Fixing Broken Politics - Never Going To Jail - Extra Politics

okay so you're good go go go go oh boy you know in nascar's top series most of the cars are run by chartered teams each team can field multiple cars during the race and share resources like mechanics owners of these organizations have a wide degree of latitude giving them the freedom to do things like hire and fire staff interface with sponsors and choose how to fund and organize their team though all this power does come at a price personal accountability if an owner or one of their team members breaks league guidelines then the league can directly punish the owners with penalties up to and including forcing them to sell their charter and exit the league and it's this threat of meaningful punishment that encourages owners to practice good behavior and push for their team members to do the same this idea exists in the game of u.s politics as well and is called the unitary executive theory keyword theory but boy oh boy is that version op and quite broken luckily we've got some patch notes that just might help [Music] [Applause] [Music] here's a fun and scary fact did you know that many of the powers of the three branches of the united states government are defined by constitutional interpretation rather than strict verbage oh yeah the unitary executive theory one such interpretation states that the president has unlimited control over the executive branch and while the legislative branch has some input as to who serves in the executive branch along with some monitoring responsibilities and some of the structure of the executive branch is set by law the idea that the president may at will wield the entire power of the executive branch is widely accepted this makes the president not unlike a nascar team owner they have the freedom to make important quick decisions like firing a department head or mobilizing the military but they're ultimately responsible if they break or allow others to break the rules so why does this system work pretty well for nascar but not so well for our government great question for this to work you really need two things one a body that has the power to investigate violations and two the ability to effectively and appropriately punish said violations in a timely manner and while those things do exist in nascar sadly our current government systems are unable to do them for many reasons so let's take a look at a few of the big ones congress's constitutional duties include oversight to do this effectively they need trained staff access to witnesses and the ability to obtain relevant documents however they currently don't have a meaningful standing investigation team and recently it's become increasingly difficult for congress to compel testimony and get documents due to claims of executive privilege additionally when half of congress belongs to the same party as a president their motivation to investigate said president is pretty low and these problems are exacerbated by one of the most unfortunate historical byproducts of our system the justice department the fbi and the inspectors general arguably our three best federal investigative bodies are housed inside of the executive branch and are led by people who are at will employees of the president this has led to situations like this a witness from the department of justice refuses to cooperate with a congressional investigation so congress slaps that person with a contempt of congress charge which is a criminal offense congress then refers the case for prosecution to wait for it the department of justice the head of which can be dismissed by the president if the prosecution proceeds oddly this terrible system worked pretty well for most of u.s history due to the fact that the players aka government employees usually put patriotic duty above their desire to keep their job and most presidents let investigations happen to retain legitimacy it's safe to assume those days are over but you know the largest set of zeus-pleasing games in the world has actually already found a solution for this in the olympics the judges are human sorry lightning daddy and have been statistically shown to favor competitors from their home countries to combat this human fallacy the olympic committee ensures that judges come from a wide variety of countries and by dispersing judge power around the system is significantly more balanced we could utilize the same concept for our government by moving one of the nation's investigative bodies out of the executive branch for instance we could reassign the inspectors general to congress and give an independent committee the task of approving their senior positions the igs could then go about their job of investigating whistleblower complaints and congressional investigations with no fear of retaliation from executive branch bosses and this could even be backed up by giving them stronger subpoena power that situationally could supersede executive privilege now that we're a little closer to that gold medal in patching politics let's jump to our next big issue that when the executive branch is found to be acting poorly the ability of congress to punish them is also extraordinarily limited currently when congress catches a president abusing the power of their office they literally only have one option impeachment the process of impeachment rightfully has an extremely high bar made higher by the fact that two-thirds of the senate must find the president guilty and again a bunch of those senators are also likely members of the same political party rough problem but we can fix it with magic the gathering in a magic tournament if a judge catches a player cheating they can institute any number of penalties ranging from a warning to a game loss to kicking the player out of the tournament completely the judge's toolbox of punishments covers a wide range of bad behavior as opposed to only having one giant ban hammer to solve every issue with so what if we gave the courts and congress a similar toolbox for example let's say a president instructs the head of the epa to bury a report about the dangers of a particular chemical in order to benefit a campaign donor with an increased toolbox of solutions congress could remove the head of the epa and replace them with someone chosen by the now not in the executive branch inspectors general as an additional penalty the president would also lose the ability to remove this new person during their remaining term or if a smaller infraction occurred such as a president inaccurately completing their financial disclosure forms congress could simply levy a fine because as we've seen if the only punishment available is the nuclear option of impeachment most members of congress will vote down party lines no matter what but if there were varying sizes of possible punishments we could see more members of a president's own party helped to rein in illegal and unconstitutional behavior without damaging the party as a whole essentially taking some of the power of their individual positions back but there's one more huge extremely obvious exploit in our system that needs fixing one derived from god granted kingly powers the pardon this power is a holdover from the british monarchy and it grants the president the power to remove any punishment from any person who violates federal law heck one famous pardon even covered crimes that might have been committed modern presidents have enjoyed using this power more and more not to necessarily write great wrongs or show mercy but to reward political loyalty by pardoning loyalists criminal behavior george h bush's pardon of several iran contra figures and clinton's notorious pardon of fugitive fundraiser mark rich are just a few recent examples and as you can imagine this just breaks everything because why would anyone playing the game of politics ever follow any of the game's other rules when simply staying loyal to just one person drops you unlimited get out of jail free cards yeah they wouldn't but not to worry we can tackle this problem head on by looking to american football in 1999 the nfl instituted a challenged-based instant replay system it allowed coaches to immediately challenge a referee's call each challenge set in motion a review and with the benefit of a recorded instant replay if the call on the field is deemed incorrect it gets reversed this is how pardons should work just you know with less concussions presidential pardons could be reviewed and affirmed by the house of representatives and that's not that crazy of an idea most countries that give an executive the ability to pardon like france and germany and rwanda and israel and canada all involve some other part of their government in the process to limit abuse this retains a system that can write past wrongs with the additional benefit of confirming that the country recognizes past actions as mistakes and not just a president the idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law can only be true if the law can be enforced on everyone in structure and in practice that currently isn't true when it comes to the executive branch and we know that these ideas don't fix everything and probably even create some all-new issues particularly with the balancing of the separation of powers but that doesn't change the fact that the current system is broken and people are getting better at gaming its exploits with frightening efficiency history makes it clear that if we don't act to structurally change how things work it's only gonna get worse games get patched all the time to limit abuse governments need patching too so let's get out vote and patch ours you know i hear there is a big election coming up so on election day we're hosting an all-night extra politics stream over on our twitch channel we'll be reviewing poll numbers making predictions and all hanging out together cordially discussing politics and we'd love to have you there for the conversation it all starts at 6 pm eastern standard time on november 3rd at twitch.tv extra credits and we'll be running until we either have the results or it's clear we won't get them for some time hope to see you there [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Extra Credits

Views: 188,485

Keywords: Extra Credits, Extra Politics, unitary executive theory, elections 101, game design and politics, extra credits politics, home learning, donald trump, extra politics youtube, political theory, unitary executive theory explained, presidential pardon

Id: sRamATEgTdY

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020