> Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
I hope you know that Congress has abdicated all of their responsibilities to the president. I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
I hope you know that Congress has abdicated all of their responsibilities to the president. I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
(The Epstein issue is a special case - some of the MAGA base still believes it was not a hoax and that Epstein was not alone in his crimes.)
What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!"
You got out-voted.
You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you".
You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.
(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
The founders didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.
The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.
They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.
It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.
The press really needs to start suffixing the justices with (R) and (D) when discussing them to drive the point home that the SC is the most partisan branch of government.
They have always done what the US should do: keep the votes on a judgment private, so opinions speak for the court as a whole, and they don't let the losers have a soapbox by publishing dissents.
As a cherry on top, they enforce a mandatory retirement age of 70.
These factors make their court an actually apolitical body in a way that's in hilariously stark contrat to the US court. The US court is what you'd make if your entire goal was to turn all its judgments into political theatre.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Court_(Austria)
They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
partisans are loud but they are not winning friends and influencing people, the parties are only losing supporters, it just takes more people to realize that they aren't alone as independents are the largest bloc now but have no representation to notice
reminder for anyone passing by, everyone knows how the parties are different, it is still valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...
I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.
And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
> By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0]
Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power).
You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse.
The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved.
I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free.
Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place.
Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly.
The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems.
An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled.
Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps.
And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats.
This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not?
The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..."
Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done.
I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
It does not look great, but I find risks mostly economical (not only in USA, everywhere) - if the situation will deteriorate even more abruptly (considering it already did a bit due to the pandemic "shock") then we will have a mess.
MAGA have screwed the country and themselves. Farmers who voted for Trump are realizing this now. The rest will find out soon when the shit hits the fan in a big way.