@ThomBrady5 @LawyerDave1 Yeah, even Marbury v Madison was a big stretch/power grab by the judiciary, but people went along with it because the judiciary made an effort to be responsible for a long period, so it worked fairly well as a system. When it stops working....

The funny thing is, if you *actually* read the constitution, you come away wondering where the idea of judicial review comes from. And I think it's a fine idea!

US isn't a One Weird Trick system. If judges can repeatedly spam injunctions, and face no consequences when they eventually get overturned, the net effect is that judges end up controlling the executive's legitimate power. SCOTUS is sophisticated and will see through this sham.

@SCHIZO_FREQ stop weaponizing!

@lakesidelovely @JoshEakle If there isn't a limiting principle on the ability of new judges to come out of the woodwork with new such orders every 1-2 weeks, the orders aren't actually temporary.

@woke8yearold @odinsbadeye Agree that you can't wish that spend away. My explicit expectation is that there will be large amounts of actual fraud inside those systems, because they are so politically untouchable that the incentive to use them to launder fraud is really high.

@woke8yearold @odinsbadeye People who haven't seen mis-run orgs usually underestimate how bad spend can get when unaudited AND used for self-dealing/political coalition building.

@odinsbadeye @JHWeissmann It's particularly good because they'll just flip back to "the judiciary is illegitimate and we need 79 Supreme Court Justices" as soon as USC smacks this silliness down.

@lakesidelovely @JoshEakle "High-level political appointee" is not a constitutionally valid distinction that would let the judiciary dictate the internal comms flows of the executive branch.

There are probably examples of organizations saying "You're Going to Kill All the Children and Babies and Grandmoms if You Audit Me", and then things turning out to be totally financially normal in that organization, but they're not super common.

@ArmandDoma "I'd like to audit some spending, and cut the more ridiculous parts of it" "YOU'RE BLOWING UP MY HOUSE WITH YOUR WHOLE FAMILY INSIDE TO MAKE SURE I DIE"

RT @TimGalebach: @JoshEakle Judges are trying to micromanage which exec agency employees are allowed to perform which functions. This is a…

It is impossible to cut spending, because it's mostly entitlements + defense. We shouldn't audit entitlement+defense spending, because it's obviously totally fine. Why do you want to audit entitlement+defense spending? Are you *unsophisticated*? I am very smart.

@QuasLacrimas Exactly. The graft used to be spread around much, much more evenly, which was why DoD cuts were always politically infeasible. Those numbers are still large in absolute terms, but the blue metropolis graft metastasized so rapidly that it's now dwarfed in relative ones.

If the spend on popular programs has massive amounts of waste and fraud, there is a very strong chance it can be real, for some value of "cut taxes" that is above "no more income tax at all." The only question (an empirical one) is "what % of entitlement/defense spending is waste/fraud?" At a high enough %, you very much can keep the programs while cutting taxes and balancing the budget. The insane overreaction of the system to ANY audits, and the amount of unnecessary spend found any time an audit of any of these systems happens, suggests that the waste % is much, much higher than "sophisticated" people claim.

I mean, "muscular, lean administrative state" is great in theory. In practice, "lean" means cutting. As soon as they touched ANY form of spend, it would squeal and call them a bad person, and they'd back off.