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

Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace.

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).

They’ve created enough of a digital system to manage public opinion (through brain rot, manipulation, bots, psychometrics) that they’re less and less afraid of elections.

Who is “they?”

Just a quibble, but we should only be impeaching Presidents for illegal acts, not mere opinions about job performance, which members of the opposite party will almost always disagree with. The remedy for doing a bad job is the ballot box.

It is interesting that our elections aren't really frequent enough. Other systems cleverly made it possible to immediately recall electors that have gone rogue or the citizens have no faith in.

I assume multiple competing systems at this point. You have Team Jorge (and many others) in Israel, Robert Mercer’s rebranded SCL Group and offshoots, whatever Elon Musk has done to X (who he himself said he used to help Trump win). In Portugal there are bot armies and influence operations on every social network - Facebook and Reddit most of all.

A lot of the members of this very forum, honestly.

SCOTUS lifelong appointments checking in to say "hi"

Well that horse left the barn a long time ago - the list of blatantly illegal things is now so long that new ones (like murdering people in boats by remote control) just fly on by.

Pretty large chance that the next election will be meaningless though.

SCOTUS has life-long appointments because it is designed to move and operate slowly and be the least political of the branches. Parties that try to legislate from the bench when they cannot successfully get something through Congress are the issue.

You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing. For example, the entire city of Nashville, TN, has been utterly and obviously gerrymandered out of existence, and the city has no representation in the House. (They used to be TN's 5th.)

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.

That’s a category error. “Murder” is a concept of domestic criminal law. It doesn’t apply to state actions against foreigners in international waters. For the same reason it’s not “murder” for the U.S. to drone strike middle eastern weddings or to nuke foreign cities.

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

> You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing.

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.

Turns out that separation of powers was incorrect. Each branch needs its own enforcement arm and our plan of having the Executive carry out the law instead of just enforcing the law was a bad idea.

The limit to separation of powers is that many people will align themselves with the most powerful existing entity as the easiest path to self advancement, and this results in a natural consolidation of power even when that consolidation is outside the formal hierarchy. So once an entity or institution becomes too powerful, it tends to just reinforce itself.

I seem to remember that the civil rights act and voting rights acts got passed through congress and upheld by the supreme court during the 20th century.

No, because then you’re just centralizing power in the hands of a specific group of people—Ivy League law school graduates—that have distinctive cultural and class interests. Maybe you think that’s a good idea today. But in the mid-20th century these institutions were the bastion of WASPs, long after that group lost electoral control of the country due to immigration. (Watch the movie The Good Shepherd.) Your system would’ve given the FBI/CIA/DOJ powerful tools to destroy the presidencies of FDR and JFK. There’s a reason the conspiracy theory exists that the CIA assassinated the first catholic president.

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.

> The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.”

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.