After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.
The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.
Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.
The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.
Do we have any evidence this initiative was ever staffed and effective?
We’ve extended a lot of credit to a vested institution to police itself. That’s not worked out in other matters, such as warrantless wiretapping, so why do you think this is effective here?
And why would you discredit third parties - especially those designed to be watchdogs?
I can see this initiative being an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. And, I’d imagine closing this reporting portal won’t deter journalists - especially those on the frontline like WikiLeaks - from reporting on incidents.
Defund the organization in charge of checking and follow-ups is one thing, but its complete removal just smell of incompetence or acknowledging of wrongdoing, or some sort of performance.
And the response is also baffling. "sorry we migrated it systems and accidentally took it down" is the handwave i expected. not "we follow the law regardless so it's not needed".
I obviously do not condone the behavior of taking down such a website. I truly wish such reports were taking with the utmost severity.
As evidence, look what happened to those that were involved in the violation of human rights in Abu Ghraib Prision [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
This week we took down the "Warcrime report form" because its hosting costs the same as the office coffee machine maintenance.
.. oo gee, mabie that one sounds a bit important. perhaps I should leave that running.
On a weekly basis now, they are blowing up civilian boats without any evidence wrong doing. Even if they had evidence, it still wouldn’t warrant using hellfire missiles on civilian ships, especially when the U.S. navy or coastguard is more than capable of intercept these ships.
And someone out there is cheering for this, I'm sure.
There’s a lot of ifs in there though, and a lot of implied honesty just for record keeping. We’re all discovering (again) that implied honesty in governance will always be abused.
The Trump admin is demonstrably pro-warcrime.
We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.
They are conservatives and push for conservative agenda. Conservatives wanted them on the court so that they can make decisions like this.
E.g., letting people who attacked police officers on Jan 6 out of prison is about as anti-conservative as you get.
I was trying to point out that conservative as a political philosophy != whatever Fox news preaches this month, but perhaps the word is used differently in the US..
Anyway point is, I'm sure the post you responded to used the word conservative more in the way I'm used to (European way?), thus your cross-talk.
When exactly was that last time? Note that rule of law would include demands that police follows the law too. As far as I can tell, it was never rule of law in the sense of "everyone must follow the law". It was "people we dont like must follow the law and we will max punishments for them".
> letting people who attacked police officers on Jan 6 out of prison is about as anti-conservative as you get.
Only because this time, police was standing against what conservatives wanted. When it was helping them, yes, it was different.
They are conservatives. People that care about things like small governments and fiscal responsibility are not. It's sad when somebody takes control over a group you identify with and changes it's goals but you're one person versus millions. The word doesn't mean what it used to.
Republican partisan-propaganda media after anti-trust de-fanging (mid ‘70s) and media deregulation (‘80s-‘00s) became huge, and cultivated an electorate that wanted Trump but had to settle for tepidly-socially-conservative neoliberal Republicans. Such voters would tell you all day long about how we should just build a border wall (or mine it…), cut trade and foreign military engagements (though those have some cross-aisle appeal), question why we extend civil rights and due process to [pick a group], tell you we should use the military against protesters in cities, wonder why anyone opposes cops beating suspects unless they love crime, and so on, and they’d tell you that stuff many years before Trump’s 2016 run.
I know leftists like to describe these sorts of phenomena (including Hitler's rise) as all part of the capitalist overlords' master plans, but that's not the most accurate description. Capitalists like Andreessen will cynically exploit it and hop on the bandwagon and benefit from it to the extent they can, but right-wing populist authoritarianism is its own beast, and they're just trying to position themselves as along for the ride rather than in its jaws. The regime is happy to reward capitalist loyalists and I do not deny there is a mutualism occurring, but it is more complex than a movement centered around capitalism.
Impeachment by itself has been shown to accomplish nothing. There is no other mechanism except conviction by the Senate to address constitutional or legal violations made by the president.
Also no president has ever been impeached by a House which is controlled by a majority of the same party of the President. If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Edit: “Approval voting” is the appropriate escape hatch from 2-party politics. It lets you get rid of primaries entirely and run all the top-n candidates who have the greatest number of valid nomination signatures. Its advantage over range-voting/etc is that it is dead-simple to explain to voters: Put a checkmark next to any candidate that you're "okay" with. The candidate with the most checkmarks wins.
Maybe you didn't mean the system as broadly.
If it’s your team or the “worse” team, you tolerate any flaw in your team.
