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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

I think Elon Musk and his lackeys' action is literally criminal, but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.

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>but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.

And I'll never understand why. There's a lot of partisan issues but I thought "not fucking around with our money" was as bipartisan as a plutocracy could get?

Because it's not about just power and money. People need to stop cynically thinking that all the social stuff is just noise so they can get power and money. They actually intend to upend the social order to establish a white, evangelical Christian state with utter disregard for the Constitution.

That is literally the power of the Executive, to choose which laws to enforce and which to not. Congress makes the laws, and the Courts adjudicate. That is the whole basis of the federal government.

I mean that's what they teach 8th graders but it's reductive. Congress makes plenty of laws that restrict how the executive performs its functions (including how they allow people within the executive to do so), and it's an open question over how much power the executive has to create departments and appoint people to run them.

At the moment though, what they're doing is very much illegal. They just have a bunch of collaborators in the DOJ who won't bring charges or arrest anyone, because they're co-conspirators.

The 8th-grader understanding is that each branch does what it's supposed to do with virtuous motives. The adult understanding is that they exercise as much power as they can until forced to stop.

I mean if that was true then the current situation wouldn't be happening. The story of the US Congress over the last two decades (probably longer) is they have ceded an enormous amount of power to the Executive via inaction, and continue to do so.

The problem with simplistic narratives where you give stuff names is it masks what's actually happening: the Executive is near enough to a dictatorship - power and authority is deliberate vested in one person. This makes it very different to Congress, which only wields power by the collective decision making of hundreds via majority or even super-majority vote.

So "Congress" doesn't really exist as an entity: because there is no guiding consciousness or collective in it which is deliberately trying to seize more power, and the story of its power is the exact opposite: it keeps giving it away (because the individual members of Congress can only retain that position and it's local benefits by staying in Congress, best accomplished by deliberately avoiding responsibility of any kind).

If you've ever tried to get 4 people to decide what to get for dinner, the guy who simply says "Let's get tacos" usually gets his way because everyone else keeps deferring.

While there is a lot of conspiracy, there are still some fringes forcing them to stop. Trump's budget freezes was already shot down.

The executive is formally required to execute all constitutional laws by the take care clause of article two. It's been politically expedient for most presidents to ignore a few policies they dislike, but it's very much not a central pillar of the American government to grant them that power.

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