>There's value in having speedbumps that keep 51%* of the population from shooting 100% (or 99%) of the population in the collective foot... or in this case, head.

That metaphor breaks down here and is not really applicable. If two people are chained to each other at the ankles, they can both plausibly argue that the only way to save their own life is to take that of the other person. Whining "but I'm the good guy, I deserve to cut off his foot and let him be the one to bleed to death" is asinine.

The solution here is, of course, to not be chained to the other person irreversibly. But any time that is suggested, we hear a bunch of "We're stronger together, that's crazy talk!" And here we are. 330 million people all chained together, and now people are upset that the other team has the hatchets and is menacingly staring at their ankles.

>and another significant percentage of the population is not yet old enough to vote

Not sensible enough to vote. Don't leave that part out.

> Then the executive decides there will, then won't, then will, then won't, then will, then won't be net neutrality.

It should be noted that the backdrop here is legislative dysfunction: the congress could have resolved network neutrality at any point but that bogged down for ages. Many of the questions around statutory power look like someone trying to do something under existing rules because they see a problem which isn’t going away but legislative attempts have failed.

I really wanted to believe that it would step up to the occasion, but twice now, it didn't.

I don't say such lightly. I genuinely believe that up until very recently, all portents of doom aside, none of the prior elected presidents truly threatened the Republic. Not Bush, not Obama, none of them.

Trump has been the exception. It the electoral college had been working as intended when it was envisioned by the Founders, it would have said "Yeah, I hear you want Trump, but, no." and voted in someone who might be better suited to implement his (rough) ideas.

I'm not completely onboard with the notion of abolishing said college just yet, as I believe that the electoral system prevents a candidate from say, simply winning all of the urban areas, or exploiting some similar demographic divide that would could exist in a pure popular vote system. We're a union of states, not a single monolithic country. And while I might place my bets on a popular vote providing me the results I'd like a majority of the time, I believe broad representation that at least aids towards unity is better than an outright majority. We strive to avoid "tyranny of the majority".

I don't have any easy or simple answers as to what might fix all of this. It may not even be something our "system" can fix, but rather just a lesson we as a country have to learn. Let's hope it's not as painful as prior instances.

The purpose of the electoral college was to protect slavery.

Unless you were in the courtroom and heard the evidence, you don't have enough information to have an opinion. The jury heard the evidence, and made their determination.

My experience is that for anyone sufficiently famous and polarizing, there are widespread false allegations. It's hard work to work from primary sources and sort fact from fiction.

It's impractical to check everything, do I tend to do deep dives spot checking a small number of things.

For readers, I'd suggest the same thing here. Disregard claims on the Internet, or even court rulings, and just look at primary evidence. Pick a small number of issues.

I make this statement generically, without prejudice to the outcome here.

I hope that's sarcasm, but if not please watch this[0] and explain how this looks like a guided tour

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z3YBtzwmHk

But Democrats "play nice" and respect the law.

That's the problem with the argument that Republicans need to be careful about setting precedents that Democrats will then also abuse: no Republican believes that any Democratic president will actually do this. In fact, a lot of Republicans probably don't believe that there will ever be another Democratic president.

Perhaps why yesterday he was saying he should take over the running of DC..

Ah, thanks!

Not just that, but DoJ lawyers are simultaneously (in different court cases) arguing DOGE both is and is not a federal agency.

Cynically, Trump and Musk are using each other. They both want huge swaths of the federal government dismantled—Trump found his whims stymied by laws and regulations and the bureaucrats who abide by them in his first administration, while federal regulations are constraining both Tesla (cars should work and be safe) and Space-X (starships blowing up shouldn’t pollute, Starlink shouldn’t clutter space, etc).

Musk is stealing the spotlight. At the appropriate time, Trump can fire him and blame him for overstepping his bounds—I have already seen this talking point privately from GOP operatives. They’ll both have gotten what they wanted, and we’ll all be stuck footing the bill.

