Comment by sschueller
3 days ago
The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed.
Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
3 days ago
The global damage has been done. It took too long and it looks like it will only be partially reversed.
Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
I don’t see how constitutional changes would help. The constitution already creates separation of powers, limits on executive authority, and procedures for removing an unfit president or one who commits serious crimes. But these only matter to the extent that majorities of elected and appointed officials care, and today’s ruling notwithstanding, there’s no political will to enforce any of them. The plurality of American voters in 2024 asked for this, and unfortunately we are all now getting what they asked for and deserve.
I think you're misunderstanding at least a little bit here. The Constitution created separation of powers, but what it did not do is explicitly block a particular branch from either abdicating their duty or simply delegating their power back to the executive.
It's certainly an interesting situation that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the law. But as far as everything that's working, it's realistically all within the legal framework of the Constitution. There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.
In short, it's a whole lot of short-sightedness of the Constitution combined with willing participants across multiple branches of the government.
The problems unearthed and the damage being done will take decades to fix just our internal issues, and it's very likely we will never resolve our international problems.
I don't know what the future holds for the United States, but we are certainly going to be operating from a severe handicap for quite a while.
The basic fact that needs to be contended with is that the Constitution, however brilliantly it may be crafted or repaired, is a piece of paper. It has no agency to enforce or do anything else. It's always people who have to decide to do things, maybe under inspiration from this paper or another. So whether the Constitution say "Congress must impeach a President who is doing this or that" vs "may impeach", that would have 0 practical impact.
Consider that most totalitarian states have constitutions that explicitly forbid torture, discrimination, and many other forms of government suppression of people. This does little in the face of a police state bent on suppressing the people.
Worth mentioning, that goes the other way too... plenty of what should be executive power was delegated to congressional authority over the years as well. And it doesn't even begin to cover activist judicial practices.
The lines have definitely blurred a lot, especially since the early 1900's. And that's just between the branches, let alone the growth of govt in general.
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> There are procedures to remove an unfit President, sure; but there's no requirement baked into the Constitution that requires those parties to act upon those procedures.
This would be enforced how?
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Seems rather unlikely to me that people who ignore the constitution for the sake of political advantage would start following the constitution if it were worded differently.
I'm not sure why Americans are so certain that their system of separation of powers is the right one. Most countries don't separate the executive and legislative like that. The executive is whoever can command the support of the legislative. If you think about the US system it makes no sense. An executive can just ignore the rules created by the legislative by just not enforcing it and the only means to stop that is a 2/3 majority in a body that by it's nature is not representative of the population but rather of States.
As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock. Things like filibuster, lower house elections every two years, state elected upper body, electorate system are all designed to create girdlock.
While Americans as a whole are to blame for some of this they are working in a completely broken system. In tech we try not to blame a person when something goes wrong so we look at what process allowed this to happen. I think many of the US problems are explained by their underlying system which is basically a copy of the English one at the time of Independence with a monarch and a parliament. Unlike the English system though it barely evolved since then.
I think it's designed that way because it wasn't originally seen as one country, more as a federation.
Even by the time of the civil war, Robert E Lee decided he was Virginian ahead of his national identity.
If you have a bunch of sovereign states, then you need some state-level evening out. If everyone is a citizen of one large state, you can just go proportional.
On top of this, it was never going to be easy to gradually move from one to the other with the issue of slavery looming large, so they didn't fix it. This was still a huge issue in 1848 when a lot of Europe was grappling with how to do a constitution.
So it stayed broken and here we are.
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The difference is in cases where the parliament chooses the executive is it leads to it's own collusion and corruption in terms of excessively growing govt... not that it's barely held the US from doing so. The point is to be in an adversarial context in order to resist overreach of govt.
For better or worse, our system today isn't quite what it was originally designed as... The Senate was originally selected by the state govts, not direct election... the Vice President was originally the runner-up, not a paired ticket and generally hamstrung as a result. The VP didn't originally participate in the Senate either, that came after WWII.
The good part about the constitution is there is a reasonable set of ground rules for changing said constitution with a minimum that should clearly represent the will of the majority of the population. (corrupt politicians not-withstanding)
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> As far as I can tell the US system is designed for gridlock.
At the federal level the US system was designed for gridlock on purpose, with the premise that something shouldn't be federal policy without widespread consensus, and without that consensus it should be left to the states.
