Disclaimer: I am not a constitutional scholar, but I still harbor a quaint belief in the rule of law and stuff.
I don't see how Musk can operate in his current role without Senate confirmation. The appointments clause requires any principal officer of the United States (who exercises "significant authority") to be confirmed first. And if locking agency heads out of their own systems isn't "significant authority", I don't know what could be.
Sigh.
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I know there's probably little in practice that can be done about this, given the state of congress and the courts right now. And, yes, this is perhaps not the most outrageous of the many assaults against norms and values being committed right now.
But it's an example of how the damage being done goes beyond merely just bad policies, and involves foundational democratic institutions being dismantled.
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Why does the appointments clause matter? Because other than the president (and, sort of, the VP), there are no other elected officials in our largest branch of government. The ONLY granular control we have of the individuals running agencies and carrying out our laws and policies is through the senate confirmation (and impeachment) process. It can be something of a rubber stamp (when the president and senate are of the same party), but it's all we've got, and at least provides some transparency.
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It's notable and concerning - separate and apart from whatever policies he's advancing - that we have no real idea what Musk and his "Department of Government Efficiency" are actually responsible for or what the limits of its authority are supposed to be. Congress wasn't involved in its creation, and Musk was installed in his position without Senate confirmation. Yet he appears to have broad authority over several agencies (whose leaders are required to be Senate confirmed).
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Congress (and especially the Senate) historically has been pretty steadfast in guarding its authority in this regard, even with presidents of the same party and agenda. Their passivity about this right now is extremely conspicuous.
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@mattblaze It's a coup. Things appear to be beyond any principles of law or anything else.
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@Nonya_Bidniss It's really distressing. Not only are the policies bad, our institutions are failing.
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@mattblaze I've worked through several administrations. Never really had much to say about any of them. These policies are beyond policy. But the institutions failing, that's the killer.
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@mattblaze @Nonya_Bidniss Would it be out of line to add here how distressing it is that critical gov't IT infrastructure is being hijacked by clueless yahoos w/ a track record of disregard for best practices?
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@mattblaze @Nonya_Bidniss They are not failing. They work as they were intended.
USA always, always relied on good will of those in power. Because rich people did not want to limit themselves. They thought they are above.
All it took to corrupt people buy everything possible to get in.
It is fundamentally broken design and we see natural conclusion.
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@mattblaze In theory, what is supposed to stop this from happening?
They didn't cover this situation in School House Rock.
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@maj @mattblaze fear of prison.
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@weyoun6 @mattblaze But, I mean, who would stop it and/or prosecute? If, like, the government were functioning as designed?
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@maj @mattblaze the DOJ.
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@weyoun6 @mattblaze That seems like a tiny bit of a fatal flaw if the people they are supposed to oversee can infiltrate and/or fire them?
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@maj @mattblaze the US Constitution is a poor design for a government.
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@maj In theory, as soon as the president proposes it the folk around him are supposed to say "wtf, dude, you can't do that" and he's supposed to go "oh shit I can't? damn" and stop.
Or the opposition is supposed to rail and the press is supposed to run non-stop headlines and people are supposed to file legal challenges and the court is supposed to go "no, quit it" and everyone is supposed to quit it.
But if everyone just lets the law be broken then 🤷 :dumpster_fire:
@mattblaze
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@zeborah @maj @mattblaze Accurate
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@maj
😆
@mattblaze
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@mattblaze Must be a good time to own a bar in DuPont Circle?
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@mattblaze I’ve been shocked just how simple it was to dismantle all of this. All you needed was one deranged hypnoclown.
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@KanaMauna @mattblaze Not really, you also need a congress full of enablers.
And a bought Supreme Court doesn’t hurt either.
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@drahardja @KanaMauna @mattblaze US institutions have never been very good from a democratic point of view (presidential pardon is in its principle a very undemocratic feature for instance), but it's still extremely worrying to see how easy it is to basically ignore the rule of law without resistance..
Every single person, from the tech giant to the ambassador of the UK, who bows unnecessarily to him gives him more power. Resistance is needed now. In two years time, it may be too late
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@tomtom @drahardja @mattblaze
I work for a local government and whenever we had to deal with the Feds, they always seemed extremely inflexible and rule-bound. Turns out that power was more important to the hierarchy than their mission. Really disappointing.
I am afraid there is no going back, not for a long time. The Repugs are never going to willingly relinquish power and follow the old norms. And if the Democrats ever get back in they will need to be absolutely ruthless. This all sucks.
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@KanaMauna @mattblaze This took 60 years of effort starting after the Civil Rights Act. 60 years of concerted effort after every electoral defeat, after every legal defeat, in the face of changing public opinion. It’s why this is a blitz of shock and awe. If they didn’t act fast and flood the zone with shit like Greenland to distract initially, it would be relatively easy to derail the effort…just like it was in that dumpster fire of human garbage’s first term.
