It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies, ie “US armed IDF forces” according to the article. Obviously there is something more to this than the headline and tone of the piece indicate. For one thing, the law written by Leahy was passed in 2011, but this website went online in 2022, so how can removing the site make it impossible to abide by the law? What was going on between 2011 and 2022 than is different from now?
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
From a practical standpoint, this is why Wikileaks matters. Rather than count on the State department to serve that role, we should count on independent journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
Agree. I'm tired of having to do research every time I read a news article. If you want me to trust your news articles give me raw unedited sources, because if I don't see any, I don't trust your assessment.
> It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies
The website is for reporting abuses by foreign forces armed with US kit. The US isn't in the habit of arming its enemies, so of course the reports concern allies. That's what the website is for.
>When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
An "auto reply with a ticket number" is not a feature of email, it is something that someone built that could just as easily be attached to a webform. Plenty of webforms work that way, I have personally built some in my career.
>> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
> why
Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc.
A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution?
On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.
Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now.
If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.
The most polite thing i can say about Pete is that he's the dimmest bulb among them, trying to imitate much more capable people. And everyone can see it.
He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.
> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders.
> The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing.
> We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.
> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture.
> A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards.
> I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.
> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.
> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.
> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.
That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".
To be fair (ignoring whether Hegseth really deserves that), what he describes is a very common view of military leadership during war time.
"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.
Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.
Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with competent warfighters.
For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)
I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well.
I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.
We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.
That's a quaint idea but the notion of having a small cadre of experienced professional personnel who could rapidly train up new recruits in wartime stopped being relevant in the 1980s. The complexity of equipment and doctrine has increased so much that it now takes years to train people. Too long to wait in a crisis.
Its into quaint, there have been plenty of times in history where countries either (a) didn't exist as they do today or (b) didn't have standing militaries.
The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.
Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.
If the war is prolonged, you can't go around treating people like eggshells to be crushed, or morale will suffer.
Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.
And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?
I'm not arguing that it is a "good" or "right" way to approach war, only that the mindset is common among the military when fighting a war they believe to be an existential fight.
At least as a thought exercise, consider the possibility that the US administration was _always not great_ on its own merits, not as the fault of whatever foreign boogeyman-of-the-day.
You're right to be skeptical of "boogeyman" narratives. The baseline should be that US administrations can be flawed on their own merits.
The problem is that the "flawed" hypothesis fails to explain the specific vector of these anomalies. This isn't random incompetence; it's a persistent, multi-year pattern of actions that consistently align with the strategic goals of a single US adversary.
This pattern required him to systematically fire or purge officials who represented traditional US security policy (Mattis, McMaster, Bolton, Tillerson) and replace them with those who would enact this new vector (Vance, Kellogg).
The "ordinary incompetence" model must be able to explain the following data points, not as isolated gaffes, but as a cohesive pattern where his actions were in direct opposition to bipartisan congressional consensus and the US national security establishment:
Publicly inviting Russian interference ("Russia, if you're listening...").
Campaign chair (Manafort) providing internal polling data and strategy to a known Russian intelligence agent (Kilimnik).
Actively pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the campaign while lying to the public about it.
Softening the 2016 GOP platform to remove "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine.
Publicly siding with Putin in Helsinki over the entire US intelligence community.
Disclosing highly-classified, "code-word" intelligence from a key ally to the Russian FM and Ambassador in the Oval Office.
Illegally withholding $391M in congressionally-mandated military aid from Ukraine to extort a political investigation.
Waging a tariff war against allies (EU, Canada), creating a transatlantic rift that primarily benefited Moscow.
Unilaterally withdrawing from the INF and Open Skies Treaties, key arms-control pacts that constrained Russia, against the advice of allies and security officials.
Publicly stating he would "encourage" Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to any NATO ally he deems "delinquent."
Dangling the prospect of critical Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, only to publicly snatch the offer away immediately after a phone call with Putin.
Pausing vital US intelligence sharing with Ukraine, a move that directly aided Russia's successful offensive in the Kursk region and retaking it.
Publicly demanding that Ukraine "cut up" its territory and "stop at the battle lines," an act that validates Russia's invasion.
Consistently laundering Kremlin disinformation from the White House itself (e.g., CrowdStrike, "biolabs," "Nazis" in Kyiv).
One or two of these is a blunder. A list this long (and incomplete), spanning campaign, business, diplomacy, intelligence, and military policy, where every single item provides a direct, tangible benefit to the Kremlin, is a data cluster that requires a better explanation.
The choice isn't "great vs. not great." It's "random incompetence" vs. a coherent, multi-year vector of pro-Moscow actions that required a complete hostile takeover of his own party and the executive branch.
First off even if it was 99% unfounded Israel complaints, that's not a reason to axe it, that's just a reason to add a filter in an excel spreadsheet. But more importantly, we are absolutely responsible for making sure that our military aid is used in a way that supports our interests and values.
> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".
We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.
Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches. “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.”
But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.
Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.
The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.
By design, the current administration moves as fast as it possibly can because it knows that the public will take time to catch up.
The key to countering is consistent pressure that does not relent to fix the mechanisms that are broken: (congress, the white house, the "deep state" side note: the deep state always existed, it was just a convenient shorthand for "the part of the US government that faithfully implements the laws as passed by congress". That portion has been gutted and replaced with sycophants, and it will now take time to undo it)
Things like the Supreme Court, term limits, election funding also need updating. We all need to do a better job reviewing the fundamentals of government.
Bold of you to assume the public will ever catch up or care in the world of relentless algos and propagandizing. Tariffs have been in place for months now, which is objectively a regressive self imposed tax on US citizens.
The founding fathers lived in a world where the average citizen would have no idea what was going on in Washington. They just didn't expect it to be exploited quite so brazenly
>But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
As usual, you see this as a "they are dumb" problem. Look within.
TBH The Right in the US has such a structural advantage, that Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-facto repeal of the law.
The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.
It's not just a structural advantage, it's a de facto suspension of the Constitution.
Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup.
What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.
This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better.
If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
I think distilling in that far is missing the point that this is a republican and right wing issue. It doesn’t “just so happen” that republicans are in power while this is happening, they are the ones who are doing it.
The essence of the problem is not political parties, we've had them for hundreds of years and nothing this bad has happened. The actual simplest essence of this problem is malignant narcissism and cult-like behavior embedded in political parties.
Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but not actually a political party. Insofar as a two party system isn't ideal, it at least provides a level of stability. But when one of the two parties is an actual cult, then the whole thing falls over. Parties must not be cults. That's the root of our current predicament.
> It just so happens
This didn't just "happen", it was predicted far in advance, and not on the basis of parties but on the basis of antisocial personality disorders. For instance:
If we as a species are to flourish and prosper, we need to understand that our urgent and necessary task is transcending and dismantling of our narcissism, both individual and collective.
Note the date, May 13, 2016 to 2018. Her body of work from that time predicts with extreme prescience what has come to pass. Thinking back to when she made these predictions, people called her crazy, alarmist, unprofessional, all ignored her warnings. And yet, she turned out to be 100% right, even predicting the insurrection years before J6. Even as Trump was calling for a mob to descend on Congress days before J6, people refused to believe it would happen. Yet she got it right just by being lucid about who Trump is at his core.
How did she do it? She used her professional experience to recognize Trump as a malignant narcissist, and her lived experience as a Polish national who watched the rise of authoritarianism in her country to put 2 + 2 together.
So it wasn't something that "just happened" as if it was only a matter of time before Democrats act this way. There are precise reagents needed to make it happen. Political parties are necessary but not sufficient. The cult leader is the necessary ingredient that was missing. People who knew what to look for recognized it early, called it out, predicted this would happen, and they were ignored.
We can't rewrite that history now, we have to learn the lessons we missed. "It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control" is not the lesson. "A two party system where one of the parties turns into an actual cult destabilizes completely" is the lesson.
People still refuse to believe J6 happened. They instead Trump got 1 trillion dollars from Qatar. That fictional version of reality is much nicer, of course.
Because they now control the Congress and SCOTUS, there is effectively no recourse. Congress is paralysed and SCOTUS will almost always rule in favor of the Administration.
They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
You're not wrong, but Congress has been broken for a long, long time. Congress really doesn't do anything except for agree (if they've got a majority with the president) or disagree (if they're in the minority against the president) with the current president. They don't really make laws, they don't hold anyone accountable, they don't fund the government. They don't govern at all, they just try to keep getting re-elected.
This isn’t true though. Lots of legislation has been passed. Government shutdowns have become common but they’re not universal. Your absolutist take is observably false. It is worth looking deeper at who the obstructionists in congress actually are. A minority of bad actors can cause immense harm.
Yeah, that's not how things work. Senate can't pass anything unless the House agrees and the House is representative of the population. Also, footnote, we've been structuring governments this way for thousands of years. Rome, etc.
The Senate heavily favors rural voters. The House is supposed to be representative, but favors rural voters thanks to gerrymandering and the cap on congressional representatives (Nebraska should have less than 1 rep in a truly representative institution, for example). Then you’ve got the presidency itself, where the electoral college favors rural voters. And the courts, which reflect the will of the president in cooperation with the senate, so also heavily biased toward rural voters.
There’s a reason the U.S. is the only modern democracy with a system like this. Almost any other country you’re likely to want to live in has a parliamentary system.
If you go that route Nebraska will lag ever more behind other states given they don't get to have any political power.
Look, I'm just someone from the other side of the pond. This is what happens: when you have no substantial representation for the country side your political system rewards centralisation, rural areas will stagnate, leading to less people there. A cycle that fuels itself.
As someone that has had to live through this I can assure you that those feeding the country should be given proper representation. Not doing so favours huge metropolies, rises urban house prices, prevents proper traffic flow, increases crime rate, etc...
Of course no system is perfect but a middle ground is preferable in my view.
With all due respect, being "from the other side of the pond", I don't think you understand the U.S. well enough to be commenting. For example, California is both the largest producer of food in the U.S., and the state being most significantly under-represented in all three branches of government.
The U.S. is also, easily, the most volatile (extreme partisanship) country of comparable rich, democratic nations. The system we have is pretty unique in its attempts to bend-over backwards to boost rural voters' importance, and we're worse off in virtually every "bad thing" you mention than countries that don't do this.
Centralization? Our president is independently murdering people in the carribbean, demolishing an entire wing of Whitehouse to build himself a new ballroom, independently changing funding (i.e. has hijacked the power of the purse from Congress), is independently sending in the U.S. military into states run by his political opponents against their will, pardoning violent criminals who supported him (one of whom was caught plotting to murder the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries), etc.
Rural areas will stagnate / people will move away? Dawg. That's already been happening despite the political concessions they've been given. That ain't the problem.
Urban house prices skyrocketing? Happening. NYC is among the least affordable major cities on the planet.
Crime rate? Generally highest in the places where we give disproportionate political sway to.
Are you suggesting the 66x more representation Wyomingers get over Californians in the Senate isn't enough? Is the ~3.5x more voting power they get in presidential elections not enough? What is a fair "middle ground" in your estimation? Because it feels extraordinarily unfair in the exact opposite direction, to me.
(Editing to add): It's also worth pointing out that this delta in voting power is much more extreme today than it was when this system was designed. In the 1800 census, the most populous state, Virginia, had 885,000 people, around 15x more than Delaware, the least populous state. Today, California has 67x the population of Wyoming.
I am but stating the dark side of equal voting power when you elect representatives per "region" dictated by the population they have. It is meant to be a warning, something to bear in mind when you do attempt to change the system you have.
I am not arguing in favour of what you have right now, hence the middle ground point at the end.
Regardless, my understanding of the US is not important. What is important in my comment is my understanding of what you don't do, and potential footguns.
A good middle ground would be to still have it entirely dictated by population (I understand this seems contradictory but hang on). But, in order to prevent votes from low population regions from being useless, your system uses "preferential voting". Most other countries do not do this, hence my previous comment. The key here is that at a national level, politicians still need to value less populated regions, because at least a percentage of their votes came from someone who voted in an order that still got them a seat (even though they weren't the top pick). Given rural regions have less seats to vote for, this vote would likely come from someone from the country side.
This solution however is only important when you do have more than 2 parties. If you don't do this, having more than 2 parties would be moot in these regions, because they need to vote strategically if they want representation. And 90% of the time that means your vote is limited to only one of the top 2 parties (as perceived by national polls before voting day). This is yet another dark side of the system my country does have, it incentivizes the status quo to prevail, even when your current leaders are a bunch of corrupt fellas.
The House is not as skewed as the Senate. But it still has a "rural" bias through two mechanisms: 1. gerrymandering, and 2. the 435 cap on the number of representatives.
Both parties do gerrymander. But there are more "red" states than blue, so it systemically favors one party.
The cap on reps also skews things. Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont all have less than 1/435th of the U.S. population, so they're over-represented in the House. That over-representation comes at the expense of big states like California being under-represented.
You can see this effect by looking at the popular vote vs the representation in The House.
In the 2016 election, Trump won the election with just 46.1% of the popular vote. Republicans maintained control of The House with 55.4% control. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote. And Democrats gained control with slightly less than that, 51.03% of The House. In the 2024 election, Trump won 49.81% of the popular vote, Republicans won 50.8% of seats in The House.
> Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-factor repeal of the law.
Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.
The difference is that uneven enforcement is the tool of autocrats. Ignoring the law breeds contempt for it. Madison said requiring a supermajority for normal legislation would poison democracy, and I think the modern usage filibuster has proven him correct. I hope the GOP ditches the whole thing, not just for continuing resolutions. The senate will no longer have any excuses for abdicating its responsibilities. Thrashing laws are a small price to pay. I do wish judicial appointments still required a supermajority.
