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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

This EO says nothing about the Judicial branch and presents a perfectly reasonable policy statement about how legal decisions and interpretation should be made within the executive branch. What specific language in this EO do you have a problem with?

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.

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Consider this hypothetical: a federal judge rules against the Trump administration's firing of the inspectors general and must offer the fired employees their positions back. The Attorney General says the judge overstepped his constitutional power and calls the ruling invalid. What should the person who would've rehired the employees do?

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.

What’s the solution you have in mind? Anyone in the Executive branch can interpret the law for themselves and disobey an order if they believe they have a legal basis to do so?

That would be completely paralyzing.

Yes.

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.

It might well be the case that, today, the executive branch (which includes essentially the entirety of what most people consider “the federal government”) is largely staffed by those who want to paralyze it.

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.

Perhaps. But I think we can agree that this is indeed not the usual case.

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.

That is why federal workers and the military swear an oath to the constitution of the united states.

I'm not sure what hallucinations you're talking about, given that this whole catastrophe has been one big "I told you so" thus far. By a bit of inductive reasoning we can predict that it will continue. (And it's not like it requires any special predictive abilities given that they told us during the campaign what they were and are planning to do.)

https://archive.is/g6ElI

“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.

“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.

"Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally."

Sounds way too familiar.

Good share, thanks.

Imagine finding absolutely no issue with an EO that uses phrases like “so-called independent regulatory agencies”.

This is what Germans must have felt like in 1933.

What branch of government do these independent agencies exist in, and where is that defined in the Constitution?

Try reading my comment again.

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