EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
I made no such long term or meta claims.
> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper. As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
And it isn’t actually gone yet, either.
The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.
Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.
It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)
I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
Yes, very few last 250 years.
USA has had some close calls before, the Civil War was horrific.
Nothing lasts forever, but I would not bet against the USA's system perpetuating itself this time, too
The aids distribution in Africa is highly correlated with Christianity
Prime example of a rapist protected by the church: https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0719/1524290-eamonn-casey/
Though, not like the natives had much better with the US.
Obviously not since you can't follow it.
> Seeing as most people on the internet are from Maryland, assuming that every poster has an opinion about Baltimore is both logical and useful for conversation.
I accounted for ignorance in my first sentence, and your conclusion doesn't even follow from your bad interpretation of my logic.
Baltimore has many problems and I can't do the history justice here. I'm not interested in writing a thoughtful essay from which someone cherry-picks a sentence, and I said as much in my second sentence. This isn't the SAT; the facts aren't all contained in the prompt. If someone is coming to this from a place of total ignorance, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, I think the best thing this person can do is simply read about Baltimore.
Baltimore isn't just something people from Maryland know about. It's a tragic national disgrace. Real suffering has been inflicted on the current and former residents of Charm City. In many ways they've caused their own suffering. There's a conversation that's worth having, and I'm willing to have it.
> One time I saw somebody post that they’d never been to that city so I assume that they were workshopping a character for an outlandish piece of speculative fiction.
If only OP's goals were that interesting.
Exactly! Baltimore is something that everyone knows about. People do not simply have political opinions without a stance on Baltimore. That isn’t really possible because the US just isn’t that big of a place.
Obviously we can imagine (with great difficulty of course) a hypothetical person that doesn’t know about everything that has happened, is happening, and what might happen in Baltimore. It is, however, impossible to imagine a person that doesn’t know why Charm City is the single most important place in American politics. It can’t be done, it is like imagining a new color. The human brain can not exist without some appreciation for Baltimore, which is why questions like “what is happening there” can only be asked in bad faith.
It is like when somebody brings up Santa Paula. Obviously I don’t need to tell you what that means
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
So.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
That seems… unlikely?
And then "information" is doing a lot of work when you start talking about social media.
A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.
I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
Same reason adtech has free reign to bring down society.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.
I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...
However, Baerbock has absolutely monstrous statements and the German gas-guzzling contingent are the obvious culprits for the EU partership agreements with Azerbaijan and for the incorrect statements treating this whole thing as somehow restoring Azerbaijani territorial integrity and the numerous statements by the EC falsely claiming that Armenia had attacked Azerbaijani (i.e. these 'we call on both sides...' in the aftermath of Azerbaijani attacks). Furthermore, it is German influence on the EC that made the implementation of the ICJ decision subject to negotiation, and it is likely German influence on the EC that forced the agreement whereby mine maps were exchanged for the release of PoWs. These mine maps naturally enabled further Azeri attacks. It is also very apparent that there was government influence on media organizations to not report the starvation in the NKAO beginning after the Azeri blocking of the Lachin corridor-- for example in Sweden state television reported nothing, and reported of the ethnic cleansing itself only that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan'. This shows co-ordination between Swedish government, Swedish state television (SVT) and Turkey or Azerbaijan, indicating a secret deal either for the sake the Swedish NATO entry or on the EU level. Certain phrases 'lightning offensive' which sound decidedly Turkish are also repeated in many newspaper articles, indicating a larger deal rather than something specific to Sweden.
The CSTO is absolutely irrelevant, as everybody who matters in any way knows completely. France would not be selling weapons to Armenia if they believed that their CSTO membership were relevant.
There were excellent opportunities to intervene even as the Azeri troops were rolling down the Agdam road to Stepanakert, and it's very unlikely that the Germans were unaware. SAR satellite imagery of the region is so readily available that unclassified images can be obtained on a commercial basis and I'm not even sure it was cloudy.
what a bunch of nonsense
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.
You don’t have it in the USA, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
Does any country?
No, and for good reasons. Even in a utopian liberal democracy, fundamental rights cannot be used to deprive someone else of their own fundamental rights. You cannot have freedom for all without limitations to that freedom.
Edit: This dilemma arises whenever your ideal is dependent on the cooperation of others. Pacifism is another example. So you cant uphold your pacifistic ideal in the case of being attacked. Or you might loose the option to enforce peace when it only depends on you cooperating, upholding it. This is a perspective many people rejecting ukranian aid dont consider (but are eager to push out nazis because they are intolerant).
