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Comment by digitaltrees | Hacker News Reader

When this administration is done we need to amend the constitution to hold politicians legally and financially responsible for intentionally lying and intentionally breaking the law. This was obviously illegal on its face and yet there is no consequence to pushing the norms.

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Start with the Supreme Court, who determined “official acts” are to be presumed legal. With no standards test for what qualifies as an official act or not.

This still makes my blood boil. Even then people didn't seem to care (maybe they didn't understand) and we're all collectively just going along with it.

While we're at it, term limits for everyone. All levels of the judiciary and legislature.

I don't think that'd require a Constitutional amendment, would it?

Literally the purpose of the House of Representatives, if I understand correctly.

So it requires a critical mass of very local reps to care about executive accountability. Which is exactly why Project 2025 / Trumpism plays the endorsement game so heavily. Fealty.

This is impossible until a critical mass of voters across every state starts putting competence and integrity ahead of their pet issue and populism. If you actually want to start making headway in this direction you have to stop voting for candidates in either of the main parties. The parties are probably not salvageable. Find a third party candidate with these qualities and vote for them and convince as many people as you can to vote for them.

If we can't do that then we are just stuck as a body politic.

Realistically, the option that will actually work for you is to fight within Democrat primaries. The absolute best case is you get a Mamdani. (Note this means accepting a bit of populism, because ultimately it's a popularity contest). Third parties are going nowhere due to the coordination problem.

(NB: this is meaningfully different in the UK which has really multi-party elections despite Westminster elections being FPTP)

A both-sides guy! How original!

Choose the worst Democratic politician currently in office and please explain what they’ve done or said that is in any way comparable to what the Republican Party is doing.

This is completely missing the point. Structurally I don't believe either party is set up to allow truly quality candidates to succeed. They optimize for all the wrong things in their candidates. Candidates who are quality that get through tend to be exceptions. Picking the worst of either side is just furthering the "We can't vote for good candidates because they might lose to whoever we believe is the worst candidate on the other side" narrative. The only way out is to stop buying into that narrative in a large enough number.

I think that’s some pretty thin gruel. The Democratic Party is hardly perfect. But that’s true of every political party on the planet. There are some grifters, some incompetent, and some corrupt Democrats. But by and large, Democratic politicians do seem to genuinely try to do their jobs. They seem to be at least somewhat receptive, as well. And crucially, they hold their own to account. Get caught with gold bars in your suitcase? Bye. Have women with credible accusations of sexual misconduct against you? Sayonara. There also are many very competent democratic politicians doing solid jobs across the country: Senator Van Hollen, Senator Ossoff, AOC, James McGovern, Baltimore’s mayor Brandon Scott, etc. I see no reason to pretend they’re unworkable. And to suggest “eh, both sides suck” has always felt incredibly lazy and nihilistic to me.

Care about third party options? There are current Democrats advocating for ranked choice voting. The RNC rejects ranked choice. And there are many GOP states that have outright banned ranked choice voting. There’s a party that’s clearly better for your interests.

Your plan is to vote third party but it has zero to say about First-Past-the-Post voting, and so it is obviously completely useless and naive.

You're missing the point. The harris administration wouldn't have had even 1% of the damage we are seeing. No 50% tariffs on Canada. No Iran war. No family members get bank charters and $600 million DoD contracts. I could go on and on. Biden was never remotely close to what his worst critics predicted nor was Obama. This admin has been far worse than even the most hyperbolic criticism predicted. American leadership and place in the world is permanently weaker now. It won't ever be the same and we will be poorer over the next few generations more isolated and sink into a position of parity if we are lucky.

The Biden administration left an economy that was the envy of the world. Leadership that was trusted and a series of impressive bipartisan legislation from the CHIPs act to the infrastructure bill that set us on a good trajectory for the coming changes. Obama did the same, if we had continued the emphasis on building a solar industry our AI build out would be better positioned now we are behind China by a massive degree.

But hunter Biden sold a few painting? And democrats take corporate contributions so it's all equally bad? That doesn't match the data, results or predictions people make before administrations take over.

Three Republicans started three wars in the middle east and caused three spikes in oil prices.

Three democrats started 0 wars and over saw reduced deficits, landmark legislation like Obamacare, build back better, CHIPs, etc. And would have had even more accomplished if the Trans pacific partnership trade area had been continued the Iran nuclear agreement remained in effect, the solar investments been expanded the EVV subsidies expanded.

How can you equivicate these records?

This can happen if we start a 50 propaganda campaign with regular TV and radio ads across the nation

Could you tell us why the politicians - who are the only ones who have the power to amend the Constitution - would be interested in doing that?

They actually had laws supposed to act as stop guard against corruption and executive lawlessness. Supreme court systematically dismantled them.

And by supreme court, I mean right wing justices specifically. Who got there thanks to their heritage foundation connections. Which made project 2025.

Even a fairly corrupt politician might believe that they are less corrupt than the other guy, and would be able to use the law as a weapon to get an even bigger slice of the cake. Or, still more likely, they would believe that "I get my fair share, you're a petty self-dealer, he is blatantly corrupt" and that the law would not be used against their perfectly open and above-board win-win deals, only against that other guy's filthy looting.

But that aside, as noted upthread, it doesn't actually require an amendment, it just requires the existing Congresscritters to do their dang jobs. Not holding my breath.

Because voters demand it.

