> The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
> "We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
> The bill’s passage came despite concerns over the constitutionality of a provision creating a Class E felony, punishable by up to 6 years in prison and a $3,000 fine, for any public official who votes in favor of so-called sanctuary policies.
It was prohibited to enact those policies. But that's performative, it has always been illegal to aid criminals. It's also technically illegal to sell weed in Colorado.
This makes it illegal to vote. That's first amendment protected behavior and has long been precedent. And once they set the precedent they can make voting a particular way illegal, they'll apply that same law to more and more laws - and then they'll apply it to citizens (based on the SCOTUS ruling that legislators have the same first amendement right as citizens). Stop being a fascist apologist and pretending this behavior is normal.
It is not God damn normal to outlaw voting a specific way. It's their job to represent their electorate and that's literally how we're supposed to change the system in democratic system. This is clearly a move to make it illegal to progressive.
I'm sorry, are you being a fascist apologist here? Is it remotely acceptable to make it a crime to vote a given way as a democratically elected representative? Once a single such law exists, it's now precedent we can do it anywhere.
Such a law doesn't even exist for murder for obvious reasons.
I'm sure this will be flagged soon enough, but people need to know that there is an unprecedented, hostile, and (seemingly) illegal blitzkrieg happening against the federal civil service. Doors are being barricaded. Strange servers are being installed by unknown individuals. People with decades of institutional experience are getting pushed out the door.
There's no way to have unbiased oversite. It was tried that way during his first term with limited sucess. Give this method a shot and if it breaks then it breaks and they try something different. This is the same "he's going to break twitter" crowd when 80% of the people were fired. Guess what, it kept running. The government will be fine. And the Chinese already have all our data.
He’s not fucking around with a social media website; this is the federal government with responsibility for trillions of dollars of spending. A small group of people were annoyed when Twitter was down for a few hours. I think the reaction will be much stronger when millions of US citizens miss a social security check or two.
Let's be sure to have a meeting to consider staffing a committee to plan appointing a board to oversee a transition. Who would have the authority to have this meeting and appoint it? Congress. Who is in power in Congress? Oh right. If Democrats didn't want {x} to occur, they should have used their majority to get what they wanted done. The reason this is happening, is because those in power want this capability to exist.
When the Republicans eventually lose power, a more refined version of this playbook will be executed by the next team.
I think most "small government" people change their tune when they find out that "big government" was behind their Medicare/Social Security payouts, their industry subsidies, and all of the things that keep them from dying on the job.
The gap between the ideology and the reality is deep enough to fall into forever.
There's a reason why there's a whole genre of images on the internet of protestors holding signs with some variation of "keep your government hands out of my Medicare"
This is beyond unconstitutional. Congress can reduce spending. It cannot be stolen in broad daylight by a private citizen. This is not a time to be sanguine. American democracy is dying before our eyes.
The judicial branch has limited ability to intervene without someone else initiating it. Which would most likely be US citizens, civil service, states, or Congress in this case. Present Congressional leadership is already ignoring other violations of law like the IG dismissals so there's a good chance that this Congress will do very little.
Hell no it is not. That's like saying no crime has happened until there is a conviction. Trump and Musk's actions are very explicitly against the law. They won't be stopped or punished until action is taken, but it is still illegal right now.
Agreed. One of the greatest liberties here in the US is that we are free to sue and counter-sue whomever we like - the free market of the people unfettered and unchained!
That's incredibly glib and pedantic. I do not have the resources and probably not the standing to bring a suit. And given that any punishment will be immediately pardoned makes it moot. State Attorney's General have successfully paused Trump's abuse of impoundment as well his end to birthright citizenship. Musk is likely committing some form of criminal trespass, but who can arrest him? Trump's own FBI? He's been firing agents and prosecutors left and right. Purging anyone remotely disloyal. There may not be a functioning criminal justice system at the federal level anymore. The justice system only works when it works.
