I think the current state of affair has exposed a fundamental bug in the consitution. Sure, the US has three branches of government that are supposed to be checks and balances on each other. Which has, mostly, worked really great.
But turns out there is no way to enforce this. If we get a president that doesn't care about any of this and is happy to ignore everyone else, there isn't actually any way to enforce the separation of duties of the three branches.
The problem we have today is that the one runaway branch has support from at least one of the branches meant to act as a check on power (the legislative).
Congress should be stepping in if the president is overstepping his legal authority, or if they wish to reduce his legal authority. The Republican party has control of Congress and our political system has devolved into a game of blind faith in your team, neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.
We need principled leaders who care to run an effective government based on our constitution. We have few, if any, of those people in charge.
>neither party is willing to go against their president in a meaningful way.
So, what's going on is that Donny himself has all the money. Not personally, but his various election funds have more than than the rest of the Republicans combined. Obama has a similar set-up back in 2012, but not nearly as disproportionate as Donny has.
Republicans can't go against Donny without risking a primary opponent funded by Donny that will oust them.
The Democrats do not have this funding problem to the same degree.
What this means is that the Republican party is only going to go against Donny (impeachment) when they figure that the average Republican Primary voter in deeply red districts will have a 50/50 chance of voting (actual polling, not vibes) the way Donny tells them too. And that reassessment is not going to happen until at least late summer 2026.
I don't know enough about the republican party's campaign finances to know whether Trump controls most or all of it. Even if he does, though, it doesn't have to work that way.
Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games. The fact that they aren't willing to is a large part of why we're in this mess.
What we need are leaders that actually have principles they're willing to fight for, and ultimately that still rolls further down hill to the voters who have collectively created these incentives.
When Ron Paul was still in office lobbyists learned to not even bother talking to him. Agree or disagree with him, the man had strong views of how governments should work, was clear about those views to his electorate, and stood by them consistently. We need more of that.
Their point is that without concerted effort the elected officials will follow Trump as long as elections in red states align with Trump's political funding
> Congress has a duty to uphold the constitution, not to play political money games
Those political money games will filter out opposition in congress as long as Trump is able to have yes men elected into congress
Sure, and if both of those problems are fundamentally just how politics is going to work now we'd be better off throwing out the system entirely and starting fresh.
Short of that, we need voters electing based on ideals and principles and we need those elected to actually follow the ideals and principles that got them elected.
Yeah, the issue is one of incentives.
For all politicians, their incentive is to get (re)elected. That's pretty much part of the definition. The ones that follow that incentive are going to be (re)elected, those that don't aren't going to get into office.
But, if you really do believe in democracy, then you have to actually trust the voters here. If you're thinking that they are just rubes and are easily lead around, then well, you don't really believe in democracy, I think [0]. Whatever you think about Donny and his methods and ideas, we've had 10 years of the guy in politics. The voters (in the system we have) were as well informed as you could possibly expect them to be. They wanted him and everything about him, the results were very clear.
Ancient Greece is a good model here with it's many cities and systems. Democracies will often choose the wolf to escape the vultures. It's just part of how humans work. We can all wish that we live in a different place and a different time with different people, but we don't. We're here and now. And our fellow voters in the system we have, they want all of this.
Look, I'm with you, I think that the voters were very dumb here. But they have to find out one way or another and get their comeuppance. There is no feasible other way. We're going to get Donny in all his glory, good and hard.
[0] yes yes, we don't have a democracy, we have a constitutional republic and blah blah blah. We've all heard it a hundred times.
I agree with you here. I do personally believe in democracy, though for a slightly different reason.
I believe in democracy because I think the public should be able to collectively pick their fate and then own the outcome. I don't want an elite class doing what they think is best for the rest of us, and I don't want to own the result of their decisions if I had no say in the decisions.
I live in a very red state. Though I didn't vote for Trump I am surrounded by a strong majority of people that did. I've viewed it the way you're describing from the beginning - we made this bed, now we get to see what the result is and decide what to do next.
It literally doesn't matter how you structure a democracy, at the end of the day, all the rules and requirements etc are just words on paper. None of it will work unless people choose to play their parts.
Democracy cannot survive a political party that spends 50 years electing worse and worse criminals, and sacrificing everything to the alter of "More power for our party"
Voters did not punish republicans for Nixon. Voters did not punish republicans for Iran-Contra. Voters did not punish republicans for several market and economic failures. Voters did not punish republicans for multiple outright illegal wars waged on false pretenses that cost us tens of trillions of dollars, spent explicitly from debt.
So this is what you get. The bar will keep getting lower until republican voters finally decide they won't support literally any criminal with an R next to them.
So we are fucked basically.
I don't think this is a problem with the constitution as it was actually written, this is just the cumulative effect of states, congress, and the judicial branch ceding power to the executive for decade after decade, with a decent dose of political corruption, because both parties thought it was convenient for when they are in power. People had been warning about it the whole time and every time it happened they were either ignored as paranoid or grouped up as conspiracy theorists.