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Comment by claytongulick | Hacker News Reader

Congress ceding it's authority to the executive branch is an issue of national concern, has been going on for decades, and is definitely not limited to one specific party [1], though I do agree that the current administration has been testing the limits of executive power more than any other that I can recall in my lifetime.

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/its-...

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The current administration is the final nail in the coffin of presidential-style governments versus the parliamentary system.

Separating the legislature and the executive has no useful purpose: if the president is going to defacto enact law should be handled by the legislature, then there's no reason they shouldn't just be the head of the legislature and forced to actually whip the votes to do so.

The US president was always designed to be like this. It's like people are deliberately forgetting anti-federalists were not only a thing, they warned about these exact same problems over 200 years ago.

And built the system as it is anyway: with no practical way to prevent this from happening. And we see it over and over again in other presidential style systems, the US is just the largest one left to fall.

You say no practical way, I say system working exactly as designed. Many people who wrote the constitution were actively disdainful of "the democracy" problem. They openly hated that citizens were practicing local politics in towns across Massachusetts while thinking that plantation slave owners in Virginia, that were equivalent to oligarchs (and ruled as such too), were a more "noble" form of government.

They used Shays' Rebellion as a pretext to push for constitutional reform.

The constitution is explicitly written to prevent change. It's why change is so hard to implement and requires actual courage (see America's second founding).

One of the first official acts George Washington did was sign the fugitive slave act then tried to deputize his nephew in the treasury department to kidnap a free woman who was his former slave, Ona Judge, because Washington didn't want to argue in a public court why she was his property. Great video on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhxivf0gmj8

Many of the founders were rotten ghouls (Alexander Hamilton's favorite form of government was a monarchy), you need to read what they exactly think because they designed a government where about less than 2% of the US population could vote and design a system where the only house that commoner's could be elected into would be the weakest. They openly wrote about all of this too, it's not anything new.

When they wrote about freedom they weren't talking about 95% of society, they were talking about a very specific type of people that excluded many.

The rot has always been there, it's why there is an allure of truth when conservatives say they just want to return to the founding. Look at what the founding actually entails, there is nothing unamerican about white national colonialism. That's why we mustn't look to the past to build a better future.

Well, yes and no. The remedies are impeachment and electoral accountability. Both of which have broken down in this era of extreme partisanship.

Impeachment that has to be done in a house of congress that was designed to have minimal accountability and is deeply anti-democratic? Maybe it "broke" down because there were no real checks and balances to begin with.

I'd recommend reading the Federalist Papers. A large number of them are more or less explicit warnings that Trump-style actions and attitudes should not be tolerated, and explanations about how they should be prevented and countered.

The Federalists were extremely familiar with the way monarchies functioned, spent a lot of time thinking about government strucutre, and the US presidency was quite explicitly set up to be something else.

If the leaders of all of our institutions decide to shrug when the president treats national powers as a tool for organized crime, and voters don't do anything about it, that's a people problem, not a problem of institutional structure. Any institution is only as powerful as our collective willingness to support and protect it.

I actually lean a little differently, though maybe it's the same thing in a different shape.

Since modern government seems to require a large bureaucratic apparatus to function, I think it should be its own branch with no single head - or put another way, all bodies established by the legislature should be independent from each other, the executive, and the legislature. This way, all power the legislature grants to a body doesn't acrue to the presidency, and the collective powers of these bodies don't acrue to a single person or group. The president would still have a suite of powers, but they wouldn't automatically expand - the president would only have whatever control over these bodies the legislature chooses to grant. Of course, if the legislature wants to exercise any power over these bodies once they've established them, they would have to do so through the usual legislative process, and it would still be subject to presidential veto.

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