> this episode has raised real questions about the durability of the rule of law in this country.

Ya, I'm not American, but I have seen people say "we can vote them out" a few times now. Assuming the democrats take the next election, they are going to have a massive mess to clean up with much of the damage not even being reversible. With peoples' fickle nature and seeming that is a very big right-leaning population in the US, there's a non-zero chance the Republicans just get voted back in four years later. Whose to say?

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sanderjd 4 hours ago | parent [-]

So, this might not be clear as an outsider to American politics, but to me this is not a "Republican vs. Democrat" thing. To me, it's about what kinds of Republicans and what kinds of Democrats are elected.

To me, as an American, what has happened this past decade is that a ton of vulnerabilities in the rule of law (and other things, but this is the one I care most about) have been exposed. But it's not a given that the next Republican president will take advantage of those vulnerabilities in the way the current president has. They might end up being a reformer who seeks to fix those glitches!

But on the more pessimistic side of the same coin, it's also not a given that the next Democrat will seek to fix the glitches rather than saying "they had eight years to take advantage of these vulnerabilities, we're going to do the same to make up for that and even the playing field!".

It's just very hard to know what is going to happen from here. So I'm very sympathetic to people in other countries not trusting us.

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sodapopcan 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I was going to bring this up but was wary of getting too deep into a political hole when I'm not super on US politics (although in the past year and a bit I've been paying way more attention). Mostly, I have no idea what the Republican party will look like post-Trump or how any of that works and it's not clear to me what kind of influence they will have as the opposition next term. The current term has made the democrats look extremely weak.

Although, again, my over understanding of your political system is poor and I just relate it to the one in my country where they hold parliament and hurl schoolyard insults at each other.

	▲	sanderjd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What I would say is that to me the "Democrats look weak" thing is pretty silly. By design, if one party holds the presidency and both houses of Congress at once, they get to enact their preferred agenda (as long as it is deemed constitutional by the current judiciary, which is also controlled by that same party at this moment). So, like, by design Democrats are powerless at this moment. They aren't "weak", they are out of power, by dint of the design of the system and the desire of the voters. So if the current government administration and policy is bad (which, in my view, it certainly is), the blame lies entirely with the people in power. It's not because the Democrats aren't "fighting" enough. I think that's nonsense, they genuinely have no power.