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Comment by stymaar | Hacker News Reader

For the past year and a half, the US administration have plunged the country in a rule of law twilight zone: the rule of law still exists, and there are still independent jurisdictions to enforce it, but the administration decided they didn't care, and they just overcome any court dismissal of their orders with a new illegal order that courts will have to push back a few month later.

Which means that, in practice, the US isn't governed by the rule of law anymore, but by the whim of the Czar's court.

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The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration, and structural reforms to make their abuses harder to do again in the future.

Being held accountable in the next administration is pretty much the opposite of what a democratic society needs. It's a never ending cycle. Let the court system handle this.

Courts can only handle cases that are brought.

Not GP, but in this context I would interpret the next administration[^1] holding the current administration to account as a willingness to use the court system to prosecute actual crimes committed while in office[^2].

That is by no means a given.

[^1]: Assuming there is one.

[^2]: That is, not petulantly prosecuting those deemed to have slighted you.

SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction. The problem with that is that just removes POTUS from office. It does nothing to punish for those crimes that were deemed worthy enough of being impeached/convicted. SCOTUS said that POTUS cannot be held accountable for things done as official acts of office. So Congress cannot hold POTUS criminally accountable, but removed from office to stop the criminal acts. Once POTUS becomes a citizen they are free. At this point, I can only see where the newly sworn POTUS would use their new pardon power to end the question as well.

However, all of this is very far away from the legality of quantum computing

> SCOTUS has already given POTUS immunity in any form other than impeachment followed by a conviction.

That's not exactly accurate and that nuanced difference may be the key to holding the executive branch accountable, now that we're in this disastrous state of the world.

Should have added IANAL, so any inaccuracies are definitely introduced by my layman's explanation.

What nuances are left then? What small amount of hope can be gleaned from the ruling?

Specifically, POTUS has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions that are within their constitutional authority, presumptive immunity from all official acts (but not absolute), and no immunity from unofficial, private acts committed by the president.

Congress could also pass legislature or constitutional amendments to revert the effect of that tragic decision, though of course those also come with their own sets of challenges.

(IANALE btw)

Congress can pass whatever, but POTUS would still have to sign it. Even this Congress is not veto proof

A future POTUS might be willing to sign it, though yeah, it doesn't help with the current situation. That would still need to be artfully litigated.

There are many people to prosecute besides the POTUS.

I am curious of that allows the new President, while in office, to assassinate the previous one and insta-pardon himself.

It's amazing how much of America's political stability might rest not on the law, but rather on the self-restraint of each cohort's leadership.

Let's not forget the complacency of this Congress. POTUS could not get away with this nonsense if Congress would do its job. The right has been working their way to this perfect scenario for decades with gerrymandering at the state level, Congress refusing to accept a SCOTUS nominee from POTUS holding out that the next POTUS would be their guy, and all of the other nonsense that has happened to get us to this spot.

The problem is, the current admin has shown how pliable the courts are. And, this weakens them, in that, there is less of a belief of impartiality.

Conjoin that with AI able to generate billions of videos, saying anything anyone wants, and you have a real issue. 99.99% of the population can't tell or even realises much of what they watch on youtube is AI, and... it will get less distinguishable, to the point that no one, at all, will be able to tell.

Not you, I, or anyone at all.

There are already endless AI personalities on youtube, each building followers. If I wanted to upset the apple cart, I'd spawn 1000 or more "people", each with a different appearance and manner of speaking. All would dance to my tune, and all would be the most honest, trustworthy source possible.

Until, of course, I wanted to upset the apple cart. Then I'd ensure that all these personalities, insisted that all the court decisions post-office, are lies, mistruths, and designed to punish and harm and "take out the right's power".

Imagine if you have someone you've watched for 2 years. On hundreds of points, they've been blisteringly honest, never lying, always truthful. Then?

On this one thing, they manipulate you.

Who do you trust? The most honest person you've ever seen, or the impartiality of the courts?

This is the sort of long game you can play with fake personalities. No disloyalty. No breaking ranks. No bad days, or mistakes.