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öffentlich-rechtlicher_Rundf...
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
https://taz.de/Laender-boykottieren-den-Bildungsgipfel/!5918...
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
I could go on. To put it lightly, consensus reality is manufactured to a significant degree. Even those who imagine themselves to be rebels, like woke leftists, are in large part the product of COINTELPRO type operations. If establishment media like Colbert and the NY Times are pushing the position of 'The Resistance' then you can be quite certain it's controlled opposition. Same applies to types like Charlie Kirk or the Daily Wire.
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
Shout out to the American Dream.
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
and yes, i'm angry too.
And no matter who wins, the other side will be convinced it was by cheating. And that has no alternative but total war.
I have looked long and hard for an alternative but I'm not seeing one.
This is not a show for me. These are the people in my life.
From this latest reply it seems you are heavily invested on one side of the political spectrum.
Surely you can see that if you have a specific and highly involved position on one side of the political spectrum, when your side is not winning, it will be losing. There can be no alternative.
What you seem to really want is complete dominance of the spectrum - this is the alternative you really seem and I think you are frustrated not to be achieving it. But would you really want to impose your opinions and 'help' on everyone, whether they like it or not? Maybe you would, I don't know.
Anyway, I'll point you back to my original point. The alternative is to let politicos play their games and try to remain personally uninvolved. This is the path to sanity.
I dont want dominance, i wish people to be less ignorant, to eg. ponder large societal problems in all their complexity and not elevate migration as their top concern.
Dominance over all three governmental branches is what trump actually seeks. If you are ignoring that tiny detail too, you are part of the ignorant masses, part of the problem.
And the knowledge that you cannot win when the other side controls the armed forces, the FBI, and all the governing institutions, a lot of states entirely too, and is clearly willing (and maybe even eager) to use them? The president and the people behind him probably look forward to their opponents trying. I think this "total war" might be very short.
E.g. "It is simply a fact that Group X is just B-like" (group X obviously disagrees, understanding itself to be C+L+M+N).
But projecting B-ness coarsely onto the surface of X, this serves both the members throughout group X and the leaders at its center, who have other goals than understanding the truth of C+L+M+N.
Sorry, that's a new analogy for framing how I see it, as someone working in collective intelligence. Might be a little rocky.
As an American living abroad this seems to be the general consensus with the people I talk to. At some point American exceptionalism became expected without the work and investment required.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
Hard to see a path to Dems winning a Senate majority.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.
As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
You are commenting on a thread about Republican Party gutting one more scientific research department. But you have audacity to say Democrats are bad. One of the commenters on this thread had described very appropriately the current political environment- mass weaponization of stupidity. Those people are running at a very high speed in the opposite direction that there’s no coming back for them.
> They work for their donors not their voters
Voters are donors too. Maybe you meant big donors like Musk. You know how that turned out.
I’m saying Democrats are ineffective at doing good and are therefore part of the problem.
If the Democrats do not effectively wield power to solve people’s real world (economic) problems the country will slide further to the right.
I obviously meant wealthy donors and corporations (the ownership class) — the minority or entities that the Democrats are beholden to as opposed to the bulk of their voters.
Age, institutional donors, and a general upper-middle-class mindset have made the leadership ineffective.
What’s worse is that rank-and-file Democrat voters in this upper-middle-class to upper class bloc—generally older white-collar voters, tech millionaires, or trust-fund kids—refuse to see that they are part of the problem.
Any constructive criticism or calls for introspection is deemed “bad faith” or conservative trolling.
Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/
Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
The *Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)* famously narrowed the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, particularly its Privileges or Immunities Clause. While the case primarily focused on that clause, the Court also touched upon the "subject to the jurisdiction" language in the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
In the Slaughterhouse Cases, Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the majority, briefly clarified the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." He stated that this phrase was intended to *exclude certain categories of individuals from automatic birthright citizenship*, even if they were born on U.S. soil. Specifically, he mentioned:
* *Children of foreign ministers or consuls:* These individuals are considered to be under the jurisdiction of their parents' sovereign nation, not the United States. * *Children of citizens or subjects of foreign states born within the United States:* This was a general exclusion for those whose allegiance was considered to be to another country, such as children of enemy aliens during wartime.
