Comment by grandempire
1 year ago
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.
Why is that the question? I think it's clear that some of them work for the president, and the president (perhaps filtered through cabinet members and others) tells them what to do. But that doesn't mean that Congress can't put limits on when and how the president can fire them.
That isn't necessarily the case for all officials. For example, I believe Congress can't prevent the president from firing a member of the cabinet. But that doesn't mean the president can do whatever he wants to anyone.
It's akin to how the board of directors doesn't let the CEO fire a companies auditors.
There's no more FOIA - Musk had their entire office fired and disbanded.
There is no central FOIA office. Each agency has is responsible for their own FOIA requests. IF you are referring to this news story [1] That was just the FOIA office at OPM.
[1] https://www.commondreams.org/news/cnn-foia-office-of-personn...
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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.”
Yes. Now look up Humphreys Executor which is mentioned in the next sentence after the sentence you quoted in Wikipedia.
It limits that power when it comes to the quasi-legislative agencies.
That was the unambiguous law of the land for nearly 100 years until the current court whittled down the exclusion in Seila in 2020.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%27s_Executor_v._Unite...
Sounds like what the parent was saying, so not flatly incorrect.
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Your comment is way too vague to be declaring anything as flat out wrong. At any rate, federal employees have numerous protections from being fired arbitrarily as laid out by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, a law passed precisely to limit arbitrary firing of federal employees, especially for politically motivated reasons.
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?
They are part of the executive branch, but the law governs and constrains the behavior of the executive in managing them.
You can’t even say that Congress is solely the source of those constraints since the laws creating and governing these agencies were signed by… the president!
Most of these agencies have already been challenged in court and the Constitutionality of their structure and governance affirmed.
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They don't have to be part of any branch. The usual branches are descriptive concepts. (Or they can be part of the executive branch yet still not be part of the "unitary executive" part. The law allows for any kind of exemptions and special-casing.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
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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?
The president signs laws, for example...... This isn't hard.
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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.
The comment you're responding to mentioned Obama because of the comment they were responding to brought it up.
Here's a link for some numbers that include Biden: https://www.newsweek.com/immigrant-deportations-removals-tru...
tl;dr: Biden seems to have deported more than any other president
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?
So in other words his supporters are a bunch of sadistic idiots who would rather see kindergartners tortured than a cartel member deported into custody because it means a hard tough man is in charge!
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> Trump famously used the same institutions to detain and torture minors indefinitely
Are you talking about the "cages" that were built under Obama and continued under every president thereafter, including Biden? Or what?
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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?
>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.
So yes, Congress has wide leeway to create agencies to administer particular executions of laws passed by Congress and signed by the President.
Furthermore, we don't have untouchable officials. What does that hypothetical have to do with anything?
The heads of these agencies that Trump is removing are protected from being fired immediately, fired without Congressional notification, and from being fired without cause.
Rank-and-file civil servants are protected from being fired unrelated to performance precisely so we don't revert to the patronage systems of the 1800s.
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How many executive functions can they seize?