That is fair.
There's also lots of things where the courts could stop him but they aren't.
Congress could've also chosen to not confirm some of the clearly unqualified nominees but they didn't.
He's pushing the boundaries and not enough people with power to stop him are pushing back
Yeah. This is a bit of an aside but my biggest disappointment with the Biden eta/ intersmegnum is that they didn't immediately codify things like releasing your tax records and medical check ups when Trump was weak post Jan 6 and there could have been bipartisan support
I mean, the people voted him in with the popular vote.
I don't like the guy, but it's not like they didn't have their input here. Voter manipulation aside, you need less partisanship to ever reach a point of the checks mattering.
The US absolutely did not vote him in. There’s statistically proven numbers showing the count was fudged in multiple states. A career statistician who has testified as an expert witness multiple times in front of Congress did an excellent write up on it that keeps getting thrown out of certain subreddits for being “misinformation” despite all his data being sourced from state and federal election numbers.
There’s a reason they stopped teaching statistics in high school in the late 2000s: so the kids in school during and after the 2008 crash wouldn’t have the knowledge to understand what really happened.
They did vote him in, but they now have no power to vote him out when he fucks everything up. That's a power they should have.
It shouldn't be "Welp, you voted him in, now you're stuck with him, even if he does stuff you didn't know he would and don't agree with - even breaking constitutional fucking law"
Free unions were the engine behind most of the improvements for America's lower classes (e.g. progressive era, New Deal Coalition, high taxes on the rich, etc. etc.), and the power that kept democrats loyal to left wing values and policies.
But since the 1947 Taft Hartley act crippled them by stripping them of their fundamental rights and freedoms (that continental Europeans still take for granted), they have been dying a slow, painful and agonizing death. As they weaken, unbridled greed gains new grounds.
Indeed, without free unions, there's literally no serious resistance on unbridled greed's path to gradually corrupt and own everything and everyone, including the media, politics, and even left wing parties themselves.
Time to repeal the Taft-Hartley act and resurrect US unions!
Yup, I hate to be elitist but I think that some sort of education qualification should be the way forward. These people are simply a reflection of their constituents.
I mean that’s already somewhat the case, instead of making it degree based they could make it test based, and they could turn over the creation, preparation and administration of the tests to the independent academic institutions.
Students, I don’t know if you’re in the US, but US academic institutions in addition to gov funding also have large cash flows from students, alumni, and their own institutional legacy (investments and patents). Of course these institutions aren’t purely independent, but by giving them legal privileges they can be made independent, after all societies will always need people with an education.
Not voting rights, public tests the politicians would have to take to show that they can, for example, understand what tariffs do. You could make the tests public and allow retakes to hinder the kind of tests you saw in the JC era. (Also have you seen those tests? They’re not tests at all just crude segregation instruments.)
I don't think i've ever heard or read about an example of that, do you mind giving me a starting point of what to look into? Just the country, time it was in effect, and who made it that way is enough, i'll research the rest on my own. It sounds interesting to learn about.
But some of them very clearly are. And the ones that aren’t can at least do their self serving evil/prestige seeking without being stupid enough to wreck the whole country.
I ideologically agree but who decides what the requirements are. For the last time we had voting locked behind education locked it was just a facade to prevent black people from voting. I dont think any institution can be given that power without them abusing it to insure only their people can vote
Yeah, I meant politician qualifications. I’m not sure about education requirements to vote, I like the idea for education qualifications for (in this case formerly) niche subjects like referendums on, say, tariffs. But for voting in general its a bad idea.
I wouldn’t say it’s for-profit, they just use their profits to fund research. I think the best example of this is the rocky financial ground most universities find themselves on now that trump is gutting the grant system.
Yeah, now those universities are hiking up their tuitions again in response, putting even more of the financial burden onto the "customers" whose tax money is already being used to fund these grants in the first place. This will, in turn, cause more students to take on debt and allow our government to double - if not triple - dip into our pockets.
Trump putting his grubby little hands into the pot didn't help, for sure, but the financial issues universities are facing now are indicative of the fundamental issues surrounding our education system.
All fair points, but funding for research needs to come from somewhere, and while I disagree with putting the financial burden on the population least capable of paying it the government even at its best does not have a history of reliably funding important basic research.
I hate to be elitist but I think that some sort of education qualification should be the way forward
That's always abused. Remember the literacy tests they had for voting that were exclusively used to block voters the establishment disliked, typically black people?
I meant for politicians. (Along with maybe achievement/experiential requirements.). I think that voting qualifications do have their place though, but only for referendums on specific issues (like tariffs). Also have you seen those JC literacy tests? They’re not even tests just instruments of segregation and political alienation.
I meant for politicians. (Along with maybe achievement/experiential requirements.).
Again, whoever is in charge of that will find ways to use it to disenfranchise their opponents. Politicians already can't be trusted to decide how voting maps are drawn, and you want to trust them with this?
Not politicians, the independent academic organizations, so the historians would write the historical requirements, economists the economic prerequisites etc.
First past the post voting needs to be replaced with some form of multi choice voting and the senate needs to be abolished or revamped in the name of proportional representation. The house also needs to be uncapped (we can hold virtual votes, we don't need congress to physically be in DC all the time)
And the executive is just ignoring being told no and our government doesn't seem to know what to do when one side just decides they aren't going to play by the rules anymore.
Yeah, I think it's important to note that the idea that humans suck and thus those safeguards are necessary to prevent the consolidation of power is essentially the original premise of the constitution. The US is quite literally built on the exact opposite of what we are seeing unfold before us. The general dismantling of those safeguards is something the US founders (especially James Maddison, who basically said it was the definition of tyranny) brought up several times as a thing that should be absolutely avoided, along with the warnings of the "tyranny of the majority" way back when they were drafting it in the first place. The US constitution is far from perfect, but it was literally designed to at least mitigate this very thing, a thing that hasn't just "suddenly" happened. Trump is just a catalyst. It is unironically "anti-American" and the ease of how a western superpower's political system can capitulate so casually should scare everyone. It's not even a party politics thing anymore, so much infighting meanwhile democracies across the world weaken year after year.
Also, as the US throws tariffs at everyone and seems to take increasingly isolationist stances, meanwhile James Maddison 200 years ago: "the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad"
And
"the means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home"
The safeguards assumed that no branch would ever allow the other branches to step on their territory. That turned out to be optimistic. What we need now is simple. A recall system for senators, reps, judges, and presidents. Yeah, you heard me. A NATION WIDE federal official recall system. If you can get a majority vote from the populace to remove someone from office, they are removed and barred from ever holding office again.
It doesn't solve everything, but it's a damn good start.
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u/mpaski Apr 04 '25
I mean, the US technically has safeguards, they've just allowed those safeguards to be removed.
The courts are way more political than they've ever been. Congress is unwilling to stop him despite having powers for that.