Comment by dkobia
1 year ago
This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
This is the problem with people being OK with executive overreach when "their team" is in power. Eventually, and in fact about 50% of the time - the OTHER team is in power.. and may just push the overreach further.
We should desire that the legislative side actually legislates and each branch of the government holds the other two in check, regardless of partisan control.
Further having our judicial branch become openly partisan while remaining lifetime appointments despite younger appointees with longer lifetimes, is really the finishing touch on this slow rolling disaster.
You've nailed it. I call this the Galadriel Principle and it can be applied to many things: weapons, executive procedures, etc.:
“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”
Oppression when Galadriel is on the throne may be better than that for Sauron; it's still oppression.
The Lord of the Rings movie that that scene so much emotional justice. Visually representing the power corrupting even with but a taste.
This is the crux of the issue. Executive power has been gradually expanded since at least the end of WWII, but things have accelerated since the early 00's. Think GWB's "signing statements" or Obama's "phone and pen." Trump I, Biden, and now Trump II have continued to push the limits, in part because of a desire for more power but also because Congress hasn't functioned as an institution in decades. Congress has passed a budget on time only 4 times since 1977, the last time being in 1997.
Presidents are elected based on promises made to various parts of the electorate, and if/when Congress won't act (often even when Congress is controlled by the president's party, nearly always when controlled by the opposition), no one generally makes a fuss if the president pushes through a popular-ish thing by executive authority. Republicans may be happy now but they won't be when a Democratic president ups the ante in a few years, just like Democrats were perfectly happy with Obama and Biden's overreaches but are furious at Trump's.
Congress needs to be expanded to do its job, and drop the filibuster. We need more, proportionally allocated representatives. Representatives that come from more than one of two parties. Representatives that spend more time at home than on the campaign trail or in DC.
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I was reading a rocking history book (Dark Continent), and it argued that Germany had already lost democracy before Hitler, as basically all rules were done by the executive. Sent a shiver down my spine when I applied it to recent US presidents. (The book was written in 1998 fwiw, so not contaminated by current events).
What you want is a parliament with proportional representation. Parliaments don't experience gridlock nearly as often.
The oldest democracy in the world is getting rusty.
While I agree with the essential point you're making, it's pretty clear this overreach was always part of this administration's game plan. At least until Pence delayed it through validating the 2020 elections.
If you are going to build a machine that can damage you, build it so that you aren't afraid of it being operated by your worst enemy.
> Eventually, and in fact about 50% of the time - the OTHER team is in power.. and may just push the overreach further.
Are you sure this is going to be a fact, in the future? How likely is it, that the next elections will still be (somewhat) fair?
Very. Election officials, across states and across parties, have been faithfully discharging their duties, often under pressure to not do so. This is a responsibility of the states, and not the federal government. If you're concerned, then work as a poll officer on election day.
In Virginia, I get to participate an incredibly professional and structured process that makes it easy for everyone who can vote to vote and makes sure there are many checks that the process is being followed correctly.
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I would put the odds at 99.9% that the US will hold an election in 2028 and that it will be the international consensus that regardless of the outcome, the election will be decided fairly by the voters and will not be "hacked" or "unfair" as current and past fringe commentators have tried to present.
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That's the reaction some extreme Trump supporters I know had after 2020. They claimed there would never be another fair election because of the manipulation of the electronic voting machines
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That’s why the current administration is going to make sure the other side doesn’t get in power again.
I'm debating on whether they will manage to stir up enough chaos to suspend the constitution, or whether there will be enough independent thought left in the military to oust them when the time comes for new elections - although I can't rule out Russian-style elections, one-man one-vote, and his vote is what counts.
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This is an example of what I like to call the "both sides fallacy". There are several reasons why people try and make a both sides equivalence in US politics. For example:
- As a way of not having to know anything while appearing intellectual or somehow "above it all";
- Genuine and fundamental misunderstanding of the political forces in the US. Example: thinking there's such a thing as "socialism" or "the far left" in America;
- To knowingly deflect from the excesses of the conservative movement.
