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This is the thin edge to a national police action. Crazy how little oversight there is over the executive branch (and this administration in particular).

by r00fus 6y ago

paxys 6y ago
The entire "checks and balances" system breaks down when a handful of Republicans in the Senate are complicit in everything that is going on.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  > ...system breaks down when a handful of Republicans... Sorry to burst your bubble, but it isn't just Republicans who resort to... creative executive strategies that are worth criticizing.
  - malnourish 6y ago
    I'm sorry, but "both sides" arguments are nothing but a deflection.
    - arminiusreturns 6y ago
      No, it really isn't, because in the end the oligarchs own both sides, full fucking stop. You can argue about the degree of harm, but almost always that approach is used to argue the degree of harm selectively about one particular partisan angle, and it's frankly bullshit. Obama just put on a nice face and was eloquent while he expanded the surveillance engine, the drone wars, the arms shipments to unstable third world countries, bailouts for billionaires, etc. Trump is brazen and up front about it, but the end result is still the same bullshit! Cops sending agent provocateurs in to justify kettling protestors happened under Obama too. That doesn't justify it in the Trump era either though! So tired of hearing this trite and cliched response anytime someone brings up that the corruption permeates the entirety of the policy elite establishment. The DNC and RNC (both corporations, never mentioned in the constitution) would rather work together in collusion than allow any real change to happen (as they did in the early 90s to control the debates), and until people wake up to the fact they won't be able to understand why nothing is changing. It just becomes a pendulum swing back and forth every few years while the inverted totalitarian kleptocratic oligarchic corporatists retain power in the shadows. Lets just spit some real facts here. Blackmail operations such as Epstein was at the front of, are a core part of how this has happened. He is a great example of how the corruption knows no party lines, but that's also why he was taken out, the story buried and convoluted, and half-assed coverup stories like netflix's latest doc are put out. The greatest thing the oligarchy fears is a united people... and the ol party lines and any other divide they can drum up is good at keeping us at each others throats instead of theirs. It's time to wake up and break out of the cycle. Or not. If not, we are Rome headed for a mighty and bloody collapse of epic proportions. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Top down compromise of a centralized system becomes increasingly trivial the further the compromise progresses.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Is it “deflecting” to point out how much Democrats benefit form gerrymandering while taking Republicans to task for the same thing? [0][1][2]. What about about senate confirmations[3][4][5]? [0] https://thefulcrum.us/worst-gerrymandering-districts-example?rebelltitem=10#rebelltitem10 https://thefulcrum.us/worst-gerrymandering-districts-example... [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-hate-gerrymanderingexcept-when-they-get-to-do-it https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-hate-gerrymanderinge... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/how-maryland-democrats-pulled-off-their-aggressive-gerrymander/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/how-m... [3] https://www.heritage.org/homeland-security/commentary/hypocrisy-the-nuclear-option https://www.heritage.org/homeland-security/commentary/hypocr... [4] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-nuclear-filibuster-rules/story?id=20964700 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-nuclear-filibuster-ru... [5] https://time.com/3701079/obama-filibuster/ https://time.com/3701079/obama-filibuster/ If we don’t wanna go there that’s fine I suppose, I just want to know where we’re gonna draw the line between “deflection” and having a substantive discussion on the gamesmanship going on inside the beltway without devolving into the usual brutish “my side good, your side bad”.
      - dlp211 6y ago
        You can't ascribe singular districts to Democrats gerrymandering. The ones in Ohio, Texas, Alabama, NC, Mich were all done by Republican legislatures, some using REDMap. And while Maryland is certainly an offender and they too should be subject to independent redistricting, comparing a single state with a concerted, organized, multistage effort using advanced mapping software designed to maximize your advantage is the kind of bullshit bothsiderism that the right and the apolitical love to use. Stop punishing one party for not being perfect but striving for better, but letting the other off for the most blatantly obvious destructive practices because that is who they are.
        dvtrn 6y ago
        Stop punishing one party for not being perfect but striving for better, but letting the other off for the most blatantly obvious destructive practices because that is who they are. Hang on, you think that’s what I’m doing here? I don’t think we have a thing to discuss if this is really the immediate conclusion you’re coming to, since it frames my entire position as antagonistic to anything but whatever critique you think should be made instead, and there’s no way out of that corner for me, now is there? How am I even supposed to respond to an assertion about what I’m doing when providing numerous sources for my position only to get boxed in as “letting the other off for the most blatantly obvious destructive practices”? I’m no partisan hack, Gerrymandering and Senate Procedure are probably the best examples of how both parties engage in pure unabated gamesmanship to get what they want while launching strikes against the other side for doing the exact same thing. Either argue the impact and convince me why the rules are inconsistently applied (as I’ve shown clearly was the case with Harry Reid changing Senate confirmation rules) or don’t, but leave the straw manning at the door.’ BOTH parties deserve a wag of the finger and a volume of criticism for their behavior where warranted. This should not be excused by anyone who pretends to give a damn about the country.
    - markus_zhang 6y ago
      Have to realize that they are two faces of the same shit, and the "Vote" route doesn't help either.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Call it deflecting, but it's true. Neither parties hands are clean.
- Robelius 6y ago
