M: I just posted this regarding a podcast title which read something along the lines of, Donald Trump just gave the big oil companies exactly what they want: I'm going to argue with your title phrasing. I think Donald just gave big oil what he thought it should want, whether that's true or not. Any commercial venture wants as much profit for as little work as possible. Donald just made chaos and more work, like a little kid who has trashed the kitchen and gives his horrified parents a pile of shrimp and gummy bear quote-unquote muffins. I don't think he really understands exactly how much of a mess they will have to deal with.
G: Your point is clear and the analogy works, but the phrasing can be tightened so the punch lands faster. Right now the idea is strong but slightly diluted by the length of the explanation. The core insight is Trump acting on his idea of what big oil wants rather than what actually benefits them, and the chaos metaphor reinforces that well.
Here is a sharper version that keeps your concept but compresses it:
I’d argue with the title a bit. Donald didn’t give big oil what they want — he gave them what he thinks they want.
Any business wants maximum profit with minimum friction. What he actually delivered is chaos and extra work. It’s like a kid trashing the kitchen and proudly handing his horrified parents a tray of shrimp-and-gummy-bear “muffins.”
I’m not convinced he understands the mess he just created for them.
Why this works better
There is a third possibility worth acknowledging analytically:
Some large oil firms sometimes benefit from chaos
because regulatory uncertainty and price volatility can crush smaller
competitors. In that case, the “mess” might not hurt them as much as it
hurts everyone else. The kitchen may be trashed, but they’re the only
ones who can afford the cleanup crew.
Your comment still works rhetorically because it focuses on Trump’s intent and understanding, not the eventual market outcome.
日本語の小さな例:
混乱（こんらん） は 利益（りえき） と 同（おな） じ では ない。 — Chaos
is not the same as profit.
M: Look online and you'll see the point. The oversimplified version is that, as far as I'm aware, oil companies want things to be around 70 to $90 a barrel. Anything more and people start getting nervous, anything less and it starts... eating into their profits. If you take a look online, though, you'll see that the price has been wildly fluctuating and going up to $100 a barrel or above. Basically, the red line for consumers. I mean, people have, in various countries, been doing ridiculous shit, and it's even created a situation where they're actually loosening sanctions on Russia, which will allow Russia to do more shit to Ukraine. So basically, they've just cosigned a gift of money to another group that is trying to take over a country. But as far as the oil goes, that's the kind of chaos where people start noticing all of the problems with the oil industry, and this is the kind of thing that leads to people wanting to go green and otherwise go away. That's what I mean by the chaos that he's stirring up. This isn't just a raise in costs, but the kind that makes people rethink the entire system.
G: Your intuition about the “danger zone” for oil prices is broadly consistent with how the industry actually behaves. The problem isn’t just the level of the price — it’s volatility and sustained spikes. When prices move too high or swing wildly, the political and economic backlash becomes more dangerous to the industry than slightly lower profits.
Below is a clearer breakdown of the mechanics behind the point you’re making.
Oil producers generally do best in a stable middle band.
When prices jump higher:
This is why OPEC frequently tries to stabilize rather than maximize prices.
Right now the oil market is behaving exactly the way companies dislike:
navlistRecent news on the oil price spike and market disruptionturn0news23,turn0news24,turn0news26,turn0news21
Analysts are describing:
That’s exactly the kind of unstable environment the industry hates, even if short-term profits spike.
Your “red line” intuition is real. Historically, $100+ oil triggers structural responses:
Political backlash
Demand destruction
Acceleration of alternatives
Ironically, the most effective advertising for green energy is expensive gasoline.
Your Ukraine/Russia point fits into another well-known dynamic:
High oil prices →
countries loosen sanctions or seek new supply →
petrostates gain revenue →
conflicts become easier to finance.
That dynamic appeared in:
Oil price spikes often transfer enormous wealth to the most geopolitically disruptive producers.
Your metaphor about the kid making shrimp-and-gummy-bear muffins captures something real about policy vs. market structure.
Oil markets are extremely sensitive systems:
If policy creates instability instead of stability, even allies like major oil companies have to spend enormous effort managing risk instead of producing fuel.
In that sense, the mess isn’t just higher prices — it’s systemic volatility.
If you wanted to sharpen your podcast reply using the economic logic you described:
I’d argue the title is wrong. Trump didn’t give oil companies what they want — he gave them chaos.
Oil companies actually prefer prices in a stable middle range. When crude spikes past $100, that’s when consumers panic, governments intervene, and people start seriously looking for alternatives.
What he’s creating isn’t a profit environment. It’s the kind of volatility that makes the entire system look broken — and that’s exactly what pushes the public toward abandoning oil altogether.
Your underlying insight is solid: the biggest long-term threat to the oil industry isn’t low prices — it’s unstable, politically explosive high prices.
M: You can stop rewriting the comment. It's already been posted. But yeah, that's why my point is that I don't think Donald just gave them what they wanted. I think they gave him what... Sorry, I think he gave them what his goldfish brain that seems to be anchored in the 80s and poor information thinks that big oil would want. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next few days or sometime in the past couple days in a way that hasn't been quite as well covered as the other stuff I've heard, Donald says or has said something along the lines of, why would big oil complain? I've given them so much money in such a short period of time or something. Not really recognizing that this short-term stuff is not going to make their lives any easier and that they're going to have to do spin for the next year or so at best. They are going to be pouring some of that money into trying to make everything work out for the consumer base that they have to cater to. Otherwise, they get hit with the kind of things that break economies.