The problem is really that many of the gridlock-inducing measures have been thwarted, e.g. delegation of rulemaking power from Congress to the executive and direct election of Senators to prevent state-representing Senators from voting down federal overreach. But those things weren't just there to induce gridlock, they were also the accountability measures, so without them you put corruption on rails and here we are.
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The structure of British government during the Hanoverian times was little different from what the UK has today. The monarch was effectively a powerless figurehead and executive decisions were made mostly by faceless very wealthy individuals in back rooms with the public face carried by a small set of charismatic figures who usually sat in parliament.
The US system was designed as a grand experiment. It made a certain amount of sense at the time: the country as a vast plantation steered by a benevolent master with policy set by wealthy landowners and businessmen who knew what was best for everyone. It was a system already in place in the Americas for generations and most national arguments could be hashed out at the club over some fine imported brandy or, for people like Franklin, some imported tea.
As far as it goes, there have been worse set-ups.
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> the US system is designed for gridlock
Yup. aka vetocracy
The filibuster isn't part of the system; it's not even part of the law. It's just part of the rules that the Senate chose for their own internal procedures.
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> The majority of American voters in 2024 asked for this
It was 49.8%, which is not quite a majority.
It's also worth noting that Kamala Harris received precisely 0 votes in the 2024 Democratic primaries.
[EDIT:] I see that the parent comment has now changed "majority" to "plurality."
If I could make one Constitutional amendment, it would be this: publicly finance all election campaigns, and make private contributions illegal bribery, punished by imprisonment of both the candidate and briber.
Fixed the “majority” claim.
I think a competent opposition party would be great for the US. But regardless of the candidate, US voters had three clear choices in the 2024 Presidential election: (1) I support what Trump is going to do, (2) I am fine with what Trump is going to do (abstain/third-party), (3) Kamala Harris. I think it’s extremely clear 3 was the best choice, but it was the least popular of the three.
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Oh man that hits the biggest nerve in me. Never again should we allow primaries to be skipped. I don't care if the incumbent is the most popular candidate in history - running a primary makes sure the best candidates will be picked and refusing to run an election and then having the gall to suddenly anoint a chosen candidate was an absolutely disastrous decision.
Democracy is a healthy process - I don't know why we buy the stupid line of "we need party unity" when what we need is an efficient expression of the voters will and having that expression is what best forms unity. There are some old Hillary quotes that make me absolutely rabid.
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My first thought when I read the Biden resignation letter was - Harris endorsement is brilliant fuck you to the Dem insiders that are ousting him. I am still lowkey convinced that he voted for Trump out of pure spite.
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Fix some of the ambiguities that allowed power to be concentrated in the executive branch. Automatically start elected officials so things like avoiding swearing in don't happen. Limit the power of these executive orders. Introduce recall votes. Switch to public funding for all elections.
Theres plenty we can do. That's off the top if my head. I'm sure if smart people sat down to think about it there are lots of practical and clever ideas.
The majority didn't ask for this. 49% of voters did.
Or hear me out - the congress should start doing their job. The main problem is the congress has been MIA for decades and outsources their power to the executive via regulatory bodies. And probably a good idea for SCOTUS to return some power to the states. There is too much power concentrated in washington, the congress refuses to yield it and the result is imperial presidency. Which is exalting when the president is from your faction and depressing when it is not.
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The problems are a product of the constitutional system. I think the main problem is the elected king presidential system nonsense. Parliamentary democracy is the way to go.
Have a proper mature parliamentary democracy made of multiple parties, not just two, and a prime minister that is always one vote away from resigning.
Slower democracy, sure, but fits advanced economies that need consistent small refactors and never full rewrites every 4 years.
> I don’t see how constitutional changes would help.
At the very least, we need a clarification on presidential immunity.
I'd like to see a change in voting system to make voting for smaller political parties more viable. My country did this in 1993[1] so I've seen to some extent that it works. A lot of other issues in the US seem downstream from that top-level issue.
But sometimes I think about the fact that you guys don't even have the metric system yet...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_New_Zealand_electoral_ref...
The American constitution is riddled with problems that many later democracies managed to fix. In general, the founding fathers envisioned a system where amendments were far more common and they didn't realize they made the bar too high. And that doesn't even touch on the electoral college, first-past-the-post voting, vague descriptions of the role of the supreme court, and no method for no confidence votes. Of course, it would be next to impossible to fix these in America because it would require a significant rewrite of the constitution.
