#2) why the admin would reject the application without saying anything | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rpadoptionnetwork · 7 years ago

Note

Hey there! We were wondering if you would be interested in giving us a full review (We're okay with public). Also sidebar, I love what you're doing here. This is really a great idea.

DISCLAIMER: this review is only reflective of my own opinions and is intended to provide constructive criticism. there is no obligation to listen to or agree with anything said.

OVERALL:

from the colour scheme to the fonts and graphics, everything feels so– thematically similar and visually pleasing. i’m incredibly impressed with how everything turned out, even if i’m not exactly convinced that i would apply. thank you so much for your hard work and love for this rp, because it clearly shows. that being said, there’s still a few things that i would like to see changed or improved upon, mostly to aid clarification.

i’ve done my best to give my honest review and opinion on your rp. i tend to be a bit wordy, so there is also a TLDR at the very bottom of the page. as always, i am here to elaborate on any of my critiques if asked. thanks for coming by!

ACCESSIBILITY:

this is not my favorite fansite theme, mostly because it is so commonly used, but you guys have done a really good job of making it your own. the links you’ve chosen to highlight on the main page very helpful and i’m happy that you’ve included so much information about the world you’ve created in the navigation.

unfortunately, i also feel that most of your writing is incredibly dense. as a newcomer to your universe and the concepts you have presented, it takes more than one read in order to understand what is being presented to me and that’s a bit of a turn-off.

i see the most problem in pages such as your rules– which, as an ooc page, should be very easy to navigate, but instead is organized in a way that I don’t feel encourages people to actually read your guidelines. this wordiness combined with the placement of your password, leads me to believe that most would just skip to the end and not read what you’ve written. i’ve suggested changes that i would make in the ‘RULES page’ section down below.

as a general structure, accessibility is great. however, for people wanting to discover more about your world, i think there must be a better way to organize the details of your story.

PLOT:

I really do think that this is an original and lovely plot idea, but I stayed on this page for a very long time and I’m still not sure I understood the whole concept. Though this plot is not particularly very long, it feels that way.

The very first sentence does not grab your attention and the first paragraph is a lot of exposition for an audience that is not quite invested yet in your RP. In particular, the first two sentences introduce three completely new concepts and terms to potential applicants, and it feels a bit sprung unto you.

It is just dense and hard to understand. I’ve done a bit of retooling of the first section that I feel better conveys the idea of your RP. I am not saying that it is better or that your writing is not Amazing (bc I firmly believe that it is), but I want to give you an option. .

A centuryago, Sector Zero of the American Government began work on PROJECT GENESIS, aclassified experiment that resulted in the creation of supersoldiers.

These supersoldiers,known as Novas, were a subspecies of humanity gifted with extraordinaryabilities. Though they looked and behaved just like any other humans, theirpowers made them more valuable and more dangerous than any human could ever be.And thus, though they had been exploited by their creators for decades, their veryexistence was kept a secret for the public.

It wasonly in 2015 when the world found out about Novakind.

And it wasthen, that the world changed for good.

Within three years, Novakind were forced to registerthemselves or be imprisoned. For the next decade, Novas and Humans would waragainst each other, attempting to find the delicate equilibrium that wouldallow both sides to coexist. When the acts of terrorism from both sides grewmore and more violent, the government was forced to step in, passing the Nova Protection Act of 2026— a piece of legislationthat saw to the imprisonment of all Nova kind under the guise of“protecting” both them and the humans.

Toavoid being forced to live in the walled-off camps and be subject to the crueltythat the Protection Act established, many Novas became fugitives. There, they seek refuge in abandoned neighborhoods, hoping tooutrun the reach of the government until the horrible injustice comes toend.

In general, I advise that your plot

relies less on terminology (Sector Zero, Project Genesis, Nova, Novakind, Novum districts,..etc. are all words we have never heard before and thus we need a slow introduction to them.

tries to be more immediately attention-grabbing rather than expository

++ there’s a few grammatical and spelling errors in your plot and extra information pages and that’s a big turnoff for me. i would read through your plot one more time and proofread.

