Deleting Musk and his team of Nazi sympathizers from government would be a great start.
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Hard Power and Soft Power
- Thread starter taxi1
- Start date
Deleting Musk and his team of Nazi sympathizers from government would be a great start.
It's actually funny how he's blowing up his brand. Maybe he doesn't care, bc it's just make-believe money. I believe though that he thinks that he is on a weird mission...disturbing
He does. That’s the bullshit, ketamine-fueled, video game heroes journey I was talking about.
None of this is exaggeration, even though you’d love to believe it. This is 100% what they meant by “flooding the zone”. What they failed to grasp is that the concept works both ways.
Government works slowly, but inexorably. We will see whether or not it still works under this regime. They’re creating a Constitutional crisis, and daring anyone to stop them.
Yeah, it's kind of disturbing. Not trying to be alarmist, but it's getting close.
By all means, be alarmist- with objective, fact-based arguments. This is everything we were taught to defend against. Musk has shown by his actions he is a domestic enemy of the Constitution.
Yeah, it seems like the framers of our Constitution designed some good checks/balances. Not sure they envisioned teenagers like Big Balls now being named as a Senior Advisor in the State Dept, without any pushback.
Because it was established at the behest of Congress under the the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. I believe, after a quick reading, that Section 204 of the act is where Congress directs the President to establish an entity to be in charge and coordinate foreign aid:
SEC. 204. DEVELOPMENT LOAN COMMITTEE.—The President shall establish an interagency Development Loan Committee, consisting of such officers from such agencies of the United States Government as he may determine, which shall, under the direction of the President, establish standards and criteria for lending operations under this title in accordance with the foreign and financial policies of the United States.
That section of the act was repealed by an amendment of the act in 1978 but USAID, along with explicit reporting requirements concerning funding of USAID to Congress, are spelled out in the amendment.
So legally, it falls into a bit of a gray area where the President could disestablish USAID but would still be required to have an entity control and coordinate foreign aid to comply with the law. I qualify that with the caveat that this is all from my very quick, non-lawyer reading of the act and its amendments.
I guess my question is why didn't this happen, or was it a priority, under 45...and now it is. They're all in.
That is not not how the courts or the law has recognized Congress's 'Power of the Purse', for the last two and a half centuries or so. The executive is obligated to spend appropriations as delineated by Congress as spelled out in the Constitution and reinforced and further spelled out in subsequent court decisions and law. The current process is also pretty close to how the founders intended for appropriations process to happen in our government.
There are claims that the President has 'impoundment' powers to withhold funds that Congress has appropriated but current law, specifically the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, and Supreme Court decisions say otherwise. Specifically:
"the Act requires the Administrator to allot the full sums authorized to be appropriated in § 207."
It will almost certainly be challenged in court but as of right now, that is the law.
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Spekkio
He bowls overhand.
This is completely alarmist.
Trump got elected in part because the general population wants a scaling back of federal waste and overreach. They also elected Trump because they believed he would be a man of action to actually do it instead of talk it to death while waiting for bureaucrats and/or Congress to act.
Trump's favorability rating is 4 percentage points higher than election day and is trending upward.
He is mostly focusing on low-hanging fruit that is controversial, which gets him the type of press that he wants to keep the populism going while having a very small tangible impact to the overall problem people actually want him to solve.
We've been down this 'you can't make me spend the money that I don't want to spend' road before. What is old is new again.
Is it though? The courts have already stopped several of the administration's actions, to include ones that appear to directly contradict the Constitution.
Popularity ≠ Legal or Constitutional.
And the last time the President lost, we'll see what the Supreme Court says this time around.
We need to get past the “mandate” line of thinking. That is not an actual thing, it’s a cheap trick to justify means that are objectively illegal.
Alarmist? Fine. If it gets people to pay the fuck attention, so be it.
That is a lot to wade through, but given that the founder of the 'Middle East Forum' has claimed Muslim immigrants are "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene" I would question their adherence to analytical rigor. But maybe it takes one to know one, since they support the racist shitbag like Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson).
I don't think anyone is debating that USAID and other agencies could use a deeper look at their operations and efficiency. I don't even think most people would oppose putting USAID underneath DoS in order to make sure Aid and Diplomacy are linked hand in hand (I honestly didn't realize USAID wasn't a branch within the State Department until this whole fight).
However, people are opposed to an "unelected bureaucrat" (sound familiar?) just intentionally culling parts of the federal government he doesn't like under the guise of government efficiency in a way that, at best seems Constitutionally shaky and at worst is a flagrant violation of the Constitution, and then when ordered by the courts to stop, does not stop doing what its doing, setting up a Constitutional crisis.
No one had a serious discussion of just ending the Defense Department after the Mai Lai Massacre or Abu Gharib - both of which were massive setbacks to US diplomacy far worse than inadvertently funding a group of terrorists.
Something tells me when Elon opens the hood at DoD, there will certainly be no fraud, waste, or abuse found with Starlink, SpaceX, or any other number of the $18 billion in contracts he does with the government.