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

(www.bbc.com)
763 points tartoran | 2 comments | 23 Oct 25 14:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mikeyouse ◴[23 Oct 25 14:35 UTC] 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 ◴[23 Oct 25 14:52 UTC] 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 ◴[23 Oct 25 15:16 UTC] No.45682818[source]▶
Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
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cheema33 ◴[23 Oct 25 15:21 UTC] 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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thayne ◴[23 Oct 25 16:00 UTC] 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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mullingitover ◴[23 Oct 25 16:13 UTC] No.45683587{4}[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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walkabout ◴[23 Oct 25 16:29 UTC] No.45683819{5}[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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mullingitover ◴[23 Oct 25 16:40 UTC] No.45683944{6}[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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1. hrimfaxi ◴[23 Oct 25 16:55 UTC] No.45684132{7}[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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2. mullingitover ◴[23 Oct 25 17:41 UTC] No.45684600[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)