Here are the two political forces in American politics:
1. The fascist party who has had a 50+ year project to take over and subvert every aspect of government to destroy any aspect of democracy and create a neofuedal dystopia masquerading as a Christian theocracy; and
2. The controlled opposition party who loves nothing more than to be out of power and, when in power, to do nothing. It's why Democrats not in office are suddenly for progressive policies like medicare-for-all (as Kamala Harris was in 2019) but when on the cusp of taking power, they have a policy of no longer opposing the death penalty, capitulating to right-wing immigratino policy, arming a genocidal apartheid state and the only tax breaks proposed are for startups.
Look at how successful progressive voter initatives were in the last election compared to the performance of the Democratic Party. Florida overwhelmingly passed recreational marijuana and abortion access (~57% for, unfortunately you need 60%+ to pass in Florida) while Trump carried the state by 14. Minimum wage increases passed in deep red Missouri. In fact, abortion access has never failed to garner a mjaority of votes whenever it's allowed to be put in front of voters, no matter how deep red the state.
So why if progressive policies are so popular, are the Democrats so opposed to them as a platform? Really think about that. The Democratic Party doesn't exist to abuse power. It exists to destroy progressive momentum at every level of government above all else.
Yeah, it's the higher-amplitude wobbles of a complex system before it snaps and finds a new equilibrium.
> having our judicial branch become openly partisan
A lot of the decisions that have been flagged as "openly partisan" are just the Supreme Court saying exactly what you're saying: the executive branch and judicial branch don't have the authority to write laws and both branches should really stop writing laws and force Congress to do that.
We will see this year and in coming years whether this Supreme Court is partisan or just activist in tearing down executive authority. If they uphold this administration's opinions about executive power, then yes, they're blatantly partisan and have no integrity. If they stand in the way, then maybe they just finally had the numbers to rein in the executive branch like conservatives have been arguing for for generations.
I don't think we have enough information at this point to judge which is more likely (though I know most here will disagree with me on that point).
What say you of the Trump vs United States (appropriately named) ruling that gives the president immunity from crimes committed while in office? Does that align with the idea that SCOTUS may reign in presidential power?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024...
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Having a permanent bureaucracy that ignores directives from the executive only really benefits democrats (look at the Washington DC presidential vote totals). So this executive order is not a both sides thing, or about executive overreach.
Something like the REINS Act, forcing regulations to be voted on by congress, would be something that hurts both sides & prevents executive overreach.
I’d note that the Washington DC vote totals mainly reflect people who live in the District proper, most of whom are not federal civil servants. Plenty of those seem to live in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, or closer to their federal workplaces in other parts of the United States.
Something tells me presidential vote totals around Fort Bragg or Oak Ridge—both home to notable numbers of career federal employees—might give a different impression.
E.g. https://news.clearancejobs.com/2025/01/18/the-data-shows-whe...
> look at the Washington DC presidential vote totals
Most federal civil servants live in Maryland or Virginia, not in DC.
>This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
Yet GOP senators were more than happy to claim credit for infrastructure funding that they opposed.
Trump also rubbished the trade deals that he himself signed!
To be fair it's unlikely he knew what he was signing.
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Mistaking a well-funded, highly coordinated project that started over 15 years ago[1] for 'those clowns in Congress are at it again!' is a huge part of what has prevented us from digging out of this crisis.
[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP
This is the key point. This dysfunction was _by design_. The Republican party has been working on this since Nixon was impeached. Through redistricting, Fox News, and changing politics to "warfare" by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk, through McConnell stonewalling Congress and refusing to hear judicial nominations.
The Democrats are complicit by trying too hard to play by the rules and take the high road, but it's not a fair comparison of culpability in the slightest.
Yes.
A good example is immigration policy. Setting immigration policy is an enumerated power of Congress. The executive branch has no say at all. Congress failed to revise immigration policy when it got out of sync with facts on the ground. That led to the current mess.
The last attempt to overhaul immigration policy was in 2006.[1] Arguably, this was more workable than what we have now. It combined tough enforcement with a path to citizenship. It had supporters from both parties. The House and Senate did not agree on terms and no bill was passed.
