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points by xg15 2 days ago | 0 comments
> The President is the chief executive in charge of government operations, not the courts. If he’s acting outside his authority, you can sue him and then the courts can figure it out.

I love this. Yes, and then several years later, the courts can declare his order was in fact illegal when it's already far, far too late to reverse any of it.

That kind of "oversight" is no oversight at all. If you believe this is just how things should be, then you want a king with unrestricted power, not a president.

[–] rayiner 2 days ago
That’s just how litigation works. If the issue comes down to the payment of money, courts assume that it can be sorted out eventually by ordering money to be paid or returned. The government can destroy your business with an illegal regulation, and they don’t have to ask courts for permission first. I’m such cases, you probably won’t even get money back from the government. It would be bizarre to impose a higher standard of oversight for the government to restructure its own operations than for the government to regulate private conduct.

The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO. A CEO doesn’t need permission from a court to spend the company’s own money or to take executive actions about the company’s own operations.

[–] eszed 2 days ago
That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not a USA-ian, and explain it in simple terms. In the USA the people are sovereign; they delegate their power to Congress, who are first-among-equals within the three branches of government; the executive branch's role is to "faithfully execute" the laws that Congress passes. So, yeah: a president "behaving like a CEO" and deciding on his own how to allocate money is patently and obviously un-Constitutional.

Now, the US legislature has, in recent decades, delegated so many of its prerogatives, and overlooked so much executive overreach, that your misappropriation is completely understandable. In fact, though, the current situation is exactly what the framers of the US Constitution most feared. (You can read their discussions at the time collected in a volume called "The Federalist Papers".) Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".

Total side-note: CEO as sovereign within "their" company is, arguably, also a perverse interpretation of the US corporate governance model. Feel free to argue that point without me, HN - I know that's just how that works nowadays - but it's totally wrong to import that model into government, where it's explicitly not intended.

[–] hackingonempty 2 days ago
> Their inability to devise a system to meet a threat they fully anticipated argues against their much-heralded "genius".

It's like byzantine faults, no system can protect you if you don't have some minimum of correctly functioning legislators, judges, and executives.

[–] hollerith 1 day ago
>That's such a total misunderstanding of the US constitution that I'll assume you're not [an American], and explain it in simple terms.

Not only is he an American, but also he routinely makes arguments to American Federal judges very similar to the argument he is making here or at least he is a colleague and coworker of people who do.

[–] xorcist 1 day ago
A CEO can absolutely not spend the company's money as it was his own. That would be a breach of trust or embezzlement and outright criminal. You can bound by budget and fidicuary duty, and answer to the owners or their board of directors. People regularly get jail time for this type of crime.
[–] xtiansimon 2 days ago
> “The President isn’t a “king” he’s a CEO.”

Given the Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United, Loper Bright, and Hobby Lobby I find this notion obscene.