Obama should have done it. Biden should have done it. In Clinton’s time this would have been a little harder to see coming, but sharp people were already predicting some flavor of it. If the dems ever gain power again, the hindsight should be bright as day. They need to limit the powers of the president. The executive branch in the USA has too much power, and it has caused direct, possibly irreparable harm to our standing in the world.
In a sense, who cares about our standing in the world? We deserve to be taken down a notch or several. It’s a market adjustment that is very long overdue. But it’s going to be painful and ruinous to people all around the world, so perhaps best avoided? Accepting this shituation is accelerationism, not my favorite flavor of change.
The issue is stability. You’d think a dictator’s hand on the tiller would stabilize the country’s institutions, but that’s not how this is playing out. Stability is the source of value in our treasury bonds. Lose that stability, lose value, lose bargaining power, and there you are.
The system of checks and balances that we all learn about in elementary school, that thing that was supposed to make us so much cooler than other countries? That was the stabilizer. The oligarchs could play tennis in the legislature and pass the baton to the other guys every four to eight years, the supreme court could go one way or the other on any issue at any time. Through this all, nothing truly radical could ever be accomplished.
That sucks when you want things to be radically better, but at least it keeps things from getting radically worse – when it’s working right. If the democrats want to be moderate and responsible and not be radical and not rock boats, they should go for that moderation radically. A Constitutional crisis calls for a Constitutional Amendment or several. We had a bill of rights, how about now a Bill of Liberty, to save us from democratically elected dictatorship?
They will need to angle desperately to fight any vote suppression tactics in preparation for the outside possibility a fair-esque election can happen in two years, but they also need to have an agenda locked and loaded, ready to go, to force checks and balances back into government. That executive power can be used to undermine itself at first, through careful use of executive orders, but it absolutely must be relinquished as soon as humanly possible, and locked out of future hands.
Tvfnp will pocket veto and otherwise stymie any legislation to that effect, but keep up the pressure and see what’s possible a few years after that, in the presidential election. If, by some fucking miracle, dems get control of this trash fire again, it’s time to lock it down so this disaster can never happen again. The next democratic president, hope to hell it’s four years from now, needs to gut their own power. It’s a moral imperative, it’s crucial for the US to continue to have anything resembling the prosperous status quo it’s enjoyed for a hundred years.
Personally, motherfuck our prosperity. Time for everybody in the world to come up and get a piece of our loser asses. But dems, if you’re listening? If you ever get another chance to do this? Curtail executive power in any way you can.
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Much like most of what Trump is doing, that’s not actually something the president can (legally) do. (Trump is just doing things anyway and letting the courts battle it out, because by then it’s too late to undo.)
The only thing that can limit Executive power is laws passed by Congress. Executive orders can just be nullified by the next president, and the president doesn’t get to decide that certain appointee positions are no longer appointed by the president.
Trump is proving that the president can expand the power of the office as long as it has a friendly Supreme Court – they’ve already granted the office complete legal immunity, the ability to take infinite bribes, and they haven’t yet stopped him from direct control of federal funding by cutting agencies, which the Constitution says is supposed to be Congress’s power. But that expansion of power is purely a one-way street until the Supreme Court changes its mind.
A lot of the problem with executive orders is that congress is so partisan that every little bill is a huge hassle to pass. The President has gained more power simply because congress isn’t doing anything, the President has had to step up to act instead of waiting for congress. Also, if the President made an executive order that Congress didn’t agree with they would simply pass another law clarifying the situation. And the ability of Congress to do so was enough that the President would often talk to Congressional leaders before issuing an order.
Worse, congress has delegated some things that are supposed to be under congress to the President. Usually this is under the principle that congress can pass some power to the President in an emergency when quick action is required. The US has been under some degree of emergency more or less continuously since 9/11. This sort of game playing with emergency powers is what created the Roman emperors.
If congress and the courts stepped up we wouldn’t need amendments. Unfortunately Congress is paralyzed by hard right fanatics who would rather see the country fail then compromise. The courts are far too trusting that Trump and the executive branch have honest motivations when they are actually playing games with the court system in attempts to go around it.
Not that amendments are a bad idea. There are a bunch of things that need fixed that require an amendment. The election system should be updated to something more modern. Congress should be forced to step up and do their job. Fitness tests for all elected officials and government officials above a certain age.
i know you can’t executive order to say “no executive orders,” but there are other ways to layer up the difficulty for future hitler wannabes. i was thinking of it as a supplemental thing, knowing legislation would be necessary as well. the frailty of executive action was illustrated with stark clarity by biden’s farewell letter to federal employees, where he touted “what we’ve achieved together” – almost all of which was hard reversed within 1 week of fucko taking office, as well as removing the farewell webpage from the whitehouse site.
i think our best hope now is the accelerationist one – that shitler makes people so creeped out and / or pissed off that dems sweep midterms and have the ability to push legislation through. Not lovin’ it.
It is infinitely easier to destroy something good than to create it.
Trump and company are destroying a lot of Good Things, but that means that we were able to create those Good Things in the first place – over periods of years and decades, with thousands of leaders in the federal government (and, yes, in Congress) working together. Even if we play out the accelerationist fantasy, we’ll only be able to build back slowly, if at all.
Preventing a future Trump-like demolition would take sweeping reform of the justice system, and I don’t see that happening within my lifetime.