So, instead of reform, we had weak enforcement, now followed by strong enforcement. What we have isn't working.
We need something like that bill now. Has anyone introduced a comprehensive reform bill in Congress? No, as far as I can see from reading through the immigration bills in the hopper. The current bills are either minor tweaks or PR exercises.[2]
Beat on your congressional representatives. We need an immigration law that works. It's Congress' job to argue over how it should work, and to come up with something that, when enforced, still works. We don't have that now. Immigrants are screaming about being deported, legal residents are screaming about being caught up in raids, and farmers are screaming about losing their labor force.[3] This is the moment to do something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Refo...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-bills-republicans-congr...
[3] https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2025/01/27/business-lead...
> This is the moment to do something.
How so? I don't really have any confidence that the current Congress (regardless of which party we're talking about) could agree on anything but what you pointed out -- minor tweaks.
Most dictorships started by the people in power streamlining decadent processes and burocracy, by putting into place the new regulations that would improve everything.
Until a couple years later on average, a state protection organism gets put in place to check those organisations are working as expected.
Eventually, the state protection organism gets a bit carried away on what they are supposed to be checking on.
I don't think so.
"Nearly half of dictatorships start as a military coup, though others have been started by foreign intervention, elected officials ending competitive elections, insurgent takeovers, popular uprisings by citizens, or legal maneuvering by autocratic elites to take power within their government. Between 1946 and 2010, 42% of dictatorships began by overthrowing a different dictatorship, and 26% began after achieving independence from a foreign government. Many others developed following a period of warlordism." [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship (see "Formation")
I might be wrong on being most, and eventually they might even be in minority, still some well known across Europe, have started with people that originally were democratically elected deciding that it was about time to change everything from inside.
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship (see "Formation")
Maybe worth considering:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
Also "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days":
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
> Nearly half of dictatorships start as a military coup
do you see jan 16 as a military coup? Coz i do. Just because the people involved are poorly equipped, and badly organized, doesn't mean it isn't.
We, as a nation, did not punish them hard enough. We as a nation, did not cut the hydra at their head, and allowed it to fester. It is done, perhaps, as a form of peace keeping and appeasement.
But history has taught us that appeasement does not work. So once again, those who failed to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
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> the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
They governed well enough until January 20.
> This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
Creating gridlock and dysfunction is an intentional (and well-known) strategy to create a strongman. Most of the gridlock and dysfunction are on one side. You can call that partisan but even they oppose even the most simple, inescable issues such as paying debt. Back under Obama, the GOP in Congress openly said that their goal was to make government a failure under Obama.
This is the thing that drives me nuts, especially when someone smugly trots out the "Democrats and Republicans are the same" nonsense.
Even when Republicans are in power, Democrats don't resort to blatantly obstructionist measures to mess with a Republican administration.
Democrats don't refuse to consider judicial nominations because "it's a presidential election year", and then hypocritically rush through a SCOTUS appointment right at the end of a presidential term.
Sure, they do things like vote down a debt ceiling increase when it's paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they don't agree with. But when the power balance is reversed, Republicans will vote down a debt ceiling increase if it's not paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they want.
(I wish there was something in the constitution that required that each bit of legislation be single-topic. Certainly that would still be open to interpretation. But I think at the very least it would eliminate the more obvious examples of abusive brinkmanship.)
> legislative gridlock and dysfunction
Isn't this a direct result of "no compromise" policies on one side of the aisle?
Right, democrats were ALWAYS looking for compromise. Hell, democrats have to compromise with their own party!
If you doubt me, simply go read votes from the past 20 years, and compare it with say 1960-1980. Republicans do not cross the aisle anymore.
The interesting part is that at some point republicans had so propagandized their voters against the very concept of governance that "Elect me to office for the next 6 years and I promise nothing will get done" was a decades long strategy that worked! The more republicans obstructed, including preventing republican voters from getting things they claim to want, the more republicans got voted in. For decades now, republicans that compromise with democrats have been primaried by less collaborative republicans.
Imagine a judge getting elected for insisting they will never hear another case!
None of this should be controversial, republican politicians have literally stated this as their goal and promise.