I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy. I've pivoted 180, I cannot see a democratic society with this level of manipulation continuing.

> I've fought for a free internet. I've fought for the right to anonymous posting. To be a voice, without an identity. But? That time is over, or we won't have a democracy.

The con is claiming that this has anything to do with anonymity. There are 8 billion people. Someone with money can get a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand of them to lend their names to bots. The cost of a random human name is less than the cost of the years worth of tokens they'd be putting under it. Sacrificing anonymity over that is a fraud.

On top of that, we shouldn't pretend this is a new issue. In 1975 the local magnate owned the local newspaper and radio station and had relatively unbiased coverage of issues until it came to the ones that affect their own business dealings or the political ambitions of their associates.

And your disaster scenario doesn't even work when people are getting information from multiple sources. If the sources are >50% lies and exaggerations then you can spot check a small sample of the stories and notice that. (Sadly all too many current outlets fail this test.) But if, as you posit, they offered unbiased coverage almost all of the time then their coverage would be similar to every other source offering mostly unbiased coverage, until they try to mislead you, and then your "reliable sources" would be saying different things from one another because less than 100% of them are controlled by the one trying to manipulate you, which is a major red flag that somebody is lying to you.

The actual problem is that people don't bother to do the spot checks when the source is telling them the pretty lies they want to hear. Which is nothing new and has very little to do with AI.

The courts are either ignoring the problem, supporting the problem, or just being ignored. They courts themselves have no power to enforce their rulings. The ones that would enforce the courts decisions are doing what the Trump tells them to.

Great incentive for a president to do whatever he pleases then just attempt a coup.

This won't happen. Mostly because the next administration that is a counter to this current administration won't happen. The electoral process in the US is effectively cooked.

That's the big worry now. We've got to wait to find out if we still have a democracy or not. They're trying to stop us from being able to vote them out of power. Even if they're unsuccessful it just means we have a chance to put things right, but the democrats are the party of the status quo and I haven't really seen them stepping up and promising accountability.

There's no demand for it. Half of the US still likes what's happening, half the ones that don't are only concerned because gas prices are a little high.

> Half of the US

citation?

Sure, "a lot of people in the US" ... but "half" is pushing it, unless you've got sources.

Trump's approval rating is in the mid to high 30 percentile even according to Fox News polling. He's lost most of the independents and minority coalition vote who naively thought the economy go back to what it was in his first term pre Covid-inflation. Never mind his love for tariffs and fossil fuels.

I don't really understand what the 35%+ still sees in Trump. Massive fraud, abuse of power, covering up Epstein files, more war in the ME, the president is ranting at 3am on his social media. He's falling asleep in meetings and looking more frail all the time. And worst of all, he's still trying to undermine elections.

Guess I have to accept the fact that 1/3 of the American public wants an authoritarian figure to rule over us without any real checks or balances. They don't want anyone in Congress or the courts to oppose his excesses.

> I don't really understand what the 35%+ still sees in Trump. Massive fraud, abuse of power, covering up Epstein files, more war in the ME, the president is ranting at 3am on his social media. He's falling asleep in meetings and looking more frail all the time. And worst of all, he's still trying to undermine elections.

None of this is particularly different from what he said he'd do. This is a felon who tried to overthrow the 2020 election. But the US decided he was the person they wanted to preside of their country for 4 years.

And that 35% was about nearer 50% before their gas prices went up. Its nothing to do with Epstein, 3am rants, sleeping, shitting himself, pulling broadcast licenses, stealing billions from the tax payer and from pension funds, or about war, its solely because a few people are having to spend a little more to full up their monster trucks

If trump decided to give a $3 a gallon subsidy on gas prices his ratings would shoot back up.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people

The future of the US depends on political candidates attempting to win the public over on the merits of their argument and the quality of their character instead of being conmen on billionaire payrolls or billionaires themselves.

Instead, we're ruled by these two dumb, evil political parties that radical centrists treat like elemental forces of nature. It's a play being put on for your benefit. Your vote changes nothing. The Heel W. Bush administration had presided over the most consciously evil things done in both foreign and domestic policy, with the full knowledge that it was illegal, and then Golden Boy Obama came and indemnified everyone. The person who illegally destroyed the CIA torture videotapes became the head of the CIA.

