The Economy and “A Trump Thanksgiving”

William:

This old Marine Sergeant has a tough time finding any reason for a President, a fascist president trump, to overthrow the nation’s government so he can be in charge and rule outside of the constitution. I would have liked to chase his fat ass to the Brig and lock him up close enough to the regular prisoners so he could experience what it was like. Tears would flow . . .

To your other point about the administrative state, sigh . . . The administrative state has been in existence for decades, a century or so and suddenly today’s Democrats own it? In spite of what Clarence claims and delegates the decision making to lower courts based upon historical evidence, without such administrative delegation, the nation would be prone to the whims of such miscreants as Greene, Gaetz, Gosar, Boebert, Santos, Jordan (who couldn’t move fast enough to get away from the rioters attacking on January 6. 2020 as inspired by him and that fat-butt (I have to exercise being polite to you) president, etc.

Banana Republic? That is laughable.

Trump has said the indictments against him are a sign that the U.S. is a “banana republic.” The term dates back 120 years, to describe single-export economies that were very susceptible to corruption and outside influence. In claiming the indictments against him inherently make the United States a quote “banana republic,” Trump is incorrectly saying that any kind of accountability reaching the highest office of the land is intrinsically corrupt. But the indictments Trump faces, all voted on by a jury of his peers, demonstrate that, in America, no-one is above the law.

To your use of the term Administrative State? It has existed under Repubs, Dems. etc. administrations long before you have lived. Quit parroting the liar trump and his sycophants.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, “administrative law” emerged as a distinct public law discipline in response to these societal changes. The federal Constitution presumes the existence of a government, yet it defines the powers and responsibilities of only the three institutions at its head: Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. This was deliberate. The draft sent to the committee concerned with Article II in mid-August of 1787 proposed summarily to define a handful of particular Departments and their responsibilities, and to create a council modeled on parliamentary lines, while explicitly reserving to the President the right of decision after receiving its advice.5 The draft of Article II returned to the Constitutional Convention, and adopted by it, rejected this approach. It empowered Congress to create all executive institutions below the President as well as any federal courts below the Supreme Court.

Anticipating those creations, the Constitution’s spare text refers both to Departments and to their heads, and requires the Senate’s consent to presidential appointment of the latter. It vests all executive power in a single elected President, charged with seeing that Congress’s laws would “be faithfully executed.” Yet in defining the President’s power in relation to the domestic government Congress was to create, and in contrast to the draft it rejected, the Constitution does not provide that the actions that government takes are to be the President’s; it says only that he may “require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective Offices.”

Like the “faithful execution” clause, this language accepts that actual administrative duties will be placed in others than the President himself. Just what Departments there would be and how they would be organized–and in what relationship to the President, Congress, and the courts–was unstated. Our government is, in effect, the hole in our Constitution, a hole Congress has been filling with a remarkable variety of public and quasi-public institutions, possessing varying powers and responsibilities and in varying relationships with the President, Congress, and our courts, ever since.

Studying the institutions that the Constitution defines, then, could no longer suffice. Administrative law emerged as the discipline concerned with the actions of these manifold institutions. Congress, vested with legislative power, quickly understood that it was incapable of foreseeing the hazards the changes were bringing or providing for their control with the necessary speed and detail. Courts, looking at past events through spectacles fashioned by the prior generations’ perspectives, were poorly equipped to meet contemporary social needs.

If the President ever had been capable of exercising personal control over all important government actions, that time quickly passed, and it early came to be understood (as the “Opinion, in writing” and “faithful execution” clauses entail) that governmental duties were the direct responsibility of the institutions Congress had created to perform them.6 In 1920, following the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission earlier in the twentieth century, nine Cabinet Departments (many housing within themselves discrete administrative bodies like the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service) and at least two dozen distinct federal governmental bodies with regulatory responsibilities employed about 691,000 civil servants–now organized into a permanent Civil Service chosen for merit, not political connection–under the direction of a much smaller number of politically appointed officials.

How the Administrative State Got to This Challenging Place

Learn from this . . .