I mean “No man shall hold office who committed insurrection” seems like a mechanism in and of itself. Dude just can’t run/be on a ballot. We just have two branches of government bought and paid for by the insurrectionist and America’s richest and most fanatical scum who refuse to follow the law.

Only if there’s anyone left in government who will enforce the law. We couldn’t get that done with a democrat pres and a democrat DOJ, we’re not getting it done now that the maganazis control everything.

Unless those Democrats still in washington have levers they can pull that none of us know about, or some Republicans grow a conscience (insert laughing hispanic guy meme here) I have legitimate fear about what the next four years will bring.

For the first time in my life I’m typing something critical of our government and elected officials and wondering if someone is going to bash my door down for it a year from now.

People who say they follow the Bible are usually lying too. And anything that’s allowed to be left up to interpretation and still be called “law” is bound to be corrupted when convenient and ignored when convenient.

It’s like the ICC and UN. They just make suggestions. Whether they are followed or effectively enforced depends on who’s in the dock.

I mean imagine if you could impeach the president without a majority. That would be the death of democracy. Just to put things in perspective: The GOP democratically won both houses of Congress and the presidency and because of DNC incompetence also has the Supreme Court. Them being able to do whatever the fuck they want is, in a way, democracy working as intended. It’d be weirder (and much more undemocratic) if there was a way to remove a sitting president without the Supreme Court or Congress.

Worse… The House makes the impeachment charge, that’s a 50% majority vote.

THEN it goes to the Senate for conviction where you need a 2/3rds majority to remove them. 67/100.

That’s the body which can’t do anything because they’re blocked by a 60 vote super majority to over-ride a filibuster.

So you get 218 in the House, goes to the Senate, needs 60 votes to end debate and proceed with charges, then 67 votes to convict and remove.

Trump’s first impeachment got 48 and 47 votes.
His second was 57 votes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_impeachment_trial_of_Donald_Trump

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_Trump

If he had been convicted, he would have been inelligible to run in '24.

If enough people in a democracy decide that they want a dictatorship instead, then there is no stopping it, because rules don’t matter at this point. The trick is to not let it get this far. Tough shit for the US, though.

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The ruling class was able to get along well enough up until the US Civil War, at which point the slavers decided they were willing to tear the country apart to keep on slaving. I include this because the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow and how we did things over here. Fascism started bubbling up in the early 20th century because industrialization and capitalism polluted everything and made people work awful hours and all that, and liberalism and conservatism hadn’t fixed it. There was a serious coup attempt forming in the early 30s called the Business Plot, but they went to a war hero Marine general who told them to fuck off and told the federal government about it.

At least in the US, we’re in this situation now because authoritarians have been working toward it since the 60s (the Powell Memo was written in 1971 I think) and they’ve taken advantage of how terribly the Constitution is written, along with consolidation of wealth and stoking backlash to all the civil rights movements to get people to back them. The worst part is that it’s a feedback loop: since Reagan took power, Republicans campaign on “look how bad the government is!” and make the government worse once they’re in office, which feeds their cause.

tl;dr capitalism makes living conditions terrible, people abandon liberalism and conservatism for socialism/communism/etc and fascism, liberals don’t want much to change, fascism lives or dies based on how much conservatives sell out to/ally with them. The fact that we’re doing this all again shows to me that liberalism is a dead ideology and capitalism is going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.

It has been under corporate dictatorship for over a century.

Well the country didn’t previously have a legion of mouth breathing retards screaming at the top of their lungs about micro-aggressions and declaring that the nation was illegitimate. I’d also question your metrics for deciding now that he’s an openly Nazi dictator, other than parroting what you hear from other people social media accounts.

USA military interventions in Asia have been a constant concern for a long time, and the USA allied Korea and Japan directly oppose Chinese expansion and Chinese allied North Korea. The USA military control of the pacific ocean is seen as a wall to be overcome. The Chinese deeply despise the existence of NATO; the world’s largest mutual defence pact, and the US Government as barriers between them and their expansionist goals.

For examples, the takeover of Hong Kong and Taiwan almost failed due to US support, and their econimic use of Philippine and Australian seas have faced setbacks.

