In the US, we are witnessing one of the flaws of the Constitution. The Executive branch, which is supposed to carry out the laws, is ignoring the law. Both Congress and the Supreme Court are acquiescing. The only people who are pushing back are the lower courts (which again are ignored by the Executive branch). This is dysfunction on a national level.
All three parts are controlled by the same party, so of course it collapses to a unitary executive.
It's not dysfunction, either. It's functioning exactly as intended, by the people who spent years setting it up, and is delivering their goals. Top of which was abortion bans, which required spending years patiently stacking the Supreme Court.
That the goals are stupid and evil and incoherent is a separate problem.
A major purpose of the Constitution was to design a system with independent components that would jealously guard their power against the others. This has been eroding for decades, and has now spectacularly failed.
The patience of waiting for "their guy" to be given 3 posts to SCOTUS in one term was the ultimate pay off. It just so happened that "their guy" has got to be one of the most malleable to anyone's position as he has no position of his own other than being "the guy".
I really wonder how history will view DJT -- surely one of the most flawed yet consequential figures in American history -- who nonetheless had the good fortune of two untimely deaths (Scalia & Ginsburg) and some arm-twisting (Kennedy) which he parlayed into fantastic 'success' in the SCOTUS. This includes primarily the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and the incredible Presidential Immunity doctrine, which is essentially legislation via judicial decision.
The falsity of how the SCOTUS was captured by the executive branch was ultimately rooted in lies. Trump's three nominees all lied about their position on Roe v. Wade during their confirmations.
As a case in point, consider Justice Brett Kavanaugh who wrote that Roe was "wrongly decided" in a concurring opinion on Dobbs (2022). Yet in his 2018 confirmation hearing he testified that Roe v. Wade was "important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times" and went on to discuss the importance of judicial precedent. Of course the Kavanaugh hearing was an utter circus in every sense, but it was obvious that he had lied during a number of exchanges with senators.
Let's not forget that just a few months ago in a decision, it was Kavanaugh who gave us the 'Kavanaugh stop' which is a law enforcement practice in the United States in which federal agents can stop and detain a person based on their perceived ethnicity, spoken language, and occupation. This doctrine reset what constituted 'reasonable suspicion' for any police stop.
> I really wonder how history will view DJT -- surely one of the most flawed yet consequential figures in American history
History is written by the victors, so that depends who gets to write the legislation controlling which version of early 20th century history is allowed in universities in 2100.
regardless of future winners, DJT will have a significant impact in the historical timeline whether you do or don't like him. There's the potential for ending the democratic experiment, or there's potential of being just the most significant test for its survival. either way, there will be more discussed than presidents 8 - 15 combined.
> All three parts are controlled by the same party, so of course it collapses to a unitary executive.
I don't think that's necessarily to be the case. As far as I understand how my country is supposed to work, Congressman and Judges are only responsible towards their own conscience and maybe the constitution. They are supposed to and do control each other, regardless of which party they are in. Just because people are in the same party doesn't mean they are now agents of the same power. That's not called party, that would be called a cult.
Granted this is not what seems to happen in the USA right now.
I mean, machine politics means that Congressmen who want to stay Congressmen fall in line.
The problem was never the system, the problem is always that the electorate actually wants this. The system is there to prevent a king from emerging if the people do not overwhelmingly want a king. Right now, we have a president and congress and judicial system in place that were all put there by people who actually want this stuff. The fact that that electorate is often unsophisticated or don't actually vote is ultimately the problem, and there's a real chance it could lead to civil war.
Obviously this is all terrible, but the American left have spent nearly three generations putting all their faith in the judicial branch to just "take care of it" because passing legislation became "too hard" because they didn't want to get rid of the filibuster. Now those chickens are coming home to roost. We have a judiciary that is saying "we need legislation more than the assumption of rights" and the American left just isn't willing to actually force through legislation when they have power.
Yeah but how legitimate is the Constitution really? Nobody alive has given their consent to it!
