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DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

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Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#231

Post by skissane »

llamaimperative wrote: post #212
skissane wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 is explicitly clear about this, there is absolutely no room for debate. Yes, but is that Act constitutional? Has SCOTUS upheld its constitutionality? That’s where there absolutely is room for debate.

Has the government's right to mow down civilians with helicopter-mounted machine guns been tested in the Supreme Court lately? That's where there absolutely is room for debate. This argument can apply to literally anything.

It is different though.

There are law journal articles debating whether the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional. And that isn’t a new thing, here’s one from 1990: https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...

There’s a big difference between a law for which there have been longstanding serious scholarly objections to its constitutionality, and a law whose constitutionality has never been questioned in any serious forum

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#232

Post by hondo77 »

vesinisa wrote: post #141
hx8 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data is on Slack servers, then Slack may be more than willing comply with FOIA.

Slack can't just willy-nilly hand over US government data to the public. There's a process that needs to be followed for FOIA requests as some classes of information are just not public. In fact, most of the data on a government Slack server would probably fall under those FOIA exemptions.

Not when I worked in the US govt. We were told that everything we did in our Slack was FOIA-able. FWIW.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#233

Post by thaumasiotes »

byroot wrote: post #103
thaumasiotes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In France public service employees have a very high level of protection (they're very hard to fire), and are legally allowed to disobey "obviously illegal" orders This would seem to imply that a French public servant who obeys an "obviously illegal" order is both knowingly (it's obvious) and willfully (there's no requirement to obey) breaking the law. What are the penalties for that?

> knowingly (it's obvious) The term used in French isn't quite as strong as "obviously", it's "manifestement illegal". See Wordreference: https://www.wordreference.com/fren/manifestement . Apparently English has "manifestly" but I never heard it so unsure if it's a good translation. > What are the penalties for that? I had to look it up, it seems you're considered complicit in whatever the order was about. Basically…

Thanks for the response.

"Manifestly" seems fine as a translation, though in English I would consider it to be about equally as strong as "obvious", or possibly stronger because it's an unusual, formal-sounding word that might suggest you're trying to sound emphatic.

crowdsourced wiktionary ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/manifestly ):

> In a manifest manner; obviously.

curated Merriam-Webster (the standard dictionary of American English; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifestly ):

> easily understood or recognized by the mind : obvious

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#234

Post by Volundr »

jacobr1 wrote: post #149
pfannkuchen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual law is a high dimensional interaction of all active legislation. Predicting what the legal system will do is hard and often cannot be achieved with high reliability with a google search. This is why lawyers exist. Presumably doge and trump have access to good lawyers. I’m not asserting that they are right, just that a shallow legal analysis is error prone and looking at a single law likely does not yield u…

Also malicious compliance is an option. Maybe they could name a single person the official administrator, given them an office in a basement and officially comply, while effectively shutting everything down. The extent to which fulfilling the intent of legislation vs relying on the discretion of the executive to interpret it within, and as a matter of precedent deferring to executive discretion by default in court ca…

Unless they are paying that person in the basement the full funding of what Congress has budgetted for USAID that's Impoundment. If they are then it's still Impoundment because it's been redirected from it's original purpose.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#235

Post by Volundr »

skissane wrote: post #131
zzzeek wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk talked Trump and Rubio into doing and they did. which is illegal. USAID can only be "shut down" by an act of Congress

[flagged]

> There is a lack of recent SCOTUS precedents on the topic

How recent do you need? Nixon already tested this one and lost at the SC.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#236

Post by Marsymars »

outside1234 wrote: post #89
dylan604 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways is a president restricted from acting like a king when the other two bodies of government meant to act as a check and balance have capitulated any of those checks and essentially give carte blanche to the president?

It is a good question. Hopefully we get an answer before we are all bankrupt. No idea why the markets aren't in freefall at this point.

Where would you park your money rather than US equities?

