Comment by InsideOutSanta
2 days ago
There are laws, but you will get fired if you try to follow them, and lawsuits to remedy that take time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
2 days ago
There are laws, but you will get fired if you try to follow them, and lawsuits to remedy that take time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/usaid-sec...
Is it true to say that in practise there are no laws here? If anyone in DOGE breaks the law, can't the President just issue a blanket pardon?
If the President himself breaks the law, he argues that it was in the course of his official duties [1].
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
There is a principal in democracy that there Should Not Be strong institutions that prevent a majority of the population from harming itself with its choices. We balance that against a Supreme Court in the US, but that court is almost uniquely powerful & active in forming policy relative to its place in the rest of the world, and right now, most of it has been appointed by fascists; Ultimately the population will have its say in the long term.
Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?
I think such a body (which exists in some system) would obviously be nice right now, but I am a lot less convinced that it would be a net positive in general.
If we want to find our way out of this, I suspect a lot of people are going to need to feel directly harmed by this administration, and are going to need to basically erect a strong protest culture out of whole cloth. Something like 5% of the population in the streets can topple an authoritarian regime in the right circumstances, but not the 0.5% we might expect for a "large" protest.
"Do you want an extra-democratic body who is capable of telling the population "No"?"
There's value in having speedbumps that keep 51%* of the population from shooting 100% (or 99%) of the population in the collective foot... or in this case, head. The institutions aren't anti-democratic - they were put together by democratic processes, and each speedbump is usually there for a reason. Sometimes a long-forgotten or no longer good reason, and it needs to be dismantled, also by the same type of processes that put it there. Yes, I want people who won't be easily and summarily dismissed for following the law and regulations even when they're not popular. I want regulations and guardrails that can't just be swept aside by an administration that rotates out every four to eight years. (I'm generalizing a lot here, of course...)
*Really much less than 51%, given that a large percentage of the population doesn't vote, another percentage of the population's vote is suppressed, and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote...
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In the UK, the Prime Minister has a lot less discretionary power, but much more ability to get legislation changed.
So when a political question arises like "should we have net neutrality?" the elected politicians decide and pass legislation.
That's in contrast to the US, where someone decide the executive was granted discretionary power over net neutrality in 1934, several generations before the net was invented. Then the executive decides there will, then won't, then will, then won't, then will, then won't be net neutrality.
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> There is a principal in democracy that there Should Not Be strong institutions that prevent a majority of the population from harming itself with its choices.
Wrong. Democracy means only majority rule. What you say is true of republics, which the USA is. However no republic can be perfect in this regard, because it's all just human beings. In this case the president is plenipotent within the executive branch, the Congress is in the hands of the same party, and the SCOTUS is largely on the same page, therefore all the institutions in question are not going to stop him unless he does things that are outrageous to the public, keeping in mind that the HN commentariat is a tiny portion of "the public".
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There is one, it is called a Constitution, and any rules where changes are only accepted by a qualified majority not of 50% but of 66% aka 2/3rds.
The electoral college was intended to serve this purpose.
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> Is it true to say that in practise there are no laws here? If anyone in DOGE breaks the law, can't the President just issue a blanket pardon?
For federal laws, yes.
If you can find a state-level law that's been violated then he has no jurisdiction to pardeon.
Trump himself was charged at the state level twice (and already convicted once):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_election_racketeering_...
See also the civil case against him for rape:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._T...
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Trump has explicitly said he is above the law: "He who saves the country cannot break the law" is what he posted.
He pardoned people who stormed the capital, threatened gov officials, and killed police officers. Pardoning DOGE employees is child's play -- but it would never get that far because the DOJ and FBI have been purged of those not fully subservient to Trump.
> He pardoned people who stormed the capital
you mean "He pardoned people who were guided in by the security staff working the capital building"?
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Yes, that is always true. It usually doesn't happen. Mainly because DoJ usually doesn't look. Congress can perform oversight and impeach if need be.
I'm assuming this is what they're betting on.
In that case, can't the next president just illegally imprison Elon or trump or whoever for their entire administration, ignore supreme court rulings or lawsuits or whatever, and then issue themselves a pardon at the end?
Yes, and restrict the 2nd amendment by fiat, etc...
But Democrats "play nice" and respect the law. Biden could have ordered Trump assassinated as soon as the Supreme Court invented the new interpretation that puts president on a piedestal, but he was never going to do it.
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Based on last year's Supreme Court rulings and what Trump/DOGE have gotten away with thus far, it'd seem so. However, democrats insist on wearing kid gloves to a chainsaw massacre, so don't count on anything like that (or, more realistically, within a lesser order of magnitude) ever happening.
Don't know, but I read somewhere that the president can't pardon breaks of federal law.
It's the other way around; the presidential pardoning power is limited to federal offenses.
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What I found significant here is that Trump (yesterday) and/or the Whitehouse stated that Elon Musk does not work for Doge and has no authority over it at all, that Elon Musk has no authority regarding anything and is solely an advisor to the president.
Of course, in practical terms "in the field" this is obviously not the case. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was Elon's ego that triggered this: that at the end of the day needing a pardon would be an insult and would bruise his ego so he wants to prevent any pathway for him to be charged with a crime. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if the Doge "interns" would need one regardless.
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And when you have an executive on one hand stating that only the president and the AG can interpret laws for the executive [0] and that you can't break laws if you're "saving the country" [1], that approach also just doesn't seem too promising.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu... Sec. 7
[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1140091792251...
Or, as JD Vance wrote, "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." (https://x.com/JDVance/status/1888607143030391287). You really have to read it twice to understand just how far out that phrase is. So now it's the executive itself deciding what's "legitimate" (=conforming to the law), not the courts, whose role it is to interpret and enforce laws?
Or Trump fucking referring to himself as king yesterday .. signs are clear.
This will end badly and it will not be fun at all in the end, but it is fascinating to watch how this new wave of fascism unfolds.
A good read: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-purge-of-the-deep-sta...
Yeah, if we (even in other countries) weren't all personally affected by it, I couldn't stop laughing. The way things are, I'd rather go with Max Liebermann, who reportedly commented on the previous wave of fascism with the words "I couldn't eat as much as I would like to throw up" ("Ich kann gar nicht soviel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte" - https://www.aphorismen.de/zitat/93763).
Honest question: who else, internal to the executive branch, and besides the president, should be able to interpret the laws for the executive branch?
By my reading, this is a clarification that if an agency makes a significant policy change or regulation, they ought to run it by the president first.
It doesn't preclude other branches of government from checking this power.
Agencies all have their own lawyers, and it’s frequently useful to have them hash out agreements for the same reason that it’s useful for scientists to get peer review. Beyond the basic efficiency argument, it’s good to have multiple people validate your reasoning.
Easy for me to say, but I would like to think I would say, "Fire me, assholes." And have a good story for the grand children.
obviously your young family would already be grown then.. and the house paid off?
You'd like to think that there are at least some people for whom doing the Right Thing is more important.
Perhaps why 'easy for me to say' was the first part.
Would be interesting to know if the poster would financially support a person in an UNSTABLE position, to, you know, Unite the States in opposition to what's an authoritarian and approaching a fascist dictatorship?
Which laws? The article describes security clearance.
Security clearances are based on laws, such as the ones compiled in Title 50 U.S. Code §3341.
So if DOGE have security clearances (unclear if the have) then their audit is legal?
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Statutes can't really constrain the president's authority to do this sort of thing (firing appointees, firing employees for cause, laying people off, auditing the executive agencies). Constitutionally the president is just plenipotent within the executive branch.