China is openly allied with other USA adversaries such as Iran and Russia.

It also helps that President Trump has repeatedly praised and admired Xi Jinping openly in public. The USA Tariffs will have no effect on Chinese trade profits at all as USA citizens will instead pay the fees. The less average faith a US Citizen has in their country and the more easily radicalized they are to harm their country, the better it is for China. They constantly predict the downfall of America and the rise of China in a single breath.

If you want evidence of all of this then look no further than the quotes of Chinese officials and the ideals of “communist parties” of the USA.

2. The brakes would be electing 60 democrats to senate to pass campaign finance reform, public healthcare with no concessions, and tax reform. As they have repeatedly tried to do for many years but always come up short of votes. Bonus points if they expand the court, house, and senate but I dont know if its an achievable goal until after the campaign finance reform.

Where would ancient Greek democracy

They had slaves, so it wasn’t particularly democratic.

I don’t know if there’s a meaningful way to treat that as a spectrum and to place political systems on it. I mostly pointed out the different definitions one might use so that people wouldn’t read my examples of rights violations and think “what’s that got to do with democracy?”.

Also, there’s no ancient Greek democracy. Greece was a bunch of city-states, each with its own political system. I know that in Athenian democracy there were slaves, and as you would image they didn’t get a vote. Neither did the women. If it existed today it would probably not even be called a democracy by western standards.

The CIA is not great at high profile assassination, their declassified documents are plenty scary though.

They have a long history of infiltrating foreign governments and assassinating world leaders, so what makes you think they’d have trouble doing the same in the US? Surely, during the height of the Cold War, they would’ve had contingencies for America electing a socialist. If they did back then, then who did what when to change that situation? Nobody’s really said no to the CIA since, again, Kennedy fired Dulles and was assassinated shortly afterward.

The CIA is right leaning wing globally and at home

There are many conservatives, who hold democratic values, freedom, and the US constitution in high regard. Those in government service have sworn an oath to protect it against enemies foreign and domestic. They have their red lines and breaking points. The ones in powerful positions draw their whole legitimacy from it.

Are you ready for some tearing up and redoing of constitution now?

I know about Jefferson and his 20 year automatic sunset phase for laws at all levels, except for Constitutions, charters, and other founding documents that can be amended. Hadn’t heard that Franklin wanted to sunset the Constitution itself as well. Not sure that we would have lasted this long if Franklin had gotten his way there. I do think that Jefferson and Madison were on the right track with the federal, state, and local laws though. Tyranny of the dead and all that.

Trump has said that Elon “knows those computers better than anybody … And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide”.

First of all, we know that to be false because we know Elon doesn’t know shit about computers. But, aside from that, there are multiple possible interpretations of what he meant, anything from “Elon rigged the election” to “Elon ensured the integrity of the election”.

My policy is “Don’t believe anything Trump says about anything”. I don’t change that policy when he says something that I want to believe is true.

Where did you hear that?

Actively spreading hate towards the LGBTQ community and making some of the most marginalised people isn’t nazi enough for you? What a sick world we live in.

40% of the time it’s democracy 100% of the time

The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.

Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.

I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm.

He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.

He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.

The US was the first large scale modern democracy. Of course it has design flaws.

Parlamentarism, as we know it now, had only been recently established in the UK in the 17rh century.

Contemporary to US early democracy were absolutist monarchies based on aristocracy. Separation of powers envisioned by Montesquieu, Rousseau‘s social contract, were still new political ideas. The federalist papers and later US constitution were cutting edge political theory at the time.

It’s very impressive that the US has lasted so long actually and was able to adapt. The French established their first democratic republic later and were unable to create a stable state.

I mean, I think they’d have considered a civil war less than 100 years after the founding of the country to be a pretty good indication of failure.

As for the modern world, they explicitly talk about trying to design a system so that a tyrant doesn’t become president. All the supposed checks and balances that were supposed to prevent that turned out to be as effective as wet tissue paper. The founders also cared a lot about the president not being corrupt, and drafted the emoluments clause(s) to prevent that, and Trump has just completely ignored those clauses. I think they’d have been pretty upset about that, and wondering why the law of the land was just being ignored.