deleted by creator
It’s really been a broken system since Marbury v. Madison (1803). The lesser known finding of that case was that SCOTUS can declare something to be illegal or a violation of the law but can’t do shit beyond that. It took over 200 years for a President to fully understand SCOTUS has no real teeth. If you control the enforcers of the law, you ARE the law.
It’s not that it took 200 years for a President to understand that, it’s just that all Presidents since then and until trump weren’t demented sociopath rapists who couldn’t be arsed to think of the good of anyone else.
Using the law enforcement arm to specifically commit national crimes against citizens was more often than not considered what it was; treason.
Every president in some way or form pushed those boundaries without any consequences. Even the lightly better ones, like the shade of grey only lightly different than black.
Trump is the culmination of every president taking its way with the constitution without even a slap on the wrist.
There were definitely a couple literal demented sociopath rapists in the mix. What changed wasn’t the law, but the political context and institutions.
It took decades for the GOP to systematically destroy faith in institutions.
It took years of Trump presidency followed by a strong reaffirmation of popular support in the last election.
It took Obama and Biden abdicating their duty to their electorate by respectively refusing to nominate a new Justice and refusing to prosecute Trump for sedition.
It took the media failing their duty to inform voters of Trump’s past, intentions, and state of mind.
It took decades of slow work by the right to reframe the media landscape to be less truthful and more obedient.
It took social media and their algorithms to galvanize fascism.
It took an entire cold war and war on terror to normalize an absolutely abnormal and near insurmountable militarization of domestic law enforcement.
The US constitution is not to blame. That’s a cop-out answer, a lame scapegoat. America wouldn’t be saved by passing amendments alone. The rot goes far deeper than that. Just like the 13th amendment didn’t do much to fix the system of racial injustice the US was built on. If it was just a matter of wording, a silly loophole, it wouldn’t have worked. It worked because the vast majority of Americans abdicated their allegiance to the Bill of Rights, to Human Rights, and to Democracy.
It took Obama and Biden abdicating their duty to their electorate by respectively refusing to nominate a new Justice and refusing to prosecute Trump for sedition.
? Obama was stuffed by McConnell on Garland, and Biden oversaw the appointment of Jack Smith to investigate Jan6 as well as the top secret stolen files.
I’d argue the checks and balances worked, the electorate failed. Trump tried to overturn and election and the checks and balances held. That should have been political suicide. He should have not even won a school board seat after that, but the electorate failed and reinstated him. You cannot build enough checks and balances into representative government to save the electorate from repeated mistakes. The checks are there to ensure someone must show their true intents to the electorate before they make a choice.
Vigorous enforcement is necessary, but there’s that whole “in group, out group, protect, bind” thing.
Andrew Jackson already did that, but we acted like checks and balances still worked because Jackson defying the supreme court only resulted in the Trail of Tears.
It broke once all three came under single party control. Mmmmm. What does the us historically think of one party control. let me think. let me think.
Tbh it was always broken - it’s just that it’s never been done this blatantly, contemptuously, and systematically before.
This is the firesale, and orangeboi et al are just vacuuming up every single cent they can wring from the wreckage that they’re turning our government and society into at breakneck pace.
Congress has abdicated their power for decades. The remedy is impeachment and scaling back administrative law for actual bills through Congress.
But that would require them to actually work! What the hell kind of masochists do you take them for?
Removed by mod
All systems are honour systems at their core. If no one respects the rule of law then laws don’t matter.
Removed by mod
Mechanisms of enforcement still need enforcers who respect the rule of law. If the enforcers stop respecting the rule of law and prefer to play power politics then the won’t help you.
Enforcers are part of the honour system. If they aren’t honourable then the system breaks down.
Removed by mod
“Hey! You can’t do that! That very clearly violates Constitutional law.”
“Oh, yeah? What are you going to do about it?”
(checks Constitution) “Oh…uhhh. I guess nothing?”
Impeachment, that’s what they’d do about it. But that would require politicians who do their job and also uphold the constitution. If the question is: what happens when everyone involved breaks the law and doesn’t do their job?
The answer is one of two things: the people vote them out.
If they are voted out but refuse to cede power peacefully, we end up with violence.
Nothing about the checks and balances are broken, what’s broken is the percentage of the population that just doesn’t care their representative isn’t actually doing their job.
Correct. Society as we know it is a social understanding
Yeah. I was just thinking about why zombies are so threatening. They represent the total collapse of the social order and a replacement of a large percent of the population of ordinary people with savage predators.
It’s no coincidence that zombie dramas and video games became extremely popular in the USA right as people started feeling they were surrounded by hostile forces in a collapsing society with no one looking out for them.
I like what I’ve heard around the Internet: “social contract”
Violate that contract, agreements (and a lack of consequences) are null.
