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"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

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

#231

Post by somenameforme »

greyface- wrote: post #44

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?

The way the US political system works is that the legislative passes laws, the executive enforces laws, and the judicial interprets laws and ensures the constitutionality/legality of it all. This is relevant because in this scenario each body plays a critical role, but they 'beat' each other in different ways, almost like a game of rock, paper, scissors. The executive beats the legislative by vetoing laws, the judicial beats the executive by blocking/halting orders/enforcements of laws, and the legislative can beat the judiciary by passing new laws or even changing the constitution (though there you'd also need the states' approval).

This simplifies some things (like the fact that congress can beat the executive by overriding a veto), but I think generally captures the essence of the system. And a key point here is that judicial beats executive. The executive can interpret a law however they want, but if the judiciary disagrees then the judiciary wins. So nothing needs to be "used" to disregard the judiciary's interpretation of laws - it simply doesn't matter what the executive's interpretation of a law - that's the role of the judiciary.

The reason for this law is simply to bring the various agencies under executive authority in line. Instead of each individual organization interpreting the law (generally around the limits of their powers) at their own discretion, those interpretations will now need to pass through the attorney general.

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

#232

Post by tmpz22 »

zeven7 wrote: post #31
Ancapistani wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With absolutely no malice intended: you step back a bit, lick your wounds, and try to figure out why your message and candidate failed - just like the GOP did for the past four years. Four years feels like a long time when it has just started; it isn’t so long at all in hindsight. Moreover, you have two years before the next opportunity you have to disempower Trump (midterm elections). The campaigns for those start i…

Thank you for a non-malicious response, but (also respectfully) I am not a Democrat, and your response seemed to me more geared toward answering "How can I deal with policy changes that I disagree with?" I am more concerned about the potential for the complete capitulation of American democracy to totalitarianism than any particular platform issues. What's happening right now is only a small part standard disagreemen…

As someone who currently studies public policy I find the centrist declaration interesting because I used to consider myself a centrist until I started reading more on the actual positions of many politicians.

In my limited view Obama was very centrist, as was Hillary, and with some notable exceptions it looked like Kamala would continue the trend (while expediently skewing left and sometimes even slightly right when necessary).

I think if you were to pie chart policy even into Trumps first term you’d see presidential action being both majority in volume and majority in impact as centrist.

So while I agree that Kamala’s messaging failed to point this out during the election, and DEI rhetoric and action being a notable exception to my argument, Kamala was at the end of the day the centrist candidate IMO and thus the 2.0 correction would be more transparency to that reality.

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

#233

Post by piva00 »

grandempire wrote: post #191
batushka5 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Fascism is a reaction to a capitalist crisis, Nazis weren't socialists by any definition except for using populist agendas like sharing of profits and welfare to rally their base.

Nazis never nationalised any industry and rather used corporatism to take hold of them while those were still private entities, same in Italy, industry and fascist regimes walked hand-in-hand.

Saying those are equivalent to socialism just due to populist rhetoric is misleading and historically wrong...

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

#234

Post by marcosdumay »

nimbius wrote: post #161
dkobia wrote: 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.

this is quite similar to anyone familiar with prussia, berlin and the constituent national assembly of 1845 in the context of the historical power struggle between vichy merchant classes and their royal monarchs during the advent of the steam era. it seems the same play is being made in 2025 at the advent of AI and Tech supremacy as it comes to a headroads with the death of traditional US neoliberalism. Tech is more…

Can we drop the "tech" prefix from our neo-feudalism?

Technology is necessarily a progressive force, and feudalism is necessarily a stagnatory conservative structure. The "Tech Supremacy" group is visibly opposed to technology, and it's reflecting more and more on society as they gain power.

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

#235

Post by snowwrestler »

gottorf wrote: post #209
snowwrestler wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not “missing” anything, your interpretation of the Constitution is incorrect. You may want to scroll up and read Article I, which constrains Article II (that’s why it comes first). Your understanding of Chevron deference is also incorrect, for what it’s worth.

> You may want to scroll up and read Article I, which constrains Article II (that’s why it comes first) What in Article I imposes constraints on the presidency? It's almost all about the legislature itself, and hardly mentions the executive. Specifically, I don't see anything that lends credence to the idea that Congress can control the workings of executive departments.

Article I defines the powers of Congress. Having been assigned to Congress, those powers are not available to the president.

Instead, the president is responsible for faithfully executing the laws. So if the law defines how an agency is staffed and makes policy, the president is bound by that.

If this seems like an imposition upon the president, please remember that the president agrees to these impositions in advance by signing the laws.

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

#236

Post by [deleted] »

steveBK123 wrote: post #162
dkobia wrote: 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.

