Not saying this is good or bad, but this doesn’t seem surprising. Isn’t the point of our government structure to stop any one person from acting like a king. I’m surprised it took this long.
America clearly forgot the workplace if this was the intent.
I would also stop holding your breath if you're expecting courts to start acting in our interest.
Do not pretend otherwise.
I'm disgusted with the executive branch's actions and congressional GOP's enablement. And, since the administration at times seems to want a fig leaf of legality, maybe the bill would make a difference after all by giving them more coverage. But, overall, I'm not sure that it's the "game over" step change that some commentary makes it sound like it is.
I could be misunderstanding - comments / counterarguments welcome.
Justice Alito and Justice Thomas in particular latch on to any fig leaf of legality to excuse the administration's out-of-court admissions of intent to break the law [1]:
> If courts pay more attention to out-of-court presidential and Administration statements, that will be another example of how the “presumption of regularity”—”the courts’ baseline assumption that government officials act lawfully and in good faith,” as Alan Rozenshtein puts it—is in serious jeopardy. Justice Alito’s dissent to the A.A.R.P. order, in which Justice Thomas joined, shows that those two justices remain content to rely on the Government’s representation’s in court—and vexed that their colleagues apparently feel differently.
> I'm not sure how much difference that bill's clause makes in practice.
There are at least three massive problems aside from undermining the role of courts in enforcing their interpretations of the law.
- The clause applies to both government-associated defendants and non-governmental defendants. [2]
- Federal Rule 65(c) does not apply to final injunctions, but the wording of the clause might apply to final injunctions. [2]
- The clause applies retroactively.
[1] https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/in-the-trump-20-era-the-c...
[2] https://blog.dividedargument.com/p/the-house-judiciary-commi...
Campaign finance
Trading on privileged information
Voting as a bloc and not in favor of their constituents
Being a useless and ignorable vocal opposition when their bloc is not in power, ignoring indiscretions when their bloc is in power
It seems like the parent is clearly asking for a concrete example.
Despite promises to "repeal Obamacare" they never did repeal it... or even change it much at all. It was just too popular / the consequences too much to consider.
The joke at the time being that the Republicans would repeal Obamacare and replace it with the Affordable Care Act ;)
FWIW, Nixoncare, totally blocked by Ted Kennedy because the dems didn't want Nixon's name on anything else that was nice (the Clean Air Act President kept claiming he'd end Johnson's war in Vietnam and then he had the gall to open relations with China!), was more like the single-payer health care Obama ran on but could not produce.
Also: Disclaimer, I'm absolutely not a conservative. I just don't like the liberal rewrites of actual history.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/138787/obama-can-put-merrick...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland_Supreme_Court_...
As you said, McConnell and the Republican Senate refused to hold hearings on Obama's Supreme Court nominee, in March more than seven months before the election 2016 election - "Give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy" said McConnell. [1]
The other half:
Four years later, they had no problem confirming Trump's nominee in late October, not two weeks before Trump's 2020 election - and McConnell said "The precedent only applies when different parties control the Senate and the White House." [2]
To me the inconsistency seems contrary to the spirit of democracy.
[1] https://www.republicanleader.senate.gov/newsroom/remarks/mcc...
[2] the precedent only applies when different parties control the Senate and the White House
The current administration is behaving exactly like they know this. They are also boosted by the fact that SCOTUS told essentially told POTUS that he can do whatevs without repercussions. He's even ignoring their direct orders, and still nothing.
You can call me pessimistic, but these are just the facts of the situation. You're optimism is based on what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_midterm_election...
Trump lost 41 seats in the house in his first term and the administration wasn't anywhere near as polarizing. The voting bloc for mid-terms is very different from presidential elections.
He won under the conditions the election was performed under. That’s clear.
I’m not sure I could call those fair after years of attacks on people’s voting rights.
Extensive post-election voter surveys showed that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...
Gerrymandering doesn't affect the presidential election? Surveys show how everyone would have voted? Do you even hear yourself?
