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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking that the US marshals need to be the enforcement arm of the courts. But I am not sure if that would help much in the current situation.

Maybe police and federal enforcement agencies should be solely under Congress? At least then senior people can actually get fired for obeying unlawful orders from the executive.

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The judicial branch is meant only to provide clarify of laws on the books. I'm not sure what they would do with an enforcement agency, and I'd be worried about what that would do with regards to the types of people attracted to those judicial positions.

The legislative branch already has a lot of power. I'd be very concerned giving them the direct control, or even shared control, over enforcement. They should be controlling enforcement through legislation.

That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there. That is a very good reason to otherwise limit the authority of the executive branch though, and why executive orders as used today shouldn't be legal (they effectively are a legislative branch with the enforcement agencies).

> That leaves the executive, and personally I don't see a problem with enforcement living there.

What if the executive just decides not to enforce the decisions of the legislative and judicial branches?

The legislative branch can pass a law requiring enforcement, likely within some specified parameters or timeline. If that passes and is constitutional, the courts could be tested and uphold the law.

Uphold the law ... how? Who actually does it? The courts can write as many orders as they want, but if they're ignored, they're powerless.

And that would be the point when congress impeaches the president for dereliction of duty.

The system is surprisingly simple, it just requires leaders willing to actually uphold it.

Ok, but (a) they won't, and (b) if they do, who carries out the actual removal of the president from power? ... oh, right, the executive branch, again. Oops.

If your concerns are only procedural, surely congress could fix that if they cared. If they actually had the vote to impeach they could likely have the voter to either pass new law or amend the constitution to ensure the removal is enforced.

Or we could fix it now, before the Constitutional crisis, which is what we were talking about from the start.

Were we? This chain started with the idea of getting rid of the concept of the president and moving to a parliamentary system. Then it shifted a bit into giving the judicial branch its own law enforcement agency.

Those both risk creating a constitutional crisis, not avoiding one.

Amending the Constitution to create a judicial law enforcement agency would not, in itself, be a Constitutional crisis. Or if you meant that such an agency could then cause one, yeah that could happen in theory, but so could the Executive causing a crisis because the courts don't have an enforcement arm. And to act like the President causing the crisis isn't the more likely scenario in 2025 would be stupifyingly ignorant.

> The legislative branch can pass a law requiring enforcement

At this point the Executive is already ignoring the law.

Congress already have the Capitol police which they could have arrest anyone they think committed a felony in any jurisdiction and have top jurisdiction in DC and any government building within it.

And I'm of the opinion that the capitol police should be limited only to acting as a security force for the Capitol itself. They shouldn't be enforcing anything beyond building security.

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