Discretionary Power Quotes
This is a major issue for the nation. How can the president be responsible if he is not informed? However, some argue that the President must have “plausibility deniability” so he can deceive foreign leaders without lying to them. The laws require that nothing may be withheld from the President but there are some in the agency including past directors who believe that they sometimes should lie to the President or withhold information when it is in the national interest—which of course only they judge without any checks and balances.
At that time a number of state legislatures all changed their state voting laws to require citizens who try to register to vote to have documentation of various kinds and or obtain special documentation. These were generally possessed by upper class and educated people but not in as large proportions by lower and working class people. To obtain the documents and register if things like original birth certificates were not possessed, the citizen had to lose much of a day’s work and travel some distance. The burden existed on most lower class people and especially the minorities. The courts nullified some of these discriminatory requirements for voter registration, but many were allowed. The rationale was to prevent voter fraud and yet there were almost no cases of voter fraud in the entire country. While the requirements were racially discriminatory, they were also socioeconomically discriminatory. By coincidence, or perhaps not, every state that added these requirements had a Republican controlled state legislature AND a Republican Governor. Despite the effort to suppress Obama and Democratic voters, the effort backfired. Minorities and especially Blacks were so outraged that Jim Crow voting suppression had returned that they made a huge effort to register and get out the vote and Blacks voted in a much larger proportion than historical and well over 90 percent voted for Obama who won the election handily.
The broad charter given Washington is a model that all American military commanders have envied since.
He had been specifically asked about the Federal Affordable Care Act—Obamacare, which he had opposed when it was debated.
Nixon was the ultimate pragmatist and used secrecy wherever he felt it might give him an advantage. His logic was that in the American system, the Judicial Branch was the only set of people who could pronounce something illegal. If the issue were secret, the judges could not see it, and therefore could never declare it illegal.
Without a Constitution and a body of Federal Law, it was unclear during the American Revolution what a soldier should d if given an order that conflicted with the law. At the WWII Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, “obeying orders” was not a defense if the orders were illegal and against humanity. American law and military regulations require that a member of the armed forces refuse to obey an illegal order.
California legislators do not have the kind of individual powers and discretion that other legislatures such as New York have. The result is that lobbyist and powerful special interests cannot assure a benefit if they invest in a legislator in California and the temptations in California are therefore less leading to less corruption.
