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Sure, it's an inherently fuzzy concept, but that hasn't mattered much until now.


I actually see this as an example of why the fuzziness should always matter. We may occasionally find good reason to take the risk, but we have a ton of this kind of fuzziness written into our countless laws and we have no real way to stop those in charge from deciding to misuse it.


The mechanism to stop it is to lean on the chickenshit Republican congress critters to impeach and convict the president who is using his discretionary powers to overtly loot for personal gain, attack our country (/me waves at the import blockade), and is already ignoring the check of the judiciary. It would be great if there were other methods of accountability, yes. But it's impossible to codify legal rules into perfect mechanically-executable formalities, and it's impossible to avoid the principle agent problem. Since you seem to be concerned about this problem, surely you are contacting your congressional representative and senators to express support for impeachment, right?


I live in a state where unfortunately my senator will absolutely never turn on Trump and impeach, those calls would be a waste of time.

I agree that holding people accountable today is important if and when laws are broken. But surely you can't just stop there. We don't need to codify legal rules perfectly, but acknowledging that we can't should lead to much more hesitation with the powers we allow and the sheer size of our legal codes.

Dealing with an immediate problem first makes sense. We would need to follow that up with overhauling our laws to better ensure this can't happen again. We're never going to do that though, solving the root cause is slow, tedious, and politically untenable.




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