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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Congress won't act, the Executive isn't permitted to do much even with what they were given by Congress, and the People are powerless to do anything unless 100% of them vote, which never happens, and even then may be overruled in many places.

No future for any of us I guess.

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> Congress won't act

Under a legal constitutional system, when Congress "won't act", the laws stay the same as they were.

The Executive branch taking unilateral action beyond its authority because the Legislative branch "won't act" scares me even more, for the long-term health of our democracy, than laws staying the same as they are now for a bit longer.

I see you've fixated on an obvious truth but missed out on the actual chess game.

> People are powerless to do anything unless 100% of them vote

I'm not following this logic? Why do we need 100% of people to vote?

I assume you mean to "oust ineffective elected officials" but I suspect that there are many people that don't vote because they are "happy" and don't feel at risk of their desired official being outed. But again, I might be off base. Hoping you can clarify more of what you meant.

Many people don’t vote because they’re skeptical that their vote can affect anything — either because they’re in a definite minority in their legislatures or they think elections are bought, in a “changing minds” sense.

Most of the public cares about climate change and wants the government to do something. The overwhelming majority of the public supports abortion in some form or other. If they actually voted maybe we could change things, but lots of people just don't vote.

Having participated in several cycles of political organizing, the actual ground game is Get Out The Vote (GOTV): not trying to get people to change their minds, but getting people to just get off their asses.

> Most of the public cares about climate change and wants the government to do something

Most of the public cares about climate change and wants the government to do something so long as it doesn't cost them anything (Or more precisely, more than 10 $/mo)[0]. Or you can just see the consternation about gas prices right now to predict how well any climate change related regulation that actually materially affected carbon production would go.

[0]: https://apnorc.org/projects/what-americans-think-about-the-e...

It's still very much an open question as to whether congress is allowed to abdicate its power of rule making to the executive branch. The constitution seems to imply that the answer is "no," but the past interpretations of it say "yes." Chevron is a younger precedent than Roe.

> It's still very much an open question as to whether congress is allowed to abdicate its power of rule making to the executive branch. The constitution seems to imply that the answer is "no," but the past interpretations of it say "yes." Chevron is a younger precedent than Roe.

You say abdicate. Not true.

Congress is obviously empowered to delegate.

Please be specific. Who (written where?) thinks this is an open question? Please cite evidence of this.

Here is a discussion on Chevron and a neighboring ruling (Auer), from a favorable perspective, which outlines some of the challenges: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-cont...

This is also a common theme of many recent cases. Examples include: American Hospital Association v. Becerra, SEC vs Cochran, SEC vs Jarkesky, Gundy vs United States.

It is not clear that Congress can actually "delegate" the power to write laws.

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