The checks and balances of the constitution really requires Congress and the Supreme Court to not be controlled by sycophants to the President. The partisanship of the former led to the partisanship of the latter. There is nothing in place to check power in this case. And even if the sycophants were to lose power via election, there is very little that can be done to check power on a President like this short of impeachment and conviction to remove him from office fully. Laws that set bounds on the powers of the president, including the constitution, have absolutely no mechanisms of enforcement. No consequences for violation. No teeth, as they say. Particularly now as the SCOTUS is fully partisan and have granted him defacto immunity for all acts in office, literally the only option for repercussions for the President the nuclear option, impeachment and conviction. Then Vance walks in and you get to do it all over again until the next election (assuming we still have those).
It’s a giant fucking mess that there is just about no coming back from. The weak points in the foundation are exposed and the foreman’s hands are tied from fixing them without a massive bipartisan push to do so. Trump has broken all norms and fundamentally broken the stability of the constitution along with it. He’s only the first that will take full advantage of these weaknesses, and the next one will be even better at it.
Hipster Santa makes some good points.
The US Army can do something funny to deal with Trump…
A) The Constitution is perfectly capable of dealing with someone like Trump, but the our elected officials are too cowardly and self-interested to use it to remove him from power.
B) Our extremely partisan Supreme Court is undermining the clear and well defined restrictions placed on the presidency by the Constitution. Again, the Constitution has remedies for this, but the cowards who are deeply entrenched in our seats of power refuse to use them.
C) No one with this facial hair should be treated seriously (with the exception of Santa Claus).
It is not. The document nor, the founders foresaw something like Citizens United which makes voting useless. So long as there is unlimited money in elections, then the system is failed.
It is.
It requires people to follow the rules and spirit of the document.
When people don’t, the constitution is no longer in charge.
That’s… Exactly his point?
It’s not the Constitution’s fault.
It should be written better so that there are consequences for a rogue president, in a way that can’t be overridden by the Supreme Court.
The founding fathers couldn’t fathom the utter deplorable evil that Trump and his crew of crazy conservatives became, but neither did we.
Like if you told me the host of the apprentice was going to form a modern reincarnation of the Nazi party, I would have asked what drugs you were on so I could take them and could understand your insane idea.
I think the founding fathers couldn’t fathom how cowardly elected officials would be faced with such a corrupt president.
Trump should have been found guilty the two times he was impeached during his first term.
And the founding fathers also probably couldn’t fathom how stupid the American people would be to vote twice for the same corrupt man who was impeached twice!!!
Like shit… I don’t think anyone in the world believed it when Trump won again. Like I still can’t believe Americans voted for him again…
Part of what they talked about was how essential it was to have good education, good communication, and a vigorous free press. Just having people vote doesn’t do shit. Even back then, they understood that. The people have to know what they’re doing. Things like Trump and the poorly educated who vote for him in large numbers were a known failure mode of democratic systems, even back then. They actually tried to design in features to make sure that only “educated” “responsible” people could vote as a check against it, although, that had its own problems.
They also were somewhat terrified of political parties and the opportunities for corruption and self-interest they created. A lot of the sadness of the system they set up is that it tended to collapse into a binary system with each “team” operated by a party, because good modern voting technology was something they were not yet aware of. Sadly. Read George Washington’s writing on political parties sometime, it seems incredibly prescient if you look at the rot of the late 20th century that set the stage for Trump.
I wouldn’t call them features designed to have “educated” or “responsible” or responsible people vote.
It was a system designed to allow male land owners to have all the say. To keep the wealthy in charge. In many states it was limited to wealthy white land owners.
Yeah, pretty much.
“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
(Barbarous ancestors meaning Jefferson and his friends)
There are a ton of datapoints suggesting funny business, but the kremlin had them drill home the interference chant so loudly and brashly for the 4 preceding years that nobody here dares bring it up out of some kind of egotistical fear. Kamala had the means and data to force the issue, but this is a bipartisan thinning of the herd.
Murica LLC was purchased over the years after deregulation by reagan. ruzzia won the cold war, it just took 50 years.
I don’t completely believe in George Carlin’s mindset of just turning a blind eye from the system, but he was right that you get exactly what you put into it. Voter apathy is more than just not showing up to vote, it’s voting but then not paying attention to what the representatives are doing, and not telling them you don’t like it (or you like it, positive feedback is good too). A representative government won’t work if you don’t stay involved except for a single day in two or four years.
We only have power a single day every few years under representational “democracy”. Representatives time and time again ignore the wishes of their constituents because and by design it’s too difficult to participate in the system.
Most localities have elections every year. Maybe try participating locally and you’ll start to see a difference…
The founding fathers couldn’t fathom the utter deplorable evil that Trump and his crew of crazy conservatives became, but neither did we.