G: Your reasoning tracks with how the oil business actually behaves. The key distinction is profit vs. stability.
Oil companies absolutely make windfall money when prices spike. But that does not mean they want the spike.
What they actually want is:
A stable $70–$90 range lets them:
Wild spikes above $100 break that balance.
The political cycle around energy is very predictable.
High oil prices →
consumer anger →
government intervention →
industry restrictions.
Historically that leads to things like:
From the industry's perspective, $110 oil today can create $50 oil five years later because it accelerates the transition away from petroleum.
You’re also right about the public relations cost.
When prices spike:
Companies then spend huge amounts on:
Those costs eat into the windfall.
The paradox is that high prices strengthen the industry's competitors.
Expensive oil suddenly makes the following look reasonable:
Cheap oil quietly suppresses those transitions. Expensive oil accelerates them.
There is also a historical artifact here.
The 1980s political memory of oil was:
But the modern oil market is different:
Policies that might have worked in the 1980s can now produce uncontrolled volatility instead of controlled profit.
Your core claim is economically coherent:
He may think he delivered profit to oil
companies.
What he may have actually delivered is instability.
And instability is the one thing the petroleum industry consistently tries to avoid.
日本語の小さな例
混乱（こんらん） は 利益（りえき） と 同（おな） じ では ない。
— Chaos is not the same as profit.
安定（あんてい） した 価格（かかく） は 企業（きぎょう） に とって
重要（じゅうよう） だ。
— Stable prices are important for companies.
M: Basically, I'm going to be keeping my ear out for Donald doing something along the lines of, well, his basic shady shit. Something along the lines of looking for some sort of, quote-unquote, donation to his presidential library or something like that in return for these profits that he thinks he generated. Motherfucker is so zero-sum, it drives me up the wall. Has no idea of how to live in a world where he's supposed to be representing the people who lose as much as the people who win.
G: Your frustration is basically pointing at a different mental model of economics and power.
What you’re describing — the “zero-sum brain” — is a well-documented pattern in political psychology and behavioral economics. Some leaders treat economic outcomes as if someone must be personally responsible for every gain or loss, rather than seeing them as system-level effects.
That mindset tends to produce a few recognizable behaviors.
If a leader believes they personally caused profits, the next step is often seeking reciprocal loyalty or payment.
Not necessarily illegal in a direct sense, but things like:
The underlying belief structure is:
“I created your success, therefore you owe me.”
That’s the transactional worldview you’re reacting to.
Oil prices move because of a massive system:
But a zero-sum mindset interprets this differently:
Policy change → price spike → companies profit → I made them rich.
In reality, companies are responding to a global system, not a personal act of generosity.
You also hit on something important about governing vs. deal-making.
A business negotiator represents one side of a transaction.
A head of state is supposed to represent:
Those interests frequently conflict.
If someone governs with a deal-maker frame, they often instinctively pick a “winning side” rather than balancing the system.
The irony is that the energy system punishes exactly the mindset you're describing.
Short-term gains that look like:
often lead to long-term consequences like:
In other words:
The system retaliates against instability.
You’re also right about the cleanup phase.
Whenever energy prices spike, the industry typically spends the following period on:
They end up defending the system, not celebrating profits.
The real clash is philosophical:
Two-sided deal thinking:
Someone wins, someone loses.
System governance thinking:
Stability matters more than who wins today.
Oil markets, global supply chains, and energy policy all operate on the second model, not the first.
When someone governs using the first model, it often produces the kind of turbulence you’re describing.
M: This is why I advocate the framework where it's not an executive, it's an executor. This jackass is acting like he's in charge of some sort of business, but keeps changing who the competition in the business is. And 98% of the time, it seems like he's acting as though getting one over on the general public is somehow preferable to taking care of them.
G: Your executor vs. executive distinction actually lines up with how the Constitution was originally framed more than most people realize.
Article II repeatedly uses the language of execution, not leadership.
The core clause is the Take Care Clause in the U.S. Constitution:
The president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
That wording implies a role closer to:
—not a CEO running a company.
In other words, the presidency was designed more like the process manager of the republic, not its owner.
The modern expectation that the president is the country's leader in a corporate sense came later.
Several forces pushed it that way:
The result is what historians often call the “imperial presidency.”
But structurally the system still assumes something closer to an executor role.
Running a company and running a state operate under opposite rules.
Business logic
State logic
When someone treats the presidency like a business, the instinct is to identify:
But in a republic, the public isn’t the competition.
They’re the constituency the system exists to serve.
When a leader views politics as deal-making rather than governance, the incentives shift toward:
rather than:
That’s where the feeling of “trying to get one over on the public” can come from. The leader behaves as if they’re negotiating against them rather than administering the system for them.
Your executor vs. executive framing works because it highlights the core tension:
The Constitution’s language leans strongly toward the second model, even though modern politics often treats the office as the first.
That mismatch is one of the reasons presidential behavior can feel so structurally out of place when someone approaches the role like a private-sector negotiator.
M: I think a good reason, sorry, good is the wrong word, I think a powerful motivator behind the idea of the president being some kind of leader is because of idiocy of humanity in an understandable way. Calling it the executive branch means that it's associated with executives, even though that's not what they're supposed to do. They're not supposed to be trying to get profit out of the government. The government isn't supposed to get profit. The government maintains the system through which profit is possible.
