It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies, ie “US armed IDF forces” according to the article. Obviously there is something more to this than the headline and tone of the piece indicate. For one thing, the law written by Leahy was passed in 2011, but this website went online in 2022, so how can removing the site make it impossible to abide by the law? What was going on between 2011 and 2022 than is different from now?
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
From a practical standpoint, this is why Wikileaks matters. Rather than count on the State department to serve that role, we should count on independent journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
Agree. I'm tired of having to do research every time I read a news article. If you want me to trust your news articles give me raw unedited sources, because if I don't see any, I don't trust your assessment.
> It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies
The website is for reporting abuses by foreign forces armed with US kit. The US isn't in the habit of arming its enemies, so of course the reports concern allies. That's what the website is for.
>> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
> why
Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc.
A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
>When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
An "auto reply with a ticket number" is not a feature of email, it is something that someone built that could just as easily be attached to a webform. Plenty of webforms work that way, I have personally built some in my career.
This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution?
On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.
> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders.
> The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing.
> We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.
> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture.
> A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards.
> I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.
> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.
> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.
> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.
That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".
To be fair (ignoring whether Hegseth really deserves that), what he describes is a very common view of military leadership during war time.
"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.
Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.
Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with competent warfighters.
For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)
I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well.
I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.
We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.
If the war is prolonged, you can't go around treating people like eggshells to be crushed, or morale will suffer.
Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.
And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?
Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now.
If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.
The most polite thing i can say about Pete is that he's the dimmest bulb among them, trying to imitate much more capable people. And everyone can see it.
He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.
> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".
We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.
Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches. “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.”
But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.
Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.
The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.
By design, the current administration moves as fast as it possibly can because it knows that the public will take time to catch up.
The key to countering is consistent pressure that does not relent to fix the mechanisms that are broken: (congress, the white house, the "deep state" side note: the deep state always existed, it was just a convenient shorthand for "the part of the US government that faithfully implements the laws as passed by congress". That portion has been gutted and replaced with sycophants, and it will now take time to undo it)
Things like the Supreme Court, term limits, election funding also need updating. We all need to do a better job reviewing the fundamentals of government.
Bold of you to assume the public will ever catch up or care in the world of relentless algos and propagandizing. Tariffs have been in place for months now, which is objectively a regressive self imposed tax on US citizens.
The founding fathers lived in a world where the average citizen would have no idea what was going on in Washington. They just didn't expect it to be exploited quite so brazenly
>But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
As usual, you see this as a "they are dumb" problem. Look within.
TBH The Right in the US has such a structural advantage, that Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-facto repeal of the law.
The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.
It's not just a structural advantage, it's a de facto suspension of the Constitution.
Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup.
What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.
This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better.
If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
I think distilling in that far is missing the point that this is a republican and right wing issue. It doesn’t “just so happen” that republicans are in power while this is happening, they are the ones who are doing it.
Because they now control the Congress and SCOTUS, there is effectively no recourse. Congress is paralysed and SCOTUS will almost always rule in favor of the Administration.
They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
You're not wrong, but Congress has been broken for a long, long time. Congress really doesn't do anything except for agree (if they've got a majority with the president) or disagree (if they're in the minority against the president) with the current president. They don't really make laws, they don't hold anyone accountable, they don't fund the government. They don't govern at all, they just try to keep getting re-elected.
This isn’t true though. Lots of legislation has been passed. Government shutdowns have become common but they’re not universal. Your absolutist take is observably false. It is worth looking deeper at who the obstructionists in congress actually are. A minority of bad actors can cause immense harm.
> Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-factor repeal of the law.
Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.
The difference is that uneven enforcement is the tool of autocrats. Ignoring the law breeds contempt for it. Madison said requiring a supermajority for normal legislation would poison democracy, and I think the modern usage filibuster has proven him correct. I hope the GOP ditches the whole thing, not just for continuing resolutions. The senate will no longer have any excuses for abdicating its responsibilities. Thrashing laws are a small price to pay. I do wish judicial appointments still required a supermajority.
Picking and choosing which laws to enforce is baked into the concept of prosecutorial discretion. There is a reason the country’s prosecutor in chief is an elected position. It was understood to be a fundamentally political office even in Jefferson’s day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-je...
I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources.
They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists.
In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
> They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
Did you read the article you posted? The entire thing is about allocation of finite resources. You can read the original Antitrust enforcement policy and see that it lays out a system of prioritization which (surprise surprise), prioritizes larger monopolization efforts over smaller ones.
It does not say "we don't think small companies can behave monopolistically so we aren't enforcing the law on them."
President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
I will reiterate the plain language of the United States Constitution: [the President] SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
SHALL does not mean MAY or AT HIS DISCRETION or any such thing.
Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. They provide guidance to people as to what they can reasonably expect will and will not be permitted, and the obligations of various people to eachother. Laws need to be changeable, because the world changes, but that process is purposefully made somewhat difficult so that only worthwhile changes are made, so that the changes can be explicitly communicated, and those who make the changes can be both advised before and held accountable after.
If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
> Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne.
That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf
“While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide-
ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice
John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s
prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to
interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which
permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”
One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate.
If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.
In the Senate at least outside of a few carve outs, you really need 60 Senators to get anything passed not just a majority. The only reason the ACA ever passed was during the brief window they had 60 Senators
Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace.
That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood the "who watches the watchers" problem and created a system without any such single point of failure. The ultimate backstop in our political system is not the law, but instead frequent elections. Congress writes the law, the President enforces the law, and the Judiciary interprets the law. If the President does a bad job of enforcing the law, the recourse is elections (or, as a last resort, impeachment).
Just a quibble, but we should only be impeaching Presidents for illegal acts, not mere opinions about job performance, which members of the opposite party will almost always disagree with. The remedy for doing a bad job is the ballot box.
Well that horse left the barn a long time ago - the list of blatantly illegal things is now so long that new ones (like murdering people in boats by remote control) just fly on by.
That’s a category error. “Murder” is a concept of domestic criminal law. It doesn’t apply to state actions against foreigners in international waters. For the same reason it’s not “murder” for the U.S. to drone strike middle eastern weddings or to nuke foreign cities.
Most people do not believe in the religion of humanist universalism.
It is interesting that our elections aren't really frequent enough. Other systems cleverly made it possible to immediately recall electors that have gone rogue or the citizens have no faith in.
You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing. For example, the entire city of Nashville, TN, has been utterly and obviously gerrymandered out of existence, and the city has no representation in the House. (They used to be TN's 5th.)
This of course does not apply to Presidential elections. The President has multiple times indicated disdain for elections, his party has used "third term and beyond", his supporters have openly floated the idea of repealing the 22A, he's called himself "king" and "dictator".
The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now.
> or, as a last resort, impeachment
"a servile congress" — they understand impeachment. If an attempted coup doesn't get impeachment, nothing will. Regardless, the GOP is going along with the president, so impeachment isn't something that's going to happen.
> You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing.
What has it done? In 2024, Republicans got 50.5% of the seats and 51.3% of the two-party Congressional popular vote. The delta between a party’s share of the popular vote and its share of House seats is much smaller since 2000 than it was for most of the 20th century: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Po...
> The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now
The VRA requires racially discriminatory gerrymandering and is probably unconstitutional in that respect. The VRA is the product of an era where white democrats would discriminate against black democrats even though they shared a party. Today, gerrymandering is based on political party, not race. If black people voted 80% republican, red states would happily gerrymander out affluent college-educated whites in their favor.
They’ve created enough of a digital system to manage public opinion (through brain rot, manipulation, bots, psychometrics) that they’re less and less afraid of elections.
I assume multiple competing systems at this point. You have Team Jorge (and many others) in Israel, Robert Mercer’s rebranded SCL Group and offshoots, whatever Elon Musk has done to X (who he himself said he used to help Trump win). In Portugal there are bot armies and influence operations on every social network - Facebook and Reddit most of all.
SCOTUS has life-long appointments because it is designed to move and operate slowly and be the least political of the branches. Parties that try to legislate from the bench when they cannot successfully get something through Congress are the issue.
The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
The founders foresaw all manner of bad behavior. They understood human nature better than most today, and they experienced a lot of shocking political acts, everything from telling scurrilous lies about your opponent to outright buying votes. The only thing that might be new to them is the scale at which technology makes these things possible. Read up on the history of early campaigns.
The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval.
The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.
(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population).
You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you".
You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
One thing the founders definitely didn't see coming was the two party system, which eventually led to a single party controlling all thee branches of government.
Go back and read Washington's farewell address. There's a section in there that addresses factions, and it's like Washington had access to the headlines from last week when he wrote it.
They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice.
The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.
They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.
It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.
The Supreme Court definitely suffers from 'not invented here' syndrome. There are vastly superior Supreme Court systems that other countries have implemented (Austria is a great example) where the US could just copy their homework, but won't.
The press really needs to start suffixing the justices with (R) and (D) when discussing them to drive the point home that the SC is the most partisan branch of government.
Austria's system was created in the mid 1700s and would have been relatively new at the time of the founding. Was Austria's system clearly vastly superior at the turn of the 19th century?
Their separate constitutional court didn't come along until the 20th century[1]. They have 14 justices on that court, but only a maximum of 9 will ever hear a case for precedent-setting decisions, and usually fewer than that (making court packing difficult if not completely pointless).
They have always done what the US should do: keep the votes on a judgment private, so opinions speak for the court as a whole, and they don't let the losers have a soapbox by publishing dissents.
As a cherry on top, they enforce a mandatory retirement age of 70.
These factors make their court an actually apolitical body in a way that's in hilariously stark contrat to the US court. The US court is what you'd make if your entire goal was to turn all its judgments into political theatre.
Not really, no. The founders were not omniscient, but many of them publicly wrote about the problematic rise of political "factions" contrary to the general interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
Our founders recognized our compromisestitution was vulnerable to this, they didn't predict a nationalist brainwashing campaign to call compromise a beneficial thing as part of a national identity
They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
This is the painful period of time where the US would have to collectively realize they are missing controls on the branches, in the form of amendments. Unfortunately, it looks like the people are lazy. They rather lose the union, before agreeing there really is a problem to be solved. Otherwise, there's no way to know there's a problem.
Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...
I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo
The founders came from England, which has the world's longest unbroken political tradition (apart from 11 years during the English Civil War). England has top-level cabinet positions that were established 800 years ago. So I doubt the founders would be surprised that their constitution was still in use 236 years later.
Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.
Along this line of thinking, surely there’s an unbroken administrative / bureaucratic tradition running China that spans multiple royal dynasties and perhaps even the recent ideological upheaval. Can we call that an enduring government?
The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people"
More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified.
They probably also didn’t see it coming that their constitution would be considered just as sacred as the Bible, instead of a document that was to be adapted.
And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of.
> By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0]
Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power).
You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from.
Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse.
The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved.
I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free.
Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place.
Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly.
The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems.
An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled.
Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps.
And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats.
This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not?
The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..."
Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done.
I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
True that most people don't care about who rules, but people do care of not living "much worse" than "before". That triggered a lot of revolutions before.
It does not look great, but I find risks mostly economical (not only in USA, everywhere) - if the situation will deteriorate even more abruptly (considering it already did a bit due to the pandemic "shock") then we will have a mess.
When a different side takes control of the justice department they may choose to go after all those who broke the law by order of this president. The president might be protected from consequences according to the supreme court, but those answering to the president are not.
This administration has set the standard that the justice department can be weaponized against political enemies. The ratchet only goes one way in American politics, presidents never relinquish the powers claimed by their predecessors.
The obvious solution to this is to change everything structurally needed to ensure the other side never again takes control, which is clearly also in progress.
>The obvious solution to this is to change everything structurally needed to ensure the other side never again takes control, which is clearly also in progress.
- Signed, the side that tried to throw a candidate in prison.
Actually it does if the US, bullies the other countries into not enforcing it and the US it's actually the main country enforcing international law. If a country dare to enforce international law against an us person, they will cut resources or threaten to use military
Even before Trump, the US had a standing policy of threatening severe retaliation against anyone who tries to enforce international law against US citizens-- this isn't just an informal policy, it's a specific law passed by Congress. And the scope has only gotten broader since then.
The whole concept of "international law" is polite fiction anyway, the reality has always been "the strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must".
> When a different side takes control of the justice department
That's an argument about the degradation of the rule of law, taking as a prior that the rule of law won't degrade. It's... unpersuasive. The end goal of this kind of thinking is that the other side never does take control, ever.
The current administration pretty clearly does not intend to give up power. They tried to evade democracy once already, and have fixed the mistakes this time.
Whether they will be successful or not is unknowable. But that's the plan. And the determining factor is very unlikely to be the normal operation of American civil society. Winning elections is, probably, not enough anymore.
At least I get to feel vindicated. Many many people, including me, have long asserted that the so-called "conservatives" in the Supreme Court are anything but. Historically their decisions have appealed to a certain kind of conservative political base, but the pretense is really starting to wear thin. Limiting the power of the executive branch in general was never the goal, it was only to limit the power of presidents who were willing to challenge the capitalist oligarchy master plan. They know that their job now, along with their allies and Congress, is to simply step aside and manage public outrage while the next phase of the plan is set in motion. I'm not just talking about in recent years either, go back through the Obama and W Bush administrations. You might notice that the conservatives in the court curiously turned more conservative when "their guy" isn't in office.