On the contrary, they designed the constitution with exactly the kind of person like Trump in mind. They just finished fighting a revolution against a king from across the ocean and wanted be as sure as they could that their government did not function the same way. The reason they failed is because they thought Americans would be much more civically engaged than they actually are. And also because the legislative branch is terribly designed.
And don’t forget that the world of the 1700s was a much darker place than it is today. There were monarchies and brutal regimes all over the place and in very recent memory from earlier centuries as well which probably gave them all kinds of inspiration of what they wanted to prevent.
The founding fathers owned people. They were just as evil as Trump. What makes them special is not their morality.
Leftists have been pointing out the authoritarian and vicious racism in the GOP since the 1980s.
Hell Alexander Hamilton basically tried to do the exact thing Trump tried in 2020 and overthrow an election. They’d have gotten it just fine.
The founding fathers were well aware.
People have this impression that the founding fathers wanted to put strict limits on what government was “allowed” to do, so that everyone in government would follow the rules and we wouldn’t get Trump. That is adjacent to what they thought, but it’s not what they thought. What they thought was, more or less, that the natural state of government is something akin to Trump, and if it gets that bad, it’s your job as a citizen to get organized and fucking get rid of it. That’s what they did. They just also tried to set up a balanced system for the people who came next, and explained why they were doing it in a lot of detail so people could understand and get behind it. And, they thought, if you don’t do that, then you get what you get.
(And also you will deserve it, but that’s not the important part. It’s more about the reality than the “deserve.” And the reality is, change things or they won’t be changed. No one “deserves” something like Trump, but that’s not the question at issue.)
(They would be surprised and saddened by Trump, I think, but I think more so about the population who let things get so bad that he came to power than about the surprise that there were very bad people doing very bad things with government. Like I said, they were completely aware of things like ICE and how those things operate. That’s why they fought the war.)
King George was literally insane and you don’t think they could have comprehended Trump?!
Didnt read past “founding fathers”.
Are you in a cult or are you 12? They were slave owners who wanted to make themselves and their friends rich. The current administration is just the reflection of their vision.
I’m really not into deifying the founders, but I don’t think you are right. Privileged class for sure, but not this concentration
The US juridical system is not adequate to deal with Trump. If American courts would have dealt quick and precise with Trumps actions from the very start, his actions would have hit the wall way faster.
*JudicialI mistakenly corrected OP.
Juridical: relating to judicial proceedings and the administration of the law.
I used “Juridical” instead of “Judical” on purpose here. It’s the general system of law that failed, not just the judges and procedures.
Holy crap, TIL. A new word. Thanks!
TFW Brazil has a better legal system than the US.
Indeed. Their criminal (ex) president went to jail for the attempted insurrection.
It’s not adequate to deal with any sufficiently wealthy person really.
Which is another reason such wealth should be taxed away.
The system was sufficient before they stole the copper… it’s just that this is a bipartisan effort to position the economy for a coming storm centered around overpopulation of workers as compared to needed workers. Union busting is a bonus.
Most of us were well aware in 2016. But no one listened to us.
*listened
Woops, corrected now!
Sweet! Haha. I’m always so terrified of correcting anything. The Internet can get really upset.
I always appreciate good faith corrections and advice! But yeah, not everyone is… receptive to that, shall we say.
If everyone ignores the laws, then are the laws inadequate?
No system can survive when bad faith is at play. This isn’t a constitution problem.
It completely was. It just can’t cope with the president, and the congressmen and the judges at the same time. We’re in this mess because huge amounts of money got into politics. Something also allowed into place by corrupt politicians.
Correction: Feckless liberals and the broken system propping them up are not adequate to deal with a president as antisocial as Trump. You can bet your ass this shit would not fly 50 years ago.
Have you considered that 50 years ago there was no one as evil as Trump?
Uh… Richard Nixon? Henry Kissinger? Ronald fucking Reagan? TF are you talking about?
It may be du to them being president before I was looking closely, but with the few things I’m aware of, I find Trum more evil.
Would you care to enlighten me what made those mentioned by you as bad as Trump?
I don’t mean it in any sarcastical way, I honestly don’t know.Long story short: Trump is a fascist, but it was the actions of people like Nixon and Reagan that made a fascist like Trump inevitable by dealing untold and irreparable damage to the social and economic checks keeping the system from destroying itself. Kissinger was his own brand of evil, aiding in the killing of anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions. Suffice it to say that in no time period did America ever lack for absurd amounts of evil; the only difference was that the system and the people manning it had not yet lost the ability to defend their preferred kind of evil.
PS: I’m not trying to defend the US constitution; that document is beyond saving for many reasons, but any system will fail to maintain itself when the people manning it aren’t willing to defend it.
Thank you for going into greater detail.
I agree. It looks bleak and has been looking this way for some time with some exceptions on the way.
Their wikipedias are sufficient to learn from.
