Summary
Donald Trump signed an executive order expanding presidential control over independent agencies, including the FTC, FCC, and SEC.
The order enforces the “unitary executive theory,” which argues the president has sole authority over the executive branch. It grants Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, oversight of these agencies’ performance and budgets.
The move is expected to face legal challenges, as past presidents have largely respected agency independence.
Trump defended the order, stating, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
I don’t even have the words to express my feelings properly to this bullshit.
I do but saying them gets you put on a list.
Probably already are, or will be soon.
That’s why they call these oversite positions “quasi-judicial”. Congress has explicit power to create judicial bodies not specified in the Constitution. Of course, who knows what this Supreme Court will do with the plain text.
What a great idea. They have always talked about about starving the beast, now they can actually do it.
Where are the American “patriots” who would defend democracy and protect the country against tyranny with their 2A rights to their dying breath?
That’s right. Fucking crickets from that bunch.
The ammosexuals voted for this shit. They only stroke their guns over the idea of helping put down any uppity {DEI}s that are nearby. All their talk about guns this, guns that, is and always has been a threat meant for others.
They don’t give a fuck about democracy and want to be the vanguard of tyranny.
Laws are more like suggestions.
Good thing we spent the 4 years between trump terms with a young, motivated go-getter who checks notes his in a closet for four years and was less seen/heard than any other president.
Moderates are not equipped to fight fascism, we can’t keep rotating between the two because the fascists will break more than a Neoliberal would ever want to fix.
Neither actually wants to fix shit, just keep their wealthy donors happy
Also, this time we have fascists with a plan at hand. They even say beforehand what they will do and no one bats an eye, until “wait, they were serious?”
They did their homework and are swiftly taking over.
Trump’s abhorrent smug face of late tells everything we need to know if they are succeeding or not.
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That’s a list of random things that happened during his presidency…
I have no idea how that’s relevant.
This would be tho:
In the 100 years since Calvin Coolidge took office, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan held as few news conferences each year as the current occupant of the Oval Office.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/politics/biden-public-appearances-media.html
He wasn’t fucking capable of being president. Even Chris Clizza admits it now, why can’t you?
Those four years was not the time to let Grandpa go in a Sunday cruise, we needed an actual fighter and moderates aren’t fighters.
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Why are we still talking about Biden? How does this serve us? Regardless of how we drove here, we’ve landed in S-Town.
So now we either live with the stink, build ourselves a waste treatment facility, or GTFO.
Why are we still talking about Biden?
Because we can’t afford to make the same mistake we made in the last three presidential elections…
People said “why are we still talking about Hillary” after 2016, so we didn’t learn the lesson and repeated it in 2020.
Then Biden barely won and we couldn’t say anything because he was president, so we didn’t learn the lesson.
And ran another uncharismatic candidate who was further right than Dem voters, for a 3rd election in a row and lost.
Id ask why moderate politicianss never want voters to discuss their failings, but that’s obvious.
What I want to know is why voters do what you’re doing right now.
How is understanding past mistakes to prevent repeating them not important to you?
Biden was bye bye 9 months ago, my dude. I’m sorry he hurt you in the feefees.
The president is not a king, there are a lot of congress critters who also got us to this point. And those don’t get elected nationally. It’s systemic. I don’t foresee us making significant systemic changes to the system this cycle… unless they are to our detriment.
For me, now is the time to recruit, to protest, to get active and get people active. If we want to keep our country, we need to be out in the streets saying this ain’t right. The leaders of the movement will bubble up naturally. And yeah, you’re probably right in that they’ll likely be a whole hell of a lot more passionate than a cluster of 80 year old geriatrics.
The one thing that would have stopped all this and put things on a different path is immediately lock up Trump and co-conspirators under solid treason charges, it was easy to prove as well.
But the wishy washy and slow way the investigation and justice machine rolled is what gave Trump all the chances.
He got to puff up his ego for years on being unjustly attacked, and (re)grow the cult around him.
He got his supreme court to give him king-like powers (and now he claims the rest of the kingly might and immunity).
