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Comment by mike_bob | Hacker News Reader

Biden passed some of the toughest anti-trust laws in the past 20 years, but Trump repealed them quite literally in the first month he returned to office, calling anti-trust legislation as "bad for business".

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The only entity that "passes" laws in this country is Congress.

You mean via executive order? That's not exactly passing a law.

Executive orders can effectively kneecap any efforts to put laws into effect, as we can see almost daily since 20. January 2025.

No, quite the opposite. Laws can kneecap efforts to make executive orders (in contradiction with those laws). That's why he's lost in court so many times about so many of his orders.

This is ... charitable. Enforcing laws relies on courts which are only reacting slowly to a non-cooperarive administration, which gleefully ignores orders or practices malicious compliance after the damage has been done (and done as fast as possible). Judiciary enforcement is barely existant.

The whole dance is really effective at keeping the administration one or two steps ahead of the judiciary and legislative branch.

Your language more accurately reflects how the US government is supposed to operate, and that's important, we'd all be better off if people remembered that the government has a number of branches with different responsibilities, actually kept track of who controls each, and otherwise understood the system.

It's also more or less true that the Biden administration took more responsibility and initiative in antitrust enforcement:

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/10/02/biden-ftc-antitrust-...

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/the-biden-administration...

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