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The President has all the power to curtail these abuses. Unfortunately, reducing your own power is not something that comes naturally to most people. Addition

by poof131 11y ago

The President has all the power to curtail these abuses. Unfortunately, reducing your own power is not something that comes naturally to most people. Additionally, any reduction in the national security apparatus will be a political disaster if another terrorist attack happens, so inaction is the prudent political course. It’s a tough problem to deal with and currently it seems a majority of Americans are more concerned with security than freedom. Until that changes, our elected officials will likely just voice concern and persist with the status quo.

tptacek 11y ago
The President technically has that power, but in reality the DOJ's policy is set by the Attorney General, and the historical relationships between Presidents and their A.G.s has tended to be fraught. Mostly, what the President can do in reality is fire the AG. But if Obama does that, he'll have to find and get confirmed a new AG. If you're outraged by NSLs, the new AG Obama could confirm in this climate is unlikely to be an improvement.
- idlewords 11y ago
  That's an odd view of the relationship. The President gets to set policy, and the AG can comply or resign. The responsibility rightly lies with the President, and Cabinet officers are unlikely to resign over issues unless their own views are irreconcilable with their boss's wishes.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That's the theory of the Unitary Executive, made famous by Bush's OLC head John Yoo. But there are statutes that delegate powers directly to agency heads and cabinet members, and not to the President, others that expressly limit the President's authority over agencies, and there are independent agencies that the President can appoint people to but cannot directly control --- despite residing in the Executive Branch. Also, the Constitution gives Congress the authority to vest the appointment of "public ministers, consuls, and all other officers of the United States" directly to the heads of departments, explicitly bypassing the President, who is mentioned earlier in that sentence of the text. Ultimately I think you're mostly right in one sense, and the President has so much authority over the DOJ that resignation is the only real authority the AG has --- which explains things like the Saturday Night Massacre --- but that the day-to-day authority of the AG and the leverage they have over the President by threatening to resign makes the balance of power here tricky. Again: John Ashcroft thwarted not just Bush but the real President at the time, Dick Cheney; so far as we know, he didn't threaten to resign in protest, but rather just refused to authorize STELLARWIND. And, unlike the Saturday Night Massacre, Bush's party controlled Congress, and was not hostile to what he was trying to do.
tormeh 11y ago
This. Reducing the size of the security apparatus is a very politically costly move. Politicians sometimes do politically costly things, e.g. Merkel and the refugees, but it really has to be tremendously important for them to do that thing for them to put their political life on the line. Few politicians has hitherto had privacy as their personal favorite value and therefore few politicians has been willing to put his political life on the line for privacy. Anyway, it's not a very inspiring thing to care about - some security hawk is probably going to just reverse everything you've done afterwards.
- narrator 11y ago
  We have our collective chains jerked all the time over some random lunatic shooting a few people for some random lunatic reason if it happens to fit some political narrative. My facebook feed gets absolutely flooded by this stuff on a regular basis. Until people wake up and learn that they are just being thrown around emotionally like a dog being tempted with a snack, they are going to have an easy time influencing the public to do whatever they want. For some reason, I am regularly downvoted when I make comments like this. The key thing is that people don't think about how something in the media affects them directly. It's like shark attacks. The risks are negligible, yet they captivate the imagination. The mental images and pictures that they are exposed to on a regular basis by the media, both news and fictional tv shows and movies, are specifically chosen to get a response out of them, like a bully getting a rise out of taunting his victim. People don't think they can be manipulated, because they don't like to think they are that stupid, yet it ridiculously common.

by poof131 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago

The President technically has that power, but in reality the DOJ's policy is set by the Attorney General, and the historical relationships between Presidents and their A.G.s has tended to be fraught. Mostly, what the President can do in reality is fire the AG. But if Obama does that, he'll have to find and get confirmed a new AG. If you're outraged by NSLs, the new AG Obama could confirm in this climate is unlikely to be an improvement.

idlewords 11y ago
That's an odd view of the relationship. The President gets to set policy, and the AG can comply or resign. The responsibility rightly lies with the President, and Cabinet officers are unlikely to resign over issues unless their own views are irreconcilable with their boss's wishes.
- tptacek 11y ago
  That's the theory of the Unitary Executive, made famous by Bush's OLC head John Yoo. But there are statutes that delegate powers directly to agency heads and cabinet members, and not to the President, others that expressly limit the President's authority over agencies, and there are independent agencies that the President can appoint people to but cannot directly control --- despite residing in the Executive Branch. Also, the Constitution gives Congress the authority to vest the appointment of "public ministers, consuls, and all other officers of the United States" directly to the heads of departments, explicitly bypassing the President, who is mentioned earlier in that sentence of the text. Ultimately I think you're mostly right in one sense, and the President has so much authority over the DOJ that resignation is the only real authority the AG has --- which explains things like the Saturday Night Massacre --- but that the day-to-day authority of the AG and the leverage they have over the President by threatening to resign makes the balance of power here tricky. Again: John Ashcroft thwarted not just Bush but the real President at the time, Dick Cheney; so far as we know, he didn't threaten to resign in protest, but rather just refused to authorize STELLARWIND. And, unlike the Saturday Night Massacre, Bush's party controlled Congress, and was not hostile to what he was trying to do.

tormeh 11y ago

This. Reducing the size of the security apparatus is a very politically costly move. Politicians sometimes do politically costly things, e.g. Merkel and the refugees, but it really has to be tremendously important for them to do that thing for them to put their political life on the line. Few politicians has hitherto had privacy as their personal favorite value and therefore few politicians has been willing to put his political life on the line for privacy. Anyway, it's not a very inspiring thing to care about - some security hawk is probably going to just reverse everything you've done afterwards.

narrator 11y ago
We have our collective chains jerked all the time over some random lunatic shooting a few people for some random lunatic reason if it happens to fit some political narrative. My facebook feed gets absolutely flooded by this stuff on a regular basis. Until people wake up and learn that they are just being thrown around emotionally like a dog being tempted with a snack, they are going to have an easy time influencing the public to do whatever they want. For some reason, I am regularly downvoted when I make comments like this. The key thing is that people don't think about how something in the media affects them directly. It's like shark attacks. The risks are negligible, yet they captivate the imagination. The mental images and pictures that they are exposed to on a regular basis by the media, both news and fictional tv shows and movies, are specifically chosen to get a response out of them, like a bully getting a rise out of taunting his victim. People don't think they can be manipulated, because they don't like to think they are that stupid, yet it ridiculously common.