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Yes, this is exactly my point. This executive order shifts power from the conservative to the-- as you call it-- "dynamic" aspect of the government. And conservatives are happy about this? What?
And your solution to this is to put all that rulemaking power in the hands of the president?
Consider that your theoretical understanding of the role of the various branches is not fully capturing the conservative critique of modern government. The executive already was asserting dynamic authority to make huge policy changes expressly against the will of Congress - e.g. massive expansion of the sweep of "civil rights" legislation, Obama and Biden's policies on immigration, and Biden on COVID policy and student loans - but only when it aligned with certain types of left/progressive priorities. Conservative attempts to push back on these innovations were blocked by recalcitrant and occasionally-outright-insubordinate bureaucracy, creating a one-way ratchet effect. The most recent generation of conservatives have abandoned "traditional" constitutional order for fighting fire with fire and trying to enable conservative executives to act in ways that previously only left executives could.
And they thought the best way to do that wasn't through an act of congress (which they control), or through an act of the supreme court (which they also control), but by massively expanding the scope of presidential power?
You do know that trump is already on his second term, right? You have coinflip odds of winning the presidency in 2028 before taking into account any incumbent-destroying black swans.
It has been a conservative goal for decades to try to shrink the power of the admin state. Yes I guess that increases somewhat the power of the executive but that’s a small price to pay.
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The obvious point would be that the Trumpist movement may be right-wing, but it is in no way conservative.
And yet every self-described conservative I know about it more-or-less happy with it. I assume that they think they're getting something out of it, but I suspect they're engaging in motivated reasoning about the likely strength of the backlash.
Because we hate the administrative state. It is unconstitutional, unaccountable, stifles growth and productivity, and is very statist / progressive. Admin state delenda est.
If the administrative state was unconstitutional the supreme court could have ruled it so.
But that's not really my point. I accept that no one gives a damn about the constitution. Rather, my point is that the cost of making a little more accountable is going to be an administrative state that is significantly more statist, and in the long-run probably more progressive and growth-stifling too. You can easily point at all the regulations you hate, but you're going to have much more trouble identifying all the bad regulations that never existed in the first place.
Now? well, it can take decades to grow a business... but only a few well-placed, well timed regulations and tarrifs to kill one. Making it easier to kill regulations by executive fiat is equivalent to making it easier to implement them. Trump is lubing up the levers of power, but one way or another, he's going to have to give up the stick.
I doubt it. The power existed. It was just very hard to oppose. Now, at minimum it can be opposed every four years.
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Yes, I am happy with more accountability in government. I'd be happier with the Legislature passing actual laws instead of delegating regulations to the Executive. The Legislature should never give an executive department (department implementing laws) the authority to make regulations that they are unwilling to have change every presidency.
The president doesn't have to enforce laws he doesn't want to, and removing the independence of independent agencies removes one of the levers by which to make a president want to enforce laws.
In practice this happens, but it really shouldn't - the President is constitutionally-charged with "faithfully" executing the law. The weaponization of enforcement discretion into a presidential pocket veto is a particularly nasty bit of constitutional hardball that's developed recently.
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While there is some discretion, I would not go that far. I actually really hate it when a president deliberately refuses to enforce a law. There is a problem of enforcement - the president cannot dedicate 100% of resources to enforce 100% of laws 100% of the time. But a president explicitly setting a policy where they refuse to enforce a law should be an impeachable offense.
What is an Independent Agency? What does the word Independent mean? Does it mean something like, "Not accountable to civilian-appointed leaders?" If so, what makes it desirable? People use the word "independent" like it should have positive connotations, instead of horrific ones.
The justification is typically that Independent means non-partisan, but that is naivete. Everyone who makes policy has a side they prefer, a side that gives them more power or makes policies that align more with their own preferences.
There are Judicial Agencies. There are Legislative Agencies. These exist with direct oversight of the bodies that control them. If Congress wants to make another Legislative Agency, that's fine to do so. If Congress wanted to put the rule-making portion of the FCC's scope under themselves, assign a committee to do so and make laws that way, they are free to do so. I would welcome it. As they refuse, we are instead left with a dysfunctional and unbalanced government.