What we're seeing now isn't exactly the power of capitalist oligarchy but right-wing populist authoritarianism. They forge alliances with wealthy figures to achieve goals and engage in a corrupt patronage system like in an undeveloped country, but if this were a capitalist coup we would not be seeing anything like the absurd and illegal tariffs, brutal response to immigrants, etc.
I know leftists like to describe these sorts of phenomena (including Hitler's rise) as all part of the capitalist overlords' master plans, but that's not the most accurate description. Capitalists like Andreessen will cynically exploit it and hop on the bandwagon and benefit from it to the extent they can, but right-wing populist authoritarianism is its own beast, and they're just trying to position themselves as along for the ride rather than in its jaws. The regime is happy to reward capitalist loyalists and I do not deny there is a mutualism occurring, but it is more complex than a movement centered around capitalism.
I think you and parent comment are just using the word conservative in two different ways. There is conservative values and there is the conservative party, two different things.
I am saying that these are real conservative values. It is not true that these would be just something conservative party does while claiming to believe something else. Instead, if you read what conservative people write and say, in journals, books, talk shows, anywhere ... this is exactly what they believe in.
They are conservatives. People that care about things like small governments and fiscal responsibility are not. It's sad when somebody takes control over a group you identify with and changes it's goals but you're one person versus millions. The word doesn't mean what it used to.
An enormous proportion of Republican voters were already Trumpers as early as the ‘90s, but didn’t have a candidate yet, so had to settle for “vote Republican to keep the democrats from doing all the bad things Rush says they will”.
Republican partisan-propaganda media after anti-trust de-fanging (mid ‘70s) and media deregulation (‘80s-‘00s) became huge, and cultivated an electorate that wanted Trump but had to settle for tepidly-socially-conservative neoliberal Republicans. Such voters would tell you all day long about how we should just build a border wall (or mine it…), cut trade and foreign military engagements (though those have some cross-aisle appeal), question why we extend civil rights and due process to [pick a group], tell you we should use the military against protesters in cities, wonder why anyone opposes cops beating suspects unless they love crime, and so on, and they’d tell you that stuff many years before Trump’s 2016 run.
> there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.
Laws don't do things, people do.
It doesn't matter what's written down on paper if the people in power ignore it and the masses don't have enough organized collective power to prevent them from doing so.
The context of all US law is that it is the implementation of the will of the people. There is currently political will to shift focus in the military to effective fighting power, as opposed to progressive values. I think this is because the electorate recognizes that military threats around the world are getting worse.
Ukrainians will tell you now, you can’t have peace without strength. Europeans are also beginning to realize this due to American leadership, hence they have all (but one) doubled NATO funding limits this year.
People have been saying for decades that Congress has delegated far too much power to the executive and that it's ripe for abuse if a malevolent president ever takes office.
Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.
(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)
Impeachment by itself has been shown to accomplish nothing. There is no other mechanism except conviction by the Senate to address constitutional or legal violations made by the president.
Also no president has ever been impeached by a House which is controlled by a majority of the same party of the President. If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Edit: “Approval voting” is the appropriate escape hatch from 2-party politics. It lets you get rid of primaries entirely and run all the top-n candidates who have the greatest number of valid nomination signatures. Its advantage over range-voting/etc is that it is dead-simple to explain to voters: Put a checkmark next to any candidate that you're "okay" with. The candidate with the most checkmarks wins.
Now we are talking. And the dynamic that makes political parties so toxic IMO is “first past the post” voting.
If it’s your team or the “worse” team, you tolerate any flaw in your team.
If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over (for example see Reform vs Conservative parties in the UK, not that I am thrilled with the underlying direction) then there is an alternative: cut bait and condemn what used to be “your team”, and start a new one.
> If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over
That's exactly what happened though -- the MAGA party took over. Conservatives "cut bait" with traditional Republicans, condemned them (see how they talk about Liz and Dick Cheney or even GWB, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, their own presidential nominees), and started a new party within the rotting corpse of the old GOP. There's still some "Republican" branding around but if you pay attention they're not waving "Republican" flags or wearing "Republican" hats anymore.
Unfortunately taking over a dominant party was the easiest way to have a "different" party that could actually win. Both parties have built a mountain of obstacles to prevent a third party from ever getting close to challenging them.
The political mechanics of the system result in a two-party system, because no other party ever stands a chance of getting seats. Coalition systems may be less stable, but when you need at least three parties to form a government, they tend to keep each other in check better.
Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but seats should be proportional to the vote. If you have 100 seats, that party only getting 5% of the votes should also have 5% of the seats.
In the country where I live, people do consider themselves leftist, centrists, or right-wing, but a vast majority only decides what specific party to vote during the campaign.
We have the opposite issue, since there is not electoral threshold, we now have a lot of small and middle-sized parties, making it harder to form a coalition. (Would be possible to address with an electoral threshold of 2-5%.)
>If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached.
That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.
>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.
Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older.
Most people I talk with about it seem divided along the lines of morality in terms of the interaction and level of consent, rather than along debate over the security risks. Security risk seems like a valid point of concern to me.
That risk could be mitigated by a president being open about their promiscuity with both family and the public during their campaign - e.g. when both Russia and USA attempted to sextort and blackmail Sukarno (the president of the Philippines) he was delighted that his encounters were filmed and requested extra copies of the kompromat.
>but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape,
I've picked up on that too. Which, in my opinion is strange... she was 22 or 23 wasn't she? We just have to wait another 2 generations, and those will think themselves still children at 35.
Rather than age differential, I think that view is primarily founded in the belief that the President's implied power over the career of their employee (a White House intern) makes it a particularly difficult choice to risk the ire of the President by refusing their advances.
I don't get the impression from talking with younger Democratic voters that they would generally be as concerned with issues of consent if it was a 22 year-old sex worker (where it's purely a transactional relationship) or 22-year old pop star (where their career isn't particularly threatened by the President's favor).
With a White House intern, there's a potential element of silent or implied coercion which puts into question whether enthusiastic consent was freely given. Similar to the national security risk - regardless if it was/wasn't, it also calls into question the President's judgment for why they would engage in such morally ambiguous behavior - it would also be fairly difficult for the President to even know themselves whether the intern is feeling coerced or not.
I don't really understand why people still talk about impeachment.
It has been very clearly shown to be a futile formality that only makes the ones doing it look even more powerless and worthy of mockery in the eyes of the other side and their supporters.
In a bygone era, impeachment would rely on concepts of shame, responsibility and public duty - it would be unimaginable that person that was impeached does not step down from the position and likely from political foreground fully - from the moral and social weight of that consequence.
We've seen last 2 times how thoroughly that weight no longer exists in modern society/politics.
Without criminal responsibility, there is no responsibility left at all.
A good point. The people who sit in parliament are very often just machines of the party. Yes yes TECHNICALLY they are elected by the people and have a mandate but your career is over if you speak out.
You have to be a very special kind of person to break rank.
Which is the flaw of the impeachment/conviction process. It heavily relies on elected officials having a strong moral compass. It's what the founders got the most wrong about the US as it's basically a worthless process. It really doesn't matter what evidence gets presented or what a president does. The result will always be a party line vote.
We love to blame the common clay, don't we. You can win a majority of voters and lose an election. There are systemic problems, starting with money in politics, two senators per state, the electoral college and gerrymandering.
We already bastardized the senate by electing senators by popular vote. Senators are supposed to represent each states government, not the people of the state. As a single member of the union a state doesn't need more senators. Making ingredients the proportional to population just makes the senate another house. The people have the house. The cap of representatives has also been harmful to the voice of the people being heard. Representatives are the face for too many people for them to truly represent their constituents.
You can win a majority of voters and lose an election, but that's not what happened. 77 million people voted for Trump, and it's not like he acted like a mild mannered constitutional conservative with a sensible reform package and turned into a vindictive, chaotic wannabe autocrat whose closest thing to a redeeming feature is is stupidity afterwards. The electoral college and gerrymandering may be ludicrous, but that's not why he won, and nor is lack of funds for opponents. The system of checks and balances isn't what they were cracked up to be, but the reason he's dismantling it is because when he telegraphed that he was going to do it the people of the land cheered him so loudly anyone else that wanted their votes stepped in line.
“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”
Do you expect elections are still a viable option in this circumstance? It's beginning to sound like the results will be just set to a default, like the last presidential election in Russia: "78%+ for Putin/Trump".
Oh there are, but only for the Democrats. Same with the media: Trumps brain is openly turning to soup and the media can’t help but cover for him. Yet Biden, when he too was clearly way too old for the job, got constantly attacked for it. The double standard is bizarre.
This fantasy of free markets, laws, branches or anything else solving what Plato wrote about in The Republic thousands of years ago is pure folly.
If it is of any comfort - it's always been this way and it's not going to get any better :) We have technological progress, not progress in wisdom. People are better behaved because well fed humans behave better than hungry humans - everything else is as it's always been.
> ...it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.
There are, but the executive for decades (centuries?) has ignored law inconvenient to its goals, and the legislative has generally shrugged it off, hoping their guy will do the same down the road.
One such restraint? Declaring war. Yet how often has this power been abused by the executive since World War 2? Korea anyone? Vietnam? Central America? The Middle East?
There's been a lot of hand-wringing in this thread about what Trump has done and is doing. Truth is, he's just the latest player in the game we've all participated in, and he's good at it.
To stop him, we'd have to change the rules of the game, as Congress did in 2017 with the Russia sanctions bill.[1] I just don't see that happening 'cause... we're all hoping our guy will do the same (as Trump) down the road.
The Constitution constrains the executive, it doesn't give him very many powers at all. Frankly, the Constitution bars him from having run in the 2024 election for having caused an insurrection against the United States. Aside from that, he should have been impeached and removed and barred from running again for extorting a bribe from a foreign government.
We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.
I don't see how anything has changed in a meaningful way. George Bush "tortured some folks" and Obama assassinated US citizens abroad. The status quo is literal evil and Trump is behaving in accordance with the status quo.
If you don't see any distinctions beyond “there is some evil” vs. “there is no evil”, all of human history must seem to be a flat, undifferentiated blob to you.
That's why the future looks so bleak. Republicans support absolutely any amount of crime and corruption, because "some" crime and corruption has happened under Democrats. Meanwhile half of the rest of Americans wouldn't support Democrats because "some" crime is infinitely worse than "no crime" in their view. Criminals enjoy an absolutely stunning structural advantage in this country.
A website was taken down. This might technically violate some paperwork law, but the real problem is we don't actually prosecute war crimes/human rights violations. So what difference does it make if some website went down?
Seems like laws exist, they're just perverted or ignored. For example, this applies to the executive branch:
(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.
(b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding.
(c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to—
(1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or
(2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.
(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)
While there may well not have been ethical intentions behind this removal (who knows), I think reporting to the press directly is probably better than reporting it to a government, so as to avoid giving the government a chance to cover things up.
> > Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage
This is not far away from "defamation" in western world.
I'm not siding with Trump here, but every western politician seem to think that he/she/it can do whatever he/she/it wants and every criticism must be regarded as defamation.
And I'm just surprised when people still react to what he does as "unbelievable", "illegal" etc... I get it, but it's weird how persistently people still try to frame Trump's actions into moral, legal, historical, cultural, responsibility or any other framework.
He is someone who was born into wealth in the worst way possible, and was never - ever - subject to any moral restrictions, material consequences, or requirements that depend on any positive qualities, effort or success.
In those conditions, his bullish way of behaving always got him what he wanted in the moment, without any downsides or counter-weight that would regulate it. Time after time, he was given proof - by us, the society - that there are no consequences, or they are just so unimpactful, and that he can continue doing what he does. There is no framework that he needed to adhere to.
He was then placed into practically the same position within the government - being able to do whatever he wants and benefits him (directly, or through benefitting his posse), and there will be no material consequences of any kind. If he comes up to any inconvenient restrictions put in place before, they can just be removed first.
And that's it, that's what he's been doing all along. He doesn't have any higher interests, any ulterior motivation, or ambitions - in every situation, he just uses it to get something for himself in that moment - even if openly solely to be able to brag that he did it - and he makes himself look big by lying or belittling others, and that's it. Just a very simple unrestricted narcissist, on grander scale.
Their behavior is quite simple to understand and predict. It's just that they can rarely be SO up there, so unrestricted, that people still seem to struggle to not try to tie him to norms and frameworks.
Their motivation seems clear from what they voted, and what they're cheering for - they want to be able to behave without consequences in the same way as well.
Blame others (dems, libs, immigrants, races, religions...) for everything that's wrong, screw the "government" whenever possible, "grab them by the ***", and treat others and the world in the same way Trump can.
It's the same in every autocracy - the leader is providing an outlet for the immoral / suppressed / forbidden thoughts, actions and feelings - they either live vicariously through him (even if they are worse off, but that's blamed on others), or can now do some of that stuff because of him.
The root cause of the current political environment is income inequality and endless funding for wars. The people who support Trump are losing the economic game and had no better representative. The reality is that both parties are owned by the investor class and support foreign funding for wars. Until we as a society figure out that the left vs right struggle is just a distraction from the investor vs labor struggle, we will never fix this problem. Note how everyone in this thread is blaming Trump and the conservative party when the Kamala and the liberal party would likely be doing the same thing, because they both support Israel and the IDF and cover up their war crimes.
