The most important thing to understand is that the ability of the executive to influence the direction of the government is limited. The reasons for this are several, but I will try to elucidate a few here.
First, it is commonly believed that because of the ability to hire/fire people the President can more or less do whatever he wants in regards to the direction of various governmental agencies. This true to an extent, but to a much more limited extent than is commonly believed. The President can nominate candidates for various positions, but these positions must be approved by Congress. Since President Obama has had a Congress whose primary tactic is to oppose everything the president wants, regardless of merits, this has severely limited his ability to get policies in place that he has otherwise wanted. This applies both to agencies like the FCC (the current chairman was Obama's third choice, IIRC; the other two were filibustered), as well as the judiciary.
Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect. This includes the military, the intelligence agencies, and the federal law enforcement agencies. (You could arguably include the Federal Reserve here, as well.) These are what Lofgren[1] calls the "Deep State". They are almost completely unaffected by elections, especially of Democratic presidents, and seek ever to increase their power and funding. Efforts to rein them in are rarely, if ever, successful.
Third, the current state of affairs re: intelligence gathering, etc., began in earnest with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947.[2]
So while it may be convenient to blame Obama for the current state of government, it is overly simplistic. It has nothing to do with any cult of personality, but rather a simple recognition of the current realities of political power and the various players.
[1] http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947
President Obama was inaugurated January 20, 2009. At that time, his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress decisively[1]. It was not until 2011 that his party lost the house. And in fact, his party still retains the Senate but will lose it in January 2015. But it is only the Senate that approves appointments and his party has controlled it the entire time he has been President. And if you look at the make up of his cabinet, you will see that he has been able to fill it with people that are reviled by the opposing party [2]. To say that he hasn't gotten his way on the vast majority of cabinet appointments just isn't true.
Second, the government itself is made up largely of agencies which are outside of the ability of the democracy to affect. This includes the military
The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them. [3] All the heads of the other agencies you listed are appointed by the President including the Federal Reserve.
Your comment is typical of the current rhetoric surrounding attempting to "debunk" the thought that the President has substantial power. The fact is the President does have substantial power and saying otherwise is merely attempting to excuse the performance of Obama that so many people are disappointed with.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_State...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander-in-chief#United_State...
This is irrelevant, since the minority party can filibuster any nominations, and they have used done so extensively throughout Obama's tenure. In this regard, the party with the majority simply does not matter.
> The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He exercises complete authority over them.
Again, I believe that this is an overly simplistic view of the Presidency. There are political realities around what Presidents can and cannot realistically do that contradict the "ultimate power" view of the Executive branch.
> All the heads of the other agencies you listed are appointed by the President including the Federal Reserve.
With Senate approval, and where no filibusters have been threatened or executed. And remember, there have been more filibusters during Obama's tenure than at any other time in history.
> The fact is the President does have substantial power and saying otherwise is merely attempting to excuse the performance of Obama that so many people are disappointed with.
Not at all. I am disappointed in the American government itself. I have never voted for Obama, and am merely stating my thoughts as an amateur observer. But if there is ever going to be any positive change in limiting Federal power viz. the military, intelligence agencies, or LEO, then clarity of causality is important.
EDIT: Came to my attention that Democrats did have a exactly 60 seats in the Senate for a brief period before Ted Kennedy passed away and his seat was won by Scott Brown in 2009. However, the point still stands that there was a very brief period over a span of 5 years where control of Congress was even possible for Democrats.
Reid was pro at changing the rules to prevent opposing views, people need to understand just how much of the problems in th Senate were his doing and his doing alone. Mister Nuclear just got nuked by the electorate
Not quite. The Democrats had 60 Senate seats for a very brief period before Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy's seat when he passed away. The main ACA bill in the senate was passed with 60 votes the normal way. A second bill that was to modify that bill was passed with reconciliation as a way to get members of the House to drop their version of ACA, accept the currently passed Senate version, and then modify that to appease some of the concerns of various congresspeople.
> Reid was pro at changing the rules to prevent opposing views, people need to understand just how much of the problems in th Senate were his doing and his doing alone. Mister Nuclear just got nuked by the electorate
I so very much hate the 'going nuclear' talk. Filibuster breaks at 60 votes is a shit idea in the first place, plus changing it only in one case for appointments is hardly shaking up the political order at large. In fact, the reluctance to do it for all types of votes shows how conservative leadership for the dems were being.
