The aggressive attempts by the Trump administration to dismantle one of their perceived political enemies’ power bases by the same “pen and phone” Executive Order fiat that substantially built that base is a fascinating example of RC Dean’s Iron Laws at work. Somehow the step-children of the Republican Party, the wallflowers too ugly to get asked to dance, ended up miraculously winning many a geek’s high-school fantasy. Nearly unlimited power and no reason not to take it out on their enemies. What happens when the people running the Executive Branch decide that the rank and file of many of the agencies they administer are the enemy?
Well, you start by naming other Republican misfit/misanthrope types to run several departments that you believe are hostile to your cause. Putting an O&G guy in charge of the State Department, a Federalist in charge of the EPA, a voucher advocate in charge of the Department of Education, a black brain-surgeon who thinks that public housing stints should be brief in charge of HUD, and a man who once couldn’t even be bothered to remember the name of the Department of Energy (but knew he wanted to cut it) to direct it. Whoever is pulling the strings in the Trump administration, they did an excellent job of putting “qualified” individuals at the helm who wanted to wreck the progressive agenda that the type of people who use the words “Deep State” believe these agencies promote.
After you finish setting out to sow confusion in the board room, you move on to proposing that a bunch of the rank and file (especially in departments you perceive to be most hostile) no longer work for you:
He’s worried about the administration’s proposed 37 percent cut to the State Department, which he says would put U.S. diplomats serving abroad at risk.The Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, the Commerce Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are also facing steep cuts. Foreign Policy reported Monday that the administration wants to cut funding for United Nations programs by 50 percent to 60 percent.
But everyone knows that the type of middle-manager who carves out their own little bureaucratic fiefdom and burrows in like a tick on a dog is going to avoid falling to those cuts. They have to keep their job because they are the Deputy Assistant Director for Left-Handedness in Prairie Voles and that exists on an org chart, so they can’t be fired because who would direct that work? Anyone who has worked for a giant organization that has experienced organic growth knows that the only way to get rid of that type of person is a reorg. Oh wait, did someone say reorg?
RC Dean’s Iron Laws are being used against the regulatory state here to great effect. Perhaps the one that seems to be biting most painfully is me today, you tomorrow. Presidents have been stretching the edges of their power since Washington, but in the current century it seems to have become particularly egregious. Driven by the combination of Congress’s ceding of statutory rule-making to the Executive Branch, the Chevron precedent in 1984 telling Federal Courts to side with administrative rule-makers at all costs, and the broad adoption of the computer, we have seen the Executive agencies under each president make regulations that constrain the ordinary citizen from engaging in just about anything. It is interesting to watch a populist who cares only for ratings and a bunch of people who have been marginalized in the Republican party for years suddenly find themselves using the power to dismantle parts of the state that libertarians dislike. Of course, they are also bulking up the parts that libertarians hate most. I don’t see a lot of love in the comments for the TSA and Border Patrol, nor much will to reinvigorate the military so that we can fight all the rest of the world at once, but that appears to be happening as well.
The Trump Administration also appears to have taken the Iron Law you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish to heart as well. For both good and ill to the broad libertarian view. Rarely have we had the opportunity to experience the impartial laws of government work in any context that could even broadly be described as not entirely horrible. You might have to go all the way back to the Carter presidency to find someone who accidentally struck a blow for not quite as effective citizen enslavement. Trump’s administration will not be a friend of libertarians, but as long as the wind of “fuck government regulators” keeps blowing, he might be a slightly mitigated disaster.
not quite as effective citizen enslavement
*shed a single tear as he realizes how spot-on accurate that statement is*
Strikes me as funny. “Trump has too much power. I’m going to be sick.” Then he proceeds to propose steep cuts to the state, which would cut executive branch power, and by extension his own power. “The state is being cut back and it won’t be powerful enough for my tastes. I’m going to be sick.” Proggies never see the contradictions in their own shitty deductions.
I’m currently arguing with someone who is freaking out over people losing coverage with the repeal of the ACA act (I have not endorsed the shitty GOP plan). He doesn’t believe that it’s possible someone wouldn’t want health insurance or coverage, or that this could be a rational choice. I have pointed out that the uninsured in fact have far better mortality rates than those on Medicaid and that the demographics of the uninsured suggest that many are carrying very low risk. He simultaneously is telling me that those on Medicaid are in fact the sickest and poorest to explain away the difference so he doesn’t have to admit that Medicaid isn’t actually effective along with adding some self-reported surveys on health and well being from things like the Oregon study in 2008.
