Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Congress has the power of the purse. Failure to appear: no paycheck. Multiple failure to appear: automatic departmental budget cut, ultimately to zero. The executive may choose to illegally shuffle money around but that doesn't work for long.

Ironically the legislation that created DHS (a big mistake made opportunistically at the time) also included a GOP wish that made it not subject to the same set of employee rules the rest of the civil service is.* So DHS is the easiest to do this with.

* It is still partially unionized, though the GOP tried to eliminate this when forming the department as well.

View on HN

The proper course of action is holding the person or persons in Contempt of Congress, then dispatching forces under the Sergeant-at-Arms of the Legislature.

They have teeth if they truly want to get to the bottom of it, don't let anyone fool you. The Legislature has it's own "Executive-Lite" arm specifically intended to facilitate the conductance of legislative business whether the summoned feels like cooperating or not.

That the Legislature refuses to flex that capability is more a sign of the woeful state of modern politics than anything else.

I want to see the Mace of the United States get used, damnit!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress

Congress could arrest the agency's officials one at a time, and keep them in jail, until they get to one who decides to fulfill their duty to the nation.

They do, but the politics of this means that if you try to temporarily defund customs then you're under the label of "X wants to defund our border patrol and let in anyone!"

We should want to let everyone in. Everyone is drinking hyper-nationalist koolaid.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. While we probably should improve/expand asylum infrastructure, and similar programs, we can't just open the borders. We have a lot of social programs that are already strained (mostly by legislation designed to hobble them) by our current population; until those are sorted out we don't have a strong enough foundation for faster/more immigration.

I disagree. Let's move fast and break things. Status quo is not going to improve our welfare in either the literal or policy sense. Economically speaking, immigration is the most profitable policy decision a government can make.

Extremism is very rarely a solution to unsatisfactory status quo.

Being an extremist, you are vastly more likely to unite the country against yourself and roll back any progress on your cause than you are to advance it.

Breaking things in this context would put peoples' lives at risk. There are already millions of newly unemployed citizens in the US. If the system is strained too far those who are already at risk could lose access to shelter, food, and clean water. Not to mention anyone who's unemployed likely doesn't have good access to healthcare right now.

So fix the programs that provide those things. I’m a hard libertarian on this issue. The government should not be telling us where we can travel or live. We wouldn’t accept it from our government and nobody should accept it from other governments either.

Things are already broken man.

If they get much more broken there's going to be riots in the places rich white people live.

Now that I think about your idea more, I agree. Destroy the entire social safety net, bring in 20-50 million refugees and hope America survives the civil war.

I’m going to assume you’re being sarcastic because there is zero evidence that’s a good idea

When you have finite resources and an economy that is not driven by unskilled labor you cannot have unlimited immigration unless your stance is that new migrants will be ineligible for public assistance. You risk bankrupting social programs otherwise.

Mass migration also hinders assimilation. When you have a steady stream of migrants, those migrants can integrate into the local culture. When you have a massive burst as you would if you suddenly deregulated immigration, those individuals have enough non-native support as to never come under pressure to assimilate. This is not a good thing and is precisely what leads to massive nationalist backlash.

All that being said, I do support generally increasing quotas while also largely uncapping skilled immigration.

Can you name a country that doesn’t have borders, customs, and immigration policies (besides maybe Somalia)? The Schengen zone still has it too

I think people should be able to pass freely but economic goods should be legislated.

Well of course, but they are already being oppositional by refusing to obey a lawful request. So this kind of response should be expected and not feared.

I think OP means they can defund the director’s salary

Then CBP will just do what the CIA did when they needed to fund their operations.

They probably are already — you can’t do drug interdiction when there’s no flow of drugs.

But in the end that funds the margins, not the bulk of the funds required.

This isn't ironic to anyone who believes public unions are anti-democratic. DHS being the easiest to deal with is the whole point of it not being unionized.

The executive has the power of surveillance, so they can get dirt on the right Congress people to turn the screws on to prevent any semblance of return to a checks and balances system, one that is completely eroded in all but the most meaningless ways. Of course, bribes and that sort of thing from k-street usually prevent the need for use of dirt, but the more powerful one is, the more likely there's a video of them somewhere on an Epstein alike property doing dirty things.

A real analysis of the three branches including the fourth estate will show the executive has gobbled them all up in the backroom, of course allowing the illusion to continue for the public. This bribery-blackmail system is bipartisan, and as for the executive... it's the cabinet and shadow cabinet with real power.

> the more likely there's a video of them somewhere on an Epstein alike property doing dirty things.

This part is over the top which distracts from a more interesting direction for the conversation to take.

No, this isn't over the top. This is a root causal issue. The blackmail system's tendrils reach deep into the political and business establishment, and until that is addressed, policy initiatives will continue to be abated by this type of control. It doesn't matter what your policy wants are, or what side of the isle you choose to align with (if any), if the blackmail system can usurp it by being a more immediate threat.

Epstein wasn't a one off. There are many more Epstein's you haven't heard about yet, still doing their thing. They don't do it alone either, you have intelligence agencies of all kinds involved, because of the power differential it offers them. This is the machiavellian realpolitik of power. Lets have the courage to talk about it and not shirk the responsibility to do so.

Any actual evidence that this has happened/is happening/will happen?

I started to write a long response, but found myself repeatly reffering to a peice by Whitney Webb [1] that touches the subject better than I can, and also one on Consortium News [2]. It's worth a read, and I highly encourage you to read the linked articles and exerpts. That should be a good start to a conversation if you want to continue. Another example I will refer people to isn't a US case, but is one of the better documented cases, the Dutroux Affair aka The Belgian X-Files. Beware the answers to the questions you ask on this topic, don't tread lightly into that last one.

1. https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epste...

2. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/23/long-before-epstein-se...

PS. Wikipedia is heavily controlled on these topics, so don't reference it expecting to find details on the subject. A good example of this editorial censorship would be the Franklin Scandal. If one were to just read the wiki entry one would walk away thinking it was just a hoax, which isn't even close to the truth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com