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

> 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.

The answer is impeachment, but when Congress is stuffed with boot licking toadies, then there is no recourse.

* s/impeachment/“conviction by the Senate”

Impeachment by itself has been shown to accomplish nothing. There is no other mechanism except conviction by the Senate to address constitutional or legal violations made by the president.

Also no president has ever been impeached by a House which is controlled by a majority of the same party of the President. If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.

Edit: “Approval voting” is the appropriate escape hatch from 2-party politics. It lets you get rid of primaries entirely and run all the top-n candidates who have the greatest number of valid nomination signatures. Its advantage over range-voting/etc is that it is dead-simple to explain to voters: Put a checkmark next to any candidate that you're "okay" with. The candidate with the most checkmarks wins.

https://rangevoting.org/CompChart.html

>If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached.

That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.

>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.

Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.

> They still defend him to this day

Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older.

Most people I talk with about it seem divided along the lines of morality in terms of the interaction and level of consent, rather than along debate over the security risks. Security risk seems like a valid point of concern to me.

That risk could be mitigated by a president being open about their promiscuity with both family and the public during their campaign - e.g. when both Russia and USA attempted to sextort and blackmail Sukarno (the president of the Philippines) he was delighted that his encounters were filmed and requested extra copies of the kompromat.