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FlaminPotato's Waterfall RSS

This personal waterfall shows you all of FlaminPotato's arguments, looking across every debate.

The President has executive privilege which gives him/her access to information that isn’t open to the public including Congress, this gives the president’s words more value than anyone in Congress. George W. Bush's Address to the Nation on the evening of the 2001 September 11 terrorist attacks, the speech that he gave wouldn't have the same impact and would've been easily forgotten if it was done by someone in Congress.

The President can pass Executive orders which have the same impact as laws and can be made without congressional action which makes Executive orders faster to make than actual laws. They use this often especially in a time of crisis or if the government is divided.

The President can bypass the War Powers Act of 1973 by using his/her inherent powers to send troops into combat without a formal declaration of war from congress. If Congress tries to cut the budget from the armed forces, the President can easily use his exposure to the public to discuss the issue and make Congress look bad thus discouraging them to do so. A constitutional scholar who retired last year after 40 years as an adviser to Congress even said "There's a long pattern of members going to court on War Powers cases...Ninety-five percent of the time, courts say, 'Thirty of you are saying the president violated the law, 30 others in an amicus brief are saying he didn't. We're not going to get involved,' " This proves that the War Powers Act is just a parchment barrier because it fails almost every time.

Even though it's true that congress controls the budget of the agencies using the Power of the Purse, it is still required for the president to approve the budget. The president can use this power to force Congress to compromise with what he/she wants. An example of this is when Trump refused to approve the budget because Congress wouldn't give him money to build the wall, this caused the government to shutdown which eventually made Congress do what he asked for.

The Bill of rights doesn’t limit the rights of the people, in fact it incidentally gives them rights to not be prosecuted for what the federal government deem as “treason or espionage” which is why they passed the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917 to limit the powers of the first amendment. This Act may have been made primarily to protect US intel from the enemies during war but it has been misused by the federal government a couple of times before. Three examples that I found was the prosecution or the attempt of prosecution of John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, and Edward Snowden, these men worked in the CIA or NSA and saw the dark side of the government. They were prosecuted for bringing light to the horrible and unconstitutional things that the government have been doing. This adds to my point that the Bill of rights is not unnecessary, I’ll even claim that it’s not enough to protect the people from what the federal government can do to us because even when we have the Bill of rights, the federal government will still have a way to do what they deem to be necessary as we can see from these whistleblowers.

Thank you, you just proved that the 10th amendment, which is part of the Bill of rights, protects the state government and the people from what the federal government can do to them using the "necessary and proper clause". Before the Bill of rights, the federal government can use this clause to do something outside the powers that you listed as long as it is deemed " necessary and proper" but the vague nature of this clause means that there's a highly probable chance that they can deem just about anything to be "necessary and proper" which is why the anti-feds wanted the Bill of Rights to be passed to prevent this from happening.

A single person in congress represents thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, this person can’t possibly know all the people he or she represents and the issues they deal with. It is stated in Brutus 1 that, “In a free republic, although all laws are derived from the consent of the people, yet the people do not declare their consent by themselves in person, but by representatives, chosen by them, who are supposed to know the minds of their constituents, and to be possessed of integrity to declare this mind”. This is a big problem especially to minority groups whos’ voices might not even reach the ones who are representing them.

You say that the Bill of rights is just a list that can be easily thrown away even though the federalist listed the things that they can do in the constitution then again ya'll can do stuff that aren't listed in there using the the necessary and proper clause.

FlaminPotato(10) Clarified
1 point

I think you meant that ya'll federalists want a republic type of government because you want to have few people who are educated to decide what to do in complex matters.

2 points

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2 points

The Bill of Rights was necessary to secure the rights of the people by limiting the power of the federal government over them. An abusable power in the constitution is the necessary and proper clause, the federal government can deem anything to be “necessary and proper” and get away with it. Another part of this clause that makes it abusable is that it doesn’t have to be written in the constitution for them to get what they want. One positive example of this is when the federal government was able to charter a national bank during the McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) case despite the constitution not mentioning any national bank. This was a beneficial way of using the necessary and proper clause but the fact that the federal government was able to do something outside their proposed jurisdiction means that they can also use this clause for tyrannical reasons and the constitution will not be able to limit that power.



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