The primary purpose of this clause, in the context of the post-Civil War era, was to firmly establish the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, overturning the Dred Scott decision. However, the "subject to the jurisdiction" language ensured that certain exceptions to territorial birthright citizenship were maintained, consistent with international law and diplomatic practice.
It's important to note that while the Slaughterhouse Cases introduced this interpretation, the scope of "subject to the jurisdiction" for birthright citizenship was later more definitively addressed and affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrants who were not citizens was indeed a U.S. citizen because he was "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
Cool, but the 14th amendment was ratified. At least we can agree on that. And this is what it says:
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
You can try to weasel out all you want, but it's at the disrespect to the words of our constitution. Whatever interpretation you are justifying this month, it is radical and lonesome.
I've come to think that this is a dangerous hybrid of (a) bibliolatry — the idolization of a written text [0]; and (b) the Nuremburg Defense of "just following orders" [1], with the orders here being the aforementioned written text.
What follows is a crude and incomplete attempt at "thinking by writing" about another possible perspective that might be more effective than the balls-and-strikes approach that Chief Justice Roberts supposedly follows:
A. Historically, in medieval England a judge was an agent of the king [2], charged with deciding specific cases as he thought the king would do.
B. In the modern United States, the people are said to be sovereign, acting through their elected- and duly-appointed representatives (legislative and otherwise).
C. A legitimate sovereign seeks "the best" for the society in the long term — with limits on what harms can be inflicted on individuals in that pursuit. (Cf. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, as partly manifested in the Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions.)
D. When an extant command from the sovereign — in legislation or constitution — is clear and explicit, then the judge must follow the command (or resign if in conscience she can't comply).
E. But when there's room for different views about just what the sovereign would do at that time and in those circumstances, then the judge — well, judges, making a best guess about what the sovereign would do.
F. Yes, this has elements of a court of equity. It also draws on supremely-pragmatic doctrine from the U.S. military: When a tactical situation isn't covered by specific orders, the leader on the ground is supposed to make a best guess about "the commander's intent" and proceed accordingly. [3]
G. Certainly a judge making such a guess must take into account any available evidence about what the sovereign's intent might be if the sovereign were on the scene.
H. But it's an abdication of responsibility for the judge to throw up her hands and say, I'm sorry, even though the sovereign isn't here today, I'm not allowed to rely on my judgment about what the sovereign would do — instead, I must try to read entrails left over from legislative sausage-making by long-dead legislators who likely didn't consider (or even imagine) everything that I must take into account today.
I. To be sure, this can be calumnized as judicial legislating. But it seems like a pragmatic way to go about judging hard cases in a complex world.
Notes:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliolatry
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_justice. In the framework I'm proposing above, today's judges, unlike their medieval counterparts, aren't given a roving commission to seek out cases and "do justice."
[3] https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/commanders-intent-define...
[4] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2002-title32-vol5/ht...
It seems obvious that the 14th amendment meant to reflect the very similar language of the civil rights act of 1866:
> all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States
What does “and not subject to any foreign power” mean? Nobody knows because Wong Kim Ark doesn’t bother to actually try and address that point.
That would also explain why Congress found it necessary to confer citizenship on Indians by legislation in 1924.
To be clear, I think the specific holding is correct. The 14th amendment is an equal protection amendment, and removed Congress’s power to discriminate citizenship based on race. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether the 14th amendment also removed Congress’s power to qualify citizenship based on legal immigration status or other grounds. It doesn’t purport to be a birthright citizenship order.
Maybe the Court should look into the “emanations from penumbras” of the term “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to see what they can find in there.
That's a lie. The opinion does engage with that question in depth, and also digs into why the language of the 14th amendment differs from that of the 1866 civil rights act. You're trying to shift attention away from the text of the 14th amendment (which is the supreme law of the land) to the text of an earlier law whose meaning you think is easier to argue over. I encourage anyone who has a few hours to take a good look at the case and see for themselves.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/169/649
Maybe the Court should look into the “emanations from penumbras” of the term “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to see what they can find in there.
Weasel words, linking the case to another (Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)) hated by conservatives so as to throw shade on the former.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
The Roberts court has overturned precedent less often than any other recent court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden....
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
There are limitations, but if a research arm was created purely by executive power, then it can be stopped through executive power.
The system works as intended.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
This may not be fully developed in the US constitution because the world was much simpler back then, but it is entirely compatible with it.
