>Emails sent to participants and scheduled speakers did not explain the reason behind CDC’s decision. Nor did the agency offer an explanation in response to a request for comment from The Washington Post, saying only that it was exploring the possibility of holding the event later in the year.
>The meeting now planned for Feb. 16 will take place outside of any government circles. Rather than at CDC, it will be held at the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta. It will be a one-day event rather than the three days originally planned.
> argue that the agency should have gone forward with the summit unless told otherwise by the Trump administration
Which implies that the Trump administration is not officially behind the cancellation. It could be unofficially behind it, or actors within the CDC could be utilizing the new political climate to cause this cancellation - whether that's in an attempt to help these aspects of the agency avoid notice, or in attempt to suppress... Further information needed.
"Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom."
It appears though, with the fact that DOE staff were asked to dob in any co-workers that had gone to UN summits on climate change, that the Trump administration is prepared to go on witch hunts.
They did an interview with someone from the DOE on this american life, she said that they have been removing all references to climate change on DOE projects and promoting them as something else in the hope that they won't be cancelled, she also said that there was only one climate change sceptic in the DOE and it's the new boss...
I'd love to know why this is being down voted, I answered a question with a link from a reputable source and a (paraphrased) quote from an employee of the organisation. There was no opinion at all.
Are you down-voting facts because you don't like them? It doesn't make them any less real. Down-voting opinion, sure, but down-voting something which is simply the truth doesn't make sense. The article even had a copy of the questionnaire.
I suppose it's just a pedantic issue, but if someone found a chemical which, proven by science, Latinos are particularly allergic to, the administration would probably buy it to coat their mythical wall with.
Science also says walls are hard for humans to walk through, and they're not disputing that.
Yes, but you're trying to be consistent. A lot of people don't really get science and think it's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo cooked up by geeks to trick hardworking simple folk out of their money so the geeks can go off having themselves a time on expeditions to exotic locations or playing with shiny toys. Just as the media's portrayal of science is generally a shallow and stereotypical one, so is the popular understanding of it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine an angry man tweeting 'shut up nerd,' forever.
Point taken. It would have been more accurate if I had said, they have nothing against science per se, and no motivation to argue against science unless it suites their agenda.
> "Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies—"
Even in the scientific community there are arguments about epistemology -- thus the occasional paradigm shift. Currently many scientific disciplines are overly reliant on Frequentist evidence, but many scientists only have a weak understanding of statistics, so we've ended up in a situation where most published studies in some fields are not reproducible. I expect the dominant episteme will shift within the next couple decades.
Parent wasn't defending "deniers", but rather pointing out a genuine problem with lots of current research. Purely observational studies like we see in health and environmental fields will never be falsifiable. That is, that one study really did find that these fifty people who drank tea really did live longer (on average) than those fifty other people who drank coffee. How would one falsify that? How about the meta-analysis based on this and twenty other studies? How about the meta-meta-analysis built on top of that?
No defense given. I'm just trying to explain why someone might choose to believe something non-scientific. Doing some descriptive science, if you will.
Edit: I think I've discovered the irony of someone who decries science denial but downvotes my analysis rather than debating on its merits.
> It saddens me when government suppresses science.
There's no public explanation as to why the original meeting was canceled. Referring to it as "government supressing science" is speculation.
That aside, not promoting a particular theory, practice, or direction for research isn't "suppressing science" either. It's just not promoting the particular things that you'd like promoted.
The reason we don't have an explanation, and most likely won't, is because Department of Health and Human Services has an indefinite Trump-issued communications freeze from talking to the public.
Would you say that's not government suppression of science?
I'm pretty sure the communications and hiring freeze is across the board (with a national security related exception). It's not specific to one department.
That aside, nobody is preventing anyone outside of government from researching anything they'd like, publishing it, or shouting it from the rooftops. The only complaint I hear is projects and voices that specific people want heard aren't being promoted.
House science committee chairman says Americans should 'get news directly from the President,' because apparently the whole media is in a conspiracy against him. Does that sound scientific to you?