The average American sees the system producing bad results, at some level people still worship the Constitution like a god when it says something they agree with, on an other level the system can feel like an exhausting and dispiriting legalistic hellscape.
How bad the results we are getting is open to debate. People today seem to be really angry about inflation and cost of living issues although the official numbers don't look too terrible. There's the explanation that the numbers are wrong and the explanation that the perception is wrong. There's probably some truth in both, but more fundamentally people don't find centrist politics of any kind emotionally satisfying anywhere anymore but when you get emotionally satisfying politics you wake up with a hangover the next day.
I think a lack of meaning is a part of it. If you're not really sure your citizenship is worth something or that you're part of something you're proud of, it's easy to get worked up about illegal immigration. If you don't have a sense of purpose, what is there to be concerned about than the price of eggs? Purposelessness turns the slightest irritation into an existential threat.
> Yeah but how legitimate is the Constitution really? Nobody alive has given their consent to it!
You do by being a citizen. You can renounce your citizenship, if you don't want a constitution to bind you. You can always ask another country whether they want you as a citizen, if you prefer their constitution.
> emotionally satisfying
Democracy is not supposed to be "emotionally satisfying", Democracy is boring. That's what makes it great. If you want "emotionally satisfying", than you have better lack with a monarchy, dictatorship or civil war.
>You do by being a citizen. You can renounce your citizenship, if you don't want a constitution to bind you. You can always ask another country whether they want you as a citizen, if you prefer their constitution.
Yeah that's not how consent works. "Leave and pay me $2000+" is the robber's or rapist's version of consent. There is no rational version of consent that requires the counterparty to pay you a large sum of money and travel to an embassy in order to declare an opt-out to consent. Most people here never consented to being a citizen unless they naturalized.
I think this is the basic issue: politics is about satisfying objective needs, in terms of allocating public goods and coordinating independent actors; it's not about satisfying emotional needs.
The latter is better done by oneself, or at worst through one's kith or karass, and certainly not at the granfalloon levels at which politics operates.
kith: people whom you have chosen to be in your entourage (friends, etc., as opposed to kin)
karass: (from "Cat's Cradle", 1963) "a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident"
granfalloon: (idem) "a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is 'Hoosiers'. Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common. They really share little more than a name."
Satisfies my cognitive dissonance needs (from afar :)
Somewhat in the same reactionary progressivism bracket as PH. I.e. have to occasionally delve into their code to see how it's working out for them so far :)
(American Gen-Z[0] are the new hipsters (middle-middle class formal-education-shunning rebels[1], I hope the HN DAU agrees with me!!)
[0]both geohot and PH's son
[1]James Dean, Marlon Brando, James Franco.. or at the very least their most popular characters
ok, so how representative are geohot and PH's son? I'm not seeing much of either over here, but maybe it's just a case of "try that in a small country?"
> ...since good students mainly educate themselves outside the lecture room, you need not worry that you will influence them too much. Eventually they will outgrow you. The clever ones will make this clear to you but the very clever ones will listen to you as respectfully as ever.
Sorry!! I should have been much more careful with this potentially incendiary stuff.. I'm not saying all gen-Z are hipsters that's dumb. But that the ("anti-elitist") middle middle class is where we might look for the new breed of "hipsters" to replace those Bernie Bros
Where we are: intellectual polarization is nowhere as marked as in suburban America.. (Remember Tocqueville!!)
>I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America
>Among a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile, and trading taste for the discoveries of the mind, which must not be confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in the heart of a few.
I wouldn't listen to Koerner on this. He might have had a great time pre-college? Did he go to schools where each teacher taught every subject?? My examples above didn't even make it to college..
(Geohot tried long after he got famous, --on the prodding of kith+kin AIUI--, straight into gradschool(!!) but then dropped out again.. Poole had a similar path. I personally know dozens of technically brilliant boys who struggled K-12)
The problem with that is that disaffected people vote and politicians can win by being emotionally satisfying when the alternatives aren't.