All this stuff about trans rights and gun rights and freedom of speech and other random culture war issues are just a tool to keep the labor class divided. The root cause is wealth insecurity, it won’t automatically solve the other problems but it’ll turn down the temperature. I wish people would wake up to this and stop fighting their neighbors when they’re both on the same team.
Indeed, the recent trend of the US government itself posting videos of the drone murders of Venezuelans stands in real stark contrast to how that was handled just 15 years ago.
Just making sure there is less noise when they start (already started) using U.S.-armed U.S. forces here in the U.S. to oppress people they don't like - non-Magazis, people without white skin, non-Christians, non-straight, and the poor. It's a lot quieter to disappear people when no one can report it and there isn't anyone to appeal to anyway.
Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
I hope that we never have to find out how ferocious the quiet, "leave me alone", armed populous is. I feel we are on that path and grouping people as the other just fuels the fire.
So there is no other way of reporting such abuses? This one web site that nobody had heard of before today, was our sole way of hearing complaints of this type?
Why is it that eliminating one particular web site is somehow a failure of the US Constitution?
Yes, Congress is dysfunctional. Welcome to the post 17th amendment world. Repeal that and make the House truly proportional instead of artificially limiting it to 435 members and you’ll go a long way towards fixing a lot of the current problems. Eliminate PACs and donation caps and enforce KYC for donations and we can see who is actually buying our legislators.
But on the main topic, the left in the US is seeking judicial intervention to block nearly every single action that the administration takes, and district court judges are handing down nationwide injunctions against the president on a weekly basis. If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.
Not that I agree with this decision, but is there any evidence that these reports yielded any consequences? Or rather, was it one of those, "After conducting an internal investigation, we have determined we did nothing wrong" kind of things?
Even if the reports didn’t result in action, they would (in theory) leave a report trail that a FOI request could uncover.
There’s a lot of ifs in there though, and a lot of implied honesty just for record keeping. We’re all discovering (again) that implied honesty in governance will always be abused.
I have a feeling thats exactly how it was used. But that makes its removal even more odd. The hosting cost must be trivial; an email support form connected to a shredder.
Defund the organization in charge of checking and follow-ups is one thing, but its complete removal just smell of incompetence or acknowledging of wrongdoing, or some sort of performance.
And the response is also baffling. "sorry we migrated it systems and accidentally took it down" is the handwave i expected. not "we follow the law regardless so it's not needed".
Guessing some mid level functionary had to come up with 3 things to do that week and this is an easy bullet point. Saying "Actually we should keep this thing because we're playing 4D chess" doesn't look good on such a status report.
It’s not odd though. This administration has been very clear that they think things like rules of engagement or caring about collateral damage are bullshit.
On a weekly basis now, they are blowing up civilian boats without any evidence wrong doing. Even if they had evidence, it still wouldn’t warrant using hellfire missiles on civilian ships, especially when the U.S. navy or coastguard is more than capable of intercept these ships.
Yes, I would think the 'smart evil' thing to do would be keeping it running and just ignoring what you don't like but now people will just send the stuff to WikiLeaks.
I don't think that's even the smart thing. Because this is set up to receive reports about acts committed by groups receiving weapons from the US, the smart evil thing is to have dossiers of all the human rights abuses of your client states ready the next time you want to negotiate something with them. "It's highly embarrassing that you used the guns we gave you to shoot so many civilians. We might be somewhat less embarrassed to continue supplying you with guns if (your national airline bought more Boeing planes|you sung praises to our glorious leader more loudly in public|you brought a complaint against our adversary in the WTO)."
They wouldn’t send to WikiLeaks before - also, or instead?
Do we have any evidence this initiative was ever staffed and effective?
We’ve extended a lot of credit to a vested institution to police itself. That’s not worked out in other matters, such as warrantless wiretapping, so why do you think this is effective here?
And why would you discredit third parties - especially those designed to be watchdogs?
I can see this initiative being an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. And, I’d imagine closing this reporting portal won’t deter journalists - especially those on the frontline like WikiLeaks - from reporting on incidents.
It reminds me of a company I used to work for that had a "suggestions box." After the box was full enough, the leadership would just dump it in the trash. Leadership didn't care about employee nor customer opinions. It was just to give people the illusion that their opinion mattered just to placate them.
After the small-ish company I worked for was bought by $ENGINEERING_MEGACORP, an integration program was promptly launched, during which numerous committees were formed to evaluate all business processes and take the best parts of both companies' DNA.
After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.
The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.
Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.
The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.
Trump has personally pardoned several known American war criminals. Not people who got caught up in a bad situation, but people who murdered non-combatants for fun
Of course not, but US imperialism is a bipartisan issue, what Trump does is remove the pretense that makes liberals sleep better at night. I think it's good that they removed it, let's get rid of all the lies and hypocrisy. Nothing material changes, it just makes it harder for democrats to pretend it's about something other than violent neocolonialism and might is right foreign policy they have been complicit in for decades.
That's what's interesting about this move (and all the other moves). We've stopped pretending we're good, signaling instead the prospect of violence to enemies foreign and domestic.
US has always looked the other way when Israel killed innocent civilians. But there were some limits on how far they could go. The difference now is that those limits have been removed.
Perception is reality. If there is at least a pretense of caring about human rights, then there is some modicum of shame upon leadership in not living up to them. And even if the desire was fake, creating a website to "tell us when we are being evil" is real. Pulling off the mask and showing the "true self", which is what the Trump administration is doing (and far more than that, I should add. It is only showing the "true self" of a subset of the population), is removing not only the potential for shame, but also accountability. I don't have to believe that America is/was a flawless champion of human rights to believe that it is much, much worse now.
One really mustn't. There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights - this 'tear it down' mentality relies on the fantasy that it will be rebuilt in some better form. And this kind of 'both sides' bullshit from the article highlights it perfectly:
> Blaha had already voiced frustration that despite the HRG passing its pilot phase, the Biden administration had not done enough to publicise it, meaning the provision to "facilitate receipt" of information was still not being fully honoured before the Trump administration deleted the channel entirely.
One side didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred, and the other one deleted it entirely. Both sides are bad!
> There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights
Hopefully most do! All should.
However, most employees don’t pick what they work on. So it’s always at the discretion of the boss to determine what’s practically considered, regardless of ideals or desires.
"Didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred" is very polite speech for killing millions in "wars on terror" and through arming our great friends, the house of Saud, in their campaign against Yemen.
Not going to get into the rich history of overthrowing local rulers and installing puppets through the most gruesome proxies to create "banana republics," the mass murder on a massive scale committed in the previous century, or the genocide that preceded to enable the founding of this state.
This place is built on murder and theft. "Both sides" are guilty. One is less shy.
The ‘tear it down’ mentality is about tearing down the covers and exposing America for what it is. That is how I understood your parent at least.
The USA has been doing human rights abuses for a long time, without any repercussions. The Iraq war and the Patriot Act is but a few of many many many more examples. For a while now the entire political spectrum in Europe has given this impunity to the USA, with the covers gone, maybe it will be harder—at least for the left of center parties—to give this impunity to the USA.
> One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
What transparency? What is transparent about running a meme coin that anyone in the world can bribe- sorry, "invest" in with no trace of who they are while you're President?
As for the topic at hand: Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage so I don't believe it's a deliberate effort at "transparency"
Transparently corrupt, sure. Who is influencing him still isn't transparent though. Book deals, board positions, and speeches all have organizers, company names, etc.. that can be investigated.
How can you trace a block chain transaction back to someone without some sort of OPSEC slip up?
> Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage
It confuses me how anyone could look at what's happening in the world and see a lack of a plan. Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy in this term and using geopolitical statecraft to upend the arrangements that were not working in favor of the US. The tariffs to force countries to choose US or China, putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending, and the peacemaker strategy in the Middle East to force oil prices down to reduce inflation. It seems to be a very comprehensive strategy.
There is a plan, but it is rather half baked and naive.
>putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending
At the same time as refusing weapons sales to US allies and restricting intelligence sharing. Thereby forcing those countries to spend on European weapons rather than the US ones they have bought for the last 70 years. Doesn't sound great for the US tbh
Tariffing the entire world, changing his position on Ukraine every week, and hinting at invasion of our allies is not coherent. On the Ukraine conflict, he didn't seem to understand that Putin is untrustworthy until recently.
> Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy..
You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.
By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
He's got a very comprehensive plan and he knows exactly what he's doing. He's also consolidated his base so he has people who are as committed as he is to carrying out his vision. He's doing everything he said he would do successfully. All his opponents are desperate for him to fail but that simply is not happening, i wonder why? This website runs opposite to his vision of MAGA, it's basically make america criminals, no surprises it's been axed.
When did the US government ever care about human rights? People act like the entire country wasn't built on the backs of war, slavery, and genocide. The most bloody conflict in the country's history was amongst itself over the rights to own another human being as property. Slaves were freed and the civil rights act wasn't passed for almost 100 years after the war.
Human rights my ass. More like rights for those with the mights.
> Slaves were freed and the civil rights act wasn't passed for almost 100 years after the war.
That's progress though, even if its progress on something that never should have existed to begin with, and the progress is far too slow.
And yes, our progress has been far too slow and way too uneven, but for the first 40 years of my life I felt like we were still progressing (yes -- too slow, and too unevenly).
But in the most recent ~decade of my life I feel like we've switched from too-slow progress to regression.
Shitty progress isn't enough, but its better than no progress (or, much worse, regression).
Progress sure but Lincoln didn't free the slaves in the Northern states.
He only freed the slaves in the South with the emancipation proclamation [1]. The 13th amendment wasn't until 2 years later. Lincoln did it as an economic weapon against the south as well as a military recruitment tool; not out of the goodness of his heart.
Which is why all of this recent mess is interesting because the only thing that’s different in terms of action now is that they are doing all the dirt in public rather in private
Even total deportation numbers are lower (given administration length) than every previous administration as reported by Jacobin in the latest issue - yall remember Elian Gonzalez?
How cruel was the treatment from the British truly? My understanding was things like "no taxation without representation" was unrealistic due to the sheer distance and amount of time required to travel between the US and the UK. We're talking somewhere around 2-4 months one way. To send a rep back and forth with a message like:
US sends rep ->
Uk and rep interact ->
rep goes back to US with UK decision ->
the US give their answer and the rep goes back to UK ->
then rep goes back to the US with the UK's decision.
Such an interaction could take well over a year.
I also thought the US was the lowest taxed colony under British control? Not to mention it's not like the British didn't provide military protection to the colonies as well.
I am not saying the revolution was purely unjustified, but I am not really aware of how bad things truly were. My history classes kind of glossed over that part.
The United States' way of government was revolutionary for its time, based on the cutting edge of human philosophy in many ways. The Bills of (negative) Rights in particular.
It is a shame that it is being destroyed at lightspeed the last year, and worse that many don't seem to care.
The colonial grievances that led to war are explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independence.
It can be assumed that the British occupation forces were just as brutal as any other occupying military force in history. The only restraint in those situations is morals and a boss that was across an ocean.
Lots of people seem to think Trump is some sort of king or going outside the law.
Fact is he was democratically elected and working within the system of checks and balances established by our founders.
Congress can stop him from doing things but the democratically elected congress allows him to continue. So they agree with his actions and are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
The courts can stop him and indeed have in several cases. Often times higher courts over rule those lower ones but not always. Majority of the time they eventually end up siding with the executive branch though. So courts are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with.
This is indeed what democracy looks like though.
Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
Note: I have been hit by the HN "posting to fast" limit so I can't respond.
It’s not exactly working when the executive seizes two core powers of Congress (taxation and spending) and gets away with it for, so far, most of a year, with no end in sight.
There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.
The executive could be stopped at any time by the courts or congress.
But the democratically elected congress chooses not to. So the majority that was elected are doing what they think is right. That's how our US democracy works.
Same with the courts, executive is elected by the people and so is the senate. They select and approve the judges, same as it ever was.
I am in no way defending everything I am simply stating that there are checks and balances but many people just don't like the decisions that they are making. Doesn't mean they are not there though.
Can you point to any parts of the constitution that, if ignored, would represent the US state based on that same constitution no longer functioning correctly, or not as a continuation of the same state as before? If so, why those parts but not, apparently, broad swaths of the rest of it?
If not… I think you’re operating under a uselessly-broad notion of what constitutes US democracy “working”.
[edit] what this really gets at is legitimacy, which is the ultimate arbiter of who’s in charge and how effectively they may wield power. I find the idea that a state founded on a constitutional document as its fundamental claim to legitimacy ignoring major parts of that document isn’t at least overtly flirting with either a loss of legitimacy or a transition to a different state with a different basis for legitimacy (either of which seem to me to clearly count as a failure of that original state)… puzzling.
This is an affront to the rule of law and equal protection under the law. It is not okay for congress or the courts to acquiesce. We are supposed to be a nation of laws.
Congress and the courts are derelict in their responsibility to honor the rule of law.
A functioning democratic republic is not, in fact, predicated on voting every couple years and shutting up in between elections.
Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.
Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.
But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.