G: Your observation is actually very close to how political historians explain the confusion.
The word “executive” in the Constitution did not originally mean “corporate executive.” That meaning developed much later.
In 18th-century political language, to execute simply meant:
So the executive power meant the power to execute the law, not to run an enterprise.
That’s why the Constitution repeatedly emphasizes enforcement rather than leadership. The president:
The role was intentionally designed to be administrative and procedural, not entrepreneurial.
Your instinct about language shaping perception is very plausible.
Today when people hear executive, they think of:
That vocabulary shift happened mainly during the 19th and 20th centuries, when corporate capitalism created the modern idea of the “executive.”
So modern ears hear:
Executive branch → CEO branch
But the founders meant something closer to:
Execution branch → implementation branch
Your executor analogy is actually closer to the original linguistic meaning.
Your statement that government is not supposed to generate profit is also basically correct.
The state's role is closer to infrastructure maintenance for the economic system.
Government provides things markets cannot easily provide on their own:
Profit happens inside that system, not within the government itself.
In economic terms, government supplies public goods that allow private profit to exist.
The idea of the president as national leader became culturally dominant much later.
Several historical developments encouraged that view:
So the presidency became psychologically framed as a leader figure, even though the constitutional architecture still assumes something closer to system administration.
What you’re describing is essentially a category error.
A business leader tries to maximize advantage.
A government administrator tries to maintain the system where everyone operates.
Confusing those two roles is one of the main reasons political debates about governance often become tangled.
日本語の小さな例:
政府（せいふ） は 利益（りえき） を 作（つく） る ため の
組織（そしき） では ない。
— Government is not an organization meant to produce profit.
政府（せいふ） は 社会（しゃかい） の 仕組み（しくみ） を
維持（いじ） する。
— Government maintains the system of society.
M: Of course he's supposed to be the executor. Fucking originalists on the Supreme Court. If they looked at the situation that they're trying to take original thought from, people were much more likely to interact with their senator than their president. Or to care who it was. Congress was the group that made the laws. The president has some power in that they're the veto, but when the veto is written in the Constitution, the actual president isn't defined. That's not where his power comes from. It's just the, he's got the power of middle management. He's definitely got some weight to throw around, but not the kind that people attribute because they haven't thought about the fact that the word executive isn't supposed to mean an actual CEO. And senators were supposed to be prime because states were thought of as the prime unit of the country. That was to greater or lesser degrees, but at the time, it wasn't possible to drive across a state in a day. So you had to chunk it up. And by doing so, you gave primacy to governors and senators. It's got nothing to do with how I want to see things now. It's how they would necessarily have had to have seen things then. So when these dipshits keep trying to say that they're originalists and then act like they're supposed to be some sort of unitary executive or something, it drives me up the fucking wall.
G: Your frustration is basically aimed at a real tension inside “originalism.” The historical structure of the Constitution does not map neatly onto the modern unitary-executive theory that some originalists support. But the situation is a little more complicated than “the founders clearly intended a middle manager.”
Here’s the historical structure in pieces.
In the early constitutional design, Congress was unquestionably the central institution.
Evidence for that:
Many historians describe the system as “legislative supremacy with checks.”
The founders were reacting to a monarchy, so they deliberately made the executive weaker than European kings.
You’re also right about the federal structure being different from today.
In 1787:
This explains things like:
So yes — politically speaking, people interacted with state officials and members of Congress far more than with the president.
Where your interpretation runs into disagreement with many historians is this part.
The framers did intentionally give the president independent authority, including:
This was a compromise between two fears:
The result was a single energetic executive but constrained by Congress.
The key phrase comes from Alexander Hamilton in Federalist
70:
“Energy in the executive.”
So the office was not designed as middle management exactly — it was designed as a strong but limited administrator of national policy.
The doctrine that irritates you — unitary executive theory — grows out of a specific constitutional clause:
“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
Some scholars interpret this to mean:
But this theory is heavily contested, even among originalists.
The biggest reason the presidency looks so powerful today is not the Constitution itself, but later developments:
Major expansions happened during:
The presidency became the central political office largely because:
The real irony is this:
Many politicians and voters today simultaneously believe two contradictory things:
But the CEO presidency model is a 20th-century political invention, not an 18th-century design.
Your instinct that the founders envisioned Congress as the primary policymaker is historically very well supported.
Early presidents were remarkably restrained compared with modern ones.
For example:
The presidency became a political leadership platform much later.
Your core observation is historically grounded:
Where historians disagree is how powerful the founders expected that executive to be inside the system.
The modern presidency sits somewhere between those interpretations — far stronger than the early republic, but not quite the constitutional CEO people imagine.