> So if DOGE have security clearances (unclear if the have) then their audit is legal?

They're also responsible liable for keeping the data safe, which has already been broken at least once:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052432

Possibly violating:

> Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information— […]

* https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798

Clearance does not allow indiscriminate access, it just means you are theoretically trustable. You still need a reason to access the data, usually negotiated with the data owners, who is legally responsible for protecting the data. DOGE has bypassed all of that to just hoover up whatever they can.

IANAL, but there are other laws governing what DOGE is doing that they are violating, such as transparency laws.

> You're effectively says Congress should mandate every detail of every regulation. Even in areas where knowledge is changing (level of chemicals that are toxic, which medicines are useful and safe, etc).

The scientific advisors who currently make rules at the EPA (to name one example) probably should have been giving advice to congress to make laws instead. Congress can pass an annual bill of "here's the new science." They already pass laws of unimaginable length and complexity, so I see no reason why Congress can't pass a huge omnibus "these chemicals are bad" bill every year, even if that bill is 5000-10000 pages.

By the way, speaking of the EPA, there's a lot of whiplash in that arm of government based on which party holds the presidency. If the EPA's rules were actual laws, they would need a much stronger mandate from the people to change. IMO this would be better for both environmental protection (since you don't have the party of "drill baby drill" arbitrarily changing things whenever they want) and for business because there is more certainty.

> The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith.

The whole premise of the American system of government is that power corrupts and a functioning government needs a series of working checks and balances. One arm of America's tripartite government has ceded most of its real power to another arm. This mostly works because the people who get into that other branch (presidents) want to play an iterated game, where burning things to the ground doesn't benefit them. We are seeing what happens when you have someone in power who is playing to win this round without regard for the iterated game.

> The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith.

It very much is not.

It is, however, that the people will not simultaneously elect sufficent majorities in both houses of Congress and a President who all fail to do so, such that the systems by which the political branches check eachother continue to function in a way which constrains those actors in either that do act in bad faith.

> I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system,

Electoral reforms to the legislative branch that could be done through statute could go a long way to reducing the probability of a sufficient concentration of bad faith actors to overwhelm the system, and electoral and structural reforms to the executive branch to make it less unitary, which would take a Constitutional amendment, could increase the necessary concentration to achieve a total breakdown.

>And that's worked for most of 200+ years. I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system,

This doesn't even require bad faith actors for it to become a clusterfuck. It's a scaling issue. Things that used to work at smaller scales accumulate cruft and other issues, until things ultimately fall apart. 200 years is of course a good run, but it wasn't going to last forever. Actually 200 years is such a long run, one doesn't have to bring "bad faith actors" into the equation at all to reach this conclusion, but I guess when things start to fall apart some people need someone to blame. Ask yourself this though... if the system was doing so great, how would it have allowed someone like Trump to ever win in the first place (let alone in the second place, as he did in 2024)? That's not a healthy system. Too many were disillusioned, and that's not their fault.

>~50% of the voting popular that "burn it to the ground" is a reasonable take.

They are disgusted with what they see, and have for a very long time felt powerless to change it. Not really just "felt", but were powerless to change it. Trump ran for office, they saw an opportunity. It's not exactly unreasonable, it's just inconvenient to a class of people who have grown comfortable because they're a little closer to the spigots of graft that pour forth. Being "reasonable" in the way you'd use that word hasn't really ever worked for those people, and they waited quite a long time for it to do the trick.

Before 2016, we all thought impeachment was reserved for transgressions that can't be fixed any other way since it is congress overriding the will of the people. It's not a real check on small overreaches. The balance of powers between the branches is a real check (when it works).

[flagged]

"Trump tends to echo the words of whomever last spoke to him, making direct access to him even more valuable" is what people said about him in 2016 [1]. Being his advisor is an incredibly powerful role, much more so than with most other government leaders

https://www.vox.com/2016/8/29/12691276/trump-believe-flop-fl...