If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over (for example see Reform vs Conservative parties in the UK, not that I am thrilled with the underlying direction) then there is an alternative: cut bait and condemn what used to be “your team”, and start a new one.
That's exactly what happened though -- the MAGA party took over. Conservatives "cut bait" with traditional Republicans, condemned them (see how they talk about Liz and Dick Cheney or even GWB, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, their own presidential nominees), and started a new party within the rotting corpse of the old GOP. There's still some "Republican" branding around but if you pay attention they're not waving "Republican" flags or wearing "Republican" hats anymore.
On the other hand, with IRV or preference voting, second parties can form without spoiling the vote for their ideologically most aligned alternatives. This allows for a much more seamless shift.
Really in the US there should be at least 4 parties formed from the corpses of the big two, if not more.
Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but seats should be proportional to the vote. If you have 100 seats, that party only getting 5% of the votes should also have 5% of the seats.
In the country where I live, people do consider themselves leftist, centrists, or right-wing, but a vast majority only decides what specific party to vote during the campaign.
We have the opposite issue, since there is not electoral threshold, we now have a lot of small and middle-sized parties, making it harder to form a coalition. (Would be possible to address with an electoral threshold of 2-5%.)
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/past-proj...
Having a bad system is one thing. Having a bad system and no one able or willing to fix it is worse.
That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.
>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.
Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older.
Most people I talk with about it seem divided along the lines of morality in terms of the interaction and level of consent, rather than along debate over the security risks. Security risk seems like a valid point of concern to me.
That risk could be mitigated by a president being open about their promiscuity with both family and the public during their campaign - e.g. when both Russia and USA attempted to sextort and blackmail Sukarno (the president of the Philippines) he was delighted that his encounters were filmed and requested extra copies of the kompromat.
I've picked up on that too. Which, in my opinion is strange... she was 22 or 23 wasn't she? We just have to wait another 2 generations, and those will think themselves still children at 35.
I don't get the impression from talking with younger Democratic voters that they would generally be as concerned with issues of consent if it was a 22 year-old sex worker (where it's purely a transactional relationship) or 22-year old pop star (where their career isn't particularly threatened by the President's favor).
With a White House intern, there's a potential element of silent or implied coercion which puts into question whether enthusiastic consent was freely given. Similar to the national security risk - regardless if it was/wasn't, it also calls into question the President's judgment for why they would engage in such morally ambiguous behavior - it would also be fairly difficult for the President to even know themselves whether the intern is feeling coerced or not.
You have to be a very special kind of person to break rank.
People get the leaders they deserve
Representatives would be more representative if not for gerrymandering.
As for returning back to the original state appointment of senators, that is required for the senate to appropriately represent the state government at the federal level.
The original house apportionment had representatives that had about 35000 people. The size of the house was locked at 435 in 1913. Before then the number of representatives grew slower than population but still grew. After the last 2020 census there are 761,000 people per representative. The unevenness of how many constituents a representative from Wyoming has vs a representative from California has is a point of contention in higher population states. The complaint is that the representatives from smaller states have more proportional power. I think that is a bit ridiculous but that is what some Californian's told me. Increasing the size of the house to have a more proportional representation would alleviate that point of contention between states.
Gerrymandering is a side effect of not increasing the size of the house.
It’s either free and people are actively choosing this or they are not free and choosing comfort of slavery than risking death for freedom
“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78321-now-there-s-one-thing...
Video version: https://youtu.be/rVXekzwkz10?si=90VqlzOLiUS_7yFx
It has been very clearly shown to be a futile formality that only makes the ones doing it look even more powerless and worthy of mockery in the eyes of the other side and their supporters.
In a bygone era, impeachment would rely on concepts of shame, responsibility and public duty - it would be unimaginable that person that was impeached does not step down from the position and likely from political foreground fully - from the moral and social weight of that consequence.
We've seen last 2 times how thoroughly that weight no longer exists in modern society/politics.
Without criminal responsibility, there is no responsibility left at all.
There are plenty of laws being ignored. Tariffs being the most obvious.
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.
> 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-american...
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.
It does not look great, but I find risks mostly economical (not only in USA, everywhere) - if the situation will deteriorate even more abruptly (considering it already did a bit due to the pandemic "shock") then we will have a mess.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.
(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.)
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.
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.
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).
The founders didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.
And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
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.
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.
They have always done what the US should do: keep the votes on a judgment private, so opinions speak for the court as a whole, and they don't let the losers have a soapbox by publishing dissents.
As a cherry on top, they enforce a mandatory retirement age of 70.