I wish the summary and notes section was separated from the rest visually (perhaps with a few line breaks?) rather than indicated under another subheader. It makes more sense to me to have it stand apart from the rest of the plot as it can be and should be read on its own, rather than as a continuation of the more detailed plot.

Though the READ MORE section is helpful and should be included in your rp, it does look a little bit out-of-place on this page, especially directly after the summary. I would rather see a READ MORE link that directs to a page with all 5 separate links right after your detailed plot.

AESTHETIC/GRAPHICS:.

I have genuinely nothing bad to say about your fonts or your layout. I wish I could write as long a section on how much I appreciate the colour scheme you’ve chosen and how consistent it is as I wrote about your plot.

You’ve made everything work for you and I’m really impressed.

I wish I had your eye for colour and your ability to pick pictures. Good job!

SKELETONS:

I love the diversity in your skeletons and the ideas behind them. The freedom of choice in the faceclaims and the unique connections are really appreciated.

However, none of the skeletons really stand out to me. A lot of the skeletons feel like bullet points, rather than like a quick look into their lives.

I love the graphics associated with each skeleton and think each of the blurbs on the skeletons are perfectly adequate, but none of them really come to life for me. Lupus and Leo are, in my opinion, the best of the batch, but I want more–

I’m sorry that I can’t really elaborate on what I’m looking for, but, in the future, I hope that you can try for a less expository description and something more imbued with animation and emotion. When skeletons are written livelily, it really does allow potential applicants to connect more with your vision of the character.

At this point, I wouldn’t change anything, but I hope that you keep this in mind for the future.

THE PAGES:

—– THE ‘RULES’ PAGE

If I would change one thing about your entire RP, it would be the rules. This page is hard to read through. Some of it feels repetitive and, at points, it even directly contradicts itself (no age limit, but also strongly recommended age limit).

I understand the need for all these rules, and, actually believe that most of them need to be there. However, the presentation could just be a little different.

For example, IV, V, IX are all the same topic with slight variations and can be summed up into

OOC Drama and Bullying will not tolerated in this RP. This includes forcing of ‘ships’ or ‘plots’ on other players without consent. If you feel uncomfortable of have any problems with any players, please contact us and we will resolve the issue. If found to be instigating the drama, you will have two warnings before you will be removed from the RP.

And instead of

We(as admins) promise to try and accept applications in a timely manner. We willtry to do acceptances every Wednesday and Sunday, however due to life outsideof tumblr things may change. We promise to make announcements regarding anychanges in acceptance dates/times as soon as possible.

Wedo reserve the right to deny applications, though it is a very rare occurrence.If we do deny an application, it will be for one of three reasons: 1. We feelyou do not understand the skeleton for which you’re applying. 2. Someone elseapplied, and even if your app was spectacular, we felt that the other applicantunderstood the character more, and you chose not to have a secondary optionwhen applying. 3. You failed to use spellcheck or other grammar resources whenwriting your app, to the extreme that it was very hard to read. If you weredenied and would like the reason why, just let us know and we’ll gladly talk itover with you. That being said, even if you’re denied, we would absolutely loveto see you apply again.

I would simply put

Acceptances are every Wednesday and Thursday. If conflicts arise, we will make an announcement regarding any changes in acceptance dates/times.

We reserve the right to deny applications. If you were denied and would like the reason why, please feel free to message us. Regardless of the reason why you were rejected, we will be happy to see you reapply.

As you can see, this is far less wordy and still conveys the same message.

I also firmly believe you should never have a TLDR on your rules page, because well… the players Should read your rules.

—– THE EXTRA INFORMATION PAGES

There a few spelling and grammatical errors on these pages and it continues to be a little bit hard to understand.

I would read over these and try to edit them in a way that is more concise.

—– RANDOM COMMENTS

The Dinah Drake name throws me off a little bit, as there is a popular superhero character by that name. It shouldn’t be important, but it just took me out of it.