Picking and choosing which laws to enforce is baked into the concept of prosecutorial discretion. There is a reason the country’s prosecutor in chief is an elected position. It was understood to be a fundamentally political office even in Jefferson’s day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-je...
I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources.
They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists.
In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
> They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
Did you read the article you posted? The entire thing is about allocation of finite resources. You can read the original Antitrust enforcement policy and see that it lays out a system of prioritization which (surprise surprise), prioritizes larger monopolization efforts over smaller ones.
It does not say "we don't think small companies can behave monopolistically so we aren't enforcing the law on them."
President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
I will reiterate the plain language of the United States Constitution: [the President] SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
SHALL does not mean MAY or AT HIS DISCRETION or any such thing.
> President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
He didn’t enforce the ASA because he disagreed with it, just like Jimmy Carter didn’t prosecute people for selective service violations because he disagreed with it. It wasn’t because the resources weren’t available to enforce those laws.
You actually can’t know what their motivations were — which is the point.
For example, if Congress had appropriated funds specifically for doing those things, the executive would be obligated to do them, because it’d be unambiguous as to whether resources existed to do them.
This is again an absolutely unambiguous consequence of Congress’s Constitutional control of spending and of the Take Care Clause.
What you are describing is effectively a line-item veto, which doesn’t exist in the US.
So far all the evidence you’ve posted is actually evidence of my argument, not yours.
Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. They provide guidance to people as to what they can reasonably expect will and will not be permitted, and the obligations of various people to eachother. Laws need to be changeable, because the world changes, but that process is purposefully made somewhat difficult so that only worthwhile changes are made, so that the changes can be explicitly communicated, and those who make the changes can be both advised before and held accountable after.
If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
> Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne.
That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf
“While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide-
ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice
John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s
prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to
interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which
permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”
> That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people.
No it doesn't. The laws are statements of what people in power will do under particular circumstances. This view only makes sense if people are executing the laws. The moment you stop executing the laws, suddenly you don't have laws.
Prosecutorial discretion is another beast entirely. Considering circumstances on a case by case basis is necessary for functional justice, as lawmakers can not possibly foresee all circumstances and even if they could the enforcers of laws have practical limits. A cop letting you off with a warning for speeding is discretion. It is not permission for you or anyone else to ignore the speed limit in the future. The law is still there, and you should expect to suffer the consequences if you break it.
We don't need laws when they ask us to do something we'd want to do anyways. Laws exist for the sole purpose of getting people to do the things they would rather not do, or to prevent them from doing things they would prefer to do. If the law can be violated when it is convenient for the lawmaker, you do not live in a nation of laws.
One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate.
If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.
In the Senate at least outside of a few carve outs, you really need 60 Senators to get anything passed not just a majority. The only reason the ACA ever passed was during the brief window they had 60 Senators
Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace.
That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood the "who watches the watchers" problem and created a system without any such single point of failure. The ultimate backstop in our political system is not the law, but instead frequent elections. Congress writes the law, the President enforces the law, and the Judiciary interprets the law. If the President does a bad job of enforcing the law, the recourse is elections (or, as a last resort, impeachment).
Just a quibble, but we should only be impeaching Presidents for illegal acts, not mere opinions about job performance, which members of the opposite party will almost always disagree with. The remedy for doing a bad job is the ballot box.
Well that horse left the barn a long time ago - the list of blatantly illegal things is now so long that new ones (like murdering people in boats by remote control) just fly on by.
That’s a category error. “Murder” is a concept of domestic criminal law. It doesn’t apply to state actions against foreigners in international waters. For the same reason it’s not “murder” for the U.S. to drone strike middle eastern weddings or to nuke foreign cities.
Most people do not believe in the religion of humanist universalism.
Turns out that separation of powers was incorrect. Each branch needs its own enforcement arm and our plan of having the Executive carry out the law instead of just enforcing the law was a bad idea.
It is interesting that our elections aren't really frequent enough. Other systems cleverly made it possible to immediately recall electors that have gone rogue or the citizens have no faith in.
You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing. For example, the entire city of Nashville, TN, has been utterly and obviously gerrymandered out of existence, and the city has no representation in the House. (They used to be TN's 5th.)
This of course does not apply to Presidential elections. The President has multiple times indicated disdain for elections, his party has used "third term and beyond", his supporters have openly floated the idea of repealing the 22A, he's called himself "king" and "dictator".
The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now.
> or, as a last resort, impeachment
"a servile congress" — they understand impeachment. If an attempted coup doesn't get impeachment, nothing will. Regardless, the GOP is going along with the president, so impeachment isn't something that's going to happen.
> You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing.
What has it done? In 2024, Republicans got 50.5% of the seats and 51.3% of the two-party Congressional popular vote. The delta between a party’s share of the popular vote and its share of House seats is much smaller since 2000 than it was for most of the 20th century: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Po...
> The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now
The VRA requires racially discriminatory gerrymandering and is probably unconstitutional in that respect. The VRA is the product of an era where white democrats would discriminate against black democrats even though they shared a party. Today, gerrymandering is based on political party, not race. If black people voted 80% republican, red states would happily gerrymander out affluent college-educated whites in their favor.
They’ve created enough of a digital system to manage public opinion (through brain rot, manipulation, bots, psychometrics) that they’re less and less afraid of elections.
I assume multiple competing systems at this point. You have Team Jorge (and many others) in Israel, Robert Mercer’s rebranded SCL Group and offshoots, whatever Elon Musk has done to X (who he himself said he used to help Trump win). In Portugal there are bot armies and influence operations on every social network - Facebook and Reddit most of all.
SCOTUS has life-long appointments because it is designed to move and operate slowly and be the least political of the branches. Parties that try to legislate from the bench when they cannot successfully get something through Congress are the issue.
The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
The founders foresaw all manner of bad behavior. They understood human nature better than most today, and they experienced a lot of shocking political acts, everything from telling scurrilous lies about your opponent to outright buying votes. The only thing that might be new to them is the scale at which technology makes these things possible. Read up on the history of early campaigns.
The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval.
The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.
(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population).
You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you".
You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
One thing the founders definitely didn't see coming was the two party system, which eventually led to a single party controlling all thee branches of government.
Go back and read Washington's farewell address. There's a section in there that addresses factions, and it's like Washington had access to the headlines from last week when he wrote it.
They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice.
The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.
They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.
It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.
The Supreme Court definitely suffers from 'not invented here' syndrome. There are vastly superior Supreme Court systems that other countries have implemented (Austria is a great example) where the US could just copy their homework, but won't.
The press really needs to start suffixing the justices with (R) and (D) when discussing them to drive the point home that the SC is the most partisan branch of government.
Austria's system was created in the mid 1700s and would have been relatively new at the time of the founding. Was Austria's system clearly vastly superior at the turn of the 19th century?
Their separate constitutional court didn't come along until the 20th century[1]. They have 14 justices on that court, but only a maximum of 9 will ever hear a case for precedent-setting decisions, and usually fewer than that (making court packing difficult if not completely pointless).
They have always done what the US should do: keep the votes on a judgment private, so opinions speak for the court as a whole, and they don't let the losers have a soapbox by publishing dissents.
As a cherry on top, they enforce a mandatory retirement age of 70.
These factors make their court an actually apolitical body in a way that's in hilariously stark contrat to the US court. The US court is what you'd make if your entire goal was to turn all its judgments into political theatre.
It's kind of incredible the news is so crowded with insanity that "minimum two justices are simply taking huge bribes more-or-less openly, and as many as all nine are doing some things that are at least ethically iffy" didn't have much staying power, as a story.
Not really, no. The founders were not omniscient, but many of them publicly wrote about the problematic rise of political "factions" contrary to the general interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
Our founders recognized our compromisestitution was vulnerable to this, they didn't predict a nationalist brainwashing campaign to call compromise a beneficial thing as part of a national identity
They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
This is the painful period of time where the US would have to collectively realize they are missing controls on the branches, in the form of amendments. Unfortunately, it looks like the people are lazy. They rather lose the union, before agreeing there really is a problem to be solved. Otherwise, there's no way to know there's a problem.
Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
currently impossible as the people that can actually bridge consensus are vilified as not being aligned to a party or excusing the actions of a particular party solely by not adding power to the other party
partisans are loud but they are not winning friends and influencing people, the parties are only losing supporters, it just takes more people to realize that they aren't alone as independents are the largest bloc now but have no representation to notice
reminder for anyone passing by, everyone knows how the parties are different, it is still valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...
I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo
The founders came from England, which has the world's longest unbroken political tradition (apart from 11 years during the English Civil War). England has top-level cabinet positions that were established 800 years ago. So I doubt the founders would be surprised that their constitution was still in use 236 years later.
Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.
Along this line of thinking, surely there’s an unbroken administrative / bureaucratic tradition running China that spans multiple royal dynasties and perhaps even the recent ideological upheaval. Can we call that an enduring government?
The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people"
More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified.
They probably also didn’t see it coming that their constitution would be considered just as sacred as the Bible, instead of a document that was to be adapted.
And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of.
> By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0]
Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power).
You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from.
Same. No leader will be perfect. We always have to pick between the lesser of two evils. Trump is at level 10. And people were like Oh but Kamala has faults too.
MAGA have screwed the country and themselves. Farmers who voted for Trump are realizing this now. The rest will find out soon when the shit hits the fan in a big way.
Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse.
The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved.
I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free.
Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place.
Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly.
The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems.
An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled.
Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps.
And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats.
This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not?
The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..."
Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done.
I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
True that most people don't care about who rules, but people do care of not living "much worse" than "before". That triggered a lot of revolutions before.
It does not look great, but I find risks mostly economical (not only in USA, everywhere) - if the situation will deteriorate even more abruptly (considering it already did a bit due to the pandemic "shock") then we will have a mess.
When a different side takes control of the justice department they may choose to go after all those who broke the law by order of this president. The president might be protected from consequences according to the supreme court, but those answering to the president are not.
This administration has set the standard that the justice department can be weaponized against political enemies. The ratchet only goes one way in American politics, presidents never relinquish the powers claimed by their predecessors.
The obvious solution to this is to change everything structurally needed to ensure the other side never again takes control, which is clearly also in progress.
>The obvious solution to this is to change everything structurally needed to ensure the other side never again takes control, which is clearly also in progress.
- Signed, the side that tried to throw a candidate in prison.
Actually it does if the US, bullies the other countries into not enforcing it and the US it's actually the main country enforcing international law. If a country dare to enforce international law against an us person, they will cut resources or threaten to use military
Even before Trump, the US had a standing policy of threatening severe retaliation against anyone who tries to enforce international law against US citizens-- this isn't just an informal policy, it's a specific law passed by Congress. And the scope has only gotten broader since then.
The whole concept of "international law" is polite fiction anyway, the reality has always been "the strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must".
> When a different side takes control of the justice department
That's an argument about the degradation of the rule of law, taking as a prior that the rule of law won't degrade. It's... unpersuasive. The end goal of this kind of thinking is that the other side never does take control, ever.
The current administration pretty clearly does not intend to give up power. They tried to evade democracy once already, and have fixed the mistakes this time.
Whether they will be successful or not is unknowable. But that's the plan. And the determining factor is very unlikely to be the normal operation of American civil society. Winning elections is, probably, not enough anymore.
The classified documents thing with Trump was a manufactured scandal, for example. Everyone in our government is mishandling classified documents because we have a massive over-classification problem, as seen by the lesser reported and covered subsequent finding of Biden having documents.
Only one of those events was associated with a televised raid (which the press was notified of beforehand so they could be sure to film it).
It was all theater.
It's the same with Trump's prosecution in NY, that case was ridiculous. One deed expanded into 37 misdemeanors that were escalated to a felony because they were committed in an effort to cover up an alleged felony. I say alleged because he was never convicted of the original crime but, conveniently, that's not a requirement of that escalation in NY law.
Ironically, both of those cases only increased Trump's support among non-Democrats (Republicans and, importantly, independents) because it was transparent.
Here's a quote for the NY AG that sued Trump.
> "We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well," [0]
That sounds an awful lot like she went looking for crimes of a person rather than finding who's responsible for crimes. And threatening his family as well.
> The classified documents thing with Trump was a manufactured scandal, for example.
It was not. Trump was asked for months to return the documents.
He purposefully had staff to move documents onto his private jet and moved them around his various properties. He stored boxes and boxes, not just a few file folders, in random bathrooms.
Yes, plenty of folks may mishandle stuff, but many folks try to fix their errors when they're pointed out. Trump ignored the requests and continued doing things consciously even when notified.
We're talking specifically about lawfare - so no idea why you're talking about the Nord Stream pipeline? These banal observations about 'both sides' are so shallow.
Name Biden's lawfare. What exactly did he abuse the Justice Department to do?
You might be talking about lawfare, I'm pointing out how your media carries water for one side covering up petty vendettas against Trump by the Biden regime, all the way to suppressing blatant acts of terrorism against an ally - sorry vassal state - Germany.
If you assume that Biden had influence on the prosecution, then we should not forget that the original deal posed by the DOJ was for Hunter to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges for which he would have received 2 years probation, and pre-trial diversion on the federal gun charges.
The judge threw this out, but those are pretty generous terms for what penultimately amounted to guilty charges on 6 felonies and 6 misdemeanors (before all charges were pardoned.)
Shouldn't that be fixed rather than now abused further?
If your justification for Trump doing something is that "Biden did it first", then that means Biden is no worse than Trump. It means Trump just just following along the path Biden laid for him to the same goal.
Setting aside the ludicrous idea that something is a "matter of survival" for the party currently controlling every single branch of the US government, what you said is still wrong and just an excuse for weak leadership.
