All the while, I don't think I've ever loved our country as much as now because I think this is a time where our system of checks and balances can come to shine.
I do hope this experience will lead to people re-evaluating their love of FDR. You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.
Well, it’s an opportunity for the system to prove that it can prevent even a president with a large support base from making America fascist. I gather from your comment that you are pessimistic, but regardless of likelihoods, this is the kind of situation where checks and balances could prevent some very bad things from happening.
People are being disappeared, snatched up without being charged with a crime and being held in for profit prisons indefinitely. US citizens are being deported without even due process. Congress is feckless about it. The courts ask for the executive to please stop, but the executive branch is continuing to do the illegal things they've been told to stop doing.
Sure seems like these checks and balances are working out.
They are currently failing, yes. We can only hope that people look at the rest of the world and history, see how much worse it can get, and find their resolve.
The time for checks and balances working to save us has passed. There are mask wearing black shirts disappearing American citizens. The courts have ruled that “no, this isn’t allowed” and these rulings are ignored. Congress is impotent, and has been for years. There are no more checks and balances to deploy that might help.
there are cases where the president has made the lives of individuals miserable in every presidency we’ve lived through. Stating that this is a terrible fact of life and doesn’t justify the harms.
what kind of powers do you envision the judiciary having to rectify these wrongs?
>what kind of powers do you envision the judiciary having to rectify these wrongs?
Isn't that supposed to be figured out already? What is "checks and balances" if they can just be ignored? Impeachment for ignoring supreme court orders would be one example.
Obama dropped a bomb on a us citizen without giving him due process. How should this case be handled? Like i said, american presidents causing untold misery on some people is a tale as old as time. The point is to create a system that is, on balance, just.
>i think i’ve written enough to show that’s that last thing im trying to do.
I mean, that may be your intent, but so far you've brought up Brazil and Obama in a conversation about Trump ignoring the courts orders and said nothing about Trump ignoring the orders.
Every time the courts say Trump did something wrong, he seems to mostly ignore this and keep going, so how much does it really matter? Without strong enforcement of those checks they will stop being taken seriously.
FDR's major lasting accomplishments that people praise him for were through legislation. Even things like the threat to pack the court would have happened through legislation.
There are some highly visible examples of direct executive action that I hope everyone today sees as authoritarian (japanese internment being the really big one). But FDR's expansion of the executive is the opposite of what Trump is doing. Trump is acting in opposition to the legislation that directs the executive to have its finger in more pies.
The long and the short of it is that FDR did (mostly) well-intentioned things with (mostly) good outcomes that were (mostly) widely distributed. That and winning WW2 secured his place in the historical record. But it was definitely a "move fast and break things" approach. The one that conservatives are still very mad about is gold confiscation, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn is a wild over-interpretation of the law to consolidate Federal power.
A lot of very important American freedoms were secured against the public opinion by court cases. That makes them brittle.
I believe that there is a huge difference between executive authoritarianism and consolidating power within the federal government instead of the states. While this was indeed a huge expansion of federal power through the commerce clause, it expands congress' power, not the president's.
The internment of the Japanese cannot be brushed off. That was a gross violation of power that, if Trump were to do something similar, would tear this country apart. On top of that, one of the side effects of the internment is that it's sowed a deep distrust in the federal government and the Census that continues to harm representation to this day.
They used Census data to round people up. It doesn't get much worse than that.
Of course. It is one of the most evil things the US government has ever done and was driven largely by the executive. I personally think that this is a big enough black mark on FDR's legacy that he shouldn't be held in such high regard by liberals.
But is also undeniable that when liberals praise FDR they are talking about things like new deal legislation which ultimately originated from congress during his presidency, which makes the "well you guys like FDR so why do you hate Trump" argument just miss completely.
> Trump is acting in opposition to the legislation that directs the executive to have its finger in more pies.
is that so true? i don't doubt that in probably 10-20% of the cases this is so, but i would bet that in the vast majority of cases the legislation as written is flexible enough that picking an amount of action that is zero is within the bounds of the law.
i am watching trump carefully for the moment when he turns some dark corners (the abrego garcia case being one) but i am unswayed by the argument that the government reducing its own power is somehow more authoritarian in contrast to an administration that convinced congress to create authority for itself out of whole cloth, which quite clearly goes against the 10th amendment.