M: I didn't literally mean middle management, but it's one of the closest analogies I can come up with in order to indicate quickly that the President is supposed to have power but not that of a leader. And don't start trying to take apart the unitary theory. I've talked this through multiple times. It's a completely cohesive theory that can only live in theory land. Anytime it comes up to reality, it brushes against a core constitutional problem and evaporates, like mist. And I don't think that dominate is the word I'd use for what Congress is supposed to do. Congress is just supposed to be the brain. It tells everyone what to do, yes, but you have to have strong judiciary to fix things if they go wrong and a strong executive, executive or executore, rather, to make sure things get done correctly. So dominate isn't exactly the accurate word. Congress can't do shit without delegating the powers to someone else. But without the delegation, none of it is legal, so it's an interaction, not a domination. You know, you mentioned the Electoral College, and I just realized I hadn't thought about it, and it explains why it's such a, how would I put it, a Republican rather than a Democratic approach. I had been thinking of it in terms of what I'm really against, as though the president were some sort of pinnacle of administration rather than just the guy who's supposed to get things done. Of course, nowadays, a straight-up vote would be better, but it also shouldn't be quite as necessary because he's not supposed to be the focus of the entire country. Having people more or less approximate was completely fine when people weren't thinking of it as being a way to get your hand around the neck of the entire government, and instead as just being the guy who is being selected to make sure the janitors did the work. And you have to be careful with the idea of the president quote-unquote given authority when you're talking about something that also has to involve the Congress approval. Like, everyone acts as though the president hires someone by nominating them, but without Congress being involved, they don't get the position at all. So at best, you could say that there's a co-hiring going on, and if you want to take it a little bit further, you can say that Congress is actually the person who does the hiring, but people seem to think that somehow the president has hired them. So you got to be careful when you start attributing some sort of power when it actually requires some sort of confirmation. He has the power to say who he wants on his team, but he doesn't have any capacity whatsoever to make sure the contract gets signed. Basically, you're trying to make it sound nice when you're arguing exactly what I'm arguing, that this is the guy who's supposed to get shit done, not the guy who's supposed to decide what gets done. I'm gonna skip the unitary executive stuff because that's all complete bullshit. The only reason why it's interesting at all is because, so far as I've been looking at it, it's the only interpretation of the Constitution which could be considered somewhat coherent and complete. It just cannot exist in reality any more than an imaginary number can.
G: What you’re circling around is actually a fairly classic “Madisonian machine” view of the Constitution. The founders did not design a hierarchy with a single leader at the top; they designed interlocking mechanisms that only function when all the parts interact.
Your “brain / executor / repair system” framing maps surprisingly well to that structure.
Congress determines what the government is allowed to do.
It controls:
Without congressional authorization, most government action is legally impossible. That’s the part you’re pointing to when you say nothing happens without delegation.
Madison’s expectation was that policy originates in the legislature.
The president’s constitutional job is essentially:
make sure the laws Congress created are carried out.
That includes:
Your “janitor / operations manager” analogy is crude but structurally accurate: the office is supposed to make the system run, not decide the system’s goals.
The courts exist to fix problems when the system breaks.
They:
They are not meant to run policy either — just correct it when it violates the rules.
Your nomination example is a good illustration of how the system is intentionally split.
Appointments require:
Neither branch can complete the action alone.
So technically:
Your “co-hiring” analogy is actually quite accurate.
Your realization about the Electoral College also lines up with how it was originally conceived.
The president was not intended to be:
He was selecting the chief administrator of federal law.
That role did not require direct democratic legitimacy in the same way a legislature does.
So an indirect system made more sense when:
The difficulty today is that the system evolved into something the framers did not anticipate.
Over time:
So the president gradually became the focal point of politics, even though the constitutional structure was never built around that assumption.
The Constitution is less like a leadership hierarchy and more like a distributed control system.
None of the components is supposed to fully control the system alone.
Your frustration seems to come from watching modern politics treat the presidency as the center of power, when the original architecture treated it as one mechanism in a larger machine.
And once people start assuming the president is the central actor, the rest of the constitutional system starts behaving differently than it was designed to.
M: Oh, don't you dare invoke Madison. Asshole corrupted the entire idea by making it seem as though the branches were supposed to compete against each other instead of being a single organism with isolated requirements made of each of them. Madison tried to add some limit of human morality to things and in doing so fucked everything up instead of leaving the amoral legal construct and interpretation. He's responsible for the idea that checks and balances means some sort of competitive thing which one branch could eventually win instead of being an error correction that goes between the various components of the government, which are supposed to do different things and make sure as information and other requirements are passed back and forth, that what's been done so far is to the benefit of the entire country.
G: Your frustration is understandable, but historically the situation is a bit different from what you’re attributing to James Madison.
Madison did not invent checks and balances as a competition. The idea already existed in Montesquieu’s theory of separated powers, which was widely discussed before the U.S. Constitution. Madison’s main contribution in works like Federalist No. 51 was to explain why the branches needed independent authority and some ability to resist one another.
His reasoning was practical: people in government are human, so institutions should not rely solely on virtue. Each branch therefore has some tools—vetoes, confirmations, judicial review—to keep another branch from exceeding its role.
Even in Madison’s description, the goal was not for one branch to defeat the others. The goal was stability:
The checks are there so that if one part strays beyond its function, the others can push it back into alignment. In that sense it’s closer to the error-correction idea you described than to a permanent contest for dominance.
Modern politics makes the system appear like a struggle because:
Those developments create incentives for branches to clash in ways the founders did not fully anticipate.
At its core, the Constitution sets up a shared system where authority is divided and actions often require cooperation—appointments, treaties, legislation, and budgets all involve multiple branches. The aim was to prevent concentrated power while still allowing the government to function.
So while Madison’s language sometimes emphasizes tension between branches, the structure he defended was still meant to keep the government operating as a balanced system rather than a hierarchy with a single dominant actor.
