Comment by _heimdall
1 day ago
A similar argument can be made against the tariffs though.
US consumers will be paying the bulk of the tariffs through price increases. We do have representatives in Congress, they just weren't the ones imposing tariffs.
edit: as fun as silent down votes are, it would be interesting to hear where you might disagree
Unfortunately the representatives in Congress gave the tariff power to the Presidency.
Now, did they do that with the approval of the voters? Ostensibly, yes, but in reality, it's not that clear-cut.
This would be more like if the Thirteen Colonies had MPs and those MPs still voted in favor of the Stamp Act, or they voted to delegate the power to tariff to someone with a severe personality disorder.
There are lawsuits arguing that Congress didn’t give the executive branch this power. They seem pretty persuasive to me and they’re successful so far, but we’ll see how the appeals process turns out.
sigh
There are a lot of lawsuits about the executive branch doing things it supposedly doesn't have the power to do.
Generally the mood seems to be that only a SCOTUS ruling will potentially be taken seriously.
It infuriates me just how much members of Congress have abdicated their jobs and given power to the president to make unilateral decisions. I wonder if we need a constitutional amendment (not that we could get such a thing to pass in this day and age), because it is a complete perversion of how our government is supposed to work.
For a long time now I've been banging the drum of "don't put power in the president's hands", because the downside has always been very clear to me: even if you trust the guy in office today, doesn't mean you will want the next guy to have that power. But people just don't care. They are quite happy to have unilateral power exercised by one man, because they don't bother to think through the consequences of such things.
Congressmen have to get reelected, so over the years they've been glad to abdicate power to the executive, the judiciary, and the unelected bureaucracy. Anyone but themselves, so they didn't have to sign their names to the unpopular policies they wanted. They still got what the ruling class wanted, but indirectly, so it rarely threatened their incumbency. Whatever happened, they could tell the votes back home, "Sorry, we tried to pass/stop such-and-such, but we don't have any control over the president/courts/bureaucrats. Can't blame me."
It worked pretty well as long as the ruling class were all pretty much on the same page about most things, with some "social issues" differences between the parties that they used for campaigning but never quite acted on. It works less well if different factions start competing and going against the status quo for real.
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I mean yes the American people should probably consider giving our current government the same taste. But they’re not going to do that because we’ve been trained to be complacent.
I fully agree tariffs should be the purview of Congress, but that's not a "similar argument". Trump was elected just as Congress was.
Trump was elected to be the president, a role itself meant to be the chief executive and public figurehead of the government. Trump was not elected to legislate and no single person should be given the power to do so.
edit: typo