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Comment by vharuck | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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