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Regarding the latest executive order re: independent agencies, I'm struggling to understand why conservatives might think this is a good idea long term. Is the plan to just never lose/hold an election again? It seems like trump is massively expanding the scope of executive power versus judicial/legislative power to the point where any president with more than 41 votes in the senate can do essentially whatever they want, with the sole exception of raising non-tariff taxes. Given that its easier to
create than to destroy[edit: this was a type, I meant "easier to destroy than to create"], that's of course a benefit for anti-welfare conservatives... but direct presidential command over regulation combined with the stance that the president is beholden to nothing but the supreme court seems like a perfect recipe for vindictive actions against corporations and industries that the president doesn't like. And considering the next democratic president is probably going to look much more like the bernie wing of the party than the obama/biden wing of the party, that's a recipe for economic disaster.Necessary disclaimer: I'm a trump-hating neoliberal.
By my own estimate, around 0.15% of Executive Branch staff is hired directly or indirectly by the President. The remaining 99.85% is permanent staff of the bureaucracy. The president in all cases has received more votes than the bureaucracy, which has received 0 votes.
I don't really know how you can possibly pay any lip service to "our democracy" in light of those facts--the modern US system is much more like a technocratic oligarchy than anything resembling a republic (even calling it a democracy is a common mistake).
I think it's really funny how neoliberals define an utterly narrow range of acceptable policy for prosperity, look down upon and fight against any experimentation outside of that range, then claim vacuous truth of an "economic disaster" if any of that policy actually might be implemented. The "consensus order" is disturbed precisely because the Trump administration has figured out how much the bureaus sit in the way of any meaningful change.
My back of hand calculations for the percentage above:
I'm sure we could bikeshed over the exact numbers, but I think it's quite clear that the bureaus massively outweigh political staff.
Unless you want all bureaucrats selected by sortition or direct election this is just a gish-gallop. Nobody cares if there are more bureacrats than elected politicians-- we care about the relative distribution of power between them, and between the branches of the government. It would be reasonable to complain about bureacrats having to much power relative to politicians... except for the fact that the politicians have held all the power the entire time, except distributed in such a way that they refused to use it. Trump's executive order therefore does nothing to decrease the power of the bureaucracy, it just takes power away from the legislature and gives it to the president. And sure, that's not hugely far from the "norm" (insofar as one exists), but I'm baffled by the fact that conservatives think that it's a norm violation that long-term benefits them. Yes, they're structurally advantaged in the electoral college-- but not nearly as much as they are in the senate.
If the bureaucracy and executive branch are not the same thing then giving power to the president decreases the power of the bureaucracy.
There's some decent evidence that the bureaucracy and executive are...not always the same thing.
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This is just completely wrong historically. There is and has been almost no oversight by Congress. The APA was intended to rein in agencies but that didn’t work.
Structurally agencies could quickly make rules and unless the rules were hopelessly inconsistent with the statutory scheme they were blessed by courts. No check there.
If Congress wanted to upend the rule, both houses would need to pass a bill (frequently with a super majority in the Senate) AND the President would need to sign the bill. That represents a lot of veto points. In contrast, agencies didn’t face those veto points. So there has been a massive growth of regulations over the years because that was easier and indeed those administrations became more of law writers compared to the Congress or President.
The courts have finally started to push back against independent agencies and this is another avenue to do so.
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