5 ms·

TBH The Right in the US has such a structural advantage, that Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de

TBH The Right in the US has such a structural advantage, that Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-facto repeal of the law. The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.

rayiner 1y ago
> Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-factor repeal of the law. Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- softwaredoug 1y ago
  I agree, I'm not sure it is surprising. (there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)
  - titzer 1y ago
    "oversight" Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.
    - walkabout 1y ago
      One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate. If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.
- galangalalgol 1y ago
  The difference is that uneven enforcement is the tool of autocrats. Ignoring the law breeds contempt for it. Madison said requiring a supermajority for normal legislation would poison democracy, and I think the modern usage filibuster has proven him correct. I hope the GOP ditches the whole thing, not just for continuing resolutions. The senate will no longer have any excuses for abdicating its responsibilities. Thrashing laws are a small price to pay. I do wish judicial appointments still required a supermajority.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Picking and choosing which laws to enforce is baked into the concept of prosecutorial discretion. There is a reason the country’s prosecutor in chief is an elected position. It was understood to be a fundamentally political office even in Jefferson’s day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-trump-comey/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-je... I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
    - estearum 1y ago
      That’s not true. Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources. They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.” They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists. In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
      - rayiner 1y ago
        > They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.” Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-law/ https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  In the Senate at least outside of a few carve outs, you really need 60 Senators to get anything passed not just a majority. The only reason the ACA ever passed was during the brief window they had 60 Senators
- jjk166 1y ago
  Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. They provide guidance to people as to what they can reasonably expect will and will not be permitted, and the obligations of various people to eachother. Laws need to be changeable, because the world changes, but that process is purposefully made somewhat difficult so that only worthwhile changes are made, so that the changes can be explicitly communicated, and those who make the changes can be both advised before and held accountable after. If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    > Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf “While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide- ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”
kranke155 1y ago
Because they now control the Congress and SCOTUS, there is effectively no recourse. Congress is paralysed and SCOTUS will almost always rule in favor of the Administration. They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
fsckboy 1y ago
[flagged]
- zzzeek 1y ago
  a giant 147000 square mile space like Montana with 1.1 M people, 2.8% the size of California's population, gets 2 Senators regardless. That is, the Senate gives representation to empty land. That's pretty structural !
  - revnode 1y ago
    Yeah, that's not how things work. Senate can't pass anything unless the House agrees and the House is representative of the population. Also, footnote, we've been structuring governments this way for thousands of years. Rome, etc.
    - wahnfrieden 1y ago
      The house is similarly disproportionate
      - revnode 1y ago
        How so?
        the_gastropod 1y ago
        The House is not as skewed as the Senate. But it still has a "rural" bias through two mechanisms: 1. gerrymandering, and 2. the 435 cap on the number of representatives. Both parties do gerrymander. But there are more "red" states than blue, so it systemically favors one party. The cap on reps also skews things. Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont all have less than 1/435th of the U.S. population, so they're over-represented in the House. That over-representation comes at the expense of big states like California being under-represented. You can see this effect by looking at the popular vote vs the representation in The House. In the 2016 election, Trump won the election with just 46.1% of the popular vote. Republicans maintained control of The House with 55.4% control. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote. And Democrats gained control with slightly less than that, 51.03% of The House. In the 2024 election, Trump won 49.81% of the popular vote, Republicans won 50.8% of seats in The House.
mullingitover 1y ago
It's not just a structural advantage, it's a de facto suspension of the Constitution. Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup. What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.
- jordanpg 1y ago
  This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better. If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
  - ssully 1y ago
    I think distilling in that far is missing the point that this is a republican and right wing issue. It doesn’t “just so happen” that republicans are in power while this is happening, they are the ones who are doing it.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    The essence of the problem is not political parties, we've had them for hundreds of years and nothing this bad has happened. The actual simplest essence of this problem is malignant narcissism and cult-like behavior embedded in political parties. Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but not actually a political party. Insofar as a two party system isn't ideal, it at least provides a level of stability. But when one of the two parties is an actual cult, then the whole thing falls over. Parties must not be cults. That's the root of our current predicament. > It just so happens This didn't just "happen", it was predicted far in advance, and not on the basis of parties but on the basis of antisocial personality disorders. For instance: https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-narcissist-251ec901dae7 https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... and https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissism-76b6fec76d0d https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissi... If we as a species are to flourish and prosper, we need to understand that our urgent and necessary task is transcending and dismantling of our narcissism, both individual and collective. Note the date, May 13, 2016 to 2018. Her body of work from that time predicts with extreme prescience what has come to pass. Thinking back to when she made these predictions, people called her crazy, alarmist, unprofessional, all ignored her warnings. And yet, she turned out to be 100% right, even predicting the insurrection years before J6. Even as Trump was calling for a mob to descend on Congress days before J6, people refused to believe it would happen. Yet she got it right just by being lucid about who Trump is at his core. How did she do it? She used her professional experience to recognize Trump as a malignant narcissist, and her lived experience as a Polish national who watched the rise of authoritarianism in her country to put 2 + 2 together. So it wasn't something that "just happened" as if it was only a matter of time before Democrats act this way. There are precise reagents needed to make it happen. Political parties are necessary but not sufficient. The cult leader is the necessary ingredient that was missing. People who knew what to look for recognized it early, called it out, predicted this would happen, and they were ignored. We can't rewrite that history now, we have to learn the lessons we missed. "It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control" is not the lesson. "A two party system where one of the parties turns into an actual cult destabilizes completely" is the lesson.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
We are, it appears now, a country of laws…uits.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  We have that, for now. The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.
everdrive 1y ago
You're not wrong, but Congress has been broken for a long, long time. Congress really doesn't do anything except for agree (if they've got a majority with the president) or disagree (if they're in the minority against the president) with the current president. They don't really make laws, they don't hold anyone accountable, they don't fund the government. They don't govern at all, they just try to keep getting re-elected.
- mulmen 1y ago
  This isn’t true though. Lots of legislation has been passed. Government shutdowns have become common but they’re not universal. Your absolutist take is observably false. It is worth looking deeper at who the obstructionists in congress actually are. A minority of bad actors can cause immense harm.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  They have subpoena power and a jail. They just refuse to exact accountability unless you're something critically important like a baseball player.

