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This is pretty "Your honor, I did not 'conspire to commit fraud'. I simply had an innocent hypothetical conversation with my good friend, who happened to commit fraud a few weeks later. That the friend's actions were related to my hypothetical is a coincidence and has no bearing on my guilt.". If the Appointments clause was intended to prevent things like this, cute tricks shouldn't and won't prevent judges from finding that no, de facto, he's the administrator.
(Also, this is another example of my point about how Trump isn't even trying to pretend to follow the law, and pretending to follow the law is an indispensable tool for minimizing legal exposure if you're trying to break the law. Whatever his goals are, it isn't smart to not have figured out who the DOGE administrator is until this point, or to have made it a little less blatant that Elon's directly calling shots without a superior)
You aren't exactly convincing me of the nonexistence of that zeroth article when you compare trying to get rid of bureaucrats to conspiring to commit fraud.
But leaving that aside, I find it immensely frustrating that people argue cute tricks wont work in a nation where growing wheat for one's own consumption is illegal because of "interstate commerce".
My man, your entire Republic is built on cute tricks. The Constitution itself was a cute trick. Not to mention the whole concept of EOs as quasi-laws like they are today.
Cute tricks without hard power maybe are fraud. Cute tricks backed by hard power are institutional innovations. The only relevant question here is whether SCOTUS will wear the excuse or not. And they've worn some pretty fucking silly excuses in their time.
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