It absolutely believes in a federal government.
It just does not believe in a federal government that it is not in control of.
It just does not believe in a federal government that it is not in control of.
For example: the perennial fight over "net neutrality" was because Congress absconded their duty to write regulation and handed it off to the Executive to figure out in a vague way that allowed for flip flopping policies with the force of law every time the administration changed.
You know what would stop the Executive power grab currently happening? If Congress would do their damn jobs. The Republicans in Congress are more to blame for this mess than the White House. This is supposed to be their power that they are just sitting and watching get taken away.
But the Democrats aren't guiltless either. People who care about this sort of thing have been complaining for decades, right through Democrat majorities and administrations. They had plenty of chances. The whole beltway fucking sucks and we are so cooked.
The fact that Congress is ineffective in no way absolves the executive branch of irresponsible or illegal behavior. The president took an oath.
That's what makes it illegal.
31 USC 1535, The Economy Act, authorizes Federal agencies to purchase from each other in the interests of economy. Obvious application is that rather than have the Social Security Administration lease an office or build a building, they sublease or lease a facility owned by the GSA so Federal demand can be aggregated. 1 big lease is cheaper than 12 little ones.
In the case of 18F, having a consultive entity within the GSA maximizes the value of procurements made by GSA and other agencies. When congress appropriates money to say, the Department of Labor to perform a function, DOL may choose to engage 18F to deliver or assist, avoiding additional procurement and taking advantage of investments and capability already built.
Congress in 1949 recognized that basic concepts like shared services, aggregation and mission focus deliver value and promote efficient operations. The current regime's corrupt interest is obvious to anyone with a brain.
The current iteration of USAID was created by an act of Congress. Unless the President's office has been given the power to create and pass legislature at some point in the past five weeks, only Congress can unmake it.
So was the CFPB, which is also being shut down.
So was the Department of Education.
People have been warning for a long time that this concentration of power in the executive is ripe for abuse. And here we are.
The legislature could stop this, yes. But it won't, because he is carrying out the program the GOP always wished it could have done, but couldn't. Once this all goes to shit, they will of course, blame him, while keeping their own hands clean.
And given just how fucking fast a dedicated executive can destroy anything it doesn't like, there's literally nothing the Dems could have done to prevent this. It doesn't matter what laws they passed when they had control of government, when the current executive simply doesn't follow the law.
And the only people who could compel it to follow the law don't want it to.
The only cure to this is never voting red, under any circumstances, for any position, in any race. It's been fully compromised, and is unsalvageable.
Oh yes there is. It's just more radical than they were prepared to admit was necessary. It's things like ramming through thousands of new federal judgeships, packing the Supreme Court, passing anti-gerrymandering laws with jail-time penalities for state officials that violate them, and ultimately packing the union (https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/pack-the-union-a-...). The things that needed to be done were not "make things so no president can do this when he gets elected", it's "fix the system so these kinds of people cannot ever be elected".
(We can also blame them for not imprisoning, quicky and fairly trying, and executing Trump for sedition and treason when they could.)
What do think would really happen in that case? They'd change their platform slightly in a way that allows them to get 5% more of the vote and then still get in half the time. They're one of the parties in a two party system and it's a two party system because it uses first past the post instead of e.g. STAR voting. And the reason court packing doesn't work is obviously that as soon as either party actually did that, it would become the norm and happen every time the party in power switched, and nobody wants the courts to become fully partisan and the number federal judges to double every 4-8 years.
If you actually want to stop them from fucking everything up, figure out why they're doing the things they're doing. "They're evil and corrupt and have entirely impure motives" doesn't explain why ~half of voters voted for them.
Instead you have to look at the actual reasons and do something about them. Why do they want to expand oil production? Because people want cheap energy. If you don't want to expand oil production then you need to cause energy prices to go down in some other way, e.g. by not actively opposing the construction of nuclear reactors so their costs don't balloon as a result of lawsuits and a capricious regulatory environment, or provide more tax incentives for renewable energy so the transition happens faster and people stop caring about the price of gas sooner. Use diplomacy to e.g. encourage Germany not to shut down their nuclear reactors and raise global energy prices by switching back to fossil fuels.
Republicans keep getting elected by saying they're going to do something about burdensome regulations. Maybe consider whether there's something there? Look into what it's like to operate a small business. If you're making $9000/year selling stuff on Etsy and you invest in a postage meter, should you now have to know what MACRS is? If you don't, is it because it's somehow illegal to own one? How does property tax work on unsold business inventory stored in an out of state third party warehouse? If you have a question about any of this, why isn't there anyone in the government who can give you an official answer? Does the law create a good way for you to accept digital payments without getting locked into an overpriced payment gateway that can capriciously disrupt your business by dropping your account at any time? If you get an electric vehicle for your business, can you take the tax credit if you have enough income to be eligible for it personally even though the business didn't make a net profit this year? Why is the tax credit aimed at making it easier to afford one limited to people who make enough money that they already can? What can happen if you get some of these things wrong?