  I think that’s a little unfair. The executive branch has always taken more and more power. Obama was guiltily of it. Bush was guilty of it. And nearly every president before them. The expansion of executive powers us usually makes sense to the party in power, and doesn’t make sense to the minority party. But there was always an understanding that everyone was a rational actor with these powers. No one ever stopped and asked what would happen if someone a little more irrational now had these expanded powers.
  - munificent 6y ago
    > The executive branch has always taken more and more power. No, the judicial and legislative branches have ceded it. The whole point of checks and balances is the tacit understanding that each branch will naturally grow as much power as it can and it is the responsibility of the other branches to check it. Blaming the executive branch for growing its power is like blaming the seller for high prices in a free market — the system is designed presuming competition and selfish behavior.
    - loopz 6y ago
      Yet it happens and the system fails when last altruism and principles are erased. The same demons blame the victims.
    - opo 6y ago
      >No, the judicial and legislative branches have ceded it. Well, it is the executive branch that chooses the supreme court... For every John Marshall there has been on the court, there is likely a Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr with his famous quote “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job.”.
      - enraged_camel 6y ago
        >>Well, it is the executive branch chooses the supreme court... And the Senate that confirms the nominees.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  And the court has been packed, and executive agencies gutted of non-loyalists.
- munificent 6y ago
  > when a handful of Republicans in the Senate This is one of the really brilliant things the GOP has done. They've led us all to believe that it's just McConnell and a couple of other shitbags but that the rest of the Republicans are mostly OK. That's a deliberate smokescreen. Notice that the "handful of Republicans" always happen to be in red strongholds? McConnell volunteers to be the public face of the GOP's bad policies because they know his seat is secure. Meanwhile, all the other GOP Congresspeople who support those same awful policies but might risk losing an election can stay out of the news and pretend it's not their doing. McConnell was voted into his seat by a majority of the GOP Senators. They all know what they're doing.
  - rowawey 6y ago
    Yep. And there are no more "checks and balances" because POTUS stacks the SCOTUS, and POTUS and SOTUS work hand-in-glove. The last remaining hold-out is HOROTUS, but that can flip any session. Even so, D and R are both beholden to the American aristocratic wealth class for support, legitimacy, and power, so there is effectively no difference beyond a few, token, mild progressives in D who don't hold sway over the majority of neoliberals.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Yep. And there are no more "checks and balances" because POTUS stacks the SCOTUS, and POTUS and SOTUS work hand-in-glove. The last remaining hold-out is HOROTUS, but that can flip any session. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm warming up to the idea of the Democrats passing court-packing legislation for the Supreme and Appellate courts the next time they control both houses of Congress and the presidency. Especially if they can somehow establish a very strong super-majority requirement for all future judicial branch nominations that would be immune to stealth court-packing tactics like the Senate Republicans have been using. The prior institutional restraints have broken down, and balance needs to be restored and new restraints implemented if the system is going to survive.
      - refurb 6y ago
        That will never happen. FDR's own party shit bricks when he tried to stack the Supreme Court. He got his pee-pee smacked hard.
- refurb 6y ago
  Yup. Only the Republican Party is to blame for the system not working. Democrats have never done anything to game the system at all.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  You don't see democrats screaming about it either. Democrats love the police state and their usual trick is to rotate through who has to take the bad vote so that authoritarian measures barely pass while the bad rep doesn't keep sticking to the same people.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  > The entire "checks and balances" system breaks down when a handful of Republicans in the Senate are complicit in everything that is going on. If Democrat mayors and governors would just send in their own police to control the situation, there wouldn't be all this hand wringing.
  - edgefield0 6y ago
    Control the situation as in suppress the protests by whatever means necessary? Violate the protestors' constitutional First Amendment rights? Please explain.
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      There is a difference between protesters who are peaceful and rioters who are violent and destructive. Which do you think I mean? Edit: This mental trick of calling a person who throws a brick through a store window or sets fire to a cop car, a "protester", is so similar to the way people unbelievably attribute a "legal" status to someone who has crossed the southern border by bypassing a port of entry. Its like saying that a person who doesn't tolerate someone else's world view is anti-fascist, because a fascist is someone who tries to impose their own worldview on others.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - cycomanic 6y ago
        So what were your thoughts on Hong Kong?
        Fjolsvith 6y ago
        The same. Edit: So, rights have to be enumerated by a country's founding documents, and then protected by that country's government. Ultimately, though, the people are responsible to establish their own freedom when no freedom exists. Black people don't have the exclusive claim of persecution by police in the US. In fact, they suffer far fewer death by cop than white people. [1] Why do they feel they are singled out? Could it be a victim-stance mentality? 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  The Democrats are actively trying to give Trump even more police power. Just because they say some of the words you like doesn't mean they're on your side. https://sirota.substack.com/p/10-things-dems-could-do-right-now https://sirota.substack.com/p/10-things-dems-could-do-right-...
  - chillingeffect 6y ago
    some great points in there. we need more ppl thinking constructively like this.
- stelonix 6y ago
