Jophiel wrote:
LockeColeMA wrote:
Are there laws to fire people for not doing their job? Ties in to the Democrats who skipped town in WI to stop a Republican victory in union agreements, but also ties into this. The Dept of Justice is refusing to enforce the laws it is supposed to enforce. Is there any recourse?
The DOJ is doing its job. Part of its job is deciding how it's going to approach various matters. In this case, they decided that they couldn't make a credible case that would pass heightened scrutiny and wouldn't spend the time on it. They will continue to enforce the law as long as it's standing and assist Congress to some degree should they decide to defend it. It's a rare case that they make that decision but it's not without precedent. Apparently, Chief Justice Roberts once wrote a brief defending the DOJ's decision not to defend a particular law back when he was working for the DOJ in the early 90s (only interesting because I know who Roberts is and don't know who any rank-and-file DOJ attorneys are).
Here's a
reasoanable analysis of the question. Given that context, the DOJs decision is questionable, but not completely out of the realm of precedence. It can't (or shouldn't) choose to refuse to defend a case just because they don't agree with it (or their bosses don't). The third case mentioned requires that the president publicly declare/condemn the law as unconstitutional, thus taking an "official" stance on the issue. While it's a weak condemnation hidden inside a release by a subordinate, which most people will never read, it does appear he's met that condition in this case.
It's an interesting turn-around from his public statements during the campaign. But I suppose that his party wants any issue it can to distract the public from the economy, so I guess this was what they settled on. In that context, I suppose it's reasonably smart politics, if not such a great reason for doing something in the broader sense. I'm not sure how this actually affects future court cases though, since I'm sure there are plenty of groups (both in and out of government) who would gladly step in and defend the Act anyway. Now, if the DOJ tries to pull some crap about not allowing anyone to represent the government in their stead, that would be an overstep IMO. Everyone and everything has a right to a day in court and fair representation.
Quote:
In the case of WI, it would depending on whether the state has recall provisions for state legislators which I assume it does not else we'd have heard about it by now.
There are other ways though. All of them, unfortunately, require the GOP to stoop to the same low methods that the Dems are using. For example, there's nothing stopping them from simply passing any other non-quorum required legislation while the Democrats are out of the state. My understanding is that anything not budget related can be thus passed. That's an awful lot of potential "bad" things the Dems would want to oppose which they could pass.
A cleaner way, but which would take longer, is to pass legislative rule changes while the Dems aren't there (that's not budget related either). So they could create rules to handle the case currently before them. That's still doing something which the GOP would rather not do: Change long standing rules of conduct to deal with a single short term problem. While the Dems may be willing to chuck the rules out when it suits them, the GOP tends to avoid that when possible.
I suspect they'll just wait them out. The impact of the protests is pretty much done. Those things wane over time and become background noise. But the looming issue is a hard deadline by which if there isn't a budget passed, a whole lot of public workers jobs will disappear, and I assume many public services will be shut down. The GOP doesn't have to engage in any dirty tricks. They can just blame the Democrats for all the lost wages and jobs and services. And I suspect that'll have more weight than anything else.
Edited, Feb 23rd 2011 4:38pm by gbaji