I sorely hope that Trump will teach Americans to get over their misguided king-complex and realise that the president should be a figurehead with limited power, and an executive leader only during time sensitive (military) crises. The rest of the government should be governed by properly legislated remits, and answering to Congress, not the president. It's ridiculous and a recipe for disaster to leave so many policy areas to the whim of a single person.
I honestly don't understand this viewpoint.. the false equivalence lately is just insane.
We're talking about Climate Change, can anyone possibly believe that the Republicans in Congress for the past 6 years would have been better on Climate than what Obama achieved through executive orders? Do people just not pay attention?
Here's a quote from the official GOP platform[1]:
> Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it.
Fuck it, I'll quote the rest of the references to climate in the official platform!
> Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate.
> We demand an immediate halt to U.S. funding for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in accordance with the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. That law prohibits Washington from giving any money to “any affiliated organization of the United Nations” which grants Palestinians membership as a state. There is no ambiguity in that language. It would be illegal for the President to follow through on his intention to provide millions in funding for the UNFCCC and hundreds of millions for its Green Climate Fund.
> We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.
On net, long term, Obama will turn out not to have been very effective at all, because everything he's done through executive order has/will be undone through executive orders in the few weeks. That's the curse of executive order, and why good, long term legislation won't arise from executive order.
That's all well and good, but there is absolutely no indicaition that congress would have produced anything resembling "good, long-term" legislation.
In my completely made up system, if we started at 0 and add up the number of points in favor of averting Climate Change, Obama probably added 3 for a few years with the Paris Agreement, CAFE and some of the EPA rules were also pretty beneficial, maybe net 4 over his term. Call it +10 for Obama. Trump's going to reverse many of those decisions, probably make some of them much worse within the next few years. Let's say he wipes out all of Obama's work and does 50% more 'damage' in this system. So by 2020, we're at -5.
If we had left it to the Republicans in Congress, we would have been at least at -5 every year since 2010..
So -5 net with Obama/Trump's dueling executive orders or -50 with Republicans in Congress.
Yes the system is made up and the points don't matter, but there is absolutely no way we would be in a better position. It's the height of naivety to dismiss what they promised to do and to assume they would have suddenly changed their views 180º to support action on climate change for 'the limelight'.
Obama issued executive orders after asking and arguably begging Congress to act. It's not like he came into office and started kicking over the metaphorical furniture. When we're talking about the quality of the policy he attempted to promulgate, rehashing partisan mischaracterizations about his style of governance is unhelpful.
The president could still veto, even if the pseudo-legislative powers were removed.
If the executive were less powerful, perhaps the attitudes in Congress would be different. It's hard to know how they would behave, because we haven't had that situation in living memory.
I read a good article conjecturing that the decline in civility in Congress is due to the increased pressure to essentially run a permanent election campaign. The congress people used to spend more time in Washington becoming friends, but now spend most of their time at home, campaigning. Now I can't find my source...
The cost of getting what you want from the president is the next president undoing it. Over the long term, I suspect that's way more destructive and wasteful than waiting longer for Congress to decide to do something which then stands a chance of being the law for a while and actually achieving something.
Also, when you stop giving all the important, flashy stuff to the president and let Congress have a bit of limelight, you'll probably find them rising to the challenge (more than today, at least, where Congress only gets credit for the boring stuff that the president don't want).
Separation of powers is a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. There's no guarantee that the legislature will be favorable to your positions either. If you're of a liberal, progressive, or even moderate bent, the past 6 years would've been much worse had Obama not been a check on the Republican Congress.
Since 1980, periods when both the Presidency and both houses of Congress have been under the control of one party have been quite rare, and the public usually votes out one house of Congress in the next election. Democrats in 09-10, Republicans from 02-06, Democrats in 92-94, and that's it.
(Interestingly, this is not universal throughout history. Dem's controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency under the Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter administrations, while Republicans controlled them during the Mckinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. The last extended time period of divided control was the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age era from 1875-1897...perhaps leading credence to those who say the current time period is much more like the Long Depression, Gilded Age, and lead up to WW1 than the Great Depression and lead-up to WW2.)
