Attorney General Pam Bondi is facing escalating pressure from Democrats as the deadline to release the full set of Jeffrey Epstein files approaches, with
I think she might be going a little deaf. Anytime anyone mentions the files she just keeps asking “Pardon Me?"
You forgot the protest video where they listen to the Hamilton soundtrack in solidarity with all the people starving and being abducted to concentration camps.
I was just thinking, and I fucking hate to say this but, trump was (ugh) right when he called them the “do nothing democrats”. Joke of a political opposition.
Considering the Dems don’t control the House, Senate, or White House, the only power they do have currently is promising future prosecution if they take back one of the branches of government. The Republican-led congress and White House are obviously not going to do anything.
What a ridiculous system. So basically politicians in the ruling government can’t be held responsible and prosecuted according to the law if they hold power in the government?
I mean, I already knew the American legal system was a fucking joke when Trump got away with all his crimes and then he pardoned a ton of other criminals. Even though he shouldn’t have this kind of power, he’s the President.
But now you’re saying that certain other people in the government cannot be prosecuted either? WTF?!
I’m no big fan of the Democrats, but historically they are willing to get rid of their own when even accused of wrongdoing. See Senator Al Franken for the silliest example of this.
Republicans will not, in the vast majority of cases, do the same.
Well yes and no. If you are thinking of it like a parliamentary system don’t. We don’t require the formation of a government through a majority party of coalition.
Each representative is elected to an existing body and they have to figure it out.
So theoretically you can have multiple combinations on which party controls the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency. Honestly we don’t even have to have parties you could have every seat filled by politically unaligned independents.
Currently all elected offices in the federal government are controlled by the Republicans. They will not remove their own party’s president.
But theoretically in the mid terms the democratic party could become the majority in the House and the Senate. The president would of course still be the same. But they could then attempt to remove him from office through impeachment.
It’s a confusing mess, but yeah that’s the US system
That’s how it should be. But it’s literally the opposite right now. Trump is issuing orders to prosecute all of his political “enemies” and the actual criminals in the government are not being prosecuted by the justice system at all.
That’s what fascism is, when people want to give their power to dear leader. So it’ll happen with GOP and not with Dems. Fun. So Dems are still a political party that can’t prosecute.
The problem is that you have a majority on the Supreme Court that are blatantly abusing their power and ignoring the law when it advances their side’s agenda, including just declaring the president to be above the law.
This would be the kind of thing that should lead to impeachment, but that requires a supermajority in the senate (because you don’t want whichever party has a majority to be able to easily abuse the impeachment process) but that won’t happen because every single republican with even a hint of integrity has been pushed out by Trump over the past decade. And even if there were Republicans that weren’t entirely corrupt, dismantling your own Supreme Court majority would be a tough sell politically. And even if they did remove the existing justices, it would just mean that Trump would get to appoint new ones that would be much worse and with many more years ahead of them.
And with Trump filling the executive branch with the worst scumbags he can find, chosen specifically for their willingness to be loyal sycophants who won’t let ethics or laws get in the way of doing his bidding, you aren’t going to get any help there. Again, this is exactly why the senate has to approve appointments but they are also scumbags right now. And for the same reason, the impeachment that should be happening for basically every member of this administration are not coming.
All that being said, there is resistance coming from both the executive and judicial branches. This administration has been firing people illegally in part because it can’t get them to do the illegal shit they want them to do. And those illegal actions and the related illegal firings have been taken to court and the administration has lost nearly 95% off the time. Sometimes the Supreme Court has stepped in to bail them out, but in most cases the ruling stands and the administration has eventually complied.
All of which is to say that, while there are many flaws both big and small in the American system, it isn’t the system itself that is at fault here, it’s the elected officials and the corrupt assholes they appointed. There is no system that will work when every branch of government is in the hands of people who ignore their ethical and legal obligations.
So it is the system’s fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.
I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.
The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.
How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It’s just asking to be abused by fascists.
Political impartiality is a myth. All actors have motives and biases. We should strive to build a robust system that has the fail-safes to prevent bad actors from doing things like:
Gerrymandering districts to disenfranchise their political opponents
Appointing political allies to lifelong terms controlling the justice system
Allowing corporate money into politics and the treatment of corporations as people
Using pardons for cronyism
A fair system is not an apolitical one, it is a very political one, with strong convictions and ideals about the rights of its citizens, such that they are unalienable.