He got Elon Musk to spy on everyone, steal all private data including home adresses to sick cultists to… and Elon now has the means to destroy the financial transaction of anyone against the regime…
The blame for it all was not directly on Biden, the democrats nor on the elections themselves, this was on a system that was apathetic and waiting out time for the one thing to happen.
And again the system is waiting out time to see what happens at the next elections, but that will turn out to be a mirage, Trump and co will not relinquish power anymore.
All of it was stopped if Trump was locked up. He should never have been a 2nd candidate, not just not eligible but locked up for decades.
The democrats would indeed need to find more charismatic leadership with fighting spirit, but the MAGA camp had been given a crippling blow.
Now the world watches as the USA destroys itself permanently, has its influence drift away on the winds, and loses everything to its ages old communist enemy Russia.
Hitler went to jail. He used that time to write a book outlining his plan.
I don’t think even Trump thought he was going to win this time. Nearly half the voting population didn’t want him to. A huge swath of people sat out this election, we’re here because of them. Yea, some of that is on Biden, some rests on Harris, some rests on the DNC, but the people who saw the choice and decided to sit it out also deserve a lot of the blame.
But that doesn’t matter now. The damned thing happened. We got here. Life doesn’t always happen the way we want. It’s now up to all of us who care about our future, the future for our kids and the future of our country to step up. This is our historical moment.
This is the one that history books will write about. We need to stand up and rise up to the moment. We have to fight the tyranny. That means some of us will be imprisoned. That means some of us will die. And that sucks, like really really sucks. I’ve been on this planet for 40+ years now. If I don’t take a stand now, for the country I love, for the people I love, then why the hell am I even here? I want to live life in the way I want to live it, not how someone else dictates it.
And I challenge you to do the same, for your life depends on it. It’s time to rise. It’s time to act. It’s time to fight.
Biden was bye bye 9 months ago, my dude. I’m sorry he hurt you in the feefees.
Factually untrue, and I don’t have much time for people who talk like trump supporters
Biden was an opportunity for the old Republican party to prevail. Instead they rolled out the carpet for MAGA, and now they are rolling it for an authoritarian dictatorship. Frankly, had the democratic stoked more attention, the more bullshit that would have been spun up about them. The root of the problem is that MAGA was getting propped up with control of social networks personality cults and the sort of modern day profile targeting a shitload of money can provide.
FCC huh? There goes TV that’s against him
They had already started with that under the guise of DEI hiring nonsense at the stations. Comcast was already being threatened that its DEI hiring practices were cause for the FCC to pull their license somehow. He broadcast (pun intended) his plan to have state run media and to diminish or ban the rest during his campaign, just nobody pays attention.
Edit s/pin/pun
We really are screwed aren’t we?
We actually are.
Most people are still sleepwalking through this. It’ll be another couple years before the general populace starts grasping how screwed we actually are.
We’re going to go through a very dark period and it’s going to take a lot of pain, suffering, and death just to get back to where we were before, if we can at all.
Absolute best case scenario is we spend the rest of our lives clawing back what we’re in the process of losing and generally we won’t see much, if any, actual progress.
We have been for decades. People have been warning about this since the early 20th century.
1936
James Waterman Wise, Jr., in a recent address here before the liberal John Reed club said that Hearst and Coughlin are the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any “shirt” movement, nor with an “insignia,” but it will probably be “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.”
1935 Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here
But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.
Trump defended the order, stating, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Okay, Adolf.
Napoleon, actually. So, a different dictator, but still a dictator.
Wait, this was ACTUALLY a quote from a famous dictator? I thought I was just being snarky and connecting this comment to the kind of rhetoric famously used by dictators. I didn’t realize this is specific rhetoric used by a specific dictator.
You don’t even need to read between the lines anymore. Insane.
What is the legal argument against this? The article was paywalled, but the summay only says that past presidents have respected agency independence. That sounds like just a gentlemans agreement. Nothing legally binding. So do the challenges have a leg to stand on?
I don’t think there is a good one. It sounds like this is another one of those things where the rules were mostly relying on the idea that the people wouldn’t elect someone who was expected to try to do something like this.
Well the boards are appointed by the President with Senate approval. The President can also remove a board member at any time. The board members are generally in pretty good control of the agency.