You are making accusations with certainty and this implies that you have special legal knowledge or evidence that could be used to at a bare minimum to stop the behavior. There will be no shortages of lawyers available to you willing to use your special knowledge or evidence to bring suit. So why wouldn’t you pursue it if you care about it passionately?
> I do not have the resources and probably not the standing to bring a suit.
Well, a good starting place might be the fact that committed small-govt candidates — ones like Ron Paul who will actually vote for cuts — almost never get elected into higher office. And even Rep. Paul himself argued that it was morally incumbent[0] on him to fight for earmarks for his district — which strongly suggests that even the constituency of the most smallgov federal politician has little enthusiasm for his principles.
As for professed advocates of smallgovt who actually get into the Senate or even the presidency, I think you can look for yourself how that's worked out.
Programs still need to be implemented, laws and regulations need to be enforced: if there is no in-house manpower or expertise then outside consultants will be hired. Do you think those will be more or less expensive?
And if you thought that the FAA's oversight of (e.g.) Boeing was weak at current staffing levels, wait until the cuts come.
How are you going to pay and run all that without staff? You think it's going to be cheaper to outsource it to consultants? Or is privatization the point/goal perhaps?
Further, the early 20th century was also a period of rapid technological change that allowed for all kinds productivity gains, which is unlikely to be repeated:
If anything, these billionaires are concerned that Chinese power is in it's ability to control its people and businesses and democracy gets in the way.
Pure delusional greed of silver spoon tech incels.
Yeah I'm not disagreeing with that, I'm so sad the space guy has become this
I've probably just been too poor/whole life, never rich but I can't imagine being that much of an ahole regarding not helping others but might is right... right
I also believe in the premise of capitalism (getting paid for merit/work) but yeah when you get to that much money why do you keep going for more
Doesn't change the fact he cannot be involuntarily celibate after fathering 9 kids. The usage of the term in this vain is basically the same as if I called cyanydeez "retarded" over the usage of this term.
A word with a negative connotation that inapplicable by definition, but used anyway because they consider people that are such to be lesser people.
Biden violated the law to forgive billions of dollars in student loans for his voters, and we are supposed to be upset about some 30 day notice requirement?
Laws suddenly have a meaning after years of streaming millions of illegal migrants into the country?
Ideologue AGs that give silk gloves treatments to violent criminals and looters because they're black.
President who wholesale pardons his career criminal son and his entire family as an afterthought because they're so bogged down in so many illegal deals that they've forgot the specifics long ago.
But the US is a country of laws? Lol, how does it feel ferrying that Scorpion across the river Mr Frog?
All of those things are completely legal. I do not agree with many of them. But laws are laws. Many of these executive orders are not legal. It doesn't matter how much you or I might want them, they must be passed by congress, and verified by the judicial branch. If you don't understand that, you need to go back and read the constitution, or leave and start your own country, because you are not a believer in the United States of America. Full stop.
A president doesn’t need an “extraordinary mandate” to hire and fire executive branch employees to execute his agenda. It’s literally the bare minimum core of his constitutional authority.
This guy decided to get into politics like 5 months ago and is now the second most powerful person in the world purely by dint of being extremely wealthy. He bought the US government and it was apparently a bargain at $250M.
The system has been broken for a while, but that certainly made it clear. Reagan set in motion what led us to the current wealth disparity and Citizens United didn't help the state of things.
Meh, that seems like hyperbole to me. Doesn't a real coup involve the military going into federal buildings and rounding up congressmen from opposing parties and detaining them?
Forgive me for not viewing it the same way. The news is focusing on the airplane right now.
I wouldn't call it a coup, but I've seen something similar going on in some Europe countries in the past (including mine).
President or government acting like a mafia, replacing all key employees based solely on loyalty to them and not competence. And this is done at such a massive scale and speed that the whole country becomes a kleptocracy real quick. Pretty much what's unfolding in the US right now.
