top | item 45683061

(no title)

outside2344 | 4 months ago

The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.

discuss

order

drob518|4 months ago

The founders foresaw all manner of bad behavior. They understood human nature better than most today, and they experienced a lot of shocking political acts, everything from telling scurrilous lies about your opponent to outright buying votes. The only thing that might be new to them is the scale at which technology makes these things possible. Read up on the history of early campaigns.

itsoktocry|4 months ago

>1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.

What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!"

You got out-voted.

shadowgovt|4 months ago

The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval.

The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.

(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).

onethought|4 months ago

If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population).

You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you".

You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.

shadowgovt|4 months ago

They did. The back-stop is Congress being brave enough to call the bluff and supporting each other as an institution, across party lines.

The founders didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.

actionfromafar|4 months ago

Dissenting representatives may very well need Secret Service protection to stay alive. Good luck getting that protection approved.

(The Epstein issue is a special case - some of the MAGA base still believes it was not a hoax and that Epstein was not alone in his crimes.)