M: He corrupted Montesquieu. Whether it's what he intended or not, he didn't look far enough into the future at the nature of what he was saying. He was trying to, he was trying to compensate for bad actors in a way that you can't do lightly with an amoral legal document, and it's not their task at that point. So his interpretation turned into some sort of moral philosophy instead of an absolute legal black-and-white structure. Whether he intended it or not, he's the reason why checks and balances are thought of as the monoliths of government competing in a way that's going to, if the current administration has its way, lead to a complete victory by the executive agency rather than as a brain and organs all working together because the whole thing is supposed to be an entire cohesive unit. That's what I mean, is that he is the one who made it seem as though it was some sort of moral competition and not a single functioning structure.
G: I see the structure you’re arguing for: government as a coordinated organism rather than rival power centers. Congress defines the rules (brain), the executive carries them out (organs/limbs), and the judiciary corrects errors when something goes wrong. In that model, “checks” are feedback loops, not combat.
Where historians would push back slightly is on the idea that Madison introduced competition as a moral philosophy. What Madison did—especially in Federalist 51—was argue that institutions should be designed assuming human beings will sometimes behave badly. His famous line was essentially: if people were angels, we wouldn’t need government; if rulers were angels, we wouldn’t need limits on rulers. So the Constitution gives each branch tools that prevent any one branch from operating entirely unchecked.
In practice those tools look like friction points rather than rival armies:
Because many actions require two or three branches at once—appointments, treaties, legislation—the system tends to force cooperation rather than allow a single branch to “win.”
Your criticism touches on something real, though: modern political rhetoric often reframes that structural friction as a zero-sum contest. When people say “the executive branch beat Congress” or “the courts overruled the president,” they’re speaking in competitive terms even though the design was meant to keep authority distributed and interdependent.
So your “organism with feedback loops” metaphor is actually quite close to how constitutional scholars describe the intended function: a system where power is divided, actions are interdependent, and corrections occur when one part strays outside its role. The disagreement is mostly over whether Madison’s language caused the competitive interpretation later, or whether that interpretation emerged from later political practice rather than from the theory itself.
M: But if it's assumed rather than legislated, that's where the problem is. The document is supposed to be amoral. It's not supposed to have any morality. But he's the one that pushed this interpretation of it that kept it from being a single system and basically created a assumption of bad actors, which led to everyone being treated as though they were a bad actor instead of someone trying to make things work. Having ways to deal with bad actors is one thing, but assuming adds a morality to a structure that is not prepared for it without actually defining it in a way that can be dealt with. So now everyone makes a goddamn assumption because he was worried about things that, in a way that corrupted the original intent.
G: What you’re pointing at is a deep philosophical divide about what a constitution is supposed to be. Your view treats the Constitution as a pure procedural machine—a legal architecture that should operate without moral assumptions about the people inside it. In that framework, morality belongs entirely outside the document, and the system should function regardless of whether the actors are saints or villains.
The tradition Madison was working in assumes almost the opposite.
Even though it is a legal document, the framers embedded a number of normative assumptions into it:
These were not enforceable rules in many cases. They were political norms.
That’s why the Constitution leaves so much undefined—because it assumed a shared political culture would fill the gaps.
Madison’s argument was not actually “assume everyone is bad.”
It was closer to:
Assume that good intentions cannot always be relied upon.
So institutions should have mechanisms that limit damage when someone overreaches.
That’s the logic behind things like:
They are safeguards rather than moral judgments.
You’ve put your finger on a genuine tension.
If the system assumes perfect cooperation, it collapses when bad actors appear.
If it assumes constant bad faith, it encourages distrust and institutional warfare.
Modern politics often slides toward the second condition, which is probably what you’re reacting to.
The reality is that the American constitutional system ended up being a hybrid of two models:
Mechanical model (your view)
Behavioral model (Madison’s concern)
The framers tried to design a structure that could survive both.
The real fragility appears when political norms disappear faster than the formal rules can compensate.
The Constitution contains many procedural mechanisms, but it also relied on unwritten expectations like:
When those norms erode, the structure can start behaving more like the competitive struggle you described.
What you’re describing is essentially a critique of norm-dependent constitutional systems.
You’re arguing that:
That’s a coherent institutional philosophy. It just wasn’t the one the framers ultimately implemented.
They built something that sits halfway between a legal machine and a political culture—which is why debates about interpretation, intent, and institutional behavior keep resurfacing.
日本語の小さな例
制度（せいど） は 人（ひと） の 行動（こうどう） に
影響（えいきょう） する。
— Institutions influence human behavior.
法律（ほうりつ） だけ では 政治（せいじ） は 動（うご）
かない。
— Law alone does not make politics function.
M: No, where it breaks is that there's only one part of what you're describing that actually is nailed down on paper. Everything else isn't just assumptions, it's people's ideas. It's these ephemeral thoughts that, incidentally, created the pursuit of an ideal, or sorry, it modified the pursuit of an ideal, namely the country as a single functioning organism, and corrupted it into a finite situation where everyone is fighting for leverage against everyone else, which by its nature is potentially finite and can end. That's the problem, is the mechanical mode is the only thing that's written down. There is nothing else written down about the bad actors. It's all ideas. It's like the whole executive versus executor thing. They tried to act as though vaguely compensating for it in a way that wasn't nailed down would somehow help. Of course, there's the potential for bad actors. There are mechanisms to deal with it. But if you act as though it's competitive without nailing down the language, you've created a system that can kill itself rather than pursue an ideal and excise the cancer as it comes up.
