Do they even need to, though? If the president cannot be prosecuted for any official acts, and has the power to pardon any subordinate for ignoring the law, and to fire (and then prosecute) anyone who insists on following the law, what does the law matter?
It is quite a sophisticated set-up, really. You'd think in principle that the courts would decide when the presidency isn't following the law, but the actual power to punish the president lives in the legislature and it makes much more sense when examined in terms of what incentives exist.
I swear I can not prepare myself anymore for the sheer hypocrisy that is about to happen in four years! You know it’s going to happen, but my issue is the theatre of it all.
It is not. The constitution allows impeachment for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors only.
Isn’t that how they got Clinton?
If the President violates the law, and Congress impeaches and convicts them, and they don’t peacefully step down, and the military/police does not remove them from office/sides with the President, we effectively have a coup and the United States as outlined in the Constitution ceases to exist.
As the risk of deflating your apparently boundless optimism, that ship has sailed. The idea you have of a country operating under the rule of law is not congruent with reality.
At that point, being the ones with all the guns, it would fall to the military to decide who they are loyal to: the Constitution, ex-POTUS, or themselves, and they will act accordingly.
But other than that, yeah, the strategy seems to be "who is going to stop us?" It remains to be seen how far he can push things because a critical majority of Republican senators will balk. For all their talk about "muh constitution" over the last few decades, they sure seem quick to abandon some basics when it's convenient. And even then it remains to be seen if he actually steps down after an impeachment conviction.
Survival of the fittest leads to dictatorship; dictatorships stagnate, because they spend all their energy only on maintaining power. They are efficient in one sense, at maintaining order. But they are centralized and limited in throughput and therefore are never dynamic systems capable of growth and innovation.
The other remedy that still technically merits a mention even if it's somewhat implausible to happen any time soon is that Congress does still have the power to impeach and remove the president. I don't see it as super likely that Republicans would turn against him at this point, since pretty much all of the internal opposition has been driven out of the party over the past decade, but I'm guessing that it also would have been almost unthinkable for Nixon to go from winning every state other than Massachusetts in 1972 to losing so much support in 1974 that his own party told him that he might as well resign rather than have more than half of his own party's senators vote with the Democrats to remove him from office[0]. Even though I think the people who voted for Trump tend to be much more passionate in their support for him, and the norms for what behavior is considered "acceptable" as a politician have expanded dramatically (not in small part from Trump himself), I think there's still an argument to be made that Trump isn't as popular as Nixon was at this point in second term, and it's at least theoretically possible to imagine a scenario where his support eroded to the point that he lost enough support to continue with what he's doing. Even if his supporters aren't ever going to turn against him, there aren't nearly as many of them that there were for Nixon, so maybe the most likely of the unlikely scenarios for this would be a large enough Democrat majority getting elected during the midterms that they (possibly along with some of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate) could remove him. (This would of course still leave Vance as president, assuming he didn't also get impeached and convicted, so he could pardon Trump, but that still removes him from power for at least couple of years, and Vance being a relatively recent convert to Trumpism doesn't seem like he'd be able to command nearly as much loyalty as Trump himself has).
As for what could actually cause something like this to take place, I have to wonder if the most likely scenario would literally be another pandemic. Not only does the previous one have a reasonable claim to being what caused him to lose in 2020, a lot of the policies he's currently enacting seem like they'd backfire spectacularly in the face of another pandemic (e.g. cutting vaccine mandates in schools, appointing Kennedy as HHS secretary when him being antivax is probably the most well known thing about him, and the recent flirting with cutting Medicaid in order to pay for the tax cuts...)
[0]: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Ri...:
> During the late afternoon of August 7, Senators Goldwater and Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Scott told reporters afterward that they did not pressure Nixon to resign, but simply told the president that "the situation is very gloomy on Capitol Hill." Rhodes told the president he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House. By Majority Leader O'Neill's estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to vote against the obstruction-of-justice article. Goldwater and Scott told the president that not only were there enough votes in the Senate to convict him, but that no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Goldwater later wrote that as a result of the meeting, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished." That night, Nixon finalized his decision to leave office.
Perhaps. A lot of it is also the flip side of an executive order conjuring more government into existence.
The escalation of executive order from administration to administration, and the reliance on courts to make law results in what we have going on today.
Everyone was perfectly fine with the President doing whatever he wanted a couple months ago. Everyone was fine with the vague executive orders being treated as law.
At some point one party needs reign in the presidency while they have it. Democrats chose not to, then ran a losing campaign with a candidate voters did not nominate.