I would argue it is working. The democratically elected congress just agrees with what he is doing. Whether they agree due to genuine belief or fear of him calling them out, doesn't really matter. We should be electing people that have a spine, if we don't then that is still democracy working. Checks and balances are there. Many people just don't like the choices they are making
Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody enforces the laws about their having to bring certain cases.
Both of the following may be true:
1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.
2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)
The fundamental problem is, there is really no "free market" of countries.
A US citizen who hates what the country has become cannot go off and set up a new one, they have a choice of a few styles of government (and it is very expensive to go and try living under another government!) Perhaps a benefit of space exploration will be experimentation with style of government.
My only niggle with your statement would be: A lot of what is happening now is happening because of "friction" in the system. If, for example, in an ideal world courts adjudicated instantly (instead of taking months or years) the current situation would be quite different. Similarly, if all congress people voted without fear of intimidation, some might vote quite differently. But, you are right, it's not like the founders didn't know that courts are slow or people can be intimidated.
The president has a mob of violent supporters, and Congress is terrified for their lives to take a stand against the president. When Republicans in congress have gone against Trump even in the smallest way, all he has to do is tweet something negative about them, and they are inundated with hundreds of death threats against their families [1]. Unless they can coordinate enough to rebel all together with loyalists somehow not finding out first, taking a stand would be suicide.
As a much lesser, but still serious point- Trump individually has so much power within the party he can get anyone removed from the party itself with a word, and effectively take away all of their campaign funding. He personally decides who is allowed to run or not run for office in the Republican party.
How do you explain away things like lobbying money (i.e. bribery), or politicians remaining in their post despite glaringly obvious physical and cognitive decline, or insider trading, or the stacking of courts with biased judges, or total lack of enforcement of the law, or the media being so obviously controlled by state-aligned actors? To name but a few.
> Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though. Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
The Republican Party acts like the midterms don't matter at all.
Approval is plummeting, representatives ignore townhalls like the plague.
Which is awesome for the dems then correct?
Reps will lose seats and then the Dems will have the house and enforce whatever checks and balances they choose.
If the reps win then the people have spoken and current actions continue.
Districts are gerrymandered and the voters are split and hardened into camps.
You can say all is going according to the law (I would say no), but it seems most people think the country is going down the tubes - they just disagree with who is at fault - and it seems the right is just happy as long as the libs are crying about it.
Unless the reason is that there will be no election, or only elections in red states, or you will need a special travel passport for going to Washington DC, which magically won't be issued to new Democrats, or any number of possible obstructions are possible.
Why would the House get back in session at all, for that matter? House leader Mike Johnson might enjoy vacation too much.
Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.
Germany 1933 is also what democracy looks like. Just because the system allows it to happen doesn't mean everyone is doing their job or that the result is in any way acceptable.
"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.
Not that I know, but I could imagine that a public/anonymous form on the web (if that's what it was) was receiving 99.8% bot/garbage/spam/nuisance reports and they took it down for that reason. Though nothing in the article gives that as a reason, and quotes only the rather vague statement that "the US State Department insisted it was continuing to receive reports regarding gross violations of human rights and was engaging with "credible organisations" on a full spectrum of human rights concerns."
I'm actually more surprised that they didn't abuse it, instead of removing it. Remember when Trump's first FCC commissioner ran a public comment campaign on net neutrality, and then heavily botted it to make it look like people were more strongly opposed than they actually were? Remember when there were zero consequences for that? I guess removing it makes a stronger statement.
The time for nudging and manipulation is apparently over. It's more like "the sky is green, who do you believe, me or your lying eyes? We got 20 trillion dollars from foreign countries. Obey."
It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies, ie “US armed IDF forces” according to the article. Obviously there is something more to this than the headline and tone of the piece indicate. For one thing, the law written by Leahy was passed in 2011, but this website went online in 2022, so how can removing the site make it impossible to abide by the law? What was going on between 2011 and 2022 than is different from now?
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
From a practical standpoint, this is why Wikileaks matters. Rather than count on the State department to serve that role, we should count on independent journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.
Agree. I'm tired of having to do research every time I read a news article. If you want me to trust your news articles give me raw unedited sources, because if I don't see any, I don't trust your assessment.
> It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies
The website is for reporting abuses by foreign forces armed with US kit. The US isn't in the habit of arming its enemies, so of course the reports concern allies. That's what the website is for.
It would still be roughly true that someone is trying to make it harder to report abuses or that they’re achieving the same by incompetence, no?
It's hard to say whether the article is lazy or is actually just partisan.
Seems premature to accuse the article if being inaccurate or biased without actually knowing whether it's inaccurate or biased.
I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.
I'm equally concerned about people being paid to push narratives in places like Hacker News. Especially in defense of large organizations.
The Leahy Law requires the U.S. government to facilitate receipt of information about alleged abuses by U.S. supported forces.
The State Department confirms it no longer operates the HRG, but says it is still receiving reports through other direct channels.
I couldn't find any requirement in the law that requires a public website.
NGOs can still submit information through established contacts or by email.
I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
Define “easier.”
Someone has to read through each email to determine the nature of the complaint, who was involved, how to classify it, etc.
If the web form was free text entry, the same effort is required by the receiving humans.
You can move the effort slider from the reviewer toward the web dev and the reporter by designing a UI to limit input and pre-classify the complaint.
So who has it “easier” now? I guess the server admin?
> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
why
>> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
> why
Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc.
A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
Not sure about you, but when I submit a “contact us” form, I am about 10% sure someone will actually read it.
When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
>When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
An "auto reply with a ticket number" is not a feature of email, it is something that someone built that could just as easily be attached to a webform. Plenty of webforms work that way, I have personally built some in my career.
Sounds like a characteristic of the responder system more so than the input system.
Whereas what’s clearly a distinct advantage of a web form is that you can find it on the web.
> The Leahy Law requires the U.S. government to facilitate receipt of information about alleged abuses by U.S. supported forces.
From Wikipedia: "Senator Leahy first introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act."
It is funny that only today they found it. Wikileaks was documenting American war crimes since some time.
This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution?
On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.
It seems to be an extension of aspects that he talked about in his speech https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318... Specifically:
> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. > The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing. > We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.
> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture. > A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards. > I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.
> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.
> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.
> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.
That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".
To be fair (ignoring whether Hegseth really deserves that), what he describes is a very common view of military leadership during war time.
"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.
Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.
Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with competent warfighters.
For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)
I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well.
I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.
We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.
If the war is prolonged, you can't go around treating people like eggshells to be crushed, or morale will suffer.
Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.
And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?
you must "hate" Amy Edmondson
Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now.
If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.
The most polite thing i can say about Pete is that he's the dimmest bulb among them, trying to imitate much more capable people. And everyone can see it.
He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.
> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".
We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.
Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches. “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.”
But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.
Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.
The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.
By design, the current administration moves as fast as it possibly can because it knows that the public will take time to catch up.
The key to countering is consistent pressure that does not relent to fix the mechanisms that are broken: (congress, the white house, the "deep state" side note: the deep state always existed, it was just a convenient shorthand for "the part of the US government that faithfully implements the laws as passed by congress". That portion has been gutted and replaced with sycophants, and it will now take time to undo it)
Things like the Supreme Court, term limits, election funding also need updating. We all need to do a better job reviewing the fundamentals of government.
Bold of you to assume the public will ever catch up or care in the world of relentless algos and propagandizing. Tariffs have been in place for months now, which is objectively a regressive self imposed tax on US citizens.
The founding fathers lived in a world where the average citizen would have no idea what was going on in Washington. They just didn't expect it to be exploited quite so brazenly
The finding fathers also set up a system where most people could not vote, so that wasn't a big problem for them.
>But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).
As usual, you see this as a "they are dumb" problem. Look within.
TBH The Right in the US has such a structural advantage, that Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-facto repeal of the law.
The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.
It's not just a structural advantage, it's a de facto suspension of the Constitution.
Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup.
What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.
This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better.
If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
I think distilling in that far is missing the point that this is a republican and right wing issue. It doesn’t “just so happen” that republicans are in power while this is happening, they are the ones who are doing it.
Because they now control the Congress and SCOTUS, there is effectively no recourse. Congress is paralysed and SCOTUS will almost always rule in favor of the Administration.
They studied and effectively undermined the system patiently. Now armed forces are being deployed to all major cities.
You're not wrong, but Congress has been broken for a long, long time. Congress really doesn't do anything except for agree (if they've got a majority with the president) or disagree (if they're in the minority against the president) with the current president. They don't really make laws, they don't hold anyone accountable, they don't fund the government. They don't govern at all, they just try to keep getting re-elected.
They have subpoena power and a jail. They just refuse to exact accountability unless you're something critically important like a baseball player.
This isn’t true though. Lots of legislation has been passed. Government shutdowns have become common but they’re not universal. Your absolutist take is observably false. It is worth looking deeper at who the obstructionists in congress actually are. A minority of bad actors can cause immense harm.
We are, it appears now, a country of laws…uits.
We have that, for now.
The talking heads on Fox have started to prepare us for a country without judges and lawsuits. Or at least without any Democratic judges.
> Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-factor repeal of the law.
Yes, but why is that surprising? If a majority of any legislature doesn't care to see a law enforced, they could vote to repeal the law anyway. It's only because of the artifice of the filibuster in the U.S. system that there's a meaningful difference between those two things.
The difference is that uneven enforcement is the tool of autocrats. Ignoring the law breeds contempt for it. Madison said requiring a supermajority for normal legislation would poison democracy, and I think the modern usage filibuster has proven him correct. I hope the GOP ditches the whole thing, not just for continuing resolutions. The senate will no longer have any excuses for abdicating its responsibilities. Thrashing laws are a small price to pay. I do wish judicial appointments still required a supermajority.
Picking and choosing which laws to enforce is baked into the concept of prosecutorial discretion. There is a reason the country’s prosecutor in chief is an elected position. It was understood to be a fundamentally political office even in Jefferson’s day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/02/thomas-je...
I agree we should abolish the filibuster. It makes incremental changes difficult and fosters extremism.
That’s not true.
Prosecutorial discretion exists because the executive can always say they’re just prioritizing their limited resources.
They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
They also absolutely ARE NOT allowed to say “I’m enforcing a specific law against Party X but not against Party Y because I’m exercising discretion and I just like X.” That’s why dismissal for selective or vindictive prosecution exists.
In principle, the Constitution is quite clear: the President SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed…
> They absolutely ARE NOT allowed to just say “I’m not enforcing this because I disagree with the law.”
Prosecutors are allowed to do that and do so all the time: https://www.aei.org/articles/viewpoint-on-not-enforcing-the-... (“Indeed, the ability of prosecutors to pick and choose among offenses is part of the constitutional structure of our government, as the Supreme Court has held too many times to recount. President Jefferson refused to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts because he was convinced that they were unjust, and unconstitutional to boot. (In 1964 the Supreme Court vindicated him.) President Carter pardoned most selective service violators and halted further prosecutions. President Johnson’s Antitrust Division published antitrust guidelines that proclaimed a policy of not bringing suit against small mergers, even though the Supreme Court had held repeatedly that similar mergers were unlawful. Many state and local governments decline to prosecute small drug offenses, saving resources for bigger game.”).
Did you read the article you posted? The entire thing is about allocation of finite resources. You can read the original Antitrust enforcement policy and see that it lays out a system of prioritization which (surprise surprise), prioritizes larger monopolization efforts over smaller ones.
It does not say "we don't think small companies can behave monopolistically so we aren't enforcing the law on them."
President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.
I will reiterate the plain language of the United States Constitution: [the President] SHALL take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
SHALL does not mean MAY or AT HIS DISCRETION or any such thing.
Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne. They provide guidance to people as to what they can reasonably expect will and will not be permitted, and the obligations of various people to eachother. Laws need to be changeable, because the world changes, but that process is purposefully made somewhat difficult so that only worthwhile changes are made, so that the changes can be explicitly communicated, and those who make the changes can be both advised before and held accountable after.
If congress wants to see the laws changed, it has that power. Indeed, that's its entire reason for existing. The fact that it is not doing so, and instead ignoring laws on the books while leaving them there, is at best dereliction of duty, if not tacit acceptance that they don't actually have the votes to make those changes.
> Because the whole point of laws is that they are not merely the whims of whoever currently sits on the throne.
That views laws as self-executing abstractions, which they are not. Laws necessarily are enforced by people. For that reason, in the U.S., law enforcement is typically assigned to elected officers and their delegates. From the beginning of the republic, enforcement of federal law has been a political activity: https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2017/04/MARKOWITZ.pdf
“While there was no direct conversation about the general power of prosecutorial discretion in the record of the framing of the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion was an uncontroversial power of the President from the start. President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted. It has been observed that President Washington’s control over ‘prosecutions was wide- ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged—even expected—by the Supreme Court.’ In the earliest days of the Union, future Chief Justice John Marshall had the opportunity to opine on the nature of the President’s prosecutorial discretion authority in discussing the decision of the President to interrupt a prosecution of an individual accused of murder on board a British vessel and to instead deliver that person to British authorities. On the floor of Congress, then-Representative Marshall described the President’s prosecutorial discretion power as ‘an indubitable and a Constitutional power’ which permitted him alone to determine the ‘will of the nation’ in making decisions about when to pursue and when to forego prosecutions.”
