It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1]. The solution was to have many competing factions. I think first-past-the-post, corporate election influence, and mass media consolidated power into a single faction that ended up causing the system to break down (in that the branches don't seem to be checking each other's power right now).
I don't think corporate election influence or mass media really have anything to do with it.
The issue first showed up in 1828 election, when some of the Framers were still alive, and the US basically did nothing about it over the ensuing 200 years.
Remember it was Andrew Jackson who went around ignoring Supreme Court decisions and saying "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it".
And his abuse of executive powers during the Bank Wars to punish political enemies led to the formation of a new political party.
> "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it"
This was one lesson the common people never wanted to learn because it was so much easier to live on the belief that their system is intrinsically immune to abuse, it's just better, magically almost. It was bolstered by the same people's desire to feel better by pointing fingers at the "weak fools" living under dictatorships, incapable to fight. "We have rights and guns, we'll pick up arms and fight any abuse".
But when the abuses came pouring almost everyone piffled, living on the next belief that time will fix things. Sometimes it did. Or maybe one of these times will bring the shocking realization that it's easy to talk big in good times and hard to act in bad times when your skin is in the game.
>I don't think corporate election influence or mass media really have anything to do with it.
Is any particular group overrepresented there? Hairy, long hooked nose? I'm talking about white cishetero men of course, this is all their fault. We need to have more, and by more, I mean ALL, such people to be non-cishetero non-white non-men.
You just invert identity politics to your liking and call it a solution without touching problem descriptions, root causes and potential true solutions.
Identity politics is at the core of the right, its a huge part of the problem. And you yield it just upside down...
Dark Money has nothing to do with being able to consolidate power, gerrymander, and reduce the system to a two-party system whose members seem to be mostly under the influence of their own desire for gain? Which brings us back to the money…
> The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1].
That was hundreds of years ago; when Madison says "domestic faction", he doesn't mean "a faction", he means what we would today call "factionalism". The 18th-century use is a pretty direct mirror of the Latin word factio, also meaning factionalism.
The idea that "checks and balances" are built into the US governmental structure is interesting. It would make sense if governmental positions were held by right of heredity. They aren't, but you can see how the Framers would be working with that mental model.
As the US government is actually constructed, Congressmen, for example, have no incentives to preserve anything as a power exclusive to Congress, because they have no lasting affiliation with Congress.
I'm probably being cynical, but I take their reasoning for opposition with a grain of salt when they themselves partake in lobbying. Removing it would hurt them, too.
Sure they would have! The elite of the United States that lead the revolution were all extremely mercantile and many were coming to the colonies to run their own little fiefdoms away from the crown.
One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.
That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.
We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
All societies are consensus realities wholly dependent upon participation.
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
Maybe the abnormal thing was the
century or so we had of papers/radio/TV guided by ethics or professionalism or some delicate trustworthiness-equilibrium.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
It was better than the illusion of freedom of information a lot of people have now. In reality mass manipulation is happening on a global scale at unprecedented levels.
You know what the weirdest thing about that century is? The Soviets.
A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.
I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
Germany has learned this lesson the hard way, with a 'defensive' constitution post-1945. You don't have 100% free speech in Germany, and it is possible to make parties illegal. It's not without its issues (currently, the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet) but it is a lesson the US should have learned after the first Trump term.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.
They didn't "learn this lesson", they had a constitution imposed on them and were basically occupied for 50 years by multiple foreign powers; even up until 2020 as I recall there were about as many active US army personnel in Germany as German ones. There isn't a hugely compelling story that the constitution is the big factor in the German journey.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
Germans have this false belief that if you just create the correct laws, people will follow them and system would be good. When in reality, for most people around the world, they follow laws only till it makes sense for them.
It's also worth noting that the mainstream German parties have actually supported ethnic cleansing abroad, in Nagorno-Karabach, etc. while the AfD opposed those things, so I don't think it's very clear cut that AfD is the dangerous party.
Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.
I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
The thousands of peace-keeping troops in Armenia/Azerbaijan that looked the other way were not German, but Russian. By the way, both Russia and Armenia are members of the CSTO military alliance[1], while Azerbaijan is not.
Yes, I know that the Russians looked the other way.
However, Baerbock has absolutely monstrous statements and the German gas-guzzling contingent are the obvious culprits for the EU partership agreements with Azerbaijan and for the incorrect statements treating this whole thing as somehow restoring Azerbaijani territorial integrity and the numerous statements by the EC falsely claiming that Armenia had attacked Azerbaijani (i.e. these 'we call on both sides...' in the aftermath of Azerbaijani attacks). Furthermore, it is German influence on the EC that made the implementation of the ICJ decision subject to negotiation, and it is likely German influence on the EC that forced the agreement whereby mine maps were exchanged for the release of PoWs. These mine maps naturally enabled further Azeri attacks. It is also very apparent that there was government influence on media organizations to not report the starvation in the NKAO beginning after the Azeri blocking of the Lachin corridor-- for example in Sweden state television reported nothing, and reported of the ethnic cleansing itself only that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan'. This shows co-ordination between Swedish government, Swedish state television (SVT) and Turkey or Azerbaijan, indicating a secret deal either for the sake the Swedish NATO entry or on the EU level. Certain phrases 'lightning offensive' which sound decidedly Turkish are also repeated in many newspaper articles, indicating a larger deal rather than something specific to Sweden.
The CSTO is absolutely irrelevant, as everybody who matters in any way knows completely. France would not be selling weapons to Armenia if they believed that their CSTO membership were relevant.
There were excellent opportunities to intervene even as the Azeri troops were rolling down the Agdam road to Stepanakert, and it's very unlikely that the Germans were unaware. SAR satellite imagery of the region is so readily available that unclassified images can be obtained on a commercial basis and I'm not even sure it was cloudy.
No, and for good reasons. Even in a utopian liberal democracy, fundamental rights cannot be used to deprive someone else of their own fundamental rights. You cannot have freedom for all without limitations to that freedom.
Since one might read this and concludes "tolerance is impossible.". You cannot tolerate intolerance, thats the contradiction here and not tolerating intolerance is a fairly easy escape out of the dilemma, at least for me.
Edit: This dilemma arises whenever your ideal is dependent on the cooperation of others. Pacifism is another example. So you cant uphold your pacifistic ideal in the case of being attacked. Or you might loose the option to enforce peace when it only depends on you cooperating, upholding it. This is a perspective many people rejecting ukranian aid dont consider (but are eager to push out nazis because they are intolerant).
Germany has the same fundamental problems. Just the symptoms are different. Look at debt brake etc. And the banning at this point is just not politically possible. It is just a legal fantasy. Over a long term, laws can only reflect the politics.
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
The civic consens could only be undermined because people lack the contextual knowledge and (self) critical reasoning to not be vulnerable.
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
It is more than depressing. During my PhD/Postdoc, we had excellent collaboration with the EPA on stuff which then really improved the life of people in the US. These agencies need to do research to stay ahead of/keep up with the development.
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
Yet we have Microplastics, PFAS, & a slew of other dangerous contamination across the planet. And the military industrial waste is rarely mentioned.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.
It's not going away with a whimper, the supreme court is killing it on purpose. There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy. There is also the impoundment act that forbid a president from redirecting or not spending appropriated money. These laws are being ignored because the supreme court has gone full partisan.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
Birthright citizenship would be the issue to watch, because a previous Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the 14th amendment back in 1888 and conservatives have been aiming to reverse this for decades.
Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said:
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
> Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said [...]
Cool, but the 14th amendment was ratified. At least we can agree on that. And this is what it says:
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
You can try to weasel out all you want, but it's at the disrespect to the words of our constitution. Whatever interpretation you are justifying this month, it is radical and lonesome.
I guess I should not be surprised that you would immediately try a rhetorical stunt like dismissing the precedential case as 'a weird fucking case' without evaluating its content. I understand it's a lot of work to read.
I read the whole case. It’s a weird fucking case. It spends a tremendous amount of ink addressing irrelevant issues (the Napoleonic Code? wtf?) and very little addressing the relevant legislative history.
It seems obvious that the 14th amendment meant to reflect the very similar language of the civil rights act of 1866:
> all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States
What does “and not subject to any foreign power” mean? Nobody knows because Wong Kim Ark doesn’t bother to actually try and address that point.
That would also explain why Congress found it necessary to confer citizenship on Indians by legislation in 1924.
To be clear, I think the specific holding is correct. The 14th amendment is an equal protection amendment, and removed Congress’s power to discriminate citizenship based on race. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether the 14th amendment also removed Congress’s power to qualify citizenship based on legal immigration status or other grounds. It doesn’t purport to be a birthright citizenship order.
Maybe the Court should look into the “emanations from penumbras” of the term “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to see what they can find in there.
What does “and not subject to any foreign power” mean? Nobody knows because Wong Kim Ark doesn’t bother to actually try and address that point.
That's a lie. The opinion does engage with that question in depth, and also digs into why the language of the 14th amendment differs from that of the 1866 civil rights act. You're trying to shift attention away from the text of the 14th amendment (which is the supreme law of the land) to the text of an earlier law whose meaning you think is easier to argue over. I encourage anyone who has a few hours to take a good look at the case and see for themselves.
It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.
> It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.
I've come to think that this is a dangerous hybrid of (a) bibliolatry — the idolization of a written text [0]; and (b) the Nuremburg Defense of "just following orders" [1], with the orders here being the aforementioned written text.
What follows is a crude and incomplete attempt at "thinking by writing" about another possible perspective that might be more effective than the balls-and-strikes approach that Chief Justice Roberts supposedly follows:
A. Historically, in medieval England a judge was an agent of the king [2], charged with deciding specific cases as he thought the king would do.
B. In the modern United States, the people are said to be sovereign, acting through their elected- and duly-appointed representatives (legislative and otherwise).
C. A legitimate sovereign seeks "the best" for the society in the long term — with limits on what harms can be inflicted on individuals in that pursuit. (Cf. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, as partly manifested in the Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions.)
D. When an extant command from the sovereign — in legislation or constitution — is clear and explicit, then the judge must follow the command (or resign if in conscience she can't comply).
E. But when there's room for different views about just what the sovereign would do at that time and in those circumstances, then the judge — well, judges, making a best guess about what the sovereign would do.
F. Yes, this has elements of a court of equity. It also draws on supremely-pragmatic doctrine from the U.S. military: When a tactical situation isn't covered by specific orders, the leader on the ground is supposed to make a best guess about "the commander's intent" and proceed accordingly. [3]
G. Certainly a judge making such a guess must take into account any available evidence about what the sovereign's intent might be if the sovereign were on the scene.
H. But it's an abdication of responsibility for the judge to throw up her hands and say, I'm sorry, even though the sovereign isn't here today, I'm not allowed to rely on my judgment about what the sovereign would do — instead, I must try to read entrails left over from legislative sausage-making by long-dead legislators who likely didn't consider (or even imagine) everything that I must take into account today.
I. To be sure, this can be calumnized as judicial legislating. But it seems like a pragmatic way to go about judging hard cases in a complex world.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_justice. In the framework I'm proposing above, today's judges, unlike their medieval counterparts, aren't given a roving commission to seek out cases and "do justice."
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
Please don't repost AI answers (although I think the summary is fine). People come to HN to hear other others' ideas, anyone who wants to know what an AI thinks is more than capable of canvassing a bunch of them and even getting them to argue with each other.
Gemini, what did the Slaughterhouse Cases say about the 14th amendment’s reference to “subject to the jurisdiction?”
The *Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)* famously narrowed the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, particularly its Privileges or Immunities Clause. While the case primarily focused on that clause, the Court also touched upon the "subject to the jurisdiction" language in the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
In the Slaughterhouse Cases, Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the majority, briefly clarified the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." He stated that this phrase was intended to *exclude certain categories of individuals from automatic birthright citizenship*, even if they were born on U.S. soil. Specifically, he mentioned:
* *Children of foreign ministers or consuls:* These individuals are considered to be under the jurisdiction of their parents' sovereign nation, not the United States.
* *Children of citizens or subjects of foreign states born within the United States:* This was a general exclusion for those whose allegiance was considered to be to another country, such as children of enemy aliens during wartime.
The primary purpose of this clause, in the context of the post-Civil War era, was to firmly establish the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, overturning the Dred Scott decision. However, the "subject to the jurisdiction" language ensured that certain exceptions to territorial birthright citizenship were maintained, consistent with international law and diplomatic practice.
It's important to note that while the Slaughterhouse Cases introduced this interpretation, the scope of "subject to the jurisdiction" for birthright citizenship was later more definitively addressed and affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrants who were not citizens was indeed a U.S. citizen because he was "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
Liberal vs conservative is not the binary that you should be looking at here, but rather just vs corrupt. It's okay if a ruling ideologically favors one side or the other, but it's not okay if it the court trends toward "our guy can do whatever he wants".
They won’t get power again in a meaningful way. The last election was their “last stand”. The U.S. has a rigged court and gerrymandered senate. Kamala was right about one thing, “we’re not going back”. Unfortunately, the context was wrong. In this case, it’s, “we’re not going back to being a functional democracy”.
The state borders themselves were gerrymandered in the 19th century to influence the electoral college. That's why for example there's all these very empty northern states like the two Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming that collectively have fewer people than LA but between them they get 8 senators.
As an example: in Texas, there are laws and processes that discourage voting in high-population-density areas that trend less conservative. Can you think of benign reason for a law that bams providing water for people waiting in line to vote in a state that gets really hot?
A majority isn't impossible, but they would have to remove the filibuster. Ideally I'd want the filibuster removed right this instant, but reinstated for judicial and really any confirmations. Let the party in power make their laws and remove old ones, but keep the judiciary independent.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
> Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.
As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
Yep. R are using every dirty trick by treating politics like love and war, and D are treating it like a purity contest. Ultimately, though both are serving, as Gore Vidal put it, the Property party. I want fair and equal accountability, no one to be above the law, and no politician to engage in even the appearance of inappropriate, unethical behavior, or corrupt behavior; and them to get things done that advance the collective good without steamrolling over groups with sudden, huge surprises. But I want more of the good parts of a culture like Japan where people are decent and conscientious and Europe where other people are cared for besides oneself. The US is currently far, far away from anything remotely resembling healthy, long-term sustainable socioeconomic attitudes, policies, and actions.
It'd be nice if we could remove congress members for blatant corruption too, e.g. Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. Or prevent further Weekend at Bernie's politicians like Diane Feinstein and Joe Biden.
> There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years.
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
I think it’s rather that good (effective) politicians wield the law and power effectively and creatively. Good people don’t follow bad laws, for example.