I highly suggest that you stylize the title of your RP when it shows up (ie DEFIANCE vs Defiance.) It helps distinguish that this is the name of your RP rather than just a noun. It also looks a lot more dynamic.

I would avoid using slang and other colloquialisms when answering asks (ooh, oh, lol..etc.) as usually you are explaining more about your universe and your vision. You want to answer asks clearly and portray your professionalism. Otherwise, I really like the vibes you give off! You seem welcoming and I’m really glad about that.

TLDR; what i would like to see changed

EDIT your Rules & Plot so that they are less wordy and more engaging (also reread for grammatical errors).

I genuinely found your plot hard to get through because it was a lot of ‘telling’ (rather than showing) and it felt a little bit dry. When introducing so many new concepts to potential applicants, you have to ease them into it and sort of sweeten the waters by using a little (but not too much) purple prose and description. It gives life and atmosphere to your RP.

Your rules are just too long and, if I were applying, I would just avoid reading them if possible. I also don’t like the use of a TLDR at the end as it feels unprofessional and implies that one can skip over your rules.

Stylize the word DEFIANCE when you are referring to your RP, so we are aware that it is the title of your RP, rather than just a word.

Really not much else! I like this RP a lot! It is truly beautiful and I wish the best for you.

as a last note and reminder, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE ANY OF MY SUGGESTIONS AND I WILL NOT CARE if you have not taken any of them. There is no ill-will from me to you. As always, this is not intended to be hate and I genuinely want the best for you guys. I’ve done my very best to make sure my advice is constructive, but please call me out if you find any of this offensive or crude.

Thank you and have a nice day. Good luck!

#rp review #rpo #rpt #defiancerpg #tl;dr

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evanvanness · 5 years ago

Text

Annotated edition for the May 24, 2020, Week in Ethereum News

Several people this week have told me they want a “drama” section in the newsletter and have asked me to annotate the Aragon and Autark Ado this week.

Perhaps that’s why the Aragon drama leads the most clicked list:

So why is Aragon suing its grantee? Aragon held a vote where the community approved these grants. Aragon now does not want to pay, claiming breach of contract - presumably that they did not believe Autark was not delivering fast enough or that products that were up to snuff. It’s a bit hard to follow the play-by-play but at some point Aragon decided that after spending 600k of the 1.6m awarded grant, they did not want to pay any longer, so Autark threatened to sue. Aragon offered to settle for $250k of the remaining million in grant payments, but it appears Autark rejected because Aragon would cut off the ANT incentive payments. So Aragon sued Autark, to make sure that the case happens on its home turf in Switzerland which benefits their deep pockets versus Autark’s (now unfunded) startup budget.

For what it’s worth, I believe I voted against Autark’s first request and while I thought I voted against the second one, it turns out I didn’t vote. There were a lot of votes in that round, and it was obviously going to pass (it passed “unanimously” with only 1 ANT voting against), so i must have decided not to spend the gas.

This all seems pretty boring, it’s just back and forth arguing over a contract, why are other people commenting on it?

1. Aragon has a reputation for not paying people.

It has long been an open secret in the industry that Aragon routinely doesn’t pay people in full or on time.

Grants are hard! I can empathize with both Aragon (presumably feeling like it wasn’t getting enough ROI) and Autark (presumably thinking that a community approved grant couldn’t be secretly overturned by Jorge and Luis).

2. Aragon sold a token for tens of millions of dollars, but after 3 years the only use for the token was a tokenholder vote. Now, the results of those votes are unilaterally and privately discarded.

It’s been over 3 years since Aragon raised a crazy amount of money selling a token. In that time frame, the only use for the token has been these votes.

If Jorge and Luis could decide by themselves to countermand the results of any of those votes without even telling the tokenholders anything, then what was the point of these votes? Why did I waste my ETH paying gas to vote in these things?

[Digression: They also recently released an ANJ token that you can exchange ANT for, but I don’t count being able to exchange a token for another token as utility. After more than 3 years, I cannot think of any other possible utility for ANT. Note: i’m very bearish on “dispute resolution by tokenholder vote”]

3. Aragon marketing hasn’t matched Aragon actions

The Aragon Manifesto was a clarion call. In black and white terms it paints the picture of transparency and technology as a solution for society’s problems of centralization, censorship and oppression.

