[whatever1]

Why not? Are we gonna send the marshals to arrest the president?

Jokes aside, this presidency showed that it was not our written laws that enabled the expected operation of gov branches within their expected limits.

It was these unwritten laws we were taking for granted, because casually we assume that the gov will not be malicious.

It seems to me that we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs.

[ceejayoz]

This is a very clearly written law, though.

It has nothing to do with the writing. It's the "fuck you we'll ignore" it thing that's a problem. No amount of writing fixes that.

[solid_fuel]

I disagree. I think that constitutional scholars have always known that it's not the written laws that hold the executive in check. Our system was designed so that the 3 branches would check each other. The Federalist Paper #51 explicitly calls this out - "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." [0]

The problem with any system like you are suggesting where "we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs" is the same as always - who enforces the law?

The cause of the dysfunction we have now is that congress has failed to check the power of the executive. Congress should have impeached and removed Donald Trump for treason and other high crimes after January 6th. He should have been convicted and felt the full force of the law around his neck for trying to interfere with the function of congress and overthrow the election.

Every problem we face with our government right now traces back to the same issue: Congress is not doing its job. Congress has the power to impeach and remove the president for threatening to nuke Iran. Congress has the power to stop the executive branch from starting illegal wars overseas. Congress has the power to punish ICE for executing citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.

Congress has failed to exercise this power for several reasons, a major one being that both the house and senate are no longer representative of the American people. The house has been limited in membership ever since the reapportionment act and the senate was always designed to favor wealthy landowners in slave states.

This results in placing massively disproportionate power in the hands of a tiny fraction of voters just because they live in the middle of nowhere, which in turn makes it very easy for the rich and powerful to game the system. There is no way forward for us as a country without reforming congress.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._51

[autoexec]

It isn't just congress failing to their job. We The People are also responsible for not ousting the freeloaders in congress who are taking our tax money and not doing the job they were elected to do.

We are the final check on making sure that government is serving us and not the other way around. The founders were pretty open about what they expected from us if that could no longer be accomplished within the framework they were putting into place. I'd like to think that we can still vote our way out of this problem, but I fear that between attempts from the government to suppress voters and the surprisingly large number of people content with the idea of a fascist dictator (so long as he's wearing their team's colors) we might have a hard time overcoming the fear, apathy, and learned helplessness in the rest of the population necessary to effectively insist on the changes we need.

[ciupicri]

I'm not very familiar with the American system, but aren't congress elections prone to gerrymandering which means they don't reflect too accurately the preferences of the people?

[autoexec]

Gerrymandering is one the most powerful ways they suppress votes. They also like to do things like limit the number of polling places and put them out of the way with limited hours, pass laws that require documents many people don't have (while making those documents more difficult to obtain), removing the right to vote from people with criminal histories (while more aggressively policing and convicting the people/communities they don't want voting), spreading disinformation about voting dates/times/locations, creating confusing ballots, having heavy police presence at polling places and putting up speed traps/check points near them, making mail-in voting difficult or unreliable, and actively discourage participation with messaging about how voting doesn't accomplish anything or even that your support of a broken/corrupt system makes you complicit in it.

Even our two party/first past the post system discourages voting by limiting the choice people have in who they can realistically support in the first place.

[jfengel]

I believe that the problem is that they also set up Congress with its own check, between two houses. They made it deliberately hard to pass legislation, which means they cannot effectively balance the other two branches.

Congress spent decades ceding power to the executive because it realized it could not do anything itself. And now it's stuck.