851–860 of 1001 posts
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Wasn't that because there was a high chance of trump going after biden's son when he was in power, making up whatever charges he needed just as a power play?
no one should be above the law. Also it's not like the democrat did not weaponize the justice to put trump in jail for 4 consecutive years.
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The U.S. is running an outdated installation of democracy. The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point. Except the populace is already badly split into warring camps.
> The French approach of just rebooting and reinstalling the entire thing seems like a good idea at this point. Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real governmen…
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Yep. We might have been the first PC, but we're running windows 3.11 while the rest of the world runs a new OS. We need ranked or approval voting, elimination of gerrymandering. Strongly prefer elimination of Citizens United and the Senate.
Unfortunately, eliminating the Senate (or more precisely, each state's equal representation in the Senate) is the one and only thing that the constitution forbids an amendment from doing (see Article V, Section 5): > Provided that no Amendment [...] no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate. (Awkward ellipsizing, but the elided text is another thing that's not allowed, which…
For the other half the country, we really don't want to Federal laws to be decided by people in other states that don't share the same values. This is why state rights exist and will not be removed (at least in our lifetime).
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>In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. When did this happen?
I wonder which police it was, as well, since the only police the Biden administration had control over were federal agencies such as the FBI. I’m tempted to think “Fox News is a hell of a drug.”
The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.
The way this is going, the President won’t need using any pardon powers, because the judges will all ask the President what the judgement should be in advance. And the prosecutors will ask who to prosecute. Finally only fair justice!
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What do you think of this counterpoint from Balaji? "CZ deserves his pardon. His show trial of a prosecution was a combination of regulatory railroading and ethnic persecution for being Chinese-Canadian. Imagine if Macron was held personally responsible for every crime committed by the 67M citizens of France, and you'll get the absurdity of holding CZ personally responsible for the actions of a few of the 250M+ Binan…
>In the physical world, the Biden admin gleefully abolished the police. When did this happen?
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The word "nothing" is completely inappropriate in describing Watergate and Iran-Contra, among the worst political scandals in American history, both involving gross abuse of executive power. I certainly don't see how the pardon of Changpeng Zhao is worse than the pardon of President Richard Nixon or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Crimes committed in office by the highest officials in the US government are a…
Ford at least had the misguided excuse of wanting to put the scandal behind and focus on the future. Trump's pardons include hundreds of literal insurrectionists, promises to pardon in exchange for not testifying against him (witness tampering), and other blatant corruption. He fired the head of the OPA and installed a political hack to speedrun awful pardon choices and made a mockery of the process in a far more cor…
I'm more concerned with the effects of the pardons on the country and on democracy than I am with judging the rectitude of the pardoner. Allowing the President to escape the law set a terrible precedent with obvious repercussions into the present.
I'm not trying to defend Trump. My point is that the stage was set for Trump. Abuses of executive power, of which I've given two egregious examples—Watergate and Iran-Contra—have been swept under the rug for far too long. To always "put the scandal behind and focus on the future" is to encourage future misbehavior. I would note that in stark contrast, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has just gone to prison.
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That might be true, but CZ is a good candidate for a pardon. Did you know before Gensler went after him at the SEC he asked CZ for a job and was rejected?
What does that have to do with anything? Executive branch leaders can have both individual lives and public responsibilities. If anything, it's better he was rejected for the job, as getting it would have provided an incentive to bury the prosecution.
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The way this is going, the President won’t need using any pardon powers, because the judges will all ask the President what the judgement should be in advance. And the prosecutors will ask who to prosecute. Finally only fair justice!
Lord Eric ?
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When Obama really increased the number of pardons, a lot of contemporary opinion writers said stuff along the lines of "this is a dangerous precedent and we're lucky that the pardons are fairly popular and sane." Now we're seeing unpopular, not sane pardons. When democratic norms erode like pardons becoming more acceptable, it's like laying tinder and kindling for a fire. You still need a fire; a bad actor who is wil…
I don't buy it. A president that will literally direct his AG in public to prosecute his political enemies is simply not bound by norms, period. To pretend that he'd never have pardoned Zhao but for Obama's "increased number of pardons" is, to be blunt, ridiculous on its face. And in context, you're doing exactly what I mocked above, tut tutting about civil behavior and norms and The Discourse while the system burns…
This is what happened to Trump though, the established politicians do not like him and did everything they could to stop him from running.