[sarchertech]

> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them

We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.

Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.

Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.

[mindslight]

One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on.

I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.

One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.

[sarchertech]

Convincing the Federal government to voluntarily relinquish power, or forcing them to do so is probably the hardest and least likely possible change we could make to our system of government. Positing that as some kind of easier more realistic stopgap vs essentially any other reform is bordering on madness.

[sigwinch]

Even though Ron Paul gets reelected, we do not know how he’d rule as a leader

[mindslight]

Probably easier than convincing individual senators/reps and the part(ies) as a whole to give up their own personal power with things like Ranked Pairs voting, no?

And probably easier to have Congress pass such legislation to draw a new line in the sand, even if it could be undone later, than doing things that would inescapably require a Constitutional amendment.

The problem with the other reforms I have thought of is that we're so far gone it will take more than one reform. Like campaign finance reform would have been great a decade ago. But now that kind of relies on getting back a non-pwnt and even trustworthy law enforcement apparatus, too. Same with a US GDPR / tech antitrust enforcement - would have been great a decade or two ago, but it won't particularly change much now that half the pop culture is already enamored with fascism.

But I agree that we need to be brainstorming and discussing many approaches to reform. So what specifically are you thinking of as the reforms we need?

[sarchertech]

You think

> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states.

Doesn’t require a constitutional amendment?

That would essentially require a rewrite of the constitution.

[mindslight]

My initial comment stated the goal very strongly. I don't see that an initial stopgap version of it would require a Constitutional amendment. The President's power to federalize the Guard comes from legislation passed by Congress ("Insurrection Act", etc), which Congress could straightforwardly undo. Congress could also reaffirm Posse Comitatus, tighten up any loopholes in the President's ability to divert funding from the state-controlled National Guards. Congress could also include a bit indicating that state courts are the appropriate jurisdiction for claims over control of the guard. The Supreme Council might try to go against that last bit under the guise of "Constitutionality", but the goal would be to give the chain of command stronger grounds to refuse illegal orders.

I'm eager to discuss other avenues of reform, though. What do you see as a minimum viable path to reform?

[sarchertech]

The President's power to control the national guard comes from the constitution not acts of congress.

“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”

But ignoring all that, if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war. The military gets deployed, and death and destruction follow.

The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President, and removes a President who violates their will.

Congress has the power to control the President right now. If they aren’t willing to do exercise that authority, there’s nothing we can do.

Let’s say you got Congress to grant states the ability to make war on the federal government in order to provide an extra-congressional check on Presidential power (which I don’t think you can do, but just pretend you can). That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress. Otherwise an extra-congressional check isn’t needed. But in the case Congress will just remove that power from the states.

This only works even a little bit as a Constitutional amendment—even if you could pass legislation to do it.

[nullocator]

> Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.

They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.

> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.

Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country

[sarchertech]

> Give Trump time.

Andrew Jackson did it 1 year into has fist term. Trump is already in his 2nd.

> it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country

It’s horrible to be clear. But ending assistance to other countries is in no way morally worse than genocide, slavery, and war.

>detention camps

The last year of the Biden administration, there were about 40k people in ICE detention facilities. The number has gone up under Trump, but it has less than doubled.

Any preventable deaths of people in ICE custody are unacceptable, but the number of deaths are a little higher proportionally than under Biden.

This is all horrible and condemnable. But detaining undocumented immigrants temporarily is something every administration does (even if this administration is ramping it up) and is in no way comparable to rounding up 100k innocent US citizens for a 4 year term.

Trump is an awful, greedy, morally corrupt human being, and a terrible President. But we’ve seen and survived much worse.