Impeachment is worthless without removal. Given the immunity ruling, the president has the unilateral power to do whatever they want so long as less than 60 people will vote for their removal.
Democrats are staring down the barrel of that right now and believe me, it is terrifying. You better hope republicans have a plan to rig every future election because otherwise that gun will be turned on you.
If congress wants to not have independent agencies, it's within their power to legislate that. They didn't. Trump seized control of the independent agencies away from them by fiat. If they don't do anything about it... well, for now they'll get some easy policy wins. But in the long term, I don't think they're going to enjoy what happens.
I mean, I've been staring at that barrel half my life as well, so my sympathies. Maybe we can agree at this point to not delegate so much to the executive?
What do you think it's been like to be a Conservative this whole time? Do you think we like not having the Comstock Act enforced and have our taxes go to killing babies in their mother's womb? What are you worried about that tops that?
I agree on this point, and that's exactly why I liked that these agencies were independent. The senate could have killed the filibuster instead and started passing laws to deal with the administrative state if they wanted to-- but they didn't because presumably the ability to loot the government and install bureacrats via a patronage system is more convenient. Oh well.
Climate change. I'm a catholic, and therefore anti-abortion, but the net effect of stuff like "not funding abortions" is dramatically outweighed by the net increase in deaths caused by droughts, floods, famines, and famine-related-instability.
But oh well, at least this power is symmetric. I hope the next democratic president just straight-up regulates carbon intensive industries out of existence.
I don't understand. Is this a real argument? There's no mechanism even gestured at, it's just words.
What mechanism do you want? I vote in accordance with my conscience, and my conscious tells me I'm going to save more lives by voting for climate action than by voting for anti-abortion measures. I wish I could just concentrate my beliefs in a single party but unfortunately we don't live in a parliamentarian democracy.
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Ok, then let's rephrase. Can we agree not to delegate so much to unelected bodies unaccountable to anyone either? I don't want Independent agencies or a Executive with so much regulatory power. I don't want either to have so much regulatory power. I want Congress to stop awarding either with broad powers that are easily abused and difficult to be held accountable.
Do you have evidence for this? I have seen reviews that show that, while the amount of property damage has increased over time, this is not due to storms getting worse, but rather that things have gotten more expensive. It doesn't seem like there has been an increase in deaths as a percentage of population or severity of storms.
If we wanted to reduce the Earth's temperature, we could do it very quickly with some basic geo-engineering. That we don't is a sign that nobody seems to think the problem is very severe yet.
(Also, as a Catholic you should know it's not about the effect of paying for an abortion, it's about the remote material cooperation with evil. Being made complicit in the murder of a baby is the thing that really upsets us and Congress explicitly tried to protect us from.)
Beyond gut instinct fermi estimates, no. But I should clarify that I'm speaking of the net effect of voting for politicians that promote particular anti-abortion policies. If I had to choose between two buttons labeled "end climate change" and "prevent abortions in the US for a hundred years" I would pick the second, but I don't think any sort of federal ban is actually enforceable. I'm suprised and impressed that republicans actually managed to overturn roe-v-wade, but most estimates of that claim that it only saves about ~30,000 lives a year. Compared to the marginal effect of preventing ISIS-style wars I'm unimpressed. I'm aware that the comparison is a little unfair because I'm imagining an intervention that could singlehandedly halt climate change at some degree thresholds-- but at the same time, I think it's likely that the most deleterious effects of climate change are liable to happen at the margins, where it might be possible to just hold the breaks long enough to get to a tipping point.
I'm concerned primarily with the net loss of life. But if we're speaking in terms of remote material cooperation with evil without considering numbers, preventing immigrants from making better lives for themselves also qualified.
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Independent is almost certainly worse.
The incentives are frequently to grow the power of the agency.
People who eventually work on policy decision typically believe in the mission in the department and therefore are ideologically predisposed to grow the agency more.
There are little checks on the agency decision making process. And because people coming up in the agency generally share the same beliefs, there is little hope for change.
Finally, the bureaucracy is largely chosen from the people in DC. DC is over 90% democrat.
