In principle, flagrant abuse of the pardon power is blocked by Congress's ability to impeach and remove a President who engages in such abuse.
In practice, that has always been an ineffective threat against Presidents who are within days of leaving office anyway. And more importantly, the framers of the Constitution seemed to have entirely failed to imagine a party like today's Republicans who value strict personal loyalty to the President over every other principle of government.
I wonder how anomalous this presidency really is. Trump is not the first strong man bullheaded president who engaged in cronyism and systemic corruption. Most people don’t know the history of presidents though especially from centuries past. Maybe this broken state of the office we observe today has always been a viable option for people who payed attention enough to see it and are also evil enough to use it. Maybe this power has been specifically maintained intentionally for some time. Like a big open secret for those tasked with approving laws.
Please enlighten us: which former presidents have been similar strong man caricatures engaging in anywhere near the level of cronyism and systemic corruption as the current administration? What precisely did they do which demonstrates such behavior?
We've certainly had some colorful presidents in the past, but the current president is engaged in a lot of blatantly impeachable behavior, and as far as I know, we've never had such a passive and complicit Congress before.
I’d probably guess there were plenty of bad eggs. Andrew Jackson for example. Who learns about him in school though? Who talks about his administration today? And he probably isn’t the only one either. 1700s government was still in flux with plenty of cases of selfish infamous people and behavior. 1800s worldview among people in power was pretty notoriously ruthless. 1900s not much different. FDR was certainly a strongman above norms too, luckily many of the things he did with his share of political power had great benefits to people.
Paul Graham and Garry Tan were both big cheerleaders of DOGE, so, keep that in mind.
A shocking number of the biggest stories about DOGE over the past year were flagged here, probably including the stories about goons physically removing people.
Posts questioning this suppression/censorship were flagged.
Some people like to argue that since any story about Musk becomes toxic - for some reason - it 'makes sense' to flag every story about anything to with him. You know, like Israel, or US torture, or Assange, or Snowden, or Epstein, etc.
For we are but naive children here in the tech industry, and must have a safe space to discuss PCB specs and the meaning of 42 without too much 'current affairs', lest the site 'lose its focus'.
It's not like almost the entire top of the industry is neck-deep in collaboration with all this or anything, right?
... Anyway, if people here don't know much about DOGE, the massive flagging that's gone on here is probably a big factor as to why.
“Shocking number” being “pretty much all of them” to the point I discovered https://news.ycombinator.com/active which shows topics where discussions are happening even if they’re flagged.
That’s the only way I browse HN now because this place is clearly brigaded to bury certain topics.
I wrote an extension that lets me tag users, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite, and it's interesting seeing the intellectual dishonesty from certain actors, yet because they produce "valuable" discussion the moderators take no action.
Yeah, you can't rely on HN to get important information. It will be flagged to death. There could be a holocaust going on and it'd get flagged for being "controversial".
> I fear things have changed and Trump'ism is here to stay.
The first time they got Trump lite. They didn't like him, and ditched him after one term.
The next president has the misfortune to get elected during a worldwide recession. They liked the recession even less than they liked Trump lite. So they re-elected Trump lite.
But they've now found the person they re-elected was Trump heavy. He's doubled down on all the things they disliked about Trump lite, and will probably land them in a recession entirely of his own making.
I'd be stunned if Trump heavy or anybody following in his footsteps won an election for a decade or two. Memories will have to fade.
Guess we'll find out at the midterms if you're right, I certainly hope so. We're at the point where even the major policy differences between Democrats and Republicans are insubstantial compared to just getting people in office that aren't openly mustache twirlingly corrupt.
I mean enforcing the laws on the books would be a good start. Corruption quickly breeds more and more corruption if it isn't rooted out and punished. Everyone who isn't corrupt starts losing and the benefits of not being corrupt evaporate
In practice, that has always been an ineffective threat against Presidents who are within days of leaving office anyway. And more importantly, the framers of the Constitution seemed to have entirely failed to imagine a party like today's Republicans who value strict personal loyalty to the President over every other principle of government.