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"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

whitehouse.gov

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with a highly sympathetic Supreme Court it is hard to imagine this EO standing. It goes against the foundation of not only US law, but couple of hundred years of international democratic tradition in which allegiance is not to a person, but to the nation itself. US civil servants and military alike swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution not the president or their commander. Illegal orders are not o…

If the Supreme Court and Congress has no enforcement power, though, what recourse is there?

I know this sounds corny, but people are the recourse. We are part of the checks and balances.

Whether it is as overt as a soldier refusing to follow an illegal order knowing they are risking court marshal, or as clandestine as mid-level bureaucrat slow-walking damaging policies, or people actually voting in local-to-national elections.

Democracy is not a passive form of government.

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

#672
post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this EO being issued? It explains itself in Section 1; pretty much all the above the fold material is on exactly that topic. Trump & friends are taking the interpretation that the US presidential election is a vote on how the executive government is to be run. As an extension of that, they're pulling power away from the unelected bureaucracy back towards the office of president - because a vote can't change…

> because a vote can't change the direction of the executive if parts of it are on autopilot independently of the president. That's only mildly true, and the belief of micromanagers everywhere. Ultimately, you need to set an overall direction and then let people execute within that framework, or you're going to get something that's badly run and slow as molasses. With a nuanced interpretation, this EO even might make…

You're getting downvoted for basically saying 'you know how command economies don't work? That model also doesn't work as a national governmental system' by the people who claim to hate command economies.

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

#673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary Everyone tasked with enforcing a law must necessarily interpret its meaning. The judiciary gets the final say though.

[flagged]

The question of whether you'd be happy to have the other guy do it always applies. If you wouldn't, people moaning when it happens is always a good thing.

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

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Supreme Court and Congress has no enforcement power, though, what recourse is there?

sic semper tyrannis

Hopefully we never get there. But America should suffer no kings.

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

#675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are equally bad. GOP are rotten to the core. I don't understand why a new party has not formed to leave the batshit crazies behind.

systemic problems require systemic solutions, currently the systemic incentives are for single-party. If you want multiparty you're going to have to want a good deal of constitutional changes or internal party structure changes (although we already have a good amount of that in the form of house caucuses).

Maybe they do though the most powerful movements are grassroots. If it can get enough momentum to outpace the demonization that surely follows growth.

For example, who wouldn't support anti-fascism? That morphed into "antifa" which became the source of all the worlds ills according to the orange goblin. Yet only a fascist could be afraid of anti-fascism.

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

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Supreme Court and Congress has no enforcement power, though, what recourse is there?

I know this sounds corny, but people are the recourse. We are part of the checks and balances. Whether it is as overt as a soldier refusing to follow an illegal order knowing they are risking court marshal, or as clandestine as mid-level bureaucrat slow-walking damaging policies, or people actually voting in local-to-national elections. Democracy is not a passive form of government.

> I know this sounds corny, but people are the recourse. We are part of the checks and balances.

By "we" here, it seems you mean bureaucrats. But what if your opinions, as an individual, unelected bureaucrat are bad? I don't care what a mid-level bureaucrat's opinions on what policies are damaging is. He could be a neo-nazi for all I know. Constitutionally, we should go with the opinions of the people who won an election, instead of some random dude. I was taught that was what "democracy" was, not some random person taking advantage of their position to advance their personal goals.

When the guy paid to guard the door starts making his own decisions about who should get to come in, it's not good. It's corruption.

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

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor does the President "interpret" the law; that is the domain of the Judiciary Everyone tasked with enforcing a law must necessarily interpret its meaning. The judiciary gets the final say though.

you are mixing up different meanings for the word "interpret". "Authoritative Interpreting law" (or in general interpreting law) doesn't mean "trying to understand what it means" but means "deciding what it means in practice" especially if you add a "authoritative" in the front it in legal language means they gave themself the right (i.e. authority) to decide (i.e. interpret) how law should be interpreted, i.e. what…

The DOJ regularly provides guidance about its interpretations of laws. These letters are also “deciding what it means in practice.”

https://adata.org/interpretation-letter

Nobody complains about this though.

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

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that be from Iran?

