
Trump to Sign Executive Order Waiving Key Environmental Laws - chmaynard
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/president-trump-to-sign-executive-order-waiving-key-environmental-laws
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amcoastal
This is extremely dangerous. Waiving environmental review and consideration
when building roads and bridges is extremely foolish. They greatly effect
water quality at crossings and alongside the roads. My guess is this will be
held up in courts and not allowed to go further -- it is an extreme deviation
from what we currently do (which is held up by supreme court precedent).
Entire industries are built on doing environmental impact studies and
mitigation.

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LanceH
Perhaps we can push back against what is effectively legislation by the
executive branch. Then, here's the tough part, don't expand executive power
when your own party is in the white house.

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pstuart
True. But the Senate is broken by being effectively owned by a single senator.

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jude-
Any four GOP senators can defect and depose Mitch McConnell, but haven't. The
Senate is very much in control of 53 people.

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irjustin
100% this. Towing the party line at all cost is what the GOP are doing today.

20 years ago this wouldn't be the case, but keeping the party unified at all
cost, against morals, ethics, logic, is what is happening.

What saddens me is the majority vote says they shouldn't be in power in many
cases but ultra effective wielding our laws in corner cases has led us to this
point. Even while I loathe it, I must say it is quite effective.

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ken
In case anyone considers writing this off as a partisan or economic issue,
it's worth remembering that both of the acts mentioned here -- the Endangered
Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act -- were enacted by a
Republican president during a recession.

He was hardly an environmentalist, either. That's how important this was 50
years ago.

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pstuart
There's always an economic factor. But the politics you are describing died
decades ago. Bipartisanship is as good as dead.

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DFHippie
Republican environmentalists are mostly literally dead.

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tathougies
Why have we as a people allowed our past three administrations to continue to
rule by fiat? Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas, but
this kind of action must come from the legislature.

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cgrealy
Because your system of government is so fundamentally broken it barely even
qualifies as a democracy anymore?

All the systems built into the US government were designed for a country with
1% the number of people it has now, when the fastest method of communication
was a horse and the majority of it's populace were farmers.

There are a few simple things that could be done right now to fix the US
government (abolish the EC and gerrymandering to start with), but no one has
the political will to do it.

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veeralpatel979
I hate gerrymandering too. More competitive elections, in my view, makes
politicians less partisan and incentivizes them more to deliver for their
districts.

But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the
hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they
gerrymander.

If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the
commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan?
Can the public hold members of this commission accountable?

Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected
officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?

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munk-a
Oh - districts should be drawn to guarantee mathematical fairness and a few
relatively good measures exist[1] including one that was used in court in
connection to a particularly egregious Wisconsin district (the efficiency-gap
measure).

This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be -
it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political
parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the
incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to
make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist
(or ditto on the other side)

1\. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-
mathematician...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-
mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy/)

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veeralpatel979
Got it, so you're proposing electoral lines by drawn by algorithms?

I don't see any problems with this myself, as long as the algorithms are fair
-- what are some downsides of this, though?

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munk-a
A pretty common downside is a lack of adherence to historical boundaries and
groupings - some neighborhoods that legitimately formed a district and a
unified block due to strange geographic features could be broken up.

But actually - there are two classes of algorithms out there: one can
determine how to fairly divide up a state and another measures how unfairly a
state is divided up - instead of going full into computers-determine-
everything it might be nice to just have a requirement that the result of the
election in the state is relatively statistically probable given the
proportions of votes for each party. So people could still draw districts we
would just have a manner to prove their districts are acceptably fair.

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credit_guy
> The order will waive several long-standing environmental laws

Is it possible for an executive order to "waive laws"? I thought laws take
precedence over executive orders. If this were possible, then the President
could waive all the laws he didn't like, and have more power than a king.

I'd be grateful if someone who understands thew law better than I do could
give some color here.

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corty
As far as I've understood, the president as boss of the executive branch can
order the executive branch to not apply a law or at least not prosecute
violations. One means to do this is to impose a certain interpretation, e.g.
ordering "severe environmental impact" to mean nothing less than "making the
area uninhabitable for anything beyond bacteria for more than 100 years" or
something.

Also, laws are often vague and their intent is clarified in regulations issued
by the executive, e.g. the EPA. The president could order those regulations to
be changed.

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mcv
Yeah, but can't the next administration simply start enforcing those laws
again? A company would have to be incredibly foolish to count on something
like this to protect them.

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corty
Yes, the next administration could do that. But permits that have already been
granted under the old rules usually remain valid. If not, possible lawsuits
and damages awarded.

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mcv
But does having a permit allow you to violate the law? What is the point of
even having laws for this if they can simply be ignored?

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loopz
I'm happy this is not forgotten. Am outside US, but we care.

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rudolph9
Could an executive order be made to make the approval process more effective
and efficient? We did the fist part of the work by identifying the bottle
necks (at least broadly), the Acts where approved by Congress so now let’s
optimize. It seems like a lot of these executive order get thrown out which if
true seems like a big waste of time and resources.

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TaylorAlexander
I don't want one person determining our laws no matter who it is.

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rudolph9
It’s a subtle difference but it’s the difference between how something is
computed vs what is computed (i.e. the processes in place to enforce a law vs
the word of the law).

I’m definitely not a legal scholar but I optimize code a fair amount that
computes the same thing as the un-optimized code.

Take for example multiplication of natural numbers, e.g. 2x2=4, there are a
number of ways this could be implemented to get the desired result, bit
shifting, symbolic mathematics, heck even trained machine learning or an impl
on a trinary computer. If The computation is correct the vast majority of the
time great! If not, a judge can order the process be updated to implement the
law.

Effectively, Congress Makes the laws, the executive branch manages their
administration, and the legislative branch ensures they are being
administrators in accordance with the law.

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mrfusion
Why do we want the president to have this much power?

It’s annoying how many laws flip flop every eight years.

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thinkingemote
Because when your guy gets in you want them to have power to make real change.

That's the idea anyhow. If we nerf the powers for one side, when our side gets
in they will be nerfed also. Other systems do things differently of course,
but every system wants to maintain itself.

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olliej
Ok, can someone please explain to me what the limits on executive orders are?
It seems like the president is allowed to right executive orders at any time,
for any reason, and completely side step the legislature?

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novalis78
Has anyone done a study or analysis of how much this might benefit large scale
civil engineering projects?

