On one hand Trump and the Republicans hate these corporations, and would love the opportunity to take them down a notch.
On the other their entire governing agenda is about deregulation, dismantling of federal agencies and being pro-business.
Interesting situation to be in.
The Westminster system on which almost all of the world's democracies are based rely on an independent, unelected civil servants who serve the government of the day.
You will never get well-run governments if you require every person involved to be elected and an expert on politics and not on specific subjects e.g. renewable energy policy.
This kind of government is described in the US constitution.
The agencies as they currently function (creating rules) isn't "described in the US constitution". We got here via a combination of practice, legislation and court decisions over decades and decades and decades. And recently court cases are swinging back against the power of the agencies.
It is not reasonable nor sensible for Congress to shift towards defining in minutiae every detail about how the laws should be implemented. Which are then locked in stone until a new bill is passed. Or not passed as in the case with Congress these days.
Because as we've seen time and time again innocent mistakes will be made and you want them rectified as quickly and easily as possible.
Regulatory agencies are constrained by the laws that Congress passes.
Where there is ambiguity (of which there is an infinite supply) the precedent was to leave up to agencies to interpret it. As opposed to requiring endless new bills to be passed.
Right now there are over 100,000 rules in the code of federal regulations across 50 volumes: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/CFR
Here is another link for you: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43056/9?utm_s...
Search for "major rules". Think about those.
They are constrained only by what is nowadays extremely broadly written legislation. Just read anything like dodd-frank, written by incompetent fools who left it so broad that it said both nothing and everything (no constraints in practice) - and is now the source of 100s of rules across various agencies.
Yes, precedent, part of my point. The constitution says nothing about it. The first regulatory agency came about 100 years after the constitution - that isn't by chance.
It hasn't always been like this. It wasn't envisaged.
>Nothing in the constitution talks about congress passing [stuff]
Yeah, because the constitution was intended to allow Congress to pass laws that define the rest of "the government". The constitution is not supposed to be the _only_ law.
>It hasn't always been like this. It wasn't envisaged.
The founders knew they couldn't predict the future which is why they set it up so Congress could make laws. Again, the whole thing is working as designed.
Now, you could say that these laws have had unintended consequences, or no longer serve their purpose, or need modification for current times, etc etc. Those would be policy positions, not the sign of some constitutional crisis.
And critically, it would be the role of Congress to correct, not the president. Now, yes, absolutely, voting for president is a way to enforce checks and balances on Congress when they are not responding effectively. However, completely eroding all checks and balances on _Executive_ power in the process, which seems to be happening now, doesn't look like a great move to me.
If congress is doing the wrong thing creating these entities (and many believe they are), the idea of checks and balances is for someone else to stop them, not themselves. The checks on congress are the president and the courts.
Paul Krugman (who I often disagree with) had a good article on how the rise of tariffs will be perfect for crony capitalism: the executive branch can't pick and choose who pays income taxes, but currently the executive branch has extremely wide latitude over tariffs, and especially, who gets exemptions. Watch as corporations line up to pledge allegiance in order to get tariff exemptions.
I'm just completely at a loss at how this behavior, which would have been looked on with disgust on both sides of the political spectrum until very recently, is now so readily accepted.
It was surprising to see just how corrupt/archaic the then system was, by modern standards.
But yet the country still functioned.
My takeaway was that the existence of the civil service at all, rather than its particular virtue, dominated value. There's benefit from even a pretty corrupt one!
I think they're realizing that you don't win at party politics by failing to have a party, and the party is more than just cheerleaders and fundraising. They're clearly not done consolidating power yet, considering the withdrawal of Gaetz and the lingering of a few impeachment representatives.
Hopefully what he gains in consistency and teamwork isn't totally overshadowed by the fact that his loyal people are, in many cases, not longtime government officials.
my dude, we passed that in 2016
Jeff Sessions appropriately recused himself from investigations into the Trump campaign, because 8 years ago we still expected the Justice Department to act impartially. In doing that, Sessions got nothing but the deep ire of Trump, solely because he wasn't willing to act as the President's personal lawyer.
Now, though, both Gaetz and Bondi have basically fallen over backward saying they'll do whatever Trump asks. The only reason Gaetz wasn't confirmed wasn't because he said flatly that he would weaponize the Justice department, but it was because he's basically loathed by everyone on Capitol Hill (IMO the sex and drug allegations were more of a convenient out to not confirm him rather than the true reason for his withdrawal). The current situation is completely without precedent in my lifetime.
If a country elects a bunch of bad eggs, it all falls over. There isn't a way around it.
But instead of paying ransoms, result would be concentration camp. We were calling them "Labor camps" because communism is not Nazism. However sign "Work to Freedom" was used on the entrance of such camps.
This reminds me 1984 with its war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Now add to that your "monopoly is free market" koolaid.
Trump never used this language. (He was also aggressive against Big Tech in his first term.)
I'd argue it is disingenuous to say his rhetoric is not primarily taping into popularist sentiments.
Oh, honey[1].
If the apparatchik remains spineless and lets them get away with it, there'll be some remnants the supposed agenda, but I think the real agenda is whatever makes them money. Already people close to him are charging others for access to him/cushy jobs[2]. Gosh, I'm trying to re-find this commentary account where it's headlines out of Washington but written like the way western media writes about some despotic African nation, but maybe I just need to wait until January.
Heck, Trump even bilked taxpayers by charging SS members a lot of money for accomodation in Mar-A-Lago or Trump Tower, and they had/have to stay there because they were guarding him [3]...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0_JfAZ5vlc [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/11/25/trump-epsht... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/trump-...
As to giving free hotel stays to the government, I'm not well attuned to the conduct of the ultra-rich, but in the reasonably comfortable ranks of the GS-teens, I assure you no one is lining up to spend his own money to make government work, despite the enormous escapes from brain damage that can often be achieved for relatively little money by just going to Staples, Home Depot, etc. and just resupplying the office on one's own dime.
It's by far the least absurd thing about Trump, who also got a press conference in a garden centre car park between a sex shop and a crematorium, which was then was mocked by furries who turned it into a VRChat environment, and the lawyer presenting that press conference got disbarred for trying to overturn the election; while the man himself has 34 felony charges for falsifying business records to hide showing he paid off a porn star that he claims not to have had sex with even though the sex part and the payment for silence is totally legal just you need to not lie about how much you spend in total on campaign finance and business expenses.
I think that's the kind of setup that Douglas Adams or Armando Iannucci would use.
Oh, and I almost forgot about the gold-coloured toilet.