Even a Democrat landslide in two years wouldn't change it, because almost all Democratic politicians are unwilling to cause a fuss (or they are secretly happy with what the other branches are doing).
But the people are getting what they voted for, so is it really ethical to intervene in that?
Knowing people in democratic politics, this isn’t true. The root of the problem is that they don’t understand or prioritize power.
They have overwhelming support for every major issue: abortion, gun control, corporate taxes, HNI taxes, healthcare, social security, climate, gay rights. All of them. And yet they lose. Minority on the Supreme Court, house, senate, presidency.
Think about Obama’s first presidency. Sixty senators. What happens if they:
1. Make DC a state. That’s two senators. I don’t think they could get Puerto Rico.
2. Make Election Day a federal holiday. That spikes turnout, which benefits democrats (see: advantage in every major issue.)
That’s the type of thinking that gives and maintains power. But they don’t think that way until it’s panic time and already over.
The problem is for a lot of these this only becomes apparent when pollsters remove all context and political baggage. For instance, ask people if they like Obamacare/ACA and results are mixed. But go down the line and ask about the constituent pieces of it all and you'll see positive support.
The Democrats have completely and utterly failed at packaging these things up with a message that resonates with the people. Instead they've allowed their opponents to demonize their stances. And that's how we wind up with people holding signs that say things like "Keep government out of Medicare"
Obviously not, or they wouldn’t have lost.
From a purely power-based standpoint, Obama probably should have pushed more in 2008. But that’s the only time he could have done it - even passing ACA got the Democrats severely punished in the 2010 Congressional elections.
This may not occur to you, you assume other people are like yourself. That they work in an office and perform a similar job as your own. Given that scenario, if the turnout of Democrats is lower than you expect, the only reasonable conclusion is that some bosses are less reasonable than your own, and ducking out for 40 minutes to go vote at 2pm just isn't allowed! And therefor if it was a federal holiday, their office jobs would just call it off for that whole day, they'd vote, and the Republicans would never win an election ever again.
However, the people who would vote for Democrats don't have such jobs. The jobs they have are menial, they are working all hours of the day and night, someone has to cover that shift on election day, and if somehow one or another of them does have an office job, there's no guarantee that it will be a paid holiday at that employer. My own employer ignores several federal holidays and instead gives us off days for Easter (Good Friday) and some other Christian holidays.
Your political opponents would hoof it through a warzone to cast their ballot. Having to vote early (or late, or apply for a mail-in) isn't why your numbers are down.
The dems spent this last election cycle distancing, downplaying, and reversing each of these issues. Is it any wonder why they are losing? Rather than play to their strengths and party positions they endlessly and relentlessly try and shift right.
Do dems actually support abortion rights? Kamala didn't really campaign on that. How about gun control? Kamala was all too happy to talk about how she's a proud gun owner.
The Kamala/Biden campaign took painstaking measures to try and quash every single one of these issues rather than centering it in the discussion. Instead, they wasted an entire campaign talking about how much Liz Cheney loves them.
Even now, Schumer is saying "let's just sit back and let people watch what's happening" rather than pressing his advantage and Jeffries is saying "It's not great, but God is in control".
Dems desperately hate their base. That's why they lose. They simply transparent in the fact that the only thing that matters is corporate campaign contributions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
No electoral mandate (and the argument for a clear mandate for all of this is thin or nonexistent) makes unconstitutional/illegal action suddenly legal or constitutional.
Whether anyone with the relevant power chooses to punish these violations, is a different matter. The choice since January 2020 has been to repeatedly do nothing in the face of illegal action, but winning elections doesn't make criminal action magically non-criminal.
Playing devil's advocate - but the people asked for this, right? Isn't it time to amend the constitution then?
The will of people is the ultimate judge, isn't it?
Frankly we haven't had any real rule of law for a long time, and that's finally filtered through to the general populace. The law has been selectively enforced for decades (the famous "three felonies a day"). Of course the people don't respect the law any more, why would they?
I think that’s extremely debatable. Last I checked “unauthorized access to confidential taxpayer information” was not an election topic.
This is true on all sides of course, folks who voted for Obama didn’t vote for drone strikes against US citizens either. Winning a presidential election does not mean four years of dictatorship and silencing of criticism.
Power Wars by Charlie Savage covers this rhetorical zig zag.
Whether most of the people doing so were smart enough to understand it is a good question, but the fact is we put a Perón-like figure into office, and only age will likely make him leave.
Gee, I'm shocked, shocked, that a guy who stole large numbers of classified documents on his way out the door and stuffed them in unused bathrooms in his house(s) would fail to safeguard confidential taxpayer information.
You're right, it wasn't an election topic. Nobody who had any power cared to make it one, nobody who cared had the power... and nobody else was paying attention.
Obama didn't run on drone strikes, but everything Trump is doing has been a part of the Trumpist or Republican fringe platform for years. The Republicans have wanted to defund and destroy government ever since Grover Norquist said he wanted government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub. Purging academia of DEI and "woke," aggressive anti-immigration policies, tariffs, rule through executive order, none of it is new, all of it is established, boilerplate Trump-era Republican doctrine.