No system will long survive players acting in bad faith. There’s no system you can come up with that is immune to conservatives and capitalists fucking with it. It might take them years, but they will never stop. They are the worst people on earth. If you could thanos-snap away conservatives, the world would become a better place overnight. Every problem we’re facing is either their fault, or made worse by them.
And we’re never going to get rid of conservatives. There are always going to be shitty humans who believe their in-group needs to be protected and the out-group needs to be bound. Shitty, scared, little shit bags that will blame brown people or queers or whatever, anything, so they can think down familiar paths and avoid any hard introspection.
So I don’t know. You don’t stop building a home because the elements are always trying to tear it down. But you can’t punch the wind in the fucking throat so hard they cry and vomit at the same time, so maybe it’s not quite the same as a maga hat.
We already require the President and Senate to agree to appoint a Justice. The problem there is the Senate gives each state equal representation with no regard to their population (this has been an issue since before the country was a country) and there’s absolutely no way that enough rural states are going to vote to change that system.
So it is the system’s fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.
The president can nominate anyone, but they have to be approved by the senate. Every justice we had made it through that process, most before they scrapped the filibuster.
I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.
The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.
Legislation doesn’t have to have support from both parties either. The filibuster rule makes it possible for a minority party to hold up certain things, but there is no requirement that anything be supported by both parties.
And even if we did have a system where a majority of both parties was required to approve a judicial appointment or attorney, that would just break the system even more. It would give a veto to the Republicans for every appointment regardless of which party is in the majority and they would gladly leave half the government vacant when they don’t hold the white house, or make such extreme demands that it wouldn’t matter which party the president belongs to. This would just give the most extreme group more power to grind the government to a halt and hold the whole system hostage.
How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It’s just asking to be abused by fascists.
Law should be politically impartial.
Yes, they should be. Unfortunately, those laws can only be written, enacted, interpreted, administered and enforced by people. Laws have no power on their own. And we have to have a process for determining who is in a position to oversee those laws. Some of those people are elected. Some are appointed. Some are hired or promoted independently within organizations that answer to elected and/or appointed officials. And there is necessarily a trade off when balancing power between elected officials (who are going to be the most politicized but also the ones who are answerable to the people directly) and those who are more independent (who can be less vulnerable to momentary political currents but also never have to answer to the general public).
As I said, there are many flaws in the American system, some of which are very big. But we also have numerous mechanisms that should prevent situations like this. The problem is they all require someone to do their fucking job and push back. Many of those furthest removed from electoral politics have been doing a lot to uphold legal and ethical standards. But when the elected officials and their appointees at the highest levels are either actively undermining the law or simply failing to do their duty to defend the law, it isn’t the law that’s at fault.
If only I’d posted more than one sentence, maybe I could have addressed the issue of impeachment… even though the comment I was responding to specifically mentioned the legal system, and the point I was making was about how no legal safety mechanism can function when the people in charge of it are corrupt, which is a problem when the people at the top in all the branches of government are corrupt.
It’s past the deadline already no? She was told to release documents, and instead she released rectangles. One would expect someone at her age to know the difference between English letters and big rectangles.
then just fuckin’ do it! She damn well knew that she was breaking the law, so hold her to account! they don’t give a damn about your empty threats.
DO SOMETHING!
That’s not how democrats work.
First, they give a verbal warning: “we are very disappointed”.
Then, comes a written warning: “we are really really disappointed now”
And then they flip and flop and don’t do anything.
You missed the part where they blast/slam them.
it’s not blast/slam, it’s BLAST/SLAM.
They then point out how hypocritical the known hypocrites are.
You forgot the protest video where they listen to the Hamilton soundtrack in solidarity with all the people starving and being abducted to concentration camps.
While kneeling in African garments.
And the small signs of dissatisfaction.
But the coordinated dance moves will be insane.
Do they count to three?
Only when it’s when it doesn’t matter if they’re successful at counting that high
democrats “work”?
I was just thinking, and I fucking hate to say this but, trump was (ugh) right when he called them the “do nothing democrats”. Joke of a political opposition.
Yes of course this is all Democrats’ fault 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Considering the Dems don’t control the House, Senate, or White House, the only power they do have currently is promising future prosecution if they take back one of the branches of government. The Republican-led congress and White House are obviously not going to do anything.