No, presidents can kind of claim national emergencies all the time. Usually they're used for sanctions, but they can also be for economic or security reasons (security being interpreted as times of war and in a very broad sense).

I guess I answered my own question. This is what I meant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12170

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

#679
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the operative line: > The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. conveys respect to the judiciary branch, and states that this only applies to situations where the executive branch is interpreting laws in isolation during their enforcement of them (which happens quite often…

> Trump isn't exposing new weaknesses in our system; the weaknesses have always been there. exactly there; the system relies on everyone following the rules and doesn't have much in the way of remediation, other than impeachment, if the president just decides to ignore the other two branches. possibly SCOTUS, but they've hamstrung themselves with their recent decisions

And interestingly; its not clear to me that we'd have a better system if many of these weaknesses were patched. As software engineers might say, the quickest way to fix all the bugs in a system is to delete the system; the quickest way to a government perfectly resilient to authoritarian control is a government which simply can't do anything. This services no one.

At the end of the day, you can build safe-guards, and the American system of safeguards is among the best in the world. But, we also need leadership that can and will act to solve emergent problems, lest we cannot adapt to an evolving world. And, honestly, America has struggled for the past 20 years, especially since 2008. Our solution to everything has been "throw money at it", when we don't have the money we abuse our position as global reserve currency to just print more, and no one in charge has had any desire to think critically about how we get out of that hole, or how we solve any of the other problems the country faces smarter not richer.

I don't know if Trump and his team will make the problem better or worse. I feel pretty confident that they'll make it worse for some already-marginalized people, and I wish that wasn't the case, but the world that is likely to happen should we not solve these problems will not be kinder to them than the one they're in right now. Someone like Trump was guaranteed to happen after our insane, elitist, kick-the-can-down-the-road response to the GFC and COVID. There were saner voices in the room at those times. No one listened to them.

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

#680

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?

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…

The way I see it, the excuse for moving to a fiat currency was that the rich people owned all the gold and social mobility had stagnated, so they decided that an elastic money supply would provide some social mobility and could go towards rewarding and building up an intellectual class.

But what happened is that a small subset of elites managed to capture the flow of new fiat money, creating even more concentration. Some social mobility was made possible, but only at the behest of this tiny number of elites... And now it's looking like we're reaching the end of that cycle and social mobility is screeching to a halt... The sheer, grotesque misallocation of fiat money has become hard to ignore. The misallocation appears to be unlimited and serves political agendas. Unlike in the gold-backed era where the elites had to provide actual value to earn their scarce gold, the elite of the current era (and their hand-picked minions) got their wealth mostly through rent-seeking and monopolization of government institutions which provided access to unlimited streams of money.

So now we have no social mobility, inequality is worse than ever (and accelerating) and we have an elite class which is ill-equipped to run any kind of economy which creates value. We are in a situation even worse than the gold-backed money era. At least then, the money was in the hands of people who COULD leverage it to deliver real value out of it. People could dig themselves out of their poverty by providing value which was worth its weight in gold. It was a level playing field. The only people who had priority access to gold were those who dug it out of the ground at great risk/expense to themselves. Nowadays, there is no heuristic or logic that you can use to dig yourself out of poverty. There is no logic behind social mobility aside from social scheming; to be chosen/funded by the elite; which produces no economic value for anyone, not even the elite. They don't even know what they want anymore so they use their money to engage on wild zero-sum political manipulations; billionaires throwing huge amounts of money against each other; going mostly into the pockets of lunatic 'activists' and nothing gets done either way; all the billionaires agendas cancel out; it just creates more crazy people with money roaming around, creating intense divisions over nothing. At the end of the day, all these 'ideological' lunatics (aka experts) funded by billionaires just care about money and they're making up all kinds of nonsense arguments to justify their paychecks... Pretending that they actually care about all this stuff when really, it's all 100% about paychecks. They're literally fighting over money, using all sorts of other ideas and social agendas as pretexts.

The people who have all the money to decide the direction of our economy and society do not have the ability or even the desire to improve it to make it work efficiently in any broad sense; they are only skilled in terms of wealth concentration, not wealth creation.

At this stage, I'm convinced that the economy would work better if the government just started handing out millions of dollars of free money to everyone and let global hyperinflation happen.

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