4 ms·

When your whole system works by giving absolutely ridiculous amount of power to a single individual who has nobody above or at least on the side capable of inte

by kakacik 9mo ago

When your whole system works by giving absolutely ridiculous amount of power to a single individual who has nobody above or at least on the side capable of interfering and changing things, this is what you eventually get. Crossing fingers and praying given person isn't a complete psycho or worse is not going to cut it forever, is it. Especially when >50% of population welcomes such person with open arms, knowing well who is coming. Given what kind of garbage from human gene pool gets and thrives in high politics its more surprising the show lasted as long as it did. Now the question shouldn't be 'how much outraged we should be' since we get this situation for a year at this point, but rather what to do next, how we can shape future to avoid this. If there will be the time for such correction, which is a huge IF.

mindslight 9mo ago
I don't disagree with where you're coming from. But to be fair, our system did have separation of powers and rough legal accountability for most of the time it was accruing so much power. The fascists just managed to get enough of the Supreme Council on board to sweep these away under the guises of unitary executive theory and blanket immunity for their new president-king. So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.
- sarchertech 9mo ago
  > Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time. Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps. Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
  - mindslight 9mo ago
    One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on. I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil. One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
    - sarchertech 9mo ago
      Convincing the Federal government to voluntarily relinquish power, or forcing them to do so is probably the hardest and least likely possible change we could make to our system of government. Positing that as some kind of easier more realistic stopgap vs essentially any other reform is bordering on madness.
      - sigwinch 9mo ago
        Even though Ron Paul gets reelected, we do not know how he’d rule as a leader
      - mindslight 9mo ago
- AngryData 9mo ago
  Its every branch of the government. The federal government, largely through congressional legislation, has been amassing more and more power for longer than anyone has been alive, while willingly ceding large chunks of that power to the executive branch, while the executive was grooming and shaping the justice department. Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers. And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.
  - mindslight 9mo ago
    Sure. I agree, but I don't really get what larger point you're making. A "unitary executive-king" is still a drastic departure from the bureaucratic structures that had been accreting power. How I categorize the old system is bureaucratic authoritarianism - there was (/is) still arbitrary authoritarian (anti- Individual Liberty) power over our lives, but its exercise is bound up in bureaucracy that at least claims to be impartial and nominally answers to the courts. Whereas now we're dealing with autocratic authoritarianism - that same power is arbitrarily and capriciously wielded by the whims of a single demented career criminal.
leptons 9mo ago
If the Democrats didn't allow SCOTUS to become corrupted by the fascist right-wing, we wouldn't be in this situation. RBG refused to retire and died while Trump was president. That gave them one seat. Obama could have McConnel refused to let Obama replace Scalia after he died. I'm not sure that had to happen the way it went down.
- nullocator 9mo ago
  When was the ideal time for RBG to retire? Was it when Mitch McConnell was refusing to even hold hearings for any Obama nominee in the last years of his presidency? There is no indication that RBG retiring would have resulting in a confirmed Obama selected justice, it could have just resulted in Trump getting his picks earlier.
  - UncleMeat 9mo ago
    No. It was before that. She should have retired in 2009 or 2010 when Obama was in the white house and democrats controlled the senate.
    - atmavatar 9mo ago
      I would point out that even had RBG retired early enough for Obama to appoint a replacement, the court would still have Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in the majority. Sure, there may be a case here or there that would go the other way, but the vast majority of cases before this hypothetical court would be decided the same way as they have been, merely with a thinner majority.
      - UncleMeat 9mo ago
        Yes, RBG retiring would not have switched the court. But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority. It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely. I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.

by kakacik 9mo ago

mindslight 9mo ago

I don't disagree with where you're coming from. But to be fair, our system did have separation of powers and rough legal accountability for most of the time it was accruing so much power. The fascists just managed to get enough of the Supreme Council on board to sweep these away under the guises of unitary executive theory and blanket immunity for their new president-king. So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.

sarchertech 9mo ago
> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time. Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps. Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
- mindslight 9mo ago
  One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on. I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil. One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
  - sarchertech 9mo ago
    Convincing the Federal government to voluntarily relinquish power, or forcing them to do so is probably the hardest and least likely possible change we could make to our system of government. Positing that as some kind of easier more realistic stopgap vs essentially any other reform is bordering on madness.
    - sigwinch 9mo ago
      Even though Ron Paul gets reelected, we do not know how he’d rule as a leader
    - mindslight 9mo ago
AngryData 9mo ago
Its every branch of the government. The federal government, largely through congressional legislation, has been amassing more and more power for longer than anyone has been alive, while willingly ceding large chunks of that power to the executive branch, while the executive was grooming and shaping the justice department. Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers. And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.
- mindslight 9mo ago
  Sure. I agree, but I don't really get what larger point you're making. A "unitary executive-king" is still a drastic departure from the bureaucratic structures that had been accreting power. How I categorize the old system is bureaucratic authoritarianism - there was (/is) still arbitrary authoritarian (anti- Individual Liberty) power over our lives, but its exercise is bound up in bureaucracy that at least claims to be impartial and nominally answers to the courts. Whereas now we're dealing with autocratic authoritarianism - that same power is arbitrarily and capriciously wielded by the whims of a single demented career criminal.

leptons 9mo ago

If the Democrats didn't allow SCOTUS to become corrupted by the fascist right-wing, we wouldn't be in this situation. RBG refused to retire and died while Trump was president. That gave them one seat. Obama could have McConnel refused to let Obama replace Scalia after he died. I'm not sure that had to happen the way it went down.

nullocator 9mo ago
When was the ideal time for RBG to retire? Was it when Mitch McConnell was refusing to even hold hearings for any Obama nominee in the last years of his presidency? There is no indication that RBG retiring would have resulting in a confirmed Obama selected justice, it could have just resulted in Trump getting his picks earlier.
- UncleMeat 9mo ago
  No. It was before that. She should have retired in 2009 or 2010 when Obama was in the white house and democrats controlled the senate.
  - atmavatar 9mo ago
    I would point out that even had RBG retired early enough for Obama to appoint a replacement, the court would still have Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in the majority. Sure, there may be a case here or there that would go the other way, but the vast majority of cases before this hypothetical court would be decided the same way as they have been, merely with a thinner majority.
    - UncleMeat 9mo ago
      Yes, RBG retiring would not have switched the court. But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority. It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely. I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.