Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

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Handing more & more power to a president is exactly how all of the other presidential systems in the world have collapsed into autocracy. I do not think the oil & gas industry 'owns' more than a minority of Congressmen and women, however you want to define that term. Remove the filibuster, weaken the Speaker of the House and return more power to the old committee system- that's how you empower Congress and get more legislation passed. But whatever you do do not hand more power to 1 single person. The US still has a relatively weak presidential system compared to other countries, and we should strive to stay that way

Edit to include: And this includes administrative agencies staffed by executive branch appointees. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of confused people who think 'no we shouldn't have an imperial presidency' but 'yes courts should defer to agency interpretations when the agency is run by appointees of the President'. Like The Office meme- it's the same picture!

Do you think everybody at the EPA is fired and a new batch of people are brought in every time control of the White House changes? The main advantage of these federal agencies is that they were somewhat stable regardless of who is in charge. Career bureaucrats who just do their job decade after decade. Sure the head of the agency gets appointed by the President and they do set a general policy, but it's not like the rulebooks are getting rewritten every 4 or 8 years.

Trump has a plan to reclassify 50,000 career bureaucrats as "Schedule F" political appointees.

They should at least stack rank the rank and file and at least quintimate all the slackers after each election cycle, regardless of winner, like clockwork, stack rank and renew. There is too much accumulated putrid growth in many departments -but it hardly ever gets sorted out.

That seems like a double edged sword. On the one hand, I'm sure every president would like a 50,000 man army to implement their preferred policies. On the other, how does one raise a 50,000 man army these days? This isn't Rome.

It's detailed more in the heritage foundation's Project 2025. The idea is to have an academy for grooming and selecting those political appointees. Essentially, they would have to pledge their allegiance to conservative values (and the president) and pass exams about what they should/should not believe in order to work in the bureaus. This would include vowing to believing climate change isn't a problem.

Of course, that's the short term "republican makes it into office" solution. Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.

> Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.

I think their logic is basically "these people function ~identically to if they were democratic political appointees, so we might as well get the benefits of them being political appointees when we're in office". Whether that's actually accurate can be debated, but it's not just "let's not worry about ever losing ever again".

"Trump" does not have a plan to do that and he has repeatedly denounced Project 2025, even pressuring the Heritage Foundation to fire the guy that led the program. I hate the guy but you don't need to lie.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/05/2024/trump-disavows-pr...

>Do you think everybody at the EPA is fired and a new batch of people are brought in every time control of the White House changes?

I mean, that's how it used to work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...

No, the political appointees who run the EPA do change with a different administration. In the US system, the president (via appointees) runs the agencies.

Yes, the rulebooks are literally rewritten every 4-8 years. EPA examples, Trump renewed the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline (Obama had denied it), 'rewrote key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions and other environmental regulations' (1), rolled back all of the Obama administration's fuel economy & emission standards, rolled back efficient lighting regulations, etc. He replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined what species are endangered, weakened the Coal Ash rule, revised the Mercury standards. And so on.

He did all of these directly through the EPA- not by passing new laws. Then, Biden reversed all of these

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Do...

>The main advantage of these federal agencies is that they were somewhat stable regardless of who is in charge. Career bureaucrats who just do their job decade after decade.

The main assumption you are making here is that these career bureaucrats are not at all partisan, which is a pretty bold assumption to make. I'd like to see some evidence that this is true. That aside, if Congress isn't delegating something to the executive that's their fault. Write better laws. These people are mostly lawyers anyway. What, they forgot how to do it on the campaign trail?

The risk of partisanship is in every profession on earth, not just career epa people.

Simply requiring an actual, physical filibuster would weaken it's power while keeping it as a check on excess or an option for a principled stand/PR stunt.

> Handing more & more power to a president is exactly how all of the other presidential systems in the world have collapsed into autocracy.

Uhh, what? All of? There are 28 countries considered more democratic than the USA, and many of them have presidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

I think I understand the confusion- awkward sentence construction on my part. I am noting that all of the presidential systems that have collapsed so far have followed the exact same pattern. I am not sayin that all presidencies are autocracies, but of the presidencies that have already become autocracies, they all granted more & more executive power to the president due to real or imagined 'emergencies'.

I am not Juan Linz and I do not think having a president means we will automatically become an autocracy, but am more saying 'hey this is like the main danger to watch out for'

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