Discussion
well i be damned. kinda forgot about such things as actually positive, yet meaningful in a major manner political news
a lot remains to be done in the states, obviously, but this significant change of powers will certainly help things a lot because like there's no way you could accomplish something actually progressive
so there it is. that's a good win! i hope it gets better from now on for those reading this from thr United States
#noretr
@ilyamikcoder so, the US political system is kind of a mess caused by its own history
like, when the colonies revolted against the british, they wanted to be less of a federal republic and more like an economic/military union of otherwise sovereign states, sort of what the EU is now
a charitable read is that they didn't like having a king and split the powers in order to not give anyone king-like powers, an uncharitable is that, with slavery being controversial even back then, the folks interested in it remaining wanted a system where nobody would be able to tell individual states to knock it off -- and, as a result, it took a civil war to actually end it
but over time, as the US grew from an agrarian colonial state into an economic, military and industrial force, that system stopped working as well and gradually more federal powers were grafted on
but the overall idea of separation of powers remained, and the president alone can still do very little -- even the "executive orders" that presidents like to use during unfriendly congresses can only regulate things that already are part of the executive branch, and congress has the "power of the purse", meaning it gets to control the federal budget and can cause lots of pain to an unfriendly president (though usually not too much, because government shutdowns are painful to everyone)
mfw there's a level 10 critical vulnerability in the united states law
those weird legal shenanigans feel to me like that sometimes
#noretr
@ilyamikcoder fun fact: mathematician kurt gödel actually claimed that there is a "contradiction" in the US constitution that would allow someone to turn the country into an outright dictatorship, but he never revealed what that contradiction is, and everyone is still guessing as to where it is or how to exploit it
@ilyamikcoder the suggestion listed in the wikipedia article -- that Article V doesn't limit how the constitution can be amended, and therefore making it possible for it to be amended to reduce the threshold for future amendments and so on -- is technically valid, but the current threshold for constitutional amendments requires 2/3 approval from BOTH chambers of congress and THEN ratification from 3/4 of all the states, which would make this loophole extremely difficult to actually use, as it would require a lot of politicians on different levels to suddenly agree on something in a way they almost never do
i am gathering this is VERY bad for the president Trump obviously, but i am, again, not educated sufficiently to tell, and am a bit confusing in regards to what he can do exactly on his own with house of representatives failing him like that
theoretically he should remain in place until 2028 elections unless someone forcibly removes him somehow. pretty sure that was attempted before, but circumstances weren't as in favour of that back then; weren't they...
i am sure he'll enact some crazy presidential powers no one used for like hunderd years or somethin'. from what i DO understand is that the governing system is really complex and has a lot of weird and obscure rules and provisions that can be used in very breaking ways
#noretr