What we have now isn't separation of power, it's immense power of the office of the president. The president should be a check on Congress (which he is), but Congress should also be a check on the president (they're not, effectively, because they have handed over so much power to him).
The same power that made Obama good to progressives will make Trump very, very bad to them.
I'd argue that they are a check on the President. Wasn't the main objection to Obama that he didn't actually accomplish much of the "Change" he promised during his presidency? Most of that is because he had an opposition Congress that obstructed every major policy change. Much of the rest is because the President doesn't actually have the power most people think he does - he is largely powerless to positively influence the economy, for example, and he's completely unable to predict or control technological breakthroughs that may throw millions of people out of work.
And Congress frequently legislates to delegate - entirely in accordance with the Constitution, which is why article II section 2.1 contemplate the President 'requir[ing] the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective Offices.'
Clearly, the framers contemplated the existence of Departments within the executive branch, whose Officers held Opinions about things within their purview, as opposed to being mindless robots. A great deal of legislation sets the scope and limits of such departmental authority, while directing the departments to engage in a more detailed rulemaking process of their own as opposed to everything being micromanaged by Congress.
You keep making normative statements that describe your personal political views, but I can't help noticing that you're not citing any provisions in the Constitution to back up your argument. I'm thus unsure whether you are talking about your view of the Constitution's meaning or some other scheme of governance with which you'd like to replace the existing one.
They are two sides of the same coin - the only difference is which side you're standing on. Same way that the patriots who started the American Revolution would've been labeled terrorists had they failed.
From the POV of the government itself though, the primary imperative - stronger than one policy prescription - is continued existence. And to ensure continued existence, a government needs to let through change that, if repressed, would bring down the government, while also preventing change so radical and so permanent that it destroys the government on its own.
When you have large numbers of people claiming to be dead against things that they were previously in favor of, it might be that they're being hypocritical and obstructive. Obvious examples that come to mind are Obamacare (modeled on a plan originated by Mitt romney as governor of Massachusetts), Syria (where the Congress refused to authorize US military action in Syria and then spent the next several years blaming Obama for being soft on ISIS in Syria), Merrick Garland (who everyone agreed to be a great judge until Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court, at which point the Senate abrogated it's Constitutional duty to advice the President by refusing to even hold a hearing for his nominee).
Republicans have repeatedly gone on record in public statements about the totality of their opposition to Obama regardless of policy considerations. Allow me to refer you to the paper cited here for some objective demonstration of the increasing polarization of US politics and its acceleration in recent years:
I strongly believe that Obama was net good in large part because there was so much opposition to him. As such he couldn't ram-rod a one-sided version of anything through.
Similarly, I feel that Bush's and Clinton's best years were the periods where they had opposition, and couldn't use party allegiance to push things through.
I've felt that one-sided rule is net-negative essentially every time it's happened in my adult life, regardless of party.
Trump will just be an especially hard to ignore version of this anti-pattern, as he's made clear that he'll punish non-conformity within the GOP; and the GOP has made clear that they will do anything he requests, even when it stands against every major conservative principle.
This is nonsensical. I consider Obama to have been a good President because I liked his policy proposals, not because he of his ability to wield executive power (the bulk of which was inherited from his predecessors, by the way). You talk as if Obama ignored Congress, which is simply not the case.
I generally agree that it should be that way, but I don't think Trump is necessarily a good example of why. Both houses of Congress are run by his party, and while they don't always see eye to eye, they do on many things like climate change. If the CDC answered directly to Congress, I don't think you'd see much of a difference.
The rest of the government already is governed by remits. To quote Wikipedia:
> As the upper house, the Senate has several powers of advice and consent which are unique to it; of these include the ratification of treaties, the confirmation of Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, federal judges, other federal executive officials, flag officers, regulatory officials, ambassadors, and other federal uniformed officers.
These people, once picked, "answer to" the Executive--because the function of the Executive is to coordinate the running (execution) of government. But they're picked by Congress, and thus the "character" of government--defined by the beliefs of the people who run it--is in large part up to the legislature.
---
Also, if I can make an analogy here, I think there's something important to understand about the role of the President within the executive.