It’s damned hard to get a prog to question their fundamental assumption that we desperately need universal coverage (which only ever really exists on paper to begin with).
A lot of the people who didn’t have health insurance didn’t want it: the large segment of young adults that the industry has called “immortals” (those who are healthy and act as if they’re never going to die). That’s a big reason for the individual mandate. It forced those people into the market to subsidize the older, sicker people.
People keep saying that lots of people are going to “lose” insurance. No, what’s going to happen is that many will choose not to purchase it due to its skyrocketing price.
+1 Indifference Curve
And that’s just one of the misconceptions. A lot of people were already on Medicaid and are still on it. Also, no one died from lack of health insurance. Emergency rooms do not turn people away. The entire thing is a pig steaming pile of lies.
I had to be taken to the emergency room at a hospital in Paterson, New Jersey, for a knife wound many years ago, long before Obamacare. When filling out the paperwork the comment the woman made was something along the lines of “Oh, you actually have insurance? We might get paid for this one!”
If Republicans were smart (they aren’t called the stupid party for no reason), they would repeal the shit with the promise to replace it and then come up with something that would keep Democrats and Republicans fighting for the next 4 years, so that it never gets done.
But WHUT ABOUT TEH ROOOSHUNZ?
I think you actually hit on something there
Democrats realize that part of Trump’s popularity is that he made “govt” the enemy.
Democrats don’t want to be seen defending “govt” (by which i mean the institutions which people loathe) – they see public opinion mustering and want to get out of its line of fire.
so they decided that pretending that there’s some foreign enemy threatening the US is a better strategy to accomplish the same purpose; they’re not defending things like “the IRS or the EPA or the DoT” or all those other shitty institutions, *really*, …. they’re protecting America from the RED MENACE = the Rooskies!
Its actually sort of a shopworn political ploy to associate critics with suspiciously ‘foreign’ elements. Isn’t that what dictators around the world always do?
What’s so absurd about the latest manifestation is that there’s probably never been a time since the 1950s where we’re less-threatened on the world stage by Russia. I mean, you’d think they’d pick “China” to be the boogeyman, but unfortunately there would be actual trade-consequences there. So they picked our old Cold War adversary because he managed to make Obama look stupid, therefore he is ‘anti-america’.
“Made” him look stupid. Also obligatory. The President colluding with the Russians during his election campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JpPU-SwcbE
While China would be the more rational pick, you have to consider that Trump himself is highly skeptical of China, so taking the rational pick would inadvertently align them more with Trump than not, and as they don’t want that it forces them into the irrational position of making Russia the boogeyman.
This Russian thing has just gotten silly. Reporting on Trumps’s tax return last night, David Muir said the return didn’t show the source of Trump’s income so we don’t know if any of it came from Russian sources. We don’t know if any of it came from scratch tickets or organ harvesting either.
Of course. It was only his 1040.
What everyone would need to get hold of would be his K1’s and all the other miscellaneous L.P. Filings. This was always going to be a retarded expose.
I’d expect the documentation for his returns would just about fit in one of those boxes you need to unfold for an office move.
Exactly. But you won’t get that sort of objectivity from the ABC World News. Better to hint that something is fishy, we can’t say for sure there aren’t Russian’s involved, we don’t know when he stopped beating his wife…..
Those hands, though.
Hi, guys. Did I miss anything?
Something about you creating laws by executive fiat.
No, This is like the worst chat room ever.
Nope…
*resumes whittling, takes sip from moonshine jug*
From the reorg link.
“(b) The Director shall publish a notice in the Federal Register inviting the public to suggest improvements in the organization and functioning of the executive branch and shall consider the suggestions when formulating the proposed plan described in subsection (c) of this section.”
I could have so much fun with this.
I could have so much fun with this.
Do it. They’ll probably get overwhelmed with comments for the pubsec unions supporting every gov job as essential, so it would do them good to get some contrarian comments in the mix.
+1 Cloward-Piven
I presume its Bannon. At least as far as all these ‘anti-institutional’ cabinet-picks go.
