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"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

whitehouse.gov

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Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#141

As Americans that believe in the Republic, what exactly are we supposed to do about this? Should we continue to implore congress to take action against this lawless behavior?

The actual answer here is to exercise actual power.

Oligarchs are always greatly outnumbered.

The only thing that is genuinely effective is mass movement. A coalition of labor unions could shut down all of Elon and Trumps businesses in hours. Block the entrances to the factories. General strikes, boycotts, that kind of thing. It’s not actually that complicated.

Instead the modern Democratic Party is in love with appeals to the referees. They think that if they can just convince some court or The NY Times editorial board or a 75 year old former republican special prosecutor they’ll win.

As we have seen that approach is a total and complete failure.

If someone in opposition was able to generate mass collective action however the change would be swift. Nobody is really trying that though.

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#142
post #135
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not hyperbolic. In one month Trump has taken full unchecked power on almost anything. In 4 years, you won’t vote, that’s a given.

So when 4 years pass and we’re still voting, are you going to admit you are hyperbolic and divorced from reality?

Would you be around if he does what he says ?

At what point are your personal thresholds crossed?

I dont understand personally, how any conservative could tolerate this man.

Nor any techie lose their minds when someone without a security clearance gets access to sensitive national networks.

I’ve seen more complex plans used by spies to break into state secrets.

Yet, people are surprisingly chill.

So perhaps I am wrong. And perhaps there are other signs I should be looking for.

At what point should I or anyone say “major redlines have been crossed.”

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#143
post #37

So disappointed by the irrational and hyperbolic comments from my fellow nerds. Why are folks reading into this so much!? Clearly folks aren’t actually reading the content and just reacting based on a headline. Read, contemplate, compose. This really shouldn’t be an inflammatory exec order - from what I can tell this is precisely within the purview of a POTUS and precisely in line with historical exec orders. Why the…

Kushner said it best. "Noone goes as low as Trump." So you also get to deal with what politics looks like when it reaches its lowest, nastiest form.

Trump's a hero to the right, but on the left there's a pretty reasonable sense that Trump's actions have already amounted to literal treason if you consider him to have an obligation to uphold the oaths he has taken.

He attempted to get Zelensky to go on US TV and execute a political attack on Democrats as a condition of the US helping Ukraine.

He attempted to get the 2020 election flipped by making mafia-don style calls to Georgia asking them to "find" precisely the number of votes which would have made him win that election. He next asked Pence to change the result for him. All of these were acts of open treason against the People of the United States, so long as you count the People of the United States as including people who didn't vote for him.

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#144
post #130
post #128

This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation. This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.

[flagged]

Always have been.

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#145

This is obviously alarming, and if used to disregard the Judiciary's interpretation of law, unconstitutional. But I'm puzzled by the exemption of the Federal Reserve and FOMC. He's previously beefed with them, and would presumably find the additional leverage useful. Why explicitly exclude them?

He’s scared of them. If he were to mess with the Fed it would impact Wall Street, particularly by making the market indices go down. For whatever reason he cares about that in ways he doesn’t care about his approval ratings or the historical norms of the office. See how fast he reached a deal on tariffs earlier in the month when the markets reacted to them? Since then they’ve been slowly leading tariffs to get the me…

Elon Musk’s entire net worth is tied up in stocks.

If Tesla crashed, so would Elon’s power.

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#146

In Germany the legal executive branch is “Weisungsgebunden” which mean it follows the lead of the politicians instead of acting on own behalf. Because of this international warrants which come from Germany do not get followed since they can’t be trusted. It would be better to have independent judges but hey it doesn’t lead to a dictatorship and the end of the world directly as propagated everywhere.

Judges in Germany are independent and most of the time appointed for life. German state attorneys are not independent. Their warrants are not recognized internationally, not even in the EU in fact.