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
You are commenting on a thread about Republican Party gutting one more scientific research department. But you have audacity to say Democrats are bad. One of the commenters on this thread had described very appropriately the current political environment- mass weaponization of stupidity. Those people are running at a very high speed in the opposite direction that there’s no coming back for them.
> They work for their donors not their voters
Voters are donors too. Maybe you meant big donors like Musk. You know how that turned out.
I’m saying Democrats are ineffective at doing good and are therefore part of the problem.
If the Democrats do not effectively wield power to solve people’s real world (economic) problems the country will slide further to the right.
I obviously meant wealthy donors and corporations (the ownership class) — the minority or entities that the Democrats are beholden to as opposed to the bulk of their voters.
You’re blaming conservatives but it’s the Democrat leadership that is desperately out of touch, which enables the worst of the conservatives.
Age, institutional donors, and a general upper-middle-class mindset have made the leadership ineffective.
What’s worse is that rank-and-file Democrat voters in this upper-middle-class to upper class bloc—generally older white-collar voters, tech millionaires, or trust-fund kids—refuse to see that they are part of the problem.
Any constructive criticism or calls for introspection is deemed “bad faith” or conservative trolling.
It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief".
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
> the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
Total war (or just any collective conflict) is in some sense the consequence of choosing the wrong abstraction, not always innocently.
E.g. "It is simply a fact that Group X is just B-like" (group X obviously disagrees, understanding itself to be C+L+M+N).
But projecting B-ness coarsely onto the surface of X, this serves both the members throughout group X and the leaders at its center, who have other goals than understanding the truth of C+L+M+N.
Sorry, that's a new analogy for framing how I see it, as someone working in collective intelligence. Might be a little rocky.
> the only thing preventing total war is the belief that it might be possible to fix it next year
And the knowledge that you cannot win when the other side controls the armed forces, the FBI, and all the governing institutions, a lot of states entirely too, and is clearly willing (and maybe even eager) to use them? The president and the people behind him probably look forward to their opponents trying. I think this "total war" might be very short.
The solution is to decrease your high investment in the politics show, and put your energy where it matters - the people around you, yourself. Do something real instead.
I am working for the people around me. Because they are being hurt by this "show". Government workers who have been fired without cause. Trans people who cannot get their medicine. Latinos who are scared to go out in public for fear of being swept up.
This is not a show for me. These are the people in my life.
You seemed to be frustrated at the lack of alternative, so I pointed out that the alternative is to ignore politics.
From this latest reply it seems you are heavily invested on one side of the political spectrum.
Surely you can see that if you have a specific and highly involved position on one side of the political spectrum, when your side is not winning, it will be losing. There can be no alternative.
What you seem to really want is complete dominance of the spectrum - this is the alternative you really seem and I think you are frustrated not to be achieving it. But would you really want to impose your opinions and 'help' on everyone, whether they like it or not? Maybe you would, I don't know.
Anyway, I'll point you back to my original point. The alternative is to let politicos play their games and try to remain personally uninvolved. This is the path to sanity.
I dont want dominance, i wish people to be less ignorant, to eg. ponder large societal problems in all their complexity and not elevate migration as their top concern.
Dominance over all three governmental branches is what trump actually seeks. If you are ignoring that tiny detail too, you are part of the ignorant masses, part of the problem.
America was always just an idea. For the idea to work, the masses need to ascribe to and appreciate it. Americans willfully took the country in this direction. It’s democracy at work but delivering a “different agenda” than many anticipated.
> Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted.
As an American living abroad this seems to be the general consensus with the people I talk to. At some point American exceptionalism became expected without the work and investment required.
We haven’t really followed the Constitution for about 100 years now, sadly. We pay lip service to it but it’s mostly a historical curiosity at this point.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. The document was meant to be a living adaptable document. In many cases rather than adapting the document directly, laws and interpretations were layered outside the document to keep most the initial structure solid. Amendments came about largely once something was deemed so important it absolutely should be embedded (like the abolishment of slavery) so few mistakes could be made.
The structure should really have a few more obvious significant layers where things could shift around over time.
If we followed the constitution the EPA wouldn’t even exist! Clearly the founders didn’t create this complicated three-branch system only to have most of the government being run by “independent agencies” exercising executive, legislative, and judicial powers.
These agencies work with delegated powers. It is completely impossible for such a limited number of people as the American Congress to be experts on everything. They need advisors and structures to help them understand the world and make the right decisions, but also to make sure that these decisions are enforced.
This may not be fully developed in the US constitution because the world was much simpler back then, but it is entirely compatible with it.
The notion of Congress “delegating powers” to administrative agencies is entirely incompatible with the constitution.
The administrative agencies do not merely “advise.” They make regulations with the force of law (legislative power), enforce those regulations (executive power), and adjudicate violations of the regulations (judicial power). That concentration of the three powers into a single entity is the very thing the Constitution goes to great lengths to avoid.
Man, we have executive imposition of regulations since the very beginning of the republic. Hamilton's treasury department and customs. The 1792 postal act.
You can't have an effective executive without some kind of rulemaking authority.
Marshall wrote in 1825--
"The line has not been exactly drawn which separates those important subjects which must be entirely regulated by the legislature itself from those of less interest in which a general provision may be made and power given to those who are to act under such general provisions to fill up the details."
(And, of course, subsequent decisions have helped to draw that line more exactly).
> adjudicate violations of the regulations
You can always go to a real Article III court, but you need to exhaust the remedies within the agency first.
> The notion of Congress “delegating powers” to administrative agencies is entirely incompatible with the constitution.
With which article specifically?
Yes, enforcement should not be managed by these agencies. The way to fix this is to reshape them, not give in and let the executive run the show without checks. Of course, that requires a working legislative body and a judiciary that is not fixated on the end times.
The constitution has already existing answer: instead of agencies passing regulation, Congress passes laws. Agencies continue to enforce the law, and appeals are adjudicated by actual federal courts.
The key failure is Congress seems not to care to defend or execute its power. They care about getting elected and their ability do obstruct... but they barely do anything. And the republicans are apparently all terrified of the executive. The democrats are meek and assume they ought to win just for showing up because they're "right".
You can't know much about Baltimore without knowing the problems it has, so I'd suggest you take some time and get caught up. I'm not going to waste my Saturday doing a writeup on the dirtiest city in America. I think it's more likely you do know what I'm talking about, so you might as well cut to the chase and share your paean to Baltimore's grittiness or your argument for how its problems are all the fault of Republicans.
I like your reasoning here. Seeing as most people on the internet are from Maryland, assuming that every poster has an opinion about Baltimore is both logical and useful for conversation. One time I saw somebody post that they’d never been to that city so I assume that they were workshopping a character for an outlandish piece of speculative fiction.
> Seeing as most people on the internet are from Maryland, assuming that every poster has an opinion about Baltimore is both logical and useful for conversation.
I accounted for ignorance in my first sentence, and your conclusion doesn't even follow from your bad interpretation of my logic.
Baltimore has many problems and I can't do the history justice here. I'm not interested in writing a thoughtful essay from which someone cherry-picks a sentence, and I said as much in my second sentence. This isn't the SAT; the facts aren't all contained in the prompt. If someone is coming to this from a place of total ignorance, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, I think the best thing this person can do is simply read about Baltimore.
Baltimore isn't just something people from Maryland know about. It's a tragic national disgrace. Real suffering has been inflicted on the current and former residents of Charm City. In many ways they've caused their own suffering. There's a conversation that's worth having, and I'm willing to have it.
> One time I saw somebody post that they’d never been to that city so I assume that they were workshopping a character for an outlandish piece of speculative fiction.
> Baltimore isn't just something people from Maryland know about. It's a tragic national disgrace.
Exactly! Baltimore is something that everyone knows about. People do not simply have political opinions without a stance on Baltimore. That isn’t really possible because the US just isn’t that big of a place.
Obviously we can imagine (with great difficulty of course) a hypothetical person that doesn’t know about everything that has happened, is happening, and what might happen in Baltimore. It is, however, impossible to imagine a person that doesn’t know why Charm City is the single most important place in American politics. It can’t be done, it is like imagining a new color. The human brain can not exist without some appreciation for Baltimore, which is why questions like “what is happening there” can only be asked in bad faith.
It is like when somebody brings up Santa Paula. Obviously I don’t need to tell you what that means
> I'm not going to waste my Saturday doing a writeup on the dirtiest city in America.
It can be said easily, what happened to Baltimore is it got Detroit'ed
The EPA is in the executive branch and Americans recently hired a CEO of the executive branch that promised to cut a lot of stuff in that branch. This is entirely consistent with what you learn about american government in high school.
You do need to spend the 10 statutory accounts associated with the EPA as directed by Congress, though. So, there's an account funded by Congress with this statutory description:
> For science and technology, including research and development activities, which shall include research and development activities under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980; necessary expenses for personnel and related costs; procurement of laboratory equipment and supplies; hire, maintenance, and operation of aircraft; and other operating expenses in support of research and development, $500,780,000, to remain available until September 30, 2027.
Neutering the department that would normally do this and kneecapping the ability to spend that appropriation effectively sidesteps how the executive and legislative have divided responsibilities back to the founding of the Republic.
This is a pretty big systemic issue. There's a normal amount of tug of war between the executive's implementation of congressional appropriation, but deliberately breaking multiple departments so that funds can't be effectively spent is something new that upends our normal checks and balances.
In the past, when Congress tried to delegate the power to selectively suppress spending through mechanisms like the line-item veto, the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Now, however, the executive branch is effectively wielding even greater power by deliberately impairing departments, circumventing Congressional appropriations without the constraints or oversight previously deemed essential.
Now I understand that we may spin up a deliberately ineffective agency, and that courts have given the executive a lot of leeway on administrative structuring. But allowing the executive to deliberately frustrate congressionally appropriated expenditures undermines separation of powers.
That seems to be the major mis-step in trying to structure the government to be secure from capture; obviously the whole experiment was new so they can be forgiven for not addressing it.
But we know now, and would be well-served to identify how to restructure things if given the chance. Unfortunately, the coup by the current regime seems to have been successful and it's going to have to get a lot worse before it blows up and we get something different.
Its a bit sad to me that the tech community here on HN doesn't seem to take any responsibility for all this.
Surely some non-trivial percentage of the commenters / lurkers that are proud to talk about their mono-repo or their favorite react library had some part in the fact that millions think the covid vaccine has 5G.
I have friends who worked or work at Meta who will sit in their mansions paid for by all this destruction telling you how bad the USA has become and how displeased they are with the current admin, and never mention the role of social media lol
Many developed nations made fun of our delusional checks and balances concept for a long time
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
Arguably the real regime did not change, since the deep state was already in control. Eisenhower had warned of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address just a couple years earlier. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had unanimously approved Operation Northwoods, a false flag attack to justify war with Cuba, which JFK had rejected. JFK also fired Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, after the botched Bay of Pigs operation and planned to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Unsurprisingly, JFK was assassinated shortly afterwards by a Manchurian candidate, Jack Ruby inexplicably killed Oswald, and then Ruby went insane in prison, probably due to MK ULTRA type operations. In sick twist of irony, Allen Dulles served on the Warren Commission, the blatant conflict of interest was lost on many.
I could go on. To put it lightly, consensus reality is manufactured to a significant degree. Even those who imagine themselves to be rebels, like woke leftists, are in large part the product of COINTELPRO type operations. If establishment media like Colbert and the NY Times are pushing the position of 'The Resistance' then you can be quite certain it's controlled opposition. Same applies to types like Charlie Kirk or the Daily Wire.
> As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The zero-day bug in the system that had not been exploited until now is that two of the three branches don't actually have any power of enforcement. So if the executive branch decides to just flat out ignore them, there are no consequences.
All of this stuff was hacked into the executive branch to begin with. People have been pointing out that the CFR is way longer than US code for a long time and someone finally dealt with it.
All systems exist ‘on belief’. And it’s objectively done better than all other known systems it has been running concurrently with (in both longevity and impact).
> it’s objectively done better than all other known systems (in longevity and impact)
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
I guess I’m just missing it, I’ve re-read the thread and it still seems like you’re discussing the US? What am I missing? The parent comment you replied to is
> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
‘systems it has been running concurrently with’. Aka during the same times.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.
There is no plausible entity arising from that arrangement that one could refer that has survived even 1/10th of that time intact. Not even counting the devolving of numerous other additional territories.
Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.
It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
> It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)
I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
People who keep parroting this take are the most hypocritical bunch I have ever seen. Because if the premise is true then when these institutions existed then those were also voted by taxpayers to exist, right? But that time these “taxpayers” made noise about how government can’t be trusted and majority is muzzling their right of speech and first amendment etc etc. Now they when they are in the majority they turn around and say stuff like majority rules, government can be trusted etc.
And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
Well the behavior of agencies has changed quite a lot since that whole mechanism was voted into existence, no? Sometimes it takes awhile for the consequences of a change to play out.
Another smoke and mirror argument. The “majority” government which decided that these agencies should get tax payers money was there till 6 months ago. So, it has not been “awhile”.
well the republican party has been talking for decades about removing EPA, DOE, etc. and has gotten lots of votes on those premises, so "they" make good on that promise and now the "voter has been lied to"? you could have made the same claim if the republicabs did nothing.
Saying that something is good (or bad) feels more like an "ought" statement than a proper "is" statement, ie not in a category that's capable of being a lie.
We can actually show that the American public are lied to, and continue to be lied to.
Yes - I can get the point you are making - “democracy for me but not for thee” is BS. Sure!
But the evidence is that theres one media network which is simply selling whatever story works, along side a 50+ year effort to kill trust in institutions. We can even show that the republican machinery gave up on bipartisanship - hell, it’s even public knowledge.
But that wouldn’t make a whit of a difference to voting patterns, or your point. Because your point doesn’t need to be based in the long history of complicated malfeasance that rots all English speaking democracies. It’s anchored in your current state and argument.
I think Trump & team have been very open about their intentions. There's even his entire first presidency to look at. At most, some of his voters might be surprised that he actually follows through on exactly what he promised (for example some of those voting for him now surprised about being targeted by ICE, including farmers fearing for their cheap workforce).
So sure, lots of lies, on the other hand and at the same time everything was planned and prepared quite openly.
One of the most onerous regulation regimes in the USA comes from the FAA.
When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.
Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
Ran the math and and it's factually incorrect to say there's not enough blood in the world to write out all these rules.
There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.
Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.
Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.
You've made a few basic fails: federal register is, well, only federal, so you've ignored all the non-federal ones. But then even at the federal level you've missed laws that contain the rules, and then the court decisions that directly impact how a rule is interpeted. And all that, of course, isn't enough, to understand them you'd also need to read professional literature that explains all of those rules.