Neither party is principled on a national level. There are some individual exceptions, but they are few and far between.
Everyone was fine with the president doing whatever he wanted a couple of months ago because he didn't abuse his power like the new guy is. When you have someone with self control and the best interests of the country in mind, you don't actually need to reign in presidential power like you suggest, and we just haven't had a Trump in the presidency enough to call a constitutional convention.
> At some point one party needs reign in the presidency while they have it. Democrats chose not to, then ran a losing campaign with a candidate voters did not nominate.
This is impossible given the threshold for a constitutional convention. 2/3rd for proposal and 3/4th for ratification, we are just way too divided for that unless Trump messes up really really bad and we actually survive as the same country to pick up the pieces. The supreme court is the only other body that could interpret the law to restrict executive power, but it is stacked with Trump appointees who have new interpretations of unrestricted executive power, so we shouldn't expect much from them.
Well, it's also just not true that Democrats didn't reign in the power of the presidency when they had control.
They passed a bill and Biden signed it which makes it even more explicitly illegal for President to impound money like Trump tried last term, and is again doing now. That's why we can emphatically say what he's doing is illegal, because he's breaking a law that was passed to curb exactly what he's doing.
Moreover, when Trump argued in court he had broad presidential immunity, Biden argued against that position, thus arguing to limit his own power.
It's hard to claim both sides abuse power when one side claiming total presidential immunity to use the military to kill his political opponents, and the other side says no. The difference couldn't be more stark.
NIH budgets aren't being cut. The NIH is simply requiring that at least 85% of the grant value goes to the actual grant recipients, rather than being siphoned off by the university for administration expenses.
At most universities this change has no impact, since they weren't taking more than 15% to begin with. This change mainly impacts Harvard and similar, as they were previously taking extortionate cuts. Harvard was taking 69%!
That's not how any of this work. All of that money was already going to necessary expenditures, and "administrative expenses" is a crucial part of that.
What happened in these places to arrive at numbers like 69%, was a very thorough audit. The purpose of the audit is to allow the government to determine they are supposed to fund, and it's being bundled into an overhead number because its allows universities to take advantage of economies of scale, freeing researchers to do actual grant research.
But because our current leaders can't understand that, what's going to happen is all of the overhead costs (which again, are efficient) are going to be replaced with direct billing, which is highly inefficient. All of the money we save through sharing resources will now be siloed and duplicated needlessly. Instead of doing grant research, grant recipients will spend more time just doing compliance work instead of actual research.
Look at it this way:
A Harvard researcher asks the government for $100. They allocate an additional $69 on top of that for the university to spend on rent, utilities, legal, publishing, lab facilities, lab personnel, library services, tech support, etc. So the total grant is $169.
If the indirect rate is 0.15, the researcher isn't going to ask for $100 anymore, they're going to ask for at least $154, putting to total grant back to $169. But they're going to ask for more than this because they've lost the economy of scale of the old system. So now they have to pay for direct costs they never had to before - a 20% bump is not unreasonable.
So what just happened? The researcher only needed $100 to do their research. But now because government introduced inefficiencies into the system, the total grant goes up, and the real overhead rate is 100% instead of 69%.
By trying to save money you've actually cost everyone to have to spend more money, meaning total research is going to go down because total research spend isn't going to go up. Such efficient.
Not to pick on albastervlog specifically but HN is filling with posts like the one above, stating "this is illegal, that is illegal", posted by non-lawyers who have no idea whatsoever what is, and what is not, truly illegal.
Why state something is illegal when the statement is false or ambiguous at best? What does it contribute?
Why not instead state the simpler truth: "I don't like that!" or "I disagree with that!" and then get on with the rest of an argument?
This forum is losing relevance b/c posters have
- forgotten about manners and
- forgotten about the logical fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
> forgotten about manners
Why are you complaining about manners? Why not just say "I like that!" or "I agree with that!" and then get on with the rest of an argument? See where this is going?
> - forgotten about the logical fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
This isn't your high school debate club. But just to humor you, you are engaging in "fallacy fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
[EDIT] Bluntly, if you think that was some kind of slanted or out-there take, you aren't paying nearly enough attention.
Congress is supposed to control spending and taxation. The administration is claiming a ton of powers related, especially, to spending. Various actions they’ve taken certainly violate the constitution and laws that exist to ensure Congress’ budget isn’t simply ignored by a president. This is another matter for the courts… unless the Supreme Court decides to rule that the radical and unprecedented far-right “unitary executive” interpretation is correct, in which case we’ve just entered a new and far worse era of American government, and it’s all “legal”. I give it 50/50 they do that.