Happens every administration. But someone from the opposition party always gets their nose out of joint and it makes news and it’s just the most horrible thing ever.
What happens every administration is that the high level managers are fired. Those are political appointees and it is normal and expected for them to be replaced.
What is not normal is going after the rank and file employees. Those are not political appointees.
Just how many actual “rank and file employees” have actually been targeted or fired so far?
If you are going to bring up the RTO directive, please don’t, those folks are in full control of their continued employment and prior to March of 2020 having to actually go to an office to work would not be viewed as “targeting” anyone.
Dozens of rank and file prosecutors have been fired from the DOJ, because they worked on cases against the January 6 defendants or on cases against Trump.
As others have asserted, this happens with every administration changeover. It is only more publicly viewable now (as in, people are reporting on it) due to the nature of the administration.
Now is a time for unity and joining together as Americans, not for divisiveness.
> If the President gets elected promising to fire executive branch employees, then his doing so is literally democratic.
But it may not be legal, which is determined by the Constitution and laws set by Congress. People who are also elected democratically. Behaving in a manner counter to those laws is also fundamentally undemocratic, the President and the Executive are bound by those laws set by the representatives of the people.
The President is not a monarch or autocrat, he is not a king or dictator with the authority to do whatever he wants. He is empowered to act, but constrained in his actions by law.
> Sorry, can you be more specific as to what law is being broken?
At least in the case of the IG firings, he failed to comply with the 30 day notice required by law.
My point is actually broader than just the firings and dismissals. The elected President is not an elected autocrat. He doesn't get to do what he wants because "his doing so is literally democratic". He gets to act in a way that complies with the democratically set laws.
> But it may not be legal, which is determined by the Constitution and laws set by Congress. People who are also elected democratically. Behaving in a manner counter to those laws is also fundamentally undemocratic, the President and the Executive are bound by those laws set by the representatives of the people.
The word "may" is important here. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will interpret the laws and the Constitution and decide whether this Presidential action is legal or not. Until they do, its (il)legality a matter of possibility, opinion and conjecture, not established fact.
And, given the ideological leanings of the current SCOTUS majority, it is entirely possible that they'll uphold this Presidential action, and either interpret away any apparent statutory violations, or rule those statutes unconstitutional in this respect. In which case, the answer will ultimately be, that it was legal all along.
Even assuming that’s true, violating some employment action notice laws is far less “anti-democratic” than the federal workforce declaring Resistance to the agenda of the elected government.
Yes, the President is constrained by law. But hiring and firing executive branch employees is also at the core of his constitutional power. And the President is the only constitutional actor that can do this job—Congress or the courts can’t hire and fire people.
Not everyone agrees on that: "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king" (The Knoxville Journal, 9 February 1896)
The president has carte blanche to create laws through executive order, nullifying the legislative branch.
The president has carte blanche to pardon Federal crimes, nullifying the judicial branch.
The president has sole command of the military. Going through Congress is a formality at best. If he says we're at war with Greenland tomorrow, we're at war with Greenland tomorrow.
And per SCOTUS, nothing the president does while in office in their official duties can be prosecuted as a crime.
And none of that "balance of powers" stuff means anything when party loyalty and loyalty to one person transcends the boundaries of office.
The president not be a monarch in theory, but in practice power has been accumulating in the executive branch for decades. The American people fundamentally fear and mistrust government, but they worship celebrities. They want to be ruled, if not by a king, by a CEO in chief.
You have to understand that phrase in the context of the tripartite system of government. We do not have a system of “legal supremacy,” where the lawyers overseeing compliance with the law are effectively a fourth branch of government above all the other branches. The framers were very concerned about the “who watches the watchers” situation.
> If the President gets elected promising to fire executive branch employees, then his doing so is literally democratic.
You seem to think the President can do whatever he wants, in constrained by laws. Which may be true in this case, but because the laws aren’t being followed, not because they don’t exist.
