“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins”
Everyone tasked with enforcing a law must necessarily interpret its meaning. The judiciary gets the final say though.
In theory the military is sworn to defend the constitution, but if the DOD is headed by a Trump loyalist (it is), then what?
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/123-what-vice-president-vance...
Congress through impeachment. If they don't do that, all bets are off.
especially if you yourself could get a part of the pie and don't think it will negatively affect you
I mean don't get me wrong if they would do so literally tomorrow it would work.
But as the majority of senate likely feel they have little to loose it won't be tomorrow.
And when they realize that maybe they won't get part of the pie (they are mostly now useless for him) it will be to late and the fear of repercussions will have set in.
especially if you add a "authoritative" in the front it in legal language means they gave themself the right (i.e. authority) to decide (i.e. interpret) how law should be interpreted, i.e. what the meaning behind the written word is in practice
this is 100% without doubt or question not compatible with any democracy (including the US constitution) and is pretty much one of the default approaches Dictators use to get unchecked authority
It means that in practice (assuming people comply with the EO) means they can do whatever they want as they can just willfully absurdly, but with authority , misinterpret laws. Including to e.g. persecute judges which "step out of line", or members of the senate which don't vote for whatever he wants etc.
https://adata.org/interpretation-letter
Nobody complains about this though.
Whereas what we saw instead was them blocking everything they could, government shutdowns etc.
Unless "Unitary Executive" means something a good deal more nuanced than the president being king, that is.
Think of it this way. I may be against paying taxes. That doesn't mean I just stop paying them. The best I can do is try to get the government to lower the taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...
"Congress granted this power to the president by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to control "pork barrel spending", but in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act to be unconstitutional in 6–3 decision in Clinton v. City of New York.
The court found that exercise of the line-item veto is tantamount to a unilateral amendment or repeal by the executive of only parts of statutes authorizing federal spending, and therefore violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. Thus a federal line-item veto, at least in this particular formulation, would only be possible through a constitutional amendment. Prior to that ruling, President Clinton applied the line-item veto to the federal budget 82 times."
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1140320828992...
If you believe the Supreme Court is an effective guardrail against tyranny then you're deeply mistaken. The only true safeguard against tyranny is the American people refusing to comply and responding with force of arms if pushed.
We'll see how that goes.
And if the US military doesn't remain loyal to the president, then on top of a fascist dictator seizing power, then we'll have a military coup.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam
And still won in Iraq, first against Saddam’s regime, then the post-regime pre-ISIS insurgency, and then the later fight against ISIS, so I’m not sure why Iraq is included, absolute immorality of the decision to go to war there and its cost to the war in Afghanistan aside, since those are irrelevant to the discussion here.
“Instead”, not “on top”. (I mean, unless the military installs a different fascist dictator, which is certainly not unheard of in military coups that are notionally countercoups.)
The GOP has been ramping up their support of unitary executive theory since the 80s yet no democratic president has been able to take a piss without cries of tyranny.
If you’ve put yourself in a place where this arrangement is literally fascism, prepare to be disappointed by the courts.
With current supreme court nothing is sacred for sure, but overturning this and granting universal executive power into hands of president would be a disaster leading towards either authocracy or revolution. And yeah - that's all very similar to how fascism started, whether you would like to see it or not.
Is the EPA, at the direction of the sitting president, making rules about coal power plants not an example of the use of "all executive power. All of it."? Or does A2S1 carve out exceptions for the EPA, even if it doesn't for those other agencies?
Whatever you think about Chevron deference or the specific EPA case I'm alluding to, the point is: The balance of power between the executive and legislative branches is nowhere near as clear cut as your comment suggests. Congress frequently legislates the structure and responsibilities of executive agencies. Presidential administrators cannot legally change those responsibilities unilaterally.
That’s certainly not the way things have been run for a long time, but it doesn’t seem irrational to argue that’s the proper constitutional structure.
Good thing Congress establishes independent agencies then. Their entire point is to receive rule making delegated to them by Congress.
It would be pretty surprising if a law passed by Congress delegating to Charles Windsor its power to write the laws about taxes, borrowing money on the credit of the United States, regulating international and interstate commerce and so forth were constitutional.
That may be what you believe, and there's been a lot of debate over that, but courts have time and time again ruled that the legislature can delegate power. Maybe current SCOTUS will reverse a lot of that, but that remains to be seen.