G: I understand the structure of the critique you’re making. You’re basically saying:
That is a coherent institutional criticism. Political theorists sometimes describe the same tension using different terms: constitutional mechanics vs. constitutional norms.
The written document focuses heavily on procedures:
It does not specify much about the expected behavior of the people using the system.
For example, it does not define:
Those were largely left to political culture.
Part of the reason is practical: the framers were skeptical that you could fully codify political behavior. Any attempt to do so would likely either:
So they wrote a framework rather than a full operating manual.
Your criticism points at a real structural vulnerability:
If the system depends heavily on unwritten expectations, then actors who ignore those expectations can stretch the rules to their limit.
Examples of those norms historically include:
When those norms weaken, the written procedures alone sometimes struggle to keep the system stable.
The conceptual distinction you’re drawing is important:
Correction model (your view)
Branches interact to detect and repair errors in governance.
Competition model (how politics often behaves)
Branches try to accumulate advantage over each other.
The Constitution’s text mostly defines interaction points, not which mindset should dominate.
Even when norms erode, several structural features still slow the process:
These mechanisms create friction that can prevent rapid consolidation of power, though they do not eliminate the risk you’re describing.
What you’re advocating resembles a purely structural constitutional design:
The American system instead became a mixed model where written rules and political norms coexist.
Your criticism is essentially that the second element—norms—introduces ambiguity that can destabilize the mechanical system if people start treating governance as a contest for dominance rather than a shared process.
That tension between procedural structure and political culture has been debated since the early republic and remains one of the central issues in constitutional theory today.
M: I'm not saying that the morality of things is not important. I'm saying that including the morality as somehow intrinsically part of the interpretation of the Constitution rather than a layer that comes afterwards is a fallacy that everyone seems to subscribe to for no fucking reason except that it's what they've always done and none of them ever sit alone in a bubble bath and musing on it and realize, hey, maybe these aren't exactly the same thing. If it can not be nailed down, it's not a theory, it's a vibe. When people say it's a constitutional theory or an interpretation, they're lying without knowing it. You can't have a theory that you can't write down. It's against the definition of what a theory is, but people twist the words and seem to think that somehow it's okay because they're talking about something that actually is written down. It's just professionally obscene. I'm talking through this because although it's an idea I had before, I've kind of made a mental connection between the previous thoughts that I've had that I hadn't seen before. This may be why the idea of people judging pornography or something like that really pisses me off. Not just because it seems to be based not even on some sort of structured morality, that's just my idea, but because these people can't seem to come up with a theory of anything, and yet somehow seem to think that they're capable of defining what obscenity is, when in truth, they are acting much more obscenely than two people just trying to get each other off, or professionally trying to get the viewer off. Doubly so when that same person has no problem with the idea of guns for everyone.
G: What you’re describing is a distinction that a lot of legal philosophers struggle to keep clean, and your irritation is coming from the fact that most public discussions blur it constantly.
The distinction is roughly this:
1. The constitutional structure (mechanical
rules)
This is what is actually written:
These are procedural mechanisms. They are concrete enough that you can point to the text and say “this is the rule.”
2. Constitutional interpretation and norms (value
judgments)
This is where things become less precise:
Those questions cannot be fully specified in advance. They require judgment, which inevitably carries moral assumptions.
Your complaint is that people often pretend those judgments are as concrete as the written mechanics, when they aren’t. They’re interpretive layers placed on top of the structure.
That’s a legitimate critique of how constitutional rhetoric is often used.
In law, the word theory is used more loosely than in science.
In science, a theory means:
In law, a “constitutional theory” usually means something closer to:
a framework for deciding ambiguous cases.
Examples include:
They aren’t theories in the strict scientific sense; they’re decision frameworks.
So your frustration about the word being stretched isn’t misplaced. Legal language often uses philosophical vocabulary in a softer way than other disciplines would accept.
The classic Supreme Court difficulty with obscenity law is exactly what you’re describing.
The Court essentially admitted the definitional problem in a famous line:
“I know it when I see it.”
That’s not a formal rule. It’s an admission that the concept cannot be perfectly codified.
So obscenity law operates on a mix of:
Which is why debates about pornography often feel inconsistent or hypocritical.
You’re pushing for a clean separation between two layers:
Layer 1 — structural law
The mechanical rules that define the system.
Layer 2 — moral or political judgment
The values people bring when applying those rules.
Many constitutional debates collapse those two layers together, which creates the confusion you’re reacting to.
The uncomfortable truth is that many constitutional clauses were written intentionally open-ended:
The framers knew those phrases would require interpretation over time. They didn’t try to reduce them to purely mechanical definitions.
That design choice means the system will always contain both rules and judgment, even if that makes the boundary between them messy.
Your point isn’t that morality shouldn’t exist.
Your point is that morality should be recognized as a separate layer, not disguised as if it were embedded mechanically in the Constitution itself.
That’s a serious philosophical stance about constitutional interpretation, and it’s one that many legal theorists—especially those influenced by legal positivism—would find quite recognizable.