  Are the courts powerless too? Can't citizens sue the government? I don't know how exactly the 3 powers work on US, but over here you can also petition courts (including the Supreme Court) to judge whether a given decree by the executive is inconstitutional or not. How does it work in the US?
  - tlb 6y ago
    Citizens (and more often, organizations like the ACLU) can sue. But it takes 3+ years to get through the courts, so we’re still waiting for judgements on even the earliest abuses of this administration.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  In general "checks and balances" never work particularly well. Very few presidential democracies last more than 50 years. Once you have two branches of government that can both claim a democratic mandate but have different ideologies in a conflict you get a cycle of constitutional hardball then eventually one says "I have a democratic mandate to do this and you can't stop me" and the system fails. The US managed to avoid this for so long first, because of the good example of George Washinton in establishing norms to start with. Then we had parties that were highly partisan but non-ideological and mostly fighting over graft until the progressive era. Well, there was the brief era of ideological polarization between the Democrats and Republicans around the 1860 election but we all know how that turned out. From the progressive era through Nixon's "southern strategy" we had an era of unusually low partisanship with ideologically mixed parties. But since then the parties have been diverging and nowadays all the conservatives are in the Republican party and all the liberals are in the Democrat party. And hardball tactics like filibustering all the opposing bills in the senate has started. https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate/0/c5d62d8d91651c2f46cdb85b23a33a82e6487caf.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Filibust... We're in a pretty bad place and I'm not sure how we get out of it.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar or generic indignation. Such threads are basically all the same—people just repeat the same points they always do, and usually turn nasty. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
burmer 6y ago
And w stonewalling from the administration, which really needs to be cracked down on.
chooseaname 6y ago
Trump fires everyone involved in oversight that he can. What is amazing is he is allowed to.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Trump fires everyone involved in oversight that he can. What is amazing is he is allowed to. IIRC, the old special prosecutor law (passed after Watergate) did not allow the president to fire them, but it was allowed to expire after Ken Starr.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
I think it's all legal. Law says (?) drug crimes only unless DOJ asks you to expand in other crimes. So DOJ did. Scary what little known and reasonable provisions do when taken to the limit...
Iv 6y ago
And of course, DEA is mandated for that, at a time where many people explain that the war on drugs is actually a tool to enforce racist policies.
pstuart 6y ago
This is practice. Trump has no intention of ever leaving office, and he'll literally stop at nothing to ensure that. It's likely to get way worse before and if it gets better. I don't say that because I hate the man (which I admit that I do), I say it because he's telegraphed these intentions and I am not alone in this assessment. The coup is effectively complete, and now it's a matter of whether or not they can make it stick. This is not a partisan screed, this is a sober assessment of history unfolding.
- ninkendo 6y ago
  What gets me is how many people think “refusing to leave office” means he’ll declare himself emperor or something. It will be nothing close to that dramatic. It’ll be simple: he will claim there were irregularities in mail-in ballots and say that voter fraud was rampant, and that he will have to stay in office until it’s sorted out. His supporters will believe him. Conservative news outlets will toe the line and the republican congress will cooperate. He’s already priming the pump for this going on and on about how mail-in voting is “predominantly fraudulent” etc etc. Does anyone really think he will accept a defeat of any kind in November?
  - chooseaname 6y ago
    I think if he loses, what you say could definitely happen. What worries me though is that he won't need to. His base is excited right now. They'll always be his base. But a lot of people who would vote against him just aren't going to go out and vote, though.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    if he wins he'll win via the electoral college again and not the popular vote. There are too many people on the West and East coast for him (and probably any non-Democrat these days) to win the popular vote. If he loses he could call for a recount I guess but I believe the margin would be wide enough to make it unrealistic.
kcorey 6y ago
It's too late. America IS a police state. Haven't you seen the videos of police arresting, sitting, beating and otherwise mistreating the media? It's a done deal. Our only hope is to vote trump or and hope he goes.
- ozfive 6y ago
  Please read the 22nd amendment. As a matter of fact everyone that reads this please read the documents that our country is founded on. Here is an excerpt of an article from the Atlantic that explains what would happen in this case. "If Trump were inclined to overstay his term, the levers of power work in favor of removal. Because the president immediately and automatically loses his constitutional authority upon expiration of his term or after removal through impeachment, he would lack the power to direct the U.S. Secret Service or other federal agents to protect him. He would likewise lose his power, as the commander in chief of the armed forces, to order a military response to defend him. In fact, the newly minted president would possess those presidential powers. If necessary, the successor could direct federal agents to forcibly remove Trump from the White House. Now a private citizen, Trump would no longer be immune from criminal prosecution, and could be arrested and charged with trespassing in the White House. While even former presidents enjoy Secret Service protection, agents presumably would not follow an illegal order to protect one from removal from office." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/what-if-he-wont-go/606259/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/what-if-he...
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
There is a ton of oversight on the executive branch- by congress. The only problem is half of congress doesn't care because it's their guy.

