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"Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order

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

#871

Post by ineptech »

pessimizer wrote: post #676
timoth3y wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elec…

Ask yourself: what's the difference between the SEC saying, "We declare that Facebook broke a securities law and shall now be fined $1M" and Trump saying, "I decree that the SEC declare that Facebook broke a securities law and shall now be fined $1M"? Either of those could be true or false. Either could be politically motivated. Either could hold up in court or be struck down. So what's the difference?

One[0] answer is, the former was vetted by someone knowledgeable and (at least allegedly) non-partisan who had the power to stop it if it was wrong. That's it. If the president really wants to fine Facebook he can - he can replace the SEC Director with the "My Pillow" guy if he wants, who can replace SEC employees with randomly chosen members MAGA types until the desired fine is eventually issued - but at least going through the bureaucracy confers the possibility of impartial and informed oversight. Vesting the power with the president directly doesn't do that; presidents are biased and partisan by design.

0: Another answer is the SEC has been granted the power to do that by Congress and the president has not; but I get that people on the "unitary executive" train disregard this, and

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

#872

Post by grandempire »

unethical_ban wrote: post #753
grandempire wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Powers are enumerated in the constitution. So it’s not a question of what the constitution says they can’t do. It would be strange if congress can designate untouchable officials. Why don’t they just grant themselves office for life?

>To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. So yes, Congress has wide leeway to create agencies to administer particular executions of laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. Furthermore, we don't have untouchable off…

> Rank-and-file civil servants are protected from being fired

That cannot be true. They do not get a lifetime claim to the treasury which is not revocable by elected officials.

The members of the executive branch work for the chief executive.

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

#873

Post by tsimionescu »

losvedir wrote: post #736
ta8645 wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ostensibly, this EO is meant to remove power from bureaucratically controlled agencies in the government. The right have been complaining that real power has been usurped from the institutions mentioned in the constitution, and centered in a professional managerial class, that works below the surface, and has no culpability or exposure to voters. That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be a…

Right, on its face this is simply more of the "drain the swamp" rhetoric from his first term. The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch. The motivation of the EO was clearly articulated all throughout the campaign that, as you say, even within the executive branch the…

> The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch.

Then maybe you need to get an understanding of human organizations in general and the US government in particular that goes beyond your high school civics days.

The president has no power or authority to interpret the law, not beyond the implicit power of every citizen to interpret the law for themsleves. The president has the power and authority to execute the law as written, mostly by appointing other people to do so in specific areas. The power to choose those specific people is already huge, directing their every move is neither needed nor desirable.

There are literally tens of thousands of laws, if not hundreds of thousands (when including regulations and binding court precedents) that need to be followed by the federal government. The president simply can't be an authority on all of them, it's not even remotely close to humanly possible.

Not to mention, very tight, military-style control is a a horrible feature. The President may get to command the army, but they are not commander-in-chief of the executive branch, civilian agencies don't and mustn't work that way. Government employees must uphold the law, and fulfill the role of their position. If they're not following the law, they should be fired, and a court may get involved to reach this conclusion. The president doesn't get to dictate what the law is and fire government employees who are upholding the law instead of the president's interpretation of the law.

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

#874

Post by linkregister »

apple4ever wrote: post #773
arunabha wrote: post #503

In general, people are going to interpret this EO with their own lens. Unsurprisingly, reasonable people may disagree on the merits of the EO as a whole. However this part of the EO is pretty concerning > 'The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch' and later > 'No employee of the executive bra…

>setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system. But that is what the Constitution specifies (Article II Section 1): > The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. I find it funny people either don't know this or are intentionally ignoring it. The entire power is vested in one person, who can delegate the enforcement of it to lower officers. >…

"The Congress shall have Power ... [long list of various government functions and agencies] ... To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof" - Article 1, §8, United States Constitution.

In practice, government agencies are primarily required to adhere to U.S. Code (list of laws compiled from bills passed in Congress). Then they consider executive orders.

