I can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this.

At least you're referencing the United States in 1934, though. Things were very dysfunctional politically in the US at that time, but not nearly as bad as what was going on in some other parts of the world.

> can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this

Seriously? You don't see the relevance of independent agencies to this discussion?

No.

And the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place (nb: it isn't).

> the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place

You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system?

Do you see any value in QC?

> You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system?

I don't see there being a distinction between the two in the real world. An institutional system's behavior largely determined by the incentive structures that actually exist on the ground, irrespective of initial intentions or de jure rules.

An institutional system that is expected to self-moderate is one where the motivations that inform its primary behavior are the same ones ultimately informing its self-moderation -- i.e. it's functionally equivalent to an unmoderated system, just more pretextual rationalization.

> Do you see any value in QC?

Sure. But I don't see much value in a QC process that's administered by the same people or judged against the same metrics as the thing it's QCing.

I'd love the equivalent of QC to be applied to both legislation and administrative rule-making in our current system. Maybe with the Loper Bright decision, the courts will gradually resume responsibility for doing this properly. But the capricious and arbitrary nature of the current administration is revealing the extent to which checks and balances are already eroded, and just what an uphill battle that's likely to be.

The entire political system in its current state is riddled with perverse incentives, and the mechanisms of external accountability are totally broken. Even with inter-branch checks and balances, the federal government in its current form is simply not trustworthy.