Basically wanting independent agencies is wanting permanent statist democrat rule.
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We were staring down the barrel of it previously, and this was the best recourse we could find. I personally would prefer the power not exist; actually using it as we see fit and Progressives resisting where they may is the clearest path to eroding that power that I can see. Under Biden, we already saw state-level defiance to Federal orders. We're seeing more now versus Trump, and we'll see yet more when the Progressives are once more ascendent. Either unified power will break down and durable Federalism emerges from the conflict, or we escalate smoothly to actual civil war.
What you are seeing with MAGA is precisely "I don't think they'll enjoy what happens" for Blue Tribe in general. "I don't think they'll enjoy what happens" wasn't a restraint on Blue ambitions under Obama or Biden (or Clinton or Bush II for that matter). The escalation spiral is a very evident phenomenon. Why expect departure now?
The basic problem is that we can no longer agree on core values, on what the laws should be and how they should be enforced. All the formal structures of our system of government assumed baseline homogeneity of values. Without that, none of this works, and what will happen is what we have seen happening for decades now: irreconcilable values-conflict blowing out one conflict-limiting mechanism after another as the pressure for a resolution one way or the other rises over time. Either someone has to win, or we have to have a divorce. There isn't really a third option.
Republicans control all three branches of government. This was the best recourse you could find? Republicans could easily have looked for a solution that favored the power of the legislative branch (where they have a structural advantage) or the courts (where they'll soon have an incumbency advantage.) Instead, they gave the power to the presidency? Seriously?
This part I agree with. That's why I'm so confused: why are the republicans giving the democrats the ammunition they need to win the divorce?
But Democrats managed to create a fourth, unaccountable, branch aligned largely with themselves. So the first order of business is to tear that branch down and/or put it under Constitutional control.
And also control of the legislature and the courts doesn't count for much if laws and judgements can simply be ignored. Illegal immigration was always illegal. The federal government spent at least dozens of billions of dollars directly supporting and subsidizing violations of the law. Ditto for drug laws and many laws protecting the ownership of firearms and practice of Christianity. Ditto for Bruen and Heller and any other decisions Blue Tribe doesn't like.
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We pass Federal laws and secure Supreme Court decisions, and Blue Tribe state governments, circuit courts, and large portions of the federal bureaucracy simply ignore them. Immigration and Guns are two issues where this pattern is more or less undeniable with a history stretching back decades; recently, we were surprised to learn that basic law enforcement was one of these as well. This has actually been a long-running conversation here on a number of threads, and is the reason why Red Tribe is currently doing what we're doing: We've lost faith in process as an impartial arbiter of outcomes, because we have, as a tribe, caught on to how "Manipulation of Procedural Outcomes" works.
We don't think the allocation of Ammunition works the way you seem to think it does. If you have five bullets and I have no bullets, and I pull a lever that gives both of us five bullets. there's a sense in which I'm "giving you more ammunition", but that doesn't make pulling it an obviously bad idea.
We already know that Blue Tribe ignores any law it doesn't like, and we already know that Blue Tribe is entirely willing to abuse power against us in lawless ways without significant consequence. Either we get to exercise meaningful power too, or the power should be denied totally. This is us attempting to exercise meaningful power. When Progressives get the Presidency again, we'll work on the "ignoring laws we don't like part". If it is not, in fact, possible for us to use power the way Blue Tribe does, we need to know that. If it is not, in fact, possible for us to ignore laws the way Blue Tribe does, we need to know that as well. We need legibility more than anything, and the current strategy does a good job of producing it, in my view.
In any case, the cumulative effect of this back-and-forth wrenching will not, I think, be a net increase in state capacity and control.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the bully power of a president with full regulatory authority over the corporations and therefore culture of the united states.
But oh well, at this point we're still discussing counterfactual. I wish I could just remindme! 8 years.
Unless-- do you have a manifold account? We could make some prediction markets to resolve this.
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This is equivocating on "conservative". (resistance to change versus right-of-center political beliefs)
The Constitution puts the executive power in the hands of the President. That we've built this entire part of government not contemplated by the Constitution doesn't change that; it cannot have independent authority.
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