What I think is that electing the president is the only way the constitution provides for democratic control of what’s become the largest and most powerful branch. And ensuring democratic responsiveness of the executive—a civil service that will diligently execute the agenda of whomever is elected President—is of overriding importance to the health of democracy.
A country where the same people are in charge regardless of who wins the election isn’t a democracy. And I think this shouldn’t be a partisan point, because the federal bureaucracy in the aggregate is like the worst parts of the Obama and Bush administrations mushed together.
I don’t know you, but I’m embarrassed on your behalf that you seem to support the idea that federal employees should bring their own ideologies to the workplace to frustrate the duly elected executive. It’s openly advocating a soft coup.
I love the whole “my guy did a coup so I’m going to call everything I don’t like a coup to minimize what he did” thing you’ve got going on. Tres chic. And in this case, it’s… the idea that federal employees don’t completely change everything every 4 years to assuage the ego of a moron who thinks he’s king.
Turns out the job of the President is to faithfully execute the laws. And the laws have a hell of a lot to say about how things get done in the government. It is solidly settled constitutional law that those laws have to be obeyed.
The President also doesn't get to enforce traffic laws by random summary executions... which is where the idiotic "unitary executive" nonsense would land you if you, you know, actually thought about it for more than 15 seconds.
> The President also doesn't get to enforce traffic laws by random summary executions
- Congress has not passed laws against traffic violations (well, except in D.C., federal land, etc.).
- Even when they have, they have not designated the punishment to be execution.
- Even if the violators are federal employees, the executive doesn't have the power to summarily punish their violations by anything worse than firing the employee, even under the unitary executive theory. The executive can't levy any criminal punishment on their own. (They have since FDR been able to levy civil penalties in certain cases, but rulings like SEC v. Jarkesy are limiting that power.)
So your hypothetical makes no sense, even under the broadest interpretation of the "unitary executive" theory. What Trump, Musk, and DOGE want to do is to make it as easy to fire and discipline the federal workforce as it is for a company executive to do the same to a company. We'll see how far it goes I suppose. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a federal civil service reform bill introduced soon to at least allow the executive to put any civil service employee on indefinite paid leave - that would allow Congress to set conditions on federal employment that don't prevent the executive branch from implementing its agenda.
As you see in the replies a well-funded anti-tax movement has been radicalizing a lot of the country against their own government.
They love to see this dissolution of constitutional government.
While they claim smaller government is better for the economy, they really care most about ending constitutional government and couldn't care less about the impact to the economy.
Because you have two parties of HN users that happily flag, which is enough. Those who are Trump supporters and those who just don't want any politics / the discussions surrounding it on HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doesn't seem to be a duplicate, so dang might unflag it and remove the filter if he sees the thread.
I wonder if the flagging/flame war detector is too aggressive for stories like this that blend the worlds of tech and politics. From my bystander PoV, it seems like the majority of interesting news stories like this one get flagged and killed despite a somewhat normal discussion in the comments. I know people want to pretend that politics don't belong on their tech/startup forum, but that's just ignoring the reality of how intertwined the two are at this point.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it seems unlikely to have any chance at a thoughtful conversation. It has the Ultimate Troll Ingredient but little actual information.
Yup, every time something important gets gang-flagged he leaves it flagged even though he can unflag. There's zero transparency and a heavy bias in moderation here. I stopped contributing here and moved to lobste.rs
In a way, Danf is just following the will of the people. If the people want to gag reflect to "Musk" and "government" and hide the story, what are we to do?
Many stories that (correctly) get flagged on HN are critically important, far more important than anything which does appear on the front page. There's a simple reason for this: if importance were the high-order bit, then HN would be a current affairs site.
Moderator review is a counter-action, especially when we turn off the flags on a story. The problem is that we don't (and can't) do that often enough to satisfy everyone.
We just have to face the facts that this is a tech site thst aggressively rejects politics, no matter how dire. It's the same Apathy that won Trump the election. A problem starred by technocrats won't necessarily have wannabe technocrats solve it anyway. Better off organizing on Reddit.