Your mental model of the executive branch is a commonly held one. However, you should adjust your model to incorporate this information which may have been omitted from your initial training data set.

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

#875

Post by notTooFarGone »

trothamel wrote: post #830
UncleOxidant wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so how would those checks and balances work if the president refuses to obey the courts? Who's going to enforce those court orders? I suppose you could say that the congress could impeach - but what if the majority of the House sides with the president? And if the House does manage to pass impeachment, it still takes 2/3 of Senators to convict - as we've seen that's a very high bar and very unlikely to happen. Bu…

> what if the majority of the House sides with the president? In that case, congress is serving as a check on the court's power.

it's basically a 51% attack. Only that the job security of the 51% are directly correlated with their participation.

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

#876

Post by grandempire »

kasey_junk wrote: post #213
grandempire wrote: post #30

The only rebuttal I see in the media is that congress set these up to be “independent”. But our government doesn’t have independent branches. In fact that sounds a lot like “unelected and unaccountable”. So which branches are these agencies under? Is it in the judicial, legislative, or executive - and if it’s in the executive why can’t the chief executive manage business? On the other hand, one of the issues brought…

They aren't 'independent' they are 'a mix between executive and legislative'. The Supreme Court decisions are Meyers v US and Hunters Executor v US. And I'm not a constitutional scholar but my reading of it is that the protections in question come from the legislative delegating some of their power to the executive, think legislative actions (researching laws, etc) but retaining their constitutional prerogative to pr…

“ Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), was a United States Supreme Court decision ruling that the President has the exclusive power to remove executive branch officials, and does not need the approval of the Senate or any other legislative body.”

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

#879

Post by tsimionescu »

jtc331 wrote: post #694
svnt wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive interpretations like this one, of bad faith actions is how we get there. This same assumption of good faith was wholly present in peoples' responses to project 2025 prior to the election. They are not acting in good faith. Try restating the problem: Why is this EO being issued? What problem, other than judicial review, does it solve for the executive branch? EDIT: For those who do not think this contributes any…

> What problem, other than judicial review, does it solve for the executive branch? It’s fairly obvious on its face the concern of the EO is not judicial review but about agencies that nominally are past of the branch the President heads determining interpretations of law contrary to what the head of the executive desires. And, it does genuinely seem weird to have an executive branch where the head of that branch doe…

> And, it does genuinely seem weird to have an executive branch where the head of that branch doesn’t actually control things.

It's not weird at all, and it's not true that the head of the executive doesn't have control over those agencies. The head of the executive names their leadership - that is a huge amount of control. And it is enough control - the government isn't some top-down system serving at the pleasure of the president. It is a system for implementing the rules set out by Congress and the courts (subject to the President's judicial review powers), that the president coordinates.

The very title of "president" was chosen by the founding fathers to evoke the largely bureaucratic role they had in mind. It's not supposed to be a position of prestige or control like a dictator or ruler, it's similar to the role of a committee president: someone who oversees the functioning of the committee, and steer the general agenda, but who doesn't otherwise get to decide for the committee.

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

#880

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

refurb wrote: post #803
Nevermark wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three branches of the government are beholden to the Constitution as a whole, and to each other based on the Constitutional roles and their expressions of their roles. All government actors individually are also responsible to the Constitution and its expression by all three branches first , before any loyalty to anyone else. In the same branch or not. Even before the current top office holders of the executive b…

> Saying that a President’s personal interpretation of Congress’ laws or the courts precedence, completely overrides any individual executive employees good faith understanding and responsibility to the Constitution, laws, and judicial rulings is madness. But it's not madness based on the intended structure of government? The EO isn't saying "ignore Constitutional violations". It wouldn't be valid if it did. If Congr…

> The EO isn't saying "ignore Constitutional violations".

What if the President says "I interpret [irrefutably unconstitutional action x] to not be in violation of the constitution"? Then anyone in the executive branch has to behave as though that action were constitutional, no matter what it is, don't they?

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