6 ms·

Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!

cheema33 1y ago
> 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.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  How do you mitigate when 2/3rd of voters support, at least tacitly, the lawlessness?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 1y ago
    You don't. That's democracy.
  - bilekas 1y ago
    I don't know exactly which support level you mean but https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker would paint a different picture. That said, who knows how valid even these numbers are.
    - parineum 1y ago
      The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of. > By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0] Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power). You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from. [0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-americans-view-congress-the-president-state-and-local-political-leaders/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
    - deathanatos 1y ago
      They're likely referencing that 2/3rds of voters either explicitly voted for Trump (≈31.9%), or implicitly support the result of the election by having not voted at all (≈35.9%). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...)
  - PaulRobinson 1y ago
    This is easy. Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse. The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved. I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free. Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place. Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly. The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems. An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled. Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps. And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats. This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not? The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..." Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done. I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
  - anon-3988 1y ago
    The next time someone says "the other guy's not much better!" I am going to strangle and choke them.
    - cheema33 1y ago
      Same. No leader will be perfect. We always have to pick between the lesser of two evils. Trump is at level 10. And people were like Oh but Kamala has faults too. MAGA have screwed the country and themselves. Farmers who voted for Trump are realizing this now. The rest will find out soon when the shit hits the fan in a big way.
- selectodude 1y ago
  it was joke. i am well aware.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  > I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming. Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean... I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people" More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
    - rrix2 1y ago
      you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified. https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/ https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/
  - wsatb 1y ago
    They did not envision it to be used in its original state, and it hasn’t. But it also hasn’t changed much in a long time.
- outside2344 1y ago
  The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Dissenting representatives may very well need Secret Service protection to stay alive. Good luck getting that protection approved. (The Epstein issue is a special case - some of the MAGA base still believes it was not a hoax and that Epstein was not alone in his crimes.)
  - itsoktocry 1y ago
    >1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them. What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!" You got out-voted.
    - onethought 1y ago
      If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population). You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you". You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
    - shadowgovt 1y ago
      The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval. The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general. (In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
- rayiner 1y ago
  George Washington could have declared himself King if he had wanted, so yes, the founders absolutely saw this coming.
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
  They probably also didn’t see it coming that their constitution would be considered just as sacred as the Bible, instead of a document that was to be adapted. And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
- thayne 1y ago
  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.
  - mullingitover 1y ago
    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.
    - walkabout 1y ago
      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.
      - mullingitover 1y ago
        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.
        kridsdale1 1y ago
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  Our founders recognized our compromisestitution was vulnerable to this, they didn't predict a nationalist brainwashing campaign to call compromise a beneficial thing as part of a national identity They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
  - Supermancho 1y ago
    This is the painful period of time where the US would have to collectively realize they are missing controls on the branches, in the form of amendments. Unfortunately, it looks like the people are lazy. They rather lose the union, before agreeing there really is a problem to be solved. Otherwise, there's no way to know there's a problem. Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
    - yieldcrv 1y ago
      currently impossible as the people that can actually bridge consensus are vilified as not being aligned to a party or excusing the actions of a particular party solely by not adding power to the other party partisans are loud but they are not winning friends and influencing people, the parties are only losing supporters, it just takes more people to realize that they aren't alone as independents are the largest bloc now but have no representation to notice reminder for anyone passing by, everyone knows how the parties are different, it is still valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
jayd16 1y ago
Third time's the charm, I guess?

> 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.

lotsofpulp 1y ago
How do you mitigate when 2/3rd of voters support, at least tacitly, the lawlessness?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 1y ago
  You don't. That's democracy.
- bilekas 1y ago
  I don't know exactly which support level you mean but https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker would paint a different picture. That said, who knows how valid even these numbers are.
  - parineum 1y ago
    The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of. > By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0] Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power). You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from. [0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-americans-view-congress-the-president-state-and-local-political-leaders/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
  - deathanatos 1y ago
    They're likely referencing that 2/3rds of voters either explicitly voted for Trump (≈31.9%), or implicitly support the result of the election by having not voted at all (≈35.9%). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...)
- PaulRobinson 1y ago
  This is easy. Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse. The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved. I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free. Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place. Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly. The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems. An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled. Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps. And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats. This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not? The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..." Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done. I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
- anon-3988 1y ago
  The next time someone says "the other guy's not much better!" I am going to strangle and choke them.
  - cheema33 1y ago
    Same. No leader will be perfect. We always have to pick between the lesser of two evils. Trump is at level 10. And people were like Oh but Kamala has faults too. MAGA have screwed the country and themselves. Farmers who voted for Trump are realizing this now. The rest will find out soon when the shit hits the fan in a big way.
selectodude 1y ago
it was joke. i am well aware.
candiddevmike 1y ago
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming. Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean... I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people" More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
  - rrix2 1y ago
    you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified. https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/ https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/
- wsatb 1y ago
  They did not envision it to be used in its original state, and it hasn’t. But it also hasn’t changed much in a long time.
outside2344 1y ago
The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Dissenting representatives may very well need Secret Service protection to stay alive. Good luck getting that protection approved. (The Epstein issue is a special case - some of the MAGA base still believes it was not a hoax and that Epstein was not alone in his crimes.)
- itsoktocry 1y ago
  >1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them. What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!" You got out-voted.
  - onethought 1y ago
    If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population). You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you". You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval. The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general. (In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
rayiner 1y ago
George Washington could have declared himself King if he had wanted, so yes, the founders absolutely saw this coming.
FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
They probably also didn’t see it coming that their constitution would be considered just as sacred as the Bible, instead of a document that was to be adapted. And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
thayne 1y ago
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.
- mullingitover 1y ago
  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.
  - walkabout 1y ago
    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.
    - mullingitover 1y ago
      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.
      - kridsdale1 1y ago
yieldcrv 1y ago
Our founders recognized our compromisestitution was vulnerable to this, they didn't predict a nationalist brainwashing campaign to call compromise a beneficial thing as part of a national identity They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
- Supermancho 1y ago
  This is the painful period of time where the US would have to collectively realize they are missing controls on the branches, in the form of amendments. Unfortunately, it looks like the people are lazy. They rather lose the union, before agreeing there really is a problem to be solved. Otherwise, there's no way to know there's a problem. Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
  - yieldcrv 1y ago
    currently impossible as the people that can actually bridge consensus are vilified as not being aligned to a party or excusing the actions of a particular party solely by not adding power to the other party partisans are loud but they are not winning friends and influencing people, the parties are only losing supporters, it just takes more people to realize that they aren't alone as independents are the largest bloc now but have no representation to notice reminder for anyone passing by, everyone knows how the parties are different, it is still valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same

jayd16 1y ago

Third time's the charm, I guess?