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@randywidell @KanaMauna @mattblaze Also, good choice of words, 'blitz of shock and awe'. One parallel to blitzkreig is the illusion of the invincible, inexhaustible German army. In reality, they had been preparing railroads and transportation lines for years, when they had to start to work uphill in Russia, the illusion died.
Likewise, this current 'blitz' has years of preparation and planning behind it, that's how they can do so much so fast. Their efficiency won't last far beyond that.
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@KanaMauna @mattblaze Unfortunately, now that they broke through, it’s going to be very difficult to fix. You don’t put judges in place willing to declare the president criminally immune if you don’t think you can control who gets to that position. They’re thinking that far ahead. Democrats never operated that way. Democrats always saw single electoral victories or single legal victories as the end of the story.
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@randywidell @mattblaze
The Democrat voters are even worse. They don't even show up every election.
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@mattblaze
I did turn a letter into my representative accusing musk running a coup attempt.
Maybe I should go for the senators and point out how he's exercising excessive power without their confirmation.
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@mattblaze This is fascism. There is no rule of law. There is only pure power politics.
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@mattblaze This is all Trump's revenge for 2020 and being dragged into court to be held accountable.
He's taking out petty revenge on a disturbing scale.
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@mos_8502 @mattblaze As soon as Musk and his TechMAGAs are done with Trump, he and his family will be fed to the wolves. The only problem is that Putin or Jinping (or both) will be ready to step in and take real control of the situation. World War Three will be over quickly after that. #HappyStoryFuntime
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@Dawilson999 @mattblaze Xi Jinping would be an upgrade.
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@mattblaze
Observing from the outside, it's been driving me nuts, too. The USA has constitutional law, statute law, regulations, procedures, norms against so much of what your new administration has been doing for the last two weeks.
And ... no one's doing anything about it. You may as well not have any prohibitions on any of it at all -- if you don't enforce the laws, they're not laws. If a tree falls in the forest, etc, etc.
Musk's monkeying with the money machinery is just the latest example - clearly exceeding any legal authority he might have, and ... crickets. The Democrats aren't even making a peep about most of this stuff.
Between the "stupid evil" nature of the threat and the existing systems, I thought that it would at least slow them down some, but it's like no one's even trying. I'm no longer confident that any significant remnant of the US experiment will exist in four years.
[#]pessimism #observer #USPol #law
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@cazabon @mattblaze
Well, the past year has shown us that the supposed "rules-based international order" is just an awful joke. Same goes for the rest.
The wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet have been undermining every democratic institution-- and our "democracy" was pretty damn flawed to begin with, established as it was by genocidal, ecocidal, white supremacist slavers.
This is finally the transition to corporate feudalism.
For a long while now, the sovereignty of nations has been largely decorative. Even the facade is crumbling now, turning ugly and slow and broken, but still lingering-- the collapsing system will trap ordinary people in a tangled and spastic mass of bureaucratic wreckage, while those with wealth and connections buy themselves tickets to the rareified heights where they can get what they want.
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@violetmadder @cazabon @mattblaze They keep throwing out distraction bits about AIs taking over.
Well, they were talking about themselves as Ogliarchs are the actual AI overlords doing all the things that's been telegraphed.
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@ShrikeTron @cazabon @mattblaze
Mindless, soulless, shit-blathering automatons replacing everything human? Sounds about right.
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@violetmadder @cazabon @mattblaze Also, same inhuman bastards take over government & vital systems, start wars with other countries, and meanwhile corralling humans into little hopeless death boxes. Also, cancelling health insurance.
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@ShrikeTron @violetmadder @cazabon @mattblaze
They have motivated reasoning to cultivate something between a con and their own cult. The group think is to their advantage. They assert that AGI is inevitable, and the first to achieve it will rule the world.
It’s perfect legitimization for them to grab every resource possible pursuing this windmill. The application the data centers are good at is surveillance..
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@violetmadder @cazabon @mattblaze
While I agree generally, this is a very USA-centric view. The Nordic countries are not perfect, but they're light years more advanced than the USA. Brazil is currently prosecuting Bolsanero for what Trump tried in 2020. Etc. Democracy is under attack and the Americans have gone from friend of democracy* to enemy of all.
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@Greengordon @cazabon @mattblaze
The social safety nets in all those places, even the most functional and successful ones, are being dismantled a piece at a time, up against the same neoliberal playbook that's made the US what it is. They may not be as far down this pit yet, but they're on the same trajectory.