This is the thin edge to a national police action. Crazy how little oversight there is over the executive branch (and this administration in particular).

by r00fus 6y ago

This is the thin edge to a national police action. Crazy how little oversight there is over the executive branch (and this administration in particular).

paxys 6y ago

The entire "checks and balances" system breaks down when a handful of Republicans in the Senate are complicit in everything that is going on.

microcolonel 6y ago
> ...system breaks down when a handful of Republicans... Sorry to burst your bubble, but it isn't just Republicans who resort to... creative executive strategies that are worth criticizing.
- malnourish 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but "both sides" arguments are nothing but a deflection.
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    No, it really isn't, because in the end the oligarchs own both sides, full fucking stop. You can argue about the degree of harm, but almost always that approach is used to argue the degree of harm selectively about one particular partisan angle, and it's frankly bullshit. Obama just put on a nice face and was eloquent while he expanded the surveillance engine, the drone wars, the arms shipments to unstable third world countries, bailouts for billionaires, etc. Trump is brazen and up front about it, but the end result is still the same bullshit! Cops sending agent provocateurs in to justify kettling protestors happened under Obama too. That doesn't justify it in the Trump era either though! So tired of hearing this trite and cliched response anytime someone brings up that the corruption permeates the entirety of the policy elite establishment. The DNC and RNC (both corporations, never mentioned in the constitution) would rather work together in collusion than allow any real change to happen (as they did in the early 90s to control the debates), and until people wake up to the fact they won't be able to understand why nothing is changing. It just becomes a pendulum swing back and forth every few years while the inverted totalitarian kleptocratic oligarchic corporatists retain power in the shadows. Lets just spit some real facts here. Blackmail operations such as Epstein was at the front of, are a core part of how this has happened. He is a great example of how the corruption knows no party lines, but that's also why he was taken out, the story buried and convoluted, and half-assed coverup stories like netflix's latest doc are put out. The greatest thing the oligarchy fears is a united people... and the ol party lines and any other divide they can drum up is good at keeping us at each others throats instead of theirs. It's time to wake up and break out of the cycle. Or not. If not, we are Rome headed for a mighty and bloody collapse of epic proportions. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Top down compromise of a centralized system becomes increasingly trivial the further the compromise progresses.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Is it “deflecting” to point out how much Democrats benefit form gerrymandering while taking Republicans to task for the same thing? [0][1][2]. What about about senate confirmations[3][4][5]? [0] https://thefulcrum.us/worst-gerrymandering-districts-example?rebelltitem=10#rebelltitem10 https://thefulcrum.us/worst-gerrymandering-districts-example... [1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-hate-gerrymanderingexcept-when-they-get-to-do-it https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-hate-gerrymanderinge... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/how-maryland-democrats-pulled-off-their-aggressive-gerrymander/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/how-m... [3] https://www.heritage.org/homeland-security/commentary/hypocrisy-the-nuclear-option https://www.heritage.org/homeland-security/commentary/hypocr... [4] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-nuclear-filibuster-rules/story?id=20964700 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-nuclear-filibuster-ru... [5] https://time.com/3701079/obama-filibuster/ https://time.com/3701079/obama-filibuster/ If we don’t wanna go there that’s fine I suppose, I just want to know where we’re gonna draw the line between “deflection” and having a substantive discussion on the gamesmanship going on inside the beltway without devolving into the usual brutish “my side good, your side bad”.
    - dlp211 6y ago