This even happens at a local level. I witnessed a Republican county councilor who was beginning to work with a local community on a serious issue they were having with their ferry. She got replaced with someone who wants to obstruct and cut in all cases, which serves as an object lesson for anyone else on the council with an at-risk seat.
For some reason the people who keep saying government doesn't work are working very hard to make government not work.
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For those looking for something to Google or concrete facts to back this up, "obstructionism" is the proper term for this.
Some key examples: Reagan saying "the government is the problem", Newt Gingrich starting the modern obstructionist movement in congress with the Contact with America (also backed by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind project 2025), and Mitch McConnel breaking norms to practically shut down congress under his leadership, openly stating his intent several times.
Republicans don't want to lead in any practical sense. They want to break the government and privatize the pieces so they can buy in and profit off of them. Anyone who can't buy in gets screwed, because services will cost more to pay for the investment and profits that the investors demand.
Trump's biggest achievement last term was a massive tax cut for the rich. So to balance to budget, they now want to destroy as many government services as they can, using "efficiency" as an excuse.
Breaking things is great when you run a social media company. Worst case scenario, your website goes offline for a few hours. When you start breaking the government, people die. Of course, if you're richer than God, you don't have to worry about the fallout. It doesnt matter if the FDA falls apart and leads to massive food contamination when you only eat Wagyu beef from your private ranch. People will die, you pay less taxes, and you only see it as a success.
There are many other critiques to be made, but this is just the surface.
I recently watched a 2 hour congressional committee session, with 5 minute talking points per member. BOTH sides of the aisle used their entire 5 minutes to spout one-sided rhetoric and talking points obviously designed for re-election rather than anything resembling debate or conversation.
I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.
These sessions are used to record clips that they can show their constituents. They are not for real debate.
I don't think you can make a general statement based on watching a single 2-hour committee session.
Yes, and the filibuster.
The causes are more complicated.
The founding fathers envisioned the legislature be slow and deliberate, so it was never intended to move quickly.
One major party doesn’t think government solves any problems, so it’s not incentivized to use it to solve any problems. In fact, a generation of Republicans have tried to stifle fixing any of the large problems.
The other party is frequently torn between a wide spectrum of “do everything for citizens in a wide swath of policy areas” and “neoliberal free market capitalism”, so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
The rest is usually downstream of sound-byte media (stripping out nuance and polarization of media outlets), paid advertising scaremongering voters (money in politics), and electoral engineering like gerrymandering (legislators picking voters instead of the inverse).
Agreed on this - the country is founded on a deep skepticism of government oversight. Some of what we see today is cultural blowback for those who think that core value has been lost by dems.
I'd also put out that the lessons of the Tea Party (Gingrich style) have not been lost on modern people with political goals -- a fairly small group has used the heavy party whipping that the Republicans use to become an important swing vote / caucus -- and the republican party was more amenable/vulnerable to this sort of tactic, precisely for cultural reasons embedded in the Republican party's history, governance and setup.
> so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
"Weird" is a presumably a typo there, but I think it actually works as-is. As long as we allow for the verbing of adjectives, anyway.
No, it's the lack of representation. We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries, worst representation in the free world. Even Communist China has better representation. The U.S. in the 1790s had representation in line with Nordic countries today.
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.
Re the Apportionment Act of 1929 -- care to elaborate? Are there figures for "the worst representation in the free world"?
My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.
(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))
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Increasing the size of the House and fixing apportionment would certainly help with some things, but we need to eliminate gerrymandering too.
It is bonkers to me that legislative districts are drawn by whatever party is in power once every ten years. Not only should the census be more frequent (real-time/ongoing, really, and more lightweight than the system we have now), but districts should be redrawn yearly, and it should be done by a non-partisan committee.
And we really need an objective, quantitative measure of gerrymandering, and comprehensive law against it.
But really I don't think all of that is it. Making representation more proportionate might make Democrats win the House (and possibly presidency, since electoral college votes are apportioned the same way) more often, but the Senate will still be broken, and political polarization will still rule the day.