Following that thought path literally anywhere just leads to the party in question being actively worse than the thing they claim to fight against.
A competent leader would see something abusable, an opportunity for corruption, and take steps to prevent its abuse.
Weak, corrupt leadership sees an opportunity for corruption and says "$core! They did it fir$t!". And that's how we lose. All of us I mean.
For the left to acknowledge something, a specific claim would have to be made and proved. The opposition party standing up a congressional committee with a scary name and making a bunch of press conferences doesn't prove anything.
At least I get to feel vindicated. Many many people, including me, have long asserted that the so-called "conservatives" in the Supreme Court are anything but. Historically their decisions have appealed to a certain kind of conservative political base, but the pretense is really starting to wear thin. Limiting the power of the executive branch in general was never the goal, it was only to limit the power of presidents who were willing to challenge the capitalist oligarchy master plan. They know that their job now, along with their allies and Congress, is to simply step aside and manage public outrage while the next phase of the plan is set in motion. I'm not just talking about in recent years either, go back through the Obama and W Bush administrations. You might notice that the conservatives in the court curiously turned more conservative when "their guy" isn't in office.
What we're seeing now isn't exactly the power of capitalist oligarchy but right-wing populist authoritarianism. They forge alliances with wealthy figures to achieve goals and engage in a corrupt patronage system like in an undeveloped country, but if this were a capitalist coup we would not be seeing anything like the absurd and illegal tariffs, brutal response to immigrants, etc.
I know leftists like to describe these sorts of phenomena (including Hitler's rise) as all part of the capitalist overlords' master plans, but that's not the most accurate description. Capitalists like Andreessen will cynically exploit it and hop on the bandwagon and benefit from it to the extent they can, but right-wing populist authoritarianism is its own beast, and they're just trying to position themselves as along for the ride rather than in its jaws. The regime is happy to reward capitalist loyalists and I do not deny there is a mutualism occurring, but it is more complex than a movement centered around capitalism.
I think you and parent comment are just using the word conservative in two different ways. There is conservative values and there is the conservative party, two different things.
I am saying that these are real conservative values. It is not true that these would be just something conservative party does while claiming to believe something else. Instead, if you read what conservative people write and say, in journals, books, talk shows, anywhere ... this is exactly what they believe in.
They are conservatives. People that care about things like small governments and fiscal responsibility are not. It's sad when somebody takes control over a group you identify with and changes it's goals but you're one person versus millions. The word doesn't mean what it used to.
An enormous proportion of Republican voters were already Trumpers as early as the ‘90s, but didn’t have a candidate yet, so had to settle for “vote Republican to keep the democrats from doing all the bad things Rush says they will”.
Republican partisan-propaganda media after anti-trust de-fanging (mid ‘70s) and media deregulation (‘80s-‘00s) became huge, and cultivated an electorate that wanted Trump but had to settle for tepidly-socially-conservative neoliberal Republicans. Such voters would tell you all day long about how we should just build a border wall (or mine it…), cut trade and foreign military engagements (though those have some cross-aisle appeal), question why we extend civil rights and due process to [pick a group], tell you we should use the military against protesters in cities, wonder why anyone opposes cops beating suspects unless they love crime, and so on, and they’d tell you that stuff many years before Trump’s 2016 run.
> there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.
Laws don't do things, people do.
It doesn't matter what's written down on paper if the people in power ignore it and the masses don't have enough organized collective power to prevent them from doing so.
The context of all US law is that it is the implementation of the will of the people. There is currently political will to shift focus in the military to effective fighting power, as opposed to progressive values. I think this is because the electorate recognizes that military threats around the world are getting worse.
Ukrainians will tell you now, you can’t have peace without strength. Europeans are also beginning to realize this due to American leadership, hence they have all (but one) doubled NATO funding limits this year.
People have been saying for decades that Congress has delegated far too much power to the executive and that it's ripe for abuse if a malevolent president ever takes office.
Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.
(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)
Impeachment by itself has been shown to accomplish nothing. There is no other mechanism except conviction by the Senate to address constitutional or legal violations made by the president.
Also no president has ever been impeached by a House which is controlled by a majority of the same party of the President. If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Edit: “Approval voting” is the appropriate escape hatch from 2-party politics. It lets you get rid of primaries entirely and run all the top-n candidates who have the greatest number of valid nomination signatures. Its advantage over range-voting/etc is that it is dead-simple to explain to voters: Put a checkmark next to any candidate that you're "okay" with. The candidate with the most checkmarks wins.
Now we are talking. And the dynamic that makes political parties so toxic IMO is “first past the post” voting.
If it’s your team or the “worse” team, you tolerate any flaw in your team.
If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over (for example see Reform vs Conservative parties in the UK, not that I am thrilled with the underlying direction) then there is an alternative: cut bait and condemn what used to be “your team”, and start a new one.
> If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over
That's exactly what happened though -- the MAGA party took over. Conservatives "cut bait" with traditional Republicans, condemned them (see how they talk about Liz and Dick Cheney or even GWB, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, their own presidential nominees), and started a new party within the rotting corpse of the old GOP. There's still some "Republican" branding around but if you pay attention they're not waving "Republican" flags or wearing "Republican" hats anymore.
It’s not a good safety valve though - sure, in a 2-party system, one of the parties can be taken over from within. But it’s uncommon and hard to achieve, and risks alienating voters while the civil war is going on.
On the other hand, with IRV or preference voting, second parties can form without spoiling the vote for their ideologically most aligned alternatives. This allows for a much more seamless shift.
Really in the US there should be at least 4 parties formed from the corpses of the big two, if not more.
Unfortunately taking over a dominant party was the easiest way to have a "different" party that could actually win. Both parties have built a mountain of obstacles to prevent a third party from ever getting close to challenging them.
I find it best to view parties like any other faction or gang. They don't want challengers to their current power. Primaries are supposed to be the democratic way to steer a party but we've seen how that goes. They aren't going to change unless it is from within. So,remove all obstacles to being on the ballot and let the existing parties whine about it when they start to lose.
The political mechanics of the system result in a two-party system, because no other party ever stands a chance of getting seats. Coalition systems may be less stable, but when you need at least three parties to form a government, they tend to keep each other in check better.
Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but seats should be proportional to the vote. If you have 100 seats, that party only getting 5% of the votes should also have 5% of the seats.
In the country where I live, people do consider themselves leftist, centrists, or right-wing, but a vast majority only decides what specific party to vote during the campaign.
We have the opposite issue, since there is not electoral threshold, we now have a lot of small and middle-sized parties, making it harder to form a coalition. (Would be possible to address with an electoral threshold of 2-5%.)
>If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached.
That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.
>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.
Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older.
Most people I talk with about it seem divided along the lines of morality in terms of the interaction and level of consent, rather than along debate over the security risks. Security risk seems like a valid point of concern to me.
That risk could be mitigated by a president being open about their promiscuity with both family and the public during their campaign - e.g. when both Russia and USA attempted to sextort and blackmail Sukarno (the president of the Philippines) he was delighted that his encounters were filmed and requested extra copies of the kompromat.
>but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape,
I've picked up on that too. Which, in my opinion is strange... she was 22 or 23 wasn't she? We just have to wait another 2 generations, and those will think themselves still children at 35.
Rather than age differential, I think that view is primarily founded in the belief that the President's implied power over the career of their employee (a White House intern) makes it a particularly difficult choice to risk the ire of the President by refusing their advances.
I don't get the impression from talking with younger Democratic voters that they would generally be as concerned with issues of consent if it was a 22 year-old sex worker (where it's purely a transactional relationship) or 22-year old pop star (where their career isn't particularly threatened by the President's favor).
With a White House intern, there's a potential element of silent or implied coercion which puts into question whether enthusiastic consent was freely given. Similar to the national security risk - regardless if it was/wasn't, it also calls into question the President's judgment for why they would engage in such morally ambiguous behavior - it would also be fairly difficult for the President to even know themselves whether the intern is feeling coerced or not.
I don't really understand why people still talk about impeachment.
It has been very clearly shown to be a futile formality that only makes the ones doing it look even more powerless and worthy of mockery in the eyes of the other side and their supporters.
In a bygone era, impeachment would rely on concepts of shame, responsibility and public duty - it would be unimaginable that person that was impeached does not step down from the position and likely from political foreground fully - from the moral and social weight of that consequence.
We've seen last 2 times how thoroughly that weight no longer exists in modern society/politics.
Without criminal responsibility, there is no responsibility left at all.
A good point. The people who sit in parliament are very often just machines of the party. Yes yes TECHNICALLY they are elected by the people and have a mandate but your career is over if you speak out.
You have to be a very special kind of person to break rank.
Which is the flaw of the impeachment/conviction process. It heavily relies on elected officials having a strong moral compass. It's what the founders got the most wrong about the US as it's basically a worthless process. It really doesn't matter what evidence gets presented or what a president does. The result will always be a party line vote.
We love to blame the common clay, don't we. You can win a majority of voters and lose an election. There are systemic problems, starting with money in politics, two senators per state, the electoral college and gerrymandering.
We already bastardized the senate by electing senators by popular vote. Senators are supposed to represent each states government, not the people of the state. As a single member of the union a state doesn't need more senators. Making ingredients the proportional to population just makes the senate another house. The people have the house. The cap of representatives has also been harmful to the voice of the people being heard. Representatives are the face for too many people for them to truly represent their constituents.
Well, yes, the senate is useless. It was useful to check the South’s power in the Great Conpromise, but now the most deliberative body is not needed when the House can slow things down all by itself. Unicameral works for me.
Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.
You can win a majority of voters and lose an election, but that's not what happened. 77 million people voted for Trump, and it's not like he acted like a mild mannered constitutional conservative with a sensible reform package and turned into a vindictive, chaotic wannabe autocrat whose closest thing to a redeeming feature is is stupidity afterwards. The electoral college and gerrymandering may be ludicrous, but that's not why he won, and nor is lack of funds for opponents. The system of checks and balances isn't what they were cracked up to be, but the reason he's dismantling it is because when he telegraphed that he was going to do it the people of the land cheered him so loudly anyone else that wanted their votes stepped in line.
“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”
Do you expect elections are still a viable option in this circumstance? It's beginning to sound like the results will be just set to a default, like the last presidential election in Russia: "78%+ for Putin/Trump".
Oh there are, but only for the Democrats. Same with the media: Trumps brain is openly turning to soup and the media can’t help but cover for him. Yet Biden, when he too was clearly way too old for the job, got constantly attacked for it. The double standard is bizarre.
This fantasy of free markets, laws, branches or anything else solving what Plato wrote about in The Republic thousands of years ago is pure folly.
If it is of any comfort - it's always been this way and it's not going to get any better :) We have technological progress, not progress in wisdom. People are better behaved because well fed humans behave better than hungry humans - everything else is as it's always been.
> ...it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.
There are, but the executive for decades (centuries?) has ignored law inconvenient to its goals, and the legislative has generally shrugged it off, hoping their guy will do the same down the road.
One such restraint? Declaring war. Yet how often has this power been abused by the executive since World War 2? Korea anyone? Vietnam? Central America? The Middle East?
There's been a lot of hand-wringing in this thread about what Trump has done and is doing. Truth is, he's just the latest player in the game we've all participated in, and he's good at it.
To stop him, we'd have to change the rules of the game, as Congress did in 2017 with the Russia sanctions bill.[1] I just don't see that happening 'cause... we're all hoping our guy will do the same (as Trump) down the road.
The Constitution constrains the executive, it doesn't give him very many powers at all. Frankly, the Constitution bars him from having run in the 2024 election for having caused an insurrection against the United States. Aside from that, he should have been impeached and removed and barred from running again for extorting a bribe from a foreign government.
We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.
This is exactly right - the Trump admin claims to have a mandate to do all sorts of things, and they're just unilaterally doing so - in plain violation of the law. If they actually the mandate they say they do, they'd pass laws repealing the requirements they don't like and defunding the programs they dislike rather than illegally impounding the funds and illegally killing programs like this one. Except it turns out that "illegal" is only important if there's someone capable of enforcing the law and under this Supreme Court's clearly insane reading of our laws and constitution, there is nobody that can constrain the President.
I don't see how anything has changed in a meaningful way. George Bush "tortured some folks" and Obama assassinated US citizens abroad. The status quo is literal evil and Trump is behaving in accordance with the status quo.
If you don't see any distinctions beyond “there is some evil” vs. “there is no evil”, all of human history must seem to be a flat, undifferentiated blob to you.
That's why the future looks so bleak. Republicans support absolutely any amount of crime and corruption, because "some" crime and corruption has happened under Democrats. Meanwhile half of the rest of Americans wouldn't support Democrats because "some" crime is infinitely worse than "no crime" in their view. Criminals enjoy an absolutely stunning structural advantage in this country.
A website was taken down. This might technically violate some paperwork law, but the real problem is we don't actually prosecute war crimes/human rights violations. So what difference does it make if some website went down?
Seems like laws exist, they're just perverted or ignored. For example, this applies to the executive branch:
(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.
(b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to—
(1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or
(2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)
While there may well not have been ethical intentions behind this removal (who knows), I think reporting to the press directly is probably better than reporting it to a government, so as to avoid giving the government a chance to cover things up.
> > Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage
This is not far away from "defamation" in western world.
I'm not siding with Trump here, but every western politician seem to think that he/she/it can do whatever he/she/it wants and every criticism must be regarded as defamation.
Indeed, the recent trend of the US government itself posting videos of the drone murders of Venezuelans stands in real stark contrast to how that was handled just 15 years ago.
