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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually illegal if it's the pet project of the president, who has been given absolute power by the rest of the government?

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Congressional inaction isn't assent. The Constitution clearly and explicitly gives the power of the purse to Congress (and this is also the understanding of I think Madison in the Federalist Papers and the interpretation we've had for now almost the entire history of the US so there's no reasonable dispute of this). Until Congress passes a law allowing this the president is constitutionally obligated to take care of the laws passed.

Though you do have a point of even if it's illegal who will enforce it? The courts have started to some but are necessarily reactive and slow.

the constitution is just an old piece of paper if the president controls the supreme court

personally I think this was Gödel's Loophole

The president isn’t a king.

You and I would like to think that, but he's been given carte blanche by the people who should be his checks and balances and the supreme court has made anything he does in the course of his duties legal.

In what ways is a president restricted from acting like a king when the other two bodies of government meant to act as a check and balance have capitulated any of those checks and essentially give carte blanche to the president?

It is a good question. Hopefully we get an answer before we are all bankrupt.

No idea why the markets aren't in freefall at this point.

I guess the markets think we'll get an answer before a full collapse

Where would you park your money rather than US equities?

I'm skeptical that billionaires will tank the very thing from which all their wealth is derived, at least not long term. We will continue to see tremendous short term volatility.

> at least not long term.

But this is the very thing. In every single financial crisis, the uber wealthy accumulate even more at the expense of everyone else that is loosing everything.

Yes - they have the resources to buy the crashing things at a discount.

This is all the Curtis Yarvin influence. There is that period in US history that the president was acting more like a king, Taft to FDR. They were doing much more executive orders then that we have been use to the past 80 years.

It all is quite unsettling. Then the fact it is Trump doing this is just something else all together too.

I am a bit worried how the country is going to deal with this level of change. We aren't even 3 weeks in.

Surprised Yarvin hasn't been mentioned much on HN since this all started. The last few weeks have been a transparent implementation of his plans.

I would say yes, insofar as the text and SCOTUS interpretations of the constitution count as law, so anything that violates, for example, the separation of powers would be illegal.

But hasn't the SCOTUS also ruled that anything the President does as a part of his duties legal? Where does that ruling actually end?

I believe that’s for criminal prosecution and probably has a lot of room for additional precedents to be set

I hope that that precedent starts to get set here, because right now it's not looking good.

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