These factors make their court an actually apolitical body in a way that's in hilariously stark contrat to the US court. The US court is what you'd make if your entire goal was to turn all its judgments into political theatre.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Court_(Austria)
They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
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
This administration has set the standard that the justice department can be weaponized against political enemies. The ratchet only goes one way in American politics, presidents never relinquish the powers claimed by their predecessors.
Unless they are granted a blanket pardon beforehand.
Then all you can really do is an "audit" for who did what, from which no charges can be laid.
The whole concept of "international law" is polite fiction anyway, the reality has always been "the strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must".
The idea of a blanket pardon is absurd on its face and we're only allowing it because we're allowing political prosecution.
In reality stuff like this feels like the beginning of an end.
I seriously don't know how anyone can look at what is happening right now and be okay with it.
- Signed, the side that tried to throw a candidate in prison.
That's an argument about the degradation of the rule of law, taking as a prior that the rule of law won't degrade. It's... unpersuasive. The end goal of this kind of thinking is that the other side never does take control, ever.
The current administration pretty clearly does not intend to give up power. They tried to evade democracy once already, and have fixed the mistakes this time.
Whether they will be successful or not is unknowable. But that's the plan. And the determining factor is very unlikely to be the normal operation of American civil society. Winning elections is, probably, not enough anymore.
Trump third term being one.
We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.
Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.
(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)
That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood the "who watches the watchers" problem and created a system without any such single point of failure. The ultimate backstop in our political system is not the law, but instead frequent elections. Congress writes the law, the President enforces the law, and the Judiciary interprets the law. If the President does a bad job of enforcing the law, the recourse is elections (or, as a last resort, impeachment).
Most people do not believe in the religion of humanist universalism.
This of course does not apply to Presidential elections. The President has multiple times indicated disdain for elections, his party has used "third term and beyond", his supporters have openly floated the idea of repealing the 22A, he's called himself "king" and "dictator".
The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now.
> or, as a last resort, impeachment
"a servile congress" — they understand impeachment. If an attempted coup doesn't get impeachment, nothing will. Regardless, the GOP is going along with the president, so impeachment isn't something that's going to happen.
What has it done? In 2024, Republicans got 50.5% of the seats and 51.3% of the two-party Congressional popular vote. The delta between a party’s share of the popular vote and its share of House seats is much smaller since 2000 than it was for most of the 20th century: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Po...
> The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now
The VRA requires racially discriminatory gerrymandering and is probably unconstitutional in that respect. The VRA is the product of an era where white democrats would discriminate against black democrats even though they shared a party. Today, gerrymandering is based on political party, not race. If black people voted 80% republican, red states would happily gerrymander out affluent college-educated whites in their favor.
The founders were right that nobody can be trusted to neutrally enforce “the law.” If you could trust Harvard graduates as a class to do that, there would be no reason for checks and balances or separation of powers.
Well my point is two-fold. First, what you say here is my point, all branches need an _enforcement_ arm. Today Congress has the Sergeant at Arms and courts have bailiffs and may deputize members of the Executive Branch.
However that's clearly inadequate in the face of the Executive's current balance of power. A rebalancing is necessary imo.
Could that result in a Roman-esque problem of the three branches having "tug of wars" with each other's law enforcement arm, but I don't think so. We have this problem today with the dozens of law enforcement organizations within the Executive...which brings me to my second point!
My second point is that carrying out the law in the Executive was clearly the wrong choice. The Legislative branch should actually carry out the law, i.e. USPS should live under a committee in Congress, and mail fraud would continue to be prosecuted by the Executive.
I'll caveat that I'm had waiving a lot here, but I hope we can all agree at least on the problem statement; too much power has concentrated in the Executive and _drastic_ measures would be required to resolve that situation.
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.
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.
(there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)
Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.
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.
I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
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…
Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: 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.”).
It does not say "we don't think small companies can behave monopolistically so we aren't enforcing the law on them."
President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
I will reiterate the plain language of the United States Constitution: [the President] SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
SHALL does not mean MAY or AT HIS DISCRETION or any such thing.
He didn’t enforce the ASA because he disagreed with it, just like Jimmy Carter didn’t prosecute people for selective service violations because he disagreed with it. It wasn’t because the resources weren’t available to enforce those laws.
For example, if Congress had appropriated funds specifically for doing those things, the executive would be obligated to do them, because it’d be unambiguous as to whether resources existed to do them.