Then the rules aren't static, so you'd need to print the full legal version for each change, so it wouldn't be neatly stuck into years, but more frequently.
Then there is the bigger elephant in the world - the actual world! Since you drain the whole wide world of blood, count all the rules that they produce out there.
Also, did you do math in JS wat to get
4.1 million pages * 1 liter per page = 115 liters (not million)
> about 40 years to
Then you've also forgotten to count all the future regulations
The Federal Register is the log of the changes, the Code of Federal Regulations is the product after applying all those changes. The Code is only about 190,000 page, so about 20 times less, which means if you abandoned your antisocial ways and made one friend (and, big stretch, another one to account for future growth of the code), the two/three of you could bleed out a copy of the updated Code by yourself each year for the foreseeable future.
A lot of comments are rightfully pointing out the destructive nature of this move. But looking at it from another angle, is it possible this is a symptom of a deeper problem?
What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda? If that belief is widespread, is an action like this seen not as 'destruction', but as 'dismantling a biased system', even if it seems counterproductive to the rest of us?
> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
Democrats also do not always do what the electorate wants.
How many times did they have executive and both houses since Roe v Wade without passing law to enshrine the right to abortion?
Surely they could have released the Epstein list as well.
We can argue which party is “worse than the other” for sure, but both serve themselves and neither is a bright shining star of serving the actual people IMO.
Why would they need to enshrine the right to abortion in law when the supreme Court said it was guaranteed in the Constitution? They probably thought they had more pressing matters to work on. I didn't hear any call to pass a right to abortion law. Maybe there was some grovel I missed?
And from what I can see, the Democrats didn't care much about the Epstein list because there wasn't much evidence there even was a list. The current administration ran on the idea that there was a list and the Democrats were covering it up.
Surely you got many of the DNC fundraisers that breathlessly urged donors to give to the DNC to protect the right for a woman to choose? Or remember the turn out the vote campaigns to protect abortion rights?
It appears to me that the possibility that Roe v Wade would be overturned was more valuable to the DNC as a threat than cementing the issue by law-making was.
> Republicans not always do what the electorate wants.
>
> Abortion, gun control and releasing the Epstain list are have popular support but the are against it.
No they're not, though? At least, amongst their voterbase. The Epstein files are the first truly bipartisan issue I've seen, the other two are very strictly partisan issues, and most Republicans/Conservatives I know do not want either.
I wish pollsters would ask the right question: "would you support the government fining you or jailing you (or a family member) if you seek an abortion." I bet the numbers would swing way towards legality. But what're ya gonna do.
> or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
I hope you realize the irony that this argument applies to both sides of the argument here. In other words, how do you know that your research was done in an unbiased way?
Being led on a leash, or at least being nudged, by monied interests is not unique to either side of US politics. Do you know who has funded anti-nuclear power propaganda since the 1950s? The same fossil fuel industry involved with the destruction of the EPA.
The good thing about science is that it doesn’t depend on trusting any one person or institution, it depends on a process designed to catch bias and error.
Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.
Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.
What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
For sure Fox et al. have been pushing the idea that scientists have biases, but it can also be true that science has become more biased.
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
Scientists can have biases, but science itself is just a methodology for determining truth. The political leanings of the people publishing papers shouldn't matter at all. Anybody can read a study and point out the problems with it. Anything else is just ad hominem.
Its a fact that the EPA added ~6000 employees during the Biden administration and also instituted DEI policies to follow President Biden’s Executive Order 14035 (2021). This included employee-led special emphasis groups, LGBTQ+ events, and justice-oriented programs. All this is out of focus from the EPA's goal to safeguard the natural environment.
It should be NO surprise that there is massive push-back after a republican administration came to power. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned to cut the EPA’s size and funding and to eliminate DEI and environmental justice programs in the federal government.
A significant portion of the electorate believes that the government is hiding aliens, or that the political leadership are all secretly lizard people (whether this is meant literally or as a metaphor for Jews or whether they think Jews are secretly lizard people depends on the person). There are vast and necessary government functions that most of the electorate doesn't understand or doesn't value or completely misunderstands.
Even on hacker news I frequently see people completely misunderstanding how, for instance, scientific research gets funded in the US. And the readership of this site is far more likely than a random sample of Americans to know about scientific research.
Dismantling chunks of the government based on the ignorance of some portion of the electorate is just bad policy.
"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian
people control our world by taking on human
form and gaining political power to manipulate
our societies, or not?"
11% said yes or were unsure.
That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
11% said yes or were unsure?! One in fucking ten people, in the most generous interpretation, did not know whether the government were secretly shape-shifting aliens. God, how did we get here.
Noooo, that’s not true. Below 100, as it’s weighted for this to be true: half above half below. It could theoretically be possible for the half below to also be below 50, but this would require the other half to all be above 150, and both are absurd, because there are a whole horde of people of completely average intelligence.
Checking IQ test results, we see they follow a Gaussian with a mean of 100 and a stddev of 15.
> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
They do, but it’s not a belief they came upon accidentally. It was pushed over decades using billions of dollars and multiple media conglomerates.
Arguably, institutions like the EPA exist to moderate extremes. The EPA simulatenously prevents industry from causing cancer clusters and extinctions while also preventing eco-terrorism. All the science, surveys, and purple prose done by the EPA and consultants is arguably kinda bullshit, but it is very useful bullshit because its a whole lot better than assassinated mining executives and hospitals full of throat cancer victims.
>our only options are "do nothing" or "murder executives".
Well no, we can have some form of mediator institution which arbitrates such debates peacefully. You could also setup a ritualised debate implicitly agreed to by both parties so you could do this without an EPA - this is essentially how humans did things before we invented rationalised nation states.
You should avoid silly personal attacks, you might get better responses from people.
They believe that because an elite few (Project 2025 authors and others) want all science to be demoted in the eyes of the public. Because that way lies control of the masses.
The last thing an authoritarian leader wants is a challenge to his authority, one that scientists will almost certainly provide.
This is sad. I have worked with many federal agencies including EPA and have seen firsthand how large corporations try to influence or circumvent the law without regard for people or the environment. The EPA isn’t as bloated as people think. Contrary to public perception, there are many talented and hardworking federal employees. The real culprits are the large federal contracting companies that deliver subpar results and hide behind federal procurement bureaucracy. I wish DOGE would focus on that.
During the next administration, it will surely be a priority to restore the functions of government dissolved throughout these years. However, these functions will be filled by private companies and will come with a large bill to U.S. taxpayers. There's a large vacuum being left, with a talent pool of government-wage workers, and a new cohort of politicians whose campaigns will need funded.
I have no stake in being right or wrong, which I think leads to sounding confident. But, I believe the incentives are there for privatization.
Those opposed to the current administration will see restoration of gutted services as a win. Talent (researchers, scientists, and anyone with knowledge of processes) is being made available to the private sector. The private sector makes significant contributions to political campaigns and will want contracts in return. Therefore, a campaign can be sold as:
"We will fix what has been broken, and bring back jobs to the critical areas of our sovereignty. We will make good on the promise of increasing efficiency and reducing waste by opening up opportunities across all areas of industry, both old and new.
What we've witnessed over the past four years was the dismantling of the American dream. What we endured was "an honest day's work" being turned into "work a day and a half for half the pay".
But now, we will rebuild. And as we do, we will no longer be vulnerable to the whims of ivory tower bureaucrats. We are taking the power back. We are keeping our taxpayer dollars focused where they should be. You are getting the respect you're owed and reminding Washington that they work for you."
Step 2: Cut taxes on the rich. <---------- You are here
It works every time. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Let’s see how the rural poor feel when their hospital closes, they can’t get medicaid, health insurance is wildly out of reach, they have no ability to borrow money thanks to insane medical debt that they can never repay, and their wages are garnished for student debt from a degree they never finished. How long until debt becomes a crime?
> Let’s see how the rural poor feel when their hospital closes, they can’t get medicaid [...]
There's been research on that [1]. They become even more likely to vote Republican. Here's the abstract:
> Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without access to emergency health care. I use data on rural hospital closures from 2008 to 2020 to explore where and why hospital closures occurred as well as who–if anyone–rural voters held responsible for local closures. Despite closures being over twice as likely to occur in the Republican-controlled states that did not expand Medicaid, closures were associated with reduced support for federal Democrats and the Affordable Care Act following local closures. I show that rural voters who lost hospitals were roughly 5–10 percentage points more likely to vote Republican in subsequent presidential elections. If anything state Republicans seemed to benefit in rural areas from rejecting Medicaid and resulting rural health woes following the passage of the ACA. These results have important implications for population health and political accountability in the U.S.
The trend you described has been going on since Reagan, and the "rural poor" haven't budged. I have no expectation that attitudes will change in Rural America, not matter how bad things get.
It turns out when the other party runs on “we’re smarter and have better ideas than you and 25% of you are deplorable”, that people tend to increase their support for their current party rather than deciding “you know what? They’re right; we should switch to follow those coastal elites…”
I’ve been all around the world. Only in America do people insist on doing evil things and still want to be praised for it.
It’s the stupid brand of evil too, like killing millions AND pissing away trillions of dollars in useless Middle East wars (god forbid you say anything against American foreign policy). Or ICE destroying lives AND hurting your own economy. It’s not like republican states are the richest! But the poorer they get the angrier and more dug-in they get.
> “we’re smarter and have better ideas than you and 25% of you are deplorable”
Hypocrisy - Trump and the GOP regularly call _half_ the country a whole fucking barrage of terms (pedophiles, rapists, marxist socialist communist fascists, evil, ungodly, sick, etc) on a regular fucking basis. Gaslight. Obstruct. Project.
And for the exact same reasons, that is just as ineffective at convincing new people to join their ranks, but rather cements support for the DNC for existing DNC members.
One fine day, liberals will wake up and decide they have had enough. Whatever the cost. Conservatives will be so surprised - look how high their pride is.
These are the reasons many voted for Trump. His ability to tear down American institutions is a direct result of the apathy born out of decades of successful corporate corruption, or lobbying, if you prefer, that we failed to stop democratically.
But it is wrong to think all American generations before ours didn't have to fight. The lie is that democracy was ever easy. There are millions of Americans mobilizing, sharing their stories, marching, talking to their representatives, protesting, and following their conscience. It is easier than ever to find and join the peaceful opposition.
Well, that leads to another narrative trick called “see these are examples of how big government doesn’t work and the other side asking for increased government and hospitals are socialist and going to waste your tax dollars or give to freeloaders like immigrants etc”. Destroy government based support, blame it as failure of government, rinse and repeat.
LBJ, JFK, and FDR are what we need more of in future leaders. People not in it for themselves and savvy enough to not prostrate themselves every time to corporate or sectarian factions while accumulating political capital to spend on worthy causes to advance humanity and create a better future.
It’s because he only knows how to destroy, not build, and destroying is always easier than building. It may be impactful but it is going to set America back decades.
He's destroying for various reasons yes. But he knows how to build. Perhaps not personally, but he can wrangle a system to do things for him, mostly for him perhaps. OK completely for himself, but that's not to say he can't.
The only thing he has ever directed that has been a net positive to society, Operation Warp Speed, is something he disowns because of the rabid anti-science stance of his base.
While a politician. You do realize he built many things or headed the building of many things prior to being a politician? In some cases to net good for the world, unbelievably. It's easy to vilify him for political or personal choices but that's not to say he can't do things.
Reminds me of reading about Karl Marx in college. As I recall he basically made a name for himself talking shit about capitalism. Then, people said, "Bro, if capitalism sucks so much, why don't you come up with something better?" And that's how The Communist Manifesto was born, which was a total disaster, and set humanity back generations.
Talking shit and tearing stuff down is easy. Building something is hard.
There’s not a lot the opposition can do. Elections have consequences and now people are gonna have to live with it. People stayed home or decided to vote against their own interest. It’s not like there wasn’t a previous track record to compare. Selective amnesia is not an excuse.
> Elections have consequences and now people are gonna have to live with it.
yes they do, but it seems dems favorability are fading [0]
> People stayed home or decided to vote against their own interest.
it seems like the democrats standard mode of operation is to always wait for the opposition to screw up everything (2008, 2020) and then anoint some weak candidates (2016, 2020, 2024) and run on "we're better vote for us" and then get run over at the next election cause they didn't do much as expected (and their horrible messaging) [1]
the democrats need to clear out their decrepit leadership or its just gonna continue to slide worse and worse
I don’t disagree. But nobody should be surprised by everything that’s happening right now. Most people justified their vote by saying he’s either joking or it won’t happen to me or my loved ones and are getting buyers remorse now. There were two options and one was much worse than the other.
Frankly, the Democratic party epically and massively failed their constituency by first running a mummy and then attempting to run perhaps the most unlikable, unrelatable, disconnected candidate of my lifetime - that literally zero people voted for.
It's not the people's fault, it's the party's... the party thought everyone would just jump when told to do so.
How was Kamala Harris more disconnected than, say, Mitt Romney, a billionaire who said that half of voters believed they were victims and were mooching off the government?
Or for that matter, how is she less disconnected than Donald Trump, who bragged about being able to get away with sexually assaulting people because he's famous?
No message should have still won out against a message of hating everything about America, but here we are.
I agree that the Democrats are feckless, but still let's not forget which direction is up. (personally I think they're just coasting along and assuming they'll still be elites in whatever "new order" arises as long as they don't stick their heads up)
Have any sort of policy position and not run on the "at least I'm not him" platform.
In an era where Republicans are dismantling the government do you know what Dems will run on? That's right, dismantling the government, but in a kinder gentler way (see Ezra Kline's abundance agenda).
Dems are anemic to running on popular positions. Raise the minimum wage, expand Medicare, restore the institutions Republicans are dismantling.
Both parties are serving the wealthy. That's what prevents Dems from serving the working class. They know not to advocate raising the minimum wage.
It's what has created the behavior where Dems try to win over right wing independents because that's a more donor friendly position and Republicans can purely pander to their based, because they're already donor friendly (you know, for example, Republicans will always act to the benefit of big oil).
Like? It's hard to do anything when the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are all controlled by the same party. Until midterms, there's not much that can be done at the federal level. States can oppose some issues, and some States are, but what exactly do you think the opposition can/should be doing that they aren't already?
Connecting with people, building a mass movement, organizing institutions that can funnel people and effort into building the world and election results they want. Taking risks by taking a stand on issues and saying those issues are the reason to vote for them (not to avoid having the other side win). Doing local politics to demonstrate competence and show that they care and are building things, then show off those things to the rest of the country and say “look, we can do this everywhere” or at least “look at what we can do on a small scale but our vision is bigger and it’s limited by the fact our vision needs to happen on a national scale and can’t be achieved fully at this small scale”. Lots of things.
