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rayinerlast Wednesday at 8:06 PM5 repliesview on HN

How can you cite “precedent” when Myers v. United States decided this issue in favor of the unitary executive back in 1926? The administrative state that exists today was only facilitated by the FDR Supreme Court overruling a bunch of precedents.

Go read the Federalist Papers. The founders thought very hard about who should exercise which powers and how they should be selected. They did not intend for 99% of the actual government operations to be run by “independent” executive officials that were insulated from elections. That’s something we made up in the 20th century in response to trendy ideas about “scientific government.”


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curt15last Wednesday at 9:18 PM

>How can you cite “precedent” when Myers v. United States decided this issue in favor of the unitary executive back in 1926? The administrative state that exists today was only facilitated by the FDR Supreme Court overruling a bunch of precedents.

And in doing so they reshaped the precedent. One can't claim Brown v Board is not precedent just because Plessy v Ferguson already spoke on the same matter.

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jfengellast Wednesday at 8:23 PM

The Federalist Papers is not "the founders". It's Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. There were numerous factions running around the Constitutional Convention, and they negotiated the final document together.

I don't understand why the Federalist Papers gets cited as if it were part of the Constitution. It is not a definitive source of anything except the opinion of those two (three, with Jay) men.

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zimpenfishlast Wednesday at 8:22 PM

> The founders thought very hard about who should exercise which powers and how they should be selected.

Which would be perfectly fine as a basis if we were still in the 18th century.

Things are, I believe, somewhat different now and what a bunch of rich old white men thought then isn't all that relevant now except as a historical oddity.

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miltonlostlast Wednesday at 8:51 PM

The fact that you still call the "founders" the "founders" as if they were a single unified person/entity with non-conflicting values shows me what kind of "originalist" jurisprudence you go for.