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Comment by distortionfield | Hacker News Reader

> who’s going to enforce it?

This is the real danger of where we’re at right now. We are currently at a point where the President has a stacked Supreme Court that had already showed they’re willing to take his side almost no matter what. There is now effectively no check against the executive branch because of that. Papers are already running stories about how Congress is just letting him loose, with these Inspectors General firings as a prime example of how Congress has just thrown their hands up without even a fight.

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We are on the brink of a fascist dictatorship and hardly anyone is noticing or taking it seriously.

Really? It seemed to me that people were shouting it from the rooftops prior to the election.

And then the Democrats were accused of only taking about the threat to Democracy instead of the price of eggs.

It is extremely difficult to take seriously.

> with these Inspectors General firings as a prime example of how Congress has just thrown their hands up without even a fight

From what I can tell, the IGs do serve at the pleasure of the President. The only thing he didn’t do is notify the Congress. Is that true?

The law says that he has to notify Congress with a good reason for the dismissal.

> he has to notify Congress with a good reason

He just has to notify. The law doesn’t give the Congress nor judges discretion over whether the reasons are good. Just detailed.

Well, until they are used as evidence in an impeachment trial.

Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case...

> Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case

No. But that's in the hands of the American people. A simple majority in the house to impeach and 67 votes in the Senate to convict. 34 seats are up for election in 2026 [1]. Dems only have 47 seats, and a 20-seat pick-up is almost impossible. But if Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida [2] swung, that could convince moderate Republicans to convict.

Of course, we'd then have the practical matter of getting him out of the White House...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...

[2] https://www.270towin.com/2026-senate-election/

Please let’s not go back to the 2016-2020 impeachment and removal fantasies. The man was impeached twice, once even after his presidency was over and still the American people put him back into office.

Also, of note, every time he has run for president he received more votes than prior runs—even in 2020. There is literally only one person who has ever received more votes than Trump and that’s Biden in 2020 and frankly there will forever be an asterisk after that election due to the pandemic and Trump’s subsequent win in 2024.

If you want him out of office before his term ends, you will need to have 67 democrats as senators with probably at least a quarter of those senators being willing to lose their own elections for that vote. Bottom line, he is in for the next four.

> you will need to have 67 democrats as senators

I think impeachment is a long shot. We agree in that Trump’s popularity is what gives him power. If he lost it, one woudln’t need 67 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, the GOP would save itself. It’s just difficult to imagine what Trump could do to fuck up that badly.

Hard disagree on 'forever be an asterisk', if you're referring to the 2020 election itself. You really think a 7 million vote margin leaves room to question this election yet another time after all the audits and Krakens, etc.? Negative sentiment on Trump was strong going into the election, especially considering the economic conditions brought on by COVID. This, being the COVID that he was seen to have mishandled, largely with his own concern at heart, wanting testing curtailed so that ever-higher cases wouldn't hurt his election chances. I guess he loved America so much that he just didn't know how to express it.

Why Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024 is clear. Biden's election win was no fluke. The 2024 election was about going with the devil-that-you-know, hoping that kitchen table concerns could be alleviated, and still delivered no landslide (unless you're Stephen Miller).

Just wait until all these Trump voters have to swallow the totality of merely the last 2 weeks of changes (and recissions, in some cases), and they'll find that wanting a bull in a China shop has severe consequences. After 100 days, when actual results will be expected, all the fun Trump & Musk had as they had their way uprooting bureaucrats will be over. As recriminations flow, whether Trump can hold together the crew he started with will be a major question. Interesting times.

I am saying that the pandemic caused an statistical outlier election shift that year and Trump’s election in 2024 where the stats sort of reset to baseline makes it seem pretty likely that without the pandemic and with his ability to increase votes in every election, the 2020 election would have been much closer. Frankly with the weak dem field in 2020 and without the pandemic, I would have bet on Trump winning.

I am not sure what the first 100 days of his second term will bring and I will make no dire predictions (literally all of the dire predictions people made in 2016 were wrong). I have never voted for Trump, but I am not tribal enough to automatically assume that everything he does or is doing is bad either. Short of the last 9 months of his first presidency, his first time in office had zero negative impact on me.

Truthfully, my bet is this second term will likely be as equally uneventful…at least for me and my family.

"...the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer."

It's a bit more than "detailed". And he didn't even try to meet any of the elements above. It's essentially a loyalty purge.

> a bit more than "detailed"

"Detailed and case-specific." The case-specific reason can be appointed by my predecessor on such and such date. The law doesn't place any limits on what those reasons can be.

Sure. And it can also be "I don't like how his name was pronounced". What you suppose is a gutting of the law.

> What you suppose is a gutting of the law

It’s not. It’s a gutting of a norm. That’s an important difference. The law provides for independent agencies where the President can’t just fire them. It didn’t provide this cover to the IGs.

Yes. The statute literally leads with "The president may remove the Inspectors General" (quoting/closely paraphrasing from memory). The notification requirement is in addition to this but there's no language which says that the removal power is conditioned on obeying the notification requirement. So Trump legally removed the IGs, and then as a side-effect broke the law by failing to notify Congress.

There's a problem with how the law is written though... It supposedly required Trump to notify Congress before he was even President, but its requirements also only apply to the President. Arguably the law was impossible to follow as written, and I gather that's not even the strongest constitutional problem with the law as written. What we have here is a failure of Congress, and Trump exploiting it.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11546

"The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal."

> the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer

So worst case, they’re legally fired a month from a few days ago and are owed back pay. This seems much ado about nothing.

Well people are also upset about the whole "President not respecting obligations to Congress" thing.

Any normal president wouldn't conduct the removal without being able to provide the substantive rationale. Which is then evidence Congress has about how the president is conducting his duties. Like "is this rationale consistent with the stated goals of increased efficiency".

Trump doesn't even care enough to make something up.

Well, there's the whole Presidential obligation from the Constitution that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". No big deal. I'm sure it's fine he can pick and choose.

> I'm sure it's fine he can pick and choose

Pretty much every president has done this…so it probably is fine.

Here's a better question:

Why with this kind of setup, absolutely no-one to stop them, would they step aside in 1450 days if voters have their say?

Past 10 days have been an absolute railroad of undoing past 100 years.

Imagine 1000 days from now the chaos and nobody can change anything for any reason.

The word tyranny seems to fit and I wouldn't have used that with Bush/Cheney or even Reagan.

He didn’t step away willingly the first time, I have zero reason to believe he would step away willingly the second time, especially after he’s spent so much time undoing all the checks and balances that pushed him out that first time.

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