They should be putting out model legislation now on a monthly basis. No, none of it can pass, none of it can get to the floor. But they need bills that they can say they will pass if given a majority, and they need to be OK with the Republicans attacking them for the next 15 months. In fact the more time the Republicans spend attacking Democratic legislative proposals, the less time they are spending on selling their own.
The Democrats also need to put out radical proposals, not incrementalist ones or business-as-usualones along with fluffy messages about competency and management skills. The public does not want a party of competent middle managers whose primary skillset is watering down expectations and telling people to be patient while they redecorate. They need to put out policies that are going to make people spit out their coffee.
IMHO, it's already too late for the midterms. In fact, it's probably too late for the 2028 presidential election, too. Democrats need to connect, and that connection isn't from showing up, out of nowhere, three months before an election and taking policy. The connection starts years before the election, by associating oneself to the things the voters also associate with. I think one of the most brilliant things Trump ever did was to get involved with WWE. That started the connection with Rural America. It was long before he ran for president, and it wasn't boring policy talk. It was, "Look at me! I'm your guy! I'm into wrestling, just like you!" Now, this is nothing new - Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall. But I think the Democrats are just terrible at it. And here's a great example: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMIuyMQRAq1
(1) Actually have a coordinated plan would be the starting point.
(2) If the left truly wanted to help the American people like they say they do they need the programs they enact to actually work. Say what you want about Trump but he is effective. But then again, all authoritarians are.
Be better (like doing it at all) of saying what they have accomplished. People don't know what they zone know. Make a list of things accomplished and say it out loud. Humility could be another way that democracy dies.
Currently there isn't much they can do, but they handed the election to a corrupt buffoon.
Inaction the border & immigration, letting the woke crowd run rampant with their nonsense(not talking about it doesn't make it go away), and selecting a VP that if ever tasked with running for President--wasn't likely to win.
American voters always look to the Dems and Republicans as if it’s a symmetric game.
So, one party puts up a person who encouraged and insurrection, has no coherent policy, ZERO moral standing, had security documents in a toilet, ran a crypto pump and dump scheme on the day of his inauguration, and wins.
But ALL of those things are not meaningful.
If one team comes to play football, and the other team brings in a posse of clowns who don’t play football, and the clowns win - then the game you are playing isn’t football. Hell, both teams should have fielded equally outrageous clowns. (This is what happens in completely corrupt nations, and America’s likely fate)
Playing a better game of football, is not as important as figuring out how the other team’s moves are legal.
In all earnestness - The question people really need to ask is not how the Dems lost, it’s how Trump ran in the first place.
Biden had an identical border policy to Trump term 1. Dems even tried to strengthen ice towards the end of Biden's term.
The fact that you think he was weak on the border really shows that Dems trying to out Republican Republicans on the border is a bad move. They should have been pushing for immigration reform and better/faster routes to becoming documented.
> letting the woke crowd run rampant with their nonsense
What does this mean?
> selecting a VP that if ever tasked with running for President--wasn't likely to win.
That's pretty typical. The much bigger problem is Biden ran while knowing his polling was in the gutter. It was him running with sundowning symptoms.
Harris's problem was that while knowing about Biden's unpopularity, she refused to distance our distinguish herself from him in any way.
To be fair, it's hard for the Dems to do anything effectively when a sitting president attempts to overthrow an election, fails, and then half of the voters think "You know what, I want that guy to lead our country again."
Not that they're blameless, of course - they had four years to throw Trump in prison, did nothing, and now we're reaping the result. But the problem goes much deeper than the Dems being incompetent. In a functioning democracy, voters aren't supposed to elect someone who literally committed treason, just because the alternative is "unlikeable" (what the fuck does that even mean, next to Trump).
You can't protect the environment without research. Without research you can't know what's dangerous.
Even in tiny countries, for example Sweden, when we notice a statistical uptick of health problems in a particular area, we have government organizations that go there to investigate and figure out the cause.
A) The Trump admin has conducted rigorous analysis and audit of 55 years of EPA research, and concluded that it is so insignificant and ineffective that one can just dismantle the entire department.
B) The Trump admin rubber stamps anything the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 wants done, and are desperate to find money for their tax cut funding.
https://archive.fo/xva9m
It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper.
As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1]. The solution was to have many competing factions. I think first-past-the-post, corporate election influence, and mass media consolidated power into a single faction that ended up causing the system to break down (in that the branches don't seem to be checking each other's power right now).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
I don't think corporate election influence or mass media really have anything to do with it.
The issue first showed up in 1828 election, when some of the Framers were still alive, and the US basically did nothing about it over the ensuing 200 years.
Remember it was Andrew Jackson who went around ignoring Supreme Court decisions and saying "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it".
And his abuse of executive powers during the Bank Wars to punish political enemies led to the formation of a new political party.
> "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it"
This was one lesson the common people never wanted to learn because it was so much easier to live on the belief that their system is intrinsically immune to abuse, it's just better, magically almost. It was bolstered by the same people's desire to feel better by pointing fingers at the "weak fools" living under dictatorships, incapable to fight. "We have rights and guns, we'll pick up arms and fight any abuse".
But when the abuses came pouring almost everyone piffled, living on the next belief that time will fix things. Sometimes it did. Or maybe one of these times will bring the shocking realization that it's easy to talk big in good times and hard to act in bad times when your skin is in the game.
>I don't think corporate election influence or mass media really have anything to do with it.
Is any particular group overrepresented there? Hairy, long hooked nose? I'm talking about white cishetero men of course, this is all their fault. We need to have more, and by more, I mean ALL, such people to be non-cishetero non-white non-men.
You just invert identity politics to your liking and call it a solution without touching problem descriptions, root causes and potential true solutions.
Identity politics is at the core of the right, its a huge part of the problem. And you yield it just upside down...
Dark Money has nothing to do with being able to consolidate power, gerrymander, and reduce the system to a two-party system whose members seem to be mostly under the influence of their own desire for gain? Which brings us back to the money…
Are you kidding? No other democracy spends this much on campaigns.
https://theconversation.com/the-scale-of-us-election-spendin...
Would you like to argue money has no influence on political outcomes? Please go ahead.
It didn’t help making senators directly elected. Makes them vulnerable to populists movements.
> The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1].
That was hundreds of years ago; when Madison says "domestic faction", he doesn't mean "a faction", he means what we would today call "factionalism". The 18th-century use is a pretty direct mirror of the Latin word factio, also meaning factionalism.
The idea that "checks and balances" are built into the US governmental structure is interesting. It would make sense if governmental positions were held by right of heredity. They aren't, but you can see how the Framers would be working with that mental model.
As the US government is actually constructed, Congressmen, for example, have no incentives to preserve anything as a power exclusive to Congress, because they have no lasting affiliation with Congress.
The Founders would never have approved of Citizens United.
Yes they would have, for many of the same reasons the ACLU did [1].
[1] https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-and-citizens-united
I'm probably being cynical, but I take their reasoning for opposition with a grain of salt when they themselves partake in lobbying. Removing it would hurt them, too.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/american-civil-liberties-un...
Disagree. The founders were wary of business influence over politics. It’s one reason why state capitols were removed from commercial centers.
And the ACLU was dead wrong on this.
Sure they would have! The elite of the United States that lead the revolution were all extremely mercantile and many were coming to the colonies to run their own little fiefdoms away from the crown.
One should acknowledge how many of the freedoms locked into the founding ideology of the US is pretty close to what libertarians reach out for. I don't know many libertarians arguing against Citizens United.
That isn't to say that the US can't aim for something different, and that the core of the nation today likely believes many different things.
We can choose our own destiny without trying to ascribe every good idea to what a group of people thought at the founding of the country.
It turns out that people were right about capitalism and its sinister dangers.
All societies are consensus realities wholly dependent upon participation.
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
So.
Weaponized social media. That's what wasn't predicted.
Maybe the abnormal thing was the century or so we had of papers/radio/TV guided by ethics or professionalism or some delicate trustworthiness-equilibrium.
And now we have returned to a state where humanity is guided by inventive stories and manipulated by propaganda.
This implies that the period with massively more centralized control of information had a truer consensus reality.
That seems… unlikely?
It was better than the illusion of freedom of information a lot of people have now. In reality mass manipulation is happening on a global scale at unprecedented levels.
At least they mostly felt the need to pick a single consensus reality to approximate. How well it represented common experience, well...
It wasn't that centralized (many many independent newspapers and such).
And then "information" is doing a lot of work when you start talking about social media.
You know what the weirdest thing about that century is? The Soviets.
A sort of seemingly valid communal society seemed possible so all the other capitalism based ones had competition and as a result were trying to improve the life of citizens.
I'm starting to become more and more convinced that as real fear of Communism disappeared at the top, our systems are regressing to the mean.
It wasn't predicted because freedom of speech is generally considered a good thing so its darker aspects were never considered.
Same reason adtech has free reign to bring down society.
Germany has learned this lesson the hard way, with a 'defensive' constitution post-1945. You don't have 100% free speech in Germany, and it is possible to make parties illegal. It's not without its issues (currently, the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet) but it is a lesson the US should have learned after the first Trump term.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.
They didn't "learn this lesson", they had a constitution imposed on them and were basically occupied for 50 years by multiple foreign powers; even up until 2020 as I recall there were about as many active US army personnel in Germany as German ones. There isn't a hugely compelling story that the constitution is the big factor in the German journey.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
Germans have this false belief that if you just create the correct laws, people will follow them and system would be good. When in reality, for most people around the world, they follow laws only till it makes sense for them.
This belief is stronger in Switzerland and Scandinavian countries, based on my experience.
> were basically occupied for 50 years by multiple foreign powers
what a bunch of nonsense
It's also worth noting that the mainstream German parties have actually supported ethnic cleansing abroad, in Nagorno-Karabach, etc. while the AfD opposed those things, so I don't think it's very clear cut that AfD is the dangerous party.
Personally I find the political inclinations of the German mainstream parties to be what appears to be dangerous, since what they're doing actually led to a large number of deaths and a large number of people being displaced, to the loss of sovereignty and to the expansion of a dictatorship.
I see very little difference between Aliyev and Hitler, and he is still tolerated (in fact, my perception of Azerbaijani hate attitudes is that they're actually more extreme that the Nazi hate attitudes, i.e. simply going further, the systematic teaching of this hatred to even younger children that the Nazis primarily targeted, etc.).
The thousands of peace-keeping troops in Armenia/Azerbaijan that looked the other way were not German, but Russian. By the way, both Russia and Armenia are members of the CSTO military alliance[1], while Azerbaijan is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Security_Treaty_Org...
Yes, I know that the Russians looked the other way.
However, Baerbock has absolutely monstrous statements and the German gas-guzzling contingent are the obvious culprits for the EU partership agreements with Azerbaijan and for the incorrect statements treating this whole thing as somehow restoring Azerbaijani territorial integrity and the numerous statements by the EC falsely claiming that Armenia had attacked Azerbaijani (i.e. these 'we call on both sides...' in the aftermath of Azerbaijani attacks). Furthermore, it is German influence on the EC that made the implementation of the ICJ decision subject to negotiation, and it is likely German influence on the EC that forced the agreement whereby mine maps were exchanged for the release of PoWs. These mine maps naturally enabled further Azeri attacks. It is also very apparent that there was government influence on media organizations to not report the starvation in the NKAO beginning after the Azeri blocking of the Lachin corridor-- for example in Sweden state television reported nothing, and reported of the ethnic cleansing itself only that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan'. This shows co-ordination between Swedish government, Swedish state television (SVT) and Turkey or Azerbaijan, indicating a secret deal either for the sake the Swedish NATO entry or on the EU level. Certain phrases 'lightning offensive' which sound decidedly Turkish are also repeated in many newspaper articles, indicating a larger deal rather than something specific to Sweden.
The CSTO is absolutely irrelevant, as everybody who matters in any way knows completely. France would not be selling weapons to Armenia if they believed that their CSTO membership were relevant.
There were excellent opportunities to intervene even as the Azeri troops were rolling down the Agdam road to Stepanakert, and it's very unlikely that the Germans were unaware. SAR satellite imagery of the region is so readily available that unclassified images can be obtained on a commercial basis and I'm not even sure it was cloudy.
> You don't have 100% free speech in Germany
You don’t have it in the USA, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
Does any country?
> Does any country?
No, and for good reasons. Even in a utopian liberal democracy, fundamental rights cannot be used to deprive someone else of their own fundamental rights. You cannot have freedom for all without limitations to that freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Since one might read this and concludes "tolerance is impossible.". You cannot tolerate intolerance, thats the contradiction here and not tolerating intolerance is a fairly easy escape out of the dilemma, at least for me.
Edit: This dilemma arises whenever your ideal is dependent on the cooperation of others. Pacifism is another example. So you cant uphold your pacifistic ideal in the case of being attacked. Or you might loose the option to enforce peace when it only depends on you cooperating, upholding it. This is a perspective many people rejecting ukranian aid dont consider (but are eager to push out nazis because they are intolerant).
Germany has the same fundamental problems. Just the symptoms are different. Look at debt brake etc. And the banning at this point is just not politically possible. It is just a legal fantasy. Over a long term, laws can only reflect the politics.
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
The civic consens could only be undermined because people lack the contextual knowledge and (self) critical reasoning to not be vulnerable.
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öffentlich-rechtlicher_Rundf...
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
https://taz.de/Laender-boykottieren-den-Bildungsgipfel/!5918...
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
It is more than depressing. During my PhD/Postdoc, we had excellent collaboration with the EPA on stuff which then really improved the life of people in the US. These agencies need to do research to stay ahead of/keep up with the development.
Context: we developed chemicals toxicity prediction models. This was 20 years ago, this allowed the EPA to quality check applications made by chemical companies.
Yet we have Microplastics, PFAS, & a slew of other dangerous contamination across the planet. And the military industrial waste is rarely mentioned.
It seems the EPA cares more about enforcing CO2 production & making sure a homesteaders doesn't build a pond...than it does about extremely harmful & destructive chemicals dispersed across the planet by industrial & military waste.
So I suppose the research is good but the emphasis & enforcement is what really matters. And while there have been historical wins, the agency seems increasingly like a political revolving door to entrench industrial incumbants.
It's not going away with a whimper, the supreme court is killing it on purpose. There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy. There is also the impoundment act that forbid a president from redirecting or not spending appropriated money. These laws are being ignored because the supreme court has gone full partisan.
One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years. If Dems don't try to do something to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
[1] tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court.
I'm not a fan of this court - but what thing that was 100's of years of precedent was torn down by this court?
Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.