Untrue. Fillibuster rules were only changed in late 2013, after years of being unable to even get votes on nominees.
No they passed the bill with 60 votes during the only time they actually had a supermajority. There were no rules changes needed or required. ACA was passed and signed before changes were made in the reconciliation process.
Other than that, I guess you don't follow the news much. Harry Reid changed the Senate Rules in 2013 to disallow filibusters of appointments.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-poised-to-limi...
Which lead to Republican senators using another procedural technique (refusing unanimous consent) to slow down appointments.[1] This means appointments were delayed for days, and even weeks, after which time the same obstructing senators often voted for the appointee anyways.
It's disingenuous to claim that appointments would go through scot free after Reid altered Senate procedures.
1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/senate-filibuster-r...
This [1] shows a breakdown that includes filibusters of nominations.
To further refute your point, the appointment relevant to the discussion, Wheeler, assumed office after the rule change[2].
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/11/21/us/politics/se...
These holds have been common practice and they are very rarely publicized.
No, he doesn't. The Constitution specifically limits the President's ability to make war and wage military campaigns. He has a great deal of authority but even the US' current adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are backed by Congress' approval through passed laws.
> At that time, his Democratic party controlled both houses of Congress decisively.
This displays a lack of insight around the Democratic party. Senator Lieberman was nominally a Democrat but he voted more often with the Republicans in the last few years of his career in the Senate. So-called "blue dog Democrats" are more conservative than you might think; that's why we got such grand bargains as the "Cornhusker Kickback" during the PPACA debates.
In reality, the President's party firmly controlled roughly 51-54 votes in the Senate with the remainder of the "majority" part of the coalition as a result of them simply not being as good a fit with the Republicans. That has arguably been one of the Democrats' greatest weaknesses: the Republican party has demonstrated its ability to move in lockstep even when some members disagree. The Democrats have not.
[EDIT: Well, he couldn't literally call anyone into the Oval Office today, since he's in Beijing, but a phone call would work just as well.]
No, he doesn't. The Congress has quite expansive (nearly plenary) power over the military (and to a lesser extent, the militia) expressly in the Constitution. The one limit on that power in the Constitution is that the Congress can't adopt a law giving the supreme command of the military (or the militia, when called into federal service) under the rules they adopt to anyone but the President -- that's what the designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief means.
They are reviled because they spend a lot of time demonizing them because this is politics.
Obama has been at work long and hard to make that the case. Since he has been unable to build any relationship with the Congress, and even holding majorities in both Houses his legislation and nominations had hard time going through, he has taken the decision to leverage his regulatory powers to circumvent the Congress as much as possible. It is not something that just happened - it is a deliberate policy which Obama chose. Of course, not him first - many presidents did the same, and some - like FDR - went a lot further than Obama ever did - but Obama is among those who believes in the Deep State and uses and intends to use it to the fullest extent possible. So if there is to be effort to rein them in, Obama is not your guy - he is the opposite of your guy. Of course, the blame does not lie solely or even primarily with Obama - it started long before him and undoubtedly won't end when he retires. But he is contributing as much as he is able to the raise of the power of the regulatory agencies and their ability to conduct policy completely independently of the Congress.
While I'm happy Obama is supporting net neutrality, I don't find him blameless.
[1] You didn't explicitly say that Obama really desired to reign in this "deep state," just that any attempt to do so would be difficult. If you did not mean that, I apologize.
Basically, any president which seeks to limit the existing power of government institutions will run into institutional resistance.
It's a signature away from ending. And Obama can forward any issues to the DoJ. If he wanted to end the NSA spying program he could simply have Holder charge those involved.
Obama is always powerless whenever people want him to do something he doesn't want to do, but to summarily try, convict, and execute a US child is apparently within his power.
And why do these common beliefs exist?
Compared to most other parliamentary democracies the president in USA is nearly a dictator. So Obama has exceptionally broad abilities in that direction.
Sources: I live in one.
This is false. The president can change interpretations of law (this is how E.O. 13233 was couched), but cannot pass a new law on his own. This is in Articles I and II of the Constitution.
In time of war or crisis, people will allow generous interpretations of the President's role to interpret the law, but time catches up.
Obviously Health Care (i.e., ACA) caused huge debate and negotiation with Congress.
The Iraq War resolution (the 2002 one) was a different situation in which Congress passed a wishy-washy resolution that was, in typical fashion, over-extended by the Bush administration. But Congress went along.
