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763 points tartoran | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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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.

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selectodude ◴[] No.45682818[source]
Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
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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.

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candiddevmike ◴[] No.45683006{3}[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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1. nemomarx ◴[] No.45683042{4}[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