Birthright citizenship would be the issue to watch, because a previous Supreme Court ruled on the scope of the 14th amendment back in 1888 and conservatives have been aiming to reverse this for decades.
Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said:
> The first observation we have to make on this clause is that it puts at rest both the questions which we stated to have been the subject of differences of opinion. It declares that persons may be citizens of the United States without regard to their citizenship of a particular State, and it overturns the Dred Scott decision by making all persons born within the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens of the United States. That its main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase, "subject to its jurisdiction" was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/83/36/
Wong Kim Ark, meanwhile, is a weird fucking case that spends a huge number of pages analyzing everything except the 14th amendment.
> Just five years after the 14th amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court said [...]
Cool, but the 14th amendment was ratified. At least we can agree on that. And this is what it says:
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
You can try to weasel out all you want, but it's at the disrespect to the words of our constitution. Whatever interpretation you are justifying this month, it is radical and lonesome.
What does “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” mean in this particular context?
I guess I should not be surprised that you would immediately try a rhetorical stunt like dismissing the precedential case as 'a weird fucking case' without evaluating its content. I understand it's a lot of work to read.
I read the whole case. It’s a weird fucking case. It spends a tremendous amount of ink addressing irrelevant issues (the Napoleonic Code? wtf?) and very little addressing the relevant legislative history.
It seems obvious that the 14th amendment meant to reflect the very similar language of the civil rights act of 1866:
> all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States
What does “and not subject to any foreign power” mean? Nobody knows because Wong Kim Ark doesn’t bother to actually try and address that point.
That would also explain why Congress found it necessary to confer citizenship on Indians by legislation in 1924.
To be clear, I think the specific holding is correct. The 14th amendment is an equal protection amendment, and removed Congress’s power to discriminate citizenship based on race. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether the 14th amendment also removed Congress’s power to qualify citizenship based on legal immigration status or other grounds. It doesn’t purport to be a birthright citizenship order.
Maybe the Court should look into the “emanations from penumbras” of the term “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to see what they can find in there.
What does “and not subject to any foreign power” mean? Nobody knows because Wong Kim Ark doesn’t bother to actually try and address that point.
That's a lie. The opinion does engage with that question in depth, and also digs into why the language of the 14th amendment differs from that of the 1866 civil rights act. You're trying to shift attention away from the text of the 14th amendment (which is the supreme law of the land) to the text of an earlier law whose meaning you think is easier to argue over. I encourage anyone who has a few hours to take a good look at the case and see for themselves.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/169/649
Maybe the Court should look into the “emanations from penumbras” of the term “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to see what they can find in there.
Weasel words, linking the case to another (Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)) hated by conservatives so as to throw shade on the former.
You're citing the Slaughterhouse Cases? Did I miss a time machine's returning us all to 1870?
It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.
> It’s an accepted principle that unclear legislative text is best interpreted by reference to sources closer in time to the enactment of the legislation.
I've come to think that this is a dangerous hybrid of (a) bibliolatry — the idolization of a written text [0]; and (b) the Nuremburg Defense of "just following orders" [1], with the orders here being the aforementioned written text.
What follows is a crude and incomplete attempt at "thinking by writing" about another possible perspective that might be more effective than the balls-and-strikes approach that Chief Justice Roberts supposedly follows:
A. Historically, in medieval England a judge was an agent of the king [2], charged with deciding specific cases as he thought the king would do.
B. In the modern United States, the people are said to be sovereign, acting through their elected- and duly-appointed representatives (legislative and otherwise).
C. A legitimate sovereign seeks "the best" for the society in the long term — with limits on what harms can be inflicted on individuals in that pursuit. (Cf. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, as partly manifested in the Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions.)
D. When an extant command from the sovereign — in legislation or constitution — is clear and explicit, then the judge must follow the command (or resign if in conscience she can't comply).
E. But when there's room for different views about just what the sovereign would do at that time and in those circumstances, then the judge — well, judges, making a best guess about what the sovereign would do.
F. Yes, this has elements of a court of equity. It also draws on supremely-pragmatic doctrine from the U.S. military: When a tactical situation isn't covered by specific orders, the leader on the ground is supposed to make a best guess about "the commander's intent" and proceed accordingly. [3]
G. Certainly a judge making such a guess must take into account any available evidence about what the sovereign's intent might be if the sovereign were on the scene.
H. But it's an abdication of responsibility for the judge to throw up her hands and say, I'm sorry, even though the sovereign isn't here today, I'm not allowed to rely on my judgment about what the sovereign would do — instead, I must try to read entrails left over from legislative sausage-making by long-dead legislators who likely didn't consider (or even imagine) everything that I must take into account today.
I. To be sure, this can be calumnized as judicial legislating. But it seems like a pragmatic way to go about judging hard cases in a complex world.
Notes:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliolatry
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_justice. In the framework I'm proposing above, today's judges, unlike their medieval counterparts, aren't given a roving commission to seek out cases and "do justice."
[3] https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/commanders-intent-define...
[4] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2002-title32-vol5/ht...
From Gemini:
The Original Intent of the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, primarily to overturn the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In that decision, the Court had held that no person of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could be a U.S. citizen.
The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to create a clear constitutional rule that would prevent this from ever happening again. Senator Jacob Howard, a key drafter of the amendment, stated that its citizenship clause "will, of course, include the children of all parents... who may be born in the United States." He specified only two exceptions: children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces.
The language of the amendment was a direct refutation of the racist rationale of the Dred Scott decision. While the concept of "undocumented immigrants" as we know it today did not exist, the amendment's framers used broad language to ensure that citizenship was based on a principle of birth on American soil, not on race or the legal status of one's parents.
The Role of Wong Kim Ark
The Wong Kim Ark case became necessary because the government's interpretation of the 14th Amendment had narrowed. Following the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the U.S. government began arguing that Chinese people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. They claimed that Wong Kim Ark was not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. because his parents were still subjects of the Emperor of China.
The 1898 Supreme Court ruling in Wong Kim Ark was a crucial reaffirmation of the original intent. The Court's 6-2 majority opinion, written by Justice Horace Gray, systematically dismantled the government's arguments. The Court looked to the history of English common law and the intent behind the 14th Amendment.
It concluded that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" applied to all persons who are subject to U.S. laws and not under the authority of a foreign government, such as diplomats. The Court found that Wong Kim Ark's birth in the U.S. automatically made him a citizen, despite his parents' ineligibility for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
In short, the Wong Kim Ark decision did not create a new standard; it prevented the government from creating a new, more restrictive interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It affirmed the foundational principle that birth on U.S. soil is the basis for citizenship, a principle that has been a cornerstone of American law ever since.
Please don't repost AI answers (although I think the summary is fine). People come to HN to hear other others' ideas, anyone who wants to know what an AI thinks is more than capable of canvassing a bunch of them and even getting them to argue with each other.
Gemini, what did the Slaughterhouse Cases say about the 14th amendment’s reference to “subject to the jurisdiction?”
The *Slaughterhouse Cases (1873)* famously narrowed the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, particularly its Privileges or Immunities Clause. While the case primarily focused on that clause, the Court also touched upon the "subject to the jurisdiction" language in the citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
In the Slaughterhouse Cases, Justice Samuel Miller, writing for the majority, briefly clarified the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." He stated that this phrase was intended to *exclude certain categories of individuals from automatic birthright citizenship*, even if they were born on U.S. soil. Specifically, he mentioned:
* *Children of foreign ministers or consuls:* These individuals are considered to be under the jurisdiction of their parents' sovereign nation, not the United States. * *Children of citizens or subjects of foreign states born within the United States:* This was a general exclusion for those whose allegiance was considered to be to another country, such as children of enemy aliens during wartime.
The primary purpose of this clause, in the context of the post-Civil War era, was to firmly establish the citizenship of formerly enslaved people, overturning the Dred Scott decision. However, the "subject to the jurisdiction" language ensured that certain exceptions to territorial birthright citizenship were maintained, consistent with international law and diplomatic practice.
It's important to note that while the Slaughterhouse Cases introduced this interpretation, the scope of "subject to the jurisdiction" for birthright citizenship was later more definitively addressed and affirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrants who were not citizens was indeed a U.S. citizen because he was "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
I think the odds of ending birthright citizenship is near zero, its not zero, just very near to zero.
>> tearing down hundreds of years of precedent is not conservative, this is an extremist court
The Roberts court has overturned precedent less often than any other recent court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/us/supreme-court-preceden....
By your definitions, the Roberts court is the most conservative court, and the Warren Burger court from 1969 to 1986 was the most extremist.
You don't care about overturning precedent. The above facts will not change your mind about the Roberts court. The real issue is there in the article I linked to:
"What distinguishes the Roberts court is ideology. In cases overruling precedents, the Warren court reached a liberal result 92 percent of the time. The Burger and Rehnquist courts reached liberal outcomes about half the time. The number dropped to 35 percent for the Roberts court. Since 2017, it has ticked down a bit, to 31 percent"
The Roberts court is in fact conservative. It does not often overturn precedent, but when it overturns precedent it does so with conservative results. That's why you and other liberals don't like it.
Liberal vs conservative is not the binary that you should be looking at here, but rather just vs corrupt. It's okay if a ruling ideologically favors one side or the other, but it's not okay if it the court trends toward "our guy can do whatever he wants".
That’s from 18 months ago. I wonder what the trend is now.
> If Dems don't try to do something about to represent 50% of the country that is panicking then they're complicit.
Uh. What are they supposed to do with a Republican trifecta? Do you mean "win votes in future elections so they can govern?"
When they get power again they need to challenge the court's extremism. I've seen ideas like term limits or packing the court with more than 9 judges.
They won’t get power again in a meaningful way. The last election was their “last stand”. The U.S. has a rigged court and gerrymandered senate. Kamala was right about one thing, “we’re not going back”. Unfortunately, the context was wrong. In this case, it’s, “we’re not going back to being a functional democracy”.
How is the Senate gerrymandered? They're elected statewide.
The state borders themselves were gerrymandered in the 19th century to influence the electoral college. That's why for example there's all these very empty northern states like the two Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming that collectively have fewer people than LA but between them they get 8 senators.
As an example: in Texas, there are laws and processes that discourage voting in high-population-density areas that trend less conservative. Can you think of benign reason for a law that bams providing water for people waiting in line to vote in a state that gets really hot?
> When they get power again
Hard to see a path to Dems winning a Senate majority.
Yep. And the House is functionally irrelevant and basically a passive onlooker.
SCOTUS legislate from the bench as instructed and POTUS decrees from a throne.
A majority isn't impossible, but they would have to remove the filibuster. Ideally I'd want the filibuster removed right this instant, but reinstated for judicial and really any confirmations. Let the party in power make their laws and remove old ones, but keep the judiciary independent.
Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
> Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.
While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:
Source: https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-co...As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.
Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
Yep. R are using every dirty trick by treating politics like love and war, and D are treating it like a purity contest. Ultimately, though both are serving, as Gore Vidal put it, the Property party. I want fair and equal accountability, no one to be above the law, and no politician to engage in even the appearance of inappropriate, unethical behavior, or corrupt behavior; and them to get things done that advance the collective good without steamrolling over groups with sudden, huge surprises. But I want more of the good parts of a culture like Japan where people are decent and conscientious and Europe where other people are cared for besides oneself. The US is currently far, far away from anything remotely resembling healthy, long-term sustainable socioeconomic attitudes, policies, and actions.
That is being naive, the way it is going, elections will be as free as in any other authoritarian country.
Ideally there will be enough representation in congress to remove justices like Thomas for blatant corruption / conflict of interest.
It'd be nice if we could remove congress members for blatant corruption too, e.g. Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. Or prevent further Weekend at Bernie's politicians like Diane Feinstein and Joe Biden.
> There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy.
That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.
Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.
Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"
First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.
Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative" [1] for at least the next 100 years.
Not really. A party needs 2/3 majority to impeach a judge. There’s a possibility Democrats can have that majority after next midterms. But the problem with Democrats is that they almost always follow laws and aren’t radical lunatics like republicans. Even after last election, HN felt pretty Red leaning, so that stupidity fever caught a lot of otherwise sane people.
Good people follow laws, bad people don't.
That's the core problem. The game is rigged
I think it’s rather that good (effective) politicians wield the law and power effectively and creatively. Good people don’t follow bad laws, for example.
The Democrats are not good, but it’s intentional. They work for their donors not their voters.
> The Democrats are not good
You are commenting on a thread about Republican Party gutting one more scientific research department. But you have audacity to say Democrats are bad. One of the commenters on this thread had described very appropriately the current political environment- mass weaponization of stupidity. Those people are running at a very high speed in the opposite direction that there’s no coming back for them.
> They work for their donors not their voters
Voters are donors too. Maybe you meant big donors like Musk. You know how that turned out.
Let me clarify.
I’m saying Democrats are ineffective at doing good and are therefore part of the problem.
If the Democrats do not effectively wield power to solve people’s real world (economic) problems the country will slide further to the right.
I obviously meant wealthy donors and corporations (the ownership class) — the minority or entities that the Democrats are beholden to as opposed to the bulk of their voters.
You’re blaming conservatives but it’s the Democrat leadership that is desperately out of touch, which enables the worst of the conservatives.
Age, institutional donors, and a general upper-middle-class mindset have made the leadership ineffective.
What’s worse is that rank-and-file Democrat voters in this upper-middle-class to upper class bloc—generally older white-collar voters, tech millionaires, or trust-fund kids—refuse to see that they are part of the problem.
Any constructive criticism or calls for introspection is deemed “bad faith” or conservative trolling.
It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief".
Word up.
Most people that ever lived, lived under some authoritarian or unjust rule. Some lived in a full terror state. Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted. One can ponder, “what was the moment it all happened?” - there wasn’t a moment. It’s a total frog boiling in water situation. We’ve been boiling. Taste the water, it’s frog soup. Given that this admin has 3 more years, it’ll be frog bone broth once the bones melt.
It is so fucking crazy that if you actually let the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country. Anyway, I’m going back to my regular programming of watching Mexican farmers jump from buildings to their death as they run from ICE, and my president sell scam crypto and sneakers and shit.
Shout out to the American Dream.
> the unintellectual border-line savage illiterates fulfill their chaotic fantasies that you truly do get a backward bumble fuck country
it's ok if you don't have energy to understand otherwise rn, but please know that there's more to it than this. to understand is the only way out that's not total war.
and yes, i'm angry too.
I don't understand. And as far as the can tell, the only thing preventing total war is the belief that it might be possible to fix it next year.
And no matter who wins, the other side will be convinced it was by cheating. And that has no alternative but total war.
I have looked long and hard for an alternative but I'm not seeing one.
