What exactly do Americans want the President to be efficacious at? More generally, what overall goal or goals do we want the President and the whole government to aim for?
1) Maximize mean/median happiness
2) Maximize mean/median wealth
3) Minimize wealth disparity
4) Maximize freedom from government coercion
5) Maximize freedom from private coercion
6) Maximize protection from domestic and foreign threats
If maximization or minimization of something is the goal, do we want to maximize that something for:
1) the current U.S. population
2) the U.S population 25/50/100 years from now
3) current American citizens
4) the current heritage-American population
5) me
My choice would be to maximize median happiness for the US population 50 years from now. I think focusing on a long-term goal would encourage positive expectations and reduce voters’ selfishness in choosing who to vote for.
Any thoughts?
You mean you demand accountability? Then look at Pentagon who never once passed an audit. Pentagon and the army is your beloved pedo president’s excuse to dispense with national healthcare.
Why don’t you demand accountability where it is really missing? Obviously because: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And ‘1984’ is the roadmap.
Ignorance is truly strong in you. Invincible. Your every post is a fantastic victory.
In the absence of full audits, it’s just my cynicism vs your optimism.
I’ve worked in the most obviously humanitarian agency that exists. I defy you to name anything more humane than protecting children from abuse. Note that malnutrition and medical neglect are subsumed.
So why am I cynical?
l’ll Depart for a short while, with one one thought:
I stayed in CPS for seven years because I needed the job to feed my family.
The day I left I had more time in service than all the others in my unit combined, including the supervisor.
Everyone else burned out in a year or less.
I consider this attitude misguided. Yes, the President is elected and represents a party. But the Presidency was always considered to have goals and limits, like “ensure the laws are faithfully followed.” Agencies created by Congress were explicitly intended to be independent. The President was never supposed to have the power to decide what to spend on and how much to spend, regardless of Congress. There was supposed to be a balance of power.
But I’ll readily agree that a great deal of the past function of the government rested on good faith, precedent, and input from a loyal opposition. As we have been learning, “because it’s a good idea and help people” has no defense against “because I can get away with it and nobody can stop me.” And most of the reason nobody can stop it is because SCOTUS decided that partisan gerrymandering at every level was fine, which renders all but a very few districts uncompetitive. And seriously erodes the balance of power.
Still, it’s a mistake to argue that “nobody is stopping him, so that’s what it is, unlimited power.” You might as well argue that crime is legal if you get away with it. I think James Carville is correct in saying that all of the countless ills and injuries Trump is inflicting on us all, ultimately comes down to corruption, in the US and every other country. The only cure for corruption is voting for good people, something clearly beyond the comprehension of the voting public. We sometimes get lucky and sometimes we don’t, but it’s always luck one way or the other. If the voting public elects someone totally corrupt, despite felony convictions, sexual assault convictions, serial bankruptcies and bottomless ignorance, that’s just bad luck. For voters, it’s not like facts matter.
“Supposed to” is no match for what a malicious agent can do and, in this case, is actually doing with hardly any repercussions.
You can argue all you want for what the founding fathers intended in your opinion, the fact is that in USA there has been this thing called the unitary executive theory (for how long, can you tell? according to Wikipedia since forever!) which on the surface says that the president has *absolute* powers in all matters pertaining to the executive branch of government, but in essence the theory intends for the president to be able to simply override all other branches. So it’s your “theory” against their “theory” as if there were a rational debate going on while fascists dismantle the government.
As you put it so well yourself:
Therefore it requires an immediate admission that all checks and balances have failed, and any remnants of law and order need to be urgently mustered against the fascist threat. And when this does not succeed (the fact that Trump got into power for a second time already means total defeat), it is time to acknowledge that the flaws of this constitution can no longer be fixed by ordinary legal means.
Doctors don’t leave the cure up to luck. When it’s up to luck, it’s not a cure worth the name.
And of course there are more cures than just elections (which in USA are conducted in a perverse manner that would/could/should have been an easy fix a long time ago, but clearly nobody is fixing it). Most normal countries rewrite their constitutions from time to time, both by peaceful means and by change of regime, so people can look back into history and see what has been tried already and what worked and what did not. This is a renewal that often cures many ills.
In USA a huge problem is that nobody suggests any profound reform to the constitution, certainly not a wholesale rewrite which is inevitable by now. The biggest suggested reform that I keep seeing is the abolition of the electoral college, which actually would exacerbate the most acute elephant in the room: unchecked presidency.
Unchecked presidency is in some seriousness being discussed only now when Trump is in office (i.e. way too late – the right time passed during the W era at the latest), but nobody suggests a cure to directly address it. Abolishing the electoral college does not address unchecked presidency. Your (“the only cure”) elections with a lucky outcome do not address unchecked presidency. Impeachment does not address it either – impeachment never once worked in the history of USA, not even against the twice impeached Donald. A repositioning of the president to a lesser role would address it. But this would require a rewrite of the constitution and, oh horror, USA would become a normal country, therefore this shall never be permitted…
You were doing well until you got to this point. In real life, NO constitution, no matter how it’s written or what it says, can stand against leadership who ignore it. You can rewrite it a dozen times over, but I defy you to write anything Trump would follow if he didn’t want to.
Nonetheless, we must rely on luck. Perhaps this is a subtle point. Just looking through American history, my reading is that the voters have selected the superior candidate about half the time at random – and some of the candidates have been truly awful. This situation is exaggerated today by hyper-partisan media – even though most voters are resolutely ignorant of issues and vote on perceived character only. Which is why we elect movie and TV personalities.
Again, I challenge you to name any constitution anywhere that Trump couldn’t ignore if he felt like it. Although I believe that if SCOTUS should outlaw politically partisan gerrymandering, someone like Trump would be more restrained because powers would be more balanced. It’s worth noting that SCOTUS explicitly allows partisan gerrymandering because it’s so beneficial to the court’s partisan majority. Which gets back to Carville’s point about deep-seated corruption.
No, the elephant is corruption. Granted, the electoral college tilts the playing field, and perhaps has become obsolete – but it’s a fixture today for the same reason it was adopted in the first place – explicitly to tilt the playing field. But as Stalin said, it doesn’t matter who the people vote for, it only matters who counts the votes. Which is why Trump is trying to insert election deniers into position to count votes in as many places as possible. If he succeeds, the electoral college is irrelevant. Nobody anymore wants fair elections they might lose.
UNLESS we are lucky enough to elect people at all levels who see and honor the need for checks and balances. Electing the right people will, over time, solve this problem. Getting them elected is a matter of luck, because the electorate is ignorant, and because the characteristics that make a good campaigner are the characteristics that make a poor governor.
(And consider the primary process. Both parties tend to nominate extremists, and in November you get to choose between the starry-eyed socialist and the corrupt bigot. Moderates don’t win primaries.)
People worry about the wrong things..
Im not exempt.
A really important election cycle is approaching, and I suspect there will be surprises in both directions.
I see things happening that remind me of Goldwater/1964, McGovern/1968, Carter//1980.
There are two major wars that could heat up or cool down in the next few months.
There is the odd bedfellow relationship between democratic socialists and Muslims that simultaneously attracts and repels voters.
The only thing I feel certain about is the campaigns are going to be ugly.
The 2028 election is too far off to make any useful predictions, but it appears Tucker Carlson is attempting A Ross Perot move.