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763 points tartoran | 43 comments | | HN request time: 0.002s | source | bottom
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mikeyouse ◴[] No.45682307[source]
> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".

We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.

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skizm ◴[] No.45682511[source]
> it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch

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

replies(2): >>45682818 #>>45682934 #
selectodude ◴[] No.45682818[source]
Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
replies(2): >>45682889 #>>45683324 #
1. cheema33 ◴[] No.45682889[source]
> Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!

I hope you know that Congress has abdicated all of their responsibilities to the president. I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.

replies(8): >>45682981 #>>45682996 #>>45683006 #>>45683061 #>>45683139 #>>45683227 #>>45683405 #>>45683441 #
2. lotsofpulp ◴[] No.45682981[source]
How do you mitigate when 2/3rd of voters support, at least tacitly, the lawlessness?
replies(5): >>45683009 #>>45683236 #>>45683244 #>>45683374 #>>45683479 #
3. selectodude ◴[] No.45682996[source]
it was joke. i am well aware.
4. candiddevmike ◴[] No.45683006[source]
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.

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.

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5. ◴[] No.45683009[source]
6. nemomarx ◴[] No.45683042[source]
They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo
7. outside2344 ◴[] No.45683061[source]
The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
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8. mrguyorama ◴[] No.45683101[source]
The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people"

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.

replies(1): >>45683732 #
9. wsatb ◴[] No.45683112[source]
They did not envision it to be used in its original state, and it hasn’t. But it also hasn’t changed much in a long time.
10. rayiner ◴[] No.45683139[source]
George Washington could have declared himself King if he had wanted, so yes, the founders absolutely saw this coming.
11. actionfromafar ◴[] No.45683180[source]
Dissenting representatives may very well need Secret Service protection to stay alive. Good luck getting that protection approved.

(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.)

12. rayiner ◴[] No.45683223[source]
The founders came from England, which has the world's longest unbroken political tradition (apart from 11 years during the English Civil War). England has top-level cabinet positions that were established 800 years ago. So I doubt the founders would be surprised that their constitution was still in use 236 years later.

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.

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13. FranzFerdiNaN ◴[] No.45683227[source]
They probably also didn’t see it coming that their constitution would be considered just as sacred as the Bible, instead of a document that was to be adapted.

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

14. rayiner ◴[] No.45683236[source]
You don't. That's democracy.
15. bilekas ◴[] No.45683244[source]
I don't know exactly which support level you mean but https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker would paint a different picture. That said, who knows how valid even these numbers are.
replies(2): >>45683540 #>>45683726 #
16. PaulRobinson ◴[] No.45683374[source]
This is easy.

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.

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17. thayne ◴[] No.45683405[source]
One thing the founders definitely didn't see coming was the two party system, which eventually led to a single party controlling all thee branches of government.
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18. yieldcrv ◴[] No.45683441[source]
Our founders recognized our compromisestitution was vulnerable to this, they didn't predict a nationalist brainwashing campaign to call compromise a beneficial thing as part of a national identity

They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done

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19. anon-3988 ◴[] No.45683479[source]
The next time someone says "the other guy's not much better!" I am going to strangle and choke them.
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20. parineum ◴[] No.45683540{3}[source]
The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of.

> 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...

21. mullingitover ◴[] No.45683587[source]
Go back and read Washington's farewell address. There's a section in there that addresses factions, and it's like Washington had access to the headlines from last week when he wrote it.
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22. mongol ◴[] No.45683666{3}[source]
Is it really longer than the Catholic church?
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23. deathanatos ◴[] No.45683726{3}[source]
They're likely referencing that 2/3rds of voters either explicitly voted for Trump (≈31.9%), or implicitly support the result of the election by having not voted at all (≈35.9%). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...)
24. rrix2 ◴[] No.45683732{3}[source]
you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified.

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

25. AnIrishDuck ◴[] No.45683812[source]
Not really, no. The founders were not omniscient, but many of them publicly wrote about the problematic rise of political "factions" contrary to the general interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
26. walkabout ◴[] No.45683819{3}[source]
They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice.

The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.

They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another 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.

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27. rayiner ◴[] No.45683905{4}[source]
Fair point.
28. vladms ◴[] No.45683910{3}[source]
True that most people don't care about who rules, but people do care of not living "much worse" than "before". That triggered a lot of revolutions before.

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.

29. efitz ◴[] No.45683915[source]
They absolutely saw it coming and warned against it, but couldn’t figure out any durable way to prevent it.
30. mullingitover ◴[] No.45683944{4}[source]
The Supreme Court definitely suffers from 'not invented here' syndrome. There are vastly superior Supreme Court systems that other countries have implemented (Austria is a great example) where the US could just copy their homework, but won't.

The press really needs to start suffixing the justices with (R) and (D) when discussing them to drive the point home that the SC is the most partisan branch of government.

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31. itsoktocry ◴[] No.45683995[source]
>1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.

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.

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32. drob518 ◴[] No.45684042[source]
The founders foresaw all manner of bad behavior. They understood human nature better than most today, and they experienced a lot of shocking political acts, everything from telling scurrilous lies about your opponent to outright buying votes. The only thing that might be new to them is the scale at which technology makes these things possible. Read up on the history of early campaigns.
33. kridsdale1 ◴[] No.45684077{5}[source]
Put a ($R!) after Thomas.
replies(1): >>45685549 #
34. onethought ◴[] No.45684079{3}[source]
If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population).

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.

35. kridsdale1 ◴[] No.45684096{4}[source]
Along this line of thinking, surely there’s an unbroken administrative / bureaucratic tradition running China that spans multiple royal dynasties and perhaps even the recent ideological upheaval. Can we call that an enduring government?
36. hrimfaxi ◴[] No.45684132{5}[source]
Austria's system was created in the mid 1700s and would have been relatively new at the time of the founding. Was Austria's system clearly vastly superior at the turn of the 19th century?
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37. shadowgovt ◴[] No.45684184[source]
They did. The back-stop is Congress being brave enough to call the bluff and supporting each other as an institution, across party lines.

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

38. shadowgovt ◴[] No.45684222{3}[source]
The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval.

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).

39. mullingitover ◴[] No.45684600{6}[source]
Their separate constitutional court didn't come along until the 20th century[1]. They have 14 justices on that court, but only a maximum of 9 will ever hear a case for precedent-setting decisions, and usually fewer than that (making court packing difficult if not completely pointless).

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)

40. Supermancho ◴[] No.45684988[source]
This is the painful period of time where the US would have to collectively realize they are missing controls on the branches, in the form of amendments. Unfortunately, it looks like the people are lazy. They rather lose the union, before agreeing there really is a problem to be solved. Otherwise, there's no way to know there's a problem.

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

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41. yieldcrv ◴[] No.45685432{3}[source]
currently impossible as the people that can actually bridge consensus are vilified as not being aligned to a party or excusing the actions of a particular party solely by not adding power to the other party

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

42. walkabout ◴[] No.45685549{6}[source]
It's kind of incredible the news is so crowded with insanity that "minimum two justices are simply taking huge bribes more-or-less openly, and as many as all nine are doing some things that are at least ethically iffy" didn't have much staying power, as a story.
43. cheema33 ◴[] No.45689763{3}[source]
Same. No leader will be perfect. We always have to pick between the lesser of two evils. Trump is at level 10. And people were like Oh but Kamala has faults too.

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.