The administrative agencies do not merely “advise.” They make regulations with the force of law (legislative power), enforce those regulations (executive power), and adjudicate violations of the regulations (judicial power). That concentration of the three powers into a single entity is the very thing the Constitution goes to great lengths to avoid.
With which article specifically?
Yes, enforcement should not be managed by these agencies. The way to fix this is to reshape them, not give in and let the executive run the show without checks. Of course, that requires a working legislative body and a judiciary that is not fixated on the end times.
You can't have an effective executive without some kind of rulemaking authority.
Marshall wrote in 1825--
"The line has not been exactly drawn which separates those important subjects which must be entirely regulated by the legislature itself from those of less interest in which a general provision may be made and power given to those who are to act under such general provisions to fill up the details."
(And, of course, subsequent decisions have helped to draw that line more exactly).
> adjudicate violations of the regulations
You can always go to a real Article III court, but you need to exhaust the remedies within the agency first.
The structure should really have a few more obvious significant layers where things could shift around over time.
One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.
That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.
We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/american-civil-liberties-un...
And the ACLU was dead wrong on this.
The issue first showed up in 1828 election, when some of the Framers were still alive, and the US basically did nothing about it over the ensuing 200 years.
Remember it was Andrew Jackson who went around ignoring Supreme Court decisions and saying "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it".
And his abuse of executive powers during the Bank Wars to punish political enemies led to the formation of a new political party.
This was one lesson the common people never wanted to learn because it was so much easier to live on the belief that their system is intrinsically immune to abuse, it's just better, magically almost. It was bolstered by the same people's desire to feel better by pointing fingers at the "weak fools" living under dictatorships, incapable to fight. "We have rights and guns, we'll pick up arms and fight any abuse".
But when the abuses came pouring almost everyone piffled, living on the next belief that time will fix things. Sometimes it did. Or maybe one of these times will bring the shocking realization that it's easy to talk big in good times and hard to act in bad times when your skin is in the game.
> I don't think corporate election influence or mass media had anything to do with it
https://theconversation.com/the-scale-of-us-election-spendin...
Would you like to argue money has no influence on political outcomes? Please go ahead.
Is any particular group overrepresented there? Hairy, long hooked nose? I'm talking about white cishetero men of course, this is all their fault. We need to have more, and by more, I mean ALL, such people to be non-cishetero non-white non-men.
Identity politics is at the core of the right, its a huge part of the problem. And you yield it just upside down...
That was hundreds of years ago; when Madison says "domestic faction", he doesn't mean "a faction", he means what we would today call "factionalism". The 18th-century use is a pretty direct mirror of the Latin word factio, also meaning factionalism.
The idea that "checks and balances" are built into the US governmental structure is interesting. It would make sense if governmental positions were held by right of heredity. They aren't, but you can see how the Framers would be working with that mental model.
As the US government is actually constructed, Congressmen, for example, have no incentives to preserve anything as a power exclusive to Congress, because they have no lasting affiliation with Congress.
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.
And therefore both parties represent corporations and the wealthy, not the voters.
> For science and technology, including research and development activities, which shall include research and development activities under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980; necessary expenses for personnel and related costs; procurement of laboratory equipment and supplies; hire, maintenance, and operation of aircraft; and other operating expenses in support of research and development, $500,780,000, to remain available until September 30, 2027.
Neutering the department that would normally do this and kneecapping the ability to spend that appropriation effectively sidesteps how the executive and legislative have divided responsibilities back to the founding of the Republic.
This is a pretty big systemic issue. There's a normal amount of tug of war between the executive's implementation of congressional appropriation, but deliberately breaking multiple departments so that funds can't be effectively spent is something new that upends our normal checks and balances.
In the past, when Congress tried to delegate the power to selectively suppress spending through mechanisms like the line-item veto, the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Now, however, the executive branch is effectively wielding even greater power by deliberately impairing departments, circumventing Congressional appropriations without the constraints or oversight previously deemed essential.
Now I understand that we may spin up a deliberately ineffective agency, and that courts have given the executive a lot of leeway on administrative structuring. But allowing the executive to deliberately frustrate congressionally appropriated expenditures undermines separation of powers.
Social media has allowed the masses to be manipulated in a targeted way like we've never seen in history.
Surely some non-trivial percentage of the commenters / lurkers that are proud to talk about their mono-repo or their favorite react library had some part in the fact that millions think the covid vaccine has 5G.
The zero-day bug in the system that had not been exploited until now is that two of the three branches don't actually have any power of enforcement. So if the executive branch decides to just flat out ignore them, there are no consequences.
