are no match for what the right wing is doing.
maybe not dictatorship but blatant abuse of power by the government.
Judges in Germany are independent and most of the time appointed for life. German state attorneys are not independent. Their warrants are not recognized internationally, not even in the EU in fact.
This will probably get flagged, but if you read this, spent a few minutes trying to understand the gravity of this specific EO. Every federal employee even in independent agents must and will jump when Trump says so. Even if he asks them to do something illegal (close the congress! Jail a democrat!), they must follow his orders. Because HIS interpretation of the law cannot be superseded.
If he wanted to fire anyone who disagreed with him, this EO wouldn’t have been necessary. With very few exceptions, executive branch employees serve at the pleasure of the President.
This is how it is, how it has been, and is entirely consistent with the Constitution.
So, if not that, then why issue this EO?
First of all, it’s a statement: “Resistance to this agenda from within the executive branch will not be effective”
Secondly, it helps ensure that when the President issues a statement, it’s not immediately met with bureaucrats making statements to the contrary.
You’re wrong, many jobs are protected by congressional law. The executive branch can’t do just anything he wants. Sure some agencies he can but now all. This shit was decided a long time ago and there are several laws covering it. Congress is not doing their job and impeaching and firing this president. GOP don’t care if he’s a criminal as long as he is their criminal
> If he wanted to fire anyone who disagreed with him, this EO wouldn’t have been necessary.
Nonsense! This is the exact opposite! This is EO shows Trump trying even harder to fire all the people who refuse to go along with his crimes.
He is asserting that when the Judicial branch concludes his firings are illegal, he's going to ignore it, and then fire anyone else who refuses to help him illegally fire people.
It's the democracy-destroying version of a Monty Python sketch: The people who followed the law have been sacked. The people who didn't sack the people who followed the law have also been sacked.
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What is an “independent agency”? Which branch of the government is that a part of? Which electoral representative do they report to?
I dunno, it makes sense that the federal branch that manages interest rates is independent of the president. Didn't we have a whole thing where Trump couldn't force rate increases or decreases back in 2020? Do we really want Trump to declare interest rate changes via tweeting or whatever?
What about things like drug approvals? I don't want Trump to ban certain drugs just because they didn't donate to his campaign. I don't want Trump to approve Elon Musk's brain chips just because Musk told him to.
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So disappointed by the irrational and hyperbolic comments from my fellow nerds. Why are folks reading into this so much!? Clearly folks aren’t actually reading the content and just reacting based on a headline. Read, contemplate, compose. This really shouldn’t be an inflammatory exec order - from what I can tell this is precisely within the purview of a POTUS and precisely in line with historical exec orders. Why the cray cray reactions? Just cause Trump I guess. For shame. Be nerds. Look stuff up. Stop with the hyperbolic “fascist” “coup” business. If you disagree with strategy, fine!! But at least recognize that these ideas aren’t new - nor fascistic - they’re inherently American and we’re in the midst of an adjustment cycle where these old ideals will be expressed in new modalities that we don’t all agree with. Doesn’t make it “fascist”. Ugh. So juvenile.
Rather than gesturing generally at all of these "irrational" and "hyperbolic" comments, why not take the time to thoughtfully rebut any specific comment that you believe is engaging in irrationality and hyperbole?
I would also cool it with the dismissive tone and avoid saying things like "cray cray" before accusing anyone else of being juvenile.
Kushner said it best. "Noone goes as low as Trump." So you also get to deal with what politics looks like when it reaches its lowest, nastiest form.
Trump's a hero to the right, but on the left there's a pretty reasonable sense that Trump's actions have already amounted to literal treason if you consider him to have an obligation to uphold the oaths he has taken.
He attempted to get Zelensky to go on US TV and execute a political attack on Democrats as a condition of the US helping Ukraine.
He attempted to get the 2020 election flipped by making mafia-don style calls to Georgia asking them to "find" precisely the number of votes which would have made him win that election. He next asked Pence to change the result for him. All of these were acts of open treason against the People of the United States, so long as you count the People of the United States as including people who didn't vote for him.