Could be Barron.
Ya know, it could just be Trump pulling the strings in his own administration.
I mean, which is it? Trump is a hapless puppet of shadowy forces, or Trump is an evil mastermind? You really have to pick one.
Hmm, we’ve heard that (false) dichotomy before, haven’t we?
We’ll have to wait for the next episode of Secret Nazi President to find out. Mwahhaahhaahhaa!
Have you seen the photos of Trump meeting with X,Y and Z? In every photo Trump has the biggest shit eating grin on his face and the ‘guest’ looks like a deer in the headlights. I know who is pulling Trump’s string. Trump. I am glad to see the guy take a wrecking bar to the govt – that is long past due – but we have to keep an eye on that guy. Guard dogs are only good if you keep ’em on a leash.
It looks like a classic corporate takeover to me. I think Trump is making the final decisions and probably making strategy. But I can’t prove that.
If Trump pulls off all these cuts it will be sweet. We’ll see, I still think the elites are going to off him since they can’t seem to oust him with their usual game.
I suspect we’ll just continue the status quo rudely interrupted for a year of Congress producing no budget. Republicans aren’t even going to get on board here.
I’m a little disappointed, because when Trump said he was going to cut 75% of regulations, I thought that all the progs would just fall over dead.
OT: McDonald’s Tweets that Trump is a disgusting excuse for a President.
pw: R0n4ld
McDonald’s DEMOLISHED Trump.
Can I have fries with that?
It would be cheaper if you get a meal.
Apparently, McDonald’s has some former Obama big wig in charge of their communications department. Is that just cronyism, or do corporations have a fetish for hiring people with politics that would seek to destroy their business model or force them to automatize everything?
They couldn’t find a republican who majored in “Communications”.
Maybe I should refer them to my father, who is a Republican who majored in communications (and he even used to like McDonald’s food, although now he thinks it’s gone downhill and is rather terrible). Of course, after majoring in communications he got an M.Div., became a pastor, joined the army as a chaplain, and became as much of a soldier’s soldier as a chaplain could be, so he might not be typical of communications majors.
Please tell me he refused to fight with any weapon other than a mace.
This is a CYA move. Soon they will replace their workers with robots, but the people who would normally bitch about that won’t because of this tweet.
They should replace their tweeters with robots.
Watched the Morning Joke interview with Rand. “I think Senator McCain presents a pretty good argument for term limits.”
Mika was, as you might suspect, scandalized.
Was smoke coming out of her ears for being forced to defend a *spit* Republican?
That wasn’t a pretty good argument for term limits, it’s the best one ever. McCain is the term limits poster boy.
I don’t think Donald Trump is a friend of liberty, but if he does reduce the power of the Executive Branch and the alphabet agencies, it would be a somewhat victory for liberty. What scares most Progressives and the Elites the most are not the budget cuts, but that no one will even care about the budget cuts or the reduction of power. It was like that with the so called government shut down a couple years ago. I had a friend who worked on the Hill complaining that no one outside of DC cares about the shut down.
What really terrifies them about the “shutdowns” is that if the government went away for a while, people might notice how little actually changed in their lives, and draw the appropriate conclusions.
There is plenty of cash flow to pay the benefit goodies and military salaries with quite a bit left over. If the Democrats force a shutdown, Trump could just announce that enough money comes in to cover “essential services”, furlough the “unessential” ones, make sure that the important stuff gets done and paid for on time and let (at least his 63,000,000 voters plus millions of others) see how well things roll along without the USG’s nose in everything. Then, keep twittering about how the Democrats are prolonging the situation.
The GOP side of the Uniparty would abhor this, but If the administration is smart, they would be planning for such a contingency.
That’s actually a brilliant plan, if the Rs actually want to cut things. The problem with shutting down the government under Obama is that he would prioritize things to inflict maximum pain on the voting public, in order to rally support for the government. If an R president actually prioritized things properly, shutting the government down like you propose would be no big deal for most people and could provide the impetus to cut some of the fat.
I don’t trust the R’s to be brilliant. They aren’t called the stupid party for nothing.
^This. I mean, they went for healthcare before tax reform… what a bunch of fools.
You’d have to fight the media on it as well. Shutdown Theater would be relentless and full of terrible anecdotes about grandma eating cat food, etc.