What is executive power? Well, it's what the constitution says it is. But a lot of things in the executive branch aren't spelled out in the constitution. A more strict interpretation of it (one that SCOTUS seems to be moving toward, at least when it's convenient to achieve conservative policy goals) is that Congress should not be delegating so much rulemaking power to the executive branch.
So let's say you're the SEC. You're an executive branch agency, but you essentially write laws. You get to write those laws because Congress delegated that power in some reasonably specific ways unique to your agency. So who do you really report to? Nominally, day to day, seems like the president. But you only exist because of an act of Congress. Congress can dissolve you tomorrow if it wants to. Congress can also give you more power and more latitude (within some limits, of course). So while you report to the president, you're accountable to Congress. That might mean that the president isn't allowed to fire your people without cause, if Congress specified so.
That's not an interference of executive power if the power you wield actually flows from the legislative branch.
This is a tiring way to speak to other reasonable people.
part of the supreme court hasn't exactly been known to defend the constitution in word and spirit but find excuses to reinterpret it
and worse by giving themself the right to authoritative misinterpreted law they can prevent any such cases ever appearing in front of the supreme court and/or very effectively blackmail people into not making or dismissing cases
and Trump abusing power to blackmail people to get changes in of court related proceeding (to ironically black mail someone else to force them to fall in line or a court case against them gets reopend/not dismissed) did already happen, openly in public just a few days ago
The Supreme Court said, if the Constitution authorizes the President to do it, then he can’t be criminally prosecuted. That doesn’t mean blanket immunity!
The fact that SCOTUS wasn't even slightly concerned about that happening belies the problem: the Democrats are ineffectual by design. They knew Biden would throw his hands up citing "norms" and "institutions" as an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
SCOTUS completely invented a concept of presidential immunity out of thin air to derail the criminal prosecutions. They also deliberaly took their time. Remember when Jack Smith tried to appeal directly to SCOTUS because everyone knew it was going to end up there? Instead, SCOTUS put everything on hold for another 6 months as a delaying tactic.
Even then, the opinion is rushed and haphazard and not at all well thought out. Some in the conservative supermajority allegedly wanted to punt the issue to the next term.
The presidential immunity decision is so brazenly political. The Roberts court will go down in history for the kinds of awful decisions in the 1840s and 1850s that led up to the Civil War.
The Democrats are people who believe in the rule of law, and they act like it. When pitted against people who have no qualms to win at all costs, even it means breaking the law and destroying the constitution, Democrats lose; if you value those things you can't preserve them by destroying them yourself. We are where we are because Republicans convinced themselves they deserved the power they have taken. The people who voted for them were convinced as well. That's the only failure we should be talking about right now. The Democrats, flawed as they are, did the right thing.
That said, they will not be the people to lead us out of this. They know how to fundraise, campaign, and maintain the status quo. They're not built for this, so it's time to just look for someone new rather than try to reform people who are clearly not made for this moment.
In many situations, those who have morals and scruples will be ineffectual when faced with an adversary who has none. Biden didn't "clean house" because he believes in the rule of law, and believes that if he'd done that, he should go to jail, even if he wouldn't.
Not everyone has an ethical code that only exists because they're afraid they'll go to jail if they break it. Some people just don't think it's ok to do the wrong thing.
Put another way: if you become the monster you're trying to fight, that's often not materially different from the monster winning in the first place.
Having said that, I do think that Democrats should fight a little dirtier sometimes. I think that would be possible to do without becoming that monster.
Congress does have some law enforcement personnel, but I doubt they'd be interested in getting in a standoff with the Secret Service.
If you are a government employee and Trump orders you to do something that exceeds his authority, can't you still say no? It seems like the Supreme Court only said that Trump can't get in trouble for asking. I don't think the court said that you have to answer yes.
I'm not trying to say that we're in a great position here or that immunity doesn't have some very destructive effects. But I am saying that we shouldn't act as if he has powers that the Supreme Court hasn't given him.
Then there’s a rebuttable presumption of immunity for more conduct. I don’t see that this flows from the Constitution, but perhaps it flows from judicial decisions over the past two centuries? ‘When the President does something official, he probably is immune, but maybe he’s not, and he could still be prosecuted from crimes he commits around the immune act’ doesn’t seem terribly meaningful.
It sounds a bit to me like saying that a citizen is immune from prosecution for his vote, but not for selling it or whatever. But I’m not a lawyer, and I could be wrong.