The country is a joke and quickly turning into a failed state, and upper middle-class people are being distracted by sock puppets because as the top 20%, they aren't suffering in the least.

edit: advocating for the prosecution of the last administration by the next is simply advocacy for dictatorship. There is no reason for anyone to leave the presidency if civic intellectual thought has degenerated so much that they think that this is a wise or democratic thing to do. If you vote in a criminal, there's no clawback after you get robbed. The reason this is a failed state is because we're exclusively putting criminals on the ballot, from President to dog catcher. Turns out that non-criminals can't raise millions of dollars to get a job.

I hope this comment isn't flagged or downvoted into oblivion. This is exactly what happened and the consequences of George W Bush are where we are today. Everyone looks at him and thinks "Oh what a cute old man, he's joking around with Michelle Obama!" and no one remembers he is directly responsible for 1 million Iraqi deaths, and then enriching the shareholders of Cheney's company. And then he broke the Middle East, created ISIS, etc.

And then Obama came in with promises and almost immediately brought everything back to default George Bush timelines. To those of you that don't live in SF, most SF progressives HATED Obama because all he did was legitimize Bush's policies instead of acting on his promises of "Hope" and "Change". Anyone remember how he talked about abortion rights, and then immediately after his presidency said that it wasn't a priority for him? If abortion rights were passed as a federal law, we wouldn't be where we are today post Dobbs.

> The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration ...

OK but who was signing in place of the totally senile Biden? The autopen is a thing. That puppet wasn't functional anymore. Yet "he" was signing things.

Who's being held accountable for the deep state that was guiding Biden's hand?

Nobody. Just as this administration isn't holding anyone accountable for any of the misdeeds done under Biden, nothing is going to happen next.

Yup. There is no authority that is going to swoop in and hold them accountable, there is no legal recourse to be had from any court currently in existence. No one is going to save us but ourselves.

will take 4 years to neutralize all of the rationals to support each topic

pretty good bet for the head of an administration that only lasts 4 years

Bernie Sanders warned right when the second Trump admin started that the country was effectively an olygarchy https://youtu.be/79KDKWEOJ1s. I wrote https://xd1.dev/2025/09/not-buying-american-anymore that made frontpage here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45277346 discussing the consequences of an irresponsible admin through the lenses of consumer rights. It's nice that now we are seeing more widespread acceptance of the fact that US isn't behaving like a democracy anymore, even though it's a bit too little too late

Are you new to the club? I saw these problems you're talking about with Biden, Trump1, Obama and Bush Jr. Of course I'm not old enough to really know about what Clinton or Bush Sr or Reagan or anyone before that did.

I know it's super annoying to have someone rain on your "but THIS stuff is REALLY bad!" parade, but that the rulers are corrupt isn't new. It's just new to a lot of people.

You aren’t really raining on anyone’s parade it sounds like you’re just looking for attention

So you think Trump2 is equivalent to all the presidents before?

I think this kind of corruption has been going on for a long time. Look at this case and how a Supreme Court decision didn't really get respected despite it being pretty clear. However bad you think any one thing Trump has done is, this is almost certainly as bad for the feeling of the rule of law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia

Just to be clear I'm not trying to say what's happening is good or right. Just that it's not new. And I used something really old to try and "prove" it's not a recent phenomena and help people maybe see past the recency bias.

Yeah, you are wrong there, sorry to say, you missed this clear escalation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

2001. Pretending that all of this was started by the game show host wrestling valet is dumb, and the kind of thing that got us into this situation. Every evil thing that Trump is doing is something that Democrats support. Every evil thing that W. Bush was doing was something that Democrats supported.

The Democrats haven't even run a real primary since 2008, and H. Clinton makes a good case that that one wasn't even real; Democratic elites had got together and decided that a black face would be perfect to make sure that no one was punished for the financial fraud and worldwide torture program that had just occurred - Clinton was simply too personally repellent to get away with pardoning, even rewarding, evil.