Yet the rhetoric hasn’t matched the reality. They’ve declared that Aragon is the world’s court, yet go running to Swiss courts to claim jurisdiction rather than even attempt to use Aragon Court in parallel (since they can’t possibly lose in either venue).

They’re the rich ones with deep pockets, yet they’ve repeatedly chosen not to pay grantees who have very little leverage in negotiation (with the exception of Prysmatic after they complained).

None of it has been transparent (though of course there are often good reasons).

----

The Aragon team so far has responded to all these concerns by saying things like “you’re questioning our good intentions” or “the courts will decide”.

It is obvious that Aragon will win in the courts. They have the deep pockets; Autark doesn’t. They drafted the contract, and any decent lawyer will have drafted it so Aragon can’t possibly lose. Even if the contract somehow wasn’t one-sided, Aragon chose to run to the home field courts. It would be shocking if they lost.

Aragon’s intentions aren’t bad; that’s not really in question. I’m 100% sure that Jorge and Luis’s intentions are good and that any individual decision is defensible.

What is in question is their decision making overall. When you stake your brand on “transparency” and anti-oppression, then people will feel disappointed when your brand promises do not match your actions.

------------------------------------------------------

Enough with the drama. As with last week, a few things I think I’d read if i were an Eth holder interested in high level things.

Carl Beekhuizen’s Eth2 keys explainer

5 things crypto can learn from Visa’s struggle for adoption in the 1970s

Brave’s anti-fingerprinting v2, available in the beta releases but coming soon in the main releases

Working in reverse order, it’s always surprising to me how little people understand how much info your browser is leaking. Fingerprinting basically lets people figure out who you are even if you switch IP addresses, clear your browsing history, etc. I used to work in anti-fraud, and I was surprised how often you could figure stuff out from the fingerprints. Good for anti-fraud, but bad for privacy. Brave is changing the game on fighting fingerprinting!

I’m old enough to remember when Visa and especially Amex were not the ubiquitous things that they are today in America. There were some interesting parallels around their ads “think of it as money.” The more things change, the more things stay the same.

A good Eth2 keys explainer, definitely worth reading if you’re interesting in staking.

On to the annotations. The stuff that I think might deserve extra comment, not necessarily the stuff I think is most important.

Eth1

Péter Szilágyi’s snap sync, and some benchmarking of snap vs fast sync

Discovery peer advertisement efficiency analysis, also applicable to eth2

Sync improvements are a big deal, as the initial sync time is one of the things that most people find daunting around running a full node.

Depending on who you are, this may not be considered sexy, but it’s an important thing for eth1 usability.

Eth2

phase 0 spec v0.12 – added latest IETF standard. This is THE spec for the eth2 launch, barring any updates for bugs

Lighthouse client update – BLS key implementation, under Trail of Bits audit, 300mb RAM to run 2000 validators

Lodestar client update – syncing to both Schlesi and Topaz testnets

Prysmatic client update – Schlesi fork post-mortem, slashing client and protection

Fizzy v0.1 – WASM interpreter written in C++

Carl Beekhuizen’s Eth2 keys explainer

There’s been plenty of talk around “this is the spec” before, so I sorta can’t blame someone who says “but you’ve already said that before!”

Basically, they were all true, but with specific exceptions. And that’s still true - there will likely be some kind of bug or clarification found so that that this isn’t THE spec that launches the eth2 chain in a few months. But unless something crazy happens, this spec for the eth2 chain isn’t going to change except to fix bugs.

Layer2

Fuel does a demo of Reddit’s community points in an optimistic rollup that reduces transaction fees by 60x

Loopring to pass 1 million trades on its zk rollup in just 3 months of being live

Gazelle (formerly Plasma Chamber) alpha release with an API for deposit, transfer and exit

Fuel’s demo is pretty cool. It’s obviously just a demo - they don’t have a way to withdraw back to the testnet where Reddit’s community points are house.