Which means it does :-) just not by much.
If either a) or b) impacts voter turnout then it could impact the presidential election even though the districts themselves don't matter.
I found some evidence both for and against voter turnout impacts from redistricting[2] or from gerrymandering[3] but it didn't seem conclusive.
[1] https://stateline.org/2022/05/20/check-your-polling-place-re...
[2] https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/90008864/90008864.pdf
[3] https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/gerrymandering-turnout-...
It is more tenuous than the others in the list, but I suspect it could be used.
And either way it had the psychological effect of people knowing their vote may not count because they vote for the wrong party in their district and have no chance of their candidate winning.
Gerrymandering is not just used on its own. The legislators that use their authority to disenfranchise voters use gerrymandering to dodge accountability. When Republican state legislators, congressmen, and senators do this, they do it to disenfranchise the same voters that would vote for a non-Republican president.
So yes, it's technically indirect, but gerrymandering obviously affects presidential elections. It couldn't not.
(I otherwise 100% agree that Republicans engage in various forms of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. Not sure what fantasy world GP lives in where they don't.)
The intense high quality polling that’s been done since Trump won in 2016 has completely dismantled the notion of “voter suppression.” It’s the left’s version of illegal immigrants voting.
For instance, how many Democrat supporters just don't show up to the polls in Texas because they feel that their vote doesn't matter due to gerrymandering in the state?
I think the issue here is that we are trying to apply logic when the American voter tends to be very emotional.
Also, Trump is the one who performs better among your supposedly “disenfranchised” voters. The folks who didn’t vote in the last 3 elections were more likely to vote for Trump in 2024: https://amac.us/newsline/elections/trump-victory-explained-n.... The only group Harris won were super voters (who voted in all four of the most recent elections).
Just because someone didn't vote doesn't immediately mean the reason was disenfranchisement.
Given you live in Maryland, how can you claim voting is easy in the the entire US? Are you familiar with voting laws in every state and how elections can be weaponized by the state governments against certain populations?
Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.
I think you are taking your lived experiences and applying it to everyone. Are you elderly, disabled, a single parent, or are you living in poverty? Do you have immediate access to your birth certificate or a passport? Do you have a government ID at all? Do you have access to transportation? All these factors play into how easy it is for someone to vote.
"Disenfranchisement" means legally or physically people from voting. Activists repurposed that term to attack any sort of rules and regulations around voting, with the specific purpose of making Voter ID seem akin to laws requiring a grandfather eligible to vote. The whole point is to muddle the facts rather than clarify them.
> Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.
No, voting is a civic ritual and should be treated with an appropriate level of solemnity to engender trust in the voting system. Look at how Taiwan counts votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZa7qIGAdo. What's the purpose of the ritual? Surely a machine could count all the votes easily. But that's not the point. The point is to have a public exercise that people can see and easily understand, to build civic trust.
I don't even know what you're going into with the civic ritual portion of the comment. You originally said voting in the US is easy, which I countered, and you seemingly did not respond to it.
Tangent: A new attack on voting rights just succeeded in the Eighth Circuit. An individual citizen or non-governmental group can no longer sue a state government for racial discrimination under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
> Until a few years ago, everyone agreed that private citizens and groups could bring Section 2 lawsuits.
...
> The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of voters in Section 2 cases numerous times, including just two years ago in Allen v. Milligan.
...
> However, some opponents of the Voting Rights Act have promoted a fringe notion that because Section 2 doesn’t say the words “private right of action” — the legal term for the ability of impacted individuals or groups to sue — such lawsuits cannot be filed. This is part of a pattern of attacking the procedures underlying Voting Rights Act litigation to make it virtually impossible to enforce the law’s important protections in court.
...
> The Department of Justice can still bring Section 2 cases, but that alone is not enough to prevent voting discrimination. Individuals and groups have brought nearly 93 percent of Section 2 cases over the last 40 years. Justice Department attorneys have explained that the department relies on citizen-led lawsuits because it doesn’t have the resources to handle all these cases on its own even if it wanted to.