I'm unswayed by that argument too, but I don't think it's an accurate characterization of what's happening. A government that arbitrarily withholds funds based on political favoritism is increasing its power, even if aggregate spending goes down because too many people weren't willing to do favors.
We need to acknowledge other authoritarian or authoritarian-lite practices that have gone under the radar for decades, like funding elite colleges (is that political favoritism?), or political influence through NGOs, or even "doing things for the greater good" through unaccountable NGOs like "broadband equity", where there is no explicit charter for the government to do such things.
Why do we need to? It seems to me that many of these efforts to “acknowledge” other controversies in the past are in fact distraction tactics to sneak in controversial premises about the current ones. Funding research grants is absolutely not political favoritism.
> Funding research grants is absolutely not political favoritism.
It's political favoritism in the same way that giving LMH or BA contracts is political favoritism. There's nothing magically "special" about science. And having been there, its just as corrupt, just as wasteful, and generally not in the public interest. It's mostly in the interest of professors that want to fuck around on their pet topics. look up leo paquette and homme hellinga, if you doubt my insider knowledge on this matter (they are just the tip of the iceberg and easily verified in terms of what I've seen). that's not even getting into more touchy subjects like the maze of conflicts of interest in an actually "politics-al" topic like lab leak investigation. whether or not you believe in the lab leak hypothesis you HAVE to acknowledge that the gatekeepers in the investigation are so entangled that it makes good faith truthseeking basically impossible.
> vast majority of cases the legislation as written is flexible enough that picking an amount of action that is zero is within the bounds of the law.
While that may be true; is that actually within the spirit of their respective laws? Passing legislation that directs the executive to do something, but then letting the executive just slow-walk it until it's moot seems counter productive.
if it incentivises congress to be more specific and reduces executive free reign style legislation in the future I'm not too terribly bothered (oh shit do we not want to give the president the authority to change tariffs in an "emergency" without defining the scope of an emergency?? yeah let's pass non stupid laws). there's lots of other stuff in this administration to be critical about.
I feel this way as well. It's a great test to see if the founding fathers got the constitution right and more importantly to see if the people are willing to assert their right to a democracy with the powers spelled out in our constitution.
The fact that you think mythological figures that enshrined slavery in the same document which describes how people are free could have gotten the constitution "right" is very telling.
No, the US constitution is not right. It has tons of problems with it, and needs a significant update to clarify it and avoid a supreme court legislating by imagining what slaveowners a few centuries ago might have thought about a problem.
In my comment I was using the Constitution and the founding Fathers as symbols for democracy to contrast the current administration which is very anti-democratic.
I understand that the constitution/founding fathers are very flawed - but to most people they still serve as symbols of the core principles of this country. As you've mentioned, if you scratch the surface the reality is very different. If you have better examples that aren't as flawed, I'd genuinely like to hear them.
>You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.
Absolute horseshit.
The majority of the New Deal was done through congress, with broad support of a SIGNIFICANT amount of the legislative body, which had just seen massive Democrat wins in the 1932 election specifically to do so. The American people gave his administration this power because Americans were tired of watching people die in ditches, watching their parents suffer through old age with zero support.
1 out of every 5 Americans were unemployed. That's a conservative estimate.
They were tired of this being the case in a country with literal "Robber barons".
There is absolutely no parallel to the current administration, who barely won election, who does not have such a commanding control of the legislative (though they do control it), and who personally appointed a significant quantity of the current supreme court.
There is no vast economic harm that Trump was elected to fix. He is openly defying and ignoring court orders, which FDR did not do.
You are spouting lies. Where did you ever get such an incorrect view of history?
I do hope this experience will lead to people re-evaluating their love of FDR. You can like what he stood for, but he was an equal if not (much) greater abuser of the executive office.