To make it crystal f**ing clear: him changing the policy of the US isn't treason. Cozying up to Russia or trying to reduce the size of the government are his prerogative as elected leader in a way that trying to change the result of an election is not. Ohh yeah and I forgot that he tried to get everyone to stop counting the votes while he was ahead! That also goes in the treason most foul bucket.
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What's your personal threshold for gatekeeping when people are supposed to call it fascist?
Have you done your nerd research on how Nazis dismantled the democratic state? If so, at what step would you have gatekept calling it fascist?
Blanket calling worried people as "juvenile" as a dismissal is in itself pretty fucking juvenile, hope you can see that.
Progressives are using words like Nazi and fascist, purely as a slur against a political rival, without really understanding what those words mean nor the attrocities they represent.
What the Nazi's did was horrifici, and it's incredibly insensitive, inappropriate, and, yes, juvenile, to water that down by using it for political point scoring.
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This is not hyperbolic. In one month Trump has taken full unchecked power on almost anything. In 4 years, you won’t vote, that’s a given.
Republicans were saying the exact same thing when Obama was elected.
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So when 4 years pass and we’re still voting, are you going to admit you are hyperbolic and divorced from reality?
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5a - consistency with the President not the law. Classic principle of Russia and the likes.
This whole situation really goes to show that both the judiciary and the legislature need to be greatly expanded -- probably by 10 fold or more. Even if you greatly reduce the size of the federal government.
The executive employs approximately 3,000,000 employees. The federal judiciary only employs about 30,000 total, and the legislature about 20,000 total. The sheer velocity with which the executive can ram through questionable directives *and have them executed upon* (despite the law) means the other "co-equal" branches of government are always potentially on the back foot. It's just a personnel game. Trump has only highlighted how absurdly easy it is to abuse this imbalance.
And after the Chevron and Trump decisions, it's only going to get worse and worse. I do think these Federalist Society types who pushed these unitary executive theory ideas have now created a monster. They've created a situation where the executive has immunity to simply apply the law however it wants, clogging up the judiciary with civil and federal suits, and where the Congress cannot pass laws fast enough or with great enough specificity to avoid defying Chevron or avoid executive misapplication. Meanwhile the executive has long since moved on from the original issue to the next 10 issues, and the next 10, and the next 10, while the courts and the Congress are still only getting started on the first few problems. And the executive will never really get "punished" for these actions because of its supposed immunity.
And presidential elections don't really help with this problem. Because one president has 4 years to drastically reshape everything, and the next president will spend all of their 4 years reverting it, dropping all the previous suits, creating its own litany of new suits, and rinse and repeat. The hysteresis of this process is too long and leads to instability and chaos.
What about Chevron is a problem in this particular case, though? My understanding is that ditching the doctrine of Chevron deference puts more power back in the hands of the judiciary.
Historic times we are living in.
When the history books are written, this executive order, along with the past few weeks of actions, will be seen as the seeds of the 2nd American revolution.
The USA had a solid 250 year run but technology, money, and greed have unfortunately undone the very core of what America stood for.
We cannot know at this point where this is going, but it seems like fascism is the inevitable course. My fear is that if you combine that path with the power of the US military, the world is in for a very scary time.
SCOTUS bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for Trump's power grab. Its immunity-granting ruling means that it's extremely difficult to stop a President who decides to simply ignore the law.
Even if you think Trump is a "good guy" who is "doing the right thing", he's setting precedents whereby a President who is a "bad guy" could turn dictator, and then what? Literally the only option is impeachment, but the Senate has never convicted because there are enough senators who are afraid of a highly vindictive politician (and now his billionaire BBF) who __will__ go after them and whip up his base against them. If only they were more concerned about the country than their own re-election, but too few are willing to make that sacrifice.
