Thursday, February 02, 2017

Backing up decisions with facts

Since Trump has taken office, an amazing number of presidential orders have been issued within a record period of time.

It is great to have a person who can make decisions and act on them, but one must also remember that any decision made by a person in office needs to be backed up with facts and supporting data, usually obtained through thorough research and background checks.

Orders need to be both legal and lawful. Legal means they are issued in accordance with the existing legal framework. Lawful means they are in accordance with existing laws, rules, and regulations, as well as the gist behind those laws, rules, and regulations. This is because not everything about how a law came into being makes it into the text, but every law in place has something that it was meant to protect, some of it explicitly stated, some implicitly implied, and some simply left to the good judgment of people executing the laws.

So an order to "kill Person A" can be legal, if it was drafted and approved by the correct people within the legal framework. But it is not lawful, if the law says it is illegal to kill someone.

At the amazing rate orders are being churned out, my only (and biggest) worry is whether enough research and background checks have been done to gather the facts and supporting data that led to the decision. Because while the orders may be legal, insufficient supporting information to back up those decisions may well render them unlawful.

No comments: