HaroldWilson
5d ago
doesn’t mean the lawfare wasn’t clearly political in nature.
I disagree with this, at least in part, but nevertheless these are two very different things. There was no quid pro quo. It's not as a prosecutor said 'if you harden your policy on Russia we'll drop the charges', they just tried to prosecute him and then either succeeded or failed.
HaroldWilson
5d ago
Eisenhower sent the US Army to Arkansas to enforce desegregation.
Sure, but elsewhere Southern states resisted desegregation for a long time and really quite effectively. Even through the 70s and 80s schools in many deep Southern states (particularly Louisiana if I recall, but also others) where still largely segregated, beyond what one would expect by pure geographic concentration.
HaroldWilson
5d ago
The initial order against the federal government began in the district courts.
Also the whole question about the steel seizure cases was whether this was a core power or a secondary power.
So? What was under discussion was whether district courts had 'personally decided how' the President should exercise their powers. In this case they did just that.
HaroldWilson
5d ago
what is her due anyway.
This is totally normal tension between state and federal governments, she isn't due anything. If New York is acting illegally, that should be resolved through the courts directly, not by using criminal charges as a bargaining chip. If they aren't, there's nothing she can, or should, do about it.
HaroldWilson
5d ago
'Twas ever thus. The idea that states not co-operating with or even obstructing the Federal government in the exercise of its powers is some sinster and unchartered political development is obviously absurd. The Fugitive Slave Law, Reconstruction and the black codes, prohibition, desegregation etc. etc. What is actually the problem, and more abnormal, here, is the federal government using the legal system to intimidate and blackmail political opponents into doing what they want (and before some retard starts moaning about the Trump cases, they were not conditional on anything, they were just prosecutions that were attempted to be carried through to their conclusion, and stood or fell on the merits, not on political cooperation). If the charges are real and would stand up, they should be carried through, not dismissed to get a quid pro quo.
HaroldWilson
6d ago
but AFAIK Thatcher is the poster child for tearing it all down
This is rather overwrought, deindustrialisation and the drawdown of employment in SOEs was well underway under Wilson, but in any case the relevant point here is in her interactions with the bureaucracy, which is the particular point of discussion in this subthread. The point is that whatever changes Thatcher was in fact able to make re: privatisation and retrenchment (though bear in mind she increaseda a range of taxes (especially early on) because unlike Republicans she actually believed in austerity, for better or for worse) she did so without tearing apart the Civil Service, even though prevailing governmental consensus was for a mixed economy and national and regional planning.
And Attlee came from before the time of entrenched hostile bureaucracies.
This is silly - just because the scale of governmental employment was not what it is now, he still was dealing with an e.g. Treasury which, though changed by the dual experiences of depression and war, was still not inclined towards his agenda.
HaroldWilson
7d ago
Deng, De Gaulle, Thatcher, Feng Guifen, Attlee
HaroldWilson
7d ago
Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer - not a conventional military operation, but the courts explicitly declared the President's actions in exercising his executive authority in wartime illegal.
HaroldWilson
7d ago
aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
Well this is correct only by virtue of its tautology - the courts obviously can and do constrain executive power, the very debate is over what are or are not legitimate exercises of that power. The President and his agencies are still subject to the law and the plaintiffs are arguing, among other things, that his OMB violated the Administrative Procedure Act in its stop order.
HaroldWilson
7d ago
He attacks Medicare at his peril. As they have found with Aid, cutting out 'waste' is basically impossible without also threatening core and useful functions. This may not be so politically destructive when it's foreigners who get the raw deal, but when it's Betty, 76, Iowa, the backlash will be much greater.
HaroldWilson
7d ago
Will we have to have another World War (or perhaps two as last time) to prevent the American relapse into the fiction that they shouldn't care about anything or anybody abroad?
HaroldWilson
7d ago
Because doing good things is good!
HaroldWilson
7d ago
I firmly believe that doing this in a slow, orderly fashion would just result in caterwauling about how we're killing the children in the future and that this caterwauling would continue apace through the next administration, which would restore funding in full plus a little extra bump for their trouble
I'm afraid this is called politics. Republicans were unashamed in their mobilisation of patriotism/the troops in the early 2000s, but that didn't mean that when Obama entered office he issued a stop-work order to the military. He simply just withdrew from Iraq. You might Trump is engaged in 'just politics' too, and this is sort of true, but he and his supporters have to own the negative consequences of their actions, and not blame the left for... complaining about Trump endangering valuable aid programmes when he does so.
HaroldWilson
7d ago
This argument is constantly advanced and it's ridiculous - it's basically blaming the left for the right having a) a stupid base and b) being rubbish at politics. Plenty of politicians/movements have proven capable of picking their way through hostile bureaucracies without tearing the whole thing down. That Trump is too stupid or impulsive to do this is no-one's fault but his own.
HaroldWilson
7d ago
We cannot sustainably be the world’s sugar daddy, protector, doctor, infrastructure manager and nature conservator.
Are you really suggesting that the <1% of GDP the US currently spends on foreign aid is some kind of unsustainable luxury? It's a rounding error as far the deficit is concerned.
HaroldWilson
8d ago
True, but all this means is that you just have to decide for yourself on an object level what restrictions are actually desirable. After all, there are going to be some characteristics which are genuinely disqualifying, you just have to try your best to work out what they actually are.
HaroldWilson
9d ago
Those are wrong not because of the logic of what is being said but because of the object-level incorrectness of the statements. Being gay doesn't inhibit one's ability to be a dispassionate public servant. Being avowedly racist does.
HaroldWilson
10d ago
I mean he only has himself to blame if people don't 'get it'. Don't broadcast yourself endorsing hatred of an entire race! Not that difficult.
HaroldWilson
10d ago
Fairly obvious. If someone had tweeted [terrorist] did nothing wrong even on their own time it would be disqualifying. It's not so much the act itself but the attitudes it betrays, attitudes which are (or rather ought to be) incompatible with his position.
HaroldWilson
10d ago
Under the metric of... the deficit. I don't understand the question.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
You don't have to 'jump' at anyone's command. Just come to the conclusion about his suitability for the role in light of his behaviour yourself.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
The sacred cow of not being avowedly racist? Pretty sure that's been a bipartisan sacred cow for quite a long time now.
HaroldWilson
12d ago
This is obviously not a principle without limits though, and for a lot of people being avowedly racist is beyond that limit. How would it even be possible not to take that attitude into the workplace?
HaroldWilson
12d ago
based on whatever definition of what's appropriate
There isn't a single mainstream workplace in the Western world where saying 'normalise Indian hate' would not be considered unprofessional.
I mean some things really are just good or bad, or at least legitimate and illegitimate. I have nothing against NY's sanctuary policies because there is no credible threat there to the rule of law - you can criticise it on substantive grounds obviously, but in terms of process it's the normal rough and tumble of politics. I don't think it's anti-social, and this isn't partisan - I also wouldn't object to a red state making life difficult for federal officers enforcing gun control on procedural grounds, only substantive ones. Very explicitly blackmailing your political opponents with 'we will withdraw charges against you if you do what we want on this totally unrelated issues' is not normal.
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