Dexes continue to improve! Using their zk rollup, Loopring has a trading experience that is just as good as a centralized exchange, but with much cheaper fees and no risk of centralized exchanges getting hacked and losing your crypto.

This newsletter is made possible by 0x!

0x is excited to sponsor Week in Ethereum News and invite readers to try out our new DEX!

Stuff for developers

web3js v1.2.8 with Ethers v5 ABI coder integration, ENS’s contenthash, and EIP-1193’s AbstractProvider

Mocking Solidity code with Waffle

A writeup of Solhint v3’s features

How to get randomness onchain using Chainlink’s VRF

Offchain voting for personal tokens, tutorial from Austin Griffith

Gas and circuit constraint benchmarks of binary and quinary incremental Merkle trees using Poseidon

Loopring’s new approach to generating frontend keys to sign offchain requests

Hegic had to shut down again because of an exploit that Sam Sun reported weeks beforehand

tBTC found a bug during their rollout; launch delayed

Matic’s mainnet is in the process of going live

I’ve seen some games migrate over to Matic.

Matic is “in the process” of going live. I note the “in the process” because I see a bunch of new blockchain projects saying that they are live, but....they aren’t really by any definition I would use.

But as I said previously in an annotated edition, it’s a process. It’s not exactly some binary “we’re live now.” Even Ethereum went live in July 2015 with less than full features.

Ecosystem

Tornado.cash non-custodial mixer is now trustless, with the admin function burned and the frontend available at https://tornadocash.eth.link

Ethereum Foundation q1 update, including how EF thinks about funding

Intro to dwebsites. dweb = ENS + IPFS (and equivalents)

Network usage is at an all time high. With similar use of the Eth2 chain, Ethereum will have negative issuance of ETH because part of every transaction fee is burned

I was surprised that gas usage is so high that we’d be in negative issuance if Eth2 was live.

I’ve said before that I’m not sure how I feel about negative issuance. On the one hand, the worry is that negative issuance means that no one has any incentive to use their ETH. On the other hand, that’s already the reality today - hardly anyone wants to pay for anything in ETH at $200, because basically every ETH holder I know has obscenely high expectations for what the price is likely to do in the near to medium term.

Some interesting thoughts in the EF update about how EF thinks about funding.

Meanwhile it’s great to see Tornado continue to improve the trustlessness of their product. Incredible work from the Roman S team. (if you missed the joke, it’s because both of them are named Roman and have last names that begin with S)

Enterprise

Using Eth mainnet, Baseline Protocol privately and securely synchronizes data and business logic across SAP and Microsoft Dynamics

Hyperledger Fabric founder John Wolpert’s common sense statement on using blockchain and Ethereum mainnet

The Baseline Protocol as lean strategy

Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s Project Whitney using Ethereum mainnet to “support private market securities, from issuance through secondary markets”

I’m surprised by how quickly the use mainnet approach has taken hold. If you rewind back to the last hype cycle, relatively few even considered the idea, even as enterprises were buying private chains that didn’t make much sense. (hat tip to GridPlus CEO Mark D’Agostino’s seminal No Country for Private Blockchains article)

DAOs and Standards

Aragon sues to avoid paying grantee a community-voted grant

Exploring DAOs as a new kind of institution

MetaCartel is becoming a DAO incubator

ERC2665: ERC721 transfer fee extension

EIP2666: Repricing of precompiles and Keccak256 function

Application layer

Uniswap v2 launched, with more features – direct token pairs, price oracles, flash swaps, etc

UMA launches the ETHBTC synthetic token, so you can bet on The Flippening

idle v3 – stablecoin yield rebalancer adds dydx, USDT, and a risk-adjusted strategy

Maker changes USDC stability fee to .75% and WBTC to 1%. Also, how Dai became a favorite in Latin America

Argent launches v1 of smart contract wallet with one touch access to TokenSets, PoolTogether, Aave, Uniswap V2, Compound, Maker and Kyber.