I agree, I'm not sure it is surprising.
(there would be tremendous oversight if the GOP was in power in Congress, and the President was a Dem)
"oversight"
Like the Benghazi and Hunter Biden investigations. In other words, sideshows.
One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate.
If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.
In the Senate at least outside of a few carve outs, you really need 60 Senators to get anything passed not just a majority. The only reason the ACA ever passed was during the brief window they had 60 Senators
Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace.
That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood the "who watches the watchers" problem and created a system without any such single point of failure. The ultimate backstop in our political system is not the law, but instead frequent elections. Congress writes the law, the President enforces the law, and the Judiciary interprets the law. If the President does a bad job of enforcing the law, the recourse is elections (or, as a last resort, impeachment).
Just a quibble, but we should only be impeaching Presidents for illegal acts, not mere opinions about job performance, which members of the opposite party will almost always disagree with. The remedy for doing a bad job is the ballot box.
Well that horse left the barn a long time ago - the list of blatantly illegal things is now so long that new ones (like murdering people in boats by remote control) just fly on by.
That’s a category error. “Murder” is a concept of domestic criminal law. It doesn’t apply to state actions against foreigners in international waters. For the same reason it’s not “murder” for the U.S. to drone strike middle eastern weddings or to nuke foreign cities.
Most people do not believe in the religion of humanist universalism.
It is interesting that our elections aren't really frequent enough. Other systems cleverly made it possible to immediately recall electors that have gone rogue or the citizens have no faith in.
You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing. For example, the entire city of Nashville, TN, has been utterly and obviously gerrymandered out of existence, and the city has no representation in the House. (They used to be TN's 5th.)
This of course does not apply to Presidential elections. The President has multiple times indicated disdain for elections, his party has used "third term and beyond", his supporters have openly floated the idea of repealing the 22A, he's called himself "king" and "dictator".
The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now.
> or, as a last resort, impeachment
"a servile congress" — they understand impeachment. If an attempted coup doesn't get impeachment, nothing will. Regardless, the GOP is going along with the president, so impeachment isn't something that's going to happen.
> You should look at what gerrymandering has done / is doing.
What has it done? In 2024, Republicans got 50.5% of the seats and 51.3% of the two-party Congressional popular vote. The delta between a party’s share of the popular vote and its share of House seats is much smaller since 2000 than it was for most of the 20th century: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Po...
> The VRA is quite literally before SCOTUS right now
The VRA requires racially discriminatory gerrymandering and is probably unconstitutional in that respect. The VRA is the product of an era where white democrats would discriminate against black democrats even though they shared a party. Today, gerrymandering is based on political party, not race. If black people voted 80% republican, red states would happily gerrymander out affluent college-educated whites in their favor.
They’ve created enough of a digital system to manage public opinion (through brain rot, manipulation, bots, psychometrics) that they’re less and less afraid of elections.
Who is “they?”
A lot of the members of this very forum, honestly.
I assume multiple competing systems at this point. You have Team Jorge (and many others) in Israel, Robert Mercer’s rebranded SCL Group and offshoots, whatever Elon Musk has done to X (who he himself said he used to help Trump win). In Portugal there are bot armies and influence operations on every social network - Facebook and Reddit most of all.
SCOTUS lifelong appointments checking in to say "hi"
SCOTUS has life-long appointments because it is designed to move and operate slowly and be the least political of the branches. Parties that try to legislate from the bench when they cannot successfully get something through Congress are the issue.
Pretty large chance that the next election will be meaningless though.
> it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch
There are plenty of laws being ignored. Tariffs being the most obvious.
Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
> Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
I hope you know that Congress has abdicated all of their responsibilities to the president. I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
The thing the founders didn't foresee was that a president could basically threaten to remove any member of Congress by 1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
The founders foresaw all manner of bad behavior. They understood human nature better than most today, and they experienced a lot of shocking political acts, everything from telling scurrilous lies about your opponent to outright buying votes. The only thing that might be new to them is the scale at which technology makes these things possible. Read up on the history of early campaigns.
>1) driving their campaign contributions to zero or 2) threatening to sic his mob on them.
What's so crazy about comments like this is they have an air of, "we are actually the good guys in the right, but the system works against us!"
You got out-voted.
The President is currently rocking about a 39% approval rating and 56% disapproval.
The numbers suggest that he is not doing what the electorate elected him to do, in general.
(In addition, the Legislature and Executive are designed and intended to be functionally independent, and regardless of the preference the electorate expressed via simple majority, to the extent that independence is threatened by executive action, it's unconstitutional. The President doesn't have a mandate to interfere with that indepdendence for the same reason his election didn't give him a mandate to institute non-carceral slavery).
If you flicked the switch and made voting mandatory. Then you'd find the extreme views on both sides would vanish as everyone would rush to please the middle (the VAST majority of the population).
You can't make statements like "you got out voted" when you actually mean "a few more people from your side turned out and voted, but actually likely the majority of the population doesn't agree with you".
You could argue that apathy is a vote in and of itself, but then you aren't a representative democracy.
Dissenting representatives may very well need Secret Service protection to stay alive. Good luck getting that protection approved.
(The Epstein issue is a special case - some of the MAGA base still believes it was not a hoax and that Epstein was not alone in his crimes.)
They did. The back-stop is Congress being brave enough to call the bluff and supporting each other as an institution, across party lines.
The founders didn't foresee Congress being this cowardly. Probably because a lot of them had fought in a war together.
George Washington could have declared himself King if he had wanted, so yes, the founders absolutely saw this coming.
One thing the founders definitely didn't see coming was the two party system, which eventually led to a single party controlling all thee branches of government.
They absolutely saw it coming and warned against it, but couldn’t figure out any durable way to prevent it.
Go back and read Washington's farewell address. There's a section in there that addresses factions, and it's like Washington had access to the headlines from last week when he wrote it.
They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice.
The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.
They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.
It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.
The Supreme Court definitely suffers from 'not invented here' syndrome. There are vastly superior Supreme Court systems that other countries have implemented (Austria is a great example) where the US could just copy their homework, but won't.
The press really needs to start suffixing the justices with (R) and (D) when discussing them to drive the point home that the SC is the most partisan branch of government.
Austria's system was created in the mid 1700s and would have been relatively new at the time of the founding. Was Austria's system clearly vastly superior at the turn of the 19th century?
Their separate constitutional court didn't come along until the 20th century[1]. They have 14 justices on that court, but only a maximum of 9 will ever hear a case for precedent-setting decisions, and usually fewer than that (making court packing difficult if not completely pointless).
They have always done what the US should do: keep the votes on a judgment private, so opinions speak for the court as a whole, and they don't let the losers have a soapbox by publishing dissents.
As a cherry on top, they enforce a mandatory retirement age of 70.
These factors make their court an actually apolitical body in a way that's in hilariously stark contrat to the US court. The US court is what you'd make if your entire goal was to turn all its judgments into political theatre.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Court_(Austria)
Put a ($R!) after Thomas.
Not really, no. The founders were not omniscient, but many of them publicly wrote about the problematic rise of political "factions" contrary to the general interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
Our founders recognized our compromisestitution was vulnerable to this, they didn't predict a nationalist brainwashing campaign to call compromise a beneficial thing as part of a national identity
They expected waaaay more amendments than we have done
This is the painful period of time where the US would have to collectively realize they are missing controls on the branches, in the form of amendments. Unfortunately, it looks like the people are lazy. They rather lose the union, before agreeing there really is a problem to be solved. Otherwise, there's no way to know there's a problem.
Modern crisis planning in action. Wait till the fuel is on fire, before putting out the fire, assessing the loss and assigning blame.
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.
Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...
I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo
The founders came from England, which has the world's longest unbroken political tradition (apart from 11 years during the English Civil War). England has top-level cabinet positions that were established 800 years ago. So I doubt the founders would be surprised that their constitution was still in use 236 years later.
Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.
Is it really longer than the Catholic church?
Along this line of thinking, surely there’s an unbroken administrative / bureaucratic tradition running China that spans multiple royal dynasties and perhaps even the recent ideological upheaval. Can we call that an enduring government?
Fair point.
They did not envision it to be used in its original state, and it hasn’t. But it also hasn’t changed much in a long time.
The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people"
More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.
you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified.
https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/
it was joke. i am well aware.
They probably also didn’t see it coming that their constitution would be considered just as sacred as the Bible, instead of a document that was to be adapted.
And they never expected that a buffoon like Trump would be elected, instead of a bunch of rich gentlemen being in charge.
How do you mitigate when 2/3rd of voters support, at least tacitly, the lawlessness?
I don't know exactly which support level you mean but https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker would paint a different picture. That said, who knows how valid even these numbers are.
They're likely referencing that 2/3rds of voters either explicitly voted for Trump (≈31.9%), or implicitly support the result of the election by having not voted at all (≈35.9%). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...)
The actual support that matters is people's approval of the people they can vote for, ie, their own senators and congresspeople, which people (unsurprisingly, since they were elected) have a positive approval rating of.
> By more than two-to-one (56% to 26%), Americans say their local elected officials are doing a good job.[0]
Executive power is unchecked because people approve of their representatives not checking executive power (when it's their executive in power).
You can certainly argue that it's a matter of scale and "this time it's different" but it's always different and executive overreach is ever increasing. Trump is setting expectations for the next president, no matter which party they come from.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-american...
The next time someone says "the other guy's not much better!" I am going to strangle and choke them.
This is easy.
Most people just don't care. They just want to live their lives. Their lives are not good, but they're not awful, they're aware there are a lot of people are worse off than them, and they know if they rock the boat too much they might get singled out and their life gets worse.
The powers in charge recognise this, and just accept that absolute monarchy in their image is fine, and they can do what they want, and so do so. And life in "the court" is particularly fine, and everybody eats and drinks well, and nobody does or says much. The occasional opposition pops up, but they can be charged with treason, and imprisoned, or even better, executed. Problem solved.
I often summarise this as saying that Putin is not the problem, Putinism is - there's vested interests in keeping him, and his ideology, just where it is. Trumpism is real, Thatcherism still has a hold in the UK, it's all these political systems with ardent supporters holding onto a name because they define their own safety and economic well being with the ideas most closely associated with them. It can take decades (perhaps centuries), for the "court" around such people to break free.
Then, at some point a minority who does not have it good in this system decides to do something about it. A charismatic leader makes some speeches, rallies people into action, an insurrection, revolution or civil war takes place.
Most people just don't care. Until the civil war arrives at their doorstep and they have to choose a side, which they do, often quite grudgingly.
The old guard sometimes wins, and doubles down on the way things were. Sometimes they are toppled. In the old days the losers were killed to make sure there was no going back, but these days they tend to get to stick around and get real bitter. South Africa might be the only example in history where they tempered this stage a little through incredible experiments in public justice, but even there, there are problems.
An attempt is then made to fix the wrongs of the past: more accountability, more democracy, or even less democracy, whatever the thing is that caused those kings and queens and their courts (even if they were in fact constitutionally not actual kings or queens, just behaving like ones), to have that power, it's all shaken up. New dice are rolled.
Most people just don't care. But there's an optimism for a while, perhaps.
And a new system takes hold. Sometimes for a few years, sometimes for a few centuries. And then the cycle repeats.
This is crudely how the United States was mostly born. And the United Kingdom (after multiple cycles in England, Wales and Scotland). There is no country in Europe that hasn't seen this cycle many times. It's the recent history of almost all of South America, Asia and Africa, except in many cases they also had to deal with foreign kings and queens having a will enforced by foreign armies or - worse still - the CIA getting involved, because, why not?
The Middle East has had its run-ins in places with this cycle, but making sure most people born in your country feel rich sure has helped a lot in recent decades, as does being able to punish (or eliminate), people who raise their hand and begin "Wait, I have a question..."
Yes, I'm cynical, yes, I'm sad about it, no I don't think there's much that can be done.
I sincerely hope this isn't a story that has a near future in the US (or indeed anywhere else), but... it's not looking or feeling great.
True that most people don't care about who rules, but people do care of not living "much worse" than "before". That triggered a lot of revolutions before.
It does not look great, but I find risks mostly economical (not only in USA, everywhere) - if the situation will deteriorate even more abruptly (considering it already did a bit due to the pandemic "shock") then we will have a mess.
You don't. That's democracy.
Third time's the charm, I guess?
Parent’s statement still holds. The laws may exist but if they are not enforced, they don‘t really constraint anyone do they?
When a different side takes control of the justice department they may choose to go after all those who broke the law by order of this president. The president might be protected from consequences according to the supreme court, but those answering to the president are not.
This administration has set the standard that the justice department can be weaponized against political enemies. The ratchet only goes one way in American politics, presidents never relinquish the powers claimed by their predecessors.
The obvious solution to this is to change everything structurally needed to ensure the other side never again takes control, which is clearly also in progress.
>The obvious solution to this is to change everything structurally needed to ensure the other side never again takes control, which is clearly also in progress.
- Signed, the side that tried to throw a candidate in prison.
Prison is typically where felons go, yes.
A convicted felon. Candidacy shouldn't be part of the equation.
> The president might be protected from consequences according to the supreme court, but those answering to the president are not.
Unless they are granted a blanket pardon beforehand.
Then all you can really do is an "audit" for who did what, from which no charges can be laid.