And I'm just surprised when people still react to what he does as "unbelievable", "illegal" etc... I get it, but it's weird how persistently people still try to frame Trump's actions into moral, legal, historical, cultural, responsibility or any other framework.
He is someone who was born into wealth in the worst way possible, and was never - ever - subject to any moral restrictions, material consequences, or requirements that depend on any positive qualities, effort or success.
In those conditions, his bullish way of behaving always got him what he wanted in the moment, without any downsides or counter-weight that would regulate it. Time after time, he was given proof - by us, the society - that there are no consequences, or they are just so unimpactful, and that he can continue doing what he does. There is no framework that he needed to adhere to.
He was then placed into practically the same position within the government - being able to do whatever he wants and benefits him (directly, or through benefitting his posse), and there will be no material consequences of any kind. If he comes up to any inconvenient restrictions put in place before, they can just be removed first.
And that's it, that's what he's been doing all along. He doesn't have any higher interests, any ulterior motivation, or ambitions - in every situation, he just uses it to get something for himself in that moment - even if openly solely to be able to brag that he did it - and he makes himself look big by lying or belittling others, and that's it. Just a very simple unrestricted narcissist, on grander scale.
Their behavior is quite simple to understand and predict. It's just that they can rarely be SO up there, so unrestricted, that people still seem to struggle to not try to tie him to norms and frameworks.
Their motivation seems clear from what they voted, and what they're cheering for - they want to be able to behave without consequences in the same way as well.
Blame others (dems, libs, immigrants, races, religions...) for everything that's wrong, screw the "government" whenever possible, "grab them by the ***", and treat others and the world in the same way Trump can.
It's the same in every autocracy - the leader is providing an outlet for the immoral / suppressed / forbidden thoughts, actions and feelings - they either live vicariously through him (even if they are worse off, but that's blamed on others), or can now do some of that stuff because of him.
Sadly that's the conclusion I've had to come to recently. I wanted to have hope in my fellow Americans, just attributing their choices to being poorly informed or just foolish, but, no, they're just as mean and greedy as he is. They like watching people suffer, and now that they've had their first taste of cruelty, they want more, more, more. They'll be that way long after Trump is gone. They're just mean-spirited assholes. It sucks.
The root cause of the current political environment is income inequality and endless funding for wars. The people who support Trump are losing the economic game and had no better representative. The reality is that both parties are owned by the investor class and support foreign funding for wars. Until we as a society figure out that the left vs right struggle is just a distraction from the investor vs labor struggle, we will never fix this problem. Note how everyone in this thread is blaming Trump and the conservative party when the Kamala and the liberal party would likely be doing the same thing, because they both support Israel and the IDF and cover up their war crimes.
All this stuff about trans rights and gun rights and freedom of speech and other random culture war issues are just a tool to keep the labor class divided. The root cause is wealth insecurity, it won’t automatically solve the other problems but it’ll turn down the temperature. I wish people would wake up to this and stop fighting their neighbors when they’re both on the same team.
Just making sure there is less noise when they start (already started) using U.S.-armed U.S. forces here in the U.S. to oppress people they don't like - non-Magazis, people without white skin, non-Christians, non-straight, and the poor. It's a lot quieter to disappear people when no one can report it and there isn't anyone to appeal to anyway.
Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
I hope that we never have to find out how ferocious the quiet, "leave me alone", armed populous is. I feel we are on that path and grouping people as the other just fuels the fire.
So there is no other way of reporting such abuses? This one web site that nobody had heard of before today, was our sole way of hearing complaints of this type?
Why is it that eliminating one particular web site is somehow a failure of the US Constitution?
Yes, Congress is dysfunctional. Welcome to the post 17th amendment world. Repeal that and make the House truly proportional instead of artificially limiting it to 435 members and you’ll go a long way towards fixing a lot of the current problems. Eliminate PACs and donation caps and enforce KYC for donations and we can see who is actually buying our legislators.
But on the main topic, the left in the US is seeking judicial intervention to block nearly every single action that the administration takes, and district court judges are handing down nationwide injunctions against the president on a weekly basis. If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.
Not that I agree with this decision, but is there any evidence that these reports yielded any consequences? Or rather, was it one of those, "After conducting an internal investigation, we have determined we did nothing wrong" kind of things?
Even if the reports didn’t result in action, they would (in theory) leave a report trail that a FOI request could uncover.
There’s a lot of ifs in there though, and a lot of implied honesty just for record keeping. We’re all discovering (again) that implied honesty in governance will always be abused.
I have a feeling thats exactly how it was used. But that makes its removal even more odd. The hosting cost must be trivial; an email support form connected to a shredder.
Defund the organization in charge of checking and follow-ups is one thing, but its complete removal just smell of incompetence or acknowledging of wrongdoing, or some sort of performance.
And the response is also baffling. "sorry we migrated it systems and accidentally took it down" is the handwave i expected. not "we follow the law regardless so it's not needed".
Guessing some mid level functionary had to come up with 3 things to do that week and this is an easy bullet point. Saying "Actually we should keep this thing because we're playing 4D chess" doesn't look good on such a status report.
It’s not odd though. This administration has been very clear that they think things like rules of engagement or caring about collateral damage are bullshit.
On a weekly basis now, they are blowing up civilian boats without any evidence wrong doing. Even if they had evidence, it still wouldn’t warrant using hellfire missiles on civilian ships, especially when the U.S. navy or coastguard is more than capable of intercept these ships.
Yes, I would think the 'smart evil' thing to do would be keeping it running and just ignoring what you don't like but now people will just send the stuff to WikiLeaks.
I don't think that's even the smart thing. Because this is set up to receive reports about acts committed by groups receiving weapons from the US, the smart evil thing is to have dossiers of all the human rights abuses of your client states ready the next time you want to negotiate something with them. "It's highly embarrassing that you used the guns we gave you to shoot so many civilians. We might be somewhat less embarrassed to continue supplying you with guns if (your national airline bought more Boeing planes|you sung praises to our glorious leader more loudly in public|you brought a complaint against our adversary in the WTO)."
They wouldn’t send to WikiLeaks before - also, or instead?
Do we have any evidence this initiative was ever staffed and effective?
We’ve extended a lot of credit to a vested institution to police itself. That’s not worked out in other matters, such as warrantless wiretapping, so why do you think this is effective here?
And why would you discredit third parties - especially those designed to be watchdogs?
I can see this initiative being an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. And, I’d imagine closing this reporting portal won’t deter journalists - especially those on the frontline like WikiLeaks - from reporting on incidents.
It reminds me of a company I used to work for that had a "suggestions box." After the box was full enough, the leadership would just dump it in the trash. Leadership didn't care about employee nor customer opinions. It was just to give people the illusion that their opinion mattered just to placate them.
After the small-ish company I worked for was bought by $ENGINEERING_MEGACORP, an integration program was promptly launched, during which numerous committees were formed to evaluate all business processes and take the best parts of both companies' DNA.
After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.
The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.
Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.
The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.
Trump has personally pardoned several known American war criminals. Not people who got caught up in a bad situation, but people who murdered non-combatants for fun
Of course not, but US imperialism is a bipartisan issue, what Trump does is remove the pretense that makes liberals sleep better at night. I think it's good that they removed it, let's get rid of all the lies and hypocrisy. Nothing material changes, it just makes it harder for democrats to pretend it's about something other than violent neocolonialism and might is right foreign policy they have been complicit in for decades.
US has always looked the other way when Israel killed innocent civilians. But there were some limits on how far they could go. The difference now is that those limits have been removed.
That's what's interesting about this move (and all the other moves). We've stopped pretending we're good, signaling instead the prospect of violence to enemies foreign and domestic.
Perception is reality. If there is at least a pretense of caring about human rights, then there is some modicum of shame upon leadership in not living up to them. And even if the desire was fake, creating a website to "tell us when we are being evil" is real. Pulling off the mask and showing the "true self", which is what the Trump administration is doing (and far more than that, I should add. It is only showing the "true self" of a subset of the population), is removing not only the potential for shame, but also accountability. I don't have to believe that America is/was a flawless champion of human rights to believe that it is much, much worse now.
One really mustn't. There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights - this 'tear it down' mentality relies on the fantasy that it will be rebuilt in some better form. And this kind of 'both sides' bullshit from the article highlights it perfectly:
> Blaha had already voiced frustration that despite the HRG passing its pilot phase, the Biden administration had not done enough to publicise it, meaning the provision to "facilitate receipt" of information was still not being fully honoured before the Trump administration deleted the channel entirely.
One side didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred, and the other one deleted it entirely. Both sides are bad!
> There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights
Hopefully most do! All should.
However, most employees don’t pick what they work on. So it’s always at the discretion of the boss to determine what’s practically considered, regardless of ideals or desires.
"Didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred" is very polite speech for killing millions in "wars on terror" and through arming our great friends, the house of Saud, in their campaign against Yemen.
Not going to get into the rich history of overthrowing local rulers and installing puppets through the most gruesome proxies to create "banana republics," the mass murder on a massive scale committed in the previous century, or the genocide that preceded to enable the founding of this state.
This place is built on murder and theft. "Both sides" are guilty. One is less shy.
The ‘tear it down’ mentality is about tearing down the covers and exposing America for what it is. That is how I understood your parent at least.
The USA has been doing human rights abuses for a long time, without any repercussions. The Iraq war and the Patriot Act is but a few of many many many more examples. For a while now the entire political spectrum in Europe has given this impunity to the USA, with the covers gone, maybe it will be harder—at least for the left of center parties—to give this impunity to the USA.
> One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
What transparency? What is transparent about running a meme coin that anyone in the world can bribe- sorry, "invest" in with no trace of who they are while you're President?
As for the topic at hand: Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage so I don't believe it's a deliberate effort at "transparency"
Transparently corrupt, sure. Who is influencing him still isn't transparent though. Book deals, board positions, and speeches all have organizers, company names, etc.. that can be investigated.
How can you trace a block chain transaction back to someone without some sort of OPSEC slip up?
> Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage
It confuses me how anyone could look at what's happening in the world and see a lack of a plan. Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy in this term and using geopolitical statecraft to upend the arrangements that were not working in favor of the US. The tariffs to force countries to choose US or China, putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending, and the peacemaker strategy in the Middle East to force oil prices down to reduce inflation. It seems to be a very comprehensive strategy.
There is a plan, but it is rather half baked and naive.
>putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending
At the same time as refusing weapons sales to US allies and restricting intelligence sharing. Thereby forcing those countries to spend on European weapons rather than the US ones they have bought for the last 70 years. Doesn't sound great for the US tbh
Tariffing the entire world, changing his position on Ukraine every week, and hinting at invasion of our allies is not coherent. On the Ukraine conflict, he didn't seem to understand that Putin is untrustworthy until recently.
> Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy..
You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.
By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
He's got a very comprehensive plan and he knows exactly what he's doing. He's also consolidated his base so he has people who are as committed as he is to carrying out his vision. He's doing everything he said he would do successfully. All his opponents are desperate for him to fail but that simply is not happening, i wonder why? This website runs opposite to his vision of MAGA, it's basically make america criminals, no surprises it's been axed.
When did the US government ever care about human rights? People act like the entire country wasn't built on the backs of war, slavery, and genocide. The most bloody conflict in the country's history was amongst itself over the rights to own another human being as property. Slaves were freed and the civil rights act wasn't passed for almost 100 years after the war.
Human rights my ass. More like rights for those with the mights.
Do you mind helping my understand how you interpreted my comment in that manner? Such a sentiment was never my intention, and I would like to know how I could have worded my comment better to avoid confusion.
I was merely try to express that things were bad and some progress has been made, however, that does not mean that things cannot get bad again. Both progress and regress are rarely a straight line.
> Slaves were freed and the civil rights act wasn't passed for almost 100 years after the war.
That's progress though, even if its progress on something that never should have existed to begin with, and the progress is far too slow.
And yes, our progress has been far too slow and way too uneven, but for the first 40 years of my life I felt like we were still progressing (yes -- too slow, and too unevenly).
But in the most recent ~decade of my life I feel like we've switched from too-slow progress to regression.
Shitty progress isn't enough, but its better than no progress (or, much worse, regression).
Progress sure but Lincoln didn't free the slaves in the Northern states.
He only freed the slaves in the South with the emancipation proclamation [1]. The 13th amendment wasn't until 2 years later. Lincoln did it as an economic weapon against the south as well as a military recruitment tool; not out of the goodness of his heart.
Which is why all of this recent mess is interesting because the only thing that’s different in terms of action now is that they are doing all the dirt in public rather in private
Even total deportation numbers are lower (given administration length) than every previous administration as reported by Jacobin in the latest issue - yall remember Elian Gonzalez?
How cruel was the treatment from the British truly? My understanding was things like "no taxation without representation" was unrealistic due to the sheer distance and amount of time required to travel between the US and the UK. We're talking somewhere around 2-4 months one way. To send a rep back and forth with a message like:
US sends rep ->
Uk and rep interact ->
rep goes back to US with UK decision ->
the US give their answer and the rep goes back to UK ->
then rep goes back to the US with the UK's decision.
Such an interaction could take well over a year.
I also thought the US was the lowest taxed colony under British control? Not to mention it's not like the British didn't provide military protection to the colonies as well.
I am not saying the revolution was purely unjustified, but I am not really aware of how bad things truly were. My history classes kind of glossed over that part.
The United States' way of government was revolutionary for its time, based on the cutting edge of human philosophy in many ways. The Bills of (negative) Rights in particular.
It is a shame that it is being destroyed at lightspeed the last year, and worse that many don't seem to care.
The colonial grievances that led to war are explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independence.
It can be assumed that the British occupation forces were just as brutal as any other occupying military force in history. The only restraint in those situations is morals and a boss that was across an ocean.