5/5 DeFi in the app layer section. Of course what I put in the app layer section vs what I put elsewhere is certainly arbitrary.

And hey, why isn’t Tornado Cash on DeFiPulse? It’s got a decent amount of value locked up.

Tokens/Business/Regulation

5 things crypto can learn from Visa’s struggle for adoption in the 1970s

WBTC mints another 1500 BTC on May 21. There’s now 5200 BTC on Ethereum compared to less than 3000 BTC on Lightning and Liquid combined

Blockchain code as antitrust, Schrepel and Buterin paper

ETH to soon surpass BTC on Bitcoiners’ preferred stock-to-flow metric

Staking will turn Ethereum into a functional store of value

What’s interesting about that 3000 BTC is that Liquid is just a trusted sidechain, and it has 2200 of the 3000 BTC. Now to be fair, WBTC definitely has some trust assumptions as well.

Still isn’t it interesting to see BTC migrate to Ethereum, where it can be used relatively trustlessly, rather than go to Blockstream’s products?

General

KYC puts lives at risk: BlockFi hack leaks client name, address, and crypto addresses. Similarly, a hacker claims to have exploited Shopify for Trezor and Ledger databases, though Ledger says the databases don’t match

Using zero knowledge proofs for vulnerability disclosure

World Economic Forum’s principles for a decentralized future (transparency, self-sovereign data, privacy and accountability)

JK Rowling jokes about trolling BTC because of her significant ETH holdings

The Winklevosses say they own a similar amount of ETH and BTC

Brave’s anti-fingerprinting v2, available in the beta releases but coming soon in the main releases

Using zero knowledge proofs for vulnerability disclosures is very cool. It’s a pretty classic problem if you’re a whitehat hacker - how do you disclose the vulnerability and then trust that you get anywhere near the value back that you deserve from someone’s bug bounty program? There are examples - even in the Ethereum space, where people should understand the value - of responsible disclosure not getting paid anything commensurate to what they deserved.

I’ll be interested to see if BlockFi suffers as a result of the hack. They’ve certainly put at risk any whales which used their service and didn’t give a PO Box/false address/whatever. Yet the history of database hacks even in our space is that most people just eventually return as if no hack ever happened.

Soon this annotated edition will be going paid, more details coming soon.

That’s all for this week!

Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter, usually forthcoming in a day or so, as well as a real-time source of Eth news.

Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it weekly

Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-may-24-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

May 26 – last day to apply for Ethereum India fellowship

May 28 – EIP1559 implementation call

May 29 – core devs call

May 29-June 16 – SOSHackathon

June 16 – deadline to apply for Gitcoin’s Kernel incubator

[Post updated at night for accuracy.]

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infiniteinjury · 6 years ago

Text

Standing and The Border Wall

So I was initially aghast at the opinion granting the government a stay in Trump v. Sierra (the emergency funding for the wall case). How could the court have done something so obviously wrong. But then I went and read the briefs and came out with a different view.

However, a key caveat here is that it’s only reasonable if Judge McFadden’s decision decision the House lacked standing to challenge is overturned on appeal. If the Supreme Court upholds that then, precedent or no, they’ve endorsed the position that the president could just start spending money without the fig lead of an excuse and no one could challenge it.

First, the court’s stay wasn’t based on whether or not the expenditure was unlawful (obviously yes IMO) but the court’s conclusion that the plaintiffs probably lacked standing. Personally, I would have voted with Bryer to allow the transfer of money but not the start of construction (thus avoiding harm to both parties) but the fact that they convinced Breyer to at least stay the injunction on the transfer of money suggests there was a pretty good argument for this point of view. And, indeed, after reading the briefs (there is only a super short opinion as it was an order) I came away thinking that this was a plausible outcome.

The most important point here is that the court has a long held rule for prudential standing that the interests of the plaintiffs raising a statutory challenge has to fall within the zone of interests the law was intended to protect. For instance, in Tax Analysts the court denied standing to an oil company seeking to challenge an IRS ruling that gave competitors tax benefits it argued were barred by law. I think it’s a stupid rule (uniform application is always an interest of the legislature).