Time to build some guillotines.
This is not about “society as we know it”, this is about a particular way of designing your political system. The American way of doing things in this regard is not terribly widespread.
So no, this is not about lofty and universal concepts like “social contract” or anything like that, it is about specific constitutional designs, which are not the same everywhere. Especially the “checks and balances” system.
It relied on voters actually caring about corruption and imposing a cost on corrupt behaviour. Unfortunately, Americans gonna American.
Caring about corruption impartially. They may care about it if it is the opposing team doing it, but are perfectly willing to ignore it if it is their own team. And with “they” I mean the Republicans.
Every country which went into dictatorship had checks and balances. US checks and balances were not unique.
It’s not a check and balance when the Executive has gone rogue and the Justice Department operates under the Executive.
There is no check. There is no balance.
Remove the Justice Department from the Executive branch and place it under the Judicial branch.
Similarly, there’s no check and balance on the Supreme Court either.
Make it so that the House and Senate can over-ride a bad Supreme Court decision without having to pass an Amendment to do it.
It’s rock-paper-scissors, guys. President can veto the House and Senate, the Judicial should hold the executive accountable, and the House and Senate should be able to over-ride the Supreme Court.
The problem is the majority of the legislative and the head of the executive decided to collude to just ignore the constitution and then proceeded to stuff the judicial branch with their puppets. The problem with the checks and balances is they don’t have an answer to “but what if 2/3rds of the government decides to wipe their ass with the constitution at the same time?”.
No amount of reorganizing the deck chairs changes that calculus. The system was broken the moment they just decided not to remove Trump from office during his first impeachment. The only way I can see to do anything about that flaw is to just make it ridiculously easy to impeach any politician, say something like a general vote of the public that only requires a 25% margin to pass. Sure the Republicans absolutely would have used something like that against Obama, but at least we’d be able to clean all the corrupt bastards out of congress and the supreme court as well.
“No Confidence Vote” like in a parliamentary system.
Yup, and there’s some other conditions that would benefit from an immediate recall, too. It’s insane that the consequence for failing to pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling is that our financial system is damaged or collapses. Failure to get it done in a timely manner should result in an automatic extension or raise paired with snap elections on all members involved.
Or hell, even just allow recall petitions at the federal level. Better to have a revolving door than a legislature that’s tempted to see what touching the third rail is like.
That does require a significant majority of the executive branch to go through with it.
Impeachment is in ways similar to it.
but what if 2/3rds of the government decides to wipe their ass with the constitution at the same time
Or just, “what if a party works together and falls in line under a single leader”?
It should have been obvious not that this was possible, but that it was inevitable.
The only way I can see to do anything about that flaw is to just make it ridiculously easy to impeach any politician, say something like a general vote of the public that only requires a 25% margin to pass
If that happened, seats would be constantly vacant. You’d have 75% D districts with a 25% R minority who would simply remove anybody the other side elected. The D’s would retaliate by removing a R. The oligarchs would love that system because there would be nobody to pass laws that stopped their looting.
The fundamental problem is democracy.
Giving every single person a vote, no matter what, is a problem. Weighing every single vote equally, no matter what, is a problem. The GOP won because there were enough people who had lost touch with reality that their lies were believable. And, now that they won, they’re going to rig the game even more, and make sure that there are no limits put on disinformation.
Democracy may be the best system we have found so far, but it has some severe failure modes.
Someone writes the checks to tip the balance.
Supreme court, July 2024: “the president is the god king, and cannot be beholden to laws of mere mortals”
The Guardian, July 2025: “i don’t know guys, checks and balances seem to be failing, don’t you think?”
checks and balances were already fucked but whatever was there was finally shot dead and thrown in a ditch like a Noem family pet a year ago, dickheads, what the fuck are you talking about
Failing? Tbh I feel like they’ve already completely failed.
The AskHistorians podcast called it, in the aftermath of January 6 riots. They did not explicitly compare January 6 with the fall of Roman republic, but explained why the republic fell. The institutions got too corrupt in spite of checks and balances. The concept worked many times and was threatened before, until the breaking point had been reached. Brutus proclaimed he saved democracy after assassinating Caesar, but the crowd booed and heckled him because Caesar was popular and could actually get the job done, unlike corrupt politicians who typically make excuses not to do what the people want, because the elites would not want to ruffle their feathers of their patrons and their own interests.
People are not dumb. If politicians are doing what the people want, populism would never be a thing.
If politicians are doing what the people want, populism would never be a thing.
Populism works to get politicians elected because it is nothing more than politicians telling the people what the people want to hear.
Populism has nothing to do with actually doing what is in the best interests of the people, it’s about making the people believe that their interests are going to be served.