People keep voting for Republicans because interacting with the government is slow, frustrating, complicated and dangerous. The best way to take that away from them is to solve those problems yourself instead of insisting that they don't exist.
It's true that to some extent both parties participate in propping up that system, but Republicans clearly do so far more. There are a lot of problems with the Democratic party as well, which is precisely why radical change is needed rather than just "pass some garden variety Democrat measures".
I agree that there are important changes to be made that Democrats are lamentably unwilling to engage with, but I'm not talking about a world where Republicans need 51%. For most of the Republicans of national prominence, we should consider ourselves as a failure as a nation if they can even get 5%.
Which in turn works because, even if they don't solve those problems, the problems are real and people experience them. So if you would make the problems actually go away, they would lose the ability to run on them.
> But they also get elected in large part because of the highly unequal and unrepresentative system that they perpetuate
This is what I mean by 46% vs. 51%. There are way bigger problems than the electoral college or district lines, which would only change how and where both parties campaign rather than making anything obviously better.
> including a media system built on feeding people falsehoods utterly disconnected reality (which is another reason ~half of voters voted for them).
This was never great but the thing that really seemed to turn it into a tornado full of broken glass is the interaction between Trump and the traditional media.
Major media outlets were used to politicians fearing them, and then Trump didn't, so the media got more aggressive and less cautious. Which was only effective for a minute until people started to realize what they were doing and that set the media's credibility on fire and made things dramatically worse.
Meanwhile the right-leaning media outlets, which were traditionally more partisan but only a little, saw this and their conclusion was basically "oh, so we can just do whatever now?"
> There are a lot of problems with the Democratic party as well, which is precisely why radical change is needed rather than just "pass some garden variety Democrat measures".
The most significant thing you could actually do is replace first past the post with one of the cardinal voting systems (STAR, score, approval), because it would allow for more than two parties. Which in turn would upend the the entire partisan apparatus of both sides which has evolved in that environment and would be maladapted to defending itself and therefore vulnerable to positive change. But it's also a subtle enough change and distinct from any of the usual battle lines that all of the villains you'd be disrupting might not recognize the implications until it has already gone through.
But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on. Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
I think we agree that structural reforms are necessary (like changing voting systems), but I think it's more than just that. There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people. Switching to STAR voting isn't going to fix it. That entire phenomenon has to be actively purged from society in the way that Nazism was purged in post-WWII Germany.
People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.
> Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
Nah, that's just confusing the problem with the rhetoric.
Republicans hype immigration because the Democrats have an immigration problem:
a) "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". b) Generous social safety net.
You can't have unlimited immigration of the world's poor and then give them all welfare; you have to pick one. But Democrats can't choose, so we end up with this nonsense where immigration which is formally illegal is still happening at scale and they're neither willing to formally legalize it nor enforce the law against it.
Which means Republicans get to beat them over the head with it because the Democrats have no response to it when they're legitimately caught in an inconsistent position. To stop that from happening they need to pick which one of the two incompatible things they want.
Likewise, the US really does have a lot of regulatory overhead, and many of the rules are needlessly complicated, inconsistent, blunt, poorly considered or obviously corrupt. The people who actually have to interact with them -- mostly small businesses -- are intimately familiar with it and find it infuriating. Now, some of the rules are net positive, but even those are often still needlessly complicated or in conflict with other, stupider rules. To fix it you would need large teams of smart people go through all the rules, throw out the bad ones (even if they're corrupt and someone wants them that way), simplify the needless complexity, do a cost/benefit analysis that includes the administrative cost of implementation and have the ability to actually modify them. Which requires fastidious people to do something expensive and boring at large scale. But until that happens -- which it hasn't -- there is still a problem.
And in the meantime the Republicans get to say "regulations bad! less regulations!" and have a bunch of people cheer because they know how much the status quo sucks.
> There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people.
Eh. That's kind of one of the things a cardinal voting system does fix.
You're defining the problem too narrowly. The general issue is, in a two party system, both of the parties are big tent parties. Which means that if your party wants both X and Y and you need a majority to get either, the people who want X can go drum up support from people who want Y so their party gets in and they get X, because by nature the other major party will support both not-X and not-Y, so more support for Y is more support for the party that wants X.
If you have a voting system that supports arbitrarily many parties and your party supports both X and Y but X is stupid or unpopular, you can't win by getting more people to support Y because then some other party would come in and support Y but not X and then win because you've convinced people to want Y but not X and now that's actually one of the options on the ballot.
But that sounds like you're saying the solution is to just fix all problems. That's never going to happen. There will always be problems of some sort, which means there can always be someone claiming to have solutions.
If the democrats grow a pair and shutdown the government by filibustering the budget, Trump will fire (or worse) Elon, scorched earth whatever is left and blame the democrats. They are all about the big lie -- they'll float the idea that Elon was secretly working with the democrats the whole time. If Trump is lucky, there will be an early hurricane or an earthquake in California and the devastation will be Chuck Schumer's fault. Long live the king.