The only way this will change is if the rest of the world leaves America behind and the quality of life here becomes so bad that radical change becomes possible.
But you are right that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, so you can't blame that on the system. But a functioning democracy would have more constraints on him. Our legislative branch has been dead in the water for 20 years at this point.
The majority of American voters can be as dumb as they want - the two big failures here are the legislature and the judiciary. The judiciary let an obviously illegal thing sit for far too long while the legislature is too partisan to actually take actions against the administration (except in the case of the Epstein files which has been surprisingly admirable and a rare ray of light in the last year).
If the majority of American voters elect snoopy the dog snoopy can do all of the things snoopy wants to do within the bounds of the law. Snoopy can use his bully pulpit to fight against dog restrictions in restaurants and grant pardons to previous offenders. Snoopy can ensure efficient spending of money on public water fountains accessible to canines... but if snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache) that's when the other branches of government are supposed to step in - we aren't supposed to need to wait four years for the next election to stop open corruption (especially since corruption is really good at funding more corruption so there's a vicious cycle that can begin if you let it fester @see the recent FBI raid on GA election offices).
Are you arguing voters in a democracy are not even a little responsible for the outcomes of their vote?
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> If snoopy starts issuing open hand-outs to the red baron (snoopy in a moustache)
You mean like how President Trump just gave 10 billion USD of taxpayer money to a board operated by Private Citizen Trump?
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/trump-board-of-peace-firs...
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Necessary changes, off the top of my head:
1. Ranked Pairs voting for national elections, including eliminating the electoral college. Break this two-party duopoly of bad-cop worse-cop.
2. Enshrining the concept of independent executive agencies, with scope created by Congress, with agency heads chosen by the same national elections. (repudiation of "Unitary Executive Theory", and a general partitioning of the executive power which is now being autocratically abused)
3. Repudiation of Citizens United and this whole nonsense that natural rights apply to government-created artificial legal entities (also goes to having a US equivalent of the GDPR to reign in the digital surveillance industry's parallel government)
4. State national guards are under sole exclusive authority of state governors while operating on American soil (repudiation of the so-called "Insurrection Act"). This could be done by Congress but at this point it needs to be in large print to avoid being sidestepped by illegal orders.
5. Drastically increase the number of senators. Maybe 6 or 8 from each state? We need to eliminate this dynamic where many states hate their specific moribund senators, yet keep voting them in to avoid losing the "experienced" person.
6. Recall elections by the People, for all executive offices, members of Congress, and Supreme Court justices. (I don't know the best way to square courts carrying out the "rule of law" rather than succumbing to "rule of the fickle mob", but right now we've got the worst of both worlds)
0. Removing the nonsensical doctrines Presidential immunity the Supreme Court has created out of whole cloth, and drastically curtailing all pardon ability with something like requiring the approval of Congress.
(yeesh, I can't believe I forgot that. I started thinking about reforming sovereign immunity, concluded that was something more fine-grained that Congress could do that didn't need to be in the Constitution, and moved on)
Statutorily reduce the power of a rogue president by reinforcing the right of the administrative state to exist with some independence for the rank and file. Reduce conviction threshold in the Senate to 60. Eliminate the electoral college to guarantee the winner of a popular vote is the winner.
Importantly, prosecute every member of the Trump administration for their blatant respective crimes.
I agree with you that the Republican party has failed the country by allowing this to happen. But I think we can still do better.
More "big picture" ideas would be to fundamentally alter the House and Senate, and implement score/ranked voting to allow a multiparty system.
> Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
I don't know about trust but the constitution isn't what enabled this type of behavior, it's the legislature. They've been abdicating their duties to executive controlled bodies (FCC, FDA, FTC, EPA, etc.) and allowing the president to rule through executive action unchallenged. They could have stopped these tariffs on day one. SCOTUS isn't supposed to be reactionary, congress is.
The constitution has all the mechanisms in place to control the president, they just aren't being used by the legislature.
It's a tricky problem that has a number of proposed solutions. I'm not going to act like it's a silver bullet but I think open primaries in federal elections would go a _long_ way towards normalizing (in the scientific meaning) the legislature and allowing people who want to do the job, rather than grandstand, into the offices.
