When did it become legal for any president to say he would withold

[pat_k]

52. Simple statements, stated over and over and over, are desperately needed.

And it doesn't need to be complicated. I think something as simple as this could do the trick:

The president promises to carry out the laws passed by Congress, whether they like them or not. If a president doesn't like a law, they work with congress to change it. It's a crime for a president or the people who work for him to single-handedly end a program Congress created. That's not how our government works.

Leave the erudite discussions of the balance of powers and how complicated the body of law that has evolved to deal with all sorts of grey areas has become for the experts. Within all that, the basic principles are sound and true.

I think perhaps the BIGGEST problem we have within the Democratic Party is a fear of making simple statements, either because we have in our heads a myriad of complicated exceptions or caveats and we lose track of the basic truth (or we fear there are little exceptions we don't know about).

Bottom line. Over and over, we lose people because we've lost sight of the forest for the trees.

We MUST stop making that mistake.

Looking for the right "message"? Just tell it simply. Assume no knowledge. Think about explaining to a 7 year old.

And if the message is challenged with "it's not that simple," great. Any exception they come up with always boils down to an attempt to deal with a grey area in a way that preserves the basic principle, so you've actually just been given the opportunity to bring it back to the basic principle.