US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

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.

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

There are plenty of laws being ignored. Tariffs being the most obvious.

If you don't collect data, you can't brag about it.

You have to be a very special kind of person to break rank.

Maybe you didn't mean the system as broadly.

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.

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%.)

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.

They are conservatives and push for conservative agenda. Conservatives wanted them on the court so that they can make decisions like this.

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.

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.

People get the leaders they deserve

Out of genuine curiosity: what specific actions do you think were 'weaponized' investigations / prosecutions under Biden?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.

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.

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.

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.

Name Biden's lawfare. What exactly did he abuse the Justice Department to do?

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.

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.

“And we’ll make ted kennedy payyyy

“If he fights back, we’ll just say that he’s gayyyy

The idea of a blanket pardon is absurd on its face and we're only allowing it because we're allowing political prosecution.

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.

They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.

Trump third term being one.

(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

They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done

Like, do you truly believe Biden started this? What was the first act?

(there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)

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.

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.

> 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...

That is, the Senate gives representation to empty land.

That's pretty structural !

Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.

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.

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.

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.

I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.

https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/

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.)

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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...>

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.

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.

As usual, you see this as a "they are dumb" problem. Look within.

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,"

Is the correct plural acronym here “IGs”, or “Is-G” (Inspectors General)?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

- Signed, the side that tried to throw a candidate in prison.

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.

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".

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 founders didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.

“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

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.

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).

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.”

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.

- 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)

The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.

Most people do not believe in the religion of humanist universalism.

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)

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.

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…

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.

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.”).

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.

Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.

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.

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.

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

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...

  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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.

Read something other than NYT.

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.

But we know the motivation because Jefferson wrote it down. It wasn’t resource management, it was opposition to the law on principle.

E.g., letting people who attacked police officers on Jan 6 out of prison is about as anti-conservative as you get.

I was trying to point out that conservative as a political philosophy != whatever Fox news preaches this month, but perhaps the word is used differently in the US..

Anyway point is, I'm sure the post you responded to used the word conservative more in the way I'm used to (European way?), thus your cross-talk.

Here's why: because it's not!

Here's SCOTUS in Kendall v United States:

> To contend that the obligations imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed implies a power to forbid their execution is a novel construction of the Constitution, and is entirely inadmissible.

> "This doctrine cannot receive the sanction of this Court. It would be vesting in the President a dispensing power which has no countenance for its support in any part of the Constitution, and is asserting a principle which, if carried out in its results to all cases falling within it, would be clothing the President with a power to control the legislation of Congress and paralyze the administration of justice."

> The result of the cases of McIntire v. Wood and McCluny v. Silliman clearly is that the [court's authority to command an officer of the United States] to perform a specific act required by a law of the United States is within the scope of the judicial powers of the United States under the Constitution"

The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.” If you could trust Harvard graduates as a class to do that, there would be no reason for checks and balances or separation of powers.

Well my point is two-fold. First, what you say here is my point, all branches need an _enforcement_ arm. Today Congress has the Sergeant at Arms and courts have bailiffs and may deputize members of the Executive Branch.

However that's clearly inadequate in the face of the Executive's current balance of power. A rebalancing is necessary imo.

Could that result in a Roman-esque problem of the three branches having "tug of wars" with each other's law enforcement arm, but I don't think so. We have this problem today with the dozens of law enforcement organizations within the Executive...which brings me to my second point!

My second point is that carrying out the law in the Executive was clearly the wrong choice. The Legislative branch should actually carry out the law, i.e. USPS should live under a committee in Congress, and mail fraud would continue to be prosecuted by the Executive.

I'll caveat that I'm had waiving a lot here, but I hope we can all agree at least on the problem statement; too much power has concentrated in the Executive and _drastic_ measures would be required to resolve that situation.

When exactly was that last time? Note that rule of law would include demands that police follows the law too. As far as I can tell, it was never rule of law in the sense of "everyone must follow the law". It was "people we dont like must follow the law and we will max punishments for them".

> letting people who attacked police officers on Jan 6 out of prison is about as anti-conservative as you get.

Only because this time, police was standing against what conservatives wanted. When it was helping them, yes, it was different.

As for returning back to the original state appointment of senators, that is required for the senate to appropriately represent the state government at the federal level.

The original house apportionment had representatives that had about 35000 people. The size of the house was locked at 435 in 1913. Before then the number of representatives grew slower than population but still grew. After the last 2020 census there are 761,000 people per representative. The unevenness of how many constituents a representative from Wyoming has vs a representative from California has is a point of contention in higher population states. The complaint is that the representatives from smaller states have more proportional power. I think that is a bit ridiculous but that is what some Californian's told me. Increasing the size of the house to have a more proportional representation would alleviate that point of contention between states.

Gerrymandering is a side effect of not increasing the size of the house.