End of the American Republic?

battle1 said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Continued from previous post:

Curbing independent agencies. Starting in the 1880s, Congress established certain government offices as independent agencies, run generally by multimember commissions whose members serve fixed terms, possess particular expertise and are left free to operate outside direct executive control. But conservatives have long chafed at the agencies’ existence, which they consider an unconstitutional “headless fourth branch of government.” They want the president to have power to fire commissioners for any reason — not only for cause, as is the case under current law — and to review their proposed regulations.

Trump is on board. “I will bring the independent regulatory agencies, such as the FCC and the FTC, back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands,” he said in an April 2023 video, referring to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. “These agencies do not get to become a fourth branch of government, issuing rules and edicts all by themselves.”

What would this mean for such agencies, which also include the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission?

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, who headed the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration and has been tapped to lead it again in the second, toldthe New York Times last year. Specifically, Vought said, “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.”

Eliminating the independence of these agencies would reflect a dramatic tilt in favor of presidential authority. There are any number of ways Trump could force the issue. He could attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, who said tersely at a post-election news conference that such a move was “not permitted under the law.” (Powell can only be fired for cause.) The Post reported that Trump is considering taking the extraordinary step of firing Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board; because of the way the labor agency is set up, Democrats are poised to retain majority control until 2026, if the Senate reconfirms the current chair to another term before it leaves town.

In any event, the issue of the constitutionality of independent agencies appears destined to return to the high court — with or without presidential action.

In a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the court rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to fire William Humphrey, an FTC commissioner, and Roosevelt’s argument that being limited to firing commissioners only “for cause” was an unconstitutional infringement on executive power.

But Humphrey’s Executor has long been in conservatives’ crosshairs. More than 20 cases raising constitutional challenges to the independent structure of agencies are making their way through the lower federal courts. The justices just declined to hear one such case, but that reticence might not last.

Bottom line: Don’t bet on independent agencies’ continued insulation from presidential interference.

Politicizing the civil service. A second term will give Trump the chance for a do-over in his bid to gain authority to remove tens of thousands of “rogue bureaucrats” who currently enjoy protections against being fired for political reasons. He has declared a “Day One” plan to reissue his October 2020 executive order to create a new Schedule F under which the president would have full power to remove any employee “whose position has been determined to be of confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”

This change would upend the civil service system, put in place in 1883 to end the spoils system. Currently, there are about 4,000 political appointees atop a federal workforce of 2.2 million. Trump, in his zeal to root out what he calls the “deep state,” would expand presidential power to fire at will an estimated 50,000 or more federal employees, depending on how broadly the exemption is interpreted.

“I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump announced in a March 2023 video. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

One sign of how sweeping the change could be: After Trump left office, the National Treasury Employees Union unearthed documents that it said showed how the Office of Management and Budget “stretched the definition of policy work to cover the vast majority of the OMB workforce, from attorneys to GS-09 assistants and specialists who have nothing to do with setting government policy.”

Trump might find it difficult to institute these changes right away. President Joe Biden not only revoked Trump’s Schedule F order but also adopted a new rule to shield federal workers against having their civil service protections removed. Undoing that and issuing new regulations is a cumbersome, time-consuming process.

The incoming administration might be tempted to act without going through these procedural hoops. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy suggested as much in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing that the civil service law leaves Trump room to quickly “implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area.”

But moving so fast would be risky, as shown by the Trump administration’s loss at the Supreme Court when it did a sloppy legal job of trying to revoke protections, from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, for immigrant “dreamers.”

It’s harder to predict how the court would deal with a revived Schedule F on the merits. The Treasury employees union, in a lawsuitchallenging the original Trump order, called it “a textbook example of the President acting contrary to Congress’s express and limited delegation of authority to the President.” Still, a court inclined to a broad reading of executive powers might give the president more authority over firing federal workers.

In 1952, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, previously FDR’s attorney general, warned of the consequences of untrammeled presidential power in concluding that President Harry S. Truman lacked constitutional authority to seize control of steel plants during the Korean War. “The tendency is strong to emphasize transient results upon policies … and lose sight of enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic,” Jackson wrote.

In Jackson’s formulation, a president’s power is “at its lowest ebb” when he “takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress” — the same sort of measures discussed here. “Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution,” Jackson admonished, “for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.”

The examples outlined above aren’t the worst of what Trump could do — or the cruelest or the most extreme. Actions such as separating families, deporting dreamers and using the Justice Department to punish political enemies fall into those two categories. Yet these threatened moves represent assaults on the very architecture of democracy — assaults that must be repelled, as Jackson instructed us, lest they permanently warp the constitutional structure.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/22/trump-congress-takeover-power/

continued from previous novel-

Yo Max, wake up!  Are we going to brunch or what? 

Gern Blansten said:

battle1 said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

Continued from previous post:

Curbing independent agencies. Starting in the 1880s, Congress established certain government offices as independent agencies, run generally by multimember commissions whose members serve fixed terms, possess particular expertise and are left free to operate outside direct executive control. But conservatives have long chafed at the agencies’ existence, which they consider an unconstitutional “headless fourth branch of government.” They want the president to have power to fire commissioners for any reason — not only for cause, as is the case under current law — and to review their proposed regulations.