That PG in his opinions against the genocide stands against HN's own censorship politics (which is to protect Israel at any cost, looking at you Daniel!) is enough for me to keep going. Otherwise, I wouldn't care (I don't fight for lost causes.)
The US commits human rights abuses constantly. The public should know. The US has no business being on a human rights committee quite frankly. We just committed genocide in Palestine.
It depends on what your motives are. Every evil personality you hate started out first as a subversive force. Do you know what the secret end goal of your subversive force flavor-of-the-month is?
I prefer creative forces, but life is not perfect. Every side is a subversive force. I just don't want to be on the receiving side as much as possible. Since what I consider subversive forces(Iran,Russia, China, Islam) try to change my world, I'm against it. I'm fine with US being a subversive force even if I consider some parts of it as a very negative and damaging.
Just wanted to point out that Iran, Russia, China, and Islam have orders of magnitude less power over you than your own political leaders. We should all hold our political leaders accountable when they break the law and ignore the constitution. "subversive forces" is a deflection at best, Orwellian doublespeak at its worst.
Lots of people seem to think Trump is some sort of king or going outside the law.
Fact is he was democratically elected and working within the system of checks and balances established by our founders.
Congress can stop him from doing things but the democratically elected congress allows him to continue. So they agree with his actions and are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
The courts can stop him and indeed have in several cases. Often times higher courts over rule those lower ones but not always. Majority of the time they eventually end up siding with the executive branch though. So courts are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with.
This is indeed what democracy looks like though.
Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
Note: I have been hit by the HN "posting to fast" limit so I can't respond.
It’s not exactly working when the executive seizes two core powers of Congress (taxation and spending) and gets away with it for, so far, most of a year, with no end in sight.
There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.
The executive could be stopped at any time by the courts or congress.
But the democratically elected congress chooses not to. So the majority that was elected are doing what they think is right. That's how our US democracy works.
Same with the courts, executive is elected by the people and so is the senate. They select and approve the judges, same as it ever was.
I am in no way defending everything I am simply stating that there are checks and balances but many people just don't like the decisions that they are making. Doesn't mean they are not there though.
Can you point to any parts of the constitution that, if ignored, would represent the US state based on that same constitution no longer functioning correctly, or not as a continuation of the same state as before? If so, why those parts but not, apparently, broad swaths of the rest of it?
If not… I think you’re operating under a uselessly-broad notion of what constitutes US democracy “working”.
[edit] what this really gets at is legitimacy, which is the ultimate arbiter of who’s in charge and how effectively they may wield power. I find the idea that a state founded on a constitutional document as its fundamental claim to legitimacy ignoring major parts of that document isn’t at least overtly flirting with either a loss of legitimacy or a transition to a different state with a different basis for legitimacy (either of which seem to me to clearly count as a failure of that original state)… puzzling.
This is an affront to the rule of law and equal protection under the law. It is not okay for congress or the courts to acquiesce. We are supposed to be a nation of laws.
Congress and the courts are derelict in their responsibility to honor the rule of law.
A functioning democratic republic is not, in fact, predicated on voting every couple years and shutting up in between elections.
Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.
Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.
But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.
I would argue it is working. The democratically elected congress just agrees with what he is doing. Whether they agree due to genuine belief or fear of him calling them out, doesn't really matter. We should be electing people that have a spine, if we don't then that is still democracy working. Checks and balances are there. Many people just don't like the choices they are making
Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody enforces the laws about their having to bring certain cases.
Both of the following may be true:
1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.
2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)
This is actually a good thought experiment.
In your example, democracy is actually fully working. The people though are voting to override the law (essentially something akin to jury nullification on a massive scale) and the prosecutor is breaking the system. So what is the solution?
Optimal solution is a check and balance where a higher level prosecutor, perhaps a federal or state level steps in and takes charge. Another optimal is courts rule that the prosecutor has to do their job.
But lets say that neither of these happen and there is no way to impeach the prosecutor.
You have a couple of scenarios.
1. Uprising. The people rise up and kill the prosecutor.
2. Dictatorship. A higher power even though they don't have the legal authority steps in and removes the prosecutor.
Now the real question is was this a good result? Democracy failed but you got rapists and murderers off the street.
I think we are very far away from this with Trump, he is still following the checks and balances, those checks and balances are just either
A: refusing to act or
B: acting in a way that some people don't like but I would add that many people do indeed like.
So I guess you could add civil war to the potential outcome as a portion of the population does not like the existing checks and balances and the results of the democratic election.
Now what is interesting is your scenario actually explains partially the rise of MAGA and Trump. For them, the law lead to open borders, what they saw as the promotion of LGBTQ amongst children (drag queen reading hour, etc) and DEI (discrimination against themselves and their children). All things they perceive as a grave threat to the future of the nation. So if they have to vote for someone that works outside the law in order to preserve their desired future they are willing to do so. They are willing to flirt with the dictator option if it means putting off what they view as a cataclysm.
I am not sure which is the best solution in your prosecutor scenario, what are your thoughts?
The fundamental problem is, there is really no "free market" of countries.
A US citizen who hates what the country has become cannot go off and set up a new one, they have a choice of a few styles of government (and it is very expensive to go and try living under another government!) Perhaps a benefit of space exploration will be experimentation with style of government.
My only niggle with your statement would be: A lot of what is happening now is happening because of "friction" in the system. If, for example, in an ideal world courts adjudicated instantly (instead of taking months or years) the current situation would be quite different. Similarly, if all congress people voted without fear of intimidation, some might vote quite differently. But, you are right, it's not like the founders didn't know that courts are slow or people can be intimidated.
I think you have hit on the fundamental reason for the rise of Trump and MAGA. There is no where else to go. I am going to try and present this in a way that is politically neutral but still captures the reason. I will probably fail.
For a large subset of those voters, the wide open borders, promotion of LGBTQ (particularly TQ) and DEI represented the end of the current state of the country.
As you stated, there is no "free market" of countries.
If the US fundamentally changes then for those people and their view of life, its over.
This has led to the massive backlash on immigration, ICE, rejection of DEI and push back on transgender promotion / acceptance.
For them, this is the end of all things and that is why they are so motivated and also so willing to overlook the obvious moral failures / grift of Trump and his manner of working. They care about preserving their way of life and if the cost is some grey legal situations and open grift then so be it. Trump is the hard man willing to do the socially distasteful things that they believe are necessary.
This particular post is not supposed to be an endorsement of those views whatever my particular opinion is but only a way to explain how we got here and the determination of Trump voters to see it through to the end.
When faced with the devil you know or what you view as the end of all things, you support the devil you know.
For the people reading this I am not trying to attack any particular people or ideology. Just presenting why people that you may disagree with act and vote in a certain way.
How do you explain away things like lobbying money (i.e. bribery), or politicians remaining in their post despite glaringly obvious physical and cognitive decline, or insider trading, or the stacking of courts with biased judges, or total lack of enforcement of the law, or the media being so obviously controlled by state-aligned actors? To name but a few.
The president has a mob of violent supporters, and Congress is terrified for their lives to take a stand against the president. When Republicans in congress have gone against Trump even in the smallest way, all he has to do is tweet something negative about them, and they are inundated with hundreds of death threats against their families [1]. Unless they can coordinate enough to rebel all together with loyalists somehow not finding out first, taking a stand would be suicide.
As a much lesser, but still serious point- Trump individually has so much power within the party he can get anyone removed from the party itself with a word, and effectively take away all of their campaign funding. He personally decides who is allowed to run or not run for office in the Republican party.
> Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though. Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
The Republican Party acts like the midterms don't matter at all.
Approval is plummeting, representatives ignore townhalls like the plague.
Which is awesome for the dems then correct?
Reps will lose seats and then the Dems will have the house and enforce whatever checks and balances they choose.
If the reps win then the people have spoken and current actions continue.
Districts are gerrymandered and the voters are split and hardened into camps.
You can say all is going according to the law (I would say no), but it seems most people think the country is going down the tubes - they just disagree with who is at fault - and it seems the right is just happy as long as the libs are crying about it.
Unless the reason is that there will be no election, or only elections in red states, or you will need a special travel passport for going to Washington DC, which magically won't be issued to new Democrats, or any number of possible obstructions are possible.
Why would the House get back in session at all, for that matter? House leader Mike Johnson might enjoy vacation too much.
Germany 1933 is also what democracy looks like. Just because the system allows it to happen doesn't mean everyone is doing their job or that the result is in any way acceptable.
"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.
Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.
You are coming to a wrong conclusion due to a misunderstanding of what the separation of powers means. I will first try to illustrate with a thought experiment, after which I believe you will agree that there is something wrong in your reasoning, and then I will demonstrate where your logic went wrong.
---
Thought experiment: Suppose a dear loved one is brutally murdered by a relative of the current democratically elected leader (imagine a hypothetical leader, country, etc). Through various extralegal manipulations, the leader ensures that the murderer is not convicted (evidence disappears, jurors are appointed in a fishy way, the judge turns out to be a family member of the murderer, ...) and you notice that none of the usual paths of recourse work. Perhaps you go to the press, but his supporters just dismiss this as a smear campaign. Crucially, this leader is very popular, their party controls the legislative and has appointed judges for years.
Following the reasoning in your post, which I think can be summarized as "the legislative and judicial branches, which are legitimately elected/appointed, chose not to stop him, therefore the separation of powers is not violated and this is how a democracy is supposed to work", the leader's actions do not constitute a violation of the separation of powers, and this incident does not demonstrate that this country's democracy is unhealthy.
---
I hope you agree that this conclusion is wrong, yet it follows inexorably from the argument you have made (because the sole precondition, that the other branches are legitimately elected/appointed, is satisfied). So we must conclude that there is a mistake in your argument, and I think it originates in the conflation of two of the core features of liberal democracy -- that is (a) leaders are elected and (b) there is a separation of powers. You are essentially saying that (b) holds because (a) holds, but it is important to remember that (a) and (b)are independent features that sometimes oppose each other: it is by design that the system (especially the judiciary) can overrule the majority of the population, at least for some time.
So the question of "are the judiciary and legislative branches effectively enforcing the separation of powers" is not actually related to whether these branches are legitimately appointed/elected, but to whether they are independent. By this I mean that they play their constitutionally prescribed role even if at times this is unpopular. For example, the judiciary's job is to enforce the law. In the thought experiment, they are not independent from the executive, and that is a deep system failure: they should enforce the law (convict the murderer) even if the (popular and legitimate) executive disagrees.
For example, the law is crystal clear wrt who has the authority to enact tariffs on foreign nations. The President cannot legally do this as the Constitution vests the power to raise taxes in Congress; reasonable people cannot disagree about this. Congress has granted him emergency powers on the basis of a fentanyl crisis at the Mexican border; the scope of these emergency powers clearly does not include imposing tariffs on, say, Australia. Again, there is no room for interpretation here, this is all crystal clear. The fact that the tariffs haven't been effectively struck down yet is a clear failure of the separation of powers, because the law is so clear. The popularity of the president or his policy is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be stopped by the courts.
The main reason this needs to exist is to make sure that, indeed, the next election is a free and fair election. If the separation of powers does not hold, then there is nothing stopping the executive from manipulating the election and hollowing out democracy. This has happened many times in history, and it is exactly what people (rightfully, I believe) fear about the Trump presidency.
Not that I know, but I could imagine that a public/anonymous form on the web (if that's what it was) was receiving 99.8% bot/garbage/spam/nuisance reports and they took it down for that reason. Though nothing in the article gives that as a reason, and quotes only the rather vague statement that "the US State Department insisted it was continuing to receive reports regarding gross violations of human rights and was engaging with "credible organisations" on a full spectrum of human rights concerns."
I'm actually more surprised that they didn't abuse it, instead of removing it. Remember when Trump's first FCC commissioner ran a public comment campaign on net neutrality, and then heavily botted it to make it look like people were more strongly opposed than they actually were? Remember when there were zero consequences for that? I guess removing it makes a stronger statement.
The time for nudging and manipulation is apparently over. It's more like "the sky is green, who do you believe, me or your lying eyes? We got 20 trillion dollars from foreign countries. Obey."
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
From a practical standpoint, this is why Wikileaks matters. Rather than count on the State department to serve that role, we should count on independent journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
The website is for reporting abuses by foreign forces armed with US kit. The US isn't in the habit of arming its enemies, so of course the reports concern allies. That's what the website is for.
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
I'm equally concerned about people being paid to push narratives in places like Hacker News. Especially in defense of large organizations.
Because it’s none of these things.
The State Department confirms it no longer operates the HRG, but says it is still receiving reports through other direct channels.
I couldn't find any requirement in the law that requires a public website.
NGOs can still submit information through established contacts or by email.
I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
Someone has to read through each email to determine the nature of the complaint, who was involved, how to classify it, etc.
If the web form was free text entry, the same effort is required by the receiving humans.
You can move the effort slider from the reviewer toward the web dev and the reporter by designing a UI to limit input and pre-classify the complaint.
So who has it “easier” now? I guess the server admin?
why
When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
An "auto reply with a ticket number" is not a feature of email, it is something that someone built that could just as easily be attached to a webform. Plenty of webforms work that way, I have personally built some in my career.
Whereas what’s clearly a distinct advantage of a web form is that you can find it on the web.
> why
Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc.
A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
From Wikipedia: "Senator Leahy first introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act."
It is funny that only today they found it. Wikileaks was documenting American war crimes since some time.
On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.
If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.
He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.
> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. > The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing. > We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.
> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture. > A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards. > I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.
> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.
> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.
> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.
That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".
"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.
Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.
For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)
I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.
We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.
The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.
Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.
Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.
And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?
At least as a thought exercise, consider the possibility that the US administration was _always not great_ on its own merits, not as the fault of whatever foreign boogeyman-of-the-day.
The problem is that the "flawed" hypothesis fails to explain the specific vector of these anomalies. This isn't random incompetence; it's a persistent, multi-year pattern of actions that consistently align with the strategic goals of a single US adversary.
This pattern required him to systematically fire or purge officials who represented traditional US security policy (Mattis, McMaster, Bolton, Tillerson) and replace them with those who would enact this new vector (Vance, Kellogg).
The "ordinary incompetence" model must be able to explain the following data points, not as isolated gaffes, but as a cohesive pattern where his actions were in direct opposition to bipartisan congressional consensus and the US national security establishment:
Publicly inviting Russian interference ("Russia, if you're listening...").
Campaign chair (Manafort) providing internal polling data and strategy to a known Russian intelligence agent (Kilimnik).
Actively pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the campaign while lying to the public about it.
Softening the 2016 GOP platform to remove "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine.
Publicly siding with Putin in Helsinki over the entire US intelligence community.
Disclosing highly-classified, "code-word" intelligence from a key ally to the Russian FM and Ambassador in the Oval Office.
Illegally withholding $391M in congressionally-mandated military aid from Ukraine to extort a political investigation.
Waging a tariff war against allies (EU, Canada), creating a transatlantic rift that primarily benefited Moscow.
Unilaterally withdrawing from the INF and Open Skies Treaties, key arms-control pacts that constrained Russia, against the advice of allies and security officials.
Publicly stating he would "encourage" Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to any NATO ally he deems "delinquent."
Dangling the prospect of critical Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, only to publicly snatch the offer away immediately after a phone call with Putin.
Pausing vital US intelligence sharing with Ukraine, a move that directly aided Russia's successful offensive in the Kursk region and retaking it.
Publicly demanding that Ukraine "cut up" its territory and "stop at the battle lines," an act that validates Russia's invasion.
Consistently laundering Kremlin disinformation from the White House itself (e.g., CrowdStrike, "biolabs," "Nazis" in Kyiv).
One or two of these is a blunder. A list this long (and incomplete), spanning campaign, business, diplomacy, intelligence, and military policy, where every single item provides a direct, tangible benefit to the Kremlin, is a data cluster that requires a better explanation.
The choice isn't "great vs. not great." It's "random incompetence" vs. a coherent, multi-year vector of pro-Moscow actions that required a complete hostile takeover of his own party and the executive branch.
That would make sense, but maybe not for the reason you think.
DOGE had no accountability. Of course they did nothing.
We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.
But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.
Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.
The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.
The key to countering is consistent pressure that does not relent to fix the mechanisms that are broken: (congress, the white house, the "deep state" side note: the deep state always existed, it was just a convenient shorthand for "the part of the US government that faithfully implements the laws as passed by congress". That portion has been gutted and replaced with sycophants, and it will now take time to undo it)
Things like the Supreme Court, term limits, election funding also need updating. We all need to do a better job reviewing the fundamentals of government.
As usual, you see this as a "they are dumb" problem. Look within.
The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.
Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup.
What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.
If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but not actually a political party. Insofar as a two party system isn't ideal, it at least provides a level of stability. But when one of the two parties is an actual cult, then the whole thing falls over. Parties must not be cults. That's the root of our current predicament.
> It just so happens
This didn't just "happen", it was predicted far in advance, and not on the basis of parties but on the basis of antisocial personality disorders. For instance:
https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... and https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissi...
Note the date, May 13, 2016 to 2018. Her body of work from that time predicts with extreme prescience what has come to pass. Thinking back to when she made these predictions, people called her crazy, alarmist, unprofessional, all ignored her warnings. And yet, she turned out to be 100% right, even predicting the insurrection years before J6. Even as Trump was calling for a mob to descend on Congress days before J6, people refused to believe it would happen. Yet she got it right just by being lucid about who Trump is at his core.How did she do it? She used her professional experience to recognize Trump as a malignant narcissist, and her lived experience as a Polish national who watched the rise of authoritarianism in her country to put 2 + 2 together.
So it wasn't something that "just happened" as if it was only a matter of time before Democrats act this way. There are precise reagents needed to make it happen. Political parties are necessary but not sufficient. The cult leader is the necessary ingredient that was missing. People who knew what to look for recognized it early, called it out, predicted this would happen, and they were ignored.
We can't rewrite that history now, we have to learn the lessons we missed. "It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control" is not the lesson. "A two party system where one of the parties turns into an actual cult destabilizes completely" is the lesson.
They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.
That is, the Senate gives representation to empty land.
That's pretty structural !
There’s a reason the U.S. is the only modern democracy with a system like this. Almost any other country you’re likely to want to live in has a parliamentary system.
Look, I'm just someone from the other side of the pond. This is what happens: when you have no substantial representation for the country side your political system rewards centralisation, rural areas will stagnate, leading to less people there. A cycle that fuels itself.
As someone that has had to live through this I can assure you that those feeding the country should be given proper representation. Not doing so favours huge metropolies, rises urban house prices, prevents proper traffic flow, increases crime rate, etc...
Of course no system is perfect but a middle ground is preferable in my view.
The U.S. is also, easily, the most volatile (extreme partisanship) country of comparable rich, democratic nations. The system we have is pretty unique in its attempts to bend-over backwards to boost rural voters' importance, and we're worse off in virtually every "bad thing" you mention than countries that don't do this.
Centralization? Our president is independently murdering people in the carribbean, demolishing an entire wing of Whitehouse to build himself a new ballroom, independently changing funding (i.e. has hijacked the power of the purse from Congress), is independently sending in the U.S. military into states run by his political opponents against their will, pardoning violent criminals who supported him (one of whom was caught plotting to murder the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries), etc.
Rural areas will stagnate / people will move away? Dawg. That's already been happening despite the political concessions they've been given. That ain't the problem.
Urban house prices skyrocketing? Happening. NYC is among the least affordable major cities on the planet.
Crime rate? Generally highest in the places where we give disproportionate political sway to.
Are you suggesting the 66x more representation Wyomingers get over Californians in the Senate isn't enough? Is the ~3.5x more voting power they get in presidential elections not enough? What is a fair "middle ground" in your estimation? Because it feels extraordinarily unfair in the exact opposite direction, to me.
(Editing to add): It's also worth pointing out that this delta in voting power is much more extreme today than it was when this system was designed. In the 1800 census, the most populous state, Virginia, had 885,000 people, around 15x more than Delaware, the least populous state. Today, California has 67x the population of Wyoming.
I am but stating the dark side of equal voting power when you elect representatives per "region" dictated by the population they have. It is meant to be a warning, something to bear in mind when you do attempt to change the system you have.
I am not arguing in favour of what you have right now, hence the middle ground point at the end.
Regardless, my understanding of the US is not important. What is important in my comment is my understanding of what you don't do, and potential footguns.
A good middle ground would be to still have it entirely dictated by population (I understand this seems contradictory but hang on). But, in order to prevent votes from low population regions from being useless, your system uses "preferential voting". Most other countries do not do this, hence my previous comment. The key here is that at a national level, politicians still need to value less populated regions, because at least a percentage of their votes came from someone who voted in an order that still got them a seat (even though they weren't the top pick). Given rural regions have less seats to vote for, this vote would likely come from someone from the country side.
This solution however is only important when you do have more than 2 parties. If you don't do this, having more than 2 parties would be moot in these regions, because they need to vote strategically if they want representation. And 90% of the time that means your vote is limited to only one of the top 2 parties (as perceived by national polls before voting day). This is yet another dark side of the system my country does have, it incentivizes the status quo to prevail, even when your current leaders are a bunch of corrupt fellas.
Both parties do gerrymander. But there are more "red" states than blue, so it systemically favors one party.
The cap on reps also skews things. Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont all have less than 1/435th of the U.S. population, so they're over-represented in the House. That over-representation comes at the expense of big states like California being under-represented.
You can see this effect by looking at the popular vote vs the representation in The House. In the 2016 election, Trump won the election with just 46.1% of the popular vote. Republicans maintained control of The House with 55.4% control. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote. And Democrats gained control with slightly less than that, 51.03% of The House. In the 2024 election, Trump won 49.81% of the popular vote, Republicans won 50.8% of seats in The House.
- Wyoming
- Vermont
- Alaska
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
4 of these 5 are consistently "red". 1 is consistently "blue".
The 5 largest states by population are:
- California
- Texas
- Florida
- New York
- Illinois
3 of these are consistently "blue". 1 is consistently "red", and 1 is "purple" (though appears to be skewing "red" in the most recent elections)
Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.
I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources.
They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists.
In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
It does not say "we don't think small companies can behave monopolistically so we aren't enforcing the law on them."
President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
I will reiterate the plain language of the United States Constitution: [the President] SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
SHALL does not mean MAY or AT HIS DISCRETION or any such thing.
He didn’t enforce the ASA because he disagreed with it, just like Jimmy Carter didn’t prosecute people for selective service violations because he disagreed with it. It wasn’t because the resources weren’t available to enforce those laws.
For example, if Congress had appropriated funds specifically for doing those things, the executive would be obligated to do them, because it’d be unambiguous as to whether resources existed to do them.
This is again an absolutely unambiguous consequence of Congress’s Constitutional control of spending and of the Take Care Clause.
What you are describing is effectively a line-item veto, which doesn’t exist in the US.
So far all the evidence you’ve posted is actually evidence of my argument, not yours.
But we know the motivation because Jefferson wrote it down. It wasn’t resource management, it was opposition to the law on principle.
If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf
“While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide- ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”
No it doesn't. The laws are statements of what people in power will do under particular circumstances. This view only makes sense if people are executing the laws. The moment you stop executing the laws, suddenly you don't have laws.
Prosecutorial discretion is another beast entirely. Considering circumstances on a case by case basis is necessary for functional justice, as lawmakers can not possibly foresee all circumstances and even if they could the enforcers of laws have practical limits. A cop letting you off with a warning for speeding is discretion. It is not permission for you or anyone else to ignore the speed limit in the future. The law is still there, and you should expect to suffer the consequences if you break it.
We don't need laws when they ask us to do something we'd want to do anyways. Laws exist for the sole purpose of getting people to do the things they would rather not do, or to prevent them from doing things they would prefer to do. If the law can be violated when it is convenient for the lawmaker, you do not live in a nation of laws.
(there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)
Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.
If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.
That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood the "who watches the watchers" problem and created a system without any such single point of failure. The ultimate backstop in our political system is not the law, but instead frequent elections. Congress writes the law, the President enforces the law, and the Judiciary interprets the law. If the President does a bad job of enforcing the law, the recourse is elections (or, as a last resort, impeachment).
Most people do not believe in the religion of humanist universalism.
This of course does not apply to Presidential elections. The President has multiple times indicated disdain for elections, his party has used "third term and beyond", his supporters have openly floated the idea of repealing the 22A, he's called himself "king" and "dictator".
The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now.
> or, as a last resort, impeachment
"a servile congress" — they understand impeachment. If an attempted coup doesn't get impeachment, nothing will. Regardless, the GOP is going along with the president, so impeachment isn't something that's going to happen.
What has it done? In 2024, Republicans got 50.5% of the seats and 51.3% of the two-party Congressional popular vote. The delta between a party’s share of the popular vote and its share of House seats is much smaller since 2000 than it was for most of the 20th century: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Po...
> The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now
The VRA requires racially discriminatory gerrymandering and is probably unconstitutional in that respect. The VRA is the product of an era where white democrats would discriminate against black democrats even though they shared a party. Today, gerrymandering is based on political party, not race. If black people voted 80% republican, red states would happily gerrymander out affluent college-educated whites in their favor.
There are plenty of laws being ignored. Tariffs being the most obvious.
I hope you know that Congress has abdicated all of their responsibilities to the president. I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!"
You got out-voted.
The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.
(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you".
You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
(The Epstein issue is a special case - some of the MAGA base still believes it was not a hoax and that Epstein was not alone in his crimes.)
The founders didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.
The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.
They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.
It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.
The press really needs to start suffixing the justices with (R) and (D) when discussing them to drive the point home that the SC is the most partisan branch of government.
They have always done what the US should do: keep the votes on a judgment private, so opinions speak for the court as a whole, and they don't let the losers have a soapbox by publishing dissents.
As a cherry on top, they enforce a mandatory retirement age of 70.
These factors make their court an actually apolitical body in a way that's in hilariously stark contrat to the US court. The US court is what you'd make if your entire goal was to turn all its judgments into political theatre.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Court_(Austria)
They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
partisans are loud but they are not winning friends and influencing people, the parties are only losing supporters, it just takes more people to realize that they aren't alone as independents are the largest bloc now but have no representation to notice
reminder for anyone passing by, everyone knows how the parties are different, it is still valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...
I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.
More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/
And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
> By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0]
Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power).
You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
MAGA have screwed the country and themselves. Farmers who voted for Trump are realizing this now. The rest will find out soon when the shit hits the fan in a big way.
Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse.
The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved.
I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free.
Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place.
Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly.
The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems.
An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled.
Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps.
And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats.
This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not?
The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..."
Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done.
I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
It does not look great, but I find risks mostly economical (not only in USA, everywhere) - if the situation will deteriorate even more abruptly (considering it already did a bit due to the pandemic "shock") then we will have a mess.
This administration has set the standard that the justice department can be weaponized against political enemies. The ratchet only goes one way in American politics, presidents never relinquish the powers claimed by their predecessors.
- Signed, the side that tried to throw a candidate in prison.
Unless they are granted a blanket pardon beforehand.