We need more than two viable political parties (which would require a major overhaul of each and every state's election process, at the least), and they need to govern through coalition-building, more like how parliamentary systems operate.
And ultimately it's just the tone of the whole thing. Legislators need to stop with this all-or-nothing approach, where the biggest hot-button issues don't see any measure of compromise. But that's a culture thing, and you can't fix that with laws or process.
> This new administration lays bare what we've known all along - the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
Some articles which were written a few years ago, but were re-upped recently:
> In a presidential system, by contrast, the president and the congress are elected separately and yet must govern concurrently. If they disagree, they simply disagree. They can point fingers and wave poll results and stomp their feet and talk about “mandates,” but the fact remains that both parties to the dispute won office fair and square. As Linz wrote in his 1990 paper “The Perils of Presidentialism,”[1] when conflict breaks out in such a system, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” That’s when the military comes out of the barracks, to resolve the conflict on the basis of something—nationalism, security, pure force—other than democracy.
* https://slate.com/business/2013/10/juan-linz-dies-yale-polit...
> Still, Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved.” The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: “the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/amer...
When it has come to presidential systems, the US has been the exception as most others with something the same have not worked out over the long term.
Gridlock, disfunction, and completely incapable of governing are a bit loaded, but other than that, a slow moving legislature was a feature built into the system — not a bug.
I don't think they are a bit loaded at all. What have the last several congresses done that has actually helped the populace?
The most notable things I recall in the last few Congresses were Mitch McConell stealing a SCOTUS appointment, the failure to remove Donald Trump from office (twice!--once for inciting an insurrection in front of the eyes of the world; it was literally televised) for political gain, and the voting down of Republicans' own immigration bill (again for political gain).
Thats what happened. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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> This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
Well... most of them are.
Or this opened opportunity for dictator to arise.
I wonder which of these two commonly happened in the past.
Was with you 100% until the second half of your final sentence. Can you clarify?
A bit hyperbolic on my part but I think Trump and Elon are quite a potent combination for the money and media influence they have between them. Members of congress and senators with opposing views are very unlikely to stick their heads up for fear of the immense amount of money that could be used against them in the midterms and beyond.
Michael Bloomberg could personally fund an entire presidential campaign. There’s a newspaper named after him. How did he wield that power?
The real problems with the DNC campaigns are complex. They have a poor model for how to run national campaigns, clearly. All this equities wealth was made under Democrats, including Elon’s wealth, so it’s not so simple as to say, chasing money. There is some consensus that Democrats need to run media personalities instead of experienced politicians. But not enough consensus to move away from demographics-based election modeling. Suffice it to say this thread could be an interesting conversation about anything but has become a magnet for fringe theories.
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Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it is that the checks and balances -- embodied by the legislative and judicial branches -- are only effective if a) they take action against the executive branch, and b) the executive branch respects them.
Congress is sitting on its hands and seems to be enjoying the view so far, for the most part. Republicans in Congress seem to think it's fine that Trump is usurping power vested in the legislative branch. Or at the very least they're afraid to speak up; every time they do, Trump threatens to primary them during the next election cycle. (I'm honestly not sure which is worse.) Democrats are "waiting for the right pitch to swing at" (paraphrasing Jeffries), as if doing nothing is some sort of strategy. And it's not like they can do anything anyway; certainly they have the power to get proposed legislation passed/not passed if Johnson loses a few GOP votes, but they can't get new legislation on the floor (y'know, like something that says "get DOGE out of the government's computer systems, right now") without the permission of GOP-controlled committees and Mike Johnson.
The courts are doing some things so far, but by their very nature, they're slower to act. But even if they tell Trump he can't do something, Trump doesn't actually have to listen. The executive branch is responsible for the enforcement of laws... and court orders. Let's say a court orders Musk to stop doing something, and he ignores it. Let's then say the court finds Musk in contempt, and orders him jailed. Who is going to arrest him? Not Trump's US Marshals Service, not Trump's FBI, etc.
It is telling that you have that interpretation of executive power but not the same of regulatory power.