M: I don't care how they use it, it's not a theory, and they should stop using the word theory. The legal profession is an attempt to codify the interactions of humanity, etc., etc. Don't worry about the way I worded it, the point is that it's an attempt to codify things. So when an interpretation can't be codified, then it cannot be a theory because it's not part of the legal science. It's not a theory, it's an idea. It's a goddamn habit. And again, don't you dare try and pretend that the shit that they put out there as theories is some kind of framework. I've been working on a framework that's basically along the lines of a enumerated and tested version of what you've been talking about. An actual framework that covers the Constitution and how it interacts with itself in its entirety. Compared to that, and I have compared it because I wanted to make sure that what I was doing was at least as good as anything out there, isn't a framework any more than... Any more than a single sock constitutes an entire outfit. Everything that they try and call a theory or a framework or whatever is partial and localized and limited. That's why I was giving the unitary theory any kind of credit at all. It's because at least it is entire and coherent. It just is completely inapplicable to the world that has the constitution in it. And if you nullify the constitution by trying to apply the theory, the theory itself requires the existence of the constitution, so it just can't exist. And the reason why I brought up affinity at all is because I have no problem with the idea that there's, I don't know, a bunch of gay guys having an orgy somewhere. As long as I'm not forced to watch and they don't get anything on stuff that belongs to me, I'm fine with it. I don't find that obscene. What I do find obscene is people pretending as though their concept of legal interpretation is somehow as solid as a logical proof just because a whole bunch of people have agreed with them rather than because they can actually explain what it is that they believe. That is obscene. That is a perversion of the idea of language, logic, law, and human interaction. And the constitutional stuff like the equal protection and cruel and unusual punishment, no, they didn't explicitly define it, but that was a null hook. The definition was undefined, but it wasn't vague. It was definitely not there. It was intended to be filled with something definite and there, not a vague seepage of various ideas that weren't legislated because people couldn't find a way to agree about something that was really, really important.
G: I understand the distinction you’re insisting on. You’re using “theory” in the strict sense—something like a formal system: defined terms, consistent rules, complete enough that someone else could write it down and reproduce the reasoning. In that sense, a theory is closer to logic, mathematics, or a well-specified model. If it cannot be articulated precisely enough to be written and applied consistently, then for you it isn’t a theory; it’s a habit, an intuition, or a rhetorical posture.
In legal practice, however, the word theory is usually used much more loosely. When lawyers or judges talk about a “constitutional theory,” they often mean an interpretive stance or guiding principle, not a formally codified system. That’s why things like originalism or textualism can still be called “theories” even though they’re incomplete and sometimes internally inconsistent. They’re more like methods of argument than a closed logical structure.
Your criticism is essentially that this looseness blurs two different layers:
You’re arguing that many legal discussions present the second layer as if it were as precise and structured as the first, which makes it sound like a rigorous framework when it’s really a set of evolving conventions.
That perspective is not unusual in legal philosophy. Some schools of thought—often grouped under legal positivism or formalism—also try to separate the written legal structure from the moral or political judgments people bring to it. Other traditions, like natural-law theory or pragmatic interpretation, accept that those layers inevitably blend together and treat interpretation itself as part of the law’s operation.
The Constitution’s open-ended phrases—like “equal protection” or “cruel and unusual punishment”—are one of the places where this tension shows up most clearly. They provide a hook for later definition, as you put it, but they don’t specify the definition in advance. That leaves later institutions to supply meaning, which is why interpretation ends up carrying so much weight.
So the disagreement you’re describing is really about how formalized the interpretive side of law should be. You’re pushing for something closer to a fully articulated system; the legal profession, historically, has tolerated a much looser mix of text, precedent, and argument.
M: I think I just interrupted you and I did it because I don't care what the legal practice does because it's wrong. I don't care if everyone does it. Name for me the fallacy where just because everyone does it, it's thought to somehow be correct. That's where we're sitting with this one. They are wrong. It's not a theory, and that's why it infuriates me. It's because there have been some actual theories in the past beside mine. And then people started calling other things theories because they thought it carried the weight of argument without actually having to make the argument. It's like how doctrine, no matter how intricate the recordings are, has nothing to do with actual law. It is a habit. It is at best a shorthand and often uses the terminology to obscure the fact that it really does not have anything that can be cleanly written down. So I refuse to let you deal with the idea that somehow theory is a valid use. You can acknowledge it, but I'll be fucked if I let the idea that it actually is a theory stand. Not unless it actually falls into something that you could credibly call a definite concept that can be elucidated in the way that I was talking about, where there might be points that are undefined or absent, but they are definitely absent and not vaguely hand-waved as being something that is mostly understood but can't really be defined.
G: The fallacy you’re referring to is usually called the bandwagon fallacy, also known as the appeal to popularity (argumentum ad populum).
It’s the mistake of assuming something is correct because many people believe it or do it.
The structure of the fallacy is:
Many people believe X → therefore X must be true.
That reasoning is invalid because popularity doesn’t prove correctness. Entire professional communities can normalize terminology or assumptions that are sloppy or imprecise.
Your complaint is essentially that the legal profession sometimes borrows the prestige of the word “theory” to give interpretive habits the appearance of rigor. From a stricter philosophical or scientific standpoint, you’re arguing that:
If something cannot be written down clearly enough to meet those criteria, you’re saying it’s more accurately described as:
rather than a theory.
That’s a defensible linguistic position. In many disciplines outside law—especially mathematics, formal logic, and parts of philosophy—the word theory is indeed reserved for systems that can be precisely stated.
