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Comment by ANarrativeApe | Hacker News Reader

"The Constitution explicitly forbids Congress from issuing bills of attainder—laws that single out individuals for punishment without trial. While that restriction technically applies to the Legislative branch, the spirit of it clearly applies here. A president cannot simply declare someone an enemy of the state for contradicting a political narrative. That’s not national security—it’s authoritarianism, dressed up in executive language."

So the Constitution does not forbid it. All executive orders, it could be argued, are authoritarian, not just the ones that you happen to dislike. The moral? Be damned careful to whom you give this authority.

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Well the way it should work is that executive orders are not laws and should not be treated as such. They’re supposed to be memos about how executive agencies should interpret the law. Somehow though, as congress has languished they’ve been accruing more and more power

Congress largely relinquished that power by creating bills that establish rule-making executive agencies rather than writing the rules themselves. That leaves congresspeople free to do things like trade stocks and raise money for their respective parties. They claim they would be too busy to read all the rules they would have to pass, but (1) that's the point and (2) they pass massive bills they don't read anyway. This version of America is fundamentally broken, but it seems to be the nash equilibrium of the system given greedy congrespeople and a greedy executive.

No, that's bullshit.

Requiring Congress to get involved every time a regulatory agency needs to adapt to new circumstances or new technology would leave us at the mercy of unscrupulous corporations who can and will "move fast and break things."

No; Congress relinquished their power when Congressional Republicans chose to become "the party of No" and just prevent anything from happening under Obama. That's when executive orders started to become much more common.

I think you need to read some history, because what I'm talking about happened in the 1930's-60's, when Obama wasn't even born yet. The regulatory agencies are ponderous and slow, too. They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.

Executive orders are the latest extension of the trend of do-nothing congresses. They have been growing exponentially over time.

There's a reason "it would take an act of Congress" is a saying.

> They are just unelected so they can do unpopular things without it impacting their careers.

Yes, this (to an extent), but more importantly, they're also experts. The people hired at these agencies aren't politicians, they're professionals.

Seems to me most congress people can barely tell their ass from a hole in the ground these days. Do we really need them chiming in on what medicine is okay and what isn't?

Do you think they are the ones writing the 1000-page bills they pass on a weekly basis? Laws are also generally written by experts.

It sounded like you were going to disagree, but then I think you arrived at the same place more or less. Congress, on net, isn’t doing what it needs to be doing. Is that not a critical problem? If the executive who takes up that slack is Trump, suddenly people notice what a problem it is. But, it is not about Trump specifically, but rather an ongoing and systemic issue with our two party system, and it will predictably escalate due to partisans in Washington and their unwavering supporters.

I was emphatically disagreeing with their first sentence. The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently, with the obviously-corrupt SCOTUS ruling ending Chevron deference.

Delegating power to regulatory agencies also has nearly nothing to do with Congress's recent gridlock and ineffectiveness, or the spate of executive orders that has prompted.

I think my mileage varies a bit. I was an Obama/Clinton supporter, and I have always felt strongly that the legislative branch was… less than efficient. Delegating away the hard non-glamorous stuff is incentivized and nothing changes because the DC system as a whole just works that way. Both parties want less accountability and more power, but citizens need the opposite. There has to be some reasonable amount of legislation coming from the legislature or what are they there for other than grandstanding, fundraising and performative outrage?

> The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently

Between about 1985 (Chevron) and 2010 (the populist movements in both parties), this idea was at its nadir of popularity. For the entire rest of US history from 1776-1980 and 2010-2025, a distrust of a large executive branch was very popular, and pretty much bipartisan most of the time. Just because you do not remember a time when this idea was popular, it does not mean that it was a fringe one only until very recently.

Congress is designed to be gridlocked. That's its natural state. We are now learning why it's a good idea to have a relatively ineffective government.

No in fact I'd say we are learning why its bad to have ineffective goverment. It lets people believe any blowhard thats claiming to be able to get things done. And its easy to do stuff when you don't care about destroying things or making things worse or following the law

I'd call that the rule of law. If Congress is unable to perform that duty, it falls upon themselves to resign their position in favor of an fairly elected candidate who will.

