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Comment by cwhiz | Hacker News Reader

Donald Trump declared a national emergency so he could bypass Congress and raid the military budget to build a wall. The idea that Obama had his hand tied is ludicrous. Obama chose not to take action. We can debate why he chose not to take action but it was a choice he alone made.

Obama had absolute direct authority over drug classification. At minimum he could have moved marijuana off of schedule 1. Not to mention his direct authority over the FBI, DEA, DoJ, and other federal agencies. Even if you want to argue that an emergency declaration is unlawful, there were still numerous changes that he could have made within the confines of existing law and precedent. He didn’t and that is on him and him alone.

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I agree with the part about moving marijuana off of schedule 1. It has no business being there and is _entirely_ under the president's control.

In my opinion he should have completely de-scheduled it federally. That is perhaps a little too radical. What's not at all radical would be taking it off of schedule 1. I can't for the life of me figure out any reason why he wouldn't have done that.

> Obama chose not to take action.

Obama's use of executive orders was widely criticized as "undemocratic" back then, by Republicans and even some Democrats, and that for stuff that actually made sense and was legal to do via EOs.

Trump? He can trample over legal issues and the Republicans won't even act like they'd even want to hold him accountable.

That is why I said even within existing precedent there were plenty of actions Obama could have taken. Obama was in charge of the entire executive branch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_executiv...

It's a real cop-out to say his hands were tied. He had wide latitude and authority to implement changes within the executive branch.

> Obama was in charge of the entire executive branch.

Obama was in charge of the entire federal executive branch. The problem at the core of anti-police protests is not the FBI and not any other federal branch (okay, a bit the DEA/ICE), it is local police and sheriffs!

But the vast majority of those problem police are governed by liberal or progressive governments. Those police agencies should be models for the rest of the country and the world absent any involvement by the federal government.

Very true. You should think that LAPD or NYPD should be good examples how liberal cities are running great police departments but that’s clearly not the case.

Police unions have so much power that local officials are generally afraid to touch them.

Again, it's not that easy to blame "the democrats". The people at the top may go away in reelections when a Republican loses their seat, but the "base" structure, think the cops and their management that has been there for decades, will stay the same - and so will the organizational inertia.

To make it worse, a large part of the blame lies on police unions, e.g. in Minneapolis, whose leaders are hard authoritarian/right-wing and use all powers they have including staging expensive and often successful legal battles to keep "bad apple" cops in the service instead of holding them accountable.

Some of these cities have been under complete liberal democrat or progressive control for decades. These cities are operating under police contracts and policing standards set and enforced by liberals or progressives.

It's a real cop-out to say his hands were tied.

For some reason CGP Grey's video called The Rules for Rulers was recommended to me recently by The Algorithm. It sort of clarified in my mind all the vague ideas I'd absorbed from countless online and in-person conversations. Basically, even a dictator has to have the support of the keys to power. We can speculate that a president's hands were tied by one of those key groups. We can also speculate that another president has different key groups, and might be more willing, with the consent of core key groups, to reduce their numbers in ways not previously/recently considered an option.

> Donald Trump declared a national emergency so he could bypass Congress and raid the military budget to build a wall.

your argument is that Obama should be more like Trump? Declaring a fake national emergency and raiding the military budget is dubious action. Obama was never going to do ish like that and we should all be happy about that.

Also as Obama pointed out in his medium posts, policy positions get converted into action through electoral wins.

I'm old enough to remember that Trump was elected in part due to Obama backlash.

I'm also old enough to remember the backlash when Obama said Cambridge police acted stupidly (the police arrested a Harvard professor in his own house when he had to go through a window bc he lost his keys)

I know people are disappointed Obama didn't accomplish more. Obama is such an impressive person you just assume he can work magic. But Obama was constrained by the system of democracy and that limits what is possible.

>your argument is that Obama should be more like Trump?

No. I even pointed out that if you were to consider that type of move to be unlawful there were still PLENTY of other legitimate actions he could have taken.

Again, the President is in charge of the entire federal executive branch. That means the FBI, DEA, DoJ, Homeland Security, ICE, and others. There are numerous changes and reforms he could have enacted at the federal level.

>Also as Obama pointed out in his medium posts, policy positions get converted into action through electoral wins.

Obama was elected President twice. What more of a mandate did he think he needed to feel confident enough to take action?

I don't see where you pointed out that type of move would be unlawful.

> Obama was elected President twice. What more of a mandate did he think he needed to feel confident enough to take action?

Obama lost control of Congress in 2010. And here's a good summary of the losses at the state level.

https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...

anyway ... my point is pretty uncontroversial ... which is that there were limits on what Obama could do.

>Donald Trump declared a national emergency so he could bypass Congress and raid the military budget to build a wall

And how well did that work out for him? It took him his entire term to build about 1/5 of what he promised. And what he built isn't anywhere close to the impenetrable concrete wall he proposed.

To top it all off, if he had been facing a congress controlled entirely by the other party, he would have never gotten away with it because they would have passed a law making exactly what he did illegal.

And this was his #1 campaign promise. He spent every bit of his political capital on building a wall.

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