rayiner 1y ago

> Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-factor repeal of the law. Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
softwaredoug 1y ago
I agree, I'm not sure it is surprising. (there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)
- titzer 1y ago
  "oversight" Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.
  - walkabout 1y ago
    One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate. If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.
galangalalgol 1y ago
The difference is that uneven enforcement is the tool of autocrats. Ignoring the law breeds contempt for it. Madison said requiring a supermajority for normal legislation would poison democracy, and I think the modern usage filibuster has proven him correct. I hope the GOP ditches the whole thing, not just for continuing resolutions. The senate will no longer have any excuses for abdicating its responsibilities. Thrashing laws are a small price to pay. I do wish judicial appointments still required a supermajority.
- rayiner 1y ago
  Picking and choosing which laws to enforce is baked into the concept of prosecutorial discretion. There is a reason the country’s prosecutor in chief is an elected position. It was understood to be a fundamentally political office even in Jefferson’s day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr-trump-comey/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-je... I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
  - estearum 1y ago
    That’s not true. Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources. They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.” They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists. In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
    - rayiner 1y ago
      > They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.” Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-law/ https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
JustExAWS 1y ago
In the Senate at least outside of a few carve outs, you really need 60 Senators to get anything passed not just a majority. The only reason the ACA ever passed was during the brief window they had 60 Senators
jjk166 1y ago
Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. They provide guidance to people as to what they can reasonably expect will and will not be permitted, and the obligations of various people to eachother. Laws need to be changeable, because the world changes, but that process is purposefully made somewhat difficult so that only worthwhile changes are made, so that the changes can be explicitly communicated, and those who make the changes can be both advised before and held accountable after. If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
- rayiner 1y ago
  > Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf “While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide- ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”

kranke155 1y ago

Because they now control the Congress and SCOTUS, there is effectively no recourse. Congress is paralysed and SCOTUS will almost always rule in favor of the Administration. They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.