That seems to be the major mis-step in trying to structure the government to be secure from capture; obviously the whole experiment was new so they can be forgiven for not addressing it.
But we know now, and would be well-served to identify how to restructure things if given the chance. Unfortunately, the coup by the current regime seems to have been successful and it's going to have to get a lot worse before it blows up and we get something different.
When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.
Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
No, that's just a lazy ignorant response, there is not enough blood in the world to provide enough ink to write all those rules.
There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.
Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.
Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/federal-register... [1] $("tbody > tr > :nth-child(9) ").text().split("\n").map(function(l){return parseInt(l.trim().replace(",",""))}).filter(function(l){return l ? l: 0}).reduce(function(a,b){return a+b},0)
Then the rules aren't static, so you'd need to print the full legal version for each change, so it wouldn't be neatly stuck into years, but more frequently.
Then there is the bigger elephant in the world - the actual world! Since you drain the whole wide world of blood, count all the rules that they produce out there.
Also, did you do math in JS wat to get
4.1 million pages * 1 liter per page = 115 liters (not million)
> about 40 years to
Then you've also forgotten to count all the future regulations
What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda? If that belief is widespread, is an action like this seen not as 'destruction', but as 'dismantling a biased system', even if it seems counterproductive to the rest of us?
Well no, we can have some form of mediator institution which arbitrates such debates peacefully. You could also setup a ritualised debate implicitly agreed to by both parties so you could do this without an EPA - this is essentially how humans did things before we invented rationalised nation states.
You should avoid silly personal attacks, you might get better responses from people.
Even on hacker news I frequently see people completely misunderstanding how, for instance, scientific research gets funded in the US. And the readership of this site is far more likely than a random sample of Americans to know about scientific research.
Dismantling chunks of the government based on the ignorance of some portion of the electorate is just bad policy.
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
11% said yes or were unsure.
That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
Checking IQ test results, we see they follow a Gaussian with a mean of 100 and a stddev of 15.
They do, but it’s not a belief they came upon accidentally. It was pushed over decades using billions of dollars and multiple media conglomerates.
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
Abortion, gun control and releasing the Epstain list are have popular support but the are against it.
Sometimes a small influential group can push for an agenda. That are more organized and have more money
How many times did they have executive and both houses since Roe v Wade without passing law to enshrine the right to abortion?
Surely they could have released the Epstein list as well.
We can argue which party is “worse than the other” for sure, but both serve themselves and neither is a bright shining star of serving the actual people IMO.
And from what I can see, the Democrats didn't care much about the Epstein list because there wasn't much evidence there even was a list. The current administration ran on the idea that there was a list and the Democrats were covering it up.
It appears to me that the possibility that Roe v Wade would be overturned was more valuable to the DNC as a threat than cementing the issue by law-making was.
No they're not, though? At least, amongst their voterbase. The Epstein files are the first truly bipartisan issue I've seen, the other two are very strictly partisan issues, and most Republicans/Conservatives I know do not want either.
I wish pollsters would ask the right question: "would you support the government fining you or jailing you (or a family member) if you seek an abortion." I bet the numbers would swing way towards legality. But what're ya gonna do.
It should be NO surprise that there is massive push-back after a republican administration came to power. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned to cut the EPA’s size and funding and to eliminate DEI and environmental justice programs in the federal government.
Wow, the bullshit some people are high on.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-reduction-for...
From the article, which was easy to google:
> The EPA currently has more than 16,000 employees, adding more than 6,000 during Joe Biden’s administration as the agency sought to rebuild.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/11/environm...
I hope you realize the irony that this argument applies to both sides of the argument here. In other words, how do you know that your research was done in an unbiased way?
Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.
Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.
What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
In the long term, yes. In the short term it is extremely hard to know what is good science, and what is noise produced by the system that incentivizes publishing and not actual science.
> Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.
I think we do not have to go further than Covid times to see that it is absolutely not the case. Mass hysteria of the pandemic absolutely ostracized anyone who dared to suggest that (a) covid maybe is coming for a Wuhan lab, or (2) that lockdowns maybe not the best way to handle things especially if we consider impact on children. So... The evidence suggests that scientists are people like everyone else, make the same mistakes, may use their status to push their own biases and their own agendas, and pursue their own interests.
> Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.
