The point was that until the Senate acts it is indeed the reason and part of the overall point that it is still congress who has to act if the courts do not.
Incidentally a veto only underlines what me and others are saying, a super majority has to come with a reasonable beef against the president to get rid of this “intolerable” act of his.
Still, this whole habeas corpus thing is just the shot in the arm the McLellan campaign was hoping for!
When it is depending on obfuscation, once again, produce evidence that what the government reported on the problems are not the truth and that the justification for the delay is not a valid one. Other efforts are just spin.
Specifically, you started the thread by questioning (via the WSJ) the legality of the executive order, and you asked we proud, we few, we Straight Dopers how we would react in a not-quite analogous case under a hypothetical President Romney.
Now, you are apparently asking why Obama hasn’t signed a bill which hasn’t been presented to him to sign (probably for the same reason I haven’t consumed that bottle of scotch you haven’t sent me) and/or why he’s opposed to the bill which, if finally passed bicamerally would go beyond what the Administration perceives as appropriate (it would delay the individual mandate as well as the employer mandate). - And then in a subsequent post you directly quoted the White House response to that question as reported by The Hill.
OK, I’ll answer: because
There, does that get the ball over those posts?
It gets analyzed with first by stating a comment: what the hell are you talking about? The scenario has literally nothing to do with Bush. Congress authorized the war, so there is literally no conflict between Article I and Article II powers.
Are you next going to posit some ax-grinding OP in which a Democratic President is pilloried for ACTUALLY carrying out a law that you don’t care that much for?
I’m afraid that I don’t know who you are referencing here, because is certainly isn’t me. I don’t believe it is what Donald Rump, xenophon41, or Gadarene stated, either. If anything, you have been the leading voice in this thread for an argument which is unfortunately partisan and totally devoid of reason: “If Democrats do it, it’s bad. Which then justifies Republicans doing that same bad thing, but making it good in the process.”
Look at your whole line of argument here, from the article in the OP until now: Lincoln (a Republican!) suspended a law the right way. What Obama is doing is terrible and he’s doing it the wrong way. But if Romney did the same thing under totally different circumstances, that must be justified because Obama did something that may or may not be different. Sure, the language making the point is dressed up with a lot of $64 words, but you strip that away and it’s nothing but right-wing talk radio nonsense that’s better suited for not-very distinguished thinkers like Sean Hannity.
First of all, the primary example I have used to explain why I think that Presidents should not be forced to follow a statutory deadline in the face of practical consequences rather than political views has been the non-partisan issue of space travel, so I feel confident that your cries of political partisanship of “only Democrat Presidents have special powers” can be safely excluded from my comments.
But let’s say the hypothetical President Romney and the GOP Congress got the votes together to pass the “Mandatory School Voucher and Legal Citation Education Program of 2019.” That bill fully embraces the elimination of the public school system in the United States and provides Ronald Reagan Freedom Dream and Religious Education Scholarship Grants for every schoolchild in America to attend parochial schools. What’s more, the law requires every schoolchild to receive special training in Lexis-Nexis searches beginning in the third grade, so that every dispute, debate, or even witty exchange could be fully sourced and cited to Supreme Court cases. I’m sure there are plenty of Republicans around the country who would find it to be a glorious piece of legislation, and it might be one of the crowning achievements of the Romney presidency.
Lo and behold, with the bill being passed so late in Romney’s first term, there’s a problem with implementation. Turns out that the watermark showing Reagan’s face on each voucher check is making the Great Communicator look more like Woody from Toy Story; and wouldn’t you know, Lexis-Nexis doesn’t have the computing resources to accept millions of new children as users of their databases. The implementation deadline of July 1, 2020, simply can’t be met. The President says an extra year is needed to make sure that this program is actually implemented as Congress intended.
I’m fine with that. President Romney is working to fulfill the law as best as he can, and barring any new revelations about his intent, it seems reasonable that the Chief Executive simply cannot snap his fingers to make situations beyond his immediate control such that the law will be implemented by a statutory deadline, but it seems that with a little extra time, the will of Congress will be carried out.
But, on January 20, 2021, President Howard Dean is inaugurated. He, like me, doesn’t like this law. He knows full well that the program is constitutional (for the Roberts court has already ruled on it), but he just doesn’t think it’s good public policy. He wants to delay implementation because he doesn’t like the law. In my view, he is not upholding his oath of office, and I believe his actions to be illegal.
To put it simply: President Romney would be acting like a responsible program manager who just simply can’t cope with the deadline that has been handed to him, but he’s acting fairly. President Dean would be acting like a dictator.
I would source my opinions to Supreme Court cases, but alas, it is only a fictional bill and I haven’t had the benefit of the Ronald Reagan Freedom Scholarship to establish the legal precedents that would make my opinion legitimate. Plus, I apologize in advance for the extreme partisanship I’ve argued for in this post, as I’m sure by staunch Democratic leanings are seeping through every word of my post.
I have regrettably missed your space travel comments, but I suspect, based on the remaining portion of the post I’m replying to, that I’d agree with them completely.
OK. So far, so good.
And here, the problem… wait, what?
Look, you have answered clearly, concisely, reasonably, and completely every point I’ve made. So as it happens, I have nothing to say to you except thanks for answering.