This seems like it is at most an attempt to end run the Senate but likely just an order to establish a liaison office once you parse everything. He’s passing all these sweeping language orders but also putting in that they should follow all applicable laws.
Think of it like a whole bunch of people standing around a $100 bill left on the ground. Everybody’s standing around waiting for the legitimate owner to come by and pick it up. Trump doesn’t give a shit about that. He’s gonna walk by, shove everyone aside, and grab it. When everyone else tries to stop him and say the money isn’t his, he’s just going to look at you and say “Who’s is it, and why haven’t they picked it up yet?” And while everybody else is standing around trying to figure out the answer to that, Trump is walking away with the money and saying “Finders keepers, asshole. It’s mine now”. Even if the original owner shows up later and tries to lay claim to the money, he’d have to prove that that specific $100 bill was his to begin with or the judge is just going to say that it’s Trump’s money now.
Think that, except with the power of the US government instead of a c-note. And Trump is hoping that the courts will use the same logic: since nobody else tried to claim the power before, and there’s nothing explicitly granting those powers to someone else, Trump is hoping that the courts will just let him keep those powers in a twisted form of finders-keepers. And given this court system, he very well might win.
This is the truth of it. Picking up $100 bill off the ground in public that isn’t yours isn’t actually illegal. And what trump is doing is attempting to stretch the powers of his office. This isn’t anything new really. Just how he is doing it, how much and how fast is new.
Who would have thought the Air Bud defense would be the death knell of democracy in America?
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” It’s literally in the OP bro.
There are laws against it but the Supreme Court gave the president total immunity so all those laws are now void
Which laws. Cause I haven’t seen any quoted anywhere. And, they only gave him immunity for official acts. Then said they (the courts) get to decide what an official act is. Lastly, they did not take away congress’s ability to prosecute him in the form of impeachment.
Did you actually read that. A lot of “potentially”, “possibly” and things like that. In short, it isn’t all that clear cut.
Musk’s and his actions are illegal, or were illegal mostly before the Supreme Court decided there’s some sleezy presidential immunity. The problem is they are so firm and quick at changing the rules of the game that no institution can catch up and, most importantly, generally afraid they would be directly attacked by these fuckers. Some commenters preciously said that it’s stupid that most of people who could’ve challenged or straight up dismissed his executive orders are pussies for resigning or being complicit, but, in their defence, all of their personal data was leaked by Muskrat and he and Trump have a pardoned terrorist cell to carbomb them or whatever. And it’s snowballing from department to department, and every new one looks at those who already kneed to the maggot.
All these famous checks and balances were DDOSed and frightened into submission. i don’t think they were exceptionally and inherently fragile. it’s just the rightwing strategists just got the right guy, the right coverage and the right plan to make it all as easy as break-and-enter with absent homeowners.
What was illegal about what musk did? Be specific. On paper he is “working” for the president, and my understanding is that the cabinet members in charge of the various agencies gave him the go ahead to do what he is doing. Both of those are directly or indirectly elected officials charged with running the executive branch of the government. My take is that congress has depended on gentleman’s agreements rather than passing laws to ensure the agencies aren’t tampered with like is happening now.
What is the legal argument against this?
None. We stacked the court with Unitary Executive friendly judges a long time ago.
So do the challenges have a leg to stand on?
John
MarshallRoberts has made his decision; now let him enforce it!
All the fucking dictators say the same shit.
Lock him up
We already tried. His fans are fucking stupid assholes who let it happen.
Ammo up rush the bastard before he gets any bigger for his britches
If Congress wasn’t filled with feckless lickspittles, they could just not fund the executive branch. But they are, so they will
If Congress wasn’t filled with feckless lickspittles
If that was the case, trump would’ve already been convicted of impeachment and been disqualified.
Indubitably
How does that actually work with Musk and his merry band of douchebags in direct control of the mechanism by which the US government pays out money?
The US Constitution gives Congress sole control of “the purse” meaning all funding of the federal government. They allocate it and the executive branch spends it. If they weren’t trump’s puppets, they could stop allocating funds for him to misuse.
God what a fucking terrible anus mouth. I hate when it smiles.