But who will stand guard and make sure no one enters National Parks?
Oh they’ll still have money for that. Remember the guy who decided to mow the grass at the LIncoln memorial ? The government still had money to pay a park service cop to chase him away.
I doubt Trump will game a “shutdown” by declaring every single service and job to be essential, and/or doing petty shit like closing parks and monuments when its actually cheaper to keep them open. This would be a huge opportunity for him to identify the chunks that shouldn’t be cut, and let the others just wither away.
But, Congress is like the Bourbon dynasty: “They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing”. They will expect Trump to handle a shutdown like Obama did.
It was shameful how the stupid party couldn’t make political hay out of stuff like this:
Obama Closes Scenic Overlook At Mt. Rushmore
http://www.bluegrassbulletin.com/2013/10/obama-closes-scenic-overlook-at-mt-rushmore.html
Hard to make much hay when the media are generally on the other side.
He doesn’t believe that it’s possible someone wouldn’t want health insurance or coverage, or that this could be a rational choice.
“Hmmm, let’s see. I could pay $350.- per month for insurance, and “only” pay the co-pay when I cut my leg mountain biking and need three stitches, or I could just pay ~$500.- out of pocket, or probably nothing at all.”
To take it further, “only” paying a copay barely exists anymore. Hospital affiliated doctors are now charging a $250 facility fee on top of the copay for Office Visits. Plus those three stitches are going to be billed separately for $600 and come out of out your deductible. So you’re really looking at $900 dollars for what used to be just a $20 office visit copay before Obamacare. Plus the $450/month premium for insurance ($1400/month for family).
We have gotten soaked at office visits before I insisted on having a breakdown of my bill and changed doctors accordingly. No more hospital affiliated doctors either, even if it’s at a standalone office 20 miles from the hospital.
Insurance is basically useless now to anyone making a decent amount of money. I pay about $5000 a year for insurance and the deductible now for the wife and I is $2000 per person. It was $750 before the ACA and the premium was around $4000, so about 20% less. So now, we would pay out around $9000 a year before the insurance has much of any value at all. And that happens just about… never. So basically, I don’t pay for healthcare. I pay for OTHER PEOPLE’S healthcare.
So basically, I don’t pay for healthcare. I pay for OTHER PEOPLE’S healthcare.
Which is exactly what the plan was. That’s what community rating and no medical underwriting do. And when people stop being willing to pay for other people’s healthcare at that level (all insurance is about paying for other people’s healthcare, to a point), they drop out and you get a death spiral.
Death spirals start out looking like this:
The numbers released Wednesday morning, a final report on the most recent enrollment season for ACA coverage, echo preliminary findings last month that the number of people signing up for health plans declined for the first time since the marketplaces opened three years ago. A total 12.2 million enrolled compared with 12.7 million a year ago.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/03/15/aca-health-plans-enrollment-2017/
Sorry for raw link – unMonocled computer.
Health insurance is a scam anyway, like all allopathic medicine. If you eat right take care of your aura and visit your locals homeopath, you’ll have no problems and live to 120. Off course, your homeopath might charge you as much as a hospital.
Doesn’t work for me, I like girls.
Heteropath is a thing, no?
Rumor is that you’re a Homo sapiens.
. What scares most Progressives and the Elites the most are not the budget cuts, but that no one will even care about the budget cuts or the reduction of power. It was like that with the so called government shut down a couple years ago. I had a friend who worked on the Hill complaining that no one outside of DC cares about the shut down.
Exactly. During the “government shutdown” a few years ago, the Park Service sent people out to places in the back country they had not visited in years to put up “closed due to Republikkin Obstructionism” signs.
Without the government, there would be no mountain streams, or trout!
There were also Dems who said the shutdown damaged the economy because brewers couldn’t get government approval of their labels. What ? Why is the government pre-approveing beer labels ?
Democrats tend to work backwards. Rather than ask why would the government be doing something, it tends to be why shouldn’t they. And the answer is there’s never a good reason for the government not being involved.
The reason the government needs to be involved always seems to start with “What about……?”
That’s also how arguments about libertarianism often start. As in, that sounds fine in theory but “what about…..” filling in some issue that exists today in the status quo they are defending.