OK, one other thing. I don’t think your opinions are shared by the other responders to this thread.
<golf clap> for Ravenman.
Seriously, Bricker, I doubt you’ll find anyone who’s so far argued in this thread for the legality of Obama’s reporting delay who actually disagrees with Ravenman about the relative legalities of the delays by hypothetical President Romney and his hypothetical successor President Dean.
ETA: To be specific ( 
), I agree completely that in Ravenman’s scenario, Romney’s actions are in good faith and Dean’s are not. While I would be opposed to the hypothetical law, I can’t accept that kind of executive nullification. But my point has been that that’s not at all what Obama’s doing in this case.
Not a problem for me. I agree with Ravenman, once again you really do not even have a clue on how you are misrepresenting what we are saying.
Ok, I accept that.
I’m trying to put my mental finger on why I was so convinced that the answers would come out differently, and I think there are a couple of pieces of evidence that nudged me towards that conclusion.
One is the general acceptance of California’s approach on Prop 8 – they refused to defend it. So I guess I could tweak the Romney/Dean hypo as I started to ask a couple of pages ago: what if the issue were President Romney’s defense of the Mandatory School Voucher and Legal Citation Education Program of 2019?
In your hypo, the Court has already blessed it. But what if we explore this question – the law gets challenged, Romney’s administration defends it, and then Dean’s administration comes into power and stops defending it in court?
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a tougher question, Bricker, although it is a fair one. I honestly don’t know that a Dept. of Justice can just stop defending an extant case that’s being adjudicated, can they?
But let’s say under Romney the law has been ruled in error some way by a lesser court and then Pres. Dean is sworn in and instructs the AG (either his newly confirmed nominee or the existing Romney era guy) not to appeal that decision. I think this is probably not improper. Same answer if PPACA had not already been upheld in SCOTUS and a 2017 administration decided not to defend it. Then I think it bounces back to Congress to fix or scrap the law per the specific judgement.
Same with selective prosecution, I think. I recall that the Bush administration had definite political priorities in the selection of cases to prosecute. I recall many of their choices infuriating those of my political stripe, but I don’t believe that was ever seriously considered unconstitutional discretion.
I think that since its Obama’s law, he should get to do what he wants. Plus he’s a Democrat and Dems can generally be trusted.
As a general proposition, I do think that any Chief Executive is put in a no-win situation when he/she has serious reservations about the constitutionality (as opposed to the general wisdom) of a law. On one hand, the Executive clearly has the responsibility to defend the laws it is required to carry out, but on the other hand, do we want an Executive Branch that is so robotic, or so devoid of judgment, that it is obligated to carry out a defense of a law that is plainly unconstitutional? (I’m not talking about Prop 8 specifically, but any law that would violate civil liberties… which I think Prop 8 clearly does!)
I can’t even begin to draw out principles for how government should deal with those quandaries… except that the Prop 8 situation is another example in my increasingly lengthy screed on why direct democracy through voter referendums is generally a bad and harmful idea.
They retain the judgment about how vigorously to do it. Would it be satisfactory if they just had some junior attorney go to court with some reluctant, half-assed, surrender document of a brief, and answer all questions with “Yeah, whatever, Your Honor”? I’d actually have preferred that, if only for the entertainment value.
On a related note, Eric Holder recently announced that he would effectively oveturn laws mandating minimum sentences for certain drug offences by directing prosecutors to not prosecute for any such crimes. (Specifically, they are not to mention the amount of drugs in the defendent’s possession, as this would trigger mandatory sentences.) How Eric Holder Reformed Mandatory Minimums
Also, Obama is avoiding the law requiring the US to cut off aid to Egypt in the aftermath of a military coup by pretending that the military coup was not actually a military coup.
Understandable goals to be sure, in both cases, but they make you wonder about the rule of law in this country.
[ISTM to be part of a broader pattern with this administration. ISTR that Bricker himself once started a previous thread on this subject.]
Ultimately the problem is that, unlike Bricker, most people don’t care as much about legal nitty gritty as they are about practical results. So as long as a president has enough support such that he is not acting in the face of overwhelming opposition, he can pretty much do whatever he wants along these lines. Especially as standing to challenge his actions in court is hard to come by for the most part.
What that ultimately boils down to is that we are not as removed from mob rule as we might think. But considering human history, that’s not so surprising.
Off topic, but I sometimes think that George Bush the elder sent attorneys to the Supreme Court to argue abortion issues in very much that way. “Go and argue the ideological point that my party maintains…and, say, don’t try too hard to win.”
I am familiar with the system in AUS, where ‘that which is to be done’ is spelled out fairly specifically in law. When I compare that to the Obamacare legislation, it is striking how much is actually left up to the administration to decide and implement.
Specifically, there really is not very much in there about when and how the penalties are to be implemented.
In fact, on my naive reading of the law, as passed by the legislature, it does seem that they have left the implementation of the penalties up to the executive, and if Obama and his cabinet want to implement that later, it certainly looks to me as if that is the law he was given.
It’s been a little while since I tried to read it. Comments from other people who have read it more recently are welcome.
Abraham Lincoln would have been a Socialist, if he had lived long enough for the word to have meaning in American politics, and you know it precious well.