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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   19504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Cancelling executive orders are an escalation cycle, but not a very serious step. Biden entered office bulk-cancelling Trump's executive orders, and I would expect to see the same thing happen again the next time the White House changes hands regardless of Trump's actions here.

Pardons are more serious, if he tries to prosecute someone with a pardon, for behavior clearly covered by the pardon. The courts will, absolutely unsurprisingly, boot such an attempt very early in the process; there's zero votes to review the pardon power at SCOTUS, and not many in the 5th Circuit. That's a kinda bad, because there's some evidence available that people used the power of the pardon without Biden's direct acknowledgment and maybe without even having been delegated that power, and that can go into some really bad (and Nicholas Cage movie-) tier problems. But it's not really resolvable this way, and it'll encourage and invite new and innovative attempts in retribution that have courts willing to rubber-stamp wrong Blue-Tribe opinions on this matter.

If it's just making sounds that could cover that, but not acting on it, it's a step in the escalation spiral that was crossed over a decade ago.

Trying to argue that autopen'd signatures on full legislation is void would be a massive escalation. Not as big as I wish it was, since there's been a few other cases where Presidents stopped defending or enforcing laws that they didn't like, but still huge and with a wide variety of downstream effects, some of which would be so bad that I don't want to talk about them publicly.

... but even with that, I can't think of an equivalent on the left to this.

There's been a pretty wide array of counterexamples. I'm a big fan of The Saga Of Defense Distributed, because it culminated in the courts specifically accepting the argument that a previous court-recognized settlement wasn't worth the toilet paper it was written on, but see for example Bank Pause Letters for a space where I don't have a lot of sympathy for the victims, or this mess for just a wide variety of examples.

Thank you for your response; if I understand it correctly, it basically is:

  1. If he goes after pardons, the courts will likely almost certainly strike it down; if they don't, super bad.
  2. If he goes after legislation, it depends basically on whether he does it as a "this legislation is invalid" vs "we just don't care about enforcing this" - if its the former, super bad, if its the latter, there's precedent.

There's been a pretty wide array of counterexamples. I'm a big fan of The Saga Of Defense Distributed, because it culminated in the courts specifically accepting the argument that a previous court-recognized settlement wasn't worth the toilet paper it was written on, but see for example Bank Pause Letters for a space where I don't have a lot of sympathy for the victims, or this mess for just a wide variety of examples.

Thank you for the examples; I was thinking too narrowly (I was thinking specifically of the presidential pardon power), but I agree that Defense Distributed is basically the same.

I'd also consider bringing prosecutions that would be incompatible with active executive orders, for acts committed while those executive orders were active, to be a bad escalation. Not an unprecedented one, but because such a modification doesn't count for ex post facto stuff a space that has a lot of There Be Dragons.

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