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Expanding Executive branch powers
DouglasDanger
PennsylvaniaRegistered User regular
PennsylvaniaRegistered User regular
So George Bush did it again. The legislature never reached a conclusion with the auto bail out thing, so Bush went ahead with it anyway. How do you feel about expanding the power of the executive branch?
On one hand, I like the concept. Our legislature takes forever to actually do anything, is bogged down by special interests, adds pork to everything, etc. FDR and LBJ got shit done when they grabbed power. Huge transformations in the role of the entire government happened in months rather than generations.
On the other hand, our presidents are far from perfect. I really don't think a few dozen minds is necessarily better than a few hundred. We have had some terrible presidents-- presidents who were indecisive to the point of causing wars, presidents whose groupies robbed the country blind, just plain idiots, etc. I imagine we will have more bad presidents in the future.
So how do you feel about a strong(er) executive branch?
On one hand, I like the concept. Our legislature takes forever to actually do anything, is bogged down by special interests, adds pork to everything, etc. FDR and LBJ got shit done when they grabbed power. Huge transformations in the role of the entire government happened in months rather than generations.
On the other hand, our presidents are far from perfect. I really don't think a few dozen minds is necessarily better than a few hundred. We have had some terrible presidents-- presidents who were indecisive to the point of causing wars, presidents whose groupies robbed the country blind, just plain idiots, etc. I imagine we will have more bad presidents in the future.
So how do you feel about a strong(er) executive branch?
DouglasDanger on
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but they're listening to every word I say
Yes. Lincoln too. He was the worst of the lot.
He suspended Habeas Corpus and invaded the south. The ultimate outcome was positive, but the means in which he did it were authoritarian.
Look where that has put the country
Yeeeeaaaaahhhhh
I think invading the South is all sorts of wrong. I think the war between the states was wrong. The end result: A unified country and the end of slavery (this was not one of Lincoln's goals mind you) was positive but I think we could have expected a unified country without the war, if only it took longer to achieve.
I mean, there are arguments to be made that it wasn't Lincoln's primary reason for fighting the war, but to say that it wasn't even a fucking consideration is a pretty ridiculously retarded statement. And the invasion of the South put an end to nullification and strong states' rights in this country, which has continued to be one of the most effective bulwarks against infringement on our freedoms since.
I consider it lip service to carry abolitionist votes at the time. Hell, even Union states had slaves and Lincoln wasn't going after them either.
No, he wanted the southern states for their tax revenue, their cotton and their deals with Europe. Freeing the slaves was incidental.
FDR backed us into a war too but at least he didn't invade a sovereign country that wanted nothing to do with us. Of course he was horrible for a variety of other reasons in expanding state power.
Lincoln never invaded a sovereign country. He invaded the Confederate States of America, which was attempting to use nullification and states' rights as an excuse to perpetuate slavery. As usual, "states' rights" is code for "we don't want the federal government protecting people's freedom in our state."
Hello Liberia!
Didn't he only do that in Maryland, mostly to prevent it from joining the confederacy?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
And like I said, he pretty much force-fed the 13th amendment to the country immediately after the Civil War. I don't see how people can say that Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist.
You believe that secession was legal? To my mind, what we had there was literally treason. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot these days by right-wing radicals, but the Confederacy, it seems to me, fits the definition precisely. Lincoln, in turn, simply enforced the law - treason is illegal. He and his successors actually were more merciful than was required, really.
I was taught that Lincoln's stance was that slavery was pretty much a moral travesty, that it was fucked up that a dude in the United States could work his whole life without ever having the opportunity to make something for himself.
I was also taught that he thought it would be better just to send all of the black people back to Africa than let them work and make something of themselves in the United States, though.
sorry the op was kinda vague and most of the thread so far is off topic about lincoln and slaves...
Everything would be perfect if the world just did what I said.
PERFECT.
He "invaded" the south after they fired on United States soldiers and seized United States property.
After succeeding from the Union, which was constitutionally A-OK.
Anyway, for some presidents expanding executive power had generally positive effects. However, we have a new president every 4-8 years, so do we really want to set the precedent that it's fine for the executive branch to overstep constitutional bondaries when deemed necessary?
Edit: I'd much prefer a bumbling, ineffecient Congress to Mum-Ra the All-Powerful POTUS.
Highly debatable. The constitution contains no provisions for its own annulment.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Patriot Act.
Let's focus here now.
Seriously though, Dick Cheney's interview was vein-popping fun. I just LOVE how flippant he is about fucking us over.
We're kind of on to all the evil shit he's been up to.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think it's intellectually irresponsible to say that the end of strong states' rights is an unmitigated good result. The ending of nullification and strong states' rights ended up killing slavery. This was good. However state sovereignty was designed as a check against exactly the kinds of absurd power grabs the federal government has been doing in the last hundred years.
