Obama Is Giving Up Some Executive Power, and He’ll Still Get No Credit

[Igel]

111. It's an inane post.

It's a new constraint on part of the judiciary established under Carter.

Somebody will have to appoint the "public advocate" or whatever the duty is called. Perhaps Roberts. Perhaps the Executive. That should be entertaining.

That person will know the law. As do the judges. He will have precisely the information that the US government has. No more.

How effective is the person going to be? Your answer rests crucially on your assumption as to what the judges do. Do they just make sure all the boxes are checked? Or do they, since it's entirely at their discretion, evaluate how appropriate the request is?

This, keep in mind, is to be viewed in the light of what was said a decade back. No application is rejected because that would waste time--instead, you know what is needed to get an application approved and you make sure that you've met all the criteria needed in the past. Questionable applications aren't filed.

Of course, Obama's big "roll back" is words and nothing more. He doesn't have the authority to implement this. Just as it's a constraint on the judiciary, the initiative he's being credit for would have to lie with the legislative.

Now, it's been months. Did he think, at the time, given the deadlock in Congress and public opinion, that this proposal would be implemented? That depends on your level of cynicism. Because if you suspect he believed the proposal would just die, then he made a nice-sounding proposal that he knew would go nowhere.

What's truly sad is that this is the level of nitpicking argumentation that we have to descend to. The extent to which a probably meaningless proposal for the legislative branch to do something to constraint the judiciary is all that exceptional and nearly unprecendented in having the executive restrict its own powers.