331–340 of 453 posts
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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.
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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 govern…
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…
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 h…
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-...
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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…
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.
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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…
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.
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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.
15 years ago it was Al-Qaeda.
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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.
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-ele…
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 seriou…
It seems to be an extension of aspects that he talked about in his speech https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318... Specifically: > 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, bully…
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> Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then! 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.
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 didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.
> 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…
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…