I don't think "more rules" is the answer. There needs to be people in our government who have integrity, who can apply pressure and take risk. It's the people, not the constitution. The last 1.5 years is evidence that legality doesn't mean anything without people willing to take action.

I actually feel the opposite. The only thing that has slowed this chaos at all have been courts and separation of powers between the states and federal government.

I also think the supreme court immunity decision that gives the executive essentially no criminal liability has awoken then worst impulses.

So laws that specifically target those charged with enforcing law with liability for willful violation of law will stop this bs

We already have the tools. The problem is that the corrupt oligarchs have the money that is considered equivalent to speech. Start with fixing that problem and other problems become solvable.

It's convenient to blame the "oligarchs" since it justifies you doing nothing since there's nothing you can do.

Huh? Are you saying that one should take action… without making any claims about who to oppose?

Of course we can do something. Take money out of politics and you will get legislation that actually reflects the will of the people. Make buying politicians harder. There are lots of ways to do that.

We don’t have the tools. No senator is afraid of a $1m fine because they lied in a campaign. Yes it would need to be a high bar but to say we have tools when the basic incentives to behave this badly are t punishable makes it hard to support that conclusion.

Presumably taxpayers will pay for it one way or the other.

I think they get a personal financial penalty with no insurance coverage. This has to stop.

Nothing means anything without consequences. You can write all the amendments you want, but if they intentionally disable and dismantle all means of holding them accountable, the Constitution doesn't mean anything. They can't even follow the plain text of blatantly clear amendments like the 14th.

My proposal is that there is a punishment for blatantly ignoring the 14th amendment. That’s the point, become an executive of the government comes with an affirmative obligation to actually enforce the law and a judicial review and cause of action that citizens can bring for Failure to comply with that commitment.

You just need the rule of law for that. It helps to not elect blatantly corrupt people as president.

Problem is that apparently the US will occasionally elect a corrupt president, so we need stronger measures in place for when that happens.

We've got one. It's called impeachment. Unfortunately the system wasn't originally intended to have parties and party loyalties, and assumed that Congress would never have a majority to give a free pass to a corrupt President because he was their guy.

We we need more checks on the executive and balance of power between the branches. The founders failed to see a scenario where all three branches would collaborate to anoint an executive rather than competing for power against each other.

No, you cannot, in a democracy, write the rules in such a way to magically and automatically guarantee that bad things cannot happen, because the core conceit of democracy is that the will of the people can happen

If your people want bad things to happen, there is no text anywhere that can prevent it.

You cannot constrain people with laws without enforcement, just as a rule. Real life isn't like code where you write it and it just happens. If you want to restrain Trump to the rules, then the people in power have to believe the rules are more important than campaign promises, and for that you need the voting public to believe it is more important to maintain rules than it is to get your pet policy goals executed on.

The entire problem is that tens of millions of Americans think rules are bad and don't see any problem with there being no rules because they often believe that everyone has the same beliefs they do. And if they don't, they should be gulag'd for being unamerican.

A democracy can agree on rules ahead of time, but that cannot ensure future compliance. As long as people have more support from "Getting things done" compared to "Breaking literal law". This administration breaks very clear cut laws. What could possibly be a law they wouldn't dare to break with their current supporters?

Those supporters don't believe in a rule of law. It's simple as that. It kills democracy. You cannot have a democracy when compromises cannot be relied on.

This was predicted when the Republican party started to court the religious fundamentalist vote. They internally complained that it would kill the party.

Bush's speech writer is cited as saying: If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy

America has a very large, very organized, very passionate body of people who toe the line of their fundamentalist "Christian" organizations. There are lots of different surveys on this, but the general minimum is that 10% of Americans affirmatively believe that god created the earth as it exists today, unchanging, within the past 10k years.

that belief requires you to believe all of science is a giant conspiracy in league with Satan himself to make you turn away from god. A minimum of 30 million Americans are firm believers in the conspiracies and anti-reality beliefs espoused in Chick Tracts.

The entire Satanic Panic was these people acting on this stupid belief. Chick Tracts are demonstrably false in everything they espouse, but when you have homeschooled your child and bought only the stupidest "textbooks" for them to learn from that state matter-of-factly that science is a conspiracy, of course people end up believing that earnestly. These people believe at all times that they are in a literal war with the devil. In war, all things are permissible of course. They believe, against direct evidence and literal text from the founders, that America is a Christian nation (but notably, not any of the christian faiths that existed when America was founded). These people have spent generations cultivating an entire parallel media ecosystem, an entire parallel education system, that will never ever ever confront them with reality. Go watch christian media, it's utterly insane the things it believes. Every single popular teen movie gets remade with the plot replaced with a surface level similar one where the government is executing "Christians" for being "Christian". They live in perpetual victimhood. If you have convinced yourself that equal treatment is persecution, you will do horrible things.

The CIA quite literally played on these fears as part of the red scare, playing up Communism's atheism. This is still taught by parents to children to this day.

The reason our currency says "In god we trust" and the reason we have "Under god" in our pledge is directly down to this bloc being extremely powerful and having an utter disrespect for the rule of law.

The founders didn’t place their faith in the rule of law, the population or benevolence of politicians or oligarchs. They designed checks on power through balancing the allocation of authority across three branches that each have the right to override the others and further separation between federal and state power. We need more checks and a modified balance between branches.

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