This is again an absolutely unambiguous consequence of Congress’s Constitutional control of spending and of the Take Care Clause.
What you are describing is effectively a line-item veto, which doesn’t exist in the US.
So far all the evidence you’ve posted is actually evidence of my argument, not yours.
But we know the motivation because Jefferson wrote it down. It wasn’t resource management, it was opposition to the law on principle.
Here's why: because it's not!
Here's SCOTUS in Kendall v United States:
> To contend that the obligations imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed implies a power to forbid their execution is a novel construction of the Constitution, and is entirely inadmissible.
> "This doctrine cannot receive the sanction of this Court. It would be vesting in the President a dispensing power which has no countenance for its support in any part of the Constitution, and is asserting a principle which, if carried out in its results to all cases falling within it, would be clothing the President with a power to control the legislation of Congress and paralyze the administration of justice."
> The result of the cases of McIntire v. Wood and McCluny v. Silliman clearly is that the [court's authority to command an officer of the United States] to perform a specific act required by a law of the United States is within the scope of the judicial powers of the United States under the Constitution"
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.
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
“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.”
No it doesn't. The laws are statements of what people in power will do under particular circumstances. This view only makes sense if people are executing the laws. The moment you stop executing the laws, suddenly you don't have laws.
Prosecutorial discretion is another beast entirely. Considering circumstances on a case by case basis is necessary for functional justice, as lawmakers can not possibly foresee all circumstances and even if they could the enforcers of laws have practical limits. A cop letting you off with a warning for speeding is discretion. It is not permission for you or anyone else to ignore the speed limit in the future. The law is still there, and you should expect to suffer the consequences if you break it.
We don't need laws when they ask us to do something we'd want to do anyways. Laws exist for the sole purpose of getting people to do the things they would rather not do, or to prevent them from doing things they would prefer to do. If the law can be violated when it is convenient for the lawmaker, you do not live in a nation of laws.
They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
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.
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.
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-bein... and 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.
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.
The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.
“And we’ll make ted kennedy payyyy
“If he fights back, we’ll just say that he’s gayyyy
(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years. (b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. (c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to— (1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate. (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)
But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.
Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.
The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.
As usual, you see this as a "they are dumb" problem. Look within.
The key to countering is consistent pressure that does not relent to fix the mechanisms that are broken: (congress, the white house, the "deep state" side note: the deep state always existed, it was just a convenient shorthand for "the part of the US government that faithfully implements the laws as passed by congress". That portion has been gutted and replaced with sycophants, and it will now take time to undo it)
Things like the Supreme Court, term limits, election funding also need updating. We all need to do a better job reviewing the fundamentals of government.
This fantasy of free markets, laws, branches or anything else solving what Plato wrote about in The Republic thousands of years ago is pure folly.
If it is of any comfort - it's always been this way and it's not going to get any better :) We have technological progress, not progress in wisdom. People are better behaved because well fed humans behave better than hungry humans - everything else is as it's always been.
Laws don't do things, people do.
It doesn't matter what's written down on paper if the people in power ignore it and the masses don't have enough organized collective power to prevent them from doing so.
Ukrainians will tell you now, you can’t have peace without strength. Europeans are also beginning to realize this due to American leadership, hence they have all (but one) doubled NATO funding limits this year.
There are, but the executive for decades (centuries?) has ignored law inconvenient to its goals, and the legislative has generally shrugged it off, hoping their guy will do the same down the road.
One such restraint? Declaring war. Yet how often has this power been abused by the executive since World War 2? Korea anyone? Vietnam? Central America? The Middle East?
There's been a lot of hand-wringing in this thread about what Trump has done and is doing. Truth is, he's just the latest player in the game we've all participated in, and he's good at it.
To stop him, we'd have to change the rules of the game, as Congress did in 2017 with the Russia sanctions bill.[1] I just don't see that happening 'cause... we're all hoping our guy will do the same (as Trump) down the road.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_America%27s_Adversa...>
Is the correct plural acronym here “IGs”, or “Is-G” (Inspectors General)?
It was followed by a decade of ridiculous but very effective character assassination of Assange, who is hated based on how dislikable he appears.
I recommend youngsters and "zoomers" read about it, because the recent past is often the most forgotten: https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/22/headlines/trump_says_...
> Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/really-i...
> The president concluded that when coverage of someone is “bad” 97% of the time, “that’s no longer free speech.”
> “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters, referring to media outlets. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
This is not far away from "defamation" in western world. I'm not siding with Trump here, but every western politician seem to think that he/she/it can do whatever he/she/it wants and every criticism must be regarded as defamation.
