alt Hacker NewsI mean, yes, technically it's "not new" for the President and Judiciary to disagree at this level. But doing so results in events like the Trail of Tears, which is pretty bad.
People are alarmed and concerned because they know it's not new. It's not difficult to find horrors in American history. Decorum and norms exist for the purpose of attempting to smooth over these stress points and make a safer power structure that hopefully prevents tragedies like this. The relative peace and safety we've enjoyed for the half century or so has been largely based on a modern era of good feelings and respectful norms.
When those norms go away and the authoritarian president dares the court to enforce the laws he breaks, people, rightly, get scared. The courts don't control the army, he does. I hope the generals remeber their oath, but oh yeah, he's been replacing them with loyalists too.
We know it isn't new. We've seen the horrors of history. That's why it's scary.
Yeah yeah, America lived on and stuff after all of that. But a lot of oppressed minorities didn’t. And if you're any minority group that the ruling party doesn't like right now, you are totally justified in being deathly afraid.
(For the record, I was against centralization of executive power under Obama and Bush too. But open and blatant disrespect like this is as especially alarming and should be treated as such, not normalized or justified)
I don't disagree; except on the point that this is open and blatant disrespect. I don't have the impression that the purpose of this action is to subvert the judicial branch toward the goal of centralizing power into the executive branch. It could be interpreted that way, but the reality is that constitutional law on this is pretty clear, and Trump hasn't gotten to the point of breaching the constitution (yet).
If you've followed Trump for long enough, one of the things he talks about a lot are the "unelected bureaucrats" in the government making the real laws that end up impacting Americans day-to-day, more than Congress oftentimes. That's who this is targeted at; subordinates within the executive branch. This isn't a law, or even an interpretation of an existing law, or an expansion of executive branch powers, or even an expansion of the powers of the office of the President (because legally, as far as I know, the President has always had this power); its best described as a memo elaborating a process.
One example that might be applicable here is Net Neutrality. FCC enforcement of Net Neutrality goes back and forth; it was about to happen, until Trump in 2017 when the ruling was cancelled, and then in 2023 it came back, and now it probably won't happen again. What you're seeing there is, in the most accurate sense, something this action would expressly cover. There's zero congressional law dealing with net neutrality. Every time the FCC has touched the topic, its been the unelected bureaucratic appointment of the latest elected President making a new rule that can just as quickly be overturned or interpreted differently by the next President. Trump's new action just recognizes a process that's already been happening, basically forever.
What net neutrality really needs is the same thing a ton of these bureaucratic agencies need: a law, passed by congress. Write it in stone.
But, this is a rare thing in modern America, and maybe it always has been. Our legislative branch sucks. Seems like our Founding Fathers may have wanted it that way, but I doubt they fully understood the consequences. Getting it to do anything is like pulling hair, and that's why Executive Actions (read: authoritarian rule) have become so common. Trump, to some degree, through his mass layoffs, the defunding of various parts of the government, and now the codification of the process that the President makes decisions on-behalf-of the executive branch, is trying to scale the bureaucratic state back. Is that a good goal? Will it be successful? I don't know. But that is, under my interpretation, the best description of his aims.