> If the President gets elected promising to fire executive branch employees, then his doing so is literally democratic.
But it may not be legal, which is determined by the Constitution and laws set by Congress. People who are also elected democratically. Behaving in a manner counter to those laws is also fundamentally undemocratic, the President and the Executive are bound by those laws set by the representatives of the people.
The President is not a monarch or autocrat, he is not a king or dictator with the authority to do whatever he wants. He is empowered to act, but constrained in his actions by law.
> But it may not be legal, which is determined by the Constitution and laws set by Congress. People who are also elected democratically. Behaving in a manner counter to those laws is also fundamentally undemocratic, the President and the Executive are bound by those laws set by the representatives of the people.
The word "may" is important here. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will interpret the laws and the Constitution and decide whether this Presidential action is legal or not. Until they do, its (il)legality a matter of possibility, opinion and conjecture, not established fact.
And, given the ideological leanings of the current SCOTUS majority, it is entirely possible that they'll uphold this Presidential action, and either interpret away any apparent statutory violations, or rule those statutes unconstitutional in this respect. In which case, the answer will ultimately be, that it was legal all along.
Even assuming that’s true, violating some employment action notice laws is far less “anti-democratic” than the federal workforce declaring Resistance to the agenda of the elected government.
Yes, the President is constrained by law. But hiring and firing executive branch employees is also at the core of his constitutional power. And the President is the only constitutional actor that can do this job—Congress or the courts can’t hire and fire people.
> Sorry, can you be more specific as to what law is being broken?
At least in the case of the IG firings, he failed to comply with the 30 day notice required by law.
My point is actually broader than just the firings and dismissals. The elected President is not an elected autocrat. He doesn't get to do what he wants because "his doing so is literally democratic". He gets to act in a way that complies with the democratically set laws.
The president has carte blanche to create laws through executive order, nullifying the legislative branch.
The president has carte blanche to pardon Federal crimes, nullifying the judicial branch.
The president has sole command of the military. Going through Congress is a formality at best. If he says we're at war with Greenland tomorrow, we're at war with Greenland tomorrow.
And per SCOTUS, nothing the president does while in office in their official duties can be prosecuted as a crime.
And none of that "balance of powers" stuff means anything when party loyalty and loyalty to one person transcends the boundaries of office.
The president not be a monarch in theory, but in practice power has been accumulating in the executive branch for decades. The American people fundamentally fear and mistrust government, but they worship celebrities. They want to be ruled, if not by a king, by a CEO in chief.
Not everyone agrees on that: "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king" (The Knoxville Journal, 9 February 1896)
You have to understand that phrase in the context of the tripartite system of government. We do not have a system of “legal supremacy,” where the lawyers overseeing compliance with the law are effectively a fourth branch of government above all the other branches. The framers were very concerned about the “who watches the watchers” situation.
> If the President gets elected promising to fire executive branch employees, then his doing so is literally democratic.
You seem to think the President can do whatever he wants, in constrained by laws. Which may be true in this case, but because the laws aren’t being followed, not because they don’t exist.
What I think is that electing the president is the only way the constitution provides for democratic control of what’s become the largest and most powerful branch. And ensuring democratic responsiveness of the executive—a civil service that will diligently execute the agenda of whomever is elected President—is of overriding importance to the health of democracy.
A country where the same people are in charge regardless of who wins the election isn’t a democracy. And I think this shouldn’t be a partisan point, because the federal bureaucracy in the aggregate is like the worst parts of the Obama and Bush administrations mushed together.
I don’t know you, but I’m embarrassed on your behalf that you seem to support the idea that federal employees should bring their own ideologies to the workplace to frustrate the duly elected executive. It’s openly advocating a soft coup.
I love the whole “my guy did a coup so I’m going to call everything I don’t like a coup to minimize what he did” thing you’ve got going on. Tres chic. And in this case, it’s… the idea that federal employees don’t completely change everything every 4 years to assuage the ego of a moron who thinks he’s king.
Turns out the job of the President is to faithfully execute the laws. And the laws have a hell of a lot to say about how things get done in the government. It is solidly settled constitutional law that those laws have to be obeyed.
The President also doesn't get to enforce traffic laws by random summary executions... which is where the idiotic "unitary executive" nonsense would land you if you, you know, actually thought about it for more than 15 seconds.
> The President also doesn't get to enforce traffic laws by random summary executions
- Congress has not passed laws against traffic violations (well, except in D.C., federal land, etc.).
- Even when they have, they have not designated the punishment to be execution.
- Even if the violators are federal employees, the executive doesn't have the power to summarily punish their violations by anything worse than firing the employee, even under the unitary executive theory. The executive can't levy any criminal punishment on their own. (They have since FDR been able to levy civil penalties in certain cases, but rulings like SEC v. Jarkesy are limiting that power.)
So your hypothetical makes no sense, even under the broadest interpretation of the "unitary executive" theory. What Trump, Musk, and DOGE want to do is to make it as easy to fire and discipline the federal workforce as it is for a company executive to do the same to a company. We'll see how far it goes I suppose. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a federal civil service reform bill introduced soon to at least allow the executive to put any civil service employee on indefinite paid leave - that would allow Congress to set conditions on federal employment that don't prevent the executive branch from implementing its agenda.