For the children. And also to avoid “customer confusion”. As an example, Lagunitas put out a beer called W. T. F., they had to expand the letters, so they went with Wilco Tango Foxtrot. They couldn’t use Whisky Tango Foxtrot, because then people would think it had whisky or was aged in whisky barrels. There’s the special level of stupidity in items such as not being able to call a beer a Barleywine, instead it must be a barleywine-style ale, so people don’t get confused and think they bought made from freshly squeezed barley.
To make it even worse, there’s fed government beer label approval, and then state level beer level approval. As an example, check out Michigan’s war against bitch in beer names. And then you have Texas, which had rules based on ABV for what was a beer, what was an ale, what was a lager, and what was a malt liquor.
It was funny how the “permission giving” part of the government was shut down, but the “punish you if you sell with an unapproved label” was still in force.
Hence the ever classic “Ale in Texas” on high ABV lager labels.
As a brewer and a pedant, that infuriates me.
Hillary’s aspirations appear to be taking a large step backward.
How about dog catcher?
It wouldn’t surprise me if he she tried to force herself upon the Democrats like Bill upon a White House intern again in 2020. Not in the least.
Everyone LOVED Poltergeist 2, so … why not?
The last stepping stone to the White House didn’t work, so let’s try a new one. I’m sure nobody would see this as contrived.
Someone from the DNC needs to talk to her and tell her to go away. Get a cushy job at some Ivy or a think tank in DC but please go away.
In all likelihood they’ll just start boosting Michelle or Liz Warren (more-so) as soon as Hillary bows out of the limelight, since the Dems have such a weak bench, so it might be better for Hillary to continue to just limp along in her chastened state sucking up all of the oxygen out of the room rather than making way for whoever comes next to fill the space she’d leave behind.
“Sucking oxygen is the only sucking she does.”
– Bill
Ooo-wee
This just goes to show if the right people don’t have power, you know what happens? The wrong people get it.
There are no ‘right ‘ people.
We just haven’t looked hard enough. I say we need to keep a votin’
If you look at other countries that have been around longer than we have, a few things become clear: America’s greatest political leader will emerge sometime in the future and America’s worst political leader will also emerge sometime in the future. Most likely neither of them have even been born yet.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that over at TSTSNBN, they have pulled out all the stops to refrain from giving Trump even a smidgen of credit for his attempt at ‘wrecking the progressive agenda’, AKA cutting the fuck out of regulations and the bureaucracies that regard them as holy untouchable objects.
I’m no fan of Trump. I didn’t vote for him and I’m more than a little upset about him making that dinosaur Sessions, AG. But come on. No one that I can remember in Washington for as long as I can remember, has had the ballz to even talk about tiny reductions of any regulations or bureaucracies. The only thing Republicans have been doing over the past couple of decades, has been making some noises about not allowing additional regulations and then not doing jackshit about even that. And then comes a guy who right away, not only talks about, but takes steps to actually cut government down to size. He deserves a little credit from libertarians for this. Well, that’s my opinion.
Reason should also stop to consider that there are the usual Republican suspects bitching that Trump isn’t increasing military spending enough. Trump’s plan is already dead on arrival regardless because Repubs won’t get on board the cuts elsewhere even for an increase in military spending, and the Dems are going to fight to block anything.
You’re absolutely right. Like I said above, I have no illusions that Trump is a friend of liberty but it’s good that someone is actually attempting to wreck the bloated regulatory state. Libertarians and Republicans alike should be encouraging and praising his actions with respect to the regulatory state but also still remain vigilant when he wants to violate our civil liberties.
As far as the other site goes, ever since this site was created I haven’t really gone over there to read anything. The articles over hear are much better and the commentators are pretty awesome, I might add. The quality of Reason’s Hit and Run has decreased for the past year and it’s sad because they are pretty much one of the few the voices for Libertarianism . I think the issue is that the libertarians over at Reason wants to reach a wider audience, which is great, but they are doing it at the cost of their integrity and quality.
They also have this false hope that somehow the Progressive Left and Libertarians will join together to curtail the security state and fight civil liberties violations, but that’s dumb as hell and incredibly nave. Progressive philosophy advocates for a powerful centralize government and with that comes a security state whether they want to admit or not. They aren’t our friends and even if some of our beliefs do overlap, they come at those beliefs from a totalitarian standpoint which as always eventually diminishes freedom and liberty.
