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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

If they decide to settle, even if for a much smaller amount, its a big L for the UC system and the nation. The past Universities were much smaller, but the UC system is a beast. They must fight this or we are really going down the road of a politicized and neutered academia (like in Russia). This along with the recent Executive Order claiming to be able to require a political appointee to approve every research grant, we are going down the wrong road.

I am constantly thinking about this modern misunderstanding of what the framers of the Constitution meant by "Executive Power" is simple "to execute the law".

"Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative" [1][2] is critical and needs to be set front stage.

[1] https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/2062/ [2]https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-meaning-of-article-...

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Blame Congress. There are 3 branches of power meant to keep the others in check. That's not happened in...20, 30 years now?

Why not both?

Yes. But there are systemic reasons that this has become the case.

1. For the house, since 1932 or so, the number of House Representatives has been fixed, meaning what used to be 30-50k citizens per representative, is quickly approaching 1M citizens:1 ratio. Instead of knocking on your neighbor's doors, you need to beg for money to run an expensive campaign.

2. Starting with Radio and TV and into hyperdrive with the internet, national political figures like the President can command a huge amount of political donations to be under their own control. That money can and is used to threaten House Representatives with getting primaried by the President, see 1. above.

3. As the law article I posted in the parent comment above thoroughly and convincingly investigated, the meaning of Executive Powers has changed from "Congress tells me what to do, and I do it" to I am a mini-king. Presidents have been able to push this growth as well, because see 2, then see 1.

Why would you suppose that a larger House would help keep the Executive in check? It seems more likely that the effect would be to dilute any individual House member's power and strengthen the party system.

> the meaning of Executive Powers has changed from "Congress tells me what to do, and I do it" to I am a mini-king.

I don't think John Adams, Lincoln, or FDR held anything close to the view that "Congress tells me what to do, and I do it."

The dynamics of a House whose member's districts are small enough (30,000) to not require a lot of money to run a campaign (just knock on doors and put up signs) compared to the current situation that makes them spend almost all their time begging for money and avoiding being the target of other people's money? That is fairly straightforward. They can buck the President and the Party, because they don't need their money for their constituents to know them.

>I don't think John Adams, Lincoln, or FDR held anything close to the view that "Congress tells me what to do, and I do it."

I provided a comprehensive and convincing document arguing that such an understanding did in fact exist in the late 1700's and the 1800's, specifically in terms of the meaning of "Executive Power" in Article II. My loose phrasing should not be where an argument should be hung.

Let me take a bit more time.

The 18th-century evidence reviewed in this law article pretty clearly shows that "executive power" just meant the power to execute laws. This didn't appear to be in contention; from radical Whigs to hardcore royalists agreed on this basic definition.

Some specific evidence: Blackstone's Commentaries, which Madison called "the book which is in every man's hand," flat-out defined executive power as "the right of enforcing the laws." That's it.

Blackstone carefully listed over thirty different royal prerogatives—war powers, foreign affairs, pardons, AND executive power. Just one item on that long list, not some umbrella term for everything.

Every single Founding-era dictionary backs this up. They all defined "executive" as having pwer to act or carry laws into execution. Not one included foreign affairs or war powers. When they specifically defined "executive power" as a legal term---it was always about implementing laws or putting plans into execution. Even Ryalists e.g Robert Filmer agreed with this narrow definition, dismissed mere executive power as beneath a true monarch (!!) calling it just "a power of putting laws in execution by judging and punishing offenders."

The actual term for the Crown's broader powers was "the royal prerogative," not "executive power." Everyone understood that executive power was inherently subordinate to legislative power—it was an empty vessel that could only execute what the legislature authorized.

So the argument goes that the modern Vesting Clause Thesis basically makes a linguistic mistake. Sure, people called the king "the executive" because he had the executive power, but that doesn't mean all his other powers were therefore "executive."

> They can buck the President and the Party, because they don't need their money for their constituents to know them.

They can’t do anything at all without convincing hundreds or thousands of other Representatives to agree with them. Coalition building is the only way to exercise legislative power (which requires majorities) and increasing the number of Representatives obviously makes that much more difficult on an individual level and strengthens party institutions by, well, institutionalizing them, as personal relationships obviously become totally insufficient.

Constituent support is not the problem. There are lots of “problem” Congressmen several Presidents would have liked to get rid of, even in recent times. Unless your constituents really love the President more than they love you it has not often worked.

The rest of your post is worth addressing but really misunderstands the way men like Adam’s and even Washington actually exercised and practiced the office. I think you’re focused to much on the different in legal phraseology. If you really care I may have time to write something up tomorrow.

I view the practical difficulties of a large body making legislative progress as a different problem than getting representatives to be less vulnerable to outside influence from a need and fear of centralized sources of campaign money, which is the primary problem we now face. There is a clear line between politicians that have to be afraid of being primaries and the very few who do not, due to personalities or political skill. Those "problem" congressman are just nuisances because the larger body is under the thumb of the party's and president's money.

As for the second, I think it is rather clear from history of the early presidency that the Presidency was not trusted nor viewed as being equal to Congress in terms of power. Moreover, the argument is about the meaning the the vestment clause's use of phrase "the executive power" as interpreted by the founders. The law article presents a strong case IMO that the vestment clause was much more restrictive, less expensive than it is viewed in the modern era, and that is less generally recognized

> which is the primary problem we now face

I am actually really, really confused as to why you think that. That's not at all what the past several years have shown - we've seen over and again again individual Senators (who have more power, of course) and small blocks of Representatives hold things up over and over and over again. It's simply not practically possible to primary most Reps in their own districts because the primary problem isn't money, is that their constituents really do support them and not some nameless figure propped up by national campaign spending. For a party primary, the most important thing is far from getting some sort of national political support. That is not even remotely on the radar. It's garnering the support of the local party (people who actually live there and run the local outlet), local "elites" (politically involved business people, city and county pols, etc), and being someone known in your community - not through ads, but because you've lived there and done something. There are exceptions but this is definitely the rule.

Of course, it's also the case that people often overstate the influence of money in the first place. It's votes that decide the election, not dollars. You can't buy your way into electing somebody that nobody wants to vote for. You can only try to persuade them and encourage them.

> As for the second, I think it is rather clear from history of the early presidency that the Presidency was not trusted nor viewed as being equal to Congress in terms of power.

On the contrary, it is quite clear from the Constitutional Convention that one of their greatest fears was making the executive in any way dependent on the legislative, and the first several Presidents took a very expansive view of Presidential power - the accusation that Adams wanted to be a king was not just wild slander. Of course it is difficult to compare modern times with the past, to some degree - the reach of government in the 1900s increased by orders of magnitude, and the APA in 46 created a sort of shadow Constitution, so the field where people could even imagine the President ordering anything changed.

> meaning what used to be 30-50k citizens per representative, is quickly approaching 1M citizens:1 ratio.

This cannot possibly be true. The US population has increased from 125M in 1932 to 330M today. That's a 3x multiple, not 20x or 30x.

Sorry, I did not mean to imply that the 30-50k ratio was active in 1932. It was about 93,020 in 1853, 280,000 in 1932, 761,000 in 2023 [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...

No, the blame for this lies squarely with the American people.

This is their circus and their mess.

Non-Americans don't care about the buck passing. At the end of the day this is all the responsibility of America as a whole and the people who live there.

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