It's hard to tell how much less totalitarian our government would be today if it weren't for the end of state sovereignty. Yeah, slavery might have lasted another decade or so in the south, along with a similar retardation of civil rights in those areas. However, you'd also see results ranging anywhere from a likely non-existence of the drug war, no unchecked expansion of the commerce clause, no more corn subsidies, to no offensive foreign military intervention on the more unlikely end of the scale. Hell, we might not even have a federal income tax if the Civil War hadn't occurred.
Now I'm almost meandering into a discussion on alternate history. But returning to the topic at hand, this essentially paved the way for the expansion of federal and executive power. Naturally, how you feel on expanding the power of the federal government is going to highly bias the way you look at the end of strong states' rights. Besides, I'd be much happier to be in a country that didn't contain the confederate states; for every step forward blue America tries to take, they try and pull us back to the dark ages.
Personally, I'm a big fan of birth control, controlling my own medical decisions, not being discriminated against on the basis of my race, religion, ethnicity, creed, disability, etc., having a 40-hour work week with labor protections, being free of the most heinous abuses of police power, being able to legally possess pornography, being able to have consenting sex in more or less whatever way I choose, being free from cruel and unusual punishment, being able to freely travel from one state to another, etc.
That's a fairly short list of things I can think up off the top of my head. Off the top of my head, stupid things the federal government has done lately: drug war, farm subsidies, war on terror... And let's be honest, the war on terror has an international component--which would be handled by the feds anyhow if we still had strong states' rights--and a domestic component, the abuses of which don't even begin to approach the things the states used to do to their own citizens before the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments were rolled into the Equal Protection Clause. There's really absolutely zero fucking comparison.
Either way it's a throw of the dice. And if you're going to throw the dice, I'll always be on the side which consolidates least amount of power into one spot. Consolidated power is far more likely to be used to take away freedoms than give them.
Again, that's the whole point of this thread. People aren't worried that the unitary executive is getting too much power because they think it'll be benevolent. It's not like, "oh god George Bush just grabbed power again and is going to give us way too much personal freedom." We're afraid of getting our freedoms liberated-the-fuck-out-of-us for our own good. And that seems a vastly more likely result than getting more freedoms from an increasingly powerful federal government or executive branch.
So why in the world would you want to consolidate all that power with people who can have more or less direct supervision over your life? It seems like a really fucking stupid strategy for increasing freedom, and as I pointed out above, history has repeatedly proven this to be true.
It's not as if the Federal Government has been the posterchild of benevolent rulership for the last hundred years or so. The fed's job should be to protect the rights of the citizenry, but when Washington decides to fuck people over, it does so on a much larger scale than any local or state government.
Edit: I'd argue, however unscientifically, that the relatively equal rights minorities enjoy now is more a cause of changing sensibilities among Americans rather than through a consolidation of power.
Just based on numbers, I think the legislative branch should have the most power, followed by the judicial, followed by the executive. The president should really just be the nation's guide. Sort of the Chief Strategic Officer, in charge of vision and execution of policy and the like. Not a figurehead, per se, but not nearly as powerful as we've grown accustomed to. I'll be really pleased with Obama if he actually does follow through and curtail the executive's powers while he's in office. Not just refuse to use the expanded powers, but actually work to remove them and prevent future presidents from trying that again.
Never seemed to play out that way, though.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think that Federalism is very good for some things, and very bad for others. When i look at the competency of federal agencies, and the executive branch, for dealing with localized, state issues, I cannot help but find them lacking. I feel though, that as the nation continues to grow in population, the average mediocrity of public policy makers and elected officials will increase as it becomes harder to reach a consensus based on Merit.
I'm not seeing how a state can just leave a binding contract by itself and take all of the federal property in that state away legally.
He should have let the South secede. If I had a time machine, I'd go back and make this happen. I mean, shit people, imagine the United States without the southern states. It would be like a utopia.
And yeah, I know, slavery is bad. But I firmly believe slavery would have died a natural death. It did in other countries without any civil wars. As an economic system, slavery simply could not compete with industrialism. Furthermore, it's not like blacks in the south were significantly better off post-slavery; they still lived in abject poverty with no education and few rights for nearly a hundred years. At what price? 600,000 people died, and Reconstruction was miserable as well.
I don't think there's anything wrong with a country splitting up over conflicting ideologies. The Czechs and the Slovaks managed to do this without killing 5% of their population in a bloody war, and their countries are better off for it.
As for FDR, he was president for way too long. And sometimes I question the need of fighting WW2.
But if history has taught us one thing it's the almost never stay that way.
Most authoritarian governments tend to falter after the leader who started it dies. Dictatorships often rely far too heavily on a cult of personality of their leaders to be viable long term governments.
My bad. I was trying to remember back to high school... I was mixing up Federalist rhetoric with the actual constitution.