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Comment by drowsspa | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the explanation. Like I said, sounds wild that yes, the American Constitution does establish the president as basically a king over the Executive branch.

Copying what I typed elsewhere, I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history when the president has such an absolute authority over the executive branch. Let's hope for the sake of the whole world it remains like this.

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Is it not the same pretty much in all systems with unitary heads of state? Prime ministers surely have similar powers, subject only to votes of no confidence by their parliaments. Kings, where they have power, are also like this.

> I guess it's a testament to American democratic cultural history that no coup has occurred in American history

The various assassinations of presidents were kinds of coups, don't you think? Soon we'll find out if the CIA did or did not kill JFK. Suppose the CIA killed JFK -for argument's sake-, surely that would have been a coup, no?

Not really, based on the little I know from legislation. When it comes to public administration, the principle of "you can do whatever the law doesn't forbid you to do" is reversed: it can only do whatever the law says it can, and there are some general principles, written in the law as well, governing the flexibility in the interpretation as well. And specially they're not at will employees, there are very complicated processes to justify firing them.

For instance, there is no law allowing the president to do a SELECT * in the income tax database. So an honest government worker can just say f-off when he is requested to do so.

They’re wrong. They are advocating for an extremely niche and fascist view of executive power in America. One that goes beyond even strong Unitary executive theories (which themselves are a relatively new idea, stemming from George W. Bush).

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