Comment by coldcode
6 hours ago
It's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.
6 hours ago
It's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.
Aaaand it's gone lol
The fourth estate is absolutely failing America. The headline ought to be "DOJ wants to break Watergate law", but instead, we get... this. Is Bari Weiss now running the Intercept too? WTAF is going on across the board?
It does not appear that this administration particularly cares about whether or not they're allowed to ignore laws.
It appears the administration is working with the Federalist Society extremists to try to destroy the government as best it can, at least in all capacities not befitting the monopolization of suppression/silencing/violence against anyone it doesnt like.
‘Let the law not get in our way’
That's because everyone else is the enemies of the people! They have a mandate!
Get out of the way, so-called judges, RINOs and communists in Congress, the failing Media, and also the low IQ former MAGA people who helped get them elected. This was a landslide! Also, true republicans don't believe in mob rule, we don't have a democracy, we have a republic. Except if our guy wins by 1% then we totally believe in mob rule and have a mandate, compared to that 1% marginal win, what are laws passed by a supermajority? A mere trifle!
Right but who is going to prosecute? the Department of Justice?
You know you have to give Nixon credit he slinked away before it ended in a shoot out between the SS and the FBI on the White House lawn.
Want to bet?
Sure you can, when you're the President. He's got presumptive immunity for all official acts. If election interference is an official act (as they decided in Trump v US), then surely ordering the destruction of all of his records is also an official act.
Don't forget about pardon power.
Can he pardon himself?!
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The rules only apply to Democrats now, did you miss the memo? (Maybe you didn't see the memo as it was sealed).
Enforced by the following the rules police. Oh wait..
Why not? Are we gonna send the marshals to arrest the president?
Jokes aside, this presidency showed that it was not our written laws that enabled the expected operation of gov branches within their expected limits.
It was these unwritten laws we were taking for granted, because casually we assume that the gov will not be malicious.
It seems to me that we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs.
This is a very clearly written law, though.
It has nothing to do with the writing. It's the "fuck you we'll ignore" it thing that's a problem. No amount of writing fixes that.
I disagree. I think that constitutional scholars have always known that it's not the written laws that hold the executive in check. Our system was designed so that the 3 branches would check each other. The Federalist Paper #51 explicitly calls this out - "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." [0]
The problem with any system like you are suggesting where "we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs" is the same as always - who enforces the law?
The cause of the dysfunction we have now is that congress has failed to check the power of the executive. Congress should have impeached and removed Donald Trump for treason and other high crimes after January 6th. He should have been convicted and felt the full force of the law around his neck for trying to interfere with the function of congress and overthrow the election.
Every problem we face with our government right now traces back to the same issue: Congress is not doing its job. Congress has the power to impeach and remove the president for threatening to nuke Iran. Congress has the power to stop the executive branch from starting illegal wars overseas. Congress has the power to punish ICE for executing citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.
Congress has failed to exercise this power for several reasons, a major one being that both the house and senate are no longer representative of the American people. The house has been limited in membership ever since the reapportionment act and the senate was always designed to favor wealthy landowners in slave states.
This results in placing massively disproportionate power in the hands of a tiny fraction of voters just because they live in the middle of nowhere, which in turn makes it very easy for the rich and powerful to game the system. There is no way forward for us as a country without reforming congress.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._51
It isn't just congress failing to their job. We The People are also responsible for not ousting the freeloaders in congress who are taking our tax money and not doing the job they were elected to do.
We are the final check on making sure that government is serving us and not the other way around. The founders were pretty open about what they expected from us if that could no longer be accomplished within the framework they were putting into place. I'd like to think that we can still vote our way out of this problem, but I fear that between attempts from the government to suppress voters and the surprisingly large number of people content with the idea of a fascist dictator (so long as he's wearing their team's colors) we might have a hard time overcoming the fear, apathy, and learned helplessness in the rest of the population necessary to effectively insist on the changes we need.
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I believe that the problem is that they also set up Congress with its own check, between two houses. They made it deliberately hard to pass legislation, which means they cannot effectively balance the other two branches.
Congress spent decades ceding power to the executive because it realized it could not do anything itself. And now it's stuck.
> It's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.
They’re not ignoring. They’re saying they think the law itself is unconstitutional.
From the article:
>> In a sweeping new memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ claims the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The department’s edict, which is already facing legal challenges, argues that a president’s records are private, rather than public, property.
> They’re saying they think the law itself is unconstitutional.
Yeah, well, they can say that to SCOTUS.
and they will, and SCOTUS will listen, and say "remind me what party the president is from again" and then say "hmmmmm"
The general rule is that even facially unconstitutional laws are usually enforced until a judicial ruling against them. see e.g. all the people who did prison time for municipal handgun prohibitions until District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010).
"This is unconstitional because Trump doesn't like it" is not a very strong argument. The position he's holding is called "Public Office" (not private office) for a reason.
> "This is unconstitional because Trump doesn't like it" is not a very strong argument.
So far, it appears to be a very convincing argument to the supreme court most of the time.