The practical distinction may vanish when the other branches do not effectively check the executive when it exceeds its Constitutional power, but that's not inherent in the President heading the Executive branch -- the same is equally true of excesses in other branches, though the unitary nature of the executive provides less of an intra-branch check on abuses by the President than exists for any actor in the legislative or judicial branches (though collective excesses, such as -- as a purely hypothetical example -- the Supreme Court intruding into Congress' Constitutional role in judging the propriety of Presidential electoral votes including the process by which they are assigned -- can still occur and be problematic if left unchecked by the other branches.)
And I suspect the reason you're being downvoted in the first place is that the TC post is about net neutrality and not government spying. While the two are connected (they both involve the internet, after all) they're different topics. If we refuse net neutrality until we also disband the NSA then we'll just lose on two counts.
No, of course it doesn't.
And, no, there's nothing wrong with complaining about the downvotes as there' heck of a lot of knee-jerk downvoting happening on HN. Almost as much as righteous preaching about proper HN "etiquette", but not as damaging in the long run.
That sort of complaining lowers the tone of the discussion and adds nothing.
Plus 8 times out of 10, just wait a minute and you'll get voted back up.
You'll find that what Bush started, Obama has drastically developed, distributed, and expanded.
Under Bush we had increasing levels of surveillance which were undesirable, but the veneer that it was still all about terrorism could at least be believed. Now, we know it's targeted specifically at us for the purposes of exploitation and domination of us.
Not if you were paying attention to any of the players involved before 9/11. Or even after for that matter.
That 9/11 was used as a pretext for things the people involved wanted for other reasons and had been seeking for years (in some cases decades) without any connection to terrorism was pretty obvious. These were in some cases the very same people that were openly upset while serving in the Ford Administration against the legislative constraints that were placed in the wake of abuses by Nixon.
It was never believably about terrorism, it was always about restoring overwhelming executive power.
I agree with you when you say that it was never about terrorism but rather increasing executive power, though. There certainly was a trend toward increased surveillance for many years before, but the entrance of surveillance into the new world-dominating media of the internet is a story in and of itself, I think.
The great thing about hyperbole is that it rebuts itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellige...
What about parallel construction, putatively started to help with terrorists but now usually used in drug investigations in order to sidestep civil rights safeguards?
It was legalized (both retroactively, covering events that had occurred prior to the act, and prospectively by broadening the allowed surveillance under the law) through the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, signed by George W. Bush on July 10, 2008.
Its true that Obama signed the bill passed by Congress extending parts of the FISA Amendments Act that were scheduled to expire in 2012 for five additional years. But that just kept it legal, it didn't legalize it.
I'm sorry but that's not good enough for me.
I am an ideologue, not a partisan. I'll complain about it when a Democrat steps over the line just as quickly as I'll complain about it when a Republican steps over the line.
I do however take issue with the ad hominem attack on the President. It's not necessary, nor constructive, to lay down a blanket criticism like "[he's] an utmost failure."
The "surveillance state" does exist, but it's a global phenomenon. In the US, at least, it's something that we're actively fighting, and the government is not shutting down dissenting opinions. The same cannot be said for countries like China, where the government's control depends heavily on the citizenry not questioning it.
Are we really, thought? At least at any meaningful scale? A handful of geeks on HN, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Slashdot isn't much of a resistance. Do you perceive that people who care about this issue have mobilized in sufficient quantity and enthusiasm to do something meaningful, like influence election outcomes?
It's good that at least some of us care, but just chattering with each other here probably isn't going to accomplish much.
Forced compliance, as in "You are a utility and all such utilities must comply with NSA/CIA/FBI/ABC requirements"
Maybe they will be brand it under some title like "Internet Bill of Rights" and watch as people don't read the fine print.
All I know is, if I waited for the regulated utility known as the phone company to have provided me with faster internet, let alone a good phone connection during a thunderstorm, it would never have happened without competition.
What will ultimately happen, is the government will regulate the Internet so tightly, it will become extremely difficult, time consuming, and costly to create a start-up (while the technology cost will continue to fall). This process will not be fought by the existing tech giants, because they will think they benefit from it by limiting competition with artificial barriers. It's the exact same thing that has played out in every other major segment of the economy, and it's exactly what is about to happen to the Internet. These days will be viewed as the unregulated wild west, when you could spend $50 and create a start-up without hardly a concern.
For comparison, the electricity company can't restrict your wattage just because you are a business.
We have that now, without net neutrality.