Do you have sources for the apparently hundreds / thousands of defamation lawsuits brought by western politicians?
The courts can stop him and indeed have in several cases. Often times higher courts over rule those lower ones but not always. Majority of the time they eventually end up siding with the executive branch though. So courts are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though.
Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
Note: I have been hit by the HN "posting to fast" limit so I can't respond.
The Republican Party acts like the midterms don't matter at all.
Approval is plummeting, representatives ignore townhalls like the plague.
If the reps win then the people have spoken and current actions continue.
You can say all is going according to the law (I would say no), but it seems most people think the country is going down the tubes - they just disagree with who is at fault - and it seems the right is just happy as long as the libs are crying about it.
Why would the House get back in session at all, for that matter? House leader Mike Johnson might enjoy vacation too much.
There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.
Same with the courts, executive is elected by the people and so is the senate. They select and approve the judges, same as it ever was.
I am in no way defending everything I am simply stating that there are checks and balances but many people just don't like the decisions that they are making. Doesn't mean they are not there though.
If not… I think you’re operating under a uselessly-broad notion of what constitutes US democracy “working”.
[edit] what this really gets at is legitimacy, which is the ultimate arbiter of who’s in charge and how effectively they may wield power. I find the idea that a state founded on a constitutional document as its fundamental claim to legitimacy ignoring major parts of that document isn’t at least overtly flirting with either a loss of legitimacy or a transition to a different state with a different basis for legitimacy (either of which seem to me to clearly count as a failure of that original state)… puzzling.
Congress and the courts are derelict in their responsibility to honor the rule of law.
Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.
But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.
Both of the following may be true:
1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.
2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)
Optimal solution is a check and balance where a higher level prosecutor, perhaps a federal or state level steps in and takes charge. Another optimal is courts rule that the prosecutor has to do their job.
But lets say that neither of these happen and there is no way to impeach the prosecutor.
You have a couple of scenarios.
1. Uprising. The people rise up and kill the prosecutor.
2. Dictatorship. A higher power even though they don't have the legal authority steps in and removes the prosecutor.
Now the real question is was this a good result? Democracy failed but you got rapists and murderers off the street.
I think we are very far away from this with Trump, he is still following the checks and balances, those checks and balances are just either
A: refusing to act or
B: acting in a way that some people don't like but I would add that many people do indeed like.
So I guess you could add civil war to the potential outcome as a portion of the population does not like the existing checks and balances and the results of the democratic election.
Now what is interesting is your scenario actually explains partially the rise of MAGA and Trump. For them, the law lead to open borders, what they saw as the promotion of LGBTQ amongst children (drag queen reading hour, etc) and DEI (discrimination against themselves and their children). All things they perceive as a grave threat to the future of the nation. So if they have to vote for someone that works outside the law in order to preserve their desired future they are willing to do so. They are willing to flirt with the dictator option if it means putting off what they view as a cataclysm.
I am not sure which is the best solution in your prosecutor scenario, what are your thoughts?
“Democracy” as in people are voting and the people they elected are wielding power (nb it is not necessarily the case that voters like that crime isn’t being prosecuted in my hypothetical, even in cases that their system of presumably-also-democratic government legally requires it—it could be that this prosecutor is popular despite that) is working.
Maybe you just mean that votes are resulting in things happening, period, regardless of whether those things are legal according to laws established and upheld by prior elected governments, and even if the system isn’t operating anywhere near its foundational legal basis, and that’s the disconnect?
(Outside the hypothetical, rule of law has always kinda struggled at times but is simply collapsing this term in ways and to a degree that’s not been seen in living memory, certainly; voting has been under attack for decades and especially lately between the ‘00s-today baseless but effective attacks on confidence in elections, the “find me votes” and illegal electors pushes having no consequences and the guy behind them currently holding effectively all federal levers of power and quite a few state ones, increasing gerrymandering activity, and the VRA being on life support and likely soon to be dead; and we’ve not seen peaceful transition of power in as shaky a place as it is post-Jan-6th [and the reactions thereto]… maybe ever, aside from the actual civil war? Certainly not since the 19th century; taken together, yeah, American democracy in the former sense is doing extremely poorly and large parts of it are entirely broken at the moment, and it’s very much not clear how much, if any, of it will recover, and it’s a safe bet a lot of that’s going to get worse at least in the short term)
"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.
The fundamental problem is, there is really no "free market" of countries.