      You can't ascribe singular districts to Democrats gerrymandering. The ones in Ohio, Texas, Alabama, NC, Mich were all done by Republican legislatures, some using REDMap. And while Maryland is certainly an offender and they too should be subject to independent redistricting, comparing a single state with a concerted, organized, multistage effort using advanced mapping software designed to maximize your advantage is the kind of bullshit bothsiderism that the right and the apolitical love to use. Stop punishing one party for not being perfect but striving for better, but letting the other off for the most blatantly obvious destructive practices because that is who they are.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Stop punishing one party for not being perfect but striving for better, but letting the other off for the most blatantly obvious destructive practices because that is who they are. Hang on, you think that’s what I’m doing here? I don’t think we have a thing to discuss if this is really the immediate conclusion you’re coming to, since it frames my entire position as antagonistic to anything but whatever critique you think should be made instead, and there’s no way out of that corner for me, now is there? How am I even supposed to respond to an assertion about what I’m doing when providing numerous sources for my position only to get boxed in as “letting the other off for the most blatantly obvious destructive practices”? I’m no partisan hack, Gerrymandering and Senate Procedure are probably the best examples of how both parties engage in pure unabated gamesmanship to get what they want while launching strikes against the other side for doing the exact same thing. Either argue the impact and convince me why the rules are inconsistently applied (as I’ve shown clearly was the case with Harry Reid changing Senate confirmation rules) or don’t, but leave the straw manning at the door.’ BOTH parties deserve a wag of the finger and a volume of criticism for their behavior where warranted. This should not be excused by anyone who pretends to give a damn about the country.
  - markus_zhang 6y ago
    Have to realize that they are two faces of the same shit, and the "Vote" route doesn't help either.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Call it deflecting, but it's true. Neither parties hands are clean.
Robelius 6y ago
I think that’s a little unfair. The executive branch has always taken more and more power. Obama was guiltily of it. Bush was guilty of it. And nearly every president before them. The expansion of executive powers us usually makes sense to the party in power, and doesn’t make sense to the minority party. But there was always an understanding that everyone was a rational actor with these powers. No one ever stopped and asked what would happen if someone a little more irrational now had these expanded powers.
- munificent 6y ago
  > The executive branch has always taken more and more power. No, the judicial and legislative branches have ceded it. The whole point of checks and balances is the tacit understanding that each branch will naturally grow as much power as it can and it is the responsibility of the other branches to check it. Blaming the executive branch for growing its power is like blaming the seller for high prices in a free market — the system is designed presuming competition and selfish behavior.
  - loopz 6y ago
    Yet it happens and the system fails when last altruism and principles are erased. The same demons blame the victims.
  - opo 6y ago
    >No, the judicial and legislative branches have ceded it. Well, it is the executive branch that chooses the supreme court... For every John Marshall there has been on the court, there is likely a Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr with his famous quote “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job.”.
    - enraged_camel 6y ago
      >>Well, it is the executive branch chooses the supreme court... And the Senate that confirms the nominees.
nerdponx 6y ago
And the court has been packed, and executive agencies gutted of non-loyalists.
munificent 6y ago
> when a handful of Republicans in the Senate This is one of the really brilliant things the GOP has done. They've led us all to believe that it's just McConnell and a couple of other shitbags but that the rest of the Republicans are mostly OK. That's a deliberate smokescreen. Notice that the "handful of Republicans" always happen to be in red strongholds? McConnell volunteers to be the public face of the GOP's bad policies because they know his seat is secure. Meanwhile, all the other GOP Congresspeople who support those same awful policies but might risk losing an election can stay out of the news and pretend it's not their doing. McConnell was voted into his seat by a majority of the GOP Senators. They all know what they're doing.
- rowawey 6y ago
  Yep. And there are no more "checks and balances" because POTUS stacks the SCOTUS, and POTUS and SOTUS work hand-in-glove. The last remaining hold-out is HOROTUS, but that can flip any session. Even so, D and R are both beholden to the American aristocratic wealth class for support, legitimacy, and power, so there is effectively no difference beyond a few, token, mild progressives in D who don't hold sway over the majority of neoliberals.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Yep. And there are no more "checks and balances" because POTUS stacks the SCOTUS, and POTUS and SOTUS work hand-in-glove. The last remaining hold-out is HOROTUS, but that can flip any session. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm warming up to the idea of the Democrats passing court-packing legislation for the Supreme and Appellate courts the next time they control both houses of Congress and the presidency. Especially if they can somehow establish a very strong super-majority requirement for all future judicial branch nominations that would be immune to stealth court-packing tactics like the Senate Republicans have been using. The prior institutional restraints have broken down, and balance needs to be restored and new restraints implemented if the system is going to survive.
