As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
So.
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
Shout out to the American Dream.
Yes - I can get the point you are making - “democracy for me but not for thee” is BS. Sure!
But the evidence is that theres one media network which is simply selling whatever story works, along side a 50+ year effort to kill trust in institutions. We can even show that the republican machinery gave up on bipartisanship - hell, it’s even public knowledge.
But that wouldn’t make a whit of a difference to voting patterns, or your point. Because your point doesn’t need to be based in the long history of complicated malfeasance that rots all English speaking democracies. It’s anchored in your current state and argument.
So yeah, people voted.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
and yes, i'm angry too.
And no matter who wins, the other side will be convinced it was by cheating. And that has no alternative but total war.
I have looked long and hard for an alternative but I'm not seeing one.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper. As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
And it isn’t actually gone yet, either.
And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
See, this is a weasel word. Nobody said it was unpalatable, they said it was bad, because it is.
Do you want bad things to happen? No? Okay then, everyone should be on the same page.
There are limitations, but if a research arm was created purely by executive power, then it can be stopped through executive power.
The system works as intended.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.
Source: https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-co...As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
That seems… unlikely?
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.
It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.
I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.
That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.
We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)
I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/
Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
Yes, very few last 250 years.
USA has had some close calls before, the Civil War was horrific.
Nothing lasts forever, but I would not bet against the USA's system perpetuating itself this time, too
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.
The issue first showed up in 1828 election, when some of the Framers were still alive, and the US basically did nothing about it over the ensuing 200 years.
Remember it was Andrew Jackson who went around ignoring Supreme Court decisions and saying "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it".
And his abuse of executive powers during the Bank Wars to punish political enemies led to the formation of a new political party.
Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.
I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
You don’t have it in the USA, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
Does any country?
No, and for good reasons. Even in a utopian liberal democracy, fundamental rights cannot be used to deprive someone else of their own fundamental rights. You cannot have freedom for all without limitations to that freedom.
This may not be fully developed in the US constitution because the world was much simpler back then, but it is entirely compatible with it.
The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öffentlich-rechtlicher_Rundf...
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
https://taz.de/Laender-boykottieren-den-Bildungsgipfel/!5918...
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...
This was one lesson the common people never wanted to learn because it was so much easier to live on the belief that their system is intrinsically immune to abuse, it's just better, magically almost. It was bolstered by the same people's desire to feel better by pointing fingers at the "weak fools" living under dictatorships, incapable to fight. "We have rights and guns, we'll pick up arms and fight any abuse".
But when the abuses came pouring almost everyone piffled, living on the next belief that time will fix things. Sometimes it did. Or maybe one of these times will bring the shocking realization that it's easy to talk big in good times and hard to act in bad times when your skin is in the game.
However, Baerbock has absolutely monstrous statements and the German gas-guzzling contingent are the obvious culprits for the EU partership agreements with Azerbaijan and for the incorrect statements treating this whole thing as somehow restoring Azerbaijani territorial integrity and the numerous statements by the EC falsely claiming that Armenia had attacked Azerbaijani (i.e. these 'we call on both sides...' in the aftermath of Azerbaijani attacks). Furthermore, it is German influence on the EC that made the implementation of the ICJ decision subject to negotiation, and it is likely German influence on the EC that forced the agreement whereby mine maps were exchanged for the release of PoWs. These mine maps naturally enabled further Azeri attacks. It is also very apparent that there was government influence on media organizations to not report the starvation in the NKAO beginning after the Azeri blocking of the Lachin corridor-- for example in Sweden state television reported nothing, and reported of the ethnic cleansing itself only that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan'. This shows co-ordination between Swedish government, Swedish state television (SVT) and Turkey or Azerbaijan, indicating a secret deal either for the sake the Swedish NATO entry or on the EU level. Certain phrases 'lightning offensive' which sound decidedly Turkish are also repeated in many newspaper articles, indicating a larger deal rather than something specific to Sweden.
The CSTO is absolutely irrelevant, as everybody who matters in any way knows completely. France would not be selling weapons to Armenia if they believed that their CSTO membership were relevant.