As proof, this isn't an American problem, it is nothing to do with the US constitution or "gridlock". In most English-speaking countries you have seen: massive increase in power by unelected officials, the vast majority of these officials have identical political views and operate with a political agenda (to be clear, at no point did anyone ask whether this was legal, whether these were "strongmen"), and this effect has paralysed government function in every country.
Even worse, this appears irrespective of clear limits. For example, the US system of political appointments of judges is clearly a bad idea, the incentives are awful, the results are predictable. But the same issue with judges overriding elected officials is occurring in countries where selection is (in theory) non-political.
The reason why is simple: there has never been a greater difference between the lives of the rulers and the ruled. The reason we have democracy is to resolve this problem.
But the US is a particularly extreme case of this: if you look at how government operates in the US, what is the actual connection with people's lives? The filth and decay in US cities is incredible given the amount of government spending...the answer why is simple: the spending is for government, the people don't matter.
Also, US-specific: it is extremely strange to characterise the US as a system of checks and balances if you look at actual real world political history rather than some theoretical imaginings of someone in the late 18th century. Checks and balances have always been dynamic. The reason why the outrage is so vitriolic (and the comparisons to Hitler so frequent...imagine if Hitler fired civil servants or changed regulatory policy, definitely the worst thing he did) is because the people being hit are the people who believed they would always be safe from oversight.
> imagine if Hitler fired civil servants
He did. It's called "Gleichschaltung", we learned about it in school. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zgtyvcw/revision/4
You completely failed to understand the context of this point (unsurprisingly).
Every government has fired civil servants. The worst thing that Hitler did was not fire civil servants...he got up to some other stuff later that was worse.
Also, quoting a resource for children does not do you much credit. Quote an actual source if you are going to do it.
The people are intuiting this. I think the next election cycle will see a left wing strongman put in. That one will do damage after cleaning up the damage from the current one. So we’ll yoyo back and forth between strongmen to get shit done because the legislative is useless. Because it’s better to yoyo between extremes than to sit in stagnation. We need some reform or we’re going to be stuck on this roller coaster for a long time.
The "strong" man and his allies are the ones that crippled the legislative branch, except for tax cuts for the rich and appointing unqualified SC justices.
There was bipartisan (Republican-ish) immigration legislation with enough votes pass until Trump told people to vote against it, because he knew that he could blame the problem on his opponents and many people would believe him.
Note that none of this would be possible with Citizens United and dramatic media consolidation in the hands of a few oligarchs. ;-(
(NOTE: Largely reposting a Robert Reich bit of writing in the Quoted areas)
FIRST Interesting how, if true, the GOP Political class is now beholden to Musk:
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxTKZoZe_AzdNF8w7X0HO19w6xxH5rGinI...
> Congress is supine because Republicans are in charge, and Musk has also become Trump’s hatchet man — threatening Republican members of Congress if they deviate from Trump.
> Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst was firmly set against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense until Musk hinted that he’d finance a primary challenger to Ernst, who’s up for reelection next year. Presto: Ernst supported Hegseth.
> Indiana’s Republican Senator Todd Young expressed concern about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence until Musk tweeted against him. A besieged Young spoke with JD Vance, who arranged a call with Musk. Presto: Young announced he would back Gabbard.
> Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.
> A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”
SECOND And Interesting how some Media, Wa Po in this case, coincidentally blocked Paid Advertisement advocating an Anti-MUSK Political takt.
> Musk’s financial and political power have been enough to intimidate even the mainstream media. An advertisement set to run in The Washington Post yesterday calling for Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to Common Cause, one of the groups that had ordered the ad. When asked why the Post had pulled the ad, the Post said it was not at liberty to give a reason.
I'd rather have gridlock than Hitler.
Hitler was popular before he became famous as "hitler".
Power abhors a vacuum.
So your interpretation of "give the elected official oversight" is that "checks and balances" and "democracy" are "mere suggestions".
You're mistaking: - bureaucracy with democracy - checks and balances with a neo-priesthood
But hey, who needs a functional government when you have a neo-priesthood to keep things 'holy'?"
Bureaucracy is what happens with _any_ large system. It's unavoidable, and the best you can do is to build institutions that know how to manage it.