If you want to get around flagging, vote it up anyway. I check top daily/weekly news and lagged news shows up (I'm pretty sure I have showdead on Btw).
I agree with the "take" that this article isn't going to get discussed substantively and thoughtfully on HN. You needn't look far to see why—the current thread demonstrates it.
The commenters insisting that this is the wrong call don't seem to have fully taken in the intended purpose of this site, because they're actually making a case in favor of the flags, not against them.
Indeed many of the top comments are about how this thread will inevitably be flagged but continuing on to give substantive commentary. Is this not a sign that the system is not producing the desired results? That good contributors see a good topic and give up on it isn’t a sign that the topic is inherently not worth discussing.
This is the culture HN is building not one magically produced by the topics themselves, and I think the fact the that the only moderator on the site agrees that all political discussion is not worth having contributes to the quality of political discussion on the site.
I think you do a great job overall dang, but I think politics is inherently in an area that highlights the downsides of having a single moderator at the helm. I get wanting to avoid policing political thought but does shutting it all down produce the best community? Does allowing power users to disable commentary on certain topics create the community you are trying to build?
We're far from "shutting it all down"; that's what those links in my GP comment are about. It's a question of which stories/threads have the best chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion.
146 comments
[ 382 ms ] story [ 4094 ms ] thread> "We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
This seems beyond bad.
> The bill’s passage came despite concerns over the constitutionality of a provision creating a Class E felony, punishable by up to 6 years in prison and a $3,000 fine, for any public official who votes in favor of so-called sanctuary policies.
Besides Tennessee law prohibits creation of "sanctuary city" way before Trump came into power.
[1] https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/Billinfo/default.aspx?BillN...
[2] https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default.aspx?BillN...
This makes it illegal to vote. That's first amendment protected behavior and has long been precedent. And once they set the precedent they can make voting a particular way illegal, they'll apply that same law to more and more laws - and then they'll apply it to citizens (based on the SCOTUS ruling that legislators have the same first amendement right as citizens). Stop being a fascist apologist and pretending this behavior is normal.
It is not God damn normal to outlaw voting a specific way. It's their job to represent their electorate and that's literally how we're supposed to change the system in democratic system. This is clearly a move to make it illegal to progressive.
But in this case, it didn't really change anything.
>making it a felony for public officials to back sanctuary policies.
Saying "vote against Republicans" makes it sound like voting against any Trump policy is a crime.
I'm sorry, are you being a fascist apologist here? Is it remotely acceptable to make it a crime to vote a given way as a democratically elected representative? Once a single such law exists, it's now precedent we can do it anywhere.
Such a law doesn't even exist for murder for obvious reasons.
First-hand accounts can be found here: https://old.reddit.com/r/fednews/
When the Republicans eventually lose power, a more refined version of this playbook will be executed by the next team.
The gap between the ideology and the reality is deep enough to fall into forever.
Kind of like people describing DEI as "anti-white racism" despite the most common beneficiaries of DEI being white women.
So sue them. Take action, make your case. All you have here on HN is an opinion which may or may not be accurate.
> I do not have the resources and probably not the standing to bring a suit.
Oh, ok. Well never mind then.
People want functional governance. And smaller government is clearly not what this coup concerns.
Americans like the socialized services a larger government can provide.
They want government to be useful to them, not useless to them.
You don’t really believe people want a small government, do you? They see a small government like Somalia. They don’t want Somalia.
Remember a large government services the people. A small libertarian government services the powerful and wealthy.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...
As for professed advocates of smallgovt who actually get into the Senate or even the presidency, I think you can look for yourself how that's worked out.
[0] https://www.aei.org/articles/ron-paul-big-government-liberta...