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#237

Post by skissane »

zzzeek wrote: post #227
skissane wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Can Congress constitutionally force the President to spend money the President doesn’t want to spend? Congress holds the power of the purse, so they aren't "forcing" the President, the President has no say in the matter

Almost every President until Nixon claimed the constitutional right to impound appropriations, and actually did it. And Congress often objected, but what could they do? Until Nixon did it so much, that Congress passed a law against it. And Nixon decided to sign the law, because he wanted to put the controversy over his own impoundments behind him. And from then until now, even if some Presidents questioned the constitutionality of that law, they decided to abide by it. Until finally, now in the second Trump administration, Trump has listened to conservative legal scholars arguing that the law is unconstitutional, and decided to adopt their argument and ignore it. And likely SCOTUS will decide its constitutionality as a result. But you make a decades-old debate sound like something that has a completely obvious answer. If the answer is as simple and obvious as you think it is, how did almost every President up to and including Nixon get it wrong?

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#238

Post by impulser_ »

exceptione wrote: post #201
impulser_ wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that why I said both. It depends on what they are doing. USAID probably needs congress, but other things might just need an EO. The point is DOGE isn't doing this, the President is. Elon doesn't have authority that Democratics are saying he does. He simply informs the President, "Hey, USAID is spending taxpayers money to fund xyz in xyz you might want to shut it down". The President then goes "Yeah, I think we…

> He simply informs the President, That man is way too friendly. Just before the election he gave $300.000.000,00 to Trump. And he is so special, eh! He can read air-gaped, highly sensitive data that no one should see from government systems, just using his mind/indoctrinated minions. I hate it when people speculate this might have to do, amongst things, with dark money to be made in intelligence/elite level internat…

Neither him nor Trump ever hid what Elon was going to do if Trump was elected. Unlike other donators of both parties, we always knew what Elon's goal was. He literally spent the last year on Twitter tweeting about it.

Many people, especially libertarians, voted for Trump for this exact reason.

Yeah, you might think he shouldn't have access to these system but it's the President, who the majority of the people voted for, that has the authority to grant him access, or ask for access from the appoint leaders of these departments.

Everyday when he posts list of things the US government is spending money on the more people are backing Elon in this endeavor.

Go here https://x.com/DOGE and read some of the things we are paying for and you tell me that we should be spending money on it.

Yeah, you might think he up to something bad but you would have always thought that because you don't like him.

Are you sure he's not just an American who cares about the US and doesn't want it too head into a death spiral from massive amount of debt with no one brave enough to stop it because it might cause them to lose an election?

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#239

Post by quickthrowman »

skissane wrote: post #200
quickthrowman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not debateable at all, the President has to ask Congress to rescind appropriated funds if the President doesn’t want to spend the money allocated by Congress. If Congress chooses not to rescind the allocated funds, then the president must spend the money. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 is explicitly clear about this, there is absolutely no room for debate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…

> The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 is explicitly clear about this, there is absolutely no room for debate. Yes, but is that Act constitutional? Has SCOTUS upheld its constitutionality? That’s where there absolutely is room for debate.

It hasn’t been tested at the Supreme Court level, no.

However, other presidential administrations have worked within the framework of the law and requested that Congress rescind funding instead of running roughshod over the law and unilaterally attempting to defund programs and canceling spending that was authorized by Congress.

We’ll likely get a Supreme Court case testing the CBIA of 1974, we’ll soon find out what these 9 justices think about it.

Re: DOGE employees ordered to stop using Slack

#240

Post by jeltz »

BryantD wrote: post #57
rayiner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are throwing around the word "impoundment" lately. But it has a very specific meaning, and no impoundment has happened.

Judge John McConnell disagrees with you. His decision placing a hold on the spending freeze cites the Impoundment Control Act as part of his finding that the lawsuit is likely to succeed on the merits.

Yeah, it is always fun when people here know more than supreme court judges about US law.
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