The President's role is basically equivalent to, and in large part historically "derived from", the role of a military flag officer (e.g. a general, admiral, etc.) That is, the President is someone who:
1. coordinates a number of units that have been temporarily assigned ("attached") to them, directing those units "from above" into a strategic configuration, without knowing much about their internals; and
2. keeps a "flag staff" who are there to manage each part of their job and liase with the individual units that affect their focus, representing the flag officer in that aspect.
Each unit under the flag officer's command, though, is independently headed by someone else: someone who is part of that unit rather than imposed on it from the outside; someone who was was hired by someone else long before the flag officer got there; and someone who is just temporarily serving the flag officer because they are the representative of their unit, and their unit is currently "attached" to that flag officer's command, rather than because they consider themselves to "work for" the flag officer themselves.
This is an exact description of the Executive branch. Congress hires the people who head the "units" (departments.) The President then comes in with their staff and those "units"--and their representatives--get attached to the President, who gets their staff (e.g. the Secretary of Defense; the Finance Minister) to liase with the unit heads (e.g. the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.)
Widespread scientific consensus exists that the world’s climate is changing. Some of these changes will likely include more variable weather, heat waves, heavy precipitation events, flooding, droughts, more intense storms, sea level rise, and air pollution. Each of these impacts could negatively affect public health. While climate change is a global issue, the effects of climate change will vary across geographic regions and populations. CDC’s Climate and Health Program is helping state and city health departments prepare for the specific health impacts of climate change that their communities will face.
You might also ask why the DoD or Homeland Security care about climate science. We are certain that the changing climate will affect many aspects of our lives in the coming decades. It'd be nice to have a better estimate of how many feet of sea level rise, what kind of storms, etc. by what year.
Doesn't it seem like NOAA would be a more appropriate place for this research? One might envision DHS research into the properties of x-ray scanners, but surely climate would be outside their purview?
I think the whole department should be shuttered forthwith. It was a bad idea in 2001, it's always been a horrible imposition and fraud on the public, and if anything it's even worse now that Comb-over Donnie is in charge.
No, South Park just picked up an existing joke. He said he "took the initiative in creating the internet" in an interview, Wired picked it up, some Republicans saw it and released some (honestly pretty gentle) press releases making fun of him, and then it went mainstream.
Correct. That infamous statement was taken out of context.
Since proponents of the OP's view probably won't believe you or me, but will respond to appeals to authority, here's Vint Cerf with Bob Kahn (the co-authors of TCP/IP [1]):
> No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
It's good to see that this issue has expanded beyond the realm of politics. There is hope when non government organizations are able to put something together in the absence of federal participation.
He'll be 72 in 2020. That'd make him easily the oldest President inaugurated. Biden reportedly shied away from it because of his age (74) and Sanders (75) has said age would probably prevent him from running again in 2020 (although he hasn't ruled it out completely from what I remember). Given he ran and lost (although I guess not technically...) 20 years previous, I can't imagine he'd consider it.
That said, I realize this was likely a joke comment. Still thought I'd point out the age factor, though.
Good, glad to see this is in the private sector where it belongs. Climate change was seriously ramping up to be just another ridiculous tax with questionable results, burdening those who can't afford it most. If preventing climate change is such a good idea, we don't need the government to stick a gun in your face unless you comply with whatever scam they come up with.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] thread>The meeting now planned for Feb. 16 will take place outside of any government circles. Rather than at CDC, it will be held at the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta. It will be a one-day event rather than the three days originally planned.
It saddens me when government suppresses science.
> argue that the agency should have gone forward with the summit unless told otherwise by the Trump administration
Which implies that the Trump administration is not officially behind the cancellation. It could be unofficially behind it, or actors within the CDC could be utilizing the new political climate to cause this cancellation - whether that's in an attempt to help these aspects of the agency avoid notice, or in attempt to suppress... Further information needed.
> Benjamin called the move a “strategic retreat” given the climate skepticism of the incoming administration.
"Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom."
They did an interview with someone from the DOE on this american life, she said that they have been removing all references to climate change on DOE projects and promoting them as something else in the hope that they won't be cancelled, she also said that there was only one climate change sceptic in the DOE and it's the new boss...
