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Comment by readthenotes1 | Hacker News Reader

The strangest "The President is not King but we give home this power of a King" section in the Constitution.

It's one of several "checks and balances" whereby one branch can override another branch, in this case the executive can override the judicial. Congress (the legislative) can override the executive too, by firing the President if they feel he's breaking too many laws (or indeed for any reason they want). It's a wonder they haven't chosen to. It indicates Congress approves of what the President is doing.

I think this is sort of final proof that electing a king for four years with more or less total power as the presidential system outlines is fundamentally a shit system.

This is just a new (and primarily conservative) interpretation of the system (the so-called "unitary executive" theory).

There's a different interpretation where the existing laws constrain the executive, there is no "unitary executive", and the result is a highly constrained presidency. E.g. Biden attempting to use explicit language written by Congress to do something and being told he could not do so by the judiciary (for "reasons").

It isn't strange per se. The Chief executor by definition has discretion. The thing that's gone haywire now is that discretion is being used in a repugnant manner to most actually sane people.

>The thing that's gone haywire now is that discretion is being used in a repugnant manner to most actually sane people.

This was probably expected. What wasn't expected is that voters would put the people doing this back into office AFTER they had done it.

> What wasn't expected is that voters would put the people doing this back into office AFTER they had done it.

Through this entire experience, the greatest revelation for me has been this:

There is a very large number of massively stupid people who live among us. Much more so than most of us expected.

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