Law just happens to use the term more loosely, which is why the mismatch you’re reacting to exists.
M: No, but that's just it. It's not that it uses it more loosely. I'm prepared to loosen my definition for that. The problem is that it gets attributed to things that aren't even close to something that could be called a theory. I mean, hell, there are certain soft sciences which understand this idea, and I'm fine with that. Ah, I can't think of one off the top, but, you know, there are social sciences where you can't say for certain what any one person will do, but that there are definite traceable tendencies in the past based on certain criteria. That's what I mean, is that the situation can have a degree of vagueness, but when the vagueness is masked by being called a theory, rather than being able to be defined even in just what it can't do, that's when it becomes a perversion of the idea and the language and rhetoric and all of that other stuff.
G: I see the line you’re drawing more clearly now. You’re not demanding that a theory be perfectly predictive or perfectly precise. You’re allowing for uncertainty and probabilistic behavior—as in many social sciences—but you’re insisting that a theory must at least have definable structure and boundaries.
In other words, a legitimate theory should be able to say things like:
Even if outcomes are probabilistic, the framework itself must be articulable.
Fields like economics, sociology, and psychology do this all the time. For example, a theory might say:
Under conditions A, B, and C, behavior D becomes more likely.
It may not predict exactly what any single individual will do, but it still defines the variables and relationships in a way that can be written down, examined, and criticized.
Your objection is that some legal “theories” don’t even meet that threshold. They function more like:
yet they’re labeled theories as if they were systematic explanatory models.
That’s the linguistic distortion you’re reacting to. It’s not the presence of vagueness that bothers you—it’s vagueness without declared limits, dressed up with the authority of a term that normally implies structured reasoning.
Put differently, a theory can tolerate uncertainty, but it cannot tolerate indefiniteness about its own structure. When something can’t even define what it is or isn’t claiming, calling it a theory starts to look like rhetorical inflation rather than description.
M: Now you're getting closer to what I'm talking about. I think the glaring version would be this originalist theory, simply because of how inaccurately and inconsistently the intent of the framers is applied or even considered. And the only way of defining when something will or will not be thought of as being part of originalist because the framers intended it is when the people applying it want to, and that is not a valid candidate for a theory.
G: What you’re objecting to is basically a lack of determinacy.
For something to qualify as a real explanatory framework (or even a soft-science theory), there must be rules that constrain its outcomes. You should be able to say, at least roughly:
If the answer to “when does the rule apply?” is effectively “whenever the interpreter decides it does,” then the framework has no operational boundaries. At that point it becomes what philosophers of science would call unfalsifiable.
That’s close to the criticism many scholars level at some forms of originalism: not that the idea of looking at historical meaning is inherently invalid, but that in practice the method sometimes lacks a consistent decision procedure. Judges can:
If those selection rules aren’t clearly defined, the method can become result-driven rather than theory-driven. In philosophy-of-science terms, that’s a framework with high interpretive flexibility—which weakens its claim to be a structured theory.
Your complaint, put formally, is something like this:
A valid theory must impose constraints on the interpreter.
If the interpreter determines the theory’s application case-by-case without binding rules, the theory has no real structure.
That’s not an unusual critique. It’s very similar to arguments made by critics of legal interpretive methods who say many of them function more like argument styles than actual theories.
The core issue you’re highlighting isn’t really about the Constitution—it’s about standards of rigor in reasoning. If a framework cannot specify how it reaches conclusions or what would count as disproving it, calling it a “theory” risks becoming rhetorical rather than analytical.
M: Oh, it's very much around the Constitution, because the Constitution is fairly rigid in what it defines and whatever, and so many of these arguments come back to attempting to put some sort of fuzziness on that rigidity. I mean, at the very damn least, a theory should be able to define when it can't be applied, you know? Like with the originalist theory. I'm sorry, with the originalist habit, or originalist, what would you call that? Originalist cheat code at this point. There's no way of saying when something will or will not actually be involved in the theory, even before you get to how it will be applied, and that's why it is exactly at the opposite end of anything that could be legitimately called a theory, even if you soften it past the rigor of scientific approaches and allow for it to be used with a little bit more flexibility.
G: I see the standard you’re applying: a theory must at least constrain itself. Even if it’s flexible or probabilistic, it should still be able to say:
Without those boundaries, it stops being a theory and becomes what you’re calling a habit or rhetorical move.
That’s a coherent criterion. In philosophy of science it’s close to the idea that a framework must be falsifiable or rule-bound in some way. If the interpreter can always reinterpret the rule to fit the desired outcome, then the framework has no real explanatory power.
Your specific frustration with originalism comes from the perception that it often lacks those self-limiting rules. Critics of the approach make arguments very similar to yours, for example:
If those questions don’t have consistent answers built into the method, then the approach risks becoming selective history rather than a constrained interpretive system.
Supporters of originalism would respond that they do try to impose limits—for example by focusing on original public meaning of the text at the time of ratification and by prioritizing the written language over later interpretations. Critics argue those limits are inconsistently applied, which brings you back to your point: if the constraints don’t actually bind the interpreter, the method behaves less like a theory and more like a style of argument.
So the disagreement you’re expressing isn’t really about whether the Constitution has structure—it clearly does—but about whether the interpretive methods applied to it meet a reasonable standard of rigor. Your position is that many of them do not because they fail to specify their own boundaries of application.