Trump ran on "draining the swamp." This is what "draining the swamp" means.
The only real exception to the norm seems to be Trump's sudden hard-on for invading Greenland and Canada.But even then you can look back at his infamous comments on not wanting immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti versus places like Norway, or his comments on Mexico sending rapists over the border, and see how he might want to forcibly annex a few million white people to balance out the scales of white replacement or whatever racist paranoid shit goes on in his head.
I don't know. But let's please stop pretending no one who voted for Trump knew who he was or what he was about, or that what's happening now is not in effect what many Trump supporters wanted.
Did people vote for this? I thought people were voting on the price of eggs. Trump dishonestly disavowed the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 ghostbuster containment system of horrible policies when people started becoming aware of the horrors that were in there. Sure, Trump is releasing those demons on us now, but a lot of voters claimed to believe Trump's dishonest disavowals.
Trump wouldn't have won if he had been honest about what he would do. Voters didn't choose *this*.
We haven't declared war since WWII, but we've waged a number of them.
The Congressional budget process is fundamentally broken and increasingly nondemocratic - the leadership of both parties get "continuing resolutions" passed while they draft a mountainous "omnibus" bill that includes all their pork and graft, then they whip the members of the majority party to pass it without reading it.
The Congressional oversight committees are usually captured by the industries and/or agencies they oversee.
Congressional hearings are not used to inform Congress or the people; they're nakedly partisan acting gigs for committee members.
Congress has unconstitutionally delegated much of its authority to a bureaucracy run by the executive branch, intending to have it operate independently of the president. Now we have a president who is choosing to exercise his authority over the executive branch.
Of course, it is illegal and unconstitutional for the president to eliminate programs that are established by law. But remember the executive branch bureaucracy ONLY exists to allow the president to implement the laws passed by Congress. If the laws aren't explicit or delegate to an executive branch agency HOW they law/program will be implemented, then the president has enormous authority over how to implement it, and there is nothing Constitutionally wrong with that. So if the president says "we don't need 10000 people to implement CFR 1.2.3 section 4, we only need 10", and he can implement the law/program as passed by Congress with 10 people, then he's allowed to do that.
The big problem is that Congress MUST depend on the executive branch to, er, execute. Whatever is required to implement the law, that isn't specified in the law, is up to the executive branch, and the President is the head of that branch.
And all this BS about "classification" again only exists to enable the president to do his job. If the president says someone can have access to something, that is non-negotiable, as two USAID folks found out over the weekend. The bureaucracy has for decades used classification to make a currency out of secrets and to try to avoid oversight. Looks like that ride has ended.
Where did you go? I am in a position to leave, but not sure where to go.
What generation was raised to respect those institutions? Because the boomers were against them and their policies, and Gen X was cynical about them...
As far as the article, Musk is a mixed bag. On the one hand, I think it is a good idea to have an entity concern itself with improving the efficiency and reducing the bloat of the bureaucracy of the federal government and Musk is not a dummy, he is the richest person in the world and runs some quite high-profile companies. On the other hand, it is hard to deny Musk is a little bit of a buffoon: fighting with Asmongold on X over his clear lies about video games is sort of unbelievable, telling Americans to "F [themselves] in the FACE" if they don't want all high-skilled jobs in this country to go to H-1Bs, and various other sort of juvenile things. Having these kids that Musk has hired to run-around the federal government is probably not the best thing but I think this doomsday stuff is completely silly.
Which Congress authorized and funded.
Congress, historically, has made formal declarations of war only at the request of the President. No President has asked for one in decades nor are they required to make war.
Furthemore, the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 specifically enumerates declaring war as a power of Congress:
>> [The Congress shall have Power] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
So good luck relying on rule of law.
We desperately need term limits. Age limits might make sense too but term limits would mostly take care of that.
Hell, the guy is able to re-run and win the elected office again after being impeached a few times during his previous administration. Congress needs to affirm his impeachment to force him out of office and that requires a supermajority, which will never happen. Trump could kill someone on national TV and he would maybe get impeached, but he'd have enough friends in congress defending his actions that he would still be president. I mean he's already a convicted criminal.
That's why he just doesn't care anymore and is going crazy as if no laws exist. Laws mean nothing to him. At worst they are an annoyance or noise to him, but he already proved that nothing can stop him.
Yes the reality of the situation is bleak. But to give up on impeachment would cede even more power to the executive branch.
As the economy crashes, proletariat sentiments will change. If trump is unable to get a war going, or it doesn't develop how he expects, the economy will be the obvious narrative. And if they get trump out before midterms, his endorsement isn't the same thing.
All they would really need to do is take the existing Trump "speeches" and present them as the.word salad they are too prove him incapable of serving. That story would viewership so the media would be all over it 24-7. That's one reason Trump is rubber-stamping everything Elon says or does - he knows they have him by the balls.