There were excellent opportunities to intervene even as the Azeri troops were rolling down the Agdam road to Stepanakert, and it's very unlikely that the Germans were unaware. SAR satellite imagery of the region is so readily available that unclassified images can be obtained on a commercial basis and I'm not even sure it was cloudy.
As an American living abroad this seems to be the general consensus with the people I talk to. At some point American exceptionalism became expected without the work and investment required.
And the knowledge that you cannot win when the other side controls the armed forces, the FBI, and all the governing institutions, a lot of states entirely too, and is clearly willing (and maybe even eager) to use them? The president and the people behind him probably look forward to their opponents trying. I think this "total war" might be very short.
I think Trump & team have been very open about their intentions. There's even his entire first presidency to look at. At most, some of his voters might be surprised that he actually follows through on exactly what he promised (for example some of those voting for him now surprised about being targeted by ICE, including farmers fearing for their cheap workforce).
So sure, lots of lies, on the other hand and at the same time everything was planned and prepared quite openly.
That was hundreds of years ago; when Madison says "domestic faction", he doesn't mean "a faction", he means what we would today call "factionalism". The 18th-century use is a pretty direct mirror of the Latin word factio, also meaning factionalism.
The idea that "checks and balances" are built into the US governmental structure is interesting. It would make sense if governmental positions were held by right of heredity. They aren't, but you can see how the Framers would be working with that mental model.
As the US government is actually constructed, Congressmen, for example, have no incentives to preserve anything as a power exclusive to Congress, because they have no lasting affiliation with Congress.
The structure should really have a few more obvious significant layers where things could shift around over time.
This is not a show for me. These are the people in my life.
The *Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)* famously narrowed the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, particularly its Privileges or Immunities Clause. While the case primarily focused on that clause, the Court also touched upon the "subject to the jurisdiction" language in the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
In the Slaughterhouse Cases, Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the majority, briefly clarified the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." He stated that this phrase was intended to *exclude certain categories of individuals from automatic birthright citizenship*, even if they were born on U.S. soil. Specifically, he mentioned:
* *Children of foreign ministers or consuls:* These individuals are considered to be under the jurisdiction of their parents' sovereign nation, not the United States. * *Children of citizens or subjects of foreign states born within the United States:* This was a general exclusion for those whose allegiance was considered to be to another country, such as children of enemy aliens during wartime.
The primary purpose of this clause, in the context of the post-Civil War era, was to firmly establish the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, overturning the Dred Scott decision. However, the "subject to the jurisdiction" language ensured that certain exceptions to territorial birthright citizenship were maintained, consistent with international law and diplomatic practice.
It's important to note that while the Slaughterhouse Cases introduced this interpretation, the scope of "subject to the jurisdiction" for birthright citizenship was later more definitively addressed and affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrants who were not citizens was indeed a U.S. citizen because he was "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
The administrative agencies do not merely “advise.” They make regulations with the force of law (legislative power), enforce those regulations (executive power), and adjudicate violations of the regulations (judicial power). That concentration of the three powers into a single entity is the very thing the Constitution goes to great lengths to avoid.
With which article specifically?
Yes, enforcement should not be managed by these agencies. The way to fix this is to reshape them, not give in and let the executive run the show without checks. Of course, that requires a working legislative body and a judiciary that is not fixated on the end times.
Social media has allowed the masses to be manipulated in a targeted way like we've never seen in history.
The Roberts court has overturned precedent less often than any other recent court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden....
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
Surely some non-trivial percentage of the commenters / lurkers that are proud to talk about their mono-repo or their favorite react library had some part in the fact that millions think the covid vaccine has 5G.
The zero-day bug in the system that had not been exploited until now is that two of the three branches don't actually have any power of enforcement. So if the executive branch decides to just flat out ignore them, there are no consequences.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/american-civil-liberties-un...
That seems to be the major mis-step in trying to structure the government to be secure from capture; obviously the whole experiment was new so they can be forgiven for not addressing it.
But we know now, and would be well-served to identify how to restructure things if given the chance. Unfortunately, the coup by the current regime seems to have been successful and it's going to have to get a lot worse before it blows up and we get something different.
And then "information" is doing a lot of work when you start talking about social media.