Reply #37: I never said it was about your OP

[alcibiades_mystery]

Stop inflating yourself.

Let's say the Congress is unhappy with military policies related to stop loss specifically for service personnel with documented PTSD. It's a hypothetical. They pass a law preventing it, given x, y, and z provisions, etc. The details aren't important. In your version, the executive can simply declare the law suspended and proceed with the stop loss by declaring some state of military need. This doesn't strike you as a usurpation of the duly constituted power of the legislative branch?

It's easy to think of these things for an issue we agree with. Yes, Obama should, with a stroke of the pen, exercise all the power of exception granted him under the law when it comes to LGBT in the military. But Bush shouldn't stop loss people into fourth and fifth tours, or some hypothetical future executive shouldn't throw people suffering from PTSD back into the combat zone. Law (and the state of exception) are about general functions and powers. Once you hitch your wagon to the specific, you open the door for all kinds of abuse. That's why these matters should be handled by the Congress, with the constitutionality of whatever it is they pass decided on by the courts. That's the system we set up. It's been perverted beyond recognition during the Cold War, with the executive becoming a kind of sovereign figure lording it over the people's representatives in Congress. Your solution is to leverage that outrage in order to accomplish particular ends. My position is that that power should be migrated back to where it belongs, even if that means we suffer on some issues that could be solved easily if only we had a dictator.

DISCLAIMER - I have been advised by a fellow DUer that this post and analogy may be read as "comparing homosexuality to a mental illness." Such a comparison is so beyond my normal range of thought that even the suggestion shocked me. Very obviously, and I'll be clear here, the comparison has to do with the powers of the executive relative to existing law and policy. It has nothing to do with the service personnel under consideration.