(this couldn't be farther than the truth from all I've seen Trump do, but just entertaining the thought here)
I'm not sure that SCOTUS's immunity ruling is all that important here. It mainly served to delay Trump's federal criminal trials until it was too late to get anywhere. In the absence of that ruling, a president could still -- in collusion with their VP -- obtain immunity by:
1. While in office, relying on the DoJ's policy of never indicting a sitting president. (Not to mention the fact that they control the DoJ.)
2. On the last day of their presidency, they resign. The VP is sworn in as president, and pardons the now-former president for whatever they've done. (The former president can of course, before resigning, pardon the VP for anything they might have been involved in as well.)
Easy peasy.
It’s important because it gives him 100% immunity from all actions that even slightly be adjacent to “executive branch” . Almost unlimited spectrum of activities are allowed including killing Americans for no good reason. Short of him walking out the door of the WH and gunning down a tour bus of tourists with his own machine gun, the SCOTUS gave him cover to say “whoops, I thought that was ok”
Sure, Trump could "find a way" regardless. But the SCOTUS ruling gives him more of a cover, and more importantly, removed a potential threat.
‘Executive order’ is starting to sound like the compilation of Garrett calling out ‘emergency crisis’ in Community in the two worlds with the Model United Nations, S3E02 iirc.
Why do you think they are called "Independent Agencies"?
Can we work on our definition of "Independent Agency"?
The founders of this country intentionally did not create a "King" role.
I wonder when he's going to go after the Fed.
After his policies crash the market and he blames it on them, of course.
Even POTUS is not immune to the wrath of trillions of dollars. I think he has been warned off that awhile back (last time he was President).
Not incidentally, both the FTC and SEC have ongoing investigations or enforcement actions against companies owned by Elon Musk.
What a coincidence
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Is it" hysterical" to point out this section of the EO?
> The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.
Because, to put it in plain words, this is ordering all members of the executive to obey exclusively the President and the Attorney General when it comes to how all law should be enforced. That includes the U.S. Marshals Service that provides enforcement duties for federal courts and the Supreme Court.
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I think everything has to be voluntary and well-informed, except in self-defence.
I may be wrong, but I think in the US enough voters have been deceived by Donald that they were not well-informed, and so elections are no longer valid.
By this, he is in power, and Congress and Senate have been subverted.
I also see Donald looking to have complete and untrammeled control, and this is one more act in that direction.
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Wonder how long it'll take for the media outlets to start blaming Biden again, "well he should have put protections in!"
When inflation starts to be a problem again (it's already rising) they'll still blame him. Fascism requires scapegoats. Ironically, that is their downfall too, because they are utterly incapable of introspection and self-improvement.
It may be a good time to study how Stalin came to power in the USSR. It wasn't through the political establishment, but by taking absolute control of the bureaucracy.
The USSR was already a one party dictatorship at that point, so I don't know if that's a relevant example.
Yes, it was a single party government, but not consolidated under a dictator until Stalin. Even Lenin, until he basically retired (was very sick and died soon thereafter), didn't have the iron grip on the government that Stalin did.
My high level take on this saga is: welcome to the Chinese century.
It's very common for companies that are failing to adopt uncreative reactive strategies that hasten their collapse. Look at the history of Kodak for some good examples. MAGA is that for the United States -- respond to the challenges of the new century by going back to the 1950s. MAGA (and Project 2025) is going to turbocharge American decline.
The pathetic thing is that while the US (like everyone else) has significant problems, it was not "failing," but we decided to do this anyway largely because of culture war panic bullshit.
Before this, America was in a place where it could credibly have continued to hold onto its global power. Its higher birth rate combined with a high immigration rate from all over the world meant its demographics were much better than China's. It was the world's #1 destination for high skill immigrants. The dollar is the global reserve, and that's hard to unseat due to network effects. Its military is still the most powerful. It still has an edge in many areas of high technology. Its universities are still arguably the best. It's still arguably the center of global pop culture.
