President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that calls for spacing out childhood vaccines into separate medical visits and splitting the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into three different single-disease shots.
That’s how a lot of the government works though. It’s legal enough to change the way things work.
It’s one branch of government declaring a new way to enforce things from the very top. It always depends on people below actually following through.
Shit, even decriminalization is like that. A city can say, “we no longer want to prosecute people for marijuana” and they literally just tell cops to stop arresting people for it, whether it’s a federal crime or not. And the cops will stop arresting people for it… Usually… And if someone does get arrested for it, the district attorney will probably say “well we aren’t prosecuting for that so let him go”, and that’s that.
It’s similarly “legal”. Someone in power declares a way of doing things and people do it, to a certain extent.
There’s a supposed balance of powers that way. Legislators don’t get to decide 100% how things work. Other branches can make choices. Judges, mayors, governors, presidents.
And obviously, it can get abused, and nothing is stopping Trump from declaring that wearing green on Sunday is illegal, and if he did judges would probably just tell people to ignore that stupid shit.
Legal is a spectrum. It always depends on how it’s going to be enforced in practice, and how severe the penalties are, and how badly people want to do it.
How ridiculous. That’s literally not even something that falls under the powers of the president or federal government.
There’s apparently nothing that says executive orders have to be legal.
That’s how a lot of the government works though. It’s legal enough to change the way things work.
It’s one branch of government declaring a new way to enforce things from the very top. It always depends on people below actually following through.
Shit, even decriminalization is like that. A city can say, “we no longer want to prosecute people for marijuana” and they literally just tell cops to stop arresting people for it, whether it’s a federal crime or not. And the cops will stop arresting people for it… Usually… And if someone does get arrested for it, the district attorney will probably say “well we aren’t prosecuting for that so let him go”, and that’s that.
It’s similarly “legal”. Someone in power declares a way of doing things and people do it, to a certain extent.
There’s a supposed balance of powers that way. Legislators don’t get to decide 100% how things work. Other branches can make choices. Judges, mayors, governors, presidents.
And obviously, it can get abused, and nothing is stopping Trump from declaring that wearing green on Sunday is illegal, and if he did judges would probably just tell people to ignore that stupid shit.
Legal is a spectrum. It always depends on how it’s going to be enforced in practice, and how severe the penalties are, and how badly people want to do it.
Executive orders should not infringe on constitutional rights. Sadly, our checks and balances have broken down.
Just that little thing called the constitution.
But I guess our checks and balances have voided that social contact, too. -sigh-