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607 points givemeethekeys | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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sgnelson ◴[] No.44992267[source]
Everyone is talking about "bailouts" and "owning a company that the government funds."

This isn't about that at all. This is about the breakdown of the rule of law, a unitary executive bypassing all other branches of government and demanding a private enterprise give itself over to the government.

If you don't think there was an "or else" as part of this deal, you're largely mistaken. If you don't think that there will be other questionalbe demands placed on Intel in the future from this government, you are largely mistaken.

But y'all go ahead and can keep arguing over whether we should "get something back" from this deal. Because that's really going to maker ameraica graet agian.

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rayiner ◴[] No.44992508[source]
Unfortunately, this ship sailed quite some time ago. For example, after the 2008 financial crisis, the Senate rejected a proposed bailout of GM. But Bush approved it anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_2008%E2%80%9320...

> However, it had been argued that the Treasury lacked the statutory authority to direct TARP funds to the automakers, since TARP is limited to "financial institutions" under Section 102 of the TARP. It was also argued that providing TARP funds to automaker's financing operations, such as GMAC, runs counter to the intent of Congress for limiting TARP funds to true "financial institutions".[79] On December 19, 2008, President Bush used his executive authority to declare that TARP funds may be spent on any program he personally deems necessary to avert the financial crisis, and declared Section 102 to be nonbinding.

Also, “unitary executive” doesn’t mean overriding other branches. It just means that whatever powers the executive branch does or does not have are exercised by the President, just like the 535 members of Congress exercise all the powers of Congress, and the 9 Justices exercise all of the powers of the Supreme Court. It means that executive branch employees don’t have independent powers, just as House staffers and Supreme Court law clerks don’t have independent powers.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._70 (“Federalist No. 70 emphasizes the unitary structure of the executive. The strong executive must be unitary, Hamilton says, because ‘unity is conducive to energy...[d]ecision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number.’”).

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anon84873628 ◴[] No.44993153[source]
>Also, “unitary executive” doesn’t mean overriding other branches

I feel we're headed for a No True Scotsman fallacy. The Trump Regime and Roberts court endorse the unitary executive theory, and they are happily overriding Article 1 powers and violating laws like the Administrative Procedures Act based on this theory's farcical and ahistorical logic.

If the theory wasn't giving him more power (like firing non-political appointees without cause or withholding funds appropriated by Congress) he wouldn't be using it.

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1. rayiner ◴[] No.44993681{3}[source]
The "unitary executive theory" is just a pejorative label for Article II, Section 1, Clause 1: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." Alexander Hamilton talks about it in Federalist 70: "I rarely met with an intelligent man from any of the States, who did not admit, as the result of experience, that the UNITY of the executive of this State was one of the best of the distinguishing features of our constitution." (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp).

Nobody called it a "theory" until FDR appointees ginned up a fourth branch of government in the 20th century. Then, they needed a label for what actually existed in the constitution to distinguish it from the shit they just made up. But most of the people who use the phrase "unitary executive theory" also think "emanations from penumbras" is constitutional law...

Also, the APA doesn't apply to the President, and it wouldn't be constitutional for it to do so.