From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.
Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.
More recently, as documented in astonishing accounts by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump has overseen a robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency.
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Considering the US founders owned slaves, I reckon they were short sighted in many other aspects of what they “founded”.
The Constitution assumed that the Congress wouldn’t abdicate all of its power. A unitary executive wouldn’t be possible if Congress stood their ground and said “Nope”.
The Senate is supposed to impeach him but GOP Senators are playing team sports instead of common sense.
The Senate is supposed to impeach him
The House Impeaches.
The Senate convicts.
But you need a supermajority in the Senate, which even the Radical Republicans of the 1870s failed to muster, despite having the half the country under Marshall Law at the time.
The unilateral presidential pardon and veto are both huge mistakes.
That puts far too much power in the hands of one person. Especially in a country that wanted to eliminate a king-like position ruling over them.
That wasn’t a mistake. It was absolutely intentional.
It is vital to understand the early American state as a patronage system and the president as the ultimate patrician through which power flows. If you look at early Plantation society, and the subsequent networks of power that flow from landholders to merchant brokers and from yeomen to their wealthy oligarch neighbors, all of this fits neatly together.
The problem the American Founders saw was with the upstart plebians and landless workers. Pardons and vetos check the power of popular judges and legislators, as intended.
Yep, it all flows together because the thinkers behind the Constitution and the plantation model were post-Enlightenment classicists literally basing their perfect model of society on the Roman Republic.
That is propaganda, they wanted a king, just their kind of king. His name was Washington and he would have been a billionaire adjusted for inflation if he had not died in his sixties. The US was always corrupt from the very start.
Back then, politicians were assumed to be honorable Gentlemen. This ended a long time ago, but Trump goes the extra mile to prove he is anything but.
Back then, politicians were assumed to be honorable Gentlemen.
https://www.americanheritage.com/verdicts-history-iv-scandalous-malicious-and-seditious-libel
In 1803 the infant American Republic was running a high political fever. The ferocity of the verbal warfare raging between the Federalists, the party created by Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by President Jefferson, has rarely been matched in American politics, even by the diatribes of today’s New Left and Ultra Right.
The first fusillades had been fired during Washington’s Presidency. The Jeffersonians, with not a little help from the Sage of Monticello himself, had set up journalists such as Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache with one mission, to deflate and discredit an administration that was, in Jefferson’s view, “galloping fast into monarchy.” They soon had the Father of His Country in a state of near apoplexy. “That rascal Freneau,” as Washington called him, insisted on sending his scurrilous National Gazette, published in Philadelphia, to the President’s house even after he had cancelled his subscription. Freneau spent most of his abuse on Hamilton. Baclic preferred Washington as a target, calling him “treacherous,” “mischievous,” “inefficient,” and sneering at his “farce of disinterestedness” and his “stately joumeyings through the American continent in search of personal incense.”
These verbal guerrillas soon had imitators. Among the more savage was William Duane, Bache’s successor as editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. Washington, he wrote, had “discharged the loathings of a sick mind.” Even this was topped by an English newcomer, James T. Callender. In the Richmond Examiner he declared that “Mr. Washington has been twice a traitor.”
Well yes, but also the concept of honour back then was dictated largely by rich slave owners. So…
I’d trust the honor of a slaveowner over the proud cruelty we have now. It’s not like the fascists are less racist.
I’d trust the honor of a slaveowner
The whole context is 22 words bud, I know you can read that much. I like Community but even as a joke reference it’s a reach.
That may be, but it’s dangerous to guess at a distance. And time is a distance all its own
Fascist is bad enough, but even Hitler would cringe at the idea of a goddamn pedophile being in charge (assuming he wasn’t one himself).
The Nazi Party was flush with pedophiles
I don’t doubt it, it’s just more depressing.
“assuming he wasn’t one himself” look up Geli Raubal and the allegiations of abusive sexual relationship between her (as a minor) and Hitler. Moreover, they were relatives. Just like Ivanka and Donnie Daughterfucker.
I did not know, but it’s not fucking surprising.
No, no, you see there’s a system of checks and balances.
Presidential Pardons are balanced by the 2nd amendment.
The Orange Shitstain has proven there are a shit ton of loopholes in the US government.
I really have no idea why they did they, I agree we should get rid of presidential pardoning power. We should have gotten rid of it after Nixon.