Anyway, the whole discussion is moot because Trump is turning America into a authoritarian state, so rules and laws and elections soon don’t matter anymore.
Donald Trump is trying to be dictator. He has been doing all but wearing a sign around his neck saying so for a long time. Please don't act surprised. It is not the time for quotes or being shocked at his actions.
He's saluted Kim Jong-Un's generals. He's bent the knee to Vladimir Putain He's whined that it's not fair that he doesn't have the powers that Xi Jinping does.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, it was widely known that Donald Trump was a fraud and a complete clown. It will be studied for decades how many people just willingly gave up their ability to call a spade a spade and ignore reality when it comes to Donald Trump. How did people become so fucking stupid?
How a real estate & brand "billionaire" from NYC who wears orange makeup and lifts and speaks in the most basic of generalities became the rallying symbol for disenfranchised rural white working class conservatives speaks to the absolute degeneracy of our society. Awful.
[0]: Trump got a higher share of nonwhite votes of every stripe in 2024 than he did in 2016, so it's clearly more about class than race.
>absolute degeneracy of our society
And there it is. The people who ended up voting for Trump have been feeling increasing alienation and hatred from the rest of the country, and they finally found their political power. No amount of insulting them is going to stop it.
The people who voted for him deserve to feel alienated and hatred, because it's not like he didn't have a track record. He's already been president. He has been a grandstanding loudmouth for the better part of the last 50 years if not longer.
It's one thing to vote for an outsider. It's another thing to say "Gosh, times are tough, and Biden's not making them better. Let me vote again for Donald Trump, a guy who sucks at business and politics, who made things awful in his first term."
Donald Trump's handlers at the Heritage Foundation put out a memorandum of what they'd do if he was re-elected. Most of these things were dangerously stupid, and a majority of them would make the country's average citizen worse off economically. Surprisingly, people believed Donald Trump's words when he claimed he'd never heard of Project 2025. Unsurprisingly, his entire campaign staff was filled with people who quite literally were the ones that wrote the memorandum and plan....and then got themselves installed as agency heads or cabinet members.
Donald Trump has always stood for Donald Trump making money by any means possible, and screwing over everyone else in the process. It's quite transparent. Yet somehow even after he was already president, people somehow overlook all his traits and say "that guy stands for the average man, he's for Main Street not Wall Street, he's going to lower my bills". Folks, he's a NYC real estate dude that wears makeup. He shits in a gold toilet and has never worked a day in his life. He lied and lied and lied about COVID. He's not for Main Street or the average American citizen, not at all. Why do people not see that?
And these people felt hated and alienated long before Trump, and nobody really did anything to bring them back into the fold over the last 4 or 8 years.
The Republic may well fall as a direct result of your kind of attitude. Being so absolutely certain of how right you are isn't going to help you.
I see your point, but let's not pretend here - that crowd was given ample opportunity to become economically stable since the times of Obama. Example: job retraining in Coal Country. Obama rolled out the red carpet for them, offering retraining, upskilling, everything under the sun. But no, those people just wanted to work in the mines, even though everyone and their cousin knew those mining jobs were not coming back. That group clung to their old ways, and when Trump said he'd bring the jobs back, they voted for him. The jobs never came back, and they voted for him again anyway.
>The Republic may well fall as a direct result of your kind of attitude. Being so absolutely certain of how right you are isn't going to help you.
It'll fall because a bunch of people who voted for "muh economy" didn't see the error of thinking a 6-time bankrupt conman would help them. My kind of attitude? Bugger off, my kind of attitude calls a spade a spade. "This fat makeup-wearing career criminal who inherited hundreds of millions yet bankrupted 2 casinos and declared personal bankruptcy 6 times is TOTALLY THE GUY WHO IS GOING TO REINVIGORATE THE US ECONOMY" I mean, where'd your common sense go? Oh yeah, people fell for this twice now. As if plenty of evidence from the first go-round wasn't enough.
Do I blame them? Yes, I absolutely do. Do I blame Democrats for managing to snatch defeat from what should have been an easy victory? Yeah, I absolutely do.
On paper, but not in practice, sadly.
The meaning of the Constitution has been bent to serve Trump's will. He violated the law constantly during his first term, was not held accountable for the electoral violations or coup, and is now violating the law again. He's gotten away with it every single time.
