Every mainstream channel is telling us to vote, which is a distraction from a more important issue: We don't need a President!

submitted by discountmeat from self.conspiracy

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[–]BigFatRetard 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I think you don't realize what the executive is supposed to do.

None of those things you mentioned are the president's job. Congress declares war. Congress sets taxes. Congress passes budgets. Congress passes laws.

You're making the mistake the left often does of misattributing cause and effect. Congress passes all these things in law, the executive executes the laws.

There are some powers the president does have, but they're checks and balances, not direct powers. The president can veto bills passed with a simple majority. The president can use the the bully pulpit. The president can at a stretch decide how to execute laws passed by the Congress.

Sometimes Congress gives its rulemaking powers to the executive. For example, the doe makes regulations because the Congress gave them the ability to do so. Even in that case, however, the Congress created the law, and the executive is only executing it.

All this is how you end up with situations like Obama dramatically cutting spending because a republican Congress has the pursestrings, or Trump spending ridiculous amounts, because Congress was controlled in part by the Democrats.

[–]StillLessons 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What you write here is the letter of the law, but it does not reflect the reality of US foreign policy since 1970. A simple example: has Congress declared war to allow the US military to enter Syria? The justification used (I believe, though I could be corrected) would be the general War on Terror declaration back under Bush II, but there has never been any congressional debate that I have seen to discuss militarily occupying Syrian soil. The military - directed by the president - simply did it, and nobody questioned it. The idea that the US is operating under the framework of the law as written is a fiction. They use it when it is useful to them, and ignore it when it doesn't.