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#147
post #7

“ Sec. 7. Rules of Conduct Guiding Federal Employees’ Interpretation of the Law. The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executi…

I think a lot of people that are freaking out are missing that this applies to the executive branch, over whom the President has already perfectly well established. Literally the first statement of article 2 of the US Constitution (which lays out the power/rules for the executive branch) is "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." The main point of this executive order is…

> It required the judicial to completely defer to the executive branch in cases where the laws around executive departments (generally relating to the the limits of their regulatory power/authority) were ambiguous.

Why doesn’t congress do its job and write laws that do things?

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#148
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your personal threshold for gatekeeping when people are supposed to call it fascist? Have you done your nerd research on how Nazis dismantled the democratic state? If so, at what step would you have gatekept calling it fascist? Blanket calling worried people as "juvenile" as a dismissal is in itself pretty fucking juvenile, hope you can see that.

Progressives are using words like Nazi and fascist, purely as a slur against a political rival, without really understanding what those words mean nor the attrocities they represent. What the Nazi's did was horrifici, and it's incredibly insensitive, inappropriate, and, yes, juvenile, to water that down by using it for political point scoring.

Not only progressives are calling it fascism or proto-fascism, do you understand the steps fascism takes to fully take hold? Don't you see any parallels? Have you read any books on the subject?

It seems like you get butthurt from reading people calling moves very similar to fascism done by politicians you support, fascism takes many flavours, Italian fascism was different from German fascism. The way it's going the past month looks like to be shaping an American flavour of fascism.

There's no watering down, you are seeing with your own eyes a movement happening where the leader of the executive is attempting to snatch power, it never happens at once, it's always through salami slicing. What will be the breaking point for you, specifically? What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?

You are all around this forum whining about "progressives" trying to heed a call about a dark path being traced. You never seem to acknowledge there are very worrying moves happening, for some reason you do not want to hear it, you want to shut off the discussion at every turn by using progressives as a slur, and anything said by that out-group as wrong or hysterical a priori. Can't you see how stupid it is? You are always attempting to throw a wrench into these discussions with vitriol, as a non-American I really ask you to inform and educate yourself better, to learn about the process of fascism before coming with knee-jerk reactions because you don't like "progressives".

Go read "Hitler's Beneficiaries", read any book on historical recounts of the process of fascism unravelling from the 1920s to the 1930s, you are behaving exactly as the citizens enabling Mussolini and Hitler. American Fascism will not be Nazi or Italia Fascista, it has its own shape and form (such as not being anti-semitic, completely different to Nazis) but even though the topography differs, the core principles are pretty much the same.

Don't be an enabler, you won't like to be on the wrong side of history.

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#149
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your personal threshold for gatekeeping when people are supposed to call it fascist? Have you done your nerd research on how Nazis dismantled the democratic state? If so, at what step would you have gatekept calling it fascist? Blanket calling worried people as "juvenile" as a dismissal is in itself pretty fucking juvenile, hope you can see that.

[flagged]

From Hitler's mouth itself[0]:

> "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

> "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

> "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

> "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/17/greatint...

Re: "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

#150
post #37

So disappointed by the irrational and hyperbolic comments from my fellow nerds. Why are folks reading into this so much!? Clearly folks aren’t actually reading the content and just reacting based on a headline. Read, contemplate, compose. This really shouldn’t be an inflammatory exec order - from what I can tell this is precisely within the purview of a POTUS and precisely in line with historical exec orders. Why the…

Kushner said it best. "Noone goes as low as Trump." So you also get to deal with what politics looks like when it reaches its lowest, nastiest form. Trump's a hero to the right, but on the left there's a pretty reasonable sense that Trump's actions have already amounted to literal treason if you consider him to have an obligation to uphold the oaths he has taken. He attempted to get Zelensky to go on US TV and execut…

To make it crystal f**ing clear: him changing the policy of the US isn't treason. Cozying up to Russia or trying to reduce the size of the government are his prerogative as elected leader in a way that trying to change the result of an election is not. Ohh yeah and I forgot that he tried to get everyone to stop counting the votes while he was ahead! That also goes in the treason most foul bucket.
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