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@violetmadder @cazabon @mattblaze
And I want to point out that the wealth of most of the billionaires now is intimately related to their data centers. And it’s intimately related to the stock market.
I thought we just have to deal with ecological and health poly crisis from climate change, but this business plot 2.0 has added a new layer of political poly crisis.
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@violetmadder @cazabon @mattblaze
In several discussions (in RL) I used to call it neo-feudalism but meant the same: Big corporates taking over the role of nobility and higher clergy (e. g. paying little to no tax), while the normal folks pay it all, like former salt taxes equivalent nowadays VAT. 🤷🏼♂️ 🤬
It's time again:
Peace to the huts, war to the palaces!
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@stiefel_fan @cazabon @mattblaze
As capitalism tilts the playing field until everyone slides into oblivion except the oligarchs, regulatory capture is inevitable. Wealth becomes a vote multiplier that overrides democracy, and then we're just left at the mercy of massive mafias/cartels. Same old aristocracy, only now instead of ruling by divine virtue of their bloodlines, they rule by divine virtue of their bank accounts.
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@cazabon
I understand that constitutional law says "after a coup, all this is waste paper"
@mattblaze @breadandcircuses
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@cazabon @mattblaze
Selective enforcement has been the problem for decades. We talk a good game, but we've always been a tiered society.
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@mattblaze of course drop a line to your folks in Congress.
There's a line on the senate website that says something about jealously guarding the advise and consent power. That applies to all members.
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@mattblaze I would also say your point matters because there’s a real absence of discourse from either party about the practical question of what democracy needs to function as an efficient representative of citizenry, despite polls indicating a widespread and bipartisan reduction of confidence in that very system.
Like, why isn’t “how do we make the system do what voters want, but in a sane way” not a bipartisan goal?
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@mattblaze the rule of law is a rear guard action now.
Two aircrashes in as many days?
Taking down air safety boards the day before?
The forest is burning and the smell is omnipresent.
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@mattblaze It's nothing like the current insanity, of course, but even in earlier administrations, I was kind of creeped out at how nominal staffers with no Senate confirmation, and titles like "National Security Advisor" or "Chief of Staff", were at least the coequals of Senate-confirmed Cabinet officers. Which has kinda been a thing since the 1970s (Zbigniew Brzezinski under Carter).
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@mattblaze I feel like everybody (including in the Senate) has drunk the “Trump has a massive mandate” kool aid, and this is one of the downstream things of that (like Hegseth getting in too)
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@mattblaze It makes one wonder just how far that passivity goes. Or, more importantly, how far it could be pushed.
With how Congress protects its authority as my only experience, I’ve never quite understood why the Reichstag fire worked. I fear it’s starting to make sense. A loyal core, an unusually passive body, and then an excuse. It’s scary to think about.
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@mattblaze So many older people refused to believe that Trump was what he was. And they still won't, because the Media is burying all of this.
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@foxxtrot @mattblaze it's not the entire media but substantially all the default information environment, Fox news and the like, talk radio, the algorithms, these are the easiest 'news' to access, even incidentally. They are full of malicious fabrications, and carefully curate out the true facts of the GOP vandalism on the commons and of Western democracy. You have to want the truth and then be able to find it under all that revolting muck. Too many would never bother...
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@mattblaze It’s a coup. It’s done. Law is irrelevant. Constitution is irrelevant. Courts are irrelevant. Senators and Congressmen are irrelevant. All the departmental documents have been re-written, the heads of departments fired, the staff removed and probably fired also. Republicans don’t seem to quite see or understand this yet - maybe this is what they expected. I think it’s way beyond what they expected though. Everyone is about to find out what it’s like to have no money, no home, no food, no medicines, no healthcare, no education, and what is available will cost a fortune.
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@HarriettMB @mattblaze it really is a coup from where we are sitting. They're getting away with it too, because of the audacity. America refuses to believe it.
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@Lazarou @mattblaze I think the American public will know personally, each and every one of them within the next two weeks exactly how bad this POTUS is. He won’t accept blame though. His presser Karoline Levitt said yesterday ‘Jesus was fine without electricity’ in reply to questions about tarriffs. The billionaires won’t care; but they may have no staff very soon.
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@HarriettMB @mattblaze "my god, he doesn't care about us at all, my god..."
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@Lazarou @mattblaze Sam Altman just announced an agreement/deal between his Open AI and the US govt for nuclear security stuff…. What could possibly go wrong? ☠️
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@HarriettMB @mattblaze didn't he hear? You don't need huge data centres any more, you don't need massively inefficient systems to make this crap.
Didn't Sam get the message?
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@Lazarou @mattblaze He’s certainly getting the money - even though money won’t do shit, when the whole world melts in a nuclear explosion.
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