At what point is congress gonna grow a spine and retake their power? Every day the goalposts just get moved a little farther.
It turns out, long after Rome had become an Empire and was only a Republic in name only, most Senators still thought of it as a Republic and that this extraordinary state of affairs with the Senate just being a glorified rubber stamp body would soon come to an end and that, they will very soon restore the Senate to its former rightful place, just as soon as this current very limited crises was over.
As it turns out, they were never able to do that again.
It’s so interesting to me that nearly all of the Founding Fathers had read Tacitus and were keenly aware of this and explicitly tried to design a system to prevent that from happening. To their credit, their system lasted a good while.
If we accept your thesis that the US republic is over, it only lasted around half as long as the Roman republic you are saying the "Founding Fathers" were trying to improve upon.
It is about republican congressmen actively supporting all of this.
That's why their main complaints have been procedural: "Why didn't you come to us first with your plans?". And why they slow-walked the vote on a war powers act.
Either the majority of Americans want this war, in which case the Dems have to be quiet, or they don’t, in which case the dems should be making it the number one issue.
Sadly I suspect the answer is not in the side of the Hollywood version of post ww2 America.
Now is the time to insert the “are we the bad guys” meme.
By "loudest supporters" - are you referring to the donor class? Money is speech, after all.
The Democratic party has an identity crisis: it's failing to balance special interests and their traditional constituents - post-Goldwater/ southern-strategy. Instead of activating their base, they seem to be courting the political center that has been hollowed out by Maga and polarization, incidentally matching the desires of their donors who abhor any kind of populist leftist politics, including anything in instituted by FDR.
No, I don't believe so. I'm talking about the people who convinced them that culture wars were the right way to do battle with a conservative opponent despite that being automatically an uphill battle. The dem leadership focused on issues that polled well with a small group of loud people on a crusade, and largely ignored bread & butter issues that resonate with people less politically inclined. But centrist votes are counted just the same as partisan ones, and more plentiful.
Which dem leadership? The only crusade I remember was Kamala Harris going on a national tour with Liz Cheney and brightly signaling her rightward shift. Somehow, "Republicans for Kamala" failed to save her campaign in the swing-states.
> people who convinced them that culture wars were the right way to do battle
Who are they exactly?
> The dem leadership focused on issues that polled well with a small group of loud people on a crusade, and largely ignored bread & butter issues that resonate with people less politically inclined
Which issues, specifically?
> centrist votes
You think there’s some huge swath people who’d vote Dem if it wasn’t for their pesky (and incredibly mild) protective stance towards trans people, for example?
Honestly curious which sources do you get your political news from mainly?
Name one instance of this actually happening. I'll wait.
> The dems have no power against a unified GOP front
They absolutely do. The war powers act is “bi partisan” And they can protest the war strongly on moral and budgetary grounds for starters. The war is incredibly unpopular with the Dem base and even independents. Opposing it is a layup. (But, like I said, the truth is Dem leadership wants the war)
> and they already look pretty weak on issues like this.
Fighting (whether winning or losing) shows strength not weakness and is what voters react to. Standing down is exactly NOT what they should do. C’mon, man!
> They are trying to figure out how they can mollify their base while attracting enough centrist voters to retake Congress later this year
Like I said the war is UNPOPULAR so OPPOSE it. Winning stat.
> year. I don't care for the dem leadership but I feel a little sympathy for them
NO! They’re “blundering” when they don’t have to. (But see points about Schumer wanting the war)
> Catering to their loudest supporters is a pretty big reason they are the minority party right now.
Also a backwards take. They’re a minority party because they’d rather lose and maintain power than oppose the capitalists who own them.
The war has record low approval ratings, even among Trump's base.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/19/imaginary-frie...
The US Army becoming Israel’s strike force, at the hands of rapist, what a time to be alive
The war does, Trump does not. He maintains very strong support among the base, and that is the part keeping the GOP politicians in line. It is why some of them just resign instead of enduring the threats from his supporters.
Protecting pedos on such a scale?
However, if the direction of the country is being seriously altered via blackmail, IMO that is many orders of magnitude worse than anything they could have done. Like we are currently bombing yet another middle eastern country for no clear reason.
I would personally be open to some kind of Epstein jubilee where we absolve everyone involved in order to nullify the blackmail.
Like it's not great, it's terrible for the victims and for justice, but at the moment we are getting terrible from both ends, could we at least reduce it to one end?
Really the rot set in with the pardons of Nixon and Oliver North.
It's not like a blackmail ring is that easy to set up, it seems to have taken a lot of heavy lifting to get this one going.
If the American government continues to perform actions that are blatantly against the interests of America and Americans, the impact of that on Americans is going to be (and may be already) massively massively worse than the person to person level crimes we are focusing on.
Does it just feel so bad thinking about it that a lot of people have a hard time even going there mentally? I really don’t get it.
I know it's conspiratorial, and I hate that, but it's one of the only things that makes any of the actions of the US in the last year make any semblance of sense.
I don't like to think that, but it remains, for me, a valid scenario.
Their actions are the foundation for everything that came after.