Total war (or just any collective conflict) is in some sense the consequence of choosing the wrong abstraction, not always innocently.
E.g. "It is simply a fact that Group X is just B-like" (group X obviously disagrees, understanding itself to be C+L+M+N).
But projecting B-ness coarsely onto the surface of X, this serves both the members throughout group X and the leaders at its center, who have other goals than understanding the truth of C+L+M+N.
Sorry, that's a new analogy for framing how I see it, as someone working in collective intelligence. Might be a little rocky.
> the only thing preventing total war is the belief that it might be possible to fix it next year
And the knowledge that you cannot win when the other side controls the armed forces, the FBI, and all the governing institutions, a lot of states entirely too, and is clearly willing (and maybe even eager) to use them? The president and the people behind him probably look forward to their opponents trying. I think this "total war" might be very short.
It would be. It's just what you do when all of the alternatives are worse.
Peaceful secession perhaps? Long shot but it seems like the least distasteful outcome.
The solution is to decrease your high investment in the politics show, and put your energy where it matters - the people around you, yourself. Do something real instead.
I am working for the people around me. Because they are being hurt by this "show". Government workers who have been fired without cause. Trans people who cannot get their medicine. Latinos who are scared to go out in public for fear of being swept up.
This is not a show for me. These are the people in my life.
You seemed to be frustrated at the lack of alternative, so I pointed out that the alternative is to ignore politics.
From this latest reply it seems you are heavily invested on one side of the political spectrum.
Surely you can see that if you have a specific and highly involved position on one side of the political spectrum, when your side is not winning, it will be losing. There can be no alternative.
What you seem to really want is complete dominance of the spectrum - this is the alternative you really seem and I think you are frustrated not to be achieving it. But would you really want to impose your opinions and 'help' on everyone, whether they like it or not? Maybe you would, I don't know.
Anyway, I'll point you back to my original point. The alternative is to let politicos play their games and try to remain personally uninvolved. This is the path to sanity.
Ignorance as a solution...
I dont want dominance, i wish people to be less ignorant, to eg. ponder large societal problems in all their complexity and not elevate migration as their top concern.
Dominance over all three governmental branches is what trump actually seeks. If you are ignoring that tiny detail too, you are part of the ignorant masses, part of the problem.
America was always just an idea. For the idea to work, the masses need to ascribe to and appreciate it. Americans willfully took the country in this direction. It’s democracy at work but delivering a “different agenda” than many anticipated.
> Americans are just so lucky and take so much for granted.
As an American living abroad this seems to be the general consensus with the people I talk to. At some point American exceptionalism became expected without the work and investment required.
We haven’t really followed the Constitution for about 100 years now, sadly. We pay lip service to it but it’s mostly a historical curiosity at this point.
If anyone doubts this, take a moment to read the document in one sitting. It’s remarkably short. Compare what you read to the government you’ve had all your life.
I’ve always thought that the electric chair would be the definition of “cruel and unusual” to the founding fathers.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. The document was meant to be a living adaptable document. In many cases rather than adapting the document directly, laws and interpretations were layered outside the document to keep most the initial structure solid. Amendments came about largely once something was deemed so important it absolutely should be embedded (like the abolishment of slavery) so few mistakes could be made.
The structure should really have a few more obvious significant layers where things could shift around over time.
"interstate commerce" has a lot to answer for regarding the creeping scope of the executive powers.
If we followed the constitution the EPA wouldn’t even exist! Clearly the founders didn’t create this complicated three-branch system only to have most of the government being run by “independent agencies” exercising executive, legislative, and judicial powers.
These agencies work with delegated powers. It is completely impossible for such a limited number of people as the American Congress to be experts on everything. They need advisors and structures to help them understand the world and make the right decisions, but also to make sure that these decisions are enforced.
This may not be fully developed in the US constitution because the world was much simpler back then, but it is entirely compatible with it.
The notion of Congress “delegating powers” to administrative agencies is entirely incompatible with the constitution.
The administrative agencies do not merely “advise.” They make regulations with the force of law (legislative power), enforce those regulations (executive power), and adjudicate violations of the regulations (judicial power). That concentration of the three powers into a single entity is the very thing the Constitution goes to great lengths to avoid.
Man, we have executive imposition of regulations since the very beginning of the republic. Hamilton's treasury department and customs. The 1792 postal act.
You can't have an effective executive without some kind of rulemaking authority.
Marshall wrote in 1825--
"The line has not been exactly drawn which separates those important subjects which must be entirely regulated by the legislature itself from those of less interest in which a general provision may be made and power given to those who are to act under such general provisions to fill up the details."
(And, of course, subsequent decisions have helped to draw that line more exactly).
> adjudicate violations of the regulations
You can always go to a real Article III court, but you need to exhaust the remedies within the agency first.
> The notion of Congress “delegating powers” to administrative agencies is entirely incompatible with the constitution.
With which article specifically?
Yes, enforcement should not be managed by these agencies. The way to fix this is to reshape them, not give in and let the executive run the show without checks. Of course, that requires a working legislative body and a judiciary that is not fixated on the end times.
Ok, so after you burn down this system what’s the replacement? Nothing?
The constitution has already existing answer: instead of agencies passing regulation, Congress passes laws. Agencies continue to enforce the law, and appeals are adjudicated by actual federal courts.
The key failure is Congress seems not to care to defend or execute its power. They care about getting elected and their ability do obstruct... but they barely do anything. And the republicans are apparently all terrified of the executive. The democrats are meek and assume they ought to win just for showing up because they're "right".
They care about getting re-elected, true. And are therefore vulnerable to lobbying and PAC dollars.
And therefore both parties represent corporations and the wealthy, not the voters.
Republicans have been attacking government and destabilizing society for decades. This has not happened overnight and it won't be fixed overnight.
But then you look at Baltimore and think "y'know, I think there's a bit more to it."
What is happening in Baltimore?
You can't know much about Baltimore without knowing the problems it has, so I'd suggest you take some time and get caught up. I'm not going to waste my Saturday doing a writeup on the dirtiest city in America. I think it's more likely you do know what I'm talking about, so you might as well cut to the chase and share your paean to Baltimore's grittiness or your argument for how its problems are all the fault of Republicans.
I like your reasoning here. Seeing as most people on the internet are from Maryland, assuming that every poster has an opinion about Baltimore is both logical and useful for conversation. One time I saw somebody post that they’d never been to that city so I assume that they were workshopping a character for an outlandish piece of speculative fiction.
> I like your reasoning here.
Obviously not since you can't follow it.
> Seeing as most people on the internet are from Maryland, assuming that every poster has an opinion about Baltimore is both logical and useful for conversation.
I accounted for ignorance in my first sentence, and your conclusion doesn't even follow from your bad interpretation of my logic.
Baltimore has many problems and I can't do the history justice here. I'm not interested in writing a thoughtful essay from which someone cherry-picks a sentence, and I said as much in my second sentence. This isn't the SAT; the facts aren't all contained in the prompt. If someone is coming to this from a place of total ignorance, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, I think the best thing this person can do is simply read about Baltimore.
Baltimore isn't just something people from Maryland know about. It's a tragic national disgrace. Real suffering has been inflicted on the current and former residents of Charm City. In many ways they've caused their own suffering. There's a conversation that's worth having, and I'm willing to have it.
> One time I saw somebody post that they’d never been to that city so I assume that they were workshopping a character for an outlandish piece of speculative fiction.
If only OP's goals were that interesting.
> Baltimore isn't just something people from Maryland know about. It's a tragic national disgrace.
Exactly! Baltimore is something that everyone knows about. People do not simply have political opinions without a stance on Baltimore. That isn’t really possible because the US just isn’t that big of a place.
Obviously we can imagine (with great difficulty of course) a hypothetical person that doesn’t know about everything that has happened, is happening, and what might happen in Baltimore. It is, however, impossible to imagine a person that doesn’t know why Charm City is the single most important place in American politics. It can’t be done, it is like imagining a new color. The human brain can not exist without some appreciation for Baltimore, which is why questions like “what is happening there” can only be asked in bad faith.
It is like when somebody brings up Santa Paula. Obviously I don’t need to tell you what that means
> I'm not going to waste my Saturday doing a writeup on the dirtiest city in America. It can be said easily, what happened to Baltimore is it got Detroit'ed
They're not going to know what that means either.
I have no idea what you are talking about but you are combative for no reason.
Do you forget your various salvos as soon as you post them?
The EPA is in the executive branch and Americans recently hired a CEO of the executive branch that promised to cut a lot of stuff in that branch. This is entirely consistent with what you learn about american government in high school.
Silly me thought that congress had the power of the purse.
They do. But you don’t need to appropriate from the Treasury to cut some department within the EPA.
You do need to spend the 10 statutory accounts associated with the EPA as directed by Congress, though. So, there's an account funded by Congress with this statutory description:
> For science and technology, including research and development activities, which shall include research and development activities under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980; necessary expenses for personnel and related costs; procurement of laboratory equipment and supplies; hire, maintenance, and operation of aircraft; and other operating expenses in support of research and development, $500,780,000, to remain available until September 30, 2027.
Neutering the department that would normally do this and kneecapping the ability to spend that appropriation effectively sidesteps how the executive and legislative have divided responsibilities back to the founding of the Republic.
This is a pretty big systemic issue. There's a normal amount of tug of war between the executive's implementation of congressional appropriation, but deliberately breaking multiple departments so that funds can't be effectively spent is something new that upends our normal checks and balances.
In the past, when Congress tried to delegate the power to selectively suppress spending through mechanisms like the line-item veto, the Supreme Court struck it down as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. Now, however, the executive branch is effectively wielding even greater power by deliberately impairing departments, circumventing Congressional appropriations without the constraints or oversight previously deemed essential.
Now I understand that we may spin up a deliberately ineffective agency, and that courts have given the executive a lot of leeway on administrative structuring. But allowing the executive to deliberately frustrate congressionally appropriated expenditures undermines separation of powers.
That's the problem. Congress is simply the bean counters. They aren't HR.
The EPA sits under the executive branch. Thus the chief executive (President) has the say on how the executive functions.
There are limitations, but if a research arm was created purely by executive power, then it can be stopped through executive power.
The system works as intended.
True. Doesn't make it any less stupid.
The stupidity of it (or lack thereof) wasn’t the point of the comment I replied to.
We were warned from the beginning about the dangers of political parties: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/blog/george-washington-o...
That seems to be the major mis-step in trying to structure the government to be secure from capture; obviously the whole experiment was new so they can be forgiven for not addressing it.
But we know now, and would be well-served to identify how to restructure things if given the chance. Unfortunately, the coup by the current regime seems to have been successful and it's going to have to get a lot worse before it blows up and we get something different.
Social media is killing our societies, and it hasn't just affected politics, that just seems to be one of the lighting rods of all the shit.
Social media has allowed the masses to be manipulated in a targeted way like we've never seen in history.
Its a bit sad to me that the tech community here on HN doesn't seem to take any responsibility for all this.
Surely some non-trivial percentage of the commenters / lurkers that are proud to talk about their mono-repo or their favorite react library had some part in the fact that millions think the covid vaccine has 5G.
I have friends who worked or work at Meta who will sit in their mansions paid for by all this destruction telling you how bad the USA has become and how displeased they are with the current admin, and never mention the role of social media lol
isn't this the separation of powers working though? for once the trump administration has waited for judicial review to act.
The system depends on ordinary people to care about perpetuating it. If people vote for its destruction then destroyed it will be.
Many developed nations made fun of our delusional checks and balances concept for a long time
We collectively dismiss external criticism on flimsy rationales like there never being a military coup here, or even more amusingly “at least we can talk about it” as if that is good enough, or is unique to the US at all
We've already had a coup in 1963, but Americans are such a thoroughly propagandized people that they don't even know it happened.
tell me about the coup to change the regime of the US Government in the US
Arguably the real regime did not change, since the deep state was already in control. Eisenhower had warned of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address just a couple years earlier. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had unanimously approved Operation Northwoods, a false flag attack to justify war with Cuba, which JFK had rejected. JFK also fired Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, after the botched Bay of Pigs operation and planned to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Unsurprisingly, JFK was assassinated shortly afterwards by a Manchurian candidate, Jack Ruby inexplicably killed Oswald, and then Ruby went insane in prison, probably due to MK ULTRA type operations. In sick twist of irony, Allen Dulles served on the Warren Commission, the blatant conflict of interest was lost on many.
I could go on. To put it lightly, consensus reality is manufactured to a significant degree. Even those who imagine themselves to be rebels, like woke leftists, are in large part the product of COINTELPRO type operations. If establishment media like Colbert and the NY Times are pushing the position of 'The Resistance' then you can be quite certain it's controlled opposition. Same applies to types like Charlie Kirk or the Daily Wire.
> As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The zero-day bug in the system that had not been exploited until now is that two of the three branches don't actually have any power of enforcement. So if the executive branch decides to just flat out ignore them, there are no consequences.
All of this stuff was hacked into the executive branch to begin with. People have been pointing out that the CFR is way longer than US code for a long time and someone finally dealt with it.
For what it's worth. It's a democratic decision at the end of the day. It's not one man going about it.
That's assuming that votes were accurately counted and reported by the black box voting machines
All systems exist ‘on belief’. And it’s objectively done better than all other known systems it has been running concurrently with (in both longevity and impact).
> it’s objectively done better than all other known systems (in longevity and impact)
I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.
You might want to re-read my comment.
I made no such long term or meta claims.
I guess I’m just missing it, I’ve re-read the thread and it still seems like you’re discussing the US? What am I missing? The parent comment you replied to is
> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper. As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
‘systems it has been running concurrently with’. Aka during the same times.
What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
And it isn’t actually gone yet, either.
> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?
The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.
There is no plausible entity arising from that arrangement that one could refer that has survived even 1/10th of that time intact. Not even counting the devolving of numerous other additional territories.
Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.
It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
> It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?
The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)
I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.
> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer
Yes, very few last 250 years.
USA has had some close calls before, the Civil War was horrific.
Nothing lasts forever, but I would not bet against the USA's system perpetuating itself this time, too
The Catholic Church is still around, and historically had a pretty major influence on academia.
And it also protects sex offenders from retribution.
Influence doesn't always mean positive influence.
The aids distribution in Africa is highly correlated with Christianity
Because they're anti contraception so they can boost their numbers. Consequences be damned.
Prime example of a rapist protected by the church: https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0719/1524290-eamonn-casey/
Ireland (and Canada First Nations) have a really rough history with the Church.
Though, not like the natives had much better with the US.
The system has existed on the taxpayer. Now the taxpayer has voted to get rid of it.
