Trump to Sign Executive Order Waiving Key Environmental Laws

Have you been to the projects? There's housing, and nothing else. People still have to sit 2 hours on a bus to get groceries because it's still a food desert. Businesses won't show up because there's no money, because there's no job training programs and no public transit to where the jobs are, etc. Eliminating segregation and raising people out of poverty is complex, and I don't think eliminating environmental review would move the needle.

According to NEPA, when an impact is identified, the intent is to develop an alternative to avoid the impact entirely. It's only when alternatives are found to be infeasible that other mitigation methods can be considered.

By doing what? Protest?

Solution to that is a functioning Congress, which requires less polarization (i.e. more compromise) and sane campaign finance laws. Term limits couldn't hurt either.

Optimistic Democrats cheered Obama's expansive use of executive power (so progressive!), and were dismayed when Trump revoked every executive order that Obama's name was on pretty much immediately after taking power. Perhaps this will be a lesson... but I'm betting that Biden would veto any such limitation even if he had a friendly Congress and Senate.

I think the most important thing is getting rid of first past the post voting, and moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.

But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander.

If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable?

Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?

For example, California passes all sorts of interesting environmental regulations; and the states regularly weigh on their neighbours and tributaries to have similar laws.

> abolish the EC ... to start with

No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything unless you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country, or have any restraint toward the rural minority.

I understand that this sounds crazy to people, but as a resident of Colorado who occasionally enjoys marijuana, a substance that my state allows but the Federal gov't has long outlawed, I like the fact that the current system puts a higher emphasis on winning over broader regions of the country without just focusing on cities.

Obviously, I want it to be more of a sane weighting. My concern with not having some form of geographic weighting is that it sets up the USA not for some dramatic Civil War 2 that some people envision, but instead for a peaceful secession of certain regions who would end up going decades without having a voice in the Federal gov't.

Most Americans don't have a strong grasp of WHY the Senate was made the more powerful chamber of Congress. It was done over the objections of the two largest, most powerful states at the time (Virginia and Pennsylvania) at the demand of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Mass, etc.

They explicitly stated that they were worried that Philadelphia, New York City, etc would dominate the Federal Gov't and permanently ignore the smaller states who were irrelevant to the power process. It's an odd situation, because the Federal Gov't of the US was a creation of the state governments, not vice versa like many Europeans seem to think.

Obviously, the current EC is pretty silly and feels arbitrary and unjust. But I don't foresee there being a single US nation without some mechanism to prevent a massive, contiguous chunk of the country from being permanently alienated from the legislative process. The history books are pretty clear on the longevity of empires whose governments ignore citizens outside of their urban centers. You can drive from Mexico to Canada in the US without driving through a single state that Hillary won in 2016. I don't see those people putting up with 6 elections in a row of defeat for their candidate. They frankly are already combative as it is.

Ironically, many states in the US already have this issue within their own governments. The citizens of upstate New York are pretty much ignored at the expense of the citizens of New York City. Property taxes reflect this. My home state of Colorado is so dominated by Denver that a minimum wage law was enacted that ignores the vast differences in cost of living across the state, forcing small businesses in tiny towns with extremely low rents to pay as if their employees live in the relatively expensive Denver metro area. The Denver Post, which is absolutely not a conservative rag, opposed the minimum wage law's implementation due to this fact.

I’m definitely not a legal scholar but I optimize code a fair amount that computes the same thing as the un-optimized code.

Take for example multiplication of natural numbers, e.g. 2x2=4, there are a number of ways this could be implemented to get the desired result, bit shifting, symbolic mathematics, heck even trained machine learning or an impl on a trinary computer. If The computation is correct the vast majority of the time great! If not, a judge can order the process be updated to implement the law.

Effectively, Congress Makes the laws, the executive branch manages their administration, and the legislative branch ensures they are being administrators in accordance with the law.