Impeachment and removing him from office means the dems will need to control congress. Which can’t happen until 2027. Then, those dems will need convince at least a double digit count of GOP senators to vote to remove him and not care about facing the wrath of the MAGA base…just to get him out a couple of years before term limits do?
I kinda imagine the next 4 years will work hard towards the singular goal of eliminating those. Or he might just ignore them with a whole lot more preparation than the badly organized insurrection of last time.
Edit: not only that, but they didn't close USAID entirely: they just closed the USAID headquarters, and installed Marco Rubio as the new head of USAID. While this may or may not be desirable, I don't see how this is actually illegal. The specific organization of USAID was established by executive order; this is one of the many consequences of the Republicans winning control of the executive branch of government.
That was true in 1961, but not in the 63 years since then. The Foreign Assistance Act has been amended many times with specific requirements since written for the by then already existing United States Agency for International Development[1]
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-1071/pdf/COMPS-107...
Regardless, the agency is a party to contracts which it is currently breaking. The actions of DOGE are causing the US to break contracts, which is illegal.
I’m suspicious, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised we’ve hit the “one simple trick” era of governing.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Aeronautics_and_Space...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...
Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:
> The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States
Edit: Daww, no sense of humor?
That'd be a major change in the US.
Not that it couldn't happen, but military peers would feel some kind of way about their superiors who did that.
Think something should be illegal? It's probably in there somewhere. Want to do it anyway? It's probably allowed somewhere else. Want to know if you can or can't do something? Well, good luck figuring that out. With enough time spent in lines talking to civil service workers you can get an answer that may be correct. Or maybe not. Probably best to hire a lawyer at hundreds of dollars an hour to tell you whether you can or not. (The lawyer will say "no", because if he says "yes" and is wrong, now he's in trouble, and nobody wants that.)
The system has grown and changed and mutated, and now it's a behemoth that nobody really understands. It's such a mess that people are genuinely hopeful that an AI will ride in and help us all untangle all that we humans did.
And the people that we've put in charge of doing all of this are collectively the most unaccountable folks ever. They routinely skirt, side-step, or ignore the rule of law as they see fit, and they still enjoy a 90%+ re-election rate and an incredibly high barrier to entry for reformers.
“And if I did, you deserved it.”
In the narcissist's prayer in your approved overthrow of our government.
And of course, the executive branch has everyone from the FBI on down, you're not going to win a shooting (or shoving) war with them.
https://bsky.app/profile/newsguy.bsky.social/post/3lhcadi7oy...
The Capitol Police Board oversees and supports the United States Capitol Police in its mission and helps to advance coordination between the Department and the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives and the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate, in their law enforcement capacities, and the Congress. Consistent with this purpose, the Capitol Police Board establishes general goals and objectives covering its major functions and operations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations.
The Capitol Police Board consists of the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the U.S. Senate, and the Architect of the Capitol. The Chief of the United States Capitol Police serves in an ex-officio non-voting capacity. The Chairmanship alternates annually between the House and Senate Sergeants at Arms.
[Citation Needed]. Seriously. Heck, even a cursory read of the Wikipedia article would tell you they are controlled by the Legislative branch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_Police
> The United States Capitol Police (USCP) is a federal law enforcement agency in the United States with nationwide jurisdiction charged with protecting the United States Congress within the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its territories. It answers to the Capitol Police Board and is the only full-service federal law enforcement agency appointed by the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States.
Misinformation is infectious.
Impeach. Subpoena. Then arrest if subpoena ignored. Pass laws (supermajority to bypass veto). Cut funding to executive office. Then go nuclear with things like amendment putting the armed forces under legislative control. Lots options. All require a united front.
So in other words "no options" because we will never have a unified front in the legislative branch.
Which requires Republicans to honor their oath to uphold the Constitution. So it's a non-starter.
... right up until they pretend they're not and never were when the political winds shift again. Though, maybe the winds no longer shift in these parts ...
"Gödel told Morgenstern about the flaw in the constitution, which, he said, would allow the United States to legally become a fascist state." [1] Unfortunately Morgenstern never completely specified what this flaw was. As pointed out in the wikipedia article speculation is that "The loophole is that Article V's procedures can be applied to Article V itself. It can therefore be altered in a "downward" direction, making it easier to alter the article again in the future." But given how difficult it is to amend the constitution it doesn't seem like the problem lies there.
"So Sue them"
It will take a long time to go through the courts, the courts may not care, and even if they do, you can usually appeal and drag your feet long enough that it doesn't matter. Oh, and bonus here, if you become president again you get another reset. It's illegal, but there's no recourse for action.
It's a DDoS on the legal system and he's got all three branches by the balls. The courts can intervene in some of the cases some of the time, but it won't intervene in all of the cases all of the time.
The only way forward here is if everybody in the federal government either does the same thing, or that they become so ineffective and unreliable at _their_ jobs that everything is slowed down enough for the courts to intervene.
Capturing the courts is the first step in a fascist takeover. The Republican controlled legislature isn't going to send the sergeant at arms and arrest him.
There is nothing in the way now. "It could happen here."
What did Parliament do during the English Civil War?
