Give it a hundred years and no one will even remember this stuff… of course, it might be that they won’t be ALLOWED to remember this stuff by some draconian government, but then, we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
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It’s remarkable how much contempt the republicans have for democracy
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The oil reserve looks to me like an actually a good idea (and for peanuts in comparison with the war budget). One never knows what the future can bring, and having some important resources stocked aside for when Something Unpredicted happens can save one’s bacon.
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The strategic petroleum reserve can be used by politicians to manipulate domestic oil prices without any need to turn a profit or report to corporate accounting departments. It’s a bit of a moral hazard.
Building a national network of distributed methane production and use would be a better way to ensure resiliency of fuel and energy supplies. The USA has vast croplands, and two major pipelines already, and many of our cities are already gas-plumbed, and you can buy natgas refrigerators, stoves, furnaces and generators anywhere in the country. Methane can be produced from vegetative mass just about anywhere. It’s the easy road to US energy self-sufficiency and does not have the military vulnerability associated with centralized storage and with point power production facilities such as nuclear and coal plants.
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[quote=“L_Mariachi, post:14, topic:71008, full:true”]
Terrible idea that would give the President far too much power. How would a line-item veto be crafted to allow for vetoing items unrelated to the main bill while leaving relevant riders safe? How would relevance be defined?
[/quote]Actually, there is a simple way to allow a line-item veto without a Constitutional Amendment. You just define “line-item veto” to do the following:
- The current bill is vetoed.
- A new version of the bill, with no additions, only removals, is sent back to Congress. This version cannot be modified by Congress, but is considered pre-signed by the President, so if they approve of it, it becomes law without going back to the President.
3a) Both houses of Congress vote whether to accept the line-item’d bill.
3b) Both houses of Congress vote whether to overrule the veto.
There is some decision making to be done by Congress in 3a and 3b to decide what order is most fair. They can be done in either order, and there’s the question of if the House or Senate vote first, but those are minor.
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“version cannot be modified by Congress…” Yeah, you’re gonna need an Amendment for that.
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[quote=“L_Mariachi, post:26, topic:71008, full:true”]
“version cannot be modified by Congress…” Yeah, you’re gonna need an Amendment for that.
[/quote]No, you’re not going to need an Amendment - you’re missing the point.
The point of it is that the President already signed it in the current form he’s sending back - Congress has a take-it-or-leave it option on it at that point - they can vote through the modified already-signed bill, they can override the veto, or they can scrap it and start over (as is the case with a traditional veto). The reason they cannot change it as this point is that a bill has to be signed off by both houses of Congress and the President in the same form to become law. If Congress changed it at that point it would no longer be the bill the President signed, but something else. This is the exact reason why the line-item veto that got passed in Clinton’s day was ruled unconstitutional.
While it might be considered a reversal of the order of events for a bill to become law in the Presentment Clause, it would likely be considered to be valid within the spirit of the Clause, and could be considered akin to the conference committees that Congress itself already uses (but are absent from the Clause itself).
That’s effectively no different from what we have now. President announces that if he’s sent a bill with [onerous provision] in it he will veto, if it’s stripped out he will sign. Congress has the option of wasting time grandstanding (How many times have they voted to repeal the ACA now, 60? How many narrowly-averted government shutdowns?) or behaving as if they were adults.
Give it a hundred years of this nonsense and there will be no problem with remembering - we won’t exist as a species any longer. So sad, so short-sighted, so… naked monkey like.
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