Then all you can really do is an "audit" for who did what, from which no charges can be laid.
The idea of a blanket pardon is absurd on its face and we're only allowing it because we're allowing political prosecution.
In reality stuff like this feels like the beginning of an end.
I seriously don't know how anyone can look at what is happening right now and be okay with it.
The whole concept of "international law" is polite fiction anyway, the reality has always been "the strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must".
That's an argument about the degradation of the rule of law, taking as a prior that the rule of law won't degrade. It's... unpersuasive. The end goal of this kind of thinking is that the other side never does take control, ever.
The current administration pretty clearly does not intend to give up power. They tried to evade democracy once already, and have fixed the mistakes this time.
Whether they will be successful or not is unknowable. But that's the plan. And the determining factor is very unlikely to be the normal operation of American civil society. Winning elections is, probably, not enough anymore.
Trump third term being one.
The classified documents thing with Trump was a manufactured scandal, for example. Everyone in our government is mishandling classified documents because we have a massive over-classification problem, as seen by the lesser reported and covered subsequent finding of Biden having documents.
Only one of those events was associated with a televised raid (which the press was notified of beforehand so they could be sure to film it).
It was all theater.
It's the same with Trump's prosecution in NY, that case was ridiculous. One deed expanded into 37 misdemeanors that were escalated to a felony because they were committed in an effort to cover up an alleged felony. I say alleged because he was never convicted of the original crime but, conveniently, that's not a requirement of that escalation in NY law.
Ironically, both of those cases only increased Trump's support among non-Democrats (Republicans and, importantly, independents) because it was transparent.
Here's a quote for the NY AG that sued Trump.
> "We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well," [0]
That sounds an awful lot like she went looking for crimes of a person rather than finding who's responsible for crimes. And threatening his family as well.
[0]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/incoming-new-y... as well,"
It was not. Trump was asked for months to return the documents.
He purposefully had staff to move documents onto his private jet and moved them around his various properties. He stored boxes and boxes, not just a few file folders, in random bathrooms.
Yes, plenty of folks may mishandle stuff, but many folks try to fix their errors when they're pointed out. Trump ignored the requests and continued doing things consciously even when notified.
It is normal for news trucks to show up once a news event has been learned of.
And yes, the same thing happened with Biden: news broke, and footage was recorded:
* https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/fbi-search-biden-vacation-h...
Biden had the support of the media and his lawfare and misdeeds were glossed over.
One example was the Hunter Biden laptop. Nord Stream pipeline sabotage was another.
Trump's shenanigans are just getting more attention. But to be fair, his shenanigans are dialled up to 11 while Biden was at a more modest 8.
Name Biden's lawfare. What exactly did he abuse the Justice Department to do?
Read something other than NYT.
Like, do you truly believe Biden started this? What was the first act?
Out of genuine curiosity: what specific actions do you think were 'weaponized' investigations / prosecutions under Biden?
The judge threw this out, but those are pretty generous terms for what penultimately amounted to guilty charges on 6 felonies and 6 misdemeanors (before all charges were pardoned.)
Shouldn't that be fixed rather than now abused further?
If your justification for Trump doing something is that "Biden did it first", then that means Biden is no worse than Trump. It means Trump just just following along the path Biden laid for him to the same goal.
Following that thought path literally anywhere just leads to the party in question being actively worse than the thing they claim to fight against.
A competent leader would see something abusable, an opportunity for corruption, and take steps to prevent its abuse.
Weak, corrupt leadership sees an opportunity for corruption and says "$core! They did it fir$t!". And that's how we lose. All of us I mean.
-SCOTUS majority so far…
I know leftists like to describe these sorts of phenomena (including Hitler's rise) as all part of the capitalist overlords' master plans, but that's not the most accurate description. Capitalists like Andreessen will cynically exploit it and hop on the bandwagon and benefit from it to the extent they can, but right-wing populist authoritarianism is its own beast, and they're just trying to position themselves as along for the ride rather than in its jaws. The regime is happy to reward capitalist loyalists and I do not deny there is a mutualism occurring, but it is more complex than a movement centered around capitalism.
They are conservatives and push for conservative agenda. Conservatives wanted them on the court so that they can make decisions like this.
They are conservatives. People that care about things like small governments and fiscal responsibility are not. It's sad when somebody takes control over a group you identify with and changes it's goals but you're one person versus millions. The word doesn't mean what it used to.
Republican partisan-propaganda media after anti-trust de-fanging (mid ‘70s) and media deregulation (‘80s-‘00s) became huge, and cultivated an electorate that wanted Trump but had to settle for tepidly-socially-conservative neoliberal Republicans. Such voters would tell you all day long about how we should just build a border wall (or mine it…), cut trade and foreign military engagements (though those have some cross-aisle appeal), question why we extend civil rights and due process to [pick a group], tell you we should use the military against protesters in cities, wonder why anyone opposes cops beating suspects unless they love crime, and so on, and they’d tell you that stuff many years before Trump’s 2016 run.
“And we’ll make ted kennedy payyyy
“If he fights back, we’ll just say that he’s gayyyy
Laws don't do things, people do.
It doesn't matter what's written down on paper if the people in power ignore it and the masses don't have enough organized collective power to prevent them from doing so.
Ukrainians will tell you now, you can’t have peace without strength. Europeans are also beginning to realize this due to American leadership, hence they have all (but one) doubled NATO funding limits this year.
Is the correct plural acronym here “IGs”, or “Is-G” (Inspectors General)?
Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.
(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)
Impeachment by itself has been shown to accomplish nothing. There is no other mechanism except conviction by the Senate to address constitutional or legal violations made by the president.
Also no president has ever been impeached by a House which is controlled by a majority of the same party of the President. If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Edit: “Approval voting” is the appropriate escape hatch from 2-party politics. It lets you get rid of primaries entirely and run all the top-n candidates who have the greatest number of valid nomination signatures. Its advantage over range-voting/etc is that it is dead-simple to explain to voters: Put a checkmark next to any candidate that you're "okay" with. The candidate with the most checkmarks wins.
https://rangevoting.org/CompChart.html
If it’s your team or the “worse” team, you tolerate any flaw in your team.
If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over (for example see Reform vs Conservative parties in the UK, not that I am thrilled with the underlying direction) then there is an alternative: cut bait and condemn what used to be “your team”, and start a new one.
That's exactly what happened though -- the MAGA party took over. Conservatives "cut bait" with traditional Republicans, condemned them (see how they talk about Liz and Dick Cheney or even GWB, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, their own presidential nominees), and started a new party within the rotting corpse of the old GOP. There's still some "Republican" branding around but if you pay attention they're not waving "Republican" flags or wearing "Republican" hats anymore.
On the other hand, with IRV or preference voting, second parties can form without spoiling the vote for their ideologically most aligned alternatives. This allows for a much more seamless shift.
Really in the US there should be at least 4 parties formed from the corpses of the big two, if not more.
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/past-proj...
Having a bad system is one thing. Having a bad system and no one able or willing to fix it is worse.
Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but seats should be proportional to the vote. If you have 100 seats, that party only getting 5% of the votes should also have 5% of the seats.
In the country where I live, people do consider themselves leftist, centrists, or right-wing, but a vast majority only decides what specific party to vote during the campaign.
We have the opposite issue, since there is not electoral threshold, we now have a lot of small and middle-sized parties, making it harder to form a coalition. (Would be possible to address with an electoral threshold of 2-5%.)
Maybe you didn't mean the system as broadly.
That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.
>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.
Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older.
Most people I talk with about it seem divided along the lines of morality in terms of the interaction and level of consent, rather than along debate over the security risks. Security risk seems like a valid point of concern to me.
That risk could be mitigated by a president being open about their promiscuity with both family and the public during their campaign - e.g. when both Russia and USA attempted to sextort and blackmail Sukarno (the president of the Philippines) he was delighted that his encounters were filmed and requested extra copies of the kompromat.
I've picked up on that too. Which, in my opinion is strange... she was 22 or 23 wasn't she? We just have to wait another 2 generations, and those will think themselves still children at 35.
I don't get the impression from talking with younger Democratic voters that they would generally be as concerned with issues of consent if it was a 22 year-old sex worker (where it's purely a transactional relationship) or 22-year old pop star (where their career isn't particularly threatened by the President's favor).
With a White House intern, there's a potential element of silent or implied coercion which puts into question whether enthusiastic consent was freely given. Similar to the national security risk - regardless if it was/wasn't, it also calls into question the President's judgment for why they would engage in such morally ambiguous behavior - it would also be fairly difficult for the President to even know themselves whether the intern is feeling coerced or not.
It has been very clearly shown to be a futile formality that only makes the ones doing it look even more powerless and worthy of mockery in the eyes of the other side and their supporters.
In a bygone era, impeachment would rely on concepts of shame, responsibility and public duty - it would be unimaginable that person that was impeached does not step down from the position and likely from political foreground fully - from the moral and social weight of that consequence.
We've seen last 2 times how thoroughly that weight no longer exists in modern society/politics.
Without criminal responsibility, there is no responsibility left at all.
You have to be a very special kind of person to break rank.
People get the leaders they deserve
Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.
“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78321-now-there-s-one-thing...
Video version: https://youtu.be/rVXekzwkz10?si=90VqlzOLiUS_7yFx
It’s either free and people are actively choosing this or they are not free and choosing comfort of slavery than risking death for freedom
This fantasy of free markets, laws, branches or anything else solving what Plato wrote about in The Republic thousands of years ago is pure folly.
If it is of any comfort - it's always been this way and it's not going to get any better :) We have technological progress, not progress in wisdom. People are better behaved because well fed humans behave better than hungry humans - everything else is as it's always been.
There are, but the executive for decades (centuries?) has ignored law inconvenient to its goals, and the legislative has generally shrugged it off, hoping their guy will do the same down the road.
One such restraint? Declaring war. Yet how often has this power been abused by the executive since World War 2? Korea anyone? Vietnam? Central America? The Middle East?
There's been a lot of hand-wringing in this thread about what Trump has done and is doing. Truth is, he's just the latest player in the game we've all participated in, and he's good at it.
To stop him, we'd have to change the rules of the game, as Congress did in 2017 with the Russia sanctions bill.[1] I just don't see that happening 'cause... we're all hoping our guy will do the same (as Trump) down the road.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_America%27s_Adversa...>
We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.
If you don't collect data, you can't brag about it.
(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years. (b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. (c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to— (1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate. (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/22/headlines/trump_says_...
> Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/really-i...
> The president concluded that when coverage of someone is “bad” 97% of the time, “that’s no longer free speech.”
> “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters, referring to media outlets. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
This is not far away from "defamation" in western world. I'm not siding with Trump here, but every western politician seem to think that he/she/it can do whatever he/she/it wants and every criticism must be regarded as defamation.
Do you have sources for the apparently hundreds / thousands of defamation lawsuits brought by western politicians?
means Israel.
It was followed by a decade of ridiculous but very effective character assassination of Assange, who is hated based on how dislikable he appears.
I recommend youngsters and "zoomers" read about it, because the recent past is often the most forgotten: https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
And I'm just surprised when people still react to what he does as "unbelievable", "illegal" etc... I get it, but it's weird how persistently people still try to frame Trump's actions into moral, legal, historical, cultural, responsibility or any other framework.
He is someone who was born into wealth in the worst way possible, and was never - ever - subject to any moral restrictions, material consequences, or requirements that depend on any positive qualities, effort or success.
In those conditions, his bullish way of behaving always got him what he wanted in the moment, without any downsides or counter-weight that would regulate it. Time after time, he was given proof - by us, the society - that there are no consequences, or they are just so unimpactful, and that he can continue doing what he does. There is no framework that he needed to adhere to.
He was then placed into practically the same position within the government - being able to do whatever he wants and benefits him (directly, or through benefitting his posse), and there will be no material consequences of any kind. If he comes up to any inconvenient restrictions put in place before, they can just be removed first.
And that's it, that's what he's been doing all along. He doesn't have any higher interests, any ulterior motivation, or ambitions - in every situation, he just uses it to get something for himself in that moment - even if openly solely to be able to brag that he did it - and he makes himself look big by lying or belittling others, and that's it. Just a very simple unrestricted narcissist, on grander scale.
Their behavior is quite simple to understand and predict. It's just that they can rarely be SO up there, so unrestricted, that people still seem to struggle to not try to tie him to norms and frameworks.
Every single last one of them is guilty of everything that happened and will happen.
Blame others (dems, libs, immigrants, races, religions...) for everything that's wrong, screw the "government" whenever possible, "grab them by the ***", and treat others and the world in the same way Trump can.
It's the same in every autocracy - the leader is providing an outlet for the immoral / suppressed / forbidden thoughts, actions and feelings - they either live vicariously through him (even if they are worse off, but that's blamed on others), or can now do some of that stuff because of him.
This congress and POTUS is, in fact, a good representation of their values, and they aren't ashamed of it.
(You could have given them that benefit in 2016, and somewhat in 2020, but definitely not in 2024.)
All this stuff about trans rights and gun rights and freedom of speech and other random culture war issues are just a tool to keep the labor class divided. The root cause is wealth insecurity, it won’t automatically solve the other problems but it’ll turn down the temperature. I wish people would wake up to this and stop fighting their neighbors when they’re both on the same team.
That's not the explanation. He overperforms among middle and upper-middle incomes.
Lower and higher incomes lean blue. (Despite the lower ones being the ones truly 'losing the economic game'.)
Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
Why is it that eliminating one particular web site is somehow a failure of the US Constitution?
Yes, Congress is dysfunctional. Welcome to the post 17th amendment world. Repeal that and make the House truly proportional instead of artificially limiting it to 435 members and you’ll go a long way towards fixing a lot of the current problems. Eliminate PACs and donation caps and enforce KYC for donations and we can see who is actually buying our legislators.