The level of federal employees has been stable for ~30 years, even with a growing population and arguable more complex world:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
It can also be argued that more bureaucracy is actually needed:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
Programs still need to be implemented, laws and regulations need to be enforced: if there is no in-house manpower or expertise then outside consultants will be hired. Do you think those will be more or less expensive?
And if you thought that the FAA's oversight of (e.g.) Boeing was weak at current staffing levels, wait until the cuts come.
Also without Medicare, minimal Social Security, without an airforce, without a standing army, and desires for a ≥350-ship navy:
* https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/02/25/trump-called-fo...
How are you going to pay and run all that without staff? You think it's going to be cheaper to outsource it to consultants? Or is privatization the point/goal perhaps?
Further, the early 20th century was also a period of rapid technological change that allowed for all kinds productivity gains, which is unlikely to be repeated:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
That's the point.
Pure delusional greed of silver spoon tech incels.
I've probably just been too poor/whole life, never rich but I can't imagine being that much of an ahole regarding not helping others but might is right... right
I also believe in the premise of capitalism (getting paid for merit/work) but yeah when you get to that much money why do you keep going for more
A word with a negative connotation that inapplicable by definition, but used anyway because they consider people that are such to be lesser people.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65429936
Musk may very well have had Grimey sex, it still remains possible to father > 500 children without having had sex with their mothers.
https://time.com/6176310/our-father-true-story-netflix/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexzhavoronkov/2022/07/27/elon...
Million of _illegal_ immigrants just walked across the borders, for years, and the law took the back seat.
Why should Musk care? Just turn the law off for whatever suits him, your party started the practice, now reap what you sow.
Don't think it's funny anymore? Well I find it hilarious, enjoy the bed you shat in.
Ideologue AGs that give silk gloves treatments to violent criminals and looters because they're black.
President who wholesale pardons his career criminal son and his entire family as an afterthought because they're so bogged down in so many illegal deals that they've forgot the specifics long ago.
But the US is a country of laws? Lol, how does it feel ferrying that Scorpion across the river Mr Frog?
Lmao.
What are you feeding yourself?
Forgive me for not viewing it the same way. The news is focusing on the airplane right now.
Months ago, the leader of Project 2025 said a second Trump term would be "a second American Revolution" and "bloodless if the left allows it to be".
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-t...
Literally lookup the definition and you'll find out more
President or government acting like a mafia, replacing all key employees based solely on loyalty to them and not competence. And this is done at such a massive scale and speed that the whole country becomes a kleptocracy real quick. Pretty much what's unfolding in the US right now.
What happens every administration is that the high level managers are fired. Those are political appointees and it is normal and expected for them to be replaced.
What is not normal is going after the rank and file employees. Those are not political appointees.
If you are going to bring up the RTO directive, please don’t, those folks are in full control of their continued employment and prior to March of 2020 having to actually go to an office to work would not be viewed as “targeting” anyone.
Now is a time for unity and joining together as Americans, not for divisiveness.
grow up and be better, buddy.
But it may not be legal, which is determined by the Constitution and laws set by Congress. People who are also elected democratically. Behaving in a manner counter to those laws is also fundamentally undemocratic, the President and the Executive are bound by those laws set by the representatives of the people.
The President is not a monarch or autocrat, he is not a king or dictator with the authority to do whatever he wants. He is empowered to act, but constrained in his actions by law.
At least in the case of the IG firings, he failed to comply with the 30 day notice required by law.
My point is actually broader than just the firings and dismissals. The elected President is not an elected autocrat. He doesn't get to do what he wants because "his doing so is literally democratic". He gets to act in a way that complies with the democratically set laws.
The word "may" is important here. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will interpret the laws and the Constitution and decide whether this Presidential action is legal or not. Until they do, its (il)legality a matter of possibility, opinion and conjecture, not established fact.
And, given the ideological leanings of the current SCOTUS majority, it is entirely possible that they'll uphold this Presidential action, and either interpret away any apparent statutory violations, or rule those statutes unconstitutional in this respect. In which case, the answer will ultimately be, that it was legal all along.
