This exactly. It's like everyone is assuming whatever ICE ordered Google to do was completely lawful. Even if this administration was a tightly run ship, when an agency gets a massive funding increase and daily quotas to hit like ICE did, all bets are off and you should never give them the benefit of the doubt. Obviously when the DHS secretary is calling American protesters domestic terrorists, cosplaying as a cop, and spending $200M+ on ads that feature herself, then you definitely give maximum scrutiny to everything that agency is doing/did.
> First, numerous other individuals have challenged recent administrative
subpoenas in court after receiving notice, and the Department of Homeland Security has withdrawn those subpoenas before reaching a court decision.
They don't want a ruling against them.
> [The subpoena would have been quashed because] there are facial deficiencies in the subpoena, including that the subpoena is missing a “Title of Proceeding.”
I’m really hoping this leads to criminal convictions once these clowns are voted out of office.
Congress needs to retroactively eliminate the presidential pardon, or (more realistically) states need to pass laws allowing them to prosecute members of the federal government (the federal government already did this to the states; the result would be symmetric, and likely survive legal challenges.)
The underlying problem is that the presidency is just a non-hereditary elected monarch. If you make a "CEO of the military", you have made a king. We need to get rid of or neuter the presidency.
The reason why we have this defective executive structure is because the Founders wanted separation of powers and thought Parliaments were inherently corrupt. In a Parliament, the executive is fundamentally a creature of the legislature and cannot disobey it. The Founders wanted an independent executive that couldn't be overruled by normal legislative actions, because the executive is supposed to be calling out the legislature when they do a tyranny. And since that executive executes the law, they also need control over the military. Congratulations, you have made a king.
Separation of powers failed the moment America got a party system: why would a Republican Congress check the power of a Republican President? Likewise, the process for removing a rogue President is laughably difficult to execute. In almost every party system in America, impeachment and conviction would require a complete collapse of party support for their own President. This rarely happens, because Congress is reliant on the Presidency to send votes downballot[0]. Voters do not reward political traitors for saving the voter's asses.
So in my mind, the only ways to fix this would be to either:
1. Replace the President and Vice President with an Executive Council (ala the EU Commission) where there is one member per department and every member is a separate elected position.
2. Make impeachment convictions a 50% majority matter.
3. Abolish the executive branch entirely and have Congress elect its own to do executive functions (i.e. become a Parliament).
I can see problems with all three, but they seem less problematic than just letting one guy run everything with term limits as the only check on their power.
[0] In general, there is a problem with Congressional and local elections not getting as much attention as they should be. I've found that mail-in ballots actually make it a lot easier to vote downballot. Even if I don't recognize the name off the top of my head, I can look them up and have a decent idea of what I'm voting for. If you have to do this in a ballot box, you aren't going to have a lot of time (there's a lot of people behind you) and will just skip the downballot races.
