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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

Given the scope of all government officials it should just be the case that you cannot trade individual equities, stocks or have any outside investments wholesale.

Otherwise how could you stop it? It’s not like when you work at big co and you just stop trading their stock. You get access to information that clearly will be material potentially months in advance.

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How about we start with congress and see how that goes? Been a point of discussion for a long, long time and politicians do not seem to be interested in regulating themselves at all.

Yeah. Lots of problems. If I could only get three wishes I’d choose implementation of score voting for presidential election and congress, introduction of recall votes and introduction of national ballot questions.

Those should fix most of the problems with time.

Until money and politics are commingled there will be no solution

I think you may mean disentangled?

Which is almost the same as saying "until money and power become disentangled", which is very unlikely to happen in our lifetimes (if at all).

Personally I think they’re inherently linked. How exactly would it look like for money and politics not to be linked? Money is political. There are some low hanging fruit though like corporate personhood and super pacs.

Start with public campaign financing, and saner election procedures. Primaries, caucuses, first last the post, and electoral college? It all contributes.

I'd add to that list the option to vote "no confidence". About half of Americans do not vote, and I strongly suspect that for a large chunk of them it's because they feel there's no candidate which represents their interests.

And if the majority is "no confidence" we get a special runoff election with new candidates.

Ok, let's make it Congress and everyone working an elected position or political appointment in the executive branch as well. All good!

They'll just do something similar to what some engineering managers do in the software industry. They'll tip off their cousin or friend of a friend of some opportunity (like needing to hire 10 engineers for a new initiative) and when they make money by acting on the information they reward the tipper with cars, vacations, homes, etc.

Sometimes managers will only hire through staffing agencies owned by family friends and get indirect kickbacks.

When I first heard about this my initial question was how do they not get caught when the assets are gifted or transferred to the manager's name. Turns out they don't actually transfer the assets to their name but they effectively own it through free usage.

My spouse was a minor elected official in california, so we had to fill out form 700. I was already pretty much ready to go on broad based mutual funds, but needing to fill that out for anything that isn't a broad based mutual fund put any thoughts of individual equities out of my mind. (Other than employment based stock, which we reported out of caution, even though my employer had no operations in or near the district)

Nit: MNPI (material, non-public information) has strict definitions. Not all internal information are considered MNPI.

The vast majority of government employees would not have access to MNPI.

The problem is Trump’s family and friends and donors and people who have otherwise bribed him all can benefit from actions the administration takes. It’s not as simple as restricting the current officials.

Why does making this rule matter? The pardon makes it all irrelevant.

My hot take is that the presidential pardon will be eliminated in our lifetime.

I suspect in the aftermath of this administration, the power of the President as a whole is going to be massively stripped back.

I think it'll be interesting to see what the consequences are. In India, it used to be (I haven't lived there in decades) pretty par for the course for a new party to come into power and jail all the previous party's heads for corruption and then when it yoyos over the inverse would happen. That would be a worse outcome for the US, I think. It would stall any significant action from the government.

I think we allowed a sense of decorum and a hope we could just "move on" to avoid that happening in 2021, and now we are suffering the wrath of not doing it. I suspect we will not make the same mistake in 2029.

Has not happened after other catastrophic administrations. Each party likes the power when they get hold of it.

Congresscritters like personal power. Trump has neutered even his own party's legislators and they do not like it, even if they fall in line out of fear. Keep in mind even when Trump is in power, his own party goes through processes like "pro forma" sessions which prevent him from making recess appointments.

I thought that would happen after the first Trump term. It did not.

The second one has made an even stronger case for doing so though.

That seems highly questionable given how little pushback Trump got in congress, and it was almost entirely along party lines. What makes you think they'll suddenly grow a spine in 3 years?

The issue is people are afraid of him. There was plenty of Republican opposition to Trump but people either fell in line or got pushed out. (The main problem is that people didn't have the courage to oppose him all at once, he can easily handle one threat at a time.)

I suspect even of Republicans voting in the lines today, they don't like him or his behavior but are too self-interested to do anything about it. When a new administration comes in, between Republicans happy to avoid a Democrat or one of their own have that power again, and Democrats ready to ensure another Trump can never happen again, we'll have bipartisan support for crippling presidential power.

There are plenty of rules in place today which say the President cannot do X thing. I do not see how adding rules to the book changes anything if the Congressional/judicial enforcement becomes so impotent to use the tools at their disposal.

They're probably counting on the majority of the current Congress losing their seats over this.

That might work out well for the Republicans - "rule by executive order" started under the Obama administration.

Based on this:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...

Looks like it really started under Teddy Roosevelt. Obama's 276 is lower than most of his predecessors.

I suggest that you actually look up the numbers for other presidents: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...

You're right. I repeated something I'd heard elsewhere and it wasn't correct.

This would require a Constitutional Amendment - a pretty high bar.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...

Why do any rules matter for government officials? Should we just make all laws not apply to them because of the pardon?

I think adding any new rules on them is going to have no effect if we expect the laws to constrain exactly those people who are likely to be pardoned, yes.

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