> That desire is not present in the current administration’s Justice Department, which shed 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division staff and has already been ordered to dismiss almost all of its Section 2 cases.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/appe...
I mean, we have two options here - one is that voters memory-holed the last eight years and had never even heard of Donald Trump until like a year ago and believed he was an honest an sincere man of character... or they voted for exactly the thing everyone said was going to happen to happen and are only disappointed because the consequences weren't what they expected. They didn't think the leopards would actually eat their faces.
And now they're pretending like they're shocked that Trump would do such terrible things, just like they were shocked that Trump would have anything to do with January 6th... after the consequences of that weren't what they expected, either.
Nobody is saying that the Republicans in congress cannot set tariffs. We're just saying the _president_ cannot singularly do it. If elected Republicans congress critters want to pass a law establishing the tariff rates and have the elected Republican president sign it; go ahead.
Because that's the law ratified by a majority of states which is much more than plurality of Americans.
The people want a king.
It's Democracy going exactly the way how Plato already described it.
That isn’t the “point” of our government structure. The constitution deliberately mixes an electorally accountable deliberative body (Congress), an electorally accountable unitary executive (the President), and a judiciary insulated from elections.
As explained in Federalist 70, the executive is unitary and “vigorous,” by design: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Federalist 70 even brings up the example of Roman Dictators to illustrate the need for a strong executive: “Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.”
What the constitution seeks to avoid is consolidation of all the government’s powers under a single entity. The President is powerful and can act unilaterally, but must stick to exercising executive rather than legislative or judicial powers.
So the real question with tariffs is whether one sees them as more of a general policy or a tool of foreign relations. The former is a power within the deliberative consideration of Congress. The latter sphere of authority is assigned to a singular President.
Yes, wealthy inter-state individuals would be so much better. Right?
The typical complaint against billionaires is stuff like their yacht is too big or people don't like one policy they took advantage of. It isn't really to the same scale. At their worst, wealthy non-state actors lobby powerful figures in government to act.
So far, "it" isn't actually anything though. Trump, and the Republicans working with him, have been completely ignoring courts telling them to do things since day 1. Time and time again, he's been told by a court "you cannot (or must) do this" and he does completely the opposite (and, by he does, I mean he orders other to do it, and the follow that order).
We are at the point where there is nothing lawful about his presidentship, but the Republicans just keep doing what he tells them to, anyways.
There is a preamble that describes the point of the constitution and kingship is no where mentioned.
Also, kings involve hereditary selection, which is orthogonal to despotic rule which is what you are thinking of.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/13/politics/china-tariffs-bi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250101032222/https://www.white...
"[The Biden admin intends to use] executive authority"
The accusation was Biden significantly expanded tariffs using the same power Trump is claiming.
Simply maintaining an existing tariff is something different. Though it could certainly still be objectionable.
Not repealing an action isn’t the same as supporting it. It doesn’t make sense to arbitrarily repeal tariffs without a coordinated draw down of tbr other party.
[1] https://www.millercanfield.com/resources-Can-President-Impos...
[2] https://www.bhfs.com/insights/alerts-articles/2024/biden-ups...
[3] https://www.ntu.org/publications/detail/bidens-new-tariffs-h...
Here is one such report from 2018 that was the impetus for the steel tariffs: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/232-steel
>Other tariffs imposed under different powers, like so-called Section 232 and Section 301 levies, are unaffected, and include the tariffs on steel, aluminum and automobiles.
It seems that Biden did not, at least in the instance you link to, do the thing that the courts have ruled against today.
The least interesting commentary you can imagine is of or from a country's closest friends. From many perspectives Europe is indistinguishable from America, except from being a little poorer.
Let's see America's (or Europe's!) earnest criticism of Kinshasa. C'mon, show us who you really are. I promise you it will only benefit humanity.