Thursday, January 5, 2012

Ron Paul, Nullification

I'm wasting a lot of my rage on Ron Paul these days. He's pretty inconsequential in the scheme of things, and not at all likely to become president...so the fact that he would make a disastrous president while Mitt Romney would merely be a bad one is really neither here nor there. Except, you know, I don't really meet anyone who likes Mitt Romney. And I do meet people who seem to think Ron Paul's objections to indefinite detention and drone attacks and other foreign policy excesses that the Obama administration are guilty of mean that having him as president might actually be a good thing.

And that is where my head explodes.

Trying to be rational about it though, one of the arguments I hear in Ron Paul's favor a lot is that you have to consider what is within the President's power, and what's not. The president gets to order drone attacks these days, but he can't unilaterally ban abortion. And that's true. But there still is a whole lot of things that a president can do, that I don't want Ron Paul's ideology anywhere within a thousand miles of.

One of the big news items of the day is that Obama just made four recess appointments...putting himself in direct confrontation with the Republican house, which has been claiming that it can avoid taking recesses just by refusing to admit that they're in recess...in order to keep congressional stone walling of his appointments from leading to the shut down of entire government agencies. One of the things that you hear about Ron Paul is that it doesn't matter that he wants to dismantle the Department of Education, because that's not something he could do unilaterally as president. But if congress can essentially force the shut down of entire government agencies (admittedly not the Department of Education, but the National Labor Review Board, which I'd argue is also pretty important) by refusing to confirm appointments, then what exactly would happen if we had a president who completely refused to appoint people to agencies he didn't believe in? I'm not claiming that I know the answer to this btw...it's possible that there's some mechanism that forces a president to keep the federal government functioning, but it also seems possible to me that there's no mechanism, because thus far anyone who has wanted to be president has also thought that the federal government was an important and sometimes useful thing. Anyways, yeah. That is my question of the day. Now I'm off to go read some more in the third book of the Twilight series, because I'm well rounded like that.

2 comments:

  1. NONONONONONO!HEATHEN!!!! RONPAULRONPAULRONPAUL20122012REMEMBERTHE5THOFNOVEMBER&ENDTEHFED!RONPAULWONIOWABUTBIGGOVTREPUBLICANSHIDTEHTRUTH!OBAMAISEMPTYSUIT!WEED! And did I mention... RONPAUL2012RONPAUL2012RONPAUL2012RONPAULANDNOSLEEPMAKESSANTORUMAFROTHYBOYRONPAUL&PABLO4EVERRONPAUL2012

    Oh and hope you had a happy winter solstice and new year.

    RONPAULRONPAUL

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  2. This spot on impersonation of a Ron Paul supporter frightens me a little...

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