This puts the plaintiffs in a tough spot since they are obviously not within the zone of interests protected by section 8005 (the law that allows the DoD to transfer money in an emergency) so they argue that it’s a constitutional violation of the spending clause since that means the government is spending money without congressional authorization. However, this is a dubious move as in some sense all government actions in violation of a statute are unconstitutional1. I think the fact that any claim of statutory violation could be turned into a constitutional violation to be a reducto of the supreme court’s precedent but the precedent is what it is. Indeed, there is some pretty explicit precedent in Dalton that seems to establish that when the executive makes a decision in a way that violates some constraint congress placed on that decision it doesn’t thereby become a constitutional violation (in the sense that’s relevant for standing). Specifically, the court held that

Our cases do not support the proposition that every action by the President, or by another executive official, in excess of his statutory authority is ipso facto in violation of the Constitution. On the contrary, we have often distinguished between claims of constitutional violations and claims that an official has acted in excess of his statutory authority. See, e. g., Wheeldin v. Wheeler, 373 U.S. 647, 650-652 (1963) (distinguishing between “rights which may arise under the Fourth Amendment” and “a cause of action for abuse of the [statutory] subpoena power by a federal officer”); Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 396-397 (1971) (distinguishing between “actions contrary to [a] constitutional prohibition,” and those “merely said to be in excess of the authority delegated . . . by the Congress”).

I think this distinction is kinda arbitrary and unreasonably provides the (arguably more important) rights protected by structural features of the constitution less protection than explicitly named rights. The plaintiffs try to distinguish Dalton by suggesting it applies only when the decision is ultimately relegated wholly to the discretion of the president but I think this misreads Dalton2.

The government also argues the constitutional violation would occur when the money is transferred between accounts not when it is spent. This feels too clever by half since the intent of section 8005 is obviously to prevent the expenditure of funds on projects congress disapproves of not to change DoD accounting procedures3.

Finally, even if we accept that the challenge should be considered based on a constitutional violation there is some debate over whether the zone of interests test still applies.

The government argues that it does based on an absurdly strained reading of the phrase “statutorily created” arguing that because the courts of equity are a creation of congress that any cause of action arising out of them are statutorily created. Frankly, that’s absurd (if that was true what function does “statutorily created” have?). But from a structural point of view it’s not implausible to think that for derivative constitutional claims, i.e., constitutional claims that arise because a statutory constraint is violated, that the zone of interests test still applies and that zone of interests is determined by those specified in the statute. Indeed, if one accepts the principle behind the zone of interests tests it seems like it applies just as strongly here (though if you, like me, don’t one would want to limit it’s application).

I’d note that the government’s argument that the transfer of funds here was legal is just absurd. It relies on a technical distinction between the budget item in the DoD and the funding of the very same project via DHS (which congress denied). That’s ridiculous and would let the president fund absolutely anything just by changing the names or agencies under which it was funded.

I mean why can’t the competing business in Tax Analysts just allege that issuing their competitors a refund (after estimated tax payments) based on this interpretation is an expenditure without congressional authorization or just generally rely on the fact that the constitution vests legislative authority with congress to challenge any contrary administrative ruling. ↩

Specifically, in Dalton the president’s only power was to either accept in whole or reject in whole a proposal by a commission on what military bases to close and the plaintiffs alleged the commission’s proposal was crafted in violation of law. I can’t see how the fact that the president ultimately had to approve or reject is relevant to the standing. ↩

To steelman the argument as best I can consider this. Imagine the Trump admin had refused to say on what exact pieces of land it was planning to build the wall on before transfering the money. In that case the plaintiffs could surely not claim injury when the transfer happened (the mere fact that the government might do something isn’t enough) and surely standing can’t turn on what you believe the government plans to do with the money. However, I’d respond that in this case if the defendants would (if they otherwise would have had standing) gain standing when that money was spent (or about to be spent) in a way that injured them. ↩

Standing and The Border Wall was originally published on Rejecting Rationality

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