One thing we should understand about this - exexutive power has been flowing more and ,ore to the president because the congress has discovered that it’s too their advantage to talk a big game but not actually do something. They are perfectly happy to devolve power to the executive branch and the administrative state, because that way they can always evade blame when something doesn’t work.
If you want to talk about actual constitutional responsibilities, how about the responsibility for producing an actual budget each year? That responsibility is explicitly called out in the constitution, but it’s one Congress routinely evades, leading to a government run by continuing resolutions, making it harder for everyone connected with government to plan their businesses or their spending and saving.
Look, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, I would urge you not to portray that your opinion constitutes a fact for the purposes of ths forum.
Again: it isn’t a fully resolved question. Some may believe that the Senate has a dormant power to consider a Presidential request to withdraw from a treaty. Some may believe this is an unconstitutional power grab that undermines the role of the country’s top diplomat. That’s all fine.
The historical record indicates that there’s been all sorts of withdrawals from treaties: quite a few of them accomplished with both the legislative and executive branches weighing in. So why isn’t that the right way, I ask you?
The answer is, we don’t know for sure. And it won’t become clear until the legislative branch asserts itself to seek to prohibit a solely executive withdrawal, which is not a rediculous idea.
Thank you for that. I had seen it described as a constitutional requirement, supposedly under Article 1, that I never bothered to check. I just did, and it looks like that was wrong. It looks like most of the rules around the budgetary process came in partly i 1921, then again in 1974 under the Budgetary Control Act. So ignorance fought. Thank you.
However, it still looks like the process set into law in 1974 is largely broken.
In case the two of you didn’t notice, this is General Questions, and there’s a factual answer we’re trying to find here. Some other posters have done good work in finding that answer. Politicking does not help, and is not appropriate for this forum. This is an official Warning for both of you.
Yes, that system is broken. But it has been functionally replaced by the Budget Control Act and the biennial amendments to it. One could say dysfunctionally replaced and I wouldn’t argue.
I said that another poster’s assertion that the text of the treaty carried implications for the constitutional processes of state parties is not how it works. That is a fact.
Yes, the official announcement that was made yesterday (which went into effect today) was the start of the six month withdrawal period. In response, Russia officially announced that it was also beginning its six month withdrawal period today. So at this point, the treaty will cease to be in effect on August 2 unless both countries agreed to rescind their withdrawals.
It is worth mentioning that Andrew Johnson was impeached on exactly this point. Congress had passed and overridden a veto of a law making it illegal for the president to fire a cabinet officer without the agreement of the senate (Tenure of Office act) and he ignored it and was impeached for that. The failure to convict made the act a dead letter and most constitutional scholars seem to feel it was not constitutional. I don’t see the difference between that and withdrawing from a treaty. Of course, had Johnson been convicted, the entire subsequent history would have been different.
Of course the real issue in that situation was that Johnson was a southern Democrat who resisted reconstruction and wanted the south readmitted unconditionally.
My understanding was that there was a legal technicality involved. Some argued that the Tenure of Office Act shouldn’t have applied because it only bound the President who appointed the cabinet members. Edwin Stanton (the Secretary of War that Johnson fired) had been appointed by Lincoln.
Some people argue that Lincoln’s cabinet should have been considered automatically disbanded when Lincoln died (or would have been if he had left office at the end of his term) and that Johnson was free to nominate new member to what was now his cabinet, the same way that any incoming President was free to replace the previous President’s cabinet.
I think it’s more accurate to say Johnson also favored reconstruction but had a different idea of what direction it should go in. Both Johnson and the Republicans in Congress wanted to remove the pre-war Southern political leadership (the plantation class) from power. But Johnson wanted to put poor and working-class whites in power and keep black people out of power. The Republicans wanted to include black people in the new power structure and wanted to restrict people who had fought against the United States from taking power (which would have included most poor and working-class white Southerners).
Putting aside the moral issues, there were practical partisan concerns. Both sides knew that the poor and working-class whites were likely to vote Democratic and the blacks were likely to vote Republican. So both sides were trying to build up their own base while keeping the other side’s base disenfranchised.