Just lock them up anyway and pardon yourself for ignoring the pardon if that's how the game is played.
The idea of a blanket pardon is absurd on its face and we're only allowing it because we're allowing political prosecution.
Or arrest them using ICE and make false claims. Or just make their life miserable and punish anyone who hires them.
In reality stuff like this feels like the beginning of an end.
I seriously don't know how anyone can look at what is happening right now and be okay with it.
That does not allow escaping from international laws.
Actually it does if the US, bullies the other countries into not enforcing it and the US it's actually the main country enforcing international law. If a country dare to enforce international law against an us person, they will cut resources or threaten to use military
International law makes traffic cops look like Judge Dredd
Can't escape State law either.
Trump seems to have been able to.
The US army does, though.
Even before Trump, the US had a standing policy of threatening severe retaliation against anyone who tries to enforce international law against US citizens-- this isn't just an informal policy, it's a specific law passed by Congress. And the scope has only gotten broader since then.
The whole concept of "international law" is polite fiction anyway, the reality has always been "the strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must".
or civil lawsuits.
Individual federal government employees are generally immune from civil liability for all official acts, even if those acts were illegal.
He will very likely just pardon everyone on his last day.
> When a different side takes control of the justice department
That's an argument about the degradation of the rule of law, taking as a prior that the rule of law won't degrade. It's... unpersuasive. The end goal of this kind of thinking is that the other side never does take control, ever.
The current administration pretty clearly does not intend to give up power. They tried to evade democracy once already, and have fixed the mistakes this time.
Whether they will be successful or not is unknowable. But that's the plan. And the determining factor is very unlikely to be the normal operation of American civil society. Winning elections is, probably, not enough anymore.
There are some signs that the current Administration has no intention of allowing “a diferente side” to retake power.
Trump third term being one.
It defeats the purpose of a veto if the executive branch can ignore the law.
“It’s ok when my guy does it.”
-SCOTUS majority so far…
At least I get to feel vindicated. Many many people, including me, have long asserted that the so-called "conservatives" in the Supreme Court are anything but. Historically their decisions have appealed to a certain kind of conservative political base, but the pretense is really starting to wear thin. Limiting the power of the executive branch in general was never the goal, it was only to limit the power of presidents who were willing to challenge the capitalist oligarchy master plan. They know that their job now, along with their allies and Congress, is to simply step aside and manage public outrage while the next phase of the plan is set in motion. I'm not just talking about in recent years either, go back through the Obama and W Bush administrations. You might notice that the conservatives in the court curiously turned more conservative when "their guy" isn't in office.
Up to 2025 they maintained a reasonable facade of impartiality. During Trump's first term they told him no a lot.
They are not conservatives. They are selfservatives.
What we're seeing now isn't exactly the power of capitalist oligarchy but right-wing populist authoritarianism. They forge alliances with wealthy figures to achieve goals and engage in a corrupt patronage system like in an undeveloped country, but if this were a capitalist coup we would not be seeing anything like the absurd and illegal tariffs, brutal response to immigrants, etc.
I know leftists like to describe these sorts of phenomena (including Hitler's rise) as all part of the capitalist overlords' master plans, but that's not the most accurate description. Capitalists like Andreessen will cynically exploit it and hop on the bandwagon and benefit from it to the extent they can, but right-wing populist authoritarianism is its own beast, and they're just trying to position themselves as along for the ride rather than in its jaws. The regime is happy to reward capitalist loyalists and I do not deny there is a mutualism occurring, but it is more complex than a movement centered around capitalism.
> have long asserted that the so-called "conservatives" in the Supreme Court are anything but
They are conservatives and push for conservative agenda. Conservatives wanted them on the court so that they can make decisions like this.
I think you and parent comment are just using the word conservative in two different ways. There is conservative values and there is the conservative party, two different things.
Go back far enough and conservative meant "conserve the monarchy"
I am saying that these are real conservative values. It is not true that these would be just something conservative party does while claiming to believe something else. Instead, if you read what conservative people write and say, in journals, books, talk shows, anywhere ... this is exactly what they believe in.
Often distinguished as "little c" conservatism and "big C" Conservatives.
Yeah, the meaning of words change.
They are conservatives. People that care about things like small governments and fiscal responsibility are not. It's sad when somebody takes control over a group you identify with and changes it's goals but you're one person versus millions. The word doesn't mean what it used to.
The Republican party has not existed since 2016. It is the Trump party wearing the Republican party's tattered clothes.
An enormous proportion of Republican voters were already Trumpers as early as the ‘90s, but didn’t have a candidate yet, so had to settle for “vote Republican to keep the democrats from doing all the bad things Rush says they will”.
Republican partisan-propaganda media after anti-trust de-fanging (mid ‘70s) and media deregulation (‘80s-‘00s) became huge, and cultivated an electorate that wanted Trump but had to settle for tepidly-socially-conservative neoliberal Republicans. Such voters would tell you all day long about how we should just build a border wall (or mine it…), cut trade and foreign military engagements (though those have some cross-aisle appeal), question why we extend civil rights and due process to [pick a group], tell you we should use the military against protesters in cities, wonder why anyone opposes cops beating suspects unless they love crime, and so on, and they’d tell you that stuff many years before Trump’s 2016 run.
Yes, the deplorables were always there. There used to be a handful of adults in the room as well.
They are cons.
I am so mad that I spent that much time watching an anthropomorphized bill moving through congress. Useless knowledge.
“And we’ll make ted kennedy payyyy
“If he fights back, we’ll just say that he’s gayyyy
> there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.
Laws don't do things, people do.
It doesn't matter what's written down on paper if the people in power ignore it and the masses don't have enough organized collective power to prevent them from doing so.
The context of all US law is that it is the implementation of the will of the people. There is currently political will to shift focus in the military to effective fighting power, as opposed to progressive values. I think this is because the electorate recognizes that military threats around the world are getting worse.
Ukrainians will tell you now, you can’t have peace without strength. Europeans are also beginning to realize this due to American leadership, hence they have all (but one) doubled NATO funding limits this year.
This is not a reply to your message, but I can’t help but dive in to this opportunity to be extremely pedantic.
Is the correct plural acronym here “IGs”, or “Is-G” (Inspectors General)?
People have been saying for decades that Congress has delegated far too much power to the executive and that it's ripe for abuse if a malevolent president ever takes office.
Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.
(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)
A very, very bad place indeed.
The answer is impeachment, but when Congress is stuffed with boot licking toadies, then there is no recourse.
* s/impeachment/“conviction by the Senate”
Impeachment by itself has been shown to accomplish nothing. There is no other mechanism except conviction by the Senate to address constitutional or legal violations made by the president.
Also no president has ever been impeached by a House which is controlled by a majority of the same party of the President. If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached. If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Edit: “Approval voting” is the appropriate escape hatch from 2-party politics. It lets you get rid of primaries entirely and run all the top-n candidates who have the greatest number of valid nomination signatures. Its advantage over range-voting/etc is that it is dead-simple to explain to voters: Put a checkmark next to any candidate that you're "okay" with. The candidate with the most checkmarks wins.
https://rangevoting.org/CompChart.html
This mostly shows that political parties are the problem themselves rather than the political mechanics of the system themselves.
Now we are talking. And the dynamic that makes political parties so toxic IMO is “first past the post” voting.
If it’s your team or the “worse” team, you tolerate any flaw in your team.
If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over (for example see Reform vs Conservative parties in the UK, not that I am thrilled with the underlying direction) then there is an alternative: cut bait and condemn what used to be “your team”, and start a new one.
> If there was a pressure valve where another party can simply take over
That's exactly what happened though -- the MAGA party took over. Conservatives "cut bait" with traditional Republicans, condemned them (see how they talk about Liz and Dick Cheney or even GWB, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, their own presidential nominees), and started a new party within the rotting corpse of the old GOP. There's still some "Republican" branding around but if you pay attention they're not waving "Republican" flags or wearing "Republican" hats anymore.
Unfortunately taking over a dominant party was the easiest way to have a "different" party that could actually win. Both parties have built a mountain of obstacles to prevent a third party from ever getting close to challenging them.
Political parties were infamously called out by the first US President over 200 years ago, the only one to not have a political party:
https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/past-proj...
Having a bad system is one thing. Having a bad system and no one able or willing to fix it is worse.
The political mechanics of the system result in a two-party system, because no other party ever stands a chance of getting seats. Coalition systems may be less stable, but when you need at least three parties to form a government, they tend to keep each other in check better.
Yes, I know that there are exceptions, but seats should be proportional to the vote. If you have 100 seats, that party only getting 5% of the votes should also have 5% of the seats.
In the country where I live, people do consider themselves leftist, centrists, or right-wing, but a vast majority only decides what specific party to vote during the campaign.
We have the opposite issue, since there is not electoral threshold, we now have a lot of small and middle-sized parties, making it harder to form a coalition. (Would be possible to address with an electoral threshold of 2-5%.)
Except that 2 parties emerge like clockwork from the political mechanics of the system. Winner-takes all almost guarantee a two-party system.
Maybe you didn't mean the system as broadly.
>If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached.
That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.
>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.
Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.
> They still defend him to this day
Older democratic voters generally do seem to defend him but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape, and support his impeachment in principle. The establishment Democratic politicians also generally seem to defend him or at least refuse to condemn his actions, but most of the politicians also lean older.
Most people I talk with about it seem divided along the lines of morality in terms of the interaction and level of consent, rather than along debate over the security risks. Security risk seems like a valid point of concern to me.
That risk could be mitigated by a president being open about their promiscuity with both family and the public during their campaign - e.g. when both Russia and USA attempted to sextort and blackmail Sukarno (the president of the Philippines) he was delighted that his encounters were filmed and requested extra copies of the kompromat.
>but a growing number of younger democratic voters seem to identify his actions as tantamount to statutory rape,
I've picked up on that too. Which, in my opinion is strange... she was 22 or 23 wasn't she? We just have to wait another 2 generations, and those will think themselves still children at 35.
Rather than age differential, I think that view is primarily founded in the belief that the President's implied power over the career of their employee (a White House intern) makes it a particularly difficult choice to risk the ire of the President by refusing their advances.
I don't get the impression from talking with younger Democratic voters that they would generally be as concerned with issues of consent if it was a 22 year-old sex worker (where it's purely a transactional relationship) or 22-year old pop star (where their career isn't particularly threatened by the President's favor).
With a White House intern, there's a potential element of silent or implied coercion which puts into question whether enthusiastic consent was freely given. Similar to the national security risk - regardless if it was/wasn't, it also calls into question the President's judgment for why they would engage in such morally ambiguous behavior - it would also be fairly difficult for the President to even know themselves whether the intern is feeling coerced or not.
I don't really understand why people still talk about impeachment.
It has been very clearly shown to be a futile formality that only makes the ones doing it look even more powerless and worthy of mockery in the eyes of the other side and their supporters.
In a bygone era, impeachment would rely on concepts of shame, responsibility and public duty - it would be unimaginable that person that was impeached does not step down from the position and likely from political foreground fully - from the moral and social weight of that consequence.
We've seen last 2 times how thoroughly that weight no longer exists in modern society/politics.
Without criminal responsibility, there is no responsibility left at all.
Impeachment is the first step before conviction and removal. That’s why it’s talked about.
Trump was impeached twice.
A good point. The people who sit in parliament are very often just machines of the party. Yes yes TECHNICALLY they are elected by the people and have a mandate but your career is over if you speak out.
You have to be a very special kind of person to break rank.
Which is the flaw of the impeachment/conviction process. It heavily relies on elected officials having a strong moral compass. It's what the founders got the most wrong about the US as it's basically a worthless process. It really doesn't matter what evidence gets presented or what a president does. The result will always be a party line vote.
If a population decides to let themselves be run this way then who is at fault?
People get the leaders they deserve
We love to blame the common clay, don't we. You can win a majority of voters and lose an election. There are systemic problems, starting with money in politics, two senators per state, the electoral college and gerrymandering.
We already bastardized the senate by electing senators by popular vote. Senators are supposed to represent each states government, not the people of the state. As a single member of the union a state doesn't need more senators. Making ingredients the proportional to population just makes the senate another house. The people have the house. The cap of representatives has also been harmful to the voice of the people being heard. Representatives are the face for too many people for them to truly represent their constituents.
You can win a majority of voters and lose an election, but that's not what happened. 77 million people voted for Trump, and it's not like he acted like a mild mannered constitutional conservative with a sensible reform package and turned into a vindictive, chaotic wannabe autocrat whose closest thing to a redeeming feature is is stupidity afterwards. The electoral college and gerrymandering may be ludicrous, but that's not why he won, and nor is lack of funds for opponents. The system of checks and balances isn't what they were cracked up to be, but the reason he's dismantling it is because when he telegraphed that he was going to do it the people of the land cheered him so loudly anyone else that wanted their votes stepped in line.
George Carlin said it best:
“Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.’”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/78321-now-there-s-one-thing...