Trump is on board. “I will bring the independent regulatory agencies, such as the FCC and the FTC, back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands,” he said in an April 2023 video, referring to the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission. “These agencies do not get to become a fourth branch of government, issuing rules and edicts all by themselves.”

What would this mean for such agencies, which also include the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Product Safety Commission?

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, who headed the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration and has been tapped to lead it again in the second, toldthe New York Times last year. Specifically, Vought said, “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.”

Eliminating the independence of these agencies would reflect a dramatic tilt in favor of presidential authority. There are any number of ways Trump could force the issue. He could attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, who said tersely at a post-election news conference that such a move was “not permitted under the law.” (Powell can only be fired for cause.) The Post reported that Trump is considering taking the extraordinary step of firing Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board; because of the way the labor agency is set up, Democrats are poised to retain majority control until 2026, if the Senate reconfirms the current chair to another term before it leaves town.

In any event, the issue of the constitutionality of independent agencies appears destined to return to the high court — with or without presidential action.

In a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the court rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to fire William Humphrey, an FTC commissioner, and Roosevelt’s argument that being limited to firing commissioners only “for cause” was an unconstitutional infringement on executive power.

But Humphrey’s Executor has long been in conservatives’ crosshairs. More than 20 cases raising constitutional challenges to the independent structure of agencies are making their way through the lower federal courts. The justices just declined to hear one such case, but that reticence might not last.

Bottom line: Don’t bet on independent agencies’ continued insulation from presidential interference.

Politicizing the civil service. A second term will give Trump the chance for a do-over in his bid to gain authority to remove tens of thousands of “rogue bureaucrats” who currently enjoy protections against being fired for political reasons. He has declared a “Day One” plan to reissue his October 2020 executive order to create a new Schedule F under which the president would have full power to remove any employee “whose position has been determined to be of confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.”

This change would upend the civil service system, put in place in 1883 to end the spoils system. Currently, there are about 4,000 political appointees atop a federal workforce of 2.2 million. Trump, in his zeal to root out what he calls the “deep state,” would expand presidential power to fire at will an estimated 50,000 or more federal employees, depending on how broadly the exemption is interpreted.

“I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump announced in a March 2023 video. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

One sign of how sweeping the change could be: After Trump left office, the National Treasury Employees Union unearthed documents that it said showed how the Office of Management and Budget “stretched the definition of policy work to cover the vast majority of the OMB workforce, from attorneys to GS-09 assistants and specialists who have nothing to do with setting government policy.”

Trump might find it difficult to institute these changes right away. President Joe Biden not only revoked Trump’s Schedule F order but also adopted a new rule to shield federal workers against having their civil service protections removed. Undoing that and issuing new regulations is a cumbersome, time-consuming process.

The incoming administration might be tempted to act without going through these procedural hoops. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy suggested as much in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing that the civil service law leaves Trump room to quickly “implement any number of ‘rules governing the competitive service’ that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area.”

But moving so fast would be risky, as shown by the Trump administration’s loss at the Supreme Court when it did a sloppy legal job of trying to revoke protections, from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, for immigrant “dreamers.”

It’s harder to predict how the court would deal with a revived Schedule F on the merits. The Treasury employees union, in a lawsuitchallenging the original Trump order, called it “a textbook example of the President acting contrary to Congress’s express and limited delegation of authority to the President.” Still, a court inclined to a broad reading of executive powers might give the president more authority over firing federal workers.

In 1952, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, previously FDR’s attorney general, warned of the consequences of untrammeled presidential power in concluding that President Harry S. Truman lacked constitutional authority to seize control of steel plants during the Korean War. “The tendency is strong to emphasize transient results upon policies … and lose sight of enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic,” Jackson wrote.

In Jackson’s formulation, a president’s power is “at its lowest ebb” when he “takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress” — the same sort of measures discussed here. “Presidential claim to a power at once so conclusive and preclusive must be scrutinized with caution,” Jackson admonished, “for what is at stake is the equilibrium established by our constitutional system.”

The examples outlined above aren’t the worst of what Trump could do — or the cruelest or the most extreme. Actions such as separating families, deporting dreamers and using the Justice Department to punish political enemies fall into those two categories. Yet these threatened moves represent assaults on the very architecture of democracy — assaults that must be repelled, as Jackson instructed us, lest they permanently warp the constitutional structure.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/22/trump-congress-takeover-power/

continued from previous novel-

Yo Max, wake up!  Are we going to brunch or what? 

Whenever I hear brunch I automatically think of eggs benedict. Now I'm hungry.

Halifax2TheMax said:

mickeyrat said:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/i-helped-the-army-remember-its-values-american-values-thanksgiving?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

Good luck with that. There is no US outside of the military. No collective good. At least by their definition or standards. It’s too late, way too late

TikTok killed the radio star.

Choccoloccotide said:

When the govt turns it back on its own people in need is another sign of the end of the republic.  Disgusting 

https://x.com/amuse/status/1862833489298563182

mookieblalock said:

MAGA playbook

1. Use the words radical and regime whenever someone disagrees with the supreme leader

2. Refuse to denounce Sandy Hook deniers