People who keep parroting this take are the most hypocritical bunch I have ever seen. Because if the premise is true then when these institutions existed then those were also voted by taxpayers to exist, right? But that time these “taxpayers” made noise about how government can’t be trusted and majority is muzzling their right of speech and first amendment etc etc. Now they when they are in the majority they turn around and say stuff like majority rules, government can be trusted etc.
And I know people like to play both sides so let me add. The big government hoopla exists only on one side.
Well the behavior of agencies has changed quite a lot since that whole mechanism was voted into existence, no? Sometimes it takes awhile for the consequences of a change to play out.
Another smoke and mirror argument. The “majority” government which decided that these agencies should get tax payers money was there till 6 months ago. So, it has not been “awhile”.
The taxpayer was lied to repeatedly and under the belief of many many many lies, unwittingly voted to get rid of it.
well the republican party has been talking for decades about removing EPA, DOE, etc. and has gotten lots of votes on those premises, so "they" make good on that promise and now the "voter has been lied to"? you could have made the same claim if the republicabs did nothing.
The lie is that getting rid of these agencies is a good thing.
Saying that something is good (or bad) feels more like an "ought" statement than a proper "is" statement, ie not in a category that's capable of being a lie.
Democracy is good until the public votes for something unpalatable. In that case they were lied to and/or they are unfit to choose for themselves.
We can actually show that the American public are lied to, and continue to be lied to.
Yes - I can get the point you are making - “democracy for me but not for thee” is BS. Sure!
But the evidence is that theres one media network which is simply selling whatever story works, along side a 50+ year effort to kill trust in institutions. We can even show that the republican machinery gave up on bipartisanship - hell, it’s even public knowledge.
But that wouldn’t make a whit of a difference to voting patterns, or your point. Because your point doesn’t need to be based in the long history of complicated malfeasance that rots all English speaking democracies. It’s anchored in your current state and argument.
So yeah, people voted.
Did they say "Democracy is bad"? For that matter, did they say "Democracy is good"?
No, they didn't. In case you don't know, that's called a "straw man fallacy".
Are you saying they weren't lied to? Like Trump saying he knew nothing about Project 2025 which was a lie.
> Are you saying they weren't lied to?
I think Trump & team have been very open about their intentions. There's even his entire first presidency to look at. At most, some of his voters might be surprised that he actually follows through on exactly what he promised (for example some of those voting for him now surprised about being targeted by ICE, including farmers fearing for their cheap workforce).
So sure, lots of lies, on the other hand and at the same time everything was planned and prepared quite openly.
> unpalatable
See, this is a weasel word. Nobody said it was unpalatable, they said it was bad, because it is.
Do you want bad things to happen? No? Okay then, everyone should be on the same page.
One of the most onerous regulation regimes in the USA comes from the FAA.
When people question these regulations, and the cost of certifying aircraft and aircraft parts, someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
The same can easily be said about environmental regulations, except in their case, the pool of blood is orders of magnitude deeper.
Do people really think that President Richard Nixon created the EPA to stick it to big business?
Thank you for pointing out that it was Nixon that created the EPA.
Nixon also created OSHA, NOAA and a bunch of other significant agencies!
Democratic super majorities created them. Nixon signed them
> someone always rightly responds "these regulations are written in blood."
No, that's just a lazy ignorant response, there is not enough blood in the world to provide enough ink to write all those rules.
Ran the math and and it's factually incorrect to say there's not enough blood in the world to write out all these rules.
There's about ~8 billion people in the world today. Estimates say an average adult has 5 liters of blood in their body, so let's say 2.5 liters per person to account for children. That's about 20 billion liters of blood for available for your macabre comparison.
Looking at the federal register[0] and running some javascript on the page [1], we get an estimate of 4.1 million pages in the federal register in it's whole history. We could get into page yields for various types of printing and how that effects how many pages could be printed, but at a generous one liter per page, it's obvious it could be done.
Skipping some more estimates, but the federal register would require about 1 oil-drum of blood or 115 liters to write out, which would only take one person donating blood at the recommend safe rates about 40 years to complete by themselves. A long time for sure, but if you start today, you could hopefully see just how wrong you were before the end of your life.
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/reader-aids/federal-register... [1] $("tbody > tr > :nth-child(9) ").text().split("\n").map(function(l){return parseInt(l.trim().replace(",",""))}).filter(function(l){return l ? l: 0}).reduce(function(a,b){return a+b},0)
You've made a few basic fails: federal register is, well, only federal, so you've ignored all the non-federal ones. But then even at the federal level you've missed laws that contain the rules, and then the court decisions that directly impact how a rule is interpeted. And all that, of course, isn't enough, to understand them you'd also need to read professional literature that explains all of those rules.
Then the rules aren't static, so you'd need to print the full legal version for each change, so it wouldn't be neatly stuck into years, but more frequently.
Then there is the bigger elephant in the world - the actual world! Since you drain the whole wide world of blood, count all the rules that they produce out there.
Also, did you do math in JS wat to get
4.1 million pages * 1 liter per page = 115 liters (not million)
> about 40 years to
Then you've also forgotten to count all the future regulations
The Federal Register is the log of the changes, the Code of Federal Regulations is the product after applying all those changes. The Code is only about 190,000 page, so about 20 times less, which means if you abandoned your antisocial ways and made one friend (and, big stretch, another one to account for future growth of the code), the two/three of you could bleed out a copy of the updated Code by yourself each year for the foreseeable future.
A lot of comments are rightfully pointing out the destructive nature of this move. But looking at it from another angle, is it possible this is a symptom of a deeper problem?
What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda? If that belief is widespread, is an action like this seen not as 'destruction', but as 'dismantling a biased system', even if it seems counterproductive to the rest of us?
> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
This is clearly the case. The next question is, how did this happen? Did these people come to this conclusion based on their own diligent research, or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
Republicans not always do what the electorate wants.
Abortion, gun control and releasing the Epstain list are have popular support but the are against it.
Sometimes a small influential group can push for an agenda. That are more organized and have more money
Democrats also do not always do what the electorate wants.
How many times did they have executive and both houses since Roe v Wade without passing law to enshrine the right to abortion?
Surely they could have released the Epstein list as well.
We can argue which party is “worse than the other” for sure, but both serve themselves and neither is a bright shining star of serving the actual people IMO.
Why would they need to enshrine the right to abortion in law when the supreme Court said it was guaranteed in the Constitution? They probably thought they had more pressing matters to work on. I didn't hear any call to pass a right to abortion law. Maybe there was some grovel I missed?
And from what I can see, the Democrats didn't care much about the Epstein list because there wasn't much evidence there even was a list. The current administration ran on the idea that there was a list and the Democrats were covering it up.
Surely you got many of the DNC fundraisers that breathlessly urged donors to give to the DNC to protect the right for a woman to choose? Or remember the turn out the vote campaigns to protect abortion rights?
It appears to me that the possibility that Roe v Wade would be overturned was more valuable to the DNC as a threat than cementing the issue by law-making was.
> Republicans not always do what the electorate wants. > > Abortion, gun control and releasing the Epstain list are have popular support but the are against it.
No they're not, though? At least, amongst their voterbase. The Epstein files are the first truly bipartisan issue I've seen, the other two are very strictly partisan issues, and most Republicans/Conservatives I know do not want either.
It looks like a large majority of Republicans do support gun control: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutio... and a large proportion support abortion being legal in at least most cases (albeit not a majority): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...
I wish pollsters would ask the right question: "would you support the government fining you or jailing you (or a family member) if you seek an abortion." I bet the numbers would swing way towards legality. But what're ya gonna do.
> or were they led to this opinion by supremely funded vested interests that influence every branch of our society?
I hope you realize the irony that this argument applies to both sides of the argument here. In other words, how do you know that your research was done in an unbiased way?
Being led on a leash, or at least being nudged, by monied interests is not unique to either side of US politics. Do you know who has funded anti-nuclear power propaganda since the 1950s? The same fossil fuel industry involved with the destruction of the EPA.
How does your comment answer my question?
The good thing about science is that it doesn’t depend on trusting any one person or institution, it depends on a process designed to catch bias and error.
Scientists don’t just publish opinions. Well, they can, but we generally call these people crackpots. However, in modern times they do financially well on YouTube and podcasts. Scientists test ideas through predictions and experiments, share their data and methods, and other scientists try to reproduce the results. If findings can’t be repeated, they’re usually rejected. Over time, only the most reliable results hold up.
Yes, funding and politics can influence science, on all sides. But the scientific system has: peer review, conflict-of-interest disclosures, reproducibility, and open data. These are not perfect, but they make science far more reliable than all other known systems.
What I believe is a continuation of how we built our modern civilization, since the time of Newton, and earlier. I cannot personally audit all of science, so instead I rely on the scientific method, which is the best system (warts and all) that we have yet found to discover the base truth.
For sure Fox et al. have been pushing the idea that scientists have biases, but it can also be true that science has become more biased.
Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
Scientists can have biases, but science itself is just a methodology for determining truth. The political leanings of the people publishing papers shouldn't matter at all. Anybody can read a study and point out the problems with it. Anything else is just ad hominem.
Liberal in US = center right
As opposed to…?
Its a fact that the EPA added ~6000 employees during the Biden administration and also instituted DEI policies to follow President Biden’s Executive Order 14035 (2021). This included employee-led special emphasis groups, LGBTQ+ events, and justice-oriented programs. All this is out of focus from the EPA's goal to safeguard the natural environment.
It should be NO surprise that there is massive push-back after a republican administration came to power. Donald Trump explicitly campaigned to cut the EPA’s size and funding and to eliminate DEI and environmental justice programs in the federal government.
If the EPA added ~6000 employees during Biden, why did it have 1,155 employees when Trump took office?
Wow, the bullshit some people are high on.
1,155 is the number of employees in the research office. The EPA overall had 16,155 employees in January 2025 [1].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-reduction-for...
> Wow, the bullshit some people are high on.
From the article, which was easy to google:
> The EPA currently has more than 16,000 employees, adding more than 6,000 during Joe Biden’s administration as the agency sought to rebuild.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/11/environm...
A significant portion of the electorate believes that the government is hiding aliens, or that the political leadership are all secretly lizard people (whether this is meant literally or as a metaphor for Jews or whether they think Jews are secretly lizard people depends on the person). There are vast and necessary government functions that most of the electorate doesn't understand or doesn't value or completely misunderstands.
Even on hacker news I frequently see people completely misunderstanding how, for instance, scientific research gets funded in the US. And the readership of this site is far more likely than a random sample of Americans to know about scientific research.
Dismantling chunks of the government based on the ignorance of some portion of the electorate is just bad policy.
Do we have real proof that a sizeable portion of Americans believe in the secret lizard people thing? Best I could find:
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
"Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?"
11% said yes or were unsure.
That's from 2013, so I can't even begin to imagine what a poll from today would look like.
11% said yes or were unsure?! One in fucking ten people, in the most generous interpretation, did not know whether the government were secretly shape-shifting aliens. God, how did we get here.
Yeah, but some proportion of those were joking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischievous_responders
Belief in aliens is fairly benign. Consider that half the population have an IQ below 50.
Noooo, that’s not true. Below 100, as it’s weighted for this to be true: half above half below. It could theoretically be possible for the half below to also be below 50, but this would require the other half to all be above 150, and both are absurd, because there are a whole horde of people of completely average intelligence.
Checking IQ test results, we see they follow a Gaussian with a mean of 100 and a stddev of 15.
Come to Texas. Qualitatively, the answer is a thunderous, enthusiastic "yes".
Well are we talking literally (under the old definition, not the new definition that the kids are apparently using these days) or metaphorically?
> What if a significant portion of the electorate no longer believes institutions like the EPA are neutral arbiters of science, but instead see them as political actors pushing an agenda?
They do, but it’s not a belief they came upon accidentally. It was pushed over decades using billions of dollars and multiple media conglomerates.
I think the original sin of this political era is the Citizen United ruling that money is free speech and corporations are persons.
Unfortunately you’re right, this is more about beliefs.
I don't think the majority of electorates know that the EPA exists, let alone know what they do.
This is nothing more than Project 2025 at work.
It is so fucking sad that people, voting on vibes and single issues, sleepwalk into situations like this.
can we imagine no other ways besides the EPA to take care of the environment? if we can't, then it was always a precarious situation.
Arguably, institutions like the EPA exist to moderate extremes. The EPA simulatenously prevents industry from causing cancer clusters and extinctions while also preventing eco-terrorism. All the science, surveys, and purple prose done by the EPA and consultants is arguably kinda bullshit, but it is very useful bullshit because its a whole lot better than assassinated mining executives and hospitals full of throat cancer victims.
wow. so as our society our only options are "do nothing" or "murder executives". i am sorry for your worldview.
>our only options are "do nothing" or "murder executives".
Well no, we can have some form of mediator institution which arbitrates such debates peacefully. You could also setup a ritualised debate implicitly agreed to by both parties so you could do this without an EPA - this is essentially how humans did things before we invented rationalised nation states.
You should avoid silly personal attacks, you might get better responses from people.
What do you suggest as the alternative? I'm genuinely curious.
They believe that because an elite few (Project 2025 authors and others) want all science to be demoted in the eyes of the public. Because that way lies control of the masses.
The last thing an authoritarian leader wants is a challenge to his authority, one that scientists will almost certainly provide.
This is sad. I have worked with many federal agencies including EPA and have seen firsthand how large corporations try to influence or circumvent the law without regard for people or the environment. The EPA isn’t as bloated as people think. Contrary to public perception, there are many talented and hardworking federal employees. The real culprits are the large federal contracting companies that deliver subpar results and hide behind federal procurement bureaucracy. I wish DOGE would focus on that.
During the next administration, it will surely be a priority to restore the functions of government dissolved throughout these years. However, these functions will be filled by private companies and will come with a large bill to U.S. taxpayers. There's a large vacuum being left, with a talent pool of government-wage workers, and a new cohort of politicians whose campaigns will need funded.
What makes you so confident these functions will be performed by private enterprise?
Seems to me like a fading empire elected the wrong person to lead them due to nonsense reasons and will now stagnate faster.
I have no stake in being right or wrong, which I think leads to sounding confident. But, I believe the incentives are there for privatization.
Those opposed to the current administration will see restoration of gutted services as a win. Talent (researchers, scientists, and anyone with knowledge of processes) is being made available to the private sector. The private sector makes significant contributions to political campaigns and will want contracts in return. Therefore, a campaign can be sold as:
"We will fix what has been broken, and bring back jobs to the critical areas of our sovereignty. We will make good on the promise of increasing efficiency and reducing waste by opening up opportunities across all areas of industry, both old and new.