I think the root of the problem is our two party system and the polarization of our culture. Congress and the president often act as a single partisan unit, not a collection of independent thinkers with their own ideas about how the country should be run. That makes it very hard for congress to serve as an effective check on presidential powers.
That's really the achilles heel of a checks and balances system. Should an ideology gain control of all of them then the system doesn't work and it immediately sinks into authoritarianism. The Supreme Court acting on this just unfortunately gives the illusion of things working when it's a game of blitzkrieg. Make an obvious illegal action and get as much done as possible then when you are eventually checked, move on to the next thing. Just keep pushing in different directions until you cover the board.
> Constitutional changes are required for other countries to trust in the stability of the US in the future.
For sure. Question is what would be enough to regain trust? I don't really see it happening
It's going to take a Constitutional Convention just for the states in North America to be able to regain their trust in Washington any time soon.
States' Rights have been slaughtered by these false patriots.
Genuinely, I think the US is pretty doomed if the Trump family and administration cronies aren't stripped of their wealth, tarred and feathered. If it is known that being president is a great way to make a bunch of money through corruption and there are no consequences then we'll be in the same situation as the Roman Republic in the waning days before Caesar. Caesar himself was funded by Crassus to make sure Crassus wealth making tactics stayed legal and grant him a big payout in the form of a rich governorship. Towards the end of the republic that sort of quid pro quo was standard operating procedure and if it happens and goes unpunished - if those benefiting see any positive RoI - then it'll just happen more and more.
Dunno. More than half the country was either enthusiastically in favor of electing a convicted criminal pathological liar or too apathetic to do anything about it. How do you fix that?
Sounds like an enormous indictment of the Democrat party. Public views of their policies was so bad that the alternative you outlined was preferred.
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You can't change or fix people who have their vote. Mental models are rigid, and people are, broadly speaking, emotional and irrational. They vote vibes, not facts. So, "what do?" as the kids would say. You keep folks who want to come to the US who might be vulnerable once in the US out of the US to protect them (which this administration is assisting with through their anti immigration efforts). The people who want to leave [1]? You help them leave for developed countries, which there are many. The people who will remain and should be protected? You protect them if you have the resources or network to do so. The global economy continues to reconfigure to decouple from the US [2]. Time marches on. These are harm reduction and risk mitigation mechanisms, perfect is not possible nor the target.
These are system problems. Think in systems. No different than having an abusive family you have to decouple from for self preservation, just at geopolitical scale. Capital, people, information are all mobile, and can relocate as needed. There is nothing on US soil that cannot be replaced or replicated elsewhere on the globe (besides perhaps national parks and other similar public goods, which can hopefully be protected until improved governance emerges). Please, challenge me on this if you think it's wrong, I've put much thought into it to provide guidance to others.
The only thing we had of value was trust (value of US treasuries and the dollar) in the rule of law and stability, and we burned it up. Humans are tricky. Get as far away as you can from harmful humans.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-w... ("In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups.")
[2] Global Trade Is Leaving the US Behind - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-02-12/on-tra... | https://archive.today/dsI9R - February 12th, 2026
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For sure, massive damage has been done to Brand USA. Remember the 'Allegory of Good and Bad Government" in the Siena public palazzo since the 14th Century? Everyone knows USA is just a bunch of grifters
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>In 2021 the US had the its best opportunity to date to assemble a military tribunal to try and then execute a President
It's completely foreign to the US or the Anglo-Saxon world in general. The military as the final guarantor of state security is a continental European thing (and removing this has been the goal of many army reforms in Europe since the end of WW2).
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I disagree. Despite all the talk and grand announcements of independence, most of the world wants globalization and worked for more of it, but maybe without the US (openings to china/india/LatAm). Now it will most likely be WITH the US. While the US may feel that globalization has been bad for itself (it hasn't - just look at the spectacular US economy) , the rest of the developed world is not in a position to reverse it (due to demographics mostly) and will be happy to jump back in.
I think that a lot of people would disagree that the economy is spectacular. People can't even afford to buy a home in a decent part of the country.
>People can't even afford to buy a home in a decent part of the country.
Is that because of scarcity? We’re manipulation? Or something else?
Presumably congress could recreate the same tariffs, if they wanted.
The economy is not spectacular by any means. It's about average on paper, and without AI growth (which will surely slow down like the .com crash) and increased healthcare spending, it's been mildly slumping.
I'm guessing you're American?
> Constitutional changes
Y'all have proven how worthless that piece of paper is.
