Grokster Ian has a great line in a comment he left on “2024 Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Event: 2023-02-22 – Panel Discussion with Vivek and Drew Cline“; it’s actually repeated twice and written differently.
We REPUBLICANS here in NH, now that the Democrat National Committee has rejected NH Democrat Chair Ray Buckley and his cohort, still have the chance to thoroughly vet potential Presidential candidates. Using lines and questions gained from one SHOULD be used with others such as to be able to do A to B to C to…Z comparisons with those A-Z candidates. Emphasis mine:
A while ago, I stopped listening to what congressional candidates were saying about what they believe (or don’t), what they will do (or won’t), and so on, unless they would answer one question first: Watch The Swamp, and then explain why you’re not going to end up the same as all those guys.
https://granitegrok.com/blo...
I agree with Vivek on some things and disagree with him on others, but none of it seems relevant to me until he answers this question: Trump came to Washington as an outsider, beholden to no one, and still he was blocked at every turn. What is your explanation for how that happened, and why won’t it happen to you?
In the end, nothing is going to change until there’s a President who will tell the Supreme Court that — contrary to what John Marshall and Charles Evans Hughes claimed — the judiciary doesn’t get to say that the Constitution means whatever they want it to.
We haven’t had one of those since Andrew Jackson said to John Marshall: You’ve made your decision, go ahead and enforce it. I was hoping Trump would do that. He seemed to have the necessary temperament, and he certainly had enough opportunities, but he caved every time.
Why should I believe that Vivek will be any different? When he says, ‘The Constitution tells me that I can do X’, and the Supreme Court says, ‘No, the Constitution says that you must do Y’, what will he do? If he doesn’t have a plan for that, none of his other plans matter at all, any more than Trump’s did.
He’s right – while being President is a very powerful position, it is still subject to push back, as Ian notes, by SCOTUS. Actually, should be as there have been executive actions taken by Biden that were blatantly unconstitutional and outside any passed Law – but he tried to get away with it anyways (pandemic eviction bans, for one example). Congress, too, wants its way as well.
The biggest issue that we saw with Trump wasn’t just with SCOTUS and Congress but mere Executive Branch employees with the attitude of “screw him, he’s a Republican – we’ll just wait him out as well as ignore him now”. Personnel IS Policy – or “non-policy” if you have the wrong employees.
So a secondary question should be in bolstering Ian’s question is this:
Ready to wind the clock back and make the “Civil Service” a political spoils system again to prevent this LARGE problem?
After all, you can’t execute the Laws if your subordinates won’t obey it or any Executive Orders you give out.
But back to Ian’s question; I generally ask ALL candidates a similar question:
Do you have an unofficial “kitchen cabinet”, a group of long time curmudgeonly friends to keep you on the straight and narrow and have NO problem in SCREAMING at you to get your act together?
I, too, have been convinced by the words of such candidates (successful one) that they’d stay “straight” only to watch them get co-opted, go swamp, and then deny they have (until years have passed and they look critically back on themselves).
