4 ms·

Here are some new concrete developments that I doubt the founders of the democracy would say are fine: - the Executive Branch now has presumptive - if not abso

• joquarky 2y ago
  > otherwise they will be de-accredited Who decides the ultimate authority on accreditation anyway? Why can't we just start a new trust network?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• _heimdall 2y ago
  Impoundment, or rather the idea that it is an issue, is a weird concept in general. Congress legislates executive directives that should be acted upon and provides a budget. They don't say "spend every dollar we give" and they rarely define metrics for success to know if the executive branch is meeting their goals. The fact that the Trump administration is able to so easily chest the game and roll back agencies is a side effect of congress writing thousands of pages of legislation without ever bothering to define precisely what is expected of the executive branch.
  • tsimionescu 2y ago
    No, this is quite wrong. It is well understood in American law that "spend every dollar we give" is exactly what the budget approved by Congress means. It is then the duty of the executive branch to do so in an effective manner. Laws shouldn't need to go into details on exactly how every last dollar is to be spent, they set the amount and the goals, and the executive exists to handle the details. The problem is that the Trump administration is ignoring the laws they don't like. They're even trying to ignore a very explicit constitutional amendment (birthright citizenship). Writing more detailed laws would do nothing to make the Trump team follow the law.
    • pfannkuchen 2y ago
      A lot of people don’t like that “regulation” has been delegated to unelected agencies instead of having congress make laws. Is the current structure of agencies with delegated regulatory powers specified in the constitution? I don’t think so. It isn’t explicitly forbidden, but it’s not like it’s what the founders had in mind or wrote down. The current administration’s approach is activist in the sense that it would be more direct to just outlaw the current structure via congress. I suspect that isn’t possible at the moment due to the entanglement of corporate interests, regulatory agencies and lobbying money. Activist action isn’t exactly new though. Maybe it hasn’t happened on the right wing as much in America in living memory, it feels like they felt like they were above it for a long time. They don’t feel like that anymore.
      • tsimionescu 2y ago
        What "many people" don't like about this system is just how effective it is at regulating their businesses. The alternative - that the 535 members of Congress should regulate every detail of every facet of federal life - is completely untenable. The reality is that Congress has been effectively neutralized as a law making institution for at least two decades, barely able to do more than pass the budget and one or two big items per election cycle. The dream of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all the others is that the executive state will be similarly neutered, unable to effectively regulate any kind of big business interests. The vast majority of the American people neither knows nor cares about the difference between a law that Congress passed and a regulation enacted by an agency of the executive (or between those and state lawd or even city regulations, much of the time). They care whether those rules are useful or detrimental to them. This is why agencies like the CFPB, that Musk and Trump have essentially dismantled (much to Mark Andreesen's delight, I'm sure) was extremely popular: normal people could see how it helped them or their friends. They didn't care that it was pursuing regulations not directly codified by Congress.