I'm sorry to say this. You are describing an America that no longer exists. We live in a new country with new rules that we don't quite understand yet.
And yet we had no opposition to it. The Biden administration and Kamala Harris were more interested in defending and providing material support for war crimes than stopping any of this.
The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.
It’s quite literally “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” They throw their hands up and surrender. You want a playbook? Look at what the Republicans did at any point from 2010 to 2016 and just do any of that.
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/global-elections-2024-incumbents-...
...
> No one seriously ran against him
> Then he dropped out and endorsed Harris no credible person attempted to run against her.
The movements like these did not just happened because people were unhappy. They are result of long political project that was enabled, excused and defended for years.
It's been like this for decades, and is why I haven't voted for a democatic party candidate for president in that time. Living in California, it doesn't even matter, all of the electoral votes go to the dems anyway.
This is all a consequence of the US still governing with an organization that was designed in 1776. After WWII european contries reorged their governments as well as their physical infrastructure. The wswitched to propotional representation with parlamentary style governments. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot closer than what we have in the US.
With presidenatial electrions decided by 7 states, and by a small minority of the voters in those states, something like 1% of the US population is deciding the outcome.
Neither dems nor reps want to change this. There is no real hope for actual democracy in the US...
Unfortunately, the democratic party seems to be unable to make the necessary adjustment and return to the winning formula of the Obama years because the political hobbyists and professionals that make up the core of the party have purity-tested out anyone with more mainstream views. If they aren't careful, they will end up as a party representing only university HR administrators.
Democratic party systematically promotes centrists and measured politicians.
Basically, our elected representatives picked social media news sources as preferred trusted sources, and the groups interested in getting information and misinformation to them followed suit.
It also exists in the 2024 election results
I’m no fan of Trump, but this pattern of people hallucinating that Trump said something he didn’t and then freaking out about their nonexistent hallucination, is getting very tiresome.
Continue that hypothetical further: the case makes its way to the Supreme Court, who agrees with the federal judge. The executive branch continues to ignore the order. The Attorney General is held in contempt of court and fined a large amount of money. Who's going to collect it? Any executive branch employee trying to carry out that fine would be violating this executive order, and be dismissed. So the fine would never happen.
Considering the president and vice president's recent disdain for judicial rulings against them, this may happen.
That would be completely paralyzing.
It would be completely paralyzing were the executive largely staffed with those that wanted to paralyze it. Usually that's not the case.
I don't think that'd be case unless the orders were completely outrageous, in which case, yes, we absolutely want them disobeyed until adjudication could happen.
You can certainly say that these people are right to try to resist the changes Trump is trying to make. But, like it or not, Trump is the democratically elected President, and it’s quite a challenge to come up with a conceptual model of American government that prevents him from exercising his constitutional authority over the Executive branch.
The majority of what he's doing is "merely" unheard of norm violations. But much of the authority he's exercising do not clearly appear to be legal, or constitutional. There are tendentious arguments for much of it being legal, of course, but they're not slam-dunks -- precisely because they would put the entire the executive branch effectively above any law or constraint.
In any other organization it would be clear that even when the head gives you an illegal or an ultra-vires orders, you're not supposed to actually follow them.
“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.
“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.
Sounds way too familiar.
This is what Germans must have felt like in 1933.
There's a clear norms violation happening here, but I don't see the power grab everybody else is seeing. These are powers the Presidency already had.
Then what, in your mind, is the purpose of this EO?
This was a live question in Trump's last administration, but I don't think it is anymore after cases like Lucia?
I concur with GP; you are arriving at the conclusion through your own logic but somehow not seeing the conclusion. See intermerda's point below.
Nothing in my comment is comparing them or suggesting they are comparable.
This i learned from a discussion between a magistrate and legal scholar.
This means that a norm violation, practically speaking, is a law violation. Which i guess is a crime. But that has to go to the courts to be judged.
That is incorrect, the president’s responsibility is to execute the laws of the United States. In order to execute a law, one must interpret it.
The exclusive domain of the judiciary is the power to adjudicate cases. In order to adjudicate a case involving a law, one must also interpret.
This isn't true.
> The exclusive domain of the judiciary is the power to adjudicate cases. In order to adjudicate a case involving a law, one must also interpret.
This is actually true.
I mean, yes, but in a non-judicial sense. The judiciary has the constitutionally assigned duty to give binding interpretations in the course of adjudicating cases.