    - refurb 6y ago
      That will never happen. FDR's own party shit bricks when he tried to stack the Supreme Court. He got his pee-pee smacked hard.
refurb 6y ago
Yup. Only the Republican Party is to blame for the system not working. Democrats have never done anything to game the system at all.
tehjoker 6y ago
You don't see democrats screaming about it either. Democrats love the police state and their usual trick is to rotate through who has to take the bad vote so that authoritarian measures barely pass while the bad rep doesn't keep sticking to the same people.
Fjolsvith 6y ago
> The entire "checks and balances" system breaks down when a handful of Republicans in the Senate are complicit in everything that is going on. If Democrat mayors and governors would just send in their own police to control the situation, there wouldn't be all this hand wringing.
- edgefield0 6y ago
  Control the situation as in suppress the protests by whatever means necessary? Violate the protestors' constitutional First Amendment rights? Please explain.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    There is a difference between protesters who are peaceful and rioters who are violent and destructive. Which do you think I mean? Edit: This mental trick of calling a person who throws a brick through a store window or sets fire to a cop car, a "protester", is so similar to the way people unbelievably attribute a "legal" status to someone who has crossed the southern border by bypassing a port of entry. Its like saying that a person who doesn't tolerate someone else's world view is anti-fascist, because a fascist is someone who tries to impose their own worldview on others.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      So what were your thoughts on Hong Kong?
      - Fjolsvith 6y ago
        The same. Edit: So, rights have to be enumerated by a country's founding documents, and then protected by that country's government. Ultimately, though, the people are responsible to establish their own freedom when no freedom exists. Black people don't have the exclusive claim of persecution by police in the US. In fact, they suffer far fewer death by cop than white people. [1] Why do they feel they are singled out? Could it be a victim-stance mentality? 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Consultant32452 6y ago
The Democrats are actively trying to give Trump even more police power. Just because they say some of the words you like doesn't mean they're on your side. https://sirota.substack.com/p/10-things-dems-could-do-right-now https://sirota.substack.com/p/10-things-dems-could-do-right-...
- chillingeffect 6y ago
  some great points in there. we need more ppl thinking constructively like this.
stelonix 6y ago
Are the courts powerless too? Can't citizens sue the government? I don't know how exactly the 3 powers work on US, but over here you can also petition courts (including the Supreme Court) to judge whether a given decree by the executive is inconstitutional or not. How does it work in the US?
- tlb 6y ago
  Citizens (and more often, organizations like the ACLU) can sue. But it takes 3+ years to get through the courts, so we’re still waiting for judgements on even the earliest abuses of this administration.
Symmetry 6y ago
In general "checks and balances" never work particularly well. Very few presidential democracies last more than 50 years. Once you have two branches of government that can both claim a democratic mandate but have different ideologies in a conflict you get a cycle of constitutional hardball then eventually one says "I have a democratic mandate to do this and you can't stop me" and the system fails. The US managed to avoid this for so long first, because of the good example of George Washinton in establishing norms to start with. Then we had parties that were highly partisan but non-ideological and mostly fighting over graft until the progressive era. Well, there was the brief era of ideological polarization between the Democrats and Republicans around the 1860 election but we all know how that turned out. From the progressive era through Nixon's "southern strategy" we had an era of unusually low partisanship with ideologically mixed parties. But since then the parties have been diverging and nowadays all the conservatives are in the Republican party and all the liberals are in the Democrat party. And hardball tactics like filibustering all the opposing bills in the senate has started. https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate/0/c5d62d8d91651c2f46cdb85b23a33a82e6487caf.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Filibust... We're in a pretty bad place and I'm not sure how we get out of it.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar or generic indignation. Such threads are basically all the same—people just repeat the same points they always do, and usually turn nasty. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