The common denominator on the left and the right is a completely garbled and fragmentary concept of the Constitution. Until recently you would have thought right wingers only cared about the second amendment although in the last ten years they've discovered the first but in the garbled sense that Facebook owes you a megaphone (for "free as in beer") and Twitter is doing a crime if they don't give your posts maximum visiblity with all the other spam and scams.
> politicians can win by being emotionally satisfying
That is called populism and comes with a huge stigma for a reason.
> The common denominator on the left and the right is a completely garbled and fragmentary concept of the Constitution.
Sure, a disagreement with what people think and what the constitution says is going to cause problems. Ultimately society is based on trust, once you loose that you have already lost some important part. The existence and growth of para-country organizations (e.g. FAANG) has certainly affected if not effected your current issue (and continues to do so for other countries in the world).
Pedantry: the general term is emotivism, not populism. "intellectuals" (shorthand for the average HNer) are vulnerable to that, we just won't admit it.
It's hard for trust to work beyond the Dunbar limit-- representative democracy is a jerry-rig-- but Swiss sidestep that with (a version of) direct democracy
Update: since there's a false etymology that "jerry" comes from "German", may I suggest we stay below the line
I have lost 15 pounds in the last month because I have had to change my food habits due to price increases. It's healthy for me so far, but soon it won't be.
People have been promised an immigration fix since Ronald Reagan gave millions of undocumented amnesty in the 1980s. This frustration isn't new, and people in the 1980s under the cold war were pretty avid supporters of the US system.
"... every year we don't make Constitutional amendments" is kinda proof of the opposite, that the system is broken and no longer able to make constitutional amendments.
The Constitution is legitimate in terms of itself, but if you want ask the question of why people don't take threats to our institution seriously the answer is that people don't actually believe in it.
The people who run our institutions reject the idea that output legitimacy matters and they will lose our republic on account of that. ("how could we be held accountable for the results we get, we can't control that" is a Hillary Clinton line that she'll borrow trouble with, Trump will only use that line after it has all fallen apart)
Because we haven't flexed out power authority in forever doesn't mean we did have it, just that we were too apathetic to be willing to use it. We picked this route, and yet your response it 'but politicians did politician things'. Weak sauce. Politicians don't hold themselves responsible, we do. Or in the case of the USA for the last forever, we no longer do. If it's because the politicians convinced us we are powerless, or some other reason, it doesn't matter. WE CHOSE to give up our power.
Gen Z in swing counties within swing states, for they are aware that the republic is not theirs, so paradoxically, it might be emotionally satisfying to lose it for the other gens ;)
You are forgetting about legislative branch too. Congress fist voluntarily "gifted" their right to the executive branch, in the form of the eCaNoMic ImErGenCy. And then Congress passed a measure which blocked every single member of Congress from legally questioning that "gift", in the form of legislation that whole year 2025 is one single calendar day, and thus a legal requirement of waiting 10 (or 15?) days before protest couldn't pass. Essentially Congress blatantly broke Constitution twice. At minimum.
They had no choice. Trump literally rewrote the republican party in his image. Congressmen who weren't falling in line got fired or forced to retire. Many many times, eg see Liz Cheney. The last time a purge like this happened was at the time of the Civil War. Even super-popular FDR tried taking out conservative democrats but wasn't successful (democrats don't have that kind of tribal discipline).
Well, they did had a choice. And all of them are directly complicit in this situation by not reforming electoral college and first part the post election system. All current and past congressmen are guilty in that, since they have preserved a broken system so long as it benefited them personally.
Maybe I misspoke, I mean it's an institutional+cultural failure. Looking forward, if we're to ever get out of this, it'll need something real big. Like another great depression leading to FDR's New Deal. Or Europe's hundreds of millions dead in two world wars. Heroism from individual congressmen isn't gonna cut it.
The Supreme Court has told Trump to pound sand as often as it's upheld his policies. As dangerous as many of the things the Trump administration is doing are, there are other dangerous narratives out there, and the caricaturing of the Supreme Court is one of those.
There's a huge difference between "I disagree with this legal rationale" and "this court is illegitimate." Like it or not, every Justice on the Court is there legitimately. One of them via bare-knuckle hardball politics, to be sure. But according to the rules.