Should have gotten rid of it after the civil war
Should have gotten rid of the traitors after the civil war.
They just kept fighting politically for a century and more and here we are. I think almost all ails we experience today can be tracked to that shit, they never went away.
And you can’t have a democratic society where some people just super want to own slaves and never ever shut the fuck up about it.
These are just fundamentally incompatible “moralities”. Red vs Blue. Slave owners against abolitionists.
I think that’s the nature of the fight we’re fighting here.
They made a lot of grave errors.
And a lot of them were errors of omission. Operating under the assumption that idiots and money wouldn’t undermine the checks and balances or usurp the highest office in the land. They didn’t erect enough barriers to prevent such things.
I was thinking about owning other human beings, as most of them did.
“error” yah right
If americsns weren’t do damn horny for guns they would’ve maybe thought some time ago that some backwards slave owners maybe haven’t figured it all out all that time ago
agreed, President also should have nothing to do with DOJ / appointing the AG. Big mistake.
Perhaps the pardon should be a 2/3 vote of congress instead, just to preserve the check on the judiciary
Along with tariffs and other dictator power, but even worse is the fools elected him twice with all the knowledge available to all and they still fail the test again! That’s bad choices and willful ignorance and will keep regressing each time and where they make the bad choices.
But how do we deal with the other side after all of this? They’ve clearly been manipulated by Fox News and social media algorithms. They think they’re up-to-date with current events. The media manipulation in the US is staggering. I don’t see how we move forward without tearing everything down. It’s rotten from the inside out.
So… Many… Things…
At this point it feels like it would be better to burn the fucking thing down and start from scratch, because fascism is like getting termites.
But at this point it would just mean total subjugation by Russia or China, so it needs to be fixed, but it’s like a flaming wreck just rolled into the shop and it has to be salvaged.
The only option is to tear it all down. Personally I say start with deregulation of the radio frequencies to hopefully drown out talk radio (and iHeartRadio) under a ride of not quite pirate stations. This would at least stop folks from listening to low tier talk radio while driving since I doubt any of them besides Coast to Coast will be able to maintain.
From there its a bit harder cause just deregulating something and waiting for it to die isn’t quite an option. But you could do a trust bust followed by simply disbanding cable TV to get rid of Fox.
Internet is both harder and easier in that you really only need to regulate how the algorithms work and maybe cave in Facebook and their subsidiaries. At least in theory, maybe throw in some indepth investigations on where right wing influencers are getting their money since it came out the ruskies were bankrolling a bunch awhile back. But overall attacking their funding structure is probably the best method, maybe see about shit canning TPUSA and similar orgs due to obviously skirting regulatory laws.
I don’t think US founders ever expected that such a moron would manage to be elected, and use that power for himself.
If you had just overtrown the british crown to be a “no king” republic in that big land you just colonized and emptied from its people, you would expect that no one would ever act like a king here, right? …right?
We need the midterms to allow for a possible reform of the constitution, if it is even still possible…
I don’t think US founders ever expected that such a moron would manage to be elected, and use that power for himself.
Within a single presidency, you had early Americans calling one another idiots, tyrants, and foreign plants. Washington himself wasn’t above suspicion.
Everyone from Patrick Henry to Aaron Burr reviled one another and accused each other of plots to reinstate some kind of monarchy.
We need the midterms to allow for a possible reform of the constitution
That won’t happen. The American system will continue to revert to the 19th century mean, until the bureaucratic mechanisms fail completely.
It’s crazy how they weren’t able to create a completely flawless founding document governing a new nation of 4 million that then grew into 340 million over centuries and became the richest and most powerful country on Earth on the first try.
That is not how any of that worked.
American Exceptionlism is summed up neatly as a continent of stolen land and a legacy of warmongering and genocide.
I hope they will tighten up and amend any loopholes that got them into this mess in the first place.
Citizens united, first past the post, the two party state are the most important ones I think to fix.
That will need the constitution to be rewritten, or amended.
A two party democracy is like a society with bipolar disorder. It’s just a one party state with an extra flavor. That’s why the oligarchs and AIPAC et al pay off both sides.
When you have that kind of money it doesn’t matter, you’ll get your way because there’s only two parties to bribe anyway.
They’ll have to if they expect the rest of us to trust them going forward.
