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And then we passed civil service reform acts, which are still on the books. If you intentionally break the law by firing bureaucrats on partisan grounds, and then ignore the courts ordering you to reinstate them, you have made an illegal power grab and set the constitution aside. In my mind this can reasonably be called a coup.
I have an idea:
Win the presidency and both houses of congress.
Eliminate the filibuster.
Repeal the Civil Service Reform Acts.
Repeal the Administrative Procedure Act.
???
Unleash total executive power over federal agencies and regulations. Very legal, very cool.
Why wouldn’t this work?
Yes, that would be entirely legal. (Though difficult to imagine in practice, because a large part of the GOP is still legacy republicans). What Vance suggested, though, was "when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"
I do not believe TPTB will allow the populists to win through the normal methods. This is just a prior, not a position I have proof of, besides observing Lucy pull away the football on many occasions. If the above program were seriously approaching accomplishment through legal methods, the establishment would throw a coup of their own.
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By this standard Biden has couped too. The border and student loans would both be considered illegal actions.
Changing bureaucrats is above competency at enacting your agenda - Democratically. The outgoing people may be competent but they are partisan robots too that will interfere with your agenda and not do their job. Intellectually and functionally competent but they will still not execute the executives policy.
As I understand it, Biden accomplished these by slithering through legal loopholes, not disobeying the courts. When the Supreme Court overturned student loan forgiveness, the Biden team did not say "Screw you, Clarence Thomas, let's see you stop us" and strike the ledgers anyway; they set lawyers to find every technicality on the books. Same with opening the borders.
Of course, I am not implying moral superiority on the Biden side. Merely that, as Scott wrote about populism vs. the deep state in Turkey:
Coups are necessary for anti-establishment side of a populist vs. establishment showdown. The establishment side can just let the systems run and get their way.
They pretty much did tell the court fuck you. They were told it’s unconstitutional. They did it anyway. Cases take a long time to make it thru the system. He did it anyway. Sounds like a coup to me.
Choosing not to enforce the border and abusing the meaning of the word “asylum” while importing voters and using tax payer money is a coup in my book. Words have meanings. Asylum when the law was written meant something very specific - as in facing direct violence due to political belief. Biden decided it means I make $1 an hour in Guatemala and want American money.
You can say this is “exploiting loopholes”, but laws and words are always going to have a great deal on inexactness to them. And as the years go by people change the meaning of the word.
I don’t even know what you are complaining about with bureaucrats. They aren’t elected people. How is that a coup? It’s not like importing millions of voters, banning proof of citizenship, and changing election results.
Only in the trivial sense that every time the President breaks a law he also violates the Take Care clause. Biden v Nebraska was a statutory interpretation case which held that the clause in the HEROES act allowing the Secretary of Education to waive or modify student loans in connection with a national emergency (which COVID qualified as) didn't extend to the kind of broad-based loan forgiveness that the Biden administration wanted to do.
Having been told that he couldn't use the HEROES act, Biden looked around for other sources of statutory authority which didn't involve such a big stretch. The biggies are Publicig Service Loan Forgiveness (The statutes say that the government can discharge student loans if someone works for the government or certain other "public service" employers for ten years. This used to be almost impossible to claim because of paperwork requirements, but Biden just cancelled the loans for anyone whose employment record showed the required ten years of public service.) and income-based repayment (The statute allows the Secretary of Education to define rates and thresholds, and Biden made them a lot more generous). These are also going to end up in front of SCOTUS, but if statutes are interpreted to mean what they say Biden would win. But this Supreme Court has tended to interpret delegations of power more narrowly than you or I would based on reading the statutory text because they don't trust Congress to protect its own Constitutional role.
I don't even think this is "exploiting loopholes" at this stage. Congress intended to give the Executive broad discretion to write off student loans for borrowers who were struggling to repay them, and they did. Congress may or may not have intended that discretion to extend as far as Biden is taking it - the answer is probably mu because Congress notoriously doesn't have a brain and can't intend things other than explicitly. If America had a functioning Congress, Congress could have said what it meant. As we are, the administration and the Courts are butting heads over who gets to decide questions that Congress negligently chose not to.
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I would think that the plan would be to fire them based on lack of merit?
In his own words, "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people", to "seize the institutions of the left" as a "de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program".
He's not saying to fire bad bureaucrats or incompetent DEI hires; he's saying to fire democrats.
He's not saying to fire democrats; he's saying 'fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive'. 'Disobeys the boss' is grounds for firing literally everywhere.
This seems like a sane-wash. Vance did not say "fire bureaucrats who won't take direction from the executive". I agree that doing that would be proper (and presumably legal). He says "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat", which doesn't seem to suggest leaving in place those who do take direction.
The fact that Vance goes on to advocate defying court rulings against the move suggests heavily that he acknowledges his preferred path would be explicitly illegal and that he doesn't care.
That seems like kind of an in-sane wash to me -- do you really think Vance plans to fire tens of thousands of people?
(and replace them with other people -- to be clear there are probably quite a few mid-level bureaucratic positions that could be eliminated altogether a la Millei)
Why wouldn't I believe it? It's what he said explicitly. And he went on to further state what he thought the consequences of that move would be and how he would respond to those consequences.
If you think that's an insane plan, fair enough, but that's what he says in his own words that he wants to do.
Because it would be kind of impractical to fire/hire literally every position upon taking office, and Vance does not appear to be mentally retarded?
This is exactly what sanewashing is though. "Well literally abolishing the police would obviously be retarded, so they obviously don't mean that." But yes, they really did literally want to abolish the police and they actually were retarded.
I don't know if Trump is going to go ahead with this full scale cleanout of the bureaucracy, but I know Vance isn't the only person on his side who wants this and is planning for it. Like the whole Project 2025 thing has gotten a lot of press couching it in vaguely conspiratorial terms as a secret policy agenda but the more substantial and meaningful part of the project IMO is the effort to build a database of loyalists pre-vetted to come and fill those positions.
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The full video and (admittedly autogen'd) transcript is here, with the relevant quotes starting around 23:00 to 30:00 (probably not worth listening to). I'm not a big fan of the Andrew Jackson worship, but the question itself assumes that said bureaucrats will be defying executive direction.
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Could you quote the part where he's saying that? I've read the article and what I'm seeing is only what popocatepetl quoted.
You are seeing "we want to fire Democrats" in the article? I'm not.
Assumption: when he says "our people", it means Republicans in 9 out of 10 cases.
So, when he talks about firing everyone, but replacing them with Republicans, it sure looks like Democrats as a class are being fired, while only individual Republicans are.
So you're assuming he means that, and I'm assuming he means all the people who slow-walked Trump's initiatives last time -- do you really think that Vance will be going around checking party cards?
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