One of them is there because Congress made up rules to deny a sitting president his legitimate right to make a nomination. So I would say that judge is illegitimate to a lot of people.
There's a difference between putting a nomination to a vote and denying versus "we don't accept nominations in last year of an outgoing POTUS" yet turned right around and did it for Trump's third nomination. In that sense, 2 out of 3 would be deemed illegitimate on the same rule being applied in opposite ways. If you can't see the hypocrisy in that, then we really can't have an honest conversation
Legitimacy can mean more than just following the letter of the rules. There's a pretty good argument to be made that refusing to even hold hearings for a nominee is a violation of the Senate's Constitutional duties. And refusing to uphold norms is a completely reasonable basis for calling something illegitimate as well. A pretty big chunk of our legal system is based on precedent and norms rather than written law.
An anecdote - it is maybe lesser known fact in the west, but Putin deems himself a very law abiding person, and he proudly repeats this many times over his 26 year reign. The only tiny problem is that he himself first changes those laws as he sees fit. And then he can play pretend to be law abiding.
I think you get the hint. In despotias laws mean nothing really. USA is not there yet, but the process is very gradual, glacial even. But irreversible.
This deeply misunderstands the Court. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court rests not simply on the justices being placed on the Court via the letter of the law, but also on the Court being an impartial arbiter of what the Constitution says. With verdicts like Trump vs. USA, the Court (especially certain justices) has pretty well jettisoned even trying to convincingly appear to like a judicial body and instead is behaving as a purely political actor. The Court has never been immune from politics, but its legitimacy rests in restraining itself by what the Constitution says, even when the justices don't like it.
Giving Trump “Presidential Immunity” instead of allowing him to be tried for the insurrection and auto coup he attempted really tips the scales though. In terms of eroding democratic norms, that was a landslide.
Overturning multiple precedents coming from decades ago, citing legal theorists from before the creation of our country to do so, and the increasing use of the shadow docket to geld the lower courts seems pretty illegitimate to me.
Also lol, this court is turning into heads Trump wins, tails everyone loses.
They ruled that Biden couldn’t forgive student loans but Trump has absolute immunity.
> The Supreme Court has told Trump to pound sand as often as it's upheld his policies.
Has it? Last I saw, they had overturned nearly 90% of lower conservative court rulings to be in Trump's favor, and a huge portion of those were on the shadow docket.
They also said it's fine to gift the justices, just not before they make a ruling.
And they gave the President a lot more immunity than he previously had.
If they're not actually corrupt, they look exactly as if they are.
So do you oppose DACA? That was the executive deliberately refusing to enforce the law as passed by congress.
Edit:
Here’s what a federal judge had to say in 2023:
"The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation ... The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void."
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199428038/federal-judge-agai...
> Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.
Obama deported more people than Bush or Clinton, but chose to deprioritize (defer action) on the most sympathetic and focused more on troublemakers. Some might call that pragmatic use of limited resources.
And - crucially - did not have indiscriminate sweeps or raids. The number of false positives, people deported or arrested who had a legitimate right to remain, was nowhere near as high.
Almost everywhere has immigration enforcement. Most of those will do the occasional raid on homes or workplaces. Very rarely do you see the kinds of conflict that ICE is (IMO intentionally) causing.
I'm reading through the Wikipedia and you'll have to explain this because it looks like that version of the federal government respected injunctions that were issued. Or we can drop the pretense that you want to start a discussion in good faith with this whataboutism, that's fine with me too.
Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.
The Constitution without the people willing to "respect" it is just a piece of dead wood, it has always been like that. That applies to all Constitution-like covenants, no matter the time and the geographical location.
What's changed now, compared to the past, it's that the people deciding that what's written there is bogus have started changing things a little bit faster compared to the usual, hence all the brouhaha. Also a reminder that the Slavery System was very much alive and all under this same US Constitution for more than half a century, which goes to show that's it's really just a piece of dead wood.