Video version: https://youtu.be/rVXekzwkz10?si=90VqlzOLiUS_7yFx
Yet the people of the state continue to allow this state of affairs to persist
It’s either free and people are actively choosing this or they are not free and choosing comfort of slavery than risking death for freedom
Do you expect elections are still a viable option in this circumstance? It's beginning to sound like the results will be just set to a default, like the last presidential election in Russia: "78%+ for Putin/Trump".
it turns out there aren't really any laws
Oh there are, but only for the Democrats. Same with the media: Trumps brain is openly turning to soup and the media can’t help but cover for him. Yet Biden, when he too was clearly way too old for the job, got constantly attacked for it. The double standard is bizarre.
It will always boil down to people.
This fantasy of free markets, laws, branches or anything else solving what Plato wrote about in The Republic thousands of years ago is pure folly.
If it is of any comfort - it's always been this way and it's not going to get any better :) We have technological progress, not progress in wisdom. People are better behaved because well fed humans behave better than hungry humans - everything else is as it's always been.
> ...it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.
There are, but the executive for decades (centuries?) has ignored law inconvenient to its goals, and the legislative has generally shrugged it off, hoping their guy will do the same down the road.
One such restraint? Declaring war. Yet how often has this power been abused by the executive since World War 2? Korea anyone? Vietnam? Central America? The Middle East?
There's been a lot of hand-wringing in this thread about what Trump has done and is doing. Truth is, he's just the latest player in the game we've all participated in, and he's good at it.
To stop him, we'd have to change the rules of the game, as Congress did in 2017 with the Russia sanctions bill.[1] I just don't see that happening 'cause... we're all hoping our guy will do the same (as Trump) down the road.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_America%27s_Adversa...>
The Constitution constrains the executive, it doesn't give him very many powers at all. Frankly, the Constitution bars him from having run in the 2024 election for having caused an insurrection against the United States. Aside from that, he should have been impeached and removed and barred from running again for extorting a bribe from a foreign government.
We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.
I don't see how anything has changed in a meaningful way. George Bush "tortured some folks" and Obama assassinated US citizens abroad. The status quo is literal evil and Trump is behaving in accordance with the status quo.
If you don't see any distinctions beyond “there is some evil” vs. “there is no evil”, all of human history must seem to be a flat, undifferentiated blob to you.
That's why the future looks so bleak. Republicans support absolutely any amount of crime and corruption, because "some" crime and corruption has happened under Democrats. Meanwhile half of the rest of Americans wouldn't support Democrats because "some" crime is infinitely worse than "no crime" in their view. Criminals enjoy an absolutely stunning structural advantage in this country.
A website was taken down. This might technically violate some paperwork law, but the real problem is we don't actually prosecute war crimes/human rights violations. So what difference does it make if some website went down?
There's no moral equivalency between the US directly torturing prisoners of war/assassinating its own citizens and a website being taken down.
Seems like laws exist, they're just perverted or ignored. For example, this applies to the executive branch:
(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years. (b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. (c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to— (1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate. (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
the Mitchell and Webb "are we the baddies" sketch certainly comes to mind here
The beheadings aren't the problem, it's the people that shut down the web page that was used to make racist reports!
While there may well not have been ethical intentions behind this removal (who knows), I think reporting to the press directly is probably better than reporting it to a government, so as to avoid giving the government a chance to cover things up.
That’s next:
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/22/headlines/trump_says_...
> Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/really-i...
> The president concluded that when coverage of someone is “bad” 97% of the time, “that’s no longer free speech.”
> “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters, referring to media outlets. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
> > Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage
This is not far away from "defamation" in western world. I'm not siding with Trump here, but every western politician seem to think that he/she/it can do whatever he/she/it wants and every criticism must be regarded as defamation.
Well, he's not talking about politicians, he's talking about reporting of his own behavior and actions.
This fuckin guy is honestly unbelievable.
Is this the greatness I was promised?
Certainly! No more complaints! See how great we are!
They should have just claimed it was hosted on AWS
> US-armed foreign forces
means Israel.
Trump is, inevitably, in the comments a lot.
And I'm just surprised when people still react to what he does as "unbelievable", "illegal" etc... I get it, but it's weird how persistently people still try to frame Trump's actions into moral, legal, historical, cultural, responsibility or any other framework.
He is someone who was born into wealth in the worst way possible, and was never - ever - subject to any moral restrictions, material consequences, or requirements that depend on any positive qualities, effort or success.
In those conditions, his bullish way of behaving always got him what he wanted in the moment, without any downsides or counter-weight that would regulate it. Time after time, he was given proof - by us, the society - that there are no consequences, or they are just so unimpactful, and that he can continue doing what he does. There is no framework that he needed to adhere to.
He was then placed into practically the same position within the government - being able to do whatever he wants and benefits him (directly, or through benefitting his posse), and there will be no material consequences of any kind. If he comes up to any inconvenient restrictions put in place before, they can just be removed first.
And that's it, that's what he's been doing all along. He doesn't have any higher interests, any ulterior motivation, or ambitions - in every situation, he just uses it to get something for himself in that moment - even if openly solely to be able to brag that he did it - and he makes himself look big by lying or belittling others, and that's it. Just a very simple unrestricted narcissist, on grander scale.
Their behavior is quite simple to understand and predict. It's just that they can rarely be SO up there, so unrestricted, that people still seem to struggle to not try to tie him to norms and frameworks.
I concur, Trumps motivation is easy. That of his voters, not so much. They knew what they would get; it was on plain display for them to see.
Every single last one of them is guilty of everything that happened and will happen.
Their motivation seems clear from what they voted, and what they're cheering for - they want to be able to behave without consequences in the same way as well.
Blame others (dems, libs, immigrants, races, religions...) for everything that's wrong, screw the "government" whenever possible, "grab them by the ***", and treat others and the world in the same way Trump can.
It's the same in every autocracy - the leader is providing an outlet for the immoral / suppressed / forbidden thoughts, actions and feelings - they either live vicariously through him (even if they are worse off, but that's blamed on others), or can now do some of that stuff because of him.
The motivation of the voters becomes a lot more understandable when you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
This congress and POTUS is, in fact, a good representation of their values, and they aren't ashamed of it.
(You could have given them that benefit in 2016, and somewhat in 2020, but definitely not in 2024.)
The root cause of the current political environment is income inequality and endless funding for wars. The people who support Trump are losing the economic game and had no better representative. The reality is that both parties are owned by the investor class and support foreign funding for wars. Until we as a society figure out that the left vs right struggle is just a distraction from the investor vs labor struggle, we will never fix this problem. Note how everyone in this thread is blaming Trump and the conservative party when the Kamala and the liberal party would likely be doing the same thing, because they both support Israel and the IDF and cover up their war crimes.
All this stuff about trans rights and gun rights and freedom of speech and other random culture war issues are just a tool to keep the labor class divided. The root cause is wealth insecurity, it won’t automatically solve the other problems but it’ll turn down the temperature. I wish people would wake up to this and stop fighting their neighbors when they’re both on the same team.
The whole WikiLeaks affair about "Collateral Murder" was also about hiding U.S. war crimes. US army goes a long way to hide that stuff...
It was followed by a decade of ridiculous but very effective character assassination of Assange, who is hated based on how dislikable he appears.
I recommend youngsters and "zoomers" read about it, because the recent past is often the most forgotten: https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
Indeed, the recent trend of the US government itself posting videos of the drone murders of Venezuelans stands in real stark contrast to how that was handled just 15 years ago.
15 years ago it was Al-Qaeda.
For better or worse they at least went out of their way to make a coherent narrative for attacks on Al-Qaeda.
are we the baddies?
Just making sure there is less noise when they start (already started) using U.S.-armed U.S. forces here in the U.S. to oppress people they don't like - non-Magazis, people without white skin, non-Christians, non-straight, and the poor. It's a lot quieter to disappear people when no one can report it and there isn't anyone to appeal to anyway.
Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
I hope that we never have to find out how ferocious the quiet, "leave me alone", armed populous is. I feel we are on that path and grouping people as the other just fuels the fire.
So there is no other way of reporting such abuses? This one web site that nobody had heard of before today, was our sole way of hearing complaints of this type?
Why is it that eliminating one particular web site is somehow a failure of the US Constitution?
Yes, Congress is dysfunctional. Welcome to the post 17th amendment world. Repeal that and make the House truly proportional instead of artificially limiting it to 435 members and you’ll go a long way towards fixing a lot of the current problems. Eliminate PACs and donation caps and enforce KYC for donations and we can see who is actually buying our legislators.
But on the main topic, the left in the US is seeking judicial intervention to block nearly every single action that the administration takes, and district court judges are handing down nationwide injunctions against the president on a weekly basis. If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.
> If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.
So the supreme court can issue a shadow docket ruling a week later, with zero rationalization or justification, staying the injunction?
interesting story, but why is this on HN.
Least they could do is tell us about the tech stack for the website.
technically it's about a website
The current playbook is so clear and open - it's hard to miss all the red flags.
It's hard to not laugh at this. Like it's so fucking stupid and up to par with what's going on.
Not that I agree with this decision, but is there any evidence that these reports yielded any consequences? Or rather, was it one of those, "After conducting an internal investigation, we have determined we did nothing wrong" kind of things?
Even if the reports didn’t result in action, they would (in theory) leave a report trail that a FOI request could uncover.
There’s a lot of ifs in there though, and a lot of implied honesty just for record keeping. We’re all discovering (again) that implied honesty in governance will always be abused.
I don't think they understand the wave of regulation through constitutional amendment that's coming.
I have a feeling thats exactly how it was used. But that makes its removal even more odd. The hosting cost must be trivial; an email support form connected to a shredder.
Defund the organization in charge of checking and follow-ups is one thing, but its complete removal just smell of incompetence or acknowledging of wrongdoing, or some sort of performance.
And the response is also baffling. "sorry we migrated it systems and accidentally took it down" is the handwave i expected. not "we follow the law regardless so it's not needed".
Guessing some mid level functionary had to come up with 3 things to do that week and this is an easy bullet point. Saying "Actually we should keep this thing because we're playing 4D chess" doesn't look good on such a status report.
I'm not sure that holds up. Because whats written in the status report is the title of this article. And thats not a good looking status report.
This week we took down the "Warcrime report form" because its hosting costs the same as the office coffee machine maintenance.
.. oo gee, mabie that one sounds a bit important. perhaps I should leave that running.
It’s not odd though. This administration has been very clear that they think things like rules of engagement or caring about collateral damage are bullshit.
On a weekly basis now, they are blowing up civilian boats without any evidence wrong doing. Even if they had evidence, it still wouldn’t warrant using hellfire missiles on civilian ships, especially when the U.S. navy or coastguard is more than capable of intercept these ships.
My guess is that it's part of the whole "department of war" rebranding. War is hell, toughen up!
And someone out there is cheering for this, I'm sure.
Not just out there. Right here, plenty.
Yeah, absolutely.
I obviously do not condone the behavior of taking down such a website. I truly wish such reports were taking with the utmost severity.
As evidence, look what happened to those that were involved in the violation of human rights in Abu Ghraib Prision [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
Vice signalling
Oh I'm using that.
Yes, I would think the 'smart evil' thing to do would be keeping it running and just ignoring what you don't like but now people will just send the stuff to WikiLeaks.
I don't think that's even the smart thing. Because this is set up to receive reports about acts committed by groups receiving weapons from the US, the smart evil thing is to have dossiers of all the human rights abuses of your client states ready the next time you want to negotiate something with them. "It's highly embarrassing that you used the guns we gave you to shoot so many civilians. We might be somewhat less embarrassed to continue supplying you with guns if (your national airline bought more Boeing planes|you sung praises to our glorious leader more loudly in public|you brought a complaint against our adversary in the WTO)."
They wouldn’t send to WikiLeaks before - also, or instead?
Do we have any evidence this initiative was ever staffed and effective?
We’ve extended a lot of credit to a vested institution to police itself. That’s not worked out in other matters, such as warrantless wiretapping, so why do you think this is effective here?
And why would you discredit third parties - especially those designed to be watchdogs?
I can see this initiative being an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. And, I’d imagine closing this reporting portal won’t deter journalists - especially those on the frontline like WikiLeaks - from reporting on incidents.
Or it gives you a nice warning about the evil things that have been discovered and its time to ramp up the psyops machine to cover it up...
It reminds me of a company I used to work for that had a "suggestions box." After the box was full enough, the leadership would just dump it in the trash. Leadership didn't care about employee nor customer opinions. It was just to give people the illusion that their opinion mattered just to placate them.
After the small-ish company I worked for was bought by $ENGINEERING_MEGACORP, an integration program was promptly launched, during which numerous committees were formed to evaluate all business processes and take the best parts of both companies' DNA.
After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.
The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.
Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.
The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.
There's some cases described below. Clearly, it doesn't help much. But, better to enforce that scrap it IMHO,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law
Trump has personally pardoned several known American war criminals. Not people who got caught up in a bad situation, but people who murdered non-combatants for fun
The Trump admin is demonstrably pro-warcrime.
Of course not, but US imperialism is a bipartisan issue, what Trump does is remove the pretense that makes liberals sleep better at night. I think it's good that they removed it, let's get rid of all the lies and hypocrisy. Nothing material changes, it just makes it harder for democrats to pretend it's about something other than violent neocolonialism and might is right foreign policy they have been complicit in for decades.
Because the US government is no longer even pretending to care about human rights.
The US Government has never cared about human rights. It's always been used as a weapon to flog enemies. Allies like Israel can do whatever they like.
