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Comment by _qbxi | Hacker News Reader

Illegal acts should be called out, even if our government is failing to enforce the law. Otherwise it will become easy for the acts to get ignored entirely.

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It would be nice if anyone would state a law being violated. A lot of people seem to be making a lot of assumptions too about what DOGE/Elon are doing vs what the president or directors of the agencies (for instance) are doing

I do agree that citing specific laws is best. However, if the building is on fire, I want the alarm bells on immediately even if it's low specificity.

What sort of assumptions have you been seeing?

> if the building is on fire

If you're already allowing the question to be begged, there's really no need for specificity in the argument.

Because if there was no law being broken, that means that the building was not on fire. People tell me that shouting "fire!" is supposed to be bad when there is no fire. I don't think they would accept it as being "low-specificity."

There's a bunch of smoke so let's call the fire dept first and let them assess.

Here's some reading after a quick googling.

https://time.com/7212753/trump-elon-musk-federal-laws-legal-...

Definitely in uncharted territory, but these are some possible laws that have been violated:

Impoundment Control Act of 1974, Privacy Act of 1974, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), Internal Revenue Code’s Section 6103.

Unless you’re a member of congress or a civil servant in the executive branch, paying any attention to this is wasted energy.

We already saw this play out in his last term. Directing how laws are enforced is a function of the executive branch. Nothing will be done.

Your energy is better spent identifying and articulating the values you hold that these actions are an affront to and shouting that out.

At minimum, drawing people's attention to the ongoing issues can result in a different batch of congressional representatives in the future.

Politics doesn't always act on instant gratification.

We are kind of locked into what we have. A single digit percentage of House races are ever contested. The vast majority of House districts are won by the party that already holds them[1].

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/30/decade-af...

If 4% or 18 seats were switched four years ago why wouldn't that matter because currently the majority is thin and only a few seats. That could flip in two years. My guess after the gaza comments is more likely than not to switch.

I'd love to believe that, even if only it meant our collective memory can recall events from 2 years ago.

>At minimum, drawing people's attention to the ongoing issues can result in a different batch of congressional representatives in the future.

>Politics doesn't always act on instant gratification.

The odds are slim to none since the public didn’t already act, 4 years after the previous act of treason by Trump, on top of the fact that he campaigned on pardoning his treasonous co-conspirators. In fact, he was rewarded with control of all 3 branches of government.

The Democrats were leading by 8 or more until the worst debate performance in history followed by a weak replacement. People never really cared about the capital riot. They cared about getting costs down... costs are going up with tariffing the world and businesses will suffer when they are shut out of foreign markets.

Things have already changed since the last election.

Many people cared about the attempted coup. Sadly not enough

I would say an extraordinary amount of effort from foreign adversaries had to be undertaken to get that outcome.

Careful not to assume the public is composed of rational actors all of whom have good information, when they're demonstrably not and haven't. Drawing people's attention to the ongoing issues can result in a huge amount of buyer's remorse among people who tried hard not to pay attention to the election in hopes things could be more 'normal' if they voted for what they thought would be the political party they knew.

This. Remember when he literally did a commercial for Goya products from the resolute desk? His justification was that they were being "cancelled" and that the law surrounding the white house endorsing products for political support was his to enforce or not and he was just not gonna enforce it.

Sure. Remember this when people say that the dems constantly complain about the repubs, and that people are tired of hearing people say things are illegal.

My guess is that at this point, talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words.

So saying the same thing, just a different language.

And no: I have zero clue what the actions would look like. Maybe suing the govt?

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