A US citizen who hates what the country has become cannot go off and set up a new one, they have a choice of a few styles of government (and it is very expensive to go and try living under another government!) Perhaps a benefit of space exploration will be experimentation with style of government.
My only niggle with your statement would be: A lot of what is happening now is happening because of "friction" in the system. If, for example, in an ideal world courts adjudicated instantly (instead of taking months or years) the current situation would be quite different. Similarly, if all congress people voted without fear of intimidation, some might vote quite differently. But, you are right, it's not like the founders didn't know that courts are slow or people can be intimidated.
For a large subset of those voters, the wide open borders, promotion of LGBTQ (particularly TQ) and DEI represented the end of the current state of the country. As you stated, there is no "free market" of countries. If the US fundamentally changes then for those people and their view of life, its over.
This has led to the massive backlash on immigration, ICE, rejection of DEI and push back on transgender promotion / acceptance.
For them, this is the end of all things and that is why they are so motivated and also so willing to overlook the obvious moral failures / grift of Trump and his manner of working. They care about preserving their way of life and if the cost is some grey legal situations and open grift then so be it. Trump is the hard man willing to do the socially distasteful things that they believe are necessary.
This particular post is not supposed to be an endorsement of those views whatever my particular opinion is but only a way to explain how we got here and the determination of Trump voters to see it through to the end.
When faced with the devil you know or what you view as the end of all things, you support the devil you know.
For the people reading this I am not trying to attack any particular people or ideology. Just presenting why people that you may disagree with act and vote in a certain way.
As a much lesser, but still serious point- Trump individually has so much power within the party he can get anyone removed from the party itself with a word, and effectively take away all of their campaign funding. He personally decides who is allowed to run or not run for office in the Republican party.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/republicans-...
Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.
---
Thought experiment: Suppose a dear loved one is brutally murdered by a relative of the current democratically elected leader (imagine a hypothetical leader, country, etc). Through various extralegal manipulations, the leader ensures that the murderer is not convicted (evidence disappears, jurors are appointed in a fishy way, the judge turns out to be a family member of the murderer, ...) and you notice that none of the usual paths of recourse work. Perhaps you go to the press, but his supporters just dismiss this as a smear campaign. Crucially, this leader is very popular, their party controls the legislative and has appointed judges for years.
Following the reasoning in your post, which I think can be summarized as "the legislative and judicial branches, which are legitimately elected/appointed, chose not to stop him, therefore the separation of powers is not violated and this is how a democracy is supposed to work", the leader's actions do not constitute a violation of the separation of powers, and this incident does not demonstrate that this country's democracy is unhealthy.
---
I hope you agree that this conclusion is wrong, yet it follows inexorably from the argument you have made (because the sole precondition, that the other branches are legitimately elected/appointed, is satisfied). So we must conclude that there is a mistake in your argument, and I think it originates in the conflation of two of the core features of liberal democracy -- that is (a) leaders are elected and (b) there is a separation of powers. You are essentially saying that (b) holds because (a) holds, but it is important to remember that (a) and (b)are independent features that sometimes oppose each other: it is by design that the system (especially the judiciary) can overrule the majority of the population, at least for some time.
So the question of "are the judiciary and legislative branches effectively enforcing the separation of powers" is not actually related to whether these branches are legitimately appointed/elected, but to whether they are independent. By this I mean that they play their constitutionally prescribed role even if at times this is unpopular. For example, the judiciary's job is to enforce the law. In the thought experiment, they are not independent from the executive, and that is a deep system failure: they should enforce the law (convict the murderer) even if the (popular and legitimate) executive disagrees.
For example, the law is crystal clear wrt who has the authority to enact tariffs on foreign nations. The President cannot legally do this as the Constitution vests the power to raise taxes in Congress; reasonable people cannot disagree about this. Congress has granted him emergency powers on the basis of a fentanyl crisis at the Mexican border; the scope of these emergency powers clearly does not include imposing tariffs on, say, Australia. Again, there is no room for interpretation here, this is all crystal clear. The fact that the tariffs haven't been effectively struck down yet is a clear failure of the separation of powers, because the law is so clear. The popularity of the president or his policy is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be stopped by the courts.
The main reason this needs to exist is to make sure that, indeed, the next election is a free and fair election. If the separation of powers does not hold, then there is nothing stopping the executive from manipulating the election and hollowing out democracy. This has happened many times in history, and it is exactly what people (rightfully, I believe) fear about the Trump presidency.