This is the problem with people being OK with executive overreach when "their team" is in power. Eventually, and in fact about 50% of the time - the OTHER team is in power.. and may just push the overreach further. We should desire that the legislative side actually legislates and each branch of the government holds the other two in check, regardless of partisan control. Further having our judicial branch become open…

[deleted]

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

#237

Post by drivers99 »

hammock wrote: post #226
intended wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bipartisan efforts are what makes Congress work. It’s this loss that plagues Congress. Bipartisanship is what was jettisoned by the republicans to ensure that they would always be able to blame democrats for the failure of the government. Even during Obamacare, when they adopted a Republican plan, Romney had to distance himself from it. Despite all the efforts for Bipartisan outreach - for all the concessions, the re…

Why so two-party system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

> political systems with single-member districts and the plurality voting system, as in, for example, the United States, two main parties tend to emerge. In this case, votes for minor parties can potentially be regarded as splitting votes away from the most similar major party

If a third party grows it will either shrink again as voters realize they are splitting their vote against their biggest common opponent, or the third party replaces one of the two existing parties. Either way, you get two main parties.

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

#238

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

CPLX wrote: post #215
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the modern Democratic Party knows, but understandably doesn’t go around trumpeting, is that they cannot organize mass collective action because there’s not enough people on their side. You talk about “a coalition of labor unions”, but even union members barely lean Democratic these days. There’s very few groups outside of the Democratic Party infrastructure which are polarized enough to take a side.

There are absolutely enough people on "their side" in the sense that there are plenty of people on the side of working people, way more than enough. The problem is the actual leadership of the Democratic Party isn't on the side of working people at all, and is actually actively hostile to those in favor of classic labor policies. Don't get me wrong the other side is absolutely not on the side of working people either…

I agree with a lot of what this article has to say, and it's true that the politics of the US would be quite different if one of the major parties were a bona fide labor movement. But they're not, and I worry that the label of "elites" makes it harder to see why they're not. It's genuinely challenging - although I agree sometimes necessary! - to explain to someone who's really fired up about racial justice or climate change that they're not representative of the public and their concerns need to take a back seat to kitchen table issues.

It's also not obvious to me that a bona fide labor movement would take a particularly strong stance on an executive order curtailing independent agencies. Being invested in the details of how paper-pushing agencies are structured is a very elite concern.

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

#239

Post by throw0101c »

tmpz22 wrote: post #212
throw0101c wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy. Debatable. But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder. It was deflation, the gold standard, and the insistence of balanced budgets that caused revolutions all over the world: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da... It was dropping prices that caused ferment in the US: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech It was FDR…

> Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy. > Debatable Wait how is this debatable. We saw wealth inequality explode in ‘20 ‘21 ‘22 and ‘23 as the wealthiest Americans navigated rapid inflation and then rate cuts by strategically buying everything they could and then turning into activist investors and forcing RTO and mass layoffs despite record profits. Wealthy people can take advantage of economic turmoil by…

> What am I missing?

Wealth inequality was previously at its highest point in the US during the Gilded Age, when the US was still on the gold standard and inflation was not as much of a thing (and deflation often reined):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

During the 1970s, US inflation was quite high:

* https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832

and yet during the same time period the wealth ownership of the top 0.1% went down:

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i...

US wealth inequality only really started rising in the 1980s—as inflation went down. Further, as The Guardian graph shows, concentration has gone up from the 1990s up until now, even though the last few decades have had the lowest, and most stable, inflation numbers in history:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

So the link between inflation and wealth concentration does not appear to have any correlation according to the historical data.

I would hazard to guess that a more promising link to wealth concentration/inequality would be the cutting of tax rates (both corporate and personal) starting during the Reagan administration, and how it reduced redistribution of money to the lower- and middle-class.

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

#240

Post by marcosdumay »

throw0101c wrote: post #151
hayst4ck wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy. Money is by definition zero sum, otherwise the word "inflation" would have no meaning. There are good questions around what an over leveraged loan is, but fundamentally, the supply of money is to some degree fixed at any given moment. The wealthy and powerful keep their money in tax benefited, inflation tracking assets. Many of those assets are stocks, and a major busin…

> Inflation is an extreme handout to the wealthy. Debatable. But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder. It was deflation, the gold standard, and the insistence of balanced budgets that caused revolutions all over the world: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da... It was dropping prices that caused ferment in the US: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech It was FDR…

I wonder who you saw debating that. It looks really settled down and unanimous to me. Inflation is extremely harmful to poor people.

The only debate I see is about whether the Austrian school has a point and merely printing money is already harmful or if harm comes only when prices increase.

Also,

> But the opposite, deflation, hits the poor much harder.

Yes. Two different things can be true.

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