But what bothered me most was the Trump coverage. I’ve been saying for years that Trump is an asshole, but the issue with Reason is that they are pretty much repeating the same narratives about Trump that they Left have been parroting for the past year or so. Like him or not, the guy is shaking up DC and forcing everyone to reconsider the limits of government spending/power and for Reason to not acknowledge this is a damn shame.
As Lincoln said about Grant, “I need this man, he fights.”
Yeah, both That Site and Jeff Tucker have been a little difficult to take seriously since Trump. Just like you and I think a lot of other people here I’m not expecting Trump to govern as a libertarian, but neither will I throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Good assessment Brett. A lot of us have been singing that song since the end of the primaries but you put it very well.
It’s still fun to watch people run around in circles with their hair on fire screaming “TRRUUUUUUUUMP!” and even more fun to watch an army of government bean counters shit themselves.
Trust me, the government bean counters have been the only ones shitting themselves for the last 50 years and are the only government employees seeing a glimpse of maybe possible hope that the cuts may actually happen. How many GAO reports have been made showing how unsustainable the spending is only to have Congress say thank you and put their report in the trash bin?
Trump is SLASHING THE BUDGET! Also, on Morning Joke, they interviewed Trump’s OMB(?) guy. He mentioned something about duplicative programs. You know, the sort of “bureaucrats created or saved” spending that gives people like Mika Brzlfski a warm fuzzy feeling inside. She challenged him to provide a single example of an unsuccessful after-school program.
what metric would you measure to gauge success for an after-school program? i only use orphan:death ratio at tax time to determine my write-off. possibly orphan:kg-ore-mined ratio for operational efficiency?
Dollars spent per child. Higher is better. Do you even government ?
And did he provide one?
He’s going to study up on it, and come back.
Well, this is really, really bad. A court in Hawaii blocked the new immigration order by disregarding its terms, and reaching a conclusion based on cable news statements by Trump and his minions that Trump has an impure heart and really, secretly wrote the order to discriminate against Muslims, even though the order is neutral on the religion of immigrants and speaks only to certain countries:
Courts are not, or should not be, in the business of disregarding the plain terms of a document in order to attribute bad intent to block it. This kind of reasoning truly sets the courts up as a purely political branch of government, and allows judges to mine the media for statements they don’t like to block actions they don’t like, regardless of what those actions actually are. If SCOTUS doesn’t slap this down, hard, the Executive will join the Legislative Branch as being ornamental, and the judges will be in full control of our former Constitutional Republic.
You know the box order: Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. If they wanna take it to the next level, I’ll oblige them.
did the “judge” just say it failed because of impure thoughts and intentions?
i’m not fooled. this is one of those “courts” without a real judge but rather just some administrative magistrate appointed by the mayor because he owes his aunt a favor.
Well, Trump is a fan of Andrew Jackson; maybe it’s time for another “He’s made his decision, now let him enforce it” moment.
He could alter the order to say “continental” US, meaning all those refugees could go to Hawaii and be the judge’s problem.
That would be priceless, if Trump were to order that all immigrants from those countries be processed through Hawaii, and builds a yuuuuge refugee camp there. Maybe even throw in a little sumpin’ on how they can only qualify as refugees as long as they stay in Hawaii, because, hey, now that they are in the US, they don’t need to move anywhere else for protection from whatever they are refuging from.
I mean, its not like Hawaii voted for him anyway.
The way SCOTUS disregarded innumerable public statements as well as the actual text of the law to conclude that well, OCare didn’t really have an unconstitutional penalty, it had a perfectly constitutional tax, makes a nice bookend for this ruling.
Was it so long ago that people had some sense of stewardship towards the institutions they work in? Now it seems there are so many people that will piss away the stature and credibility of their office in exchange for short term political gain. Obama using the presidency to reward friends and punish enemies, Hillary using SoS as a piggy bank, Roberts and the penaltax. Now this judge who will ignore the plain language of the law and the order because Trump. Are people in office now more venal and short sighted, or am I just older and more jaded.
a reasonable, objective observer—enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance—would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion, in spite of its stated, religiously-neutral purpose
So, basically, “Laws? We don’ need no stinkin’ laws.”