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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

I know most will see this as a good thing, and perhaps in this case it is, but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.

I understand this community largely disagrees with Trump, but the only people who win overall from these scenarios are people who support the status-quo and don't like the idea of a leader having significant power to change things. Any leader who is elected on a mandate to govern differently will face similar legal challenges.

I'm also not saying there's no place for legal challenges either, but there is a balance to be found there. The idea the Pentagon can't blacklist a US company for whatever reason it wants just seems absurd to me regardless of whether this specific ruling is good or bad.

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> I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant

There's been a ton of this sort of discussion over the past three hundred years, and the consensus which was particularly strong in the Federalist Papers was explicitly that there should be no _one_ person with significant, arbitrary powers.

> but I think it's generally concerning that people can vote for leaders who effectively can't do anything significant.

The people vote for a lot more than just the president. This isn't the president's job. That's what the judge says, not that nobody can do it, just the president/executive can't.

The people also vote for the people who's job it is to have done the same thing but legally.

If only it were that simple.

Recall the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act". The legislature _did_ pass a law banning software then and the executive just ignored it.

Trump wasn't elected on a mandate to govern differently, he was elected because the DNC is a shambling corpse of a party that is paid to lose.

Due to some decisions made to protect """free speech""" - specifically, the free speech of moneybag men - capital interests are free to puppet our two parties around with abandon. The DNC in particular saw the new fundraising environment as an opportunity to completely sell out and ignore voters, and they're now hilariously unpopular with their own base despite being nominally in opposition to one of the least popular presidents of all time.

The environment this creates is one in which electoral politics is less than useless: it is actively harmful to the exercise of power on behalf of the people. We are actually seeing unusually high levels of activism in this country, and we actually do have a lot of issues with bipartisan support from voters. People don't want data centers built in their backyard, they don't want Flock building a private Stasi, they want the child rapists running our country to be brought to justice, they want right-to-repair, etc. But all of those issues are also antipartisan: they have bipartisan opposition from politicians, because they all imperil the funding sources you need in order to get into office. Compare the things MAGA people are saying to the things Trump is saying and you'll see the split.

I think you might have also mischaracterized the ruling. The Pentagon is still allowed to sanction supply chain risks, it just has to provide an actual reason for doing so. The Trump administration (really, just Pete Hegseth) tried to sanction Anthropic with no evidence. The actual reason was simple and straightforward: Anthropic had principles other than "doing what Pete Hegseth wanted" and everyone in this administration demands absolute and unfettered loyalty. I can see the value in "governing differently" but this government isn't just "different", it's demonstrably worse even on its own terms.

I support the status quo in comparison to Donald Trump being allowed to use Claude for automated weapons and mass domestic surveillance, yeah

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