Now it looks like we will systematically forfeit all that. We'll close our borders to general migration and will no longer be an attractive destination for skilled immigration. By removing reproductive rights I predict we'll actually decrease the birth rate by driving people to sterilize themselves (already happening) and driving a further wedge between genders (see the Korean 4B movement). The dollar will start losing ground. Our military may stay dominant for a while but will gradually slip with everything else. We'll gradually lose our technological edge to brain drain and lack of high skill immigration. We're going to run some kind of culture war purge on the universities or maybe even defund the best higher education system in the world. We'll lose our cultural edge because right wing culture warriors will drive away all the artists.
Imagine Germany without Naziism where they drove away or killed all their intellectuals. Imagine if Weimar Germany with its incredible intellectual and cultural scene had recovered economically and remained functional. They had the greatest minds in physics, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and many areas of engineering. It's likely that without Hitler Germany would have developed the microprocessor, ArpaNet and Silicon Valley would have been German, the Germans would have landed on the Moon, etc.
Muscular reactionary politics is a cult of what looks strong, not what is strong.
Here is the crux. If during this time they also dismantle the checks and balances that allow a stable democracy to exist then they transition into chaos. Chaos creates a very convenient excuse to establish martial law. This is accelerated if the people rise up to protest the dismantling of democracy. Martial law leads to suspension of elections, ipso facto, the loss of democracy.
Agreed -- which will vastly accelerate the collapse of the US empire since everyone around the world will start diversifying away even faster. If this kind of scenario happens then USD hyperinflationary collapse is on the table.
The Heritage Foundation might get their Gilead LARP in the form of a hollowed out declining US whose young and high-skill people are pouring across the border in the 'out' direction. Meanwhile China is cracking AGI and fusion and landing on Mars with an improved clone of Starship built for 1/2 the price.
At least we'll start publicly funding religious evangelical Christian schools.
This creates strong associations to „Machtergreifung“ and „Gleichschaltung“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
The Nazi term Gleichschaltung (German pronunciation: [ˈɡlaɪçʃaltʊŋ] ⓘ), meaning "synchronization" or "bringing into line", was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazi Party in Germany—established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".[1]
There is no direct counterpart in Englisch Wikipedia for:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machtergreifung
Machtergreifung Mit Machtergreifung (auch Machtübernahme oder Machtübergabe) wird die Ernennung des Nationalsozialisten Adolf Hitler zum Reichskanzler durch den Reichspräsidenten Paul von Hindenburg am 30. Januar 1933 bezeichnet. Hitler übernahm an diesem Tag die Führung einer Koalitionsregierung von NSDAP und nationalkonservativen Verbündeten (DNVP, Stahlhelm), in der neben ihm zunächst nur zwei Nationalsozialisten Regierungsämter bekleideten (Kabinett Hitler); dies waren Wilhelm Frick als Reichsinnenminister und Hermann Göring als Reichsminister ohne Geschäftsbereich. Zusätzlich zur eigentlichen Ernennung umfasst der Begriff die anschließende Umwandlung der bis dahin schon seit 1930 durch Präsidialkabinette geschwächten parlamentarischen Demokratie der Weimarer Republik und deren Verfassung in eine nach dem nationalsozialistischen Führerprinzip agierende zentralistische Diktatur.
Nachdem am 1. Februar das Parlament in Berlin, der Reichstag, aufgelöst worden war, schränkten die Machthaber in den folgenden – von nationalsozialistischem Terror gekennzeichneten – Monaten die politischen und demokratischen Rechte durch Notverordnungen des Präsidenten ein. Als entscheidende Schritte auf dem Weg zur Diktatur gelten die Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Reichstagsbrandverordnung) vom 28. Februar 1933 und das Ermächtigungsgesetz vom 24. März 1933. Der Reichstag verlor damit praktisch jegliche Entscheidungskompetenz. Neben vielen anderen wurden nun auch Parlamentarier ohne Gerichtsverfahren in Konzentrationslagern eingesperrt und gefoltert.
