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

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.

> 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.

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.

What about the gerrymandering?

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.

I think the more obvious possibility is far more sinister.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The voters keep voting for them. That is democracy. The people elect these same people over and over again. We get what we vote for.

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.

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

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.

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)

You are mostly correct in my opinion.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/republicans-...

> Fact is he was democratically elected

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.

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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.

Respectfully your thought experiment is meaningless as the president already has the power of pardon. See Joe Biden’s pardon of his son.

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.

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?

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.

“Democracy” in the sense of “a government with large amounts of citizen participation via voting, strong rule of law, and peaceful transition of power” (this is an entirely fine usage; it’s the main way most political scientists use the term day-to-day, ditto ordinary people, that’s why there are so many openings for incorrecting people online with “ackshually only direct democracy is democracy, the rest is sparkling representative republics”, which, again, isn’t how people who study government generally use the term) is failing, because rule of law is failing. This is a (partial, in this hypothetical, but far more complete in the real thing I’m alluding to) clear failure of government.

“Democracy” as in people are voting and the people they elected are wielding power (nb it is not necessarily the case that voters like that crime isn’t being prosecuted in my hypothetical, even in cases that their system of presumably-also-democratic government legally requires it—it could be that this prosecutor is popular despite that) is working.

Maybe you just mean that votes are resulting in things happening, period, regardless of whether those things are legal according to laws established and upheld by prior elected governments, and even if the system isn’t operating anywhere near its foundational legal basis, and that’s the disconnect?

(Outside the hypothetical, rule of law has always kinda struggled at times but is simply collapsing this term in ways and to a degree that’s not been seen in living memory, certainly; voting has been under attack for decades and especially lately between the ‘00s-today baseless but effective attacks on confidence in elections, the “find me votes” and illegal electors pushes having no consequences and the guy behind them currently holding effectively all federal levers of power and quite a few state ones, increasing gerrymandering activity, and the VRA being on life support and likely soon to be dead; and we’ve not seen peaceful transition of power in as shaky a place as it is post-Jan-6th [and the reactions thereto]… maybe ever, aside from the actual civil war? Certainly not since the 19th century; taken together, yeah, American democracy in the former sense is doing extremely poorly and large parts of it are entirely broken at the moment, and it’s very much not clear how much, if any, of it will recover, and it’s a safe bet a lot of that’s going to get worse at least in the short term)