The Examiner: Election Tracker

[Torie]

Hey Jas, now I "know" why I "hate" the main stream media! 

[Torie]

The so called executive orders if not rescinded one way or the other will generate a rash of litigation, I suspect.

[Torie]

The two faces of Spade, as it were.   This does strike me as even more efficacious  than Catholic confession for Catholics however. If you commit a crime, and they are after you, just deregister, and then re-register, and you are a different person, and good to go!  There is a silver lining in every cloud.

[Torie]

President Ebowed Gets Down to Business

In contrast to the Senate’s comatose state, President Ebowed has decided to cut them out of the loop and get on with a one man legislating mission, issuing no fewer than 7 executive orders in quick succession dealing with a range of issues from capital punishment to faith-based initiatives to asbestos to safe injection sites. As of yet the Senate (or indeed nobody at all) has made no response.

You will likely see an official response coming sometime around noon on July 4.

Is there a compendium of executive orders anywhere, or are they just buried in random posting threads?  If they are, I think we need to do what is required to invalidate all executive orders that are not properly archived on the Wiki Altlasia page. An government of effectively invisible regulations, is a government without transparency.

Edit:  I do see a few appear here. Is this a complete list? If so, the number has about doubled in the last two days or so.

[Torie]

Dear Jas:

The thing about the SoFA office, is that if one is unhappy with the nomination, one needs to posit an alternative. One can't replace someone with no one.

Putting that aside, in all candor, I was a bit unhappy myself with the nominee's deportment during the recent litigation involving himself, as he became a bit too defensive, and at one point characterizing our Supreme Court nominee as a "perjurer," or something along those lines. I expect a retraction of that, and an apology, before I can consider giving him my vote.

[Torie]

Letter to the Editor:

Dear Jas,


Just for the record, in response to Peter's letter, below is the comment to which I referred.

The lawsuit will be more about whether being deregistered invalidates the deregistrant as a valid candidate or not, giving when the effecting of the derigistration occurred. If you are interested in this legal stuff, the thread I think is really very good.

We've had issues like this before - it was always something like, "If I'm not a valid candidate while people are voting, but I am when I'd assume office, do votes for me count."  That's similar to this case, but we may not have court precedent on any of those.

On the other hand, the Attorney General could CLEARLY go after Sam for perjury for his 2nd statement.

[Torie]

Calling someone a liar, i.e.,  with an intent to deceive, I don't think is a trivial matter. It bothers me. We shall see how it plays out.  In my about 30,000 posts on the internet, I have never used that term as to any poster. Maybe it is just a little "tick" of mine.

[Torie]

Interesting now that Ernest has left the court with regards to election vs. appointment.

True.  Of course, someone has to bring a lawsuit first.

Probably someone will file a lawsuit over the enforceability of a law which only passed due to DWTL's vote. In the litigation, it could be that the Court will deem the prior order errant, and disregard it.

[Torie]

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You might have a standing issue Jas, if DWTL's vote were not the deciding vote in enacting a law (if his vote was decisive, then you could challenge the law). An interesting case would be where DWTL's vote was decisive in not enacting a law, as to standing. But hey, maybe the concept of standing does not obtain in Atlasia. Everybody can sue everybody, with abandon.

[Torie]

Fellow Senator CK, is the thrust of your opposition, that less populated regions will lose senators, or that the regions should exist as separate government entities for other reasons?  I think having regions as entities just over the rainbow should exist so that there can be discussions about the limits of federal power, and litigation, and all of that good stuff. We need to keep the court busy.

Senator Trondheim, do we care as to whether of not the regions are functional, so long as the federal trains run on time?  Is the concern that they drain energy away from the center, which has only a marginal amount in its own right? Or is the concern that it makes amending the Constitution too difficult? Is it just about having rotten boroughs? Or something else?

[Torie]

Is the delay associated with the regions due to not acting on Constitutional Amendments or what?

[Torie]

I wish to write a letter to the editor with a brief comment on our Supreme Court's most impressive decision in Jas v Inks.  There is one unfortunate paragraph in it I think which reads as follows:

"In other words, when the Presidency is vacant, whether by resignation, impeachment or conclusion of term, the executive power does not cease to exist; rather, no citizen may exercise the executive power.  Only when a citizen legitimately takes the oath as President, providing him the ability to discharge the powers and duties of the office, may the executive power of the Presidency be exercised."

The statement that "no citizen may exercise the executive power" when the office of the Presidency is vacant surely is not right. Rather (i) such power devolves to the Vice President in the first instance, and (ii) more to the point of the facts of the case, the cabinet officers continue to exercise their powers because, as the Court ruled, their terms do not end when the term of the office expires. In short, the exercise of the executive power is alive and well when the office of the President becomes vacant.

Indeed, the statement is wholly unnecessary, because the issue was not the vacancy of the President, but rather the issue of how and when the terms of office of cabinet members end.   In that regard, the Court could have avoided some of its complex and somewhat strained bridgework which may have led to this unfortunate conflation when it vested the use of the term "President" with two different meanings in various contexts, one meaning in effect being  the executive branch, and the other the actual person of the President, by simply noting that there is no specified ending date to the terms of Cabinet officers, and therefore, given the legal silence, both Constitutional and statutory, their terms continue indefinitely until death, resignation or removal by the President.

I note as an aside, that the above is  the protocol in the U.S. as to when cabinet members cease to hold office, after having looked it up. Sometimes, even in the law, the KISS principle has a certain merit. Terms without a specified end, never end absent a specified legal event that causes them to end, and the end of Presidential terms, or a change of the identity of the President, is not one of those specified ends.

Regards,

Senator Torie