50.001% of Americans voted for this. FAFO
If people think that we are safe because it is a democracy, and Trump was somehow elected, let's not forget that Russia is also a democracy and Poutine was also elected and re-elected.
Now we can be scared because it shows that "votation" doesn't prevent dictators to grab the power to abuse if it for their own good.
Well no, the Putin's party wasn't. The fraud was widespread and decently documented, but not prosecuted, which is not the case here.
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I am duly elected and I set the laws, and interpret the rules as I please - as a duly elected representative with spineless Congress.
Signed
Your neighborhood dictator
An independent regulatory agency are established by law and function outside direct executive supervision. That’s the whole purpose: they’re supposed to be non partisan.
But there’s a loop hole - this independence isn’t codified. Rather an executive order from 1993 (12866) required federal agencies to submit proposals to OMB but exempted regulatory agencies. Today Trump is closing that loop hole.
So if that’s not congress’s intent (which I’m sure is not) then they will need to pass a law soon making these agencies independence from the president explicit
Who wrote this?
The President of the United States, of course. Or one of his subordinates, who, according to this missive, has the full authority same as the U.S. president, of course.
"An assault on the king's men is the same as an assault on the king" and all that...
This is a power grab that is unprecedented.
No one left to investigate Trump himself or his followers, no control, no means of ensuring a fair election…
Executive Orders aren’t law.
This Executive Order says they are law, checkmate, sane people.
Where exactly does it say that?
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Judge can say no it isn’t and you’ll have to fight it out in court.
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We have a government that has been completely capture by the elite. Democrats are the oligarchs good cops offering performative resistance while ultimately consenting to anything that boosts their brokerage accounts and re-election budgets, while republicans are the oligarchs bad cops, directly weakening regulation of those with power, protections for those without, and systematically destroying any force that can stand up to the insanely wealthy. Republicans are setting the wealthy up for the mass privatization of public property and services as well as the purchase of all the assets firesold to sustain life during a disaster, like your parent's house when social security/medicare doesn't cover the cost of living, or like farmland that isn't profitable to farm because it's too expensive to import fertilizer.
The elite capture is multiplicitively damaging because the elite own nearly all major media outlets. WaPo, NYT, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Neutrality is implicit support for power over justice. Justice requires challenging those with power, because those with power are the default victors in conflict. Evil wins when good men do nothing.
The Hacker News algorithm is easily gamed. Downvoting and flagging will sink any post, but resigned consent to a fait accompli is the win condition for this coup. The less they are publicly challenged, the easier it is to seize power without resistance. The easier it is to keep exercises of power unchecked.
State AGs and members of the house of representatives are making public official statements with the power of their office that we are experiencing a coup. This is historic.
I really wish dang would privilege more of these discussions about the end of constitutional rule from the automatic downward moderation of controversy and flagging.
The number of largely independent media platforms which allow for open and public discussion without major algorithmic influence is few. Failing to challenge power, submitting to it, or protecting yourself from attention is the easy thing to do, and right now we all have the privilege of doing so, but this slow moving disaster will seep into every area of our lives as the scaffolding of trust is eroded and the lack of consequences for those who exercise arbitrary power will make it a winning strategy to take advantage of people.
I understand hacker news is a place for curiosity, but curiosity is not allowed when obedience is demanded, and that is what authoritarians do, demand obedience. Maintaining one day's curiosity at the cost of tomorrow's defeats the goal of being a place for curiosity. The right to question authority... the right to be curious must be defended.
I still don't buy the bothsidesism. You say at first they are part of the coup, quietly approving of what is happening, then pointing out the commentary by state AGs that this is a a power grab.
We agree this is a catastrophe, but I don't think that media and the liberal political parties are willful codefendants.
One would think then I saw an NYT article that basically went up for bat for RFK jr. and danced entirely around his rhetoric on research cuts. So that ship is certainly lost at this point.
I think there is a need to distinguish between AGs who write such letters and party organizations (i.e., democrats) that have allowed corruption such as insider trading within their ranks. A non-complicit to oligarchy democrat party would never have allowed nancy pelosi to be a completely unchecked insider trader.
