Look, there is a certain segment of this country that love him, he is a washed up TV star - unfortunately most of those people are too ignorant to realize that his policies will be screwing them directly. When he says...."No taxes on Overtime pay" it is because they are ELIMINATING the OT pay - no more time and a half.....ooops....what? DD
The way the federal bureaucracy is built is that you have agencies that were created by law passed by Congress (which also gets signed by the President) and given a mission by Congress. It is then headed by a bureaucrat appointed by the President but also confirmed by the Senate, and it's his job to execute on the mission defined in law by Congress. That's why Trump's promise to abolish the Department of Education, to take one example, actually would require an act of Congress to do properly. The federal bureaucracy is led by the President, but as in many things in our government, the power is divided between two branches of government. MAGA wants us to understand the nature of federal agencies completely differently. They'd like for us to think that federal agencies are completely within the domain of the Executive Branch and that the president should be able to make decisions on their work unilaterally. They want the President to set an agency's agenda, though that's actually already defined in law by Congress. They say stuff like there are 3 million workers who don't report to anyone, but they all report up to appointed and confirmed agency heads who are accountable for fulfilling that Congressionally defined mission. They say the President should be able to fire anyone, ignoring that doing so treads on some of Congress' authority. The implication regarding democracy is this. They would strip powers from Congress and give them wholly to the President. They would remove a check on Presidential authority. They would ignore law enacted by Congress. And they implicitly engage in this temporal shift where the democratically legitimate choices of past administrations and Congresses are recast as undemocratic because they have a lingering effect on the present. And they want to say that it is somehow 'more democratic' because the one guy who gains more control had won an election. Their understanding about democracy ends after the part where we vote for a President. They don't understand or appreciate how we vote for a Congress, how we pass laws, how we confirm appointments, how agencies pursue Congressional missions, how the powers of government are intentionally divided among branches and how each is meant to be a check and a balance on the others. They say, 'our guy won so now he should be able to do whatever he wants.'
Congress cannot (and should not) create bureaucratic ministries to do their lawmaking for them. They cannot outsource their Article 1 powers. That's not how The Constitution works. There are millions of pages of regulations that have the force of law, that we must comply with, and yet were never voted on by our elected representatives. And no matter who we elect, many/most of the nameless people making those rules remain in place! And there is no job more secure, no person more difficult to fire, than a federal government employee.
What you're complaining about here is the Chevron doctrine, where SCOTUS said where there was an administrative need for clarity and the law was silent, the agency could make a decision on how the law would be implemented subject to the normal process of proposed rulemaking, comments and stakeholder engagement, filings, and then final rulemakings followed by lawsuits, etc. Congress came to embrace that system because they couldn't think of every little thing implementation would require. And I don't see anything in the Constitution that says they cannot do so. There is no article that says Congress cannot so delegate to an agency. They would even insert a clause explicitly saying an agency could make such mandane decisions where the law was silent. But -- don't worry! -- SCOTUS threw that out anyway and now instead of unelected bureaucrats deciding, we'll have unelected judges decide. (As an aside, do you understand how ridiculous it is to ask Congress to foresee every issue that might come up in the implementation of the laws they pass? First, it's hard to tell the future. Second, they aren't subject matter experts (regulators are). Third, their time is too precious to waste on a long process of interacting with stakeholders to find a workable implementation of every law they pass. Fourth, the way the law interacts with society changes with time, recent events, evolution of industry, innovation, scientific discovery, and so on. If an unforeseen question crops up, they could pass another law to clarify the original law. But they have to get a majority in both chambers and get the president to sign. And, if they fail to do that, then no clarification on how to proceed will be forthcoming and the stakeholders waiting for the direction by Congress will... do what? So Congress can't really be relied upon to fully address implementation. Courts will have to be the ones to make decisions to bridge that gap. And they aren't any better suited to be the decisionmaker than an agency is.) And why shouldn't they remain? The agency is a creature of the law and its employees are trying to fulfill the mission given to them by the law. If you think they are doing their work the wrong way, there are two remedies you could pursue: (a) fire them, as you suggest, or (b) pass another law (you are suggesting, after all, that Congress take the time to do more legislating to avoid outsourcing their powers) that makes the mission more clear or more narrow so that the bureaucrats working it must pursue their goals the way Congress directs them. The first way pretends that an agency is answerable only to the president and that they should do whatever he tells them -- implicitly that it is the president who makes the law because it is up to him to decide how the law should be implemented. The latter way recognizes that agencies are created by Congress and are creatures of the law and that, while they report to the president, they are accountable for seeing the law implemented (as is, honestly, the President himself). This is, btw, why I say MAGA is fascist. I know that's an emotionally-laden term that short circuits people's brains and conversations. I'm not talking about gas chambers or whatever. Just the boring, pedantic stuff about separation of powers. Liberalism makes sure power is divided and that two branches are involved in every major facet of governance so they can be a check on one another. Fascism is the reaction to liberalism that wants to give much of the power to singular, popular leaders to be the embodiment of the people's will. It is the ultimate in majoritarian politics -- if you can win power you can do whatever you want. It always ends badly.
This guy in Oklahoma is a whackjob who refuses to answer the questions. https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/poli...er-video-trump-endorsed-bibles-intv-nr-digvid
https://nypost.com/2024/11/19/opinion/trump-keeping-the-left-on-defense-in-transition-and-beyond/ I expect this time — with both House and Senate more Trump-aligned than before — will be different. Expect to see quick votes on a national voter-ID and election-integrity bill, increased presidential authority over immigration, national handgun permit reciprocity, laws regulating or possibly criminalizing race and sex discrimination as part of DEI programs, and much more. Plus tax cuts, which should be easy, since the old-line GOP establishment always supports those. Again, fast and furious. It won’t all pass, of course, but much of it probably will — and the legislative fights will keep Democrats too busy to attack elsewhere. Given Trump’s deal-making style, some of these bills may even carve off key Democratic constituencies, encouraging division among his foes. If Republicans really want to turn up the temperature, they might even reintroduce Democratic bills filed this session to increase the size of the Supreme Court to 15 — something Democrats surely would have done had they won and controlled both houses. Sure, Chuck Schumer is talking bipartisanship and moderation now, but he wouldn’t be doing that if his side had won decisively. Meanwhile, of course, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can busy themselves slicing off chunks of the federal bureaucracy, much as Argentina’s Javier Milei has done, in a quest to save money and dig the federal government out of its deep financial hole. Properly managed, this effort will keep federal bureaucrats too busy trying to protect their own jobs to wage the kind of underground war they conducted against Trump throughout his first term.