And bureaucracy isn't always bad. State and federal bureaucracies are probably largely responsible for protecting the 2020 US election from fraud and interference.
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this is quite similar to anyone familiar with prussia, berlin and the constituent national assembly of 1845 in the context of the historical power struggle between vichy merchant classes and their royal monarchs during the advent of the steam era.
it seems the same play is being made in 2025 at the advent of AI and Tech supremacy as it comes to a headroads with the death of traditional US neoliberalism. Tech is more interested in the monarchy, as was the feudal lords of old, and seeks a neofeudalism while the parliament of our time, the house and senate, prattle on like the Diets and assembly promulgating edicts and regulations that are either wholesale ignored, or gridlocked bike-shedding; fiddling whilst Rome burns.
Can we drop the "tech" prefix from our neo-feudalism?
Technology is necessarily a progressive force, and feudalism is necessarily a stagnatory conservative structure. The "Tech Supremacy" group is visibly opposed to technology, and it's reflecting more and more on society as they gain power.
> Technology is necessarily a progressive force
Technology is a tool. It is not a culture or a system. In fact, I think state and corporate use of technology for things like surveillance, censorship, frankly pointless jobs that somehow attract VC money, mass propaganda and social media access, data tracking and advertising and behavior modelling to a T, hypothetical pointless-job-destroying-AGI, etc. that are currently in vogue are part of the conservative structure. Technology means moving, but is this outwards or inwards movement?
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No, because it's enabled by the tech industry and tech figures. It's not big pharma or big oil that has anywhere near as much lobbying power or money.
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Always have been.
This is the sad reality of oligarchy. Red/blue culture wars appeal to some people because they would prefer an authoritarianism that at least pretends to have their back 50 percent of the time over rich people (their employers) who have their back 0 percent of the time.
No one wants (and I don’t think anyone should want) bipartisanship, not really. Bipartisanship means the rich get everything they want—efficiently. It means the meetings of the club we aren’t in happen on time and no one ends up with a black eye. That’s also an unacceptable outcome. Of course, it can be argued that the outcome we are getting is basically the same thing, but with cheap depressing entertainment and widespread governmental dysfunction.
Of course, anyone who thinks voting for any of these right-wing figures will end oligarchy is delusional. Their charisma comes from the fact that, because they hate basically everyone, they also incidentally hate many of the other oligarchs. But nothing good happens when people vote for hate, and none of these pricks will ever end oligarchy since they are all part of it. The Nazis truly did present themselves as somewhat socialist (it was in the name) in the early 1920s to gain their first followers, but as soon as they were in power, they realized they had more to gain by siding with the industrialists and against labor, which is of course what they did.
Bipartisan efforts are what makes Congress work.
It’s this loss that plagues Congress.
Bipartisanship is what was jettisoned by the republicans to ensure that they would always be able to blame democrats for the failure of the government.
Even during Obamacare, when they adopted a Republican plan, Romney had to distance himself from it. Despite all the efforts for Bipartisan outreach - for all the concessions, the republicans couldn’t stand with the dems.
The Dems must always be wrong.
Bipartisanship means you have to spend more effort to get more people on your team.
Partisanship means you just have to get on board with one party.
So how is bipartisanship the problem?
Looking at this mess from far away in Switzerland.
I'm so glad we have a consensus democracy. We're a small country but I don't see any reason why a more moderate, consensus based system couldn't be adopted by larger ones. In fact I think this centralization of power around one person doesn't scale.
I'm also glad that we have the direct vote in order to reign in our government whenever they overreach or turn too far away from our interests. That seems much harder to implement in larger countries, but it's an excellent tool to course correct a government.
Why so two-party system?
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I want bipartisanship. Consensus and a willingness to concede are the only way to govern fairly. Anything else is just naked fiat, which is another word for authoritarianism.
Completely incapable of governing is quite some hyperbole. IRA Act, CHIPs Act that got a TSM fab up in record time on American soil, Operation Warp Speed.
This kind of rhetoric really just feeds the beast.
The CHIPS and Science Act is a U.S. federal statute enacted by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 9, 2022.