Yes, the President is constrained by law. But hiring and firing executive branch employees is also at the core of his constitutional power. And the President is the only constitutional actor that can do this job—Congress or the courts can’t hire and fire people.
The president is not a constitutional monarch.
Not everyone agrees on that: "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king" (The Knoxville Journal, 9 February 1896)
The president has carte blanche to create laws through executive order, nullifying the legislative branch.
The president has carte blanche to pardon Federal crimes, nullifying the judicial branch.
The president has sole command of the military. Going through Congress is a formality at best. If he says we're at war with Greenland tomorrow, we're at war with Greenland tomorrow.
And per SCOTUS, nothing the president does while in office in their official duties can be prosecuted as a crime.
And none of that "balance of powers" stuff means anything when party loyalty and loyalty to one person transcends the boundaries of office.
The president not be a monarch in theory, but in practice power has been accumulating in the executive branch for decades. The American people fundamentally fear and mistrust government, but they worship celebrities. They want to be ruled, if not by a king, by a CEO in chief.
You seem to think the President can do whatever he wants, in constrained by laws. Which may be true in this case, but because the laws aren’t being followed, not because they don’t exist.
A country where the same people are in charge regardless of who wins the election isn’t a democracy. And I think this shouldn’t be a partisan point, because the federal bureaucracy in the aggregate is like the worst parts of the Obama and Bush administrations mushed together.
The President also doesn't get to enforce traffic laws by random summary executions... which is where the idiotic "unitary executive" nonsense would land you if you, you know, actually thought about it for more than 15 seconds.
- Congress has not passed laws against traffic violations (well, except in D.C., federal land, etc.).
- Even when they have, they have not designated the punishment to be execution.
- Even if the violators are federal employees, the executive doesn't have the power to summarily punish their violations by anything worse than firing the employee, even under the unitary executive theory. The executive can't levy any criminal punishment on their own. (They have since FDR been able to levy civil penalties in certain cases, but rulings like SEC v. Jarkesy are limiting that power.)
So your hypothetical makes no sense, even under the broadest interpretation of the "unitary executive" theory. What Trump, Musk, and DOGE want to do is to make it as easy to fire and discipline the federal workforce as it is for a company executive to do the same to a company. We'll see how far it goes I suppose. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a federal civil service reform bill introduced soon to at least allow the executive to put any civil service employee on indefinite paid leave - that would allow Congress to set conditions on federal employment that don't prevent the executive branch from implementing its agenda.
They love to see this dissolution of constitutional government. While they claim smaller government is better for the economy, they really care most about ending constitutional government and couldn't care less about the impact to the economy.
Let's hope they don't use a regex or an "AI" to decide whom to purge, but I would not be surprised.
this is ... beyond bad.
Doesn't seem to be a duplicate, so dang might unflag it and remove the filter if he sees the thread.
In fact its mandate is something quite different, as everyone here should know—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and (for endless elaboration on the point) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
If you want to get around flagging, vote it up anyway. I check top daily/weekly news and lagged news shows up (I'm pretty sure I have showdead on Btw).
The commenters insisting that this is the wrong call don't seem to have fully taken in the intended purpose of this site, because they're actually making a case in favor of the flags, not against them.
Btw, it's not true that every political post gets flagged. HN's approach to that question has been stable for a long time, even though there can be strong disagreement about specific calls. If you or anyone wants to read about what the approach is, there are lots of links at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... In particular, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 are good places to start.
This is the culture HN is building not one magically produced by the topics themselves, and I think the fact the that the only moderator on the site agrees that all political discussion is not worth having contributes to the quality of political discussion on the site.
I think you do a great job overall dang, but I think politics is inherently in an area that highlights the downsides of having a single moderator at the helm. I get wanting to avoid policing political thought but does shutting it all down produce the best community? Does allowing power users to disable commentary on certain topics create the community you are trying to build?
Welcome to absolute free speech.