burmer 6y ago

And w stonewalling from the administration, which really needs to be cracked down on.

chooseaname 6y ago

Trump fires everyone involved in oversight that he can. What is amazing is he is allowed to.

ardy42 6y ago
> Trump fires everyone involved in oversight that he can. What is amazing is he is allowed to. IIRC, the old special prosecutor law (passed after Watergate) did not allow the president to fire them, but it was allowed to expire after Ken Starr.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

I think it's all legal. Law says (?) drug crimes only unless DOJ asks you to expand in other crimes. So DOJ did. Scary what little known and reasonable provisions do when taken to the limit...

Iv 6y ago

And of course, DEA is mandated for that, at a time where many people explain that the war on drugs is actually a tool to enforce racist policies.

pstuart 6y ago

This is practice. Trump has no intention of ever leaving office, and he'll literally stop at nothing to ensure that. It's likely to get way worse before and if it gets better. I don't say that because I hate the man (which I admit that I do), I say it because he's telegraphed these intentions and I am not alone in this assessment. The coup is effectively complete, and now it's a matter of whether or not they can make it stick. This is not a partisan screed, this is a sober assessment of history unfolding.

ninkendo 6y ago
What gets me is how many people think “refusing to leave office” means he’ll declare himself emperor or something. It will be nothing close to that dramatic. It’ll be simple: he will claim there were irregularities in mail-in ballots and say that voter fraud was rampant, and that he will have to stay in office until it’s sorted out. His supporters will believe him. Conservative news outlets will toe the line and the republican congress will cooperate. He’s already priming the pump for this going on and on about how mail-in voting is “predominantly fraudulent” etc etc. Does anyone really think he will accept a defeat of any kind in November?
- chooseaname 6y ago
  I think if he loses, what you say could definitely happen. What worries me though is that he won't need to. His base is excited right now. They'll always be his base. But a lot of people who would vote against him just aren't going to go out and vote, though.
- chasd00 6y ago
  if he wins he'll win via the electoral college again and not the popular vote. There are too many people on the West and East coast for him (and probably any non-Democrat these days) to win the popular vote. If he loses he could call for a recount I guess but I believe the margin would be wide enough to make it unrealistic.

kcorey 6y ago

It's too late. America IS a police state. Haven't you seen the videos of police arresting, sitting, beating and otherwise mistreating the media? It's a done deal. Our only hope is to vote trump or and hope he goes.

ozfive 6y ago
Please read the 22nd amendment. As a matter of fact everyone that reads this please read the documents that our country is founded on. Here is an excerpt of an article from the Atlantic that explains what would happen in this case. "If Trump were inclined to overstay his term, the levers of power work in favor of removal. Because the president immediately and automatically loses his constitutional authority upon expiration of his term or after removal through impeachment, he would lack the power to direct the U.S. Secret Service or other federal agents to protect him. He would likewise lose his power, as the commander in chief of the armed forces, to order a military response to defend him. In fact, the newly minted president would possess those presidential powers. If necessary, the successor could direct federal agents to forcibly remove Trump from the White House. Now a private citizen, Trump would no longer be immune from criminal prosecution, and could be arrested and charged with trespassing in the White House. While even former presidents enjoy Secret Service protection, agents presumably would not follow an illegal order to protect one from removal from office." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/what-if-he-wont-go/606259/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/what-if-he...

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

There is a ton of oversight on the executive branch- by congress. The only problem is half of congress doesn't care because it's their guy.