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I disagree that this is a "hidden" veto, I think it's an obvious feature of liberal democracy. A president can't govern without the lower level bureaucrats' cooperation. If they find his proposals so hideous that they're willing to blow up their careers by defying him, he'll have difficulty implementing anything. To become an actual totalitarian, the president would have to replace all the bureaucrats with yes-men, and that takes time. If he just fires them all immediately, he won't have the infrastructure to govern. I find this very comforting, and it makes me less scared of a Trump presidency than many of my family members and friends. But when a politician talks about "draining the swamp", that's a clear sign that he's not willing to work within the system. We need to protect the swamp.
I can't remember much careers being blown up by #resistance against Trump though. Even with Trump being nominally president, the best careerist move has been to join the #resistance, not to oppose it.
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I don't like bureaucrats and I obviously didn't vote for them. These self-appointed vetoers should be fired and criminally punished if I had my way. They derive all their authority from the executive. In a better world they would be suitably punished for betraying that. They also almost all happen to be partisan Democrats very selectively deciding which sorts of policies to obstruct.
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I think they exercise the veto power prior to Trump doing anything, and they exercised it without any serious consequences. There were generals lying to Trump about troop levels in foreign countries, and not only were they not court marshaled for insubordination they were lauded for their efforts. And I'd be pretty happy to with generals that were willing to stand up and defy orders like "shoot american civilians" but they used their "backbone" to defy the president by continuing to wage wars abroad that the president and voters did not want.
I agree that there is a good use case for a veto among the bureaucracy and state agents. But they basically demonstrated the worst level of judgement in exercising it pre-emptively, used it for dumb things, and then suffered no consequences. Theoretically good, but in practice it was awful.
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That is not how it went when marriage ceased to be between a man and a woman: if bureaucrats had an objection of conscience at facilitating a man marrying man, they lost their jobs. Such firings weren't called totalitarian by those who now object to insubordination possibly having actual consequences.
I'm not exactly saying that bureaucrats shouldn't be fired if they disobey the president. Just that the process of firing them and finding replacements would serve as a buffer against a totalitarian president implementing his agenda. If only a few bureaucrats object, it's obviously not much of an obstacle. But their act of civil disobedience can still raise awareness of what's going on.
Right - the conscience veto didn't work in the case of marriage because it was only a small handful of people willing to stand up for it. It's different when you're looking at most of the bureaucracy. The president can fire them all, but if so he's destroying his own state apparatus and thus his own ability to act.
There's an obvious rebuttal here - "If I fire the bureaucracy I won't be able to act? But I'm not able to act now! My choice is a bureaucracy that refuses to do what I want, and no bureaucracy that does nothing. At least with no bureaucracy, there isn't an institution actively impeding me, and I can get started on the long, difficult process of building a new state apparatus."
But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.
First, I — like many — would question just how necessary so much of the federal bureaucracy is. There was that discussion here recently about what the Department of Education does. I'd also point to some of Curtis Yarvin's comments in this interview by Harrison Pitt about bringing in Elon Musk to head a "Department of Government Efficiency":
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So, if you focus only on rebuilding the most core, essential functions of the federal government — can we get by for awhile without a Department of Energy? Transportation? HUD? CPSC? USAID? The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service? the Postal Regulatory Commission? — I can see quite a lot getting done in just four years.
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