Are you down-voting facts because you don't like them? It doesn't make them any less real. Down-voting opinion, sure, but down-voting something which is simply the truth doesn't make sense. The article even had a copy of the questionnaire.
If science supported their agenda it would be hailed as the second coming.
What? No, thats suppressing science.
Science also says walls are hard for humans to walk through, and they're not disputing that.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine an angry man tweeting 'shut up nerd,' forever.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/65
No matter what mistakes science makes it has one fundamental virtue that politicians will never have:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Edit: I think I've discovered the irony of someone who decries science denial but downvotes my analysis rather than debating on its merits.
I'd rephrase that as 'when science suits their agenda', which is not to say that their support for it will be in the least bit consistent.
There's no public explanation as to why the original meeting was canceled. Referring to it as "government supressing science" is speculation.
That aside, not promoting a particular theory, practice, or direction for research isn't "suppressing science" either. It's just not promoting the particular things that you'd like promoted.
Would you say that's not government suppression of science?
That aside, nobody is preventing anyone outside of government from researching anything they'd like, publishing it, or shouting it from the rooftops. The only complaint I hear is projects and voices that specific people want heard aren't being promoted.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511572169/...
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/lamar-smith-donald-tr...
We're talking about Climate Change, can anyone possibly believe that the Republicans in Congress for the past 6 years would have been better on Climate than what Obama achieved through executive orders? Do people just not pay attention?
Here's a quote from the official GOP platform[1]:
> Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it.
Fuck it, I'll quote the rest of the references to climate in the official platform!
> Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate.
> We demand an immediate halt to U.S. funding for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in accordance with the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. That law prohibits Washington from giving any money to “any affiliated organization of the United Nations” which grants Palestinians membership as a state. There is no ambiguity in that language. It would be illegal for the President to follow through on his intention to provide millions in funding for the UNFCCC and hundreds of millions for its Green Climate Fund.
> We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.
These people are pathological.
[1] - https://www.gop.com/platform/americas-natural-resources/
In my completely made up system, if we started at 0 and add up the number of points in favor of averting Climate Change, Obama probably added 3 for a few years with the Paris Agreement, CAFE and some of the EPA rules were also pretty beneficial, maybe net 4 over his term. Call it +10 for Obama. Trump's going to reverse many of those decisions, probably make some of them much worse within the next few years. Let's say he wipes out all of Obama's work and does 50% more 'damage' in this system. So by 2020, we're at -5.
If we had left it to the Republicans in Congress, we would have been at least at -5 every year since 2010..
So -5 net with Obama/Trump's dueling executive orders or -50 with Republicans in Congress.
Yes the system is made up and the points don't matter, but there is absolutely no way we would be in a better position. It's the height of naivety to dismiss what they promised to do and to assume they would have suddenly changed their views 180º to support action on climate change for 'the limelight'.
If the executive were less powerful, perhaps the attitudes in Congress would be different. It's hard to know how they would behave, because we haven't had that situation in living memory.
I read a good article conjecturing that the decline in civility in Congress is due to the increased pressure to essentially run a permanent election campaign. The congress people used to spend more time in Washington becoming friends, but now spend most of their time at home, campaigning. Now I can't find my source...
Also, when you stop giving all the important, flashy stuff to the president and let Congress have a bit of limelight, you'll probably find them rising to the challenge (more than today, at least, where Congress only gets credit for the boring stuff that the president don't want).
Since 1980, periods when both the Presidency and both houses of Congress have been under the control of one party have been quite rare, and the public usually votes out one house of Congress in the next election. Democrats in 09-10, Republicans from 02-06, Democrats in 92-94, and that's it.
(Interestingly, this is not universal throughout history. Dem's controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency under the Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter administrations, while Republicans controlled them during the Mckinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. The last extended time period of divided control was the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age era from 1875-1897...perhaps leading credence to those who say the current time period is much more like the Long Depression, Gilded Age, and lead up to WW1 than the Great Depression and lead-up to WW2.)
