The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.
Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup.
What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.
If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but not actually a political party. Insofar as a two party system isn't ideal, it at least provides a level of stability. But when one of the two parties is an actual cult, then the whole thing falls over. Parties must not be cults. That's the root of our current predicament.
> It just so happens
This didn't just "happen", it was predicted far in advance, and not on the basis of parties but on the basis of antisocial personality disorders. For instance:
https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... and https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissi...
If we as a species are to flourish and prosper, we need to understand that our urgent and necessary task is transcending and dismantling of our narcissism, both individual and collective.
How did she do it? She used her professional experience to recognize Trump as a malignant narcissist, and her lived experience as a Polish national who watched the rise of authoritarianism in her country to put 2 + 2 together.
So it wasn't something that "just happened" as if it was only a matter of time before Democrats act this way. There are precise reagents needed to make it happen. Political parties are necessary but not sufficient. The cult leader is the necessary ingredient that was missing. People who knew what to look for recognized it early, called it out, predicted this would happen, and they were ignored.
We can't rewrite that history now, we have to learn the lessons we missed. "It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control" is not the lesson. "A two party system where one of the parties turns into an actual cult destabilizes completely" is the lesson.
They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.
Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.
I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources.
They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists.
In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
It does not say "we don't think small companies can behave monopolistically so we aren't enforcing the law on them."
President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
I will reiterate the plain language of the United States Constitution: [the President] SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
SHALL does not mean MAY or AT HIS DISCRETION or any such thing.
He didn’t enforce the ASA because he disagreed with it, just like Jimmy Carter didn’t prosecute people for selective service violations because he disagreed with it. It wasn’t because the resources weren’t available to enforce those laws.
For example, if Congress had appropriated funds specifically for doing those things, the executive would be obligated to do them, because it’d be unambiguous as to whether resources existed to do them.
This is again an absolutely unambiguous consequence of Congress’s Constitutional control of spending and of the Take Care Clause.
What you are describing is effectively a line-item veto, which doesn’t exist in the US.
So far all the evidence you’ve posted is actually evidence of my argument, not yours.
But we know the motivation because Jefferson wrote it down. It wasn’t resource management, it was opposition to the law on principle.
Here's why: because it's not!
Here's SCOTUS in Kendall v United States:
> To contend that the obligations imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed implies a power to forbid their execution is a novel construction of the Constitution, and is entirely inadmissible.
> "This doctrine cannot receive the sanction of this Court. It would be vesting in the President a dispensing power which has no countenance for its support in any part of the Constitution, and is asserting a principle which, if carried out in its results to all cases falling within it, would be clothing the President with a power to control the legislation of Congress and paralyze the administration of justice."
> The result of the cases of McIntire v. Wood and McCluny v. Silliman clearly is that the [court's authority to command an officer of the United States] to perform a specific act required by a law of the United States is within the scope of the judicial powers of the United States under the Constitution"
If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf
“While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide- ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”
No it doesn't. The laws are statements of what people in power will do under particular circumstances. This view only makes sense if people are executing the laws. The moment you stop executing the laws, suddenly you don't have laws.
Prosecutorial discretion is another beast entirely. Considering circumstances on a case by case basis is necessary for functional justice, as lawmakers can not possibly foresee all circumstances and even if they could the enforcers of laws have practical limits. A cop letting you off with a warning for speeding is discretion. It is not permission for you or anyone else to ignore the speed limit in the future. The law is still there, and you should expect to suffer the consequences if you break it.
We don't need laws when they ask us to do something we'd want to do anyways. Laws exist for the sole purpose of getting people to do the things they would rather not do, or to prevent them from doing things they would prefer to do. If the law can be violated when it is convenient for the lawmaker, you do not live in a nation of laws.
(there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)
Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.
If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.