There are many countries that have functioning constitutions that are regularly revised.
It’s not impossible for the USA to get there one day.
We still haven't fixed things caused by putting chattel slavery into the Constitution almost 150 years after a civil war.
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it is impossible and it is great that it is impossible because you need one party to basically run everything at the federal level and vast majority at the state level which means that any changes to the constitution would be heavily politically motivated to one side of the isle.
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Doesn’t this decision exactly prove the opposite?
What piece of paper is worth more to you?
The difference with many other countries -- I'm Australian -- is that we don't constantly bang on about how glorious our constitution is and how it's the be-all end-all. We just get on with it.
And I wouldn't mind if the American constitution did provide all of these tremendous benefits that everyone bangs on about all the time. That'd be great! But it turns out nobody's really tested that, until now.
And you get an F, my friend. Hard fail.
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This is probably true. Even before this ruling Trump and Bessent and Lutnick have spoken about how they would react to such a ruling. And it looks like they’re going to do the same thing Democrats do when they don’t like a SCOTUS ruling, and try to implement the same tariffs in a slightly different way to effectively ignore the ruling. We have to fix this. The Supreme Court’s rulings and the US Constitution have to matter. There must be consequences for ignoring them - like the president or lawmakers going to jail.
Even if part of the tariffs are rolled back, we may see other ones remain. And I bet they will not make it easy for people to get their money back, and force them into courts. Not that it matters. If people get their money back, it will effectively increase the national debt which hurts citizens anyways.
And let’s not forget the long-term damage of hurting all of the relationships America had with other countries. If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China and made a case around that (pointing to Taiwan, IP theft, cyber attacks, etc). Instead he implemented blanket tariffs on the whole world, including close allies like Canada.
In the end, my guess is China and India gained from this saga. And the Trump administration’s family and friends gained by trading ahead of every tariff announcement. Americans lost.
> And it looks like they’re going to do the same thing Democrats do when they don’t like a SCOTUS ruling, and try to implement the same tariffs in a slightly different way to effectively ignore the ruling
This is kind of a bizarre whataboutism to throw in there. The current administration (with the full support of Congressional majorities in both houses that have largely abdicated any pretense of having their own policy goals) has been flouting constitutional norms pretty much nonstop for a year now and literally ignoring court orders in a way that probably no administration has ever done before, and yet the playbook they're following for extrajudicial activity apparently is from the Democrats? Just because there's bad behavior on both sides doesn't mean that the magnitude of it is equal, and in terms of respect for the rule of law the behavior of the current administration really has no comparison.
There is a serious problem in our present constitution and laws that lets both parties ignore the law. Just yesterday we had discussions here about Everytown sponsored legislation that will restrict 3D printers. Do you think California has adhered to constitutional norms with their laws? Do you think they have flouted SCOTUS rulings? Have they done so consistently? What about when Biden was backdooring censorship through big tech?
You can answer these questions for yourself and decide. But for me it’s clear that Democrats have repeatedly violated the first and second amendments and normalized those practices. They’ve played a part in creating the norms that now are exploited by the Trump administration. I consider these amendments to be way more important and consequential than a misuse of IEEPA.
I guess what I’m saying is the two sides are indeed comparable, even if I agree the Trump administration is a greater violator of laws and norms than anything before. And we shouldn’t ignore the rot on either side but instead strengthen the constitution to avoid these abuses.
> If Trump wanted to use tariffs as a tool for emergency purposes, he should have just taken action against China.
What is the emergency with China?
Good luck convening a Constitutional Convention in the current (or future) political climate.
Good luck ratifying any constitutional amendments that are in any way a response to MAGA.
I love how it’s “global damage” when the US tariffs counties that are already tariffing them. But no, unfortunately the rest of the world knows the US’s value.
Like Switzerland that basically has zero tariffs on export to the US but was initially slapped with 39% because trump can't stand women in power? What about Brasil where trump stated the 50% tariff is punishment for putting Bolsonaro in prison?
Ah, yes, just like he hates Japan and Italy for being run by women.
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the "global damage" is largely because these tariffs were arbitrary, lacking strategic planning, and highly inflationary creating a turbulence tax. The frequent reversals and selective granting of exemptions showed that its another tool to enrich the Trump family, cabinet and their business associates. In other worlds the rest of the world stopped trusting the US and started making trade deals on their own.