The same power that made Obama good to progressives will make Trump very, very bad to them.
Clearly, the framers contemplated the existence of Departments within the executive branch, whose Officers held Opinions about things within their purview, as opposed to being mindless robots. A great deal of legislation sets the scope and limits of such departmental authority, while directing the departments to engage in a more detailed rulemaking process of their own as opposed to everything being micromanaged by Congress.
You keep making normative statements that describe your personal political views, but I can't help noticing that you're not citing any provisions in the Constitution to back up your argument. I'm thus unsure whether you are talking about your view of the Constitution's meaning or some other scheme of governance with which you'd like to replace the existing one.
From the POV of the government itself though, the primary imperative - stronger than one policy prescription - is continued existence. And to ensure continued existence, a government needs to let through change that, if repressed, would bring down the government, while also preventing change so radical and so permanent that it destroys the government on its own.
Republicans have repeatedly gone on record in public statements about the totality of their opposition to Obama regardless of policy considerations. Allow me to refer you to the paper cited here for some objective demonstration of the increasing polarization of US politics and its acceleration in recent years:
http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/04/24/poli...
Similarly, I feel that Bush's and Clinton's best years were the periods where they had opposition, and couldn't use party allegiance to push things through.
I've felt that one-sided rule is net-negative essentially every time it's happened in my adult life, regardless of party.
Trump will just be an especially hard to ignore version of this anti-pattern, as he's made clear that he'll punish non-conformity within the GOP; and the GOP has made clear that they will do anything he requests, even when it stands against every major conservative principle.
> As the upper house, the Senate has several powers of advice and consent which are unique to it; of these include the ratification of treaties, the confirmation of Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, federal judges, other federal executive officials, flag officers, regulatory officials, ambassadors, and other federal uniformed officers.
These people, once picked, "answer to" the Executive--because the function of the Executive is to coordinate the running (execution) of government. But they're picked by Congress, and thus the "character" of government--defined by the beliefs of the people who run it--is in large part up to the legislature.
---
Also, if I can make an analogy here, I think there's something important to understand about the role of the President within the executive.
The President's role is basically equivalent to, and in large part historically "derived from", the role of a military flag officer (e.g. a general, admiral, etc.) That is, the President is someone who:
1. coordinates a number of units that have been temporarily assigned ("attached") to them, directing those units "from above" into a strategic configuration, without knowing much about their internals; and
2. keeps a "flag staff" who are there to manage each part of their job and liase with the individual units that affect their focus, representing the flag officer in that aspect.
Each unit under the flag officer's command, though, is independently headed by someone else: someone who is part of that unit rather than imposed on it from the outside; someone who was was hired by someone else long before the flag officer got there; and someone who is just temporarily serving the flag officer because they are the representative of their unit, and their unit is currently "attached" to that flag officer's command, rather than because they consider themselves to "work for" the flag officer themselves.
This is an exact description of the Executive branch. Congress hires the people who head the "units" (departments.) The President then comes in with their staff and those "units"--and their representatives--get attached to the President, who gets their staff (e.g. the Secretary of Defense; the Finance Minister) to liase with the unit heads (e.g. the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.)
Climate and Health
Widespread scientific consensus exists that the world’s climate is changing. Some of these changes will likely include more variable weather, heat waves, heavy precipitation events, flooding, droughts, more intense storms, sea level rise, and air pollution. Each of these impacts could negatively affect public health. While climate change is a global issue, the effects of climate change will vary across geographic regions and populations. CDC’s Climate and Health Program is helping state and city health departments prepare for the specific health impacts of climate change that their communities will face.
https://www.cdc.gov/climateandhealth/
In it they routinely poke fun at Al Gore, having his character go around saying "I invented the internet!" among other things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2013/11/...
https://youtu.be/BnFJ8cHAlco?t=46s
Since proponents of the OP's view probably won't believe you or me, but will respond to appeals to authority, here's Vint Cerf with Bob Kahn (the co-authors of TCP/IP [1]):
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/m...
> No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
[1]: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/p...
That said, I realize this was likely a joke comment. Still thought I'd point out the age factor, though.