Tariffs are due to be deliberated on during this session by the supreme court and as such checks and balances will have an opportunity to act.
On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.
If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.
He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.
Can you give examples? In your own words? Without linking to another website?
> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. > The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing. > We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.
> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture. > A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards. > I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.
> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.
> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.
> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.
That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".
"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.
Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.
Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.
And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?
For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)
I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.
We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.
The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.
Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
From a practical standpoint, this is why Wikileaks matters. Rather than count on the State department to serve that role, we should count on independent journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
Because it’s none of these things.
The website is for reporting abuses by foreign forces armed with US kit. The US isn't in the habit of arming its enemies, so of course the reports concern allies. That's what the website is for.
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
I'm equally concerned about people being paid to push narratives in places like Hacker News. Especially in defense of large organizations.
> journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
independent from whom?
So... what is that something? Did you find out or is the article not actually using the wrong "tone" and is in fact just reporting what happened?
>so how can removing the site make it impossible to abide by the law?
Did you find what the replacement for this service is? Has the government actually provided one? Did you read the law?
Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
The State Department confirms it no longer operates the HRG, but says it is still receiving reports through other direct channels.
I couldn't find any requirement in the law that requires a public website.
NGOs can still submit information through established contacts or by email.
I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
Someone has to read through each email to determine the nature of the complaint, who was involved, how to classify it, etc.
If the web form was free text entry, the same effort is required by the receiving humans.
You can move the effort slider from the reviewer toward the web dev and the reporter by designing a UI to limit input and pre-classify the complaint.
So who has it “easier” now? I guess the server admin?
From Wikipedia: "Senator Leahy first introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act."
It is funny that only today they found it. Wikileaks was documenting American war crimes since some time.
why
When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
Whereas what’s clearly a distinct advantage of a web form is that you can find it on the web.
An "auto reply with a ticket number" is not a feature of email, it is something that someone built that could just as easily be attached to a webform. Plenty of webforms work that way, I have personally built some in my career.
> why
Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc.
A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
I would not prefer email for multiple reasons:
- First, you always need an account to send one, and therefore have to decide which identity you want to attach to a communication. With a form, you sometimes can skip that decision. However, I suspect that in this case, this argument does not apply, because you probably have to attach an identity either way.
- However, email is one of the most unreliable protocols due to its poor solutions for handling spam. For example, if someone from outside my organisation tries to contact me, I can never be sure whether the email reaches me, due to various factors in spam detection. Sometimes an email is delivered to my mailbox, sometimes to the spam folder, and sometimes it just gets lost in transmission. I had even cases where I sent an email to two people in the same organization, and one would receive it and the other would not, even though they were using the same email server.
And I'm just surprised when people still react to what he does as "unbelievable", "illegal" etc... I get it, but it's weird how persistently people still try to frame Trump's actions into moral, legal, historical, cultural, responsibility or any other framework.
He is someone who was born into wealth in the worst way possible, and was never - ever - subject to any moral restrictions, material consequences, or requirements that depend on any positive qualities, effort or success.
In those conditions, his bullish way of behaving always got him what he wanted in the moment, without any downsides or counter-weight that would regulate it. Time after time, he was given proof - by us, the society - that there are no consequences, or they are just so unimpactful, and that he can continue doing what he does. There is no framework that he needed to adhere to.
He was then placed into practically the same position within the government - being able to do whatever he wants and benefits him (directly, or through benefitting his posse), and there will be no material consequences of any kind. If he comes up to any inconvenient restrictions put in place before, they can just be removed first.
And that's it, that's what he's been doing all along. He doesn't have any higher interests, any ulterior motivation, or ambitions - in every situation, he just uses it to get something for himself in that moment - even if openly solely to be able to brag that he did it - and he makes himself look big by lying or belittling others, and that's it. Just a very simple unrestricted narcissist, on grander scale.
Their behavior is quite simple to understand and predict. It's just that they can rarely be SO up there, so unrestricted, that people still seem to struggle to not try to tie him to norms and frameworks.
Every single last one of them is guilty of everything that happened and will happen.
This congress and POTUS is, in fact, a good representation of their values, and they aren't ashamed of it.
(You could have given them that benefit in 2016, and somewhat in 2020, but definitely not in 2024.)
All this stuff about trans rights and gun rights and freedom of speech and other random culture war issues are just a tool to keep the labor class divided. The root cause is wealth insecurity, it won’t automatically solve the other problems but it’ll turn down the temperature. I wish people would wake up to this and stop fighting their neighbors when they’re both on the same team.
