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

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.

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.

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

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.

They absolutely saw it coming and warned against it, but couldn’t figure out any durable way to prevent it.

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.

Put a ($R!) after Thomas.

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?

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)

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.