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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.

The presidency works by following the proper channels of checks and balances, not spamming Executive Orders until the courts block it. I have a very hard time believing that if a Democratic president did the same behavior you would have the same reaction.

  • -13

I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.

There is general agreement on this, but the question is who decides when this happens. According to the Constitution, the answer has been "Congress." As such, attempts to force this result by the judiciary are in this tradition inappropriate.

Spamming executive orders until the courts block it has been how presidential admins work since Obama lost his supermajority. Biden blatantly ignored the court orders blocking him from student loan forgiveness and eviction freezes and nobody thought it was a constitutional crisis.

Biden in fact attempted to get student loan forgiveness placed wholly outside the ability of the courts to review by arranging so nobody would have standing. The response of the Democrats was to be angry at the Republican's almost-as-tenuous methods of obtaining standing anyway.

Probably the closest we came to a crisis was Biden's extension of the rent moratorium after the Supreme Court's deciding vote (Kavanaugh) said basically "It's unconstitutional but we'll let you wind it down".

Popular presidents ignore the constitution all the time. Unless you're arguing that FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans was constitutional. The Biden administration made clear its intent to ignore the constitution when it was searching for a way to make good on its promise to make a handout to the college educated. It's unclear as to the executive branch auditing itself and controlling its staffing is unconstitutional: the Trump administration should ignore the lower courts until a clarifying ruling comes down from the Supreme Court.

The institution which interprets the US constitution, and has the final say on its meaning is the Supreme Court. It famously okayed the camps in Korematsu so from its issuing the matter was no longer in dispute. But in 2018 Hawaii case, USSC repudiated it.

So the camps were constitutional, as affirned in Korematsu, from their inception until 2018.