That's not the explanation. He overperforms among middle and upper-middle incomes.
Lower and higher incomes lean blue. (Despite the lower ones being the ones truly 'losing the economic game'.)
Blame others (dems, libs, immigrants, races, religions...) for everything that's wrong, screw the "government" whenever possible, "grab them by the ***", and treat others and the world in the same way Trump can.
It's the same in every autocracy - the leader is providing an outlet for the immoral / suppressed / forbidden thoughts, actions and feelings - they either live vicariously through him (even if they are worse off, but that's blamed on others), or can now do some of that stuff because of him.
Why is it that eliminating one particular web site is somehow a failure of the US Constitution?
Yes, Congress is dysfunctional. Welcome to the post 17th amendment world. Repeal that and make the House truly proportional instead of artificially limiting it to 435 members and you’ll go a long way towards fixing a lot of the current problems. Eliminate PACs and donation caps and enforce KYC for donations and we can see who is actually buying our legislators.
But on the main topic, the left in the US is seeking judicial intervention to block nearly every single action that the administration takes, and district court judges are handing down nationwide injunctions against the president on a weekly basis. If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.
So the supreme court can issue a shadow docket ruling a week later, with zero rationalization or justification, staying the injunction?
means Israel.
excalibur•3mo ago
propagandist•3mo ago
One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
mikeyouse•3mo ago
> Blaha had already voiced frustration that despite the HRG passing its pilot phase, the Biden administration had not done enough to publicise it, meaning the provision to "facilitate receipt" of information was still not being fully honoured before the Trump administration deleted the channel entirely.
One side didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred, and the other one deleted it entirely. Both sides are bad!
runarberg•3mo ago
The USA has been doing human rights abuses for a long time, without any repercussions. The Iraq war and the Patriot Act is but a few of many many many more examples. For a while now the entire political spectrum in Europe has given this impunity to the USA, with the covers gone, maybe it will be harder—at least for the left of center parties—to give this impunity to the USA.
dfee•3mo ago
Hopefully most do! All should.
However, most employees don’t pick what they work on. So it’s always at the discretion of the boss to determine what’s practically considered, regardless of ideals or desires.
propagandist•3mo ago
Not going to get into the rich history of overthrowing local rulers and installing puppets through the most gruesome proxies to create "banana republics," the mass murder on a massive scale committed in the previous century, or the genocide that preceded to enable the founding of this state.
This place is built on murder and theft. "Both sides" are guilty. One is less shy.
hypeatei•3mo ago
What transparency? What is transparent about running a meme coin that anyone in the world can bribe- sorry, "invest" in with no trace of who they are while you're President?
As for the topic at hand: Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage so I don't believe it's a deliberate effort at "transparency"
speakfreely•3mo ago
It confuses me how anyone could look at what's happening in the world and see a lack of a plan. Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy in this term and using geopolitical statecraft to upend the arrangements that were not working in favor of the US. The tariffs to force countries to choose US or China, putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending, and the peacemaker strategy in the Middle East to force oil prices down to reduce inflation. It seems to be a very comprehensive strategy.
hypeatei•3mo ago
actionfromafar•3mo ago
cheema33•3mo ago
You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.
By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
FridayoLeary•3mo ago
bigyabai•3mo ago
I seem to remember him promising that he would release the Epstein Files the moment they were available.
That one's been taking a loooong time. All the ties that Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell have to Israel probably isn't super great for PR either.
cheema33•3mo ago
He said he would not touch the existing Whitehouse when building his new gilded $300m ballroom. I could go on and on and on...
The dude thinks like a toddler. Unfortunately a large part of this country also thinks this way.
jimnotgym•3mo ago
>putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending
At the same time as refusing weapons sales to US allies and restricting intelligence sharing. Thereby forcing those countries to spend on European weapons rather than the US ones they have bought for the last 70 years. Doesn't sound great for the US tbh
propagandist•3mo ago
"Here's my hat, put some coin in" is transparency.
hypeatei•3mo ago
How can you trace a block chain transaction back to someone without some sort of OPSEC slip up?
hydrogen7800•3mo ago
gorbachev•3mo ago
cheema33•3mo ago
US has always looked the other way when Israel killed innocent civilians. But there were some limits on how far they could go. The difference now is that those limits have been removed.
jkestner•3mo ago
hulitu•3mo ago
This is a blatant lie. /s
They do care, and have always cared, about human rights. The human rights of the US Government and their sponsors.