"Hungry for the Power"
You guys are lucky to have biology on your side.
Statistically, Trump will be in charge for about 10 years max, before the Grimm Reaper creates a power vacuum. (I can't wait for his creative interpretation of the 22st.)
At this point, options will be open again.
May some real lawyers have a jab at this.
Good luck.
In many other countries people would take to the streets and protest until they get a new government if something like this happened.
Perhaps you should try it?
Yes! Where are the mass protests? Take some inspiration from Serbia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/01/student-led-pr....
I have been asking myself: what needs to happen until US citizens wake up and finally take it to the streets? In countries like Iran or Syria people have been protesting despite the danger of being tortured and/or killed. People in the US do not need to fear any of that, so what's holding them back?
10 years of indoctrination via social media and Fox News is holding them back, unfortunately
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> I am independent and not a Democrat or a Republican because they are two sides of the same coin.
The only sense in which this is true: the GOP are fascist, racist authoritarians who have waged a decades-long war on the middle and lower class; the Democrats aren't.
If you think the Democrats and GOP are equally bad, you're out of your mind.
I don't think they are equally bad. GOP are rotten to the core. I don't understand why a new party has not formed to leave the batshit crazies behind.
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I agree that they are not equally bad, and- Democrats since Carter have bowed to influence from neoliberal capitalists, and capitalism is is a "boom-bust-quit" cycle, which I see as narrow-minded and selfish. Clinton got away with undoing the 1933 Glass-Stiegel Act (separating stock market and banking? financial regulation to reduce boom-bust amplitude, anyway) in 1999 by selling a "third way" that was really just watered-down Reaganomics (neoliberal capitalism, following the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership). Neither Obama nor Biden did enough to prevent oligrarchy, eithe, though under Biden the value of future lives was increased a bit. All the Republican presidents have done more harm, though. I'm really disheartened by this trend, and one little upside is that I'm bonding & bridging with local people, because it gives me a sense of meaning and efficacy. HN is my only social media outlet, and I only dip my toes in now and then.
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> two sides of the same coin
One of those sides is milquetoast and piecemeal kowtows to corporate interests, but still generally belives in the rule of law. The other side has been busy making Nazi salutes and illegally giving complete read-write access to the entire government's payroll to random twentysomethings who work for a South African billionare.
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Lying and blaming Ukraine for starting the war and taking sides with Russia puts blood on his hands.
That an aggressor nation can walk into another country's sovereign territory and annex it with the blessing of a sitting US president is a disgrace.
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> people will stop dying
I think that's an overoptimistic judgement of the fate of Ukrainians left stuck under Russian control. Russia doesn't even care about its own people dying.
How do you know he's trying to stop the war and not just looking for personal benefits? His words are worth little.
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This is not unlike saying that rape ceases to be rape when the victim stops resisting.
We have every reason to think that "ending the war" under Chief Cheeto will mean "capitulate to the aggressor," and Russia has already shown its eagerness to commit genocide against Ukraine and eradicate it culturally.
So he is indeed complicit. The unacceptable terms he wants or likely will suggest (and the unacceptable manner in which he pursues those terms, by negotiating without Ukraine's involvement) -- essentially Ukraine's surrender -- amount, by corollary, to a justification of further Russian aggression when Ukraine rejects them.
There are plenty of historical examples showing that appeasement does not work, it enables the aggressor to continue being aggressive.
> Utter nonsense. He's trying to end the war. That may not happen on terms that make you happy, but people will stop dying which is quite the opposite of what you said
I was going to say just like Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler - but realised that would be grossly unfair on Chamberlain as he never tried to exploit Czechoslovakia for half of its mineral resources.
He is trying to "end the war" on terms that enrich himself, in vainglorious pursuit of a Nobel peace prize, and in a way that will almost inevitably result in a wider conflict very soon. Please don't pretend this is about "people will stop dying". That is utter nonsense.