Truly an incident where I couldn't tell how much of that was legitimate insanity, and how much of it was carefully curated fake-controversy-as-distraction. A common question I ask myself about conservatives every single day. Multiple times a day, lately.

It's objectively true no sane person would have cared about that issue.

That basically does describe his philanthropy in education though.

Aiui, the 8M contract was not fraudulent, they just disagree with it. Also, it was multi-year and less then half has been paid out.

Are you saying that federal spending should always be done in chunks of less than $8 million?

IMO firing the people inside the agency wasn't enough. He needs to install anti-union replacements to destroy it from the inside.

Black flag attack next, like Hitler did, the right wing is obsessed with those. Or will crack down hard on a protest and when they try to fight back he'll declare a state of emergency.

Doubt anything short of a military coup that dismantles maga can stop this. Hopefully neither party survives and the US will have an actual democracy.

That's not exactly true, to pick some examples Bernie quitting the race in 2020 used his connections with biden and got a lot of things into a unity party platform, and I've seen it argued that AOC and the green new deal pushed the overton window for the infrastructure recovery act, and while it definitely wasn't everything they hoped for, it did include elements, including a massive investment in clean energy.

https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-07-08/bi...

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/thank-green-ne...

The Dems cooperate more, so the media highlights their occasional disagreements.

Pelosi is the top grifter. Instead of spending her last years with her kids she stays “employed” in order to keep her and her families crimes under wraps. She will die in office, there will be great fan fair of how amazing she was, followed by countless breaking stories of her and her families corruption of over half a century.

Oh but there was a supreme court ruling that said that official presidential actions are in fact above the law, and he signed an executive order that says he gets to decide what the law is, which is not illegal because it's an official presidential action.

...yeah.

>> The federal bureaucracy is not a separate branch of government that gets to have its own checks and balances on the president. They are people that he hires to carry out his duties in his stead.

> The civil servants are beholden to the law as passed by the representatives of the people, the chief executive can only give orders as allowed by the law.

And I restated the first point.

This is the context in which I am responding — and that point is true: they are not a fourth entity that is created by law, but an extension of the president carrying out his duty to enact laws.

To the extent the president gives a lawful order, failure to comply by the bureaucracy isn’t lawful — it’s a coup against the elected government of the US.

> the chief executive can only give orders as allowed by the law

The mistake is here: the law does not permit the president to carry out executive functions, but restrains what he can do from the presumption of anything. He does not need permission in law; the absence of restraint is sufficient.

I understand many people (such as yourself) don’t respect that because you favor an autocratic politically aligned bureaucracy — and hence are outraged that the public will is imposing itself on the rogue bureaucrats.

That fascism is disgusting.

US president has a lot of powers, I’m not aware of any elected official in Europe with the same amount of powers (ignore Russia).

President of France is probably the most comparable, but in France you also have the prime minister, selected by the president but supported by the parliament.

In Sweden we have a separation of powers within the executive branch. Government agencies are independent of the cabinet.

DOGE’s audit wouldn’t be possible in Sweden, that would have required legislation or even constitutional changes.

Sweden has already an independent government agency that audits the rest of the government, but it has support in the constitution for that and it is technically administered by the parliament and not the cabinet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_National_Audit_Offic...

My personal opinion is that the US system of government is vastly inferior to Sweden’s.

The consequences for following an illegal order include being sued, being held in contempt of court, or being criminally prosecuted by a subsequent administration. They don't have the same immunity that presidents do because they don't have a direct vesting of authority under Article II.

I am talking about this EO https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu...

> the Constitution also provides for subordinate officers to assist the President in his executive duties.

> Therefore, in order to improve the administration of the executive branch and to increase regulatory officials’ accountability to the American people, it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch.

And of course: > President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.

We’ve come a long way from “Hillary shouldn’t be President because she has demonstrated a disrespect for national security information protocol” to “its Trump’s right as POTUS to disrespect national security information protocol”