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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

Completely authoritarian and unacceptable. This entire saga shows the American political system has serious flaws where it cannot hold the executive branch accountable.

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Agree. This is absolutely unacceptable by any measurement you can name. They are not respecting equality under the law, they are behaving like a terrorist regime. Every one of these people needs to be held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent the US Constitution allows. End of Story.

"While becoming a U.S. citizen, Kurt Gödel confided in his friend Albert Einstein that he had found an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that would allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship, causing Einstein to worry that Gödel's unpredictability would lead to his application being denied."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del#Princeton,_Ein...

It's not "cannot" but "will not", and the flaw is not with the American political system but with the GOP and the American populace. Congress could absolutely rein this in at any time if Republicans in Congress cared to do so; the Supreme Court could rein this in at any time if the Republicans on the Supreme Court cared to do so. Do not let yourself be convinced that the problem is Trump or a too-powerful executive; the problem is an entire party and the people who cheerfully vote for it.

But neither congress nor the presidency is an accurate representation of the will of the people, and that is one of the flaws with the American political system.

The problem is that it does represent a lot of people in America. A very vocal and active part of America. It’s not some tiny demographic either. It doesn’t represent the majority but the majority doesn’t vote, doesn’t take action, and is overall extremely passive in their political position. Some of this is good because most Americans are wildly uneducated. Problem is that people are more likely to try to protect what exists than try to move towards a new paradigm. That’s the biggest reason we have such a slow moving system in the US. Most people in the US are very wary of change at this point because they’re not educated about anything.

That's true to a certain extent, but I think a significant reason for Trump's success is precisely that the government is so unresponsive that many people were willing to suffer an extremely painful self-inflicted wound just to break out of the status quo.

I agree the voters and party are a problem, but disagree that we shouldn’t do more. We need better checks and balances on an administration that willfully and casually violates constitutional rights all the time. Not to mention the constant corruption and grifting that enriches the Trump family. We should have a system that can protect against this even when the majority makes a bad voting decision.

There were some. They all got dismantled. Loyalists have been systematically installed into all relevant positions. What system is immune to this? There is none. Voters have to take responsibility for what they voted for, which is the complete destruction of the United States of America as a political unit.

Goverment is corrupt. Solution - more goverment. Give me a brake.

SCOTUS can only rule on cases presented to it. AFAIK there has not been a relevant case submitted to them.

How on earth can you say that with a straight face?

> Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.

> ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.

Ref: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

This is an official filing--facts, not a news report. A judge placed his job on the line and said these things in a written, filed, official ruling.

The problem isn't judicial rulings; the problems are petulant bullies who simply ignore the rulings; and completely subservient sycophants who only can say "As you wish, master."

SCOTUS has already ruled on cases that were presented to them and now we're contending with a mad king.

It is not a flaw but a choice made by the GOP.

The flaw is that they are able to make such a choice.

Every government is always able to turn totalitarian. That's why voting is important. You don't vote for the totalitarian.

Well yes, but the US was supposed to have three separate branches of government to keep each other in check.

Unfortunately turns out that in practice two of the three don't actually have any power at all when push comes to shove.

I think Congress does have power, it's just chosen not to wield it to control this presidency.

Based on what we've seen of the courts, I have doubts about that.

Congress does not have an army they can send out to enforce any law they pass, so turns out the president can simply just ignore it all without consequences. What are they going to do?

Courts don't have an army either. Only the executive has an army. Actually the president doesn't have an army. The generals have an army. You know we've never invented a system that stops the guys who have an army from taking over the guys who don't have an army, and we call it a coup d'etat, and it happens all over the world with some regularity. The best we can do is make sure the guys who have the army are guys who are committed to the wellbeing of the country.

> Courts don't have an army either. Only the executive has an army.

Exactly, that's the bug. Two of the three branches of government can only write sternly worded opinions on paper. Only one has the brute force to impose their will. So there really is only one branch of government in the US.

It was a long period of time voting for totalitarians. Checks and balances worked by design: preventing immediate radical changes. And they worked by design: allowing changes gradually over a period of time if people keep voting for the same thing. And now it's here.

If it can be exploited by a bad actor, it is a flaw.

Everything can be exploited by a bad actor if the bad actor is put in a position of authority over it.

There's no democratic system of government that's completely immune to a majority of voters actively trying to erode and damage the system.

This story in particular seems like a flaw. There should not be such a thing as a privilege that the executive branch can revoke with no explanation or process.

The American political system has definite problems, but so does every other system. If you rank democracies by any metric, the USA has done rather well, if not the best. If you disagree with that statement, I invite you to list the countries you consider democratic, in your order of ‘successfulness’.

Lol nowhere near the best, unfortunately. By multiple rankings.

https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

LOL, the first list also seems to use the US as the cut-off & first country that is a “deficient democracy”. The magic number must be between somewhere between 0.811 and 0.821.

Having spent a good chunk of my life in Canada and the US, a list that has Canada as more democratic doesn’t make any sense to me. In the end, it’s just a random mix of different measurements, weighted to tell whatever story you want to tell.

See also this metric, showing how fast the US is falling away from a democracy:

https://www.ft.com/content/b474855e-66b0-4e6e-9b73-7e252bd88...

looks like objective data to me. Look at our democracy number, it's lower than a ton of other countries!

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