fsckboy 1y ago

[flagged]

zzzeek 1y ago
a giant 147000 square mile space like Montana with 1.1 M people, 2.8% the size of California's population, gets 2 Senators regardless. That is, the Senate gives representation to empty land. That's pretty structural !
- revnode 1y ago
  Yeah, that's not how things work. Senate can't pass anything unless the House agrees and the House is representative of the population. Also, footnote, we've been structuring governments this way for thousands of years. Rome, etc.
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    The house is similarly disproportionate
    - revnode 1y ago
      How so?
      - the_gastropod 1y ago
        The House is not as skewed as the Senate. But it still has a "rural" bias through two mechanisms: 1. gerrymandering, and 2. the 435 cap on the number of representatives. Both parties do gerrymander. But there are more "red" states than blue, so it systemically favors one party. The cap on reps also skews things. Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont all have less than 1/435th of the U.S. population, so they're over-represented in the House. That over-representation comes at the expense of big states like California being under-represented. You can see this effect by looking at the popular vote vs the representation in The House. In the 2016 election, Trump won the election with just 46.1% of the popular vote. Republicans maintained control of The House with 55.4% control. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 51.3% of the popular vote. And Democrats gained control with slightly less than that, 51.03% of The House. In the 2024 election, Trump won 49.81% of the popular vote, Republicans won 50.8% of seats in The House.

mullingitover 1y ago

It's not just a structural advantage, it's a de facto suspension of the Constitution. Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup. What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.

jordanpg 1y ago
This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better. If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
- ssully 1y ago
  I think distilling in that far is missing the point that this is a republican and right wing issue. It doesn’t “just so happen” that republicans are in power while this is happening, they are the ones who are doing it.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  The essence of the problem is not political parties, we've had them for hundreds of years and nothing this bad has happened. The actual simplest essence of this problem is malignant narcissism and cult-like behavior embedded in political parties. Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but not actually a political party. Insofar as a two party system isn't ideal, it at least provides a level of stability. But when one of the two parties is an actual cult, then the whole thing falls over. Parties must not be cults. That's the root of our current predicament. > It just so happens This didn't just "happen", it was predicted far in advance, and not on the basis of parties but on the basis of antisocial personality disorders. For instance: https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-narcissist-251ec901dae7 https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... and https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissism-76b6fec76d0d https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissi... If we as a species are to flourish and prosper, we need to understand that our urgent and necessary task is transcending and dismantling of our narcissism, both individual and collective. Note the date, May 13, 2016 to 2018. Her body of work from that time predicts with extreme prescience what has come to pass. Thinking back to when she made these predictions, people called her crazy, alarmist, unprofessional, all ignored her warnings. And yet, she turned out to be 100% right, even predicting the insurrection years before J6. Even as Trump was calling for a mob to descend on Congress days before J6, people refused to believe it would happen. Yet she got it right just by being lucid about who Trump is at his core. How did she do it? She used her professional experience to recognize Trump as a malignant narcissist, and her lived experience as a Polish national who watched the rise of authoritarianism in her country to put 2 + 2 together. So it wasn't something that "just happened" as if it was only a matter of time before Democrats act this way. There are precise reagents needed to make it happen. Political parties are necessary but not sufficient. The cult leader is the necessary ingredient that was missing. People who knew what to look for recognized it early, called it out, predicted this would happen, and they were ignored. We can't rewrite that history now, we have to learn the lessons we missed. "It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control" is not the lesson. "A two party system where one of the parties turns into an actual cult destabilizes completely" is the lesson.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

We are, it appears now, a country of laws…uits.

actionfromafar 1y ago
We have that, for now. The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.

everdrive 1y ago

You're not wrong, but Congress has been broken for a long, long time. Congress really doesn't do anything except for agree (if they've got a majority with the president) or disagree (if they're in the minority against the president) with the current president. They don't really make laws, they don't hold anyone accountable, they don't fund the government. They don't govern at all, they just try to keep getting re-elected.

mulmen 1y ago
This isn’t true though. Lots of legislation has been passed. Government shutdowns have become common but they’re not universal. Your absolutist take is observably false. It is worth looking deeper at who the obstructionists in congress actually are. A minority of bad actors can cause immense harm.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
They have subpoena power and a jail. They just refuse to exact accountability unless you're something critically important like a baseball player.