But on the main topic, the left in the US is seeking judicial intervention to block nearly every single action that the administration takes, and district court judges are handing down nationwide injunctions against the president on a weekly basis. If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.
So the supreme court can issue a shadow docket ruling a week later, with zero rationalization or justification, staying the injunction?
There’s a lot of ifs in there though, and a lot of implied honesty just for record keeping. We’re all discovering (again) that implied honesty in governance will always be abused.
Defund the organization in charge of checking and follow-ups is one thing, but its complete removal just smell of incompetence or acknowledging of wrongdoing, or some sort of performance.
And the response is also baffling. "sorry we migrated it systems and accidentally took it down" is the handwave i expected. not "we follow the law regardless so it's not needed".
This week we took down the "Warcrime report form" because its hosting costs the same as the office coffee machine maintenance.
.. oo gee, mabie that one sounds a bit important. perhaps I should leave that running.
I obviously do not condone the behavior of taking down such a website. I truly wish such reports were taking with the utmost severity.
As evidence, look what happened to those that were involved in the violation of human rights in Abu Ghraib Prision [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
On a weekly basis now, they are blowing up civilian boats without any evidence wrong doing. Even if they had evidence, it still wouldn’t warrant using hellfire missiles on civilian ships, especially when the U.S. navy or coastguard is more than capable of intercept these ships.
And someone out there is cheering for this, I'm sure.
Do we have any evidence this initiative was ever staffed and effective?
We’ve extended a lot of credit to a vested institution to police itself. That’s not worked out in other matters, such as warrantless wiretapping, so why do you think this is effective here?
And why would you discredit third parties - especially those designed to be watchdogs?
I can see this initiative being an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. And, I’d imagine closing this reporting portal won’t deter journalists - especially those on the frontline like WikiLeaks - from reporting on incidents.
After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.
The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.
Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.
The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law
The Trump admin is demonstrably pro-warcrime.
US has always looked the other way when Israel killed innocent civilians. But there were some limits on how far they could go. The difference now is that those limits have been removed.
This is a blatant lie. /s
They do care, and have always cared, about human rights. The human rights of the US Government and their sponsors.
One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
> Blaha had already voiced frustration that despite the HRG passing its pilot phase, the Biden administration had not done enough to publicise it, meaning the provision to "facilitate receipt" of information was still not being fully honoured before the Trump administration deleted the channel entirely.
One side didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred, and the other one deleted it entirely. Both sides are bad!
Hopefully most do! All should.
However, most employees don’t pick what they work on. So it’s always at the discretion of the boss to determine what’s practically considered, regardless of ideals or desires.
Not going to get into the rich history of overthrowing local rulers and installing puppets through the most gruesome proxies to create "banana republics," the mass murder on a massive scale committed in the previous century, or the genocide that preceded to enable the founding of this state.
This place is built on murder and theft. "Both sides" are guilty. One is less shy.
The USA has been doing human rights abuses for a long time, without any repercussions. The Iraq war and the Patriot Act is but a few of many many many more examples. For a while now the entire political spectrum in Europe has given this impunity to the USA, with the covers gone, maybe it will be harder—at least for the left of center parties—to give this impunity to the USA.
What transparency? What is transparent about running a meme coin that anyone in the world can bribe- sorry, "invest" in with no trace of who they are while you're President?
As for the topic at hand: Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage so I don't believe it's a deliberate effort at "transparency"
"Here's my hat, put some coin in" is transparency.
How can you trace a block chain transaction back to someone without some sort of OPSEC slip up?
It confuses me how anyone could look at what's happening in the world and see a lack of a plan. Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy in this term and using geopolitical statecraft to upend the arrangements that were not working in favor of the US. The tariffs to force countries to choose US or China, putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending, and the peacemaker strategy in the Middle East to force oil prices down to reduce inflation. It seems to be a very comprehensive strategy.
>putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending
At the same time as refusing weapons sales to US allies and restricting intelligence sharing. Thereby forcing those countries to spend on European weapons rather than the US ones they have bought for the last 70 years. Doesn't sound great for the US tbh
You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.
By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
He said he would not touch the existing Whitehouse when building his new gilded $300m ballroom. I could go on and on and on...
The dude thinks like a toddler. Unfortunately a large part of this country also thinks this way.
I seem to remember him promising that he would release the Epstein Files the moment they were available.
That one's been taking a loooong time. All the ties that Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell have to Israel probably isn't super great for PR either.
Human rights my ass. More like rights for those with the mights.
I was merely try to express that things were bad and some progress has been made, however, that does not mean that things cannot get bad again. Both progress and regress are rarely a straight line.
Just look at what Russia is up to these days.
That's progress though, even if its progress on something that never should have existed to begin with, and the progress is far too slow.
And yes, our progress has been far too slow and way too uneven, but for the first 40 years of my life I felt like we were still progressing (yes -- too slow, and too unevenly).
But in the most recent ~decade of my life I feel like we've switched from too-slow progress to regression.
Shitty progress isn't enough, but its better than no progress (or, much worse, regression).
He only freed the slaves in the South with the emancipation proclamation [1]. The 13th amendment wasn't until 2 years later. Lincoln did it as an economic weapon against the south as well as a military recruitment tool; not out of the goodness of his heart.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
Even total deportation numbers are lower (given administration length) than every previous administration as reported by Jacobin in the latest issue - yall remember Elian Gonzalez?
July 4 1776
How cruel was the treatment from the British truly? My understanding was things like "no taxation without representation" was unrealistic due to the sheer distance and amount of time required to travel between the US and the UK. We're talking somewhere around 2-4 months one way. To send a rep back and forth with a message like:
US sends rep -> Uk and rep interact -> rep goes back to US with UK decision -> the US give their answer and the rep goes back to UK -> then rep goes back to the US with the UK's decision.
Such an interaction could take well over a year.
I also thought the US was the lowest taxed colony under British control? Not to mention it's not like the British didn't provide military protection to the colonies as well.
I am not saying the revolution was purely unjustified, but I am not really aware of how bad things truly were. My history classes kind of glossed over that part.
It is a shame that it is being destroyed at lightspeed the last year, and worse that many don't seem to care.
It can be assumed that the British occupation forces were just as brutal as any other occupying military force in history. The only restraint in those situations is morals and a boss that was across an ocean.
The courts can stop him and indeed have in several cases. Often times higher courts over rule those lower ones but not always. Majority of the time they eventually end up siding with the executive branch though. So courts are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though.
Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
Note: I have been hit by the HN "posting to fast" limit so I can't respond.
There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.
Same with the courts, executive is elected by the people and so is the senate. They select and approve the judges, same as it ever was.
I am in no way defending everything I am simply stating that there are checks and balances but many people just don't like the decisions that they are making. Doesn't mean they are not there though.
If not… I think you’re operating under a uselessly-broad notion of what constitutes US democracy “working”.
[edit] what this really gets at is legitimacy, which is the ultimate arbiter of who’s in charge and how effectively they may wield power. I find the idea that a state founded on a constitutional document as its fundamental claim to legitimacy ignoring major parts of that document isn’t at least overtly flirting with either a loss of legitimacy or a transition to a different state with a different basis for legitimacy (either of which seem to me to clearly count as a failure of that original state)… puzzling.
Congress and the courts are derelict in their responsibility to honor the rule of law.
Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.
But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.
Both of the following may be true:
1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.
2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)
Optimal solution is a check and balance where a higher level prosecutor, perhaps a federal or state level steps in and takes charge. Another optimal is courts rule that the prosecutor has to do their job.
But lets say that neither of these happen and there is no way to impeach the prosecutor.
You have a couple of scenarios.
1. Uprising. The people rise up and kill the prosecutor.
2. Dictatorship. A higher power even though they don't have the legal authority steps in and removes the prosecutor.
Now the real question is was this a good result? Democracy failed but you got rapists and murderers off the street.
I think we are very far away from this with Trump, he is still following the checks and balances, those checks and balances are just either
A: refusing to act or
B: acting in a way that some people don't like but I would add that many people do indeed like.
So I guess you could add civil war to the potential outcome as a portion of the population does not like the existing checks and balances and the results of the democratic election.
Now what is interesting is your scenario actually explains partially the rise of MAGA and Trump. For them, the law lead to open borders, what they saw as the promotion of LGBTQ amongst children (drag queen reading hour, etc) and DEI (discrimination against themselves and their children). All things they perceive as a grave threat to the future of the nation. So if they have to vote for someone that works outside the law in order to preserve their desired future they are willing to do so. They are willing to flirt with the dictator option if it means putting off what they view as a cataclysm.
I am not sure which is the best solution in your prosecutor scenario, what are your thoughts?
The fundamental problem is, there is really no "free market" of countries.
A US citizen who hates what the country has become cannot go off and set up a new one, they have a choice of a few styles of government (and it is very expensive to go and try living under another government!) Perhaps a benefit of space exploration will be experimentation with style of government.
My only niggle with your statement would be: A lot of what is happening now is happening because of "friction" in the system. If, for example, in an ideal world courts adjudicated instantly (instead of taking months or years) the current situation would be quite different. Similarly, if all congress people voted without fear of intimidation, some might vote quite differently. But, you are right, it's not like the founders didn't know that courts are slow or people can be intimidated.
For a large subset of those voters, the wide open borders, promotion of LGBTQ (particularly TQ) and DEI represented the end of the current state of the country. As you stated, there is no "free market" of countries. If the US fundamentally changes then for those people and their view of life, its over.
This has led to the massive backlash on immigration, ICE, rejection of DEI and push back on transgender promotion / acceptance.
For them, this is the end of all things and that is why they are so motivated and also so willing to overlook the obvious moral failures / grift of Trump and his manner of working. They care about preserving their way of life and if the cost is some grey legal situations and open grift then so be it. Trump is the hard man willing to do the socially distasteful things that they believe are necessary.
This particular post is not supposed to be an endorsement of those views whatever my particular opinion is but only a way to explain how we got here and the determination of Trump voters to see it through to the end.
When faced with the devil you know or what you view as the end of all things, you support the devil you know.
For the people reading this I am not trying to attack any particular people or ideology. Just presenting why people that you may disagree with act and vote in a certain way.
As a much lesser, but still serious point- Trump individually has so much power within the party he can get anyone removed from the party itself with a word, and effectively take away all of their campaign funding. He personally decides who is allowed to run or not run for office in the Republican party.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/republicans-...
The Republican Party acts like the midterms don't matter at all.
Approval is plummeting, representatives ignore townhalls like the plague.
If the reps win then the people have spoken and current actions continue.
You can say all is going according to the law (I would say no), but it seems most people think the country is going down the tubes - they just disagree with who is at fault - and it seems the right is just happy as long as the libs are crying about it.
Why would the House get back in session at all, for that matter? House leader Mike Johnson might enjoy vacation too much.
"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.
Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.
---
Thought experiment: Suppose a dear loved one is brutally murdered by a relative of the current democratically elected leader (imagine a hypothetical leader, country, etc). Through various extralegal manipulations, the leader ensures that the murderer is not convicted (evidence disappears, jurors are appointed in a fishy way, the judge turns out to be a family member of the murderer, ...) and you notice that none of the usual paths of recourse work. Perhaps you go to the press, but his supporters just dismiss this as a smear campaign. Crucially, this leader is very popular, their party controls the legislative and has appointed judges for years.
Following the reasoning in your post, which I think can be summarized as "the legislative and judicial branches, which are legitimately elected/appointed, chose not to stop him, therefore the separation of powers is not violated and this is how a democracy is supposed to work", the leader's actions do not constitute a violation of the separation of powers, and this incident does not demonstrate that this country's democracy is unhealthy.
---
I hope you agree that this conclusion is wrong, yet it follows inexorably from the argument you have made (because the sole precondition, that the other branches are legitimately elected/appointed, is satisfied). So we must conclude that there is a mistake in your argument, and I think it originates in the conflation of two of the core features of liberal democracy -- that is (a) leaders are elected and (b) there is a separation of powers. You are essentially saying that (b) holds because (a) holds, but it is important to remember that (a) and (b)are independent features that sometimes oppose each other: it is by design that the system (especially the judiciary) can overrule the majority of the population, at least for some time.
So the question of "are the judiciary and legislative branches effectively enforcing the separation of powers" is not actually related to whether these branches are legitimately appointed/elected, but to whether they are independent. By this I mean that they play their constitutionally prescribed role even if at times this is unpopular. For example, the judiciary's job is to enforce the law. In the thought experiment, they are not independent from the executive, and that is a deep system failure: they should enforce the law (convict the murderer) even if the (popular and legitimate) executive disagrees.
For example, the law is crystal clear wrt who has the authority to enact tariffs on foreign nations. The President cannot legally do this as the Constitution vests the power to raise taxes in Congress; reasonable people cannot disagree about this. Congress has granted him emergency powers on the basis of a fentanyl crisis at the Mexican border; the scope of these emergency powers clearly does not include imposing tariffs on, say, Australia. Again, there is no room for interpretation here, this is all crystal clear. The fact that the tariffs haven't been effectively struck down yet is a clear failure of the separation of powers, because the law is so clear. The popularity of the president or his policy is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be stopped by the courts.
The main reason this needs to exist is to make sure that, indeed, the next election is a free and fair election. If the separation of powers does not hold, then there is nothing stopping the executive from manipulating the election and hollowing out democracy. This has happened many times in history, and it is exactly what people (rightfully, I believe) fear about the Trump presidency.
Tariffs are due to be deliberated on during this session by the supreme court and as such checks and balances will have an opportunity to act.