When a law is passed that says "Do what the executive agency says.", then it makes executive orders that control that executive agency on the level of laws. Even with some limits in the original law, the executive order becomes like a law at least within those limits. But it isn't a law, meaning that some protections based on laws aren't offered. So now we run into an issue where we have things that aren't laws that effectively work as a law as far as the common man cares. The only simple fix I see for this is to require that all laws must clearly define what is and isn't illegal without any regard to another system's interpretation of the matter (but as with any simple fix, it is never that simple).

All executive orders, it can be shown - expected a functioning set of co-equal branches of government.

Congress is broken - intentionally.

It's not broken, it's complicit. As I understand it Congress has a R majority, which is why all this is happening.

The time window you indicate here is too narrow for the topic under discussion, and thinking in partisan terms about the dysfunction of this republic an error, in my opinion. At the foundational (practical not ideological) level, the complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US. It is possible they did not foresee the black swan of Trumpism and now a faction of the ruling elite is being excised through mechanisms of their own making. But that would not absolve them of the responsibility for where we are today.

Trumpism is simply the cherry on top of a dedicated plan that favored partisanship.

This is not news, it is well known, and public facts (60 years) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...

The core plank of the Repub strategy has been to eschew bi-partisanship. It is the home of the Tea party movement, because it kept feeding its base red meat, and then never actually delivering. Trump is lauded by his base, because he treats the political theater as reality.

Please remember, during Trump 1, liberals and centrists reached out constantly to the Republican rank and file, and never made progress. You cannot overcome a media and political machine built to prevent such progress and dialogue.

No, pjc50 is right. Republican politicians are scared of their leader because their primary elections are completely at his mercy. The reason for Congress's dysfunction today is 100% a partisan issue. No need to blame "elite power centers".

Eh, there's something in "complicity has been between the economic, political, and informational power centers in US": in that all of them backed an increasingly dysfunctional Republican party, as a means of avoiding problems they didn't want to have solved (post industrial areas, police violence, fake news, money politics and so on)

The reverse applies to Democrats, who are sufficiently unafraid of their leadership that they occasionally engage openly in collaboration with the enemy.

Even before Trump Congress was at a standstill because R would just say "no" to absolutely everything. Doesn't matter what it was, it was "no". They fight tooth and nail for any kind of solution to anything.

The only time Congress gets anything done is with a blue majority.

Congress abdicated their role quite a while ago.

They don't even pass a budget anymore.. which they're explicitly required to do. They learned there are political consequences to their action so they handed their job to agencies in the Executive Branch to write their own rules which acted like laws.

When SCOTUS struck down Chevron Doctrine last year, it boiled down to "No, Congress writes the laws."

The fix is Congress doing their job.

The executive branch has the authority execute citizens that pose a threat, unilaterally. Deeming someone as a public enemy clearly shows a measure of restraint from that power. Thus it must be legal. Otherwise the executive branch would find themselves in a position where they cannot point out when something has been done to harm the US, but could in fact just kill that person without comment.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...

We need to pass a law that makes it obvious that ANY executive order that clashes with a law that has been passed disagree, that the law wins. I know that's already the case, but it looks like it needs to be made a law so that it can go in front of SCOTUS. If a president has an issue with a law, he can always use his influence to see that a new law is passed or that it gets challenged in court; he can't simply issue an Executive order to override it.

I've also been imploring my friends to go vote, make sure their ID is in order because the current regime is going to do everything in their power to make sure than anyone under 65 has a tough time voting

Under the current administration, what the constitution does and doesn't say may be entirely immaterial. They are perfectly happy running ripshod over the due process provisions of the fifth amendment so may choose to ignore, or at least try to ignore, any other part too.

It could be writen on single-ply toilet paper, and the paper hold more value.

Of course a lot of this is up in the air and could be resolved before the end of this term, as there are numerous legal challenges on-going, but perhaps not and with people openly taking about a 3rd term by various tricks (not blatantly declaring that it is happening, but I'd not put it past them!) such as him running as vice to someone else's election campaign then the president elect stepping down, this sort of ignorance of current law could continue for two terms or more.

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