That's what's interesting about this move (and all the other moves). We've stopped pretending we're good, signaling instead the prospect of violence to enemies foreign and domestic.
> Allies like Israel can do whatever they like.
US has always looked the other way when Israel killed innocent civilians. But there were some limits on how far they could go. The difference now is that those limits have been removed.
> The US Government has never cared about human rights.
This is a blatant lie. /s
They do care, and have always cared, about human rights. The human rights of the US Government and their sponsors.
Perception is reality. If there is at least a pretense of caring about human rights, then there is some modicum of shame upon leadership in not living up to them. And even if the desire was fake, creating a website to "tell us when we are being evil" is real. Pulling off the mask and showing the "true self", which is what the Trump administration is doing (and far more than that, I should add. It is only showing the "true self" of a subset of the population), is removing not only the potential for shame, but also accountability. I don't have to believe that America is/was a flawless champion of human rights to believe that it is much, much worse now.
And it was always purely a pretense.
One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
One really mustn't. There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights - this 'tear it down' mentality relies on the fantasy that it will be rebuilt in some better form. And this kind of 'both sides' bullshit from the article highlights it perfectly:
> Blaha had already voiced frustration that despite the HRG passing its pilot phase, the Biden administration had not done enough to publicise it, meaning the provision to "facilitate receipt" of information was still not being fully honoured before the Trump administration deleted the channel entirely.
One side didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred, and the other one deleted it entirely. Both sides are bad!
> There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights
Hopefully most do! All should.
However, most employees don’t pick what they work on. So it’s always at the discretion of the boss to determine what’s practically considered, regardless of ideals or desires.
"Didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred" is very polite speech for killing millions in "wars on terror" and through arming our great friends, the house of Saud, in their campaign against Yemen.
Not going to get into the rich history of overthrowing local rulers and installing puppets through the most gruesome proxies to create "banana republics," the mass murder on a massive scale committed in the previous century, or the genocide that preceded to enable the founding of this state.
This place is built on murder and theft. "Both sides" are guilty. One is less shy.
The ‘tear it down’ mentality is about tearing down the covers and exposing America for what it is. That is how I understood your parent at least.
The USA has been doing human rights abuses for a long time, without any repercussions. The Iraq war and the Patriot Act is but a few of many many many more examples. For a while now the entire political spectrum in Europe has given this impunity to the USA, with the covers gone, maybe it will be harder—at least for the left of center parties—to give this impunity to the USA.
> One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
What transparency? What is transparent about running a meme coin that anyone in the world can bribe- sorry, "invest" in with no trace of who they are while you're President?
As for the topic at hand: Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage so I don't believe it's a deliberate effort at "transparency"
It is more transparent than getting out of government then getting "book deals", doing "speaking engagements" and sitting on boards.
"Here's my hat, put some coin in" is transparency.
Transparently corrupt, sure. Who is influencing him still isn't transparent though. Book deals, board positions, and speeches all have organizers, company names, etc.. that can be investigated.
How can you trace a block chain transaction back to someone without some sort of OPSEC slip up?
> Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage
It confuses me how anyone could look at what's happening in the world and see a lack of a plan. Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy in this term and using geopolitical statecraft to upend the arrangements that were not working in favor of the US. The tariffs to force countries to choose US or China, putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending, and the peacemaker strategy in the Middle East to force oil prices down to reduce inflation. It seems to be a very comprehensive strategy.
There is a plan, but it is rather half baked and naive.
>putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending
At the same time as refusing weapons sales to US allies and restricting intelligence sharing. Thereby forcing those countries to spend on European weapons rather than the US ones they have bought for the last 70 years. Doesn't sound great for the US tbh
Tariffing the entire world, changing his position on Ukraine every week, and hinting at invasion of our allies is not coherent. On the Ukraine conflict, he didn't seem to understand that Putin is untrustworthy until recently.
Upending the arrangements that were not working in favor of Trump!
> Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy..
You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.
By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
He's got a very comprehensive plan and he knows exactly what he's doing. He's also consolidated his base so he has people who are as committed as he is to carrying out his vision. He's doing everything he said he would do successfully. All his opponents are desperate for him to fail but that simply is not happening, i wonder why? This website runs opposite to his vision of MAGA, it's basically make america criminals, no surprises it's been axed.
> He's doing everything he said he would do successfully.
I seem to remember him promising that he would release the Epstein Files the moment they were available.
That one's been taking a loooong time. All the ties that Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell have to Israel probably isn't super great for PR either.
When did the US government ever care about human rights? People act like the entire country wasn't built on the backs of war, slavery, and genocide. The most bloody conflict in the country's history was amongst itself over the rights to own another human being as property. Slaves were freed and the civil rights act wasn't passed for almost 100 years after the war.
Human rights my ass. More like rights for those with the mights.
This is a dangerous fallacy - "it has always been bad, so it can't get worse".
The US has had many opportunities to care a lot less!
Just look at what Russia is up to these days.
> Slaves were freed and the civil rights act wasn't passed for almost 100 years after the war.
That's progress though, even if its progress on something that never should have existed to begin with, and the progress is far too slow.
And yes, our progress has been far too slow and way too uneven, but for the first 40 years of my life I felt like we were still progressing (yes -- too slow, and too unevenly).
But in the most recent ~decade of my life I feel like we've switched from too-slow progress to regression.
Shitty progress isn't enough, but its better than no progress (or, much worse, regression).
Progress sure but Lincoln didn't free the slaves in the Northern states.
He only freed the slaves in the South with the emancipation proclamation [1]. The 13th amendment wasn't until 2 years later. Lincoln did it as an economic weapon against the south as well as a military recruitment tool; not out of the goodness of his heart.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
Which is why all of this recent mess is interesting because the only thing that’s different in terms of action now is that they are doing all the dirt in public rather in private
Even total deportation numbers are lower (given administration length) than every previous administration as reported by Jacobin in the latest issue - yall remember Elian Gonzalez?
> When did the US government ever care about human rights?
July 4 1776
At that point “human” really only meant the white man who owns property though eh?
Baby steps
Educate me.
How cruel was the treatment from the British truly? My understanding was things like "no taxation without representation" was unrealistic due to the sheer distance and amount of time required to travel between the US and the UK. We're talking somewhere around 2-4 months one way. To send a rep back and forth with a message like:
US sends rep -> Uk and rep interact -> rep goes back to US with UK decision -> the US give their answer and the rep goes back to UK -> then rep goes back to the US with the UK's decision.
Such an interaction could take well over a year.
I also thought the US was the lowest taxed colony under British control? Not to mention it's not like the British didn't provide military protection to the colonies as well.
I am not saying the revolution was purely unjustified, but I am not really aware of how bad things truly were. My history classes kind of glossed over that part.
The United States' way of government was revolutionary for its time, based on the cutting edge of human philosophy in many ways. The Bills of (negative) Rights in particular.
It is a shame that it is being destroyed at lightspeed the last year, and worse that many don't seem to care.
Fwiw I believe the comment you are replying to was being sarcastic. Thus, you don't need educating. You're making their point.
The colonial grievances that led to war are explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independence.
It can be assumed that the British occupation forces were just as brutal as any other occupying military force in history. The only restraint in those situations is morals and a boss that was across an ocean.
We didn't want to be ruled by wankers!
I'm sorry that didn't work out for you.
I mean, the minister of war was clear where he stand on these. They are manly acts manly man armies commit.
Lots of people seem to think Trump is some sort of king or going outside the law. Fact is he was democratically elected and working within the system of checks and balances established by our founders. Congress can stop him from doing things but the democratically elected congress allows him to continue. So they agree with his actions and are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
The courts can stop him and indeed have in several cases. Often times higher courts over rule those lower ones but not always. Majority of the time they eventually end up siding with the executive branch though. So courts are doing their job. Checked and balanced.
Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though.
Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
Note: I have been hit by the HN "posting to fast" limit so I can't respond.
It’s not exactly working when the executive seizes two core powers of Congress (taxation and spending) and gets away with it for, so far, most of a year, with no end in sight.
There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.
The executive could be stopped at any time by the courts or congress. But the democratically elected congress chooses not to. So the majority that was elected are doing what they think is right. That's how our US democracy works.
Same with the courts, executive is elected by the people and so is the senate. They select and approve the judges, same as it ever was.
I am in no way defending everything I am simply stating that there are checks and balances but many people just don't like the decisions that they are making. Doesn't mean they are not there though.
Can you point to any parts of the constitution that, if ignored, would represent the US state based on that same constitution no longer functioning correctly, or not as a continuation of the same state as before? If so, why those parts but not, apparently, broad swaths of the rest of it?
If not… I think you’re operating under a uselessly-broad notion of what constitutes US democracy “working”.
[edit] what this really gets at is legitimacy, which is the ultimate arbiter of who’s in charge and how effectively they may wield power. I find the idea that a state founded on a constitutional document as its fundamental claim to legitimacy ignoring major parts of that document isn’t at least overtly flirting with either a loss of legitimacy or a transition to a different state with a different basis for legitimacy (either of which seem to me to clearly count as a failure of that original state)… puzzling.
This is an affront to the rule of law and equal protection under the law. It is not okay for congress or the courts to acquiesce. We are supposed to be a nation of laws.
Congress and the courts are derelict in their responsibility to honor the rule of law.
A functioning democratic republic is not, in fact, predicated on voting every couple years and shutting up in between elections.
Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.
Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.
But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.
I would argue it is working. The democratically elected congress just agrees with what he is doing. Whether they agree due to genuine belief or fear of him calling them out, doesn't really matter. We should be electing people that have a spine, if we don't then that is still democracy working. Checks and balances are there. Many people just don't like the choices they are making
Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody enforces the laws about their having to bring certain cases.
Both of the following may be true:
1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.
2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)
You are mostly correct in my opinion.
The fundamental problem is, there is really no "free market" of countries.
A US citizen who hates what the country has become cannot go off and set up a new one, they have a choice of a few styles of government (and it is very expensive to go and try living under another government!) Perhaps a benefit of space exploration will be experimentation with style of government.
My only niggle with your statement would be: A lot of what is happening now is happening because of "friction" in the system. If, for example, in an ideal world courts adjudicated instantly (instead of taking months or years) the current situation would be quite different. Similarly, if all congress people voted without fear of intimidation, some might vote quite differently. But, you are right, it's not like the founders didn't know that courts are slow or people can be intimidated.
The president has a mob of violent supporters, and Congress is terrified for their lives to take a stand against the president. When Republicans in congress have gone against Trump even in the smallest way, all he has to do is tweet something negative about them, and they are inundated with hundreds of death threats against their families [1]. Unless they can coordinate enough to rebel all together with loyalists somehow not finding out first, taking a stand would be suicide.
As a much lesser, but still serious point- Trump individually has so much power within the party he can get anyone removed from the party itself with a word, and effectively take away all of their campaign funding. He personally decides who is allowed to run or not run for office in the Republican party.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/republicans-...
How do you explain away things like lobbying money (i.e. bribery), or politicians remaining in their post despite glaringly obvious physical and cognitive decline, or insider trading, or the stacking of courts with biased judges, or total lack of enforcement of the law, or the media being so obviously controlled by state-aligned actors? To name but a few.
The voters keep voting for them. That is democracy. The people elect these same people over and over again. We get what we vote for.
> Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though. Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.
The Republican Party acts like the midterms don't matter at all.
Approval is plummeting, representatives ignore townhalls like the plague.
Which is awesome for the dems then correct? Reps will lose seats and then the Dems will have the house and enforce whatever checks and balances they choose.
If the reps win then the people have spoken and current actions continue.
Districts are gerrymandered and the voters are split and hardened into camps.
You can say all is going according to the law (I would say no), but it seems most people think the country is going down the tubes - they just disagree with who is at fault - and it seems the right is just happy as long as the libs are crying about it.
Unless the reason is that there will be no election, or only elections in red states, or you will need a special travel passport for going to Washington DC, which magically won't be issued to new Democrats, or any number of possible obstructions are possible.
Why would the House get back in session at all, for that matter? House leader Mike Johnson might enjoy vacation too much.
I think the more obvious possibility is far more sinister.
What about the gerrymandering?
> Fact is he was democratically elected
Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.
Germany 1933 is also what democracy looks like. Just because the system allows it to happen doesn't mean everyone is doing their job or that the result is in any way acceptable.
"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.
So many far left conspiracy theories in here, blatant false accusations, assertions and wild fallacies.
So many that you can't take a moment to identify a few?
Not that I know, but I could imagine that a public/anonymous form on the web (if that's what it was) was receiving 99.8% bot/garbage/spam/nuisance reports and they took it down for that reason. Though nothing in the article gives that as a reason, and quotes only the rather vague statement that "the US State Department insisted it was continuing to receive reports regarding gross violations of human rights and was engaging with "credible organisations" on a full spectrum of human rights concerns."
I'm actually more surprised that they didn't abuse it, instead of removing it. Remember when Trump's first FCC commissioner ran a public comment campaign on net neutrality, and then heavily botted it to make it look like people were more strongly opposed than they actually were? Remember when there were zero consequences for that? I guess removing it makes a stronger statement.
The time for nudging and manipulation is apparently over. It's more like "the sky is green, who do you believe, me or your lying eyes? We got 20 trillion dollars from foreign countries. Obey."