The feds have had free access to everything for a long time, what you're likely to see after utility conversion is the local cops demanding access to all ebay/CL traffic for an entire city to track down stolen property fences or similar actions. Give me a list of everyone in my district who ever bought lockpicks or lockpicking stuff.
Essentially, we cannot create more competition at the broadband utility level but we can prevent monopoly power from begetting more monopoly power. Common carrier is regulation purposed towards facilitating a free market.
Yes there could be unwanted side-effects of such a classification, we have to cross that bridge when we get to it.
Would you prefer Obama to call for a closed internet?
You are confusing different things. Just because someone might be wrong with a lot of things doesn't mean he's not allowed to be right with something else.
As other's said: The world wide wrongdoing by the secret agencies is no invention of Obama. Not even an invention of the US. I'm German and even the BND did whatever it could to gain for it's purpose useful information. They did under governments of all kind of political orientation.
And then you're confusing things again. The downvotes most likely come from your indifferentiated opinion about net neutrality and spying activities. Not from your dislike of Obama.
> I am not American (feel free to ignore my opinion)
Why did you post it?
An internet where all traffic is closely monitored, recorded and data-mined is not free and open in my books.
The internet was never a private place and it will never be.
Edit: It's important that we don't loose the freedom and openness. That's what the discussion is all about. Not about the lack of privacy.
According to Snowden's documents, several mass collection programs shut down under his watch (including email header collection), and no new mass collection programs were added.
Meanwhile, in the passing of those six years the US has continued to fall further behind on fixed broadband speeds and ISP competitiveness.
He deserves criticism and his motives deserve criticism, but I'm just happy that he decided to support it after all.
Theres some interesting things to discuss regarding the validity of obamas actions but that doesnt seem to be the best way to start that debate ;)
Translated: "If you disagree with me, you're a stooge for the cult of personality."
What an effective way to make your position to be unassailable!
However, I totally agree with you when you're concerned about the diminishing privacy. I think the advance of technology is the key factor for this. Agencies are as ruthless as always and use this new technologies.
Most people are totally fine to tell Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. everything about their private lifes in exchange to ... distraction. Think of all the health shit ... they gonna make furtunes selling our data to the pharma and insurrance industry.
I see all kinds of American apologists in this thread, but the fact is that regardless of what it inherited, this particular administration has of its own volition pursued an aggressive anti-freedom and anti-privacy agenda both on behalf of its own intelligence agencies, its tech industry and its copyright exploitation industry.
The fact that this president dares to call for a free and open internet disgusts me.
Spoken like someone with little sense of historical perspective. Or understanding of the DDR.
It outdoes the DDR by a factor of two with regard to those they imprison, as well the DDR stopped executing anyone in 1987, as of last year the US still executes minors.
... or the German citizens killed by the Stasi...
Do you really think the only difference between the Stasi and the NSA is the technology available?
I can understand if you're saying you fear the NSA's power grab because of similarities with the Stasi. I have trouble believing that you think there is literally no difference between the Stasi and the current NSA, given their body of work has significant differences.
Arguing about the niceties of barbaric practices is fruitless anyway, but we can argue about the size of the weapons wielded by the barbarians.
However, your tone and word choice, along with the hyperbole of your statements, serve to weaken your point.
The Stasi created a culture of fear in the populace of the nation they were supposed to protect. They used the citizenry against itself; fathers doubting children, wives were suspicious of neighbors.
German citizens and residents found sufficiently undesirable were imprisoned or executed by the Stasi.
While the US has committed some terrible acts abroad in the name of anti-terrorism, I still contend there is a significant difference between the current NSA and the Stasi.
It's similar to how I object when people equate the US internment of their Japanese residents with the Nazi Final Solution. Similarities, sure. Both awful, sure. But there is a difference between immorally and illegally imprisoning people based on race for a few years and trying to wipe an entire race from the face of the planet in a systematic and sick environment.
Anyone who conflates arguments like that sound like they're shouting with an agenda, and it only serves to weaken what would be, in a more measured tone, a strong argument.
Especially in light of last week FBI/NSA/DHS undermining TOR and killing its utility for any dissidents and free speech in authoritarian states. Under his watch the surveillance state has expanded and has become downright creepy
25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall we should be saying "Ich bin ein Ost-Berliner" :( The Stasi would be proud of the surveillance state that western countries have created with Obama at the helm.
edit: Oh i see the cult of personality is still strong in this one, downvoted in under a minute.