Putting aside every instinct I have to join the choir voicing every issue I have with blaming the victim and cozying up to the agitator, or to challenge your charitable view of Trump's motivations...
I'm genuinely interested to hear your take on the likely and potential repercussions of rewarding Russia/Putin for their aggression. What makes you confident that they won't reasonably perceive this outcome as tacit permission to start coming for other territory?
Putin loves working off maps from the 1800s. Finland, for example, is a likely future target.
Not to be hyperbolic, but there's a good reason you aren't supposed to negotiate with terrorists.
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> He is making himself complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Ukraine
There's no need for hyperbole. Trump is bad but there's been less than 100,000 Ukrainian deaths (troops and civilians combined) since the beginning of the war in 2022, let alone under his reign.
It might be 100,000 by now: “A confidential Ukrainian estimate from earlier this year [2024] put the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 80,000 and the wounded at 400,000, according to people familiar with the matter.” [https://archive.ph/5wRcT]
And today Trump blamed the Ukrainians for the war going on for that long, saying they could have stopped it three years ago.
He is literally giving Ukraine to Putin. Which Russia will use for further expansion.
While that might be true (there's a whole ball of wax about whether or not that's true), it's probably not true for combined deaths. No doubt well more than hundred thousand, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than two hundred thousand.
The deaths are tragic. And no matter how many there are, Trump's actions will certainly make the number go up before it stops.
It's not hyperbole.
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"The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. "
Of course down below it says something like "subject to applicable law".
Nevertheless I think the scary sentence will be stricken by the supreme Court
Watch them do nothing about it.
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What it says is bad enough. Those agencies are independent for a reason. They're not supposed to be the president's political agents. Loss of that independence is a serious, damaging thing.
Next question: Why does Trump want control of those agencies? General principles? People around him told him to? Ego (proving that he's the Big Man In Charge)? Or does he actually intend to use that power? If so, for what?
This is a big deal. This is reducing the US federal government's ability to competently govern, and that's going to hurt, in concrete ways, before too long. If this stands, we're going to regret it.
If. I still have hope for the court system to overturn this.
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Don't you mean that free speech is going on?
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My concerns are;
a. Congress and Senate are wholly passive and unable to act.
b. The courts will be attacked, and so be unable to act.
c. If the courts act, by the time they act, it will be too late; the harm will have been done and will be irreversible.
“Attacked” what does this even mean? The courts have zero power in the first place, and never have. The judiciary, all the way back to Marbury v. Madison, has had to rely on the assent from the other branches that its rulings matter.
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> and if it goes beyond the scope of executive powers, it will be curtailed or shut down.
The position of the executive order is that only the President can interpret laws, including executive orders about interpreting laws.
That is to say, if the courts try to stop it, Trump may try to say "the courts don't have that power" and order the DoJ and/or military to block anything they do.
That is not what the EO says. You’ve been misled by a Reddit post.
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>Trump may try to say "the courts don't have that power" and order the DoJ and/or military to block anything they do.
Perhaps we should refrain from calling the US a de facto dictatorship until that point then?
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Thank you for your comment. Overall, this lifted me up and helped me learn some more about what was in the Declaration. (I went and read it for the first time after seeing your comment.)
> deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Unfortunately, unlike 1776, today's king was given power by the governed, and the majority (of those who care enough to vote) still support him. So I don't know where those of us who are horrified go from here.
With absolutely no malice intended: you step back a bit, lick your wounds, and try to figure out why your message and candidate failed - just like the GOP did for the past four years.
Four years feels like a long time when it has just started; it isn’t so long at all in hindsight. Moreover, you have two years before the next opportunity you have to disempower Trump (midterm elections). The campaigns for those start in a year or so, so if you’re going to cripple Trump by taking back Congress now is the time to be introspective.
The electorate is not irreconcilable, but change doesn’t happen when you double down on the same course.