Populism is getting a bad rap, but more often than not, it is triggered when people feel under pressure from worsening cost and standards of living. If we follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the base requirement of security of food and shelter has to be addressed first, before more conceptual self-realisation needs and other abstract ideas are thought of. If you are constantly worried about how to put food on the table, or how to pay the rent, you would not have sufficient time to think more abstract ideas like exploring the nebula, algebra, democracy, rule of law, checks and balances, etc.
Demagogues rile up populism to get into power, because there is genuine frustration among the people on not having their basic needs being met. Needless to say, populism is still democracy. Here in Europe (or in anywhere really), experts have already repeated numerous times that in order to prevent the further rise of far right, just build more houses. But of course politicians don’t want that, because they themselves are landlords or have financial stakes in keeping property and rent prices high. Unfortunately, demagogues twist the genuine concerns and frustrations, and exploit the desperate situation people are in to gain power.
I spent the first 3/4 of my adult life listening to all politicians and deciding who I thought had better ideas for the issues that concerned me. The last 12 years have taught me that there are simply to many fucking republicans. That wouldn’t be a problem but every single last one of them are worthless pieces of shit, more interested in cruelty than accomplishing anything decent.
The last 12 years have taught me that there are simply to many fucking republicans.
So many that they’ve been bleeding into the Democratic Party.
Felt like I was taking crazy pills when Kamala Harris spent the back half of October leaving her very popular VP candidate on the side of the road while doing a whirlwind tour with… Liz fucking Cheney. Between that, importing all of Keir Starmer’s UK campaign staffers, and letting Michael Bloomberg manager her social media, it’s a wonder she didn’t do worse.
That wouldn’t be a problem but every single last one of them are worthless pieces of shit
Waking up every day and saying the Pledge of Allegiance on a pile of Ayn Rand novels will do that to you.
I honestly think that she should’ve won but the repubos cheated, as they do every time. There’s no way Trump swept every single swing state. All the polls showed it’s be a tight race but for Kamala to lose so utterly? Now, I’ve made fun of election deniers in the past, I see the irony. But its suspect.
I honestly think that she should’ve won but the repubos cheated, as they do every time.
When Republicans cheat and win, Democrats stomp their feet but insist there’s nothing they can do.
When Republicans cheat and lose, Democrats say “demographics is destiny!” and ignore the problem until the next election cycle.
There’s no way Trump swept every single swing state.
Eh. Harris was a dogshit campaigner who inherited a dogshit campaign from a senile neoconservative hack with underwater approval numbers. Had Walz been at the top of the ticket (or Pritzker or Baldwin or maybe even Klobacher or Warren) things might have gone differently. Their political instincts were miles better than Harris’s, which is why they stomp all over her in the 2020 primary.
No, statistically what happened was about impossible not to mention a shit ton of votes for Donald Cuck that only voted for him and ignored all the other candidates. You can’t tell me that many voters only voted for the President and ignored all the other Republican candidates.
Besides all the legal voter suppression there was likely some tabulation machine manipulation. Maga had also infiltrated all levels of the voting system to make sure it was “fair” aka stop the blue no matter what.
You can’t tell me that many voters only voted for the President and ignored all the other Republican candidates.
If you actually interview the voters themselves, its very easy to see why they loved Trump and hated the rest of the party. Like, their social media routinely says as much. Their favorite news and entertainment channels say as much. They say as much. This is a cult of personality, not unlike with Reagan in '80/'84 or Nixon in '72, where split-tickets and blank bottom ballots swept both Republican Presidents and Dem House Majorities into power.
Besides all the legal voter suppression there was likely some tabulation machine manipulation.
Oh absolutely. But that’s been fucking liberals over since Operation Eagle Eye. Democrats simply don’t seem to care. From Michelle Obama to Stacey Abrams to Pete Buttigieg, when they’re asked what they can do to resist voters disenfranchisement, the answer is always “Vote Harder”.
The “when they go low, we go high” strategy appears to be little more than wishful thinking, as democrats chant “demographics is destiny” in states where more and more of the residents are cut off from the elections process.
BlueAnon
… Right. I just love conservative-lite, all the fascism with none of the stigma 🙄
Seems like it
*has failed.
**completely and totally
***repeatedly
laws mean nothing when you can just ignore them
*cuts off penis*
”Why is my penis failing?”
Someone just noticed this?
Has failed. Has failed. Has…
You’ll catch up. Whatever.
Edit:
Well, I dont think there are any shortages of checks, to the corrupt politicians.
And there certainly is balancing going on, the balance of billionaires bank accounts going up.
There you have it. The world famous checks and balances in america.
No shit Sherlock.
No fucking shit, Sherlock, what gave it the fuck away?
It died, fell to the ground, started rotting, MAGA took a dump on it and now it really stinks up the place.