What we've witnessed over the past four years was the dismantling of the American dream. What we endured was "an honest day's work" being turned into "work a day and a half for half the pay".
But now, we will rebuild. And as we do, we will no longer be vulnerable to the whims of ivory tower bureaucrats. We are taking the power back. We are keeping our taxpayer dollars focused where they should be. You are getting the respect you're owed and reminding Washington that they work for you."
What makes you so sure there will be a next administration?
Because not everyone is a 12 year old that doom scrolls reddit
i'll bet you $100. Are you game? :)
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Step 1: Point at immigrants/trans/blacks/etc
Step 2: Cut taxes on the rich. <---------- You are here
It works every time. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Let’s see how the rural poor feel when their hospital closes, they can’t get medicaid, health insurance is wildly out of reach, they have no ability to borrow money thanks to insane medical debt that they can never repay, and their wages are garnished for student debt from a degree they never finished. How long until debt becomes a crime?
We’re gonna recreate serfdom in the USA.
> Let’s see how the rural poor feel when their hospital closes, they can’t get medicaid [...]
There's been research on that [1]. They become even more likely to vote Republican. Here's the abstract:
> Who do citizens hold responsible for outcomes and experiences? Hundreds of rural hospitals have closed or significantly reduced their capacity since just 2010, leaving much of the rural U.S. without access to emergency health care. I use data on rural hospital closures from 2008 to 2020 to explore where and why hospital closures occurred as well as who–if anyone–rural voters held responsible for local closures. Despite closures being over twice as likely to occur in the Republican-controlled states that did not expand Medicaid, closures were associated with reduced support for federal Democrats and the Affordable Care Act following local closures. I show that rural voters who lost hospitals were roughly 5–10 percentage points more likely to vote Republican in subsequent presidential elections. If anything state Republicans seemed to benefit in rural areas from rejecting Medicaid and resulting rural health woes following the passage of the ACA. These results have important implications for population health and political accountability in the U.S.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-024-10000-8
The trend you described has been going on since Reagan, and the "rural poor" haven't budged. I have no expectation that attitudes will change in Rural America, not matter how bad things get.
Way longer than that if you want to get technical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer
In a nutshell that's why the South is so poor. They've been falling for this for generations.
It turns out when the other party runs on “we’re smarter and have better ideas than you and 25% of you are deplorable”, that people tend to increase their support for their current party rather than deciding “you know what? They’re right; we should switch to follow those coastal elites…”
I’ve been all around the world. Only in America do people insist on doing evil things and still want to be praised for it.
It’s the stupid brand of evil too, like killing millions AND pissing away trillions of dollars in useless Middle East wars (god forbid you say anything against American foreign policy). Or ICE destroying lives AND hurting your own economy. It’s not like republican states are the richest! But the poorer they get the angrier and more dug-in they get.
> “we’re smarter and have better ideas than you and 25% of you are deplorable”
Hypocrisy - Trump and the GOP regularly call _half_ the country a whole fucking barrage of terms (pedophiles, rapists, marxist socialist communist fascists, evil, ungodly, sick, etc) on a regular fucking basis. Gaslight. Obstruct. Project.
And for the exact same reasons, that is just as ineffective at convincing new people to join their ranks, but rather cements support for the DNC for existing DNC members.
If you have to be persuaded not to do evil shit, well democrats (and independents) increasingly don’t even want you.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692150/american-pride-slips-new...
One fine day, liberals will wake up and decide they have had enough. Whatever the cost. Conservatives will be so surprised - look how high their pride is.
See step one. The hospitals closed and Medicaid had to be gutted because of illegal immigrants. Nothing to be done about it now.
These are the reasons many voted for Trump. His ability to tear down American institutions is a direct result of the apathy born out of decades of successful corporate corruption, or lobbying, if you prefer, that we failed to stop democratically.
But it is wrong to think all American generations before ours didn't have to fight. The lie is that democracy was ever easy. There are millions of Americans mobilizing, sharing their stories, marching, talking to their representatives, protesting, and following their conscience. It is easier than ever to find and join the peaceful opposition.
That's the process.
Most annoying part will be the time delay so people will forget exactly who caused all this damage in the first place too.
Well, that leads to another narrative trick called “see these are examples of how big government doesn’t work and the other side asking for increased government and hospitals are socialist and going to waste your tax dollars or give to freeloaders like immigrants etc”. Destroy government based support, blame it as failure of government, rinse and repeat.
> Let’s see how the rural poor feel
There is a book titled "What's the matter with Kansas?" which dives into this a bit (hint: they will continue to vote against their best interests)
LBJ, JFK, and FDR are what we need more of in future leaders. People not in it for themselves and savvy enough to not prostrate themselves every time to corporate or sectarian factions while accumulating political capital to spend on worthy causes to advance humanity and create a better future.
God damn the stupidity is just out of control
America fucking itself in the ass, just for a few more dollars...
Not the first time, not the last time.
How stupid
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It’s because he only knows how to destroy, not build, and destroying is always easier than building. It may be impactful but it is going to set America back decades.
He's destroying for various reasons yes. But he knows how to build. Perhaps not personally, but he can wrangle a system to do things for him, mostly for him perhaps. OK completely for himself, but that's not to say he can't.
The only thing he has ever directed that has been a net positive to society, Operation Warp Speed, is something he disowns because of the rabid anti-science stance of his base.
does he actually disown it? i thought he keeps up being proud of that despite his base hating it?
While a politician. You do realize he built many things or headed the building of many things prior to being a politician? In some cases to net good for the world, unbelievably. It's easy to vilify him for political or personal choices but that's not to say he can't do things.
> he built many things or headed the building of many things prior to being a politician
Are you talking about the gaudy casinos he bankrupted with the half-billion dollar head start his daddy gave him?
You're talking tropes. Life is more complicated. Read the book "Why nothing works"
The book Why Nothing Works is worth a read.
The irony of you saying that about a real estate mogul.
Reminds me of reading about Karl Marx in college. As I recall he basically made a name for himself talking shit about capitalism. Then, people said, "Bro, if capitalism sucks so much, why don't you come up with something better?" And that's how The Communist Manifesto was born, which was a total disaster, and set humanity back generations.
Talking shit and tearing stuff down is easy. Building something is hard.
>Bro, if capitalism sucks so much, why don't you come up with something better?
That totally happened.
There’s not a lot the opposition can do. Elections have consequences and now people are gonna have to live with it. People stayed home or decided to vote against their own interest. It’s not like there wasn’t a previous track record to compare. Selective amnesia is not an excuse.
the democrats need to clear out their decrepit leadership or its just gonna continue to slide worse and worse
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/congressional-democrats-favorabilit...
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3846305-democrats-have-a-messag...
I don’t disagree. But nobody should be surprised by everything that’s happening right now. Most people justified their vote by saying he’s either joking or it won’t happen to me or my loved ones and are getting buyers remorse now. There were two options and one was much worse than the other.
Frankly, the Democratic party epically and massively failed their constituency by first running a mummy and then attempting to run perhaps the most unlikable, unrelatable, disconnected candidate of my lifetime - that literally zero people voted for.
It's not the people's fault, it's the party's... the party thought everyone would just jump when told to do so.
Democrats deserve better.
Seventy million people voted for her.
In the primary? No... 70 million people were forced to vote for her in the general. That's why Democrats lost this election.
It's comments like yours that make it really seem like the Democrat Party hasn't learned a damn thing from this ordeal.
I voted for her, but I didn't do it because I *wanted* her.
I don’t think it was “for” her. Most votes against Trump.
How was Kamala Harris more disconnected than, say, Mitt Romney, a billionaire who said that half of voters believed they were victims and were mooching off the government?
Or for that matter, how is she less disconnected than Donald Trump, who bragged about being able to get away with sexually assaulting people because he's famous?
They are all disconnected. The problem with Harris was that she was nothing. No message, no charisma.
No message should have still won out against a message of hating everything about America, but here we are.
I agree that the Democrats are feckless, but still let's not forget which direction is up. (personally I think they're just coasting along and assuming they'll still be elites in whatever "new order" arises as long as they don't stick their heads up)
What would you expect a competent opposition to do?
Have any sort of policy position and not run on the "at least I'm not him" platform.
In an era where Republicans are dismantling the government do you know what Dems will run on? That's right, dismantling the government, but in a kinder gentler way (see Ezra Kline's abundance agenda).
Dems are anemic to running on popular positions. Raise the minimum wage, expand Medicare, restore the institutions Republicans are dismantling.
Both parties are serving the wealthy. That's what prevents Dems from serving the working class. They know not to advocate raising the minimum wage.
It's what has created the behavior where Dems try to win over right wing independents because that's a more donor friendly position and Republicans can purely pander to their based, because they're already donor friendly (you know, for example, Republicans will always act to the benefit of big oil).
For starters, anything.
Like? It's hard to do anything when the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are all controlled by the same party. Until midterms, there's not much that can be done at the federal level. States can oppose some issues, and some States are, but what exactly do you think the opposition can/should be doing that they aren't already?
Connecting with people, building a mass movement, organizing institutions that can funnel people and effort into building the world and election results they want. Taking risks by taking a stand on issues and saying those issues are the reason to vote for them (not to avoid having the other side win). Doing local politics to demonstrate competence and show that they care and are building things, then show off those things to the rest of the country and say “look, we can do this everywhere” or at least “look at what we can do on a small scale but our vision is bigger and it’s limited by the fact our vision needs to happen on a national scale and can’t be achieved fully at this small scale”. Lots of things.
They should be putting out model legislation now on a monthly basis. No, none of it can pass, none of it can get to the floor. But they need bills that they can say they will pass if given a majority, and they need to be OK with the Republicans attacking them for the next 15 months. In fact the more time the Republicans spend attacking Democratic legislative proposals, the less time they are spending on selling their own.
The Democrats also need to put out radical proposals, not incrementalist ones or business-as-usualones along with fluffy messages about competency and management skills. The public does not want a party of competent middle managers whose primary skillset is watering down expectations and telling people to be patient while they redecorate. They need to put out policies that are going to make people spit out their coffee.
IMHO, it's already too late for the midterms. In fact, it's probably too late for the 2028 presidential election, too. Democrats need to connect, and that connection isn't from showing up, out of nowhere, three months before an election and taking policy. The connection starts years before the election, by associating oneself to the things the voters also associate with. I think one of the most brilliant things Trump ever did was to get involved with WWE. That started the connection with Rural America. It was long before he ran for president, and it wasn't boring policy talk. It was, "Look at me! I'm your guy! I'm into wrestling, just like you!" Now, this is nothing new - Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall. But I think the Democrats are just terrible at it. And here's a great example: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMIuyMQRAq1
I have a solution, talk The Rock into running for the dems. Wrestling and fame taken care of in one fell swoop!
The Rock is as fake as Beyonce. The democrats are probably stupid enough to hook up with him though.
(1) Actually have a coordinated plan would be the starting point.
(2) If the left truly wanted to help the American people like they say they do they need the programs they enact to actually work. Say what you want about Trump but he is effective. But then again, all authoritarians are.
> Say what you want about Trump but he is effective. But then again, all authoritarians are.
What? No, they aren’t.
Be better (like doing it at all) of saying what they have accomplished. People don't know what they zone know. Make a list of things accomplished and say it out loud. Humility could be another way that democracy dies.
Select a candidate that would not lose to Trump.
Currently there isn't much they can do, but they handed the election to a corrupt buffoon. Inaction the border & immigration, letting the woke crowd run rampant with their nonsense(not talking about it doesn't make it go away), and selecting a VP that if ever tasked with running for President--wasn't likely to win.
American voters always look to the Dems and Republicans as if it’s a symmetric game.
So, one party puts up a person who encouraged and insurrection, has no coherent policy, ZERO moral standing, had security documents in a toilet, ran a crypto pump and dump scheme on the day of his inauguration, and wins.
But ALL of those things are not meaningful.
If one team comes to play football, and the other team brings in a posse of clowns who don’t play football, and the clowns win - then the game you are playing isn’t football. Hell, both teams should have fielded equally outrageous clowns. (This is what happens in completely corrupt nations, and America’s likely fate)
Playing a better game of football, is not as important as figuring out how the other team’s moves are legal.
In all earnestness - The question people really need to ask is not how the Dems lost, it’s how Trump ran in the first place.
> Inaction the border
Biden had an identical border policy to Trump term 1. Dems even tried to strengthen ice towards the end of Biden's term.
The fact that you think he was weak on the border really shows that Dems trying to out Republican Republicans on the border is a bad move. They should have been pushing for immigration reform and better/faster routes to becoming documented.
> letting the woke crowd run rampant with their nonsense
What does this mean?
> selecting a VP that if ever tasked with running for President--wasn't likely to win.
That's pretty typical. The much bigger problem is Biden ran while knowing his polling was in the gutter. It was him running with sundowning symptoms.
Harris's problem was that while knowing about Biden's unpopularity, she refused to distance our distinguish herself from him in any way.
To be fair, it's hard for the Dems to do anything effectively when a sitting president attempts to overthrow an election, fails, and then half of the voters think "You know what, I want that guy to lead our country again."
Not that they're blameless, of course - they had four years to throw Trump in prison, did nothing, and now we're reaping the result. But the problem goes much deeper than the Dems being incompetent. In a functioning democracy, voters aren't supposed to elect someone who literally committed treason, just because the alternative is "unlikeable" (what the fuck does that even mean, next to Trump).
All they needed to do was have a primary, but they didn't
That's a pretty stupid benchmark. A president who just nukes Chicago would also be "impactful".
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This is such a simple trick. Politicize something, then call it politicized, and move along with a shrug.
I assume that mathematics will become "politicized" very soon.
Please note that this is not an attack on the parent, just an observation of what appears to be happening all around us.
mathematics will become "politicized" very soon
It was already politicised long ago. Remember the "maths is racist white supremacy" crap?
There’s strong consensus in these comments. That gives me pause.
Was the prior system good? Was it great? If so, was it optimal? If not, what does better look like?
The discussion can splinter a thousand ways, and on HN it should as we seek truth.
Should we destroy the thing we're questioning before we have that conversation, or after it?
You can't protect the environment without research. Without research you can't know what's dangerous.
Even in tiny countries, for example Sweden, when we notice a statistical uptick of health problems in a particular area, we have government organizations that go there to investigate and figure out the cause.
Enlightened centrism at its absolute worst
Time to pull out Occam's razor again:
A) The Trump admin has conducted rigorous analysis and audit of 55 years of EPA research, and concluded that it is so insignificant and ineffective that one can just dismantle the entire department.
B) The Trump admin rubber stamps anything the Heritage Foundation / Project 2025 wants done, and are desperate to find money for their tax cut funding.
Both.