What happened after 2001 is that the country was turned over to the executive and the judiciary, and congress just decided it was going to act as a passive conduit of billionaire wishes. Both parties deciding that votes needed 60% to pass made the job something you could nap through. It's no coincidence that they're so old they're barely sentient now. Clever Hans could do the job.

The only people dumber than extreme Republican partisans in this country are extreme Democratic partisans. They are all treating this as sports while people are dying, because they're doing better than they ever have. Democrats shoved an ancient confabulating corrupt racist into the White House as the reply to an ancient confabulating corrupt racist. The first time in history that the public asked for the last president back, it was the least popular president that had ever been elected, and Democratic partisans still stand around with their fingers in their ears blaming the celebrity.

I recall this precedent was set previously under Biden (likely sooner).

Biden admin lost CDC eviction prohibitions case and immediately enacted new slightly different prohibition and Biden defended the effort as it would take time to be stopped.

“Whether that option will pass constitutional measure with this administration, I can’t tell you. I don’t know,” Biden said. “There are a few scholars who say it will, and others who say it’s not likely to. But, at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact behind in the rent and don’t have the money.”

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/housing/566230-biden-buys...

The eviction moratorium is probably the strongest example available, and I don't think it's a good one for Biden. But one controversial episode doesn't establish a precedent for systematic noncompliance with court orders. If anything, it stands out precisely because it was unusual enough to generate criticism across the political spectrum.

Sources:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anatomy-screw-biden-evi...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a23_ap6c.pdf

The previous admin also ruled via executive order. It said it would find ways to do things even if struck down by the SCOTUS such as the school loan forgiveness, firearms controls, speech suppression via “embeds” etc.

And Obama did this. See his famous pen and phone quote:

"We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I've got a pen, and I've got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.."

What Obama didn't say: I don't care about what the courts say, the courts are bad people, the only law that matters is me.

The myth of the Supreme Court having any check on executive power was disproven by the "switch in time to save 9", where Owen Roberts agreed to stop obstructing The New Deal so FDR wouldn't implement court-packing and term limits. That was almost 90 years ago.

If only the conversation could be rooted with this understanding, rather than it being a leaf.

Why is this a bad thing? The New Deal literally created a society that allowed the country to flourish for a solid 50 years before neoliberal economics took hold.

I like the New Deal! My point is that the realpolitik of the court being subservient to the other two "coequal" branches goes back almost 100 years.

Marbury v Madison established judicial review in 1803 but there is no enforcement mechanism. The switch in time shows that practically the Court is subject to the political pressure of Congress and the President.

The Clinton impeachment and the lack of Trump impeachment show (imo) that there is effectively no rule of law in the United States anymore.

Congressional representation is subject to gerrymandering for partisan and racial reasons, and majority control of Congress gives you broad power to pass laws and punish political enemies. Controlling both Congress and the Presidency gives a single party the ability to completely ignore any constitutional boundaries.

America's experiment in multi-racial democracy has failed and their international influence will continue to wane as it has since the 80s. It seems like something that happens "slowly, and then all at once", like bankruptcy.

At the same scope and scale?

Can you see a problem here, a failure of the intended system of checks and balances?

That’s like saying we shouldn’t hold a drunk driver accountable for his driving because we all had a beer sometimes.

Nobody cares if an admin "rules via executive order". What we care about is whether they rule according to the law. That is, for example: the administration is free to fire whoever it wants from the civil service as long as it follows the laws about how and when this is done. This administration, however, has repeatedly fired federal employees without following the law.

In more than 85% of cases brought against the administration, lower courts have ruled that the administration has broken the law.

So, you can decide if you think SCOTUS overruling those decisions is an indication of a problem, or justice winning out.

I also don't care when an administration says "We will find a way to ...." - I care about whether they do so, and do so in accordance with the law. The Biden administration followed SCOTUS rulings on its orders, and AFAIK, did not find workarounds for any of the things you mention.

Biden signed about 150 executive orders across his term.

Guess how many trump has done since just last year...

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