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I enjoy discussing politics, but flagged this because the title is so absurdly far beyond sensationalized and links to a friggin Reddit post which then amps the hyperbole up even further. It's not going to be conducive to interesting or informative discussion for anybody, and seems mostly intended to mislead.
Donald has direct control of entire Federal Gov, controls their budgets, has installed his men in every agency, and will now decide interpretation of law.
Congress and Senate both wholly passive (subverted, I would say).
That leaves the States and the courts. I think the courts will go next.
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> We need an "unflag".
There is one, it’s called “vouch”. If this was flagged, it’s not anymore.
Edit: Spoke too soon, it’s flagged again.
Ah, I'm too humble an account to have ever been presented with this option. I did not know it exists.
I'm not a state-run troll farm, the last 10 years have trained me and probably anyone else to vote away anything related to US politics.
I may be wrong, but it might be time now not to do so.
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Sorry, what does that mean??
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There comes a point where it has to be faced, because to hide it is to lose everything.
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This is sadly one of the last few places online where rational discussion of the topic by at least some mostly smart people is at all likely to happen. It's also one of the last few places where discussion will get pretty instantly shut down if it devolves into chaos, so let's all at least try our level best to keep those discussions either productive or interesting.
the associates - if not owners - of this very site are involved in a coup, "keep politics off HN" isn't some neutral statement, it's an endorsement.
Keep looking the other way when the world is burning down. Great policy!
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Considering that Silicon Valley exists within the US, it's significant that the US has turned into a dictatorship — the implications are beyond political on this one.
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Damn. I can't even begin to comprehend how separated from reality your worldview is.
Please point me to the EOs Biden signed that gave him absolute power.
It's probably slightly more complicated than that
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Well, if the predictive text algorithm says it's fine then it must be fine!
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I don't know why people are (reflexively?) downvoting our LLM summaries of the EO
These LLMs score pretty highly on reading comprehension
If people want a zero-effort LLM summary, they can get one themselves.
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I think it's highly likely that the Democratic party will never govern the United States again.
Every single move the current government is making increasingly seems to be a clever way to stack the chips in their favor in perpetuity.
We seem to be living though the backstory of how some far-off sci-fi civilization came to be, replete with greedy tech corps in the ears and pockets of narcissistic leaders.
The irony is that it's impossible to say if this will ultimately play out as a dystopian horror or a utopian fantasy.
It's an open question whether elections will be held, but demographics also make it much harder for Democrats to be elected after 2030 (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-future-crisi...).
>I think it's highly likely that the Democratic party will never govern the United States again.
I think they will when climate change comes knocking (I'm assuming the US will double down on carbon for some incredible short-term profit). Or at least some version of the democrats i.e. whatever is on the other side.
Propaganda via Xitter successfully got the orange turd elected and the propaganda machine will only get worse (TikTok, deep fakes etc). Democrats will never hold the presidency again. At best they will occasionally get the House, and I'm not sure until when that still will be a possibility.
all during covid and the biden admin we couldnt talk about any politics here. what a bunch of poppycock.
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What corruption? Firing the inspector generals and making up claims don’t count as receipts.
It's the equivalent of the cops pulling you over and using a slightly dim tail light to search your entire car, make you get out, spread your legs, and get a pat-down.
Every large government department in every country in the world has some waste. All of them. All of the time.
This is why it's so disingenuous for Trump/Musk supporters to point at tiny bits of waste or whatever and scream "See! See! We found it! They deserve what they got!"
It's not coincidentally one of the justifications used by Russia to invade Ukraine. They claimed they were after Nazis. So what if Ukraine has Nazis!? So does every other damned European country! American has Nazis! Russia has Nazis!
It's the drill sergeant making you do 100 push ups because there was a barely visible scratch on your boots. His boots have scratches too. That's not the point. It's an excuse to make you jump.
My advice is: Any time anyone uses such a claim, or anything like it, always ask yourself: Okay, but what is the base rate for this thing they've suddenly decided is objectionable? Is it higher or lower elsewhere?
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You can't attack others like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Didn’t we decide to not talk here about US politics?