Despite being the son of a liberal Finnish politician, he appreciates meritocracy. That being said a lot of people in the Linux/GNU community are undermining that through the usual social justice tactics (https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-team-approves-new-terminology-bans-terms-like-blacklist-and-slave/).
This is the funniest most deluded thing I have ever heard. The House Counsel honestly thinks that the Sergeant at Arms of the House can act unilaterally in exercising a physical action against the executive branch, the Justice Department in particular. First off, there is also a senate Sergeant at Arms who presumably can intercede, so we can have an inter branch physical conflict as well. Who will the Capitol Police take their orders from, the Senate or the House? Finally, the most inconvenient fact of them all, the executive branch holds the greatest amount of potential firepower and force of any of the branches by many orders of magnitude. This is not the English Civil War, where Parliament and the Monarchy were fairly evenly matched.
Not possible, there must be a constitutional amendment to give the president this power. The Republican Congress under Gingrich attempted to do this by law in mid 1990s, resulted in a SCOTUS ruling in Clinton vs City of New York which declared the law unconstitutional because the constitution explicitly states the president only has the binary choice to sign or veto a bill in full.
Not ideal, but there are two aspects of reality that must be pointed out: 1) The House and Senate have enough votes to override his veto, while there might be some political benefit to having Congress own the spending bill, until we start voting for a Congress that is willing to live within its means, this is not the hill to die on. This brings me to my second point. 2) Our economy is propped up by a monetary system under the Federal Reserve that requires near constant deficit spending to monetize the debt and keep the economy moving in a positive direction. If the president magically had the power to end deficit spending and bring our books back in the black the economy would stall and the election would be lost. Trump, from his past tweets has indicated that he may be willing to reform the monetary system and ditch the Federal Reserve System. Let’s see if he can accomplish that in a potential second term, then fiscal conservatism may be viable
Long story short, don’t get caught up on this short term set back. We should be pushing Congressional candidates that are willing to reform the Fed, act fiscally conservative and perhaps give the president a prerogative enjoyed by most governors, the constitutional power to make line item vetos on budget bills.
Is Steve Hilton jumping the shark? On Sunday’s show he claims DiGenova, Toensing and Solomon laundered (legitimized)fake news from a Ukrainian Oligarch. In the same breath he accuses Giuliani of enriching himself in Ukrainian business deals. Seems like a concerted effort to change the narrative.
It should be, the bureaucracy was created to take orders from the president regarding execution of policy written by congress. It’s only in recent history that Congress has seceded a great deal of it’s rule making power to the executive branch. This is the perfect storm of unaccountable government, rules are being made by bureaucrats who are unelected and unaccountable to the president—and by extension not accountable to the people. The bureaucracy needs to be accountable to the president and the only way is to have a political bureaucracy that comes in and leaves with an administration.
Radical idea here, revert the bureaucracy to the original patronage/spoils system. Remove any chance of a fifth column operating against the duly elected president’s policies. The constitution created the presidency as a unitary executive, the executive branch is literally embodied in one person, the president. Having a “professional civil service” that is untouchable (read: hard to fire) for insubordination thanks to congressional law and public sector collective bargaining contracts, is an unconstitutional usurpation of the power of the president.
Very true. That’s really the beauty of open source, you can always fork the project. Of course, the constant fractionalization of open source projects can take its toll. The BSD community is a case in point and this has relegated them to virtual obscurity and brain drain, despite amazing technical feats.