All these things work only if people act with honor. The moment the incentives are misaligned nothing will work. Peer review is absolutely gamed. I do not know if you remember, but someone took his own life because of this -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27296433
> What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
Totally agree. Me too (as a scientist myself). However, I have absolutely no belief in the system itself. Today, I only believe those who I think do good science, either because I read their papers and I see that they are absolutely honest and upfront about issues with their work and ideas, or because I know from personal experience that these people will never falsify data just to put the paper out. My advisor is like this: we never publish a paper until we know that all the data tracks, and all the environment, scripts, data, etc are archived to ensure that if needed we can track the issue. However, some advisors are not like that, and I know it because students talk between themselves, and you just hear those stories, and you know.
There is no incentive today for a scientist to be honest (unless they grew up this way).
This is nothing more than Project 2025 at work.
It is so fucking sad that people, voting on vibes and single issues, sleepwalk into situations like this.
The last thing an authoritarian leader wants is a challenge to his authority, one that scientists will almost certainly provide.
Seems to me like a fading empire elected the wrong person to lead them due to nonsense reasons and will now stagnate faster.
Those opposed to the current administration will see restoration of gutted services as a win. Talent (researchers, scientists, and anyone with knowledge of processes) is being made available to the private sector. The private sector makes significant contributions to political campaigns and will want contracts in return. Therefore, a campaign can be sold as:
"We will fix what has been broken, and bring back jobs to the critical areas of our sovereignty. We will make good on the promise of increasing efficiency and reducing waste by opening up opportunities across all areas of industry, both old and new.
What we've witnessed over the past four years was the dismantling of the American dream. What we endured was "an honest day's work" being turned into "work a day and a half for half the pay".
But now, we will rebuild. And as we do, we will no longer be vulnerable to the whims of ivory tower bureaucrats. We are taking the power back. We are keeping our taxpayer dollars focused where they should be. You are getting the respect you're owed and reminding Washington that they work for you."
Step 2: Cut taxes on the rich. <---------- You are here
It works every time. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
We’re gonna recreate serfdom in the USA.
In a nutshell that's why the South is so poor. They've been falling for this for generations.
It’s the stupid brand of evil too, like killing millions AND pissing away trillions of dollars in useless Middle East wars (god forbid you say anything against American foreign policy). Or ICE destroying lives AND hurting your own economy. It’s not like republican states are the richest! But the poorer they get the angrier and more dug-in they get.
Hypocrisy - Trump and the GOP regularly call _half_ the country a whole fucking barrage of terms (pedophiles, rapists, marxist socialist communist fascists, evil, ungodly, sick, etc) on a regular fucking basis. Gaslight. Obstruct. Project.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692150/american-pride-slips-new...
One fine day, liberals will wake up and decide they have had enough. Whatever the cost. Conservatives will be so surprised - look how high their pride is.
There's been research on that [1]. They become even more likely to vote Republican. Here's the abstract:
> Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without access to emergency health care. I use data on rural hospital closures from 2008 to 2020 to explore where and why hospital closures occurred as well as who–if anyone–rural voters held responsible for local closures. Despite closures being over twice as likely to occur in the Republican-controlled states that did not expand Medicaid, closures were associated with reduced support for federal Democrats and the Affordable Care Act following local closures. I show that rural voters who lost hospitals were roughly 5–10 percentage points more likely to vote Republican in subsequent presidential elections. If anything state Republicans seemed to benefit in rural areas from rejecting Medicaid and resulting rural health woes following the passage of the ACA. These results have important implications for population health and political accountability in the U.S.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-024-10000-8
But it is wrong to think all American generations before ours didn't have to fight. The lie is that democracy was ever easy. There are millions of Americans mobilizing, sharing their stories, marching, talking to their representatives, protesting, and following their conscience. It is easier than ever to find and join the peaceful opposition.
That's the process.
There is a book titled "What's the matter with Kansas?" which dives into this a bit (hint: they will continue to vote against their best interests)
Was the prior system good? Was it great? If so, was it optimal? If not, what does better look like?
The discussion can splinter a thousand ways, and on HN it should as we seek truth.
A) The Trump admin has conducted rigorous analysis and audit of 55 years of EPA research, and concluded that it is so insignificant and ineffective that one can just dismantle the entire department.
B) The Trump admin rubber stamps anything the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 wants done, and are desperate to find money for their tax cut funding.
Even in tiny countries, for example Sweden, when we notice a statistical uptick of health problems in a particular area, we have government organizations that go there to investigate and figure out the cause.