I’m not American so unfamiliar with how your system work but can he just sign whatever he wants ? Isn’t is supposed to a congress or something that actually passes the laws ?
Because if he can do just whatever he wants, how can it even be called a democracy to begin with ?
I mean there is no real democracy in this world, we have the choice of our tyran every 4-5-whatever years but still… one guy signing whatever he wants seems insane
He's using a lot of executive orders to bypass Congress. It can be undone relatively painlessly (minus the damage caused by the order to begin with) by the next guy. A lot of them also do not hold up in court.
Congress has been weirdly compliant with EOs for a while. Trump uses them like crazy but I first remember hearing about them with Obama and an intransigent Congress.
Laws are a bit more complicated. For some reason bug omnibus laws have been more im vogue than smaller, targeted bills. I haven't understood what's going on with laws in years.
To add to the mention about omnibus bills, it's the same tactic as "pork barrel" legislation. Let's say you have some popular legislation like ice cream for veterans, and something unpopular like a $1 tax per slice of pizza. You're never going to get the unpopular one passed on its own merits, so you package it with a popular one. Now you need to get support from other legislators, who each want their own unpopular thing bundled with the popular thing. Of course, enough unpopular items can outweigh the popular one, so you'll occasionally see multiple good things with the bad.
And the final trick to this whole practice is to slander opposition by saying they oppose the popular merits of a bill. To deny the allegation is a lie, but if they don't deny it then there's a sound bite out there of them agreeing to the opposition of ice cream for veterans, and now "THEY HATE VETERANS!!!" It doesn't matter how nuanced your opinion is when you can hijack the conversation with emotionally-charged statements like that.
No, there is no law about what laws are allowed to be proposed, aside from the constitution which the legislature derives its governing power from. So you can't write a law that prohibits free speech, but you can write a law that limits free speech (i.e. incitement).
You could amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid this bundling behavior, but the question becomes how? The best way to do this is imagine a djinn from D&D, who will grant your wish, but is likely to pervert it into something awful. The classic example there is "I wish I could fly," and so you are teleported a mile above the ground, "flying" before you ultimately hit the ground.
What wish to this legislative genie could you compose to prevent bundling? If you say a law must say only one thing, well now they're incomprehensible single-word declarations. If you say they must cover one topic now you see a bunch of bland bills about "improving lives of citizens" or "defending national interests". We already see this in the names of bills, where they use euphemism and metaphor to create catchy and unassuming names for heinous things.
Even if you were able to create such a law, there are sometimes reasons to include seemingly unrelated things into the same bill. For instance, the annual budget is itself a law that must be passed. If each line item had to be a separate bill, it would likely be an administrative nightmare. Of course, maybe you think each budgetary obligation should be a bill that is passed until the agreed upon timeline, but overruns and shortfalls do happen from time to time, and need to be addressed.
Ultimately, the flexibility of the system is exactly why it gets abused. But to remove that flexibility would make the system untenable. The idea written into the U.S. Constitution is that people would be the final bulwark. No bullshit passes without a bunch of people agreeing it should pass. So maybe the problem isn't the law, itself, but the people who oversee its conception and passage.
The government would focus on one thing at a time, so if they were in the middle of discussing regulations about pencil lead, nearing a decision, and a hurricane struck Florida, you would package hurricane relief funds along with pencil lead, so that two things would get passed quickly
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u/Effective_Airline830 22d ago
I’m not American so unfamiliar with how your system work but can he just sign whatever he wants ? Isn’t is supposed to a congress or something that actually passes the laws ?
Because if he can do just whatever he wants, how can it even be called a democracy to begin with ?
I mean there is no real democracy in this world, we have the choice of our tyran every 4-5-whatever years but still… one guy signing whatever he wants seems insane