What a ridiculous system. So basically politicians in the ruling government can’t be held responsible and prosecuted according to the law if they hold power in the government?
I mean, I already knew the American legal system was a fucking joke when Trump got away with all his crimes and then he pardoned a ton of other criminals. Even though he shouldn’t have this kind of power, he’s the President.
But now you’re saying that certain other people in the government cannot be prosecuted either? WTF?!
I’m no big fan of the Democrats, but historically they are willing to get rid of their own when even accused of wrongdoing. See Senator Al Franken for the silliest example of this.
Republicans will not, in the vast majority of cases, do the same.
Hey now, Putin does not approve this. Angry downvote!! /s
Well yes and no. If you are thinking of it like a parliamentary system don’t. We don’t require the formation of a government through a majority party of coalition.
Each representative is elected to an existing body and they have to figure it out.
So theoretically you can have multiple combinations on which party controls the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency. Honestly we don’t even have to have parties you could have every seat filled by politically unaligned independents.
Currently all elected offices in the federal government are controlled by the Republicans. They will not remove their own party’s president.
But theoretically in the mid terms the democratic party could become the majority in the House and the Senate. The president would of course still be the same. But they could then attempt to remove him from office through impeachment.
It’s a confusing mess, but yeah that’s the US system
The Justice system prosecutes. Political parties don’t.
That’s how it should be. But it’s literally the opposite right now. Trump is issuing orders to prosecute all of his political “enemies” and the actual criminals in the government are not being prosecuted by the justice system at all.
That’s what fascism is, when people want to give their power to dear leader. So it’ll happen with GOP and not with Dems. Fun. So Dems are still a political party that can’t prosecute.
The problem is that you have a majority on the Supreme Court that are blatantly abusing their power and ignoring the law when it advances their side’s agenda, including just declaring the president to be above the law.
This would be the kind of thing that should lead to impeachment, but that requires a supermajority in the senate (because you don’t want whichever party has a majority to be able to easily abuse the impeachment process) but that won’t happen because every single republican with even a hint of integrity has been pushed out by Trump over the past decade. And even if there were Republicans that weren’t entirely corrupt, dismantling your own Supreme Court majority would be a tough sell politically. And even if they did remove the existing justices, it would just mean that Trump would get to appoint new ones that would be much worse and with many more years ahead of them.
And with Trump filling the executive branch with the worst scumbags he can find, chosen specifically for their willingness to be loyal sycophants who won’t let ethics or laws get in the way of doing his bidding, you aren’t going to get any help there. Again, this is exactly why the senate has to approve appointments but they are also scumbags right now. And for the same reason, the impeachment that should be happening for basically every member of this administration are not coming.
All that being said, there is resistance coming from both the executive and judicial branches. This administration has been firing people illegally in part because it can’t get them to do the illegal shit they want them to do. And those illegal actions and the related illegal firings have been taken to court and the administration has lost nearly 95% off the time. Sometimes the Supreme Court has stepped in to bail them out, but in most cases the ruling stands and the administration has eventually complied.
All of which is to say that, while there are many flaws both big and small in the American system, it isn’t the system itself that is at fault here, it’s the elected officials and the corrupt assholes they appointed. There is no system that will work when every branch of government is in the hands of people who ignore their ethical and legal obligations.
So it is the system’s fault for allowing this. Why not make the system so that the president or the ruling party alone cannot appoint the supreme court justices.
I mean I only spent 5 minutes thinking about this, but why not make the appointments work the same way they vote for laws? I.e. both parties, not individuals, have to vote and get a majority to appoint, and only in emergency situations could anyone appoint a justice without a vote.
The same should be done for appointing the highest attorneys in the country.
How fucking stupid is it to allow the ruling party to control the justice system. It’s just asking to be abused by fascists.
Law should be politically impartial.
Political impartiality is a myth. All actors have motives and biases. We should strive to build a robust system that has the fail-safes to prevent bad actors from doing things like:
A fair system is not an apolitical one, it is a very political one, with strong convictions and ideals about the rights of its citizens, such that they are unalienable.
No system will long survive players acting in bad faith. There’s no system you can come up with that is immune to conservatives and capitalists fucking with it. It might take them years, but they will never stop. They are the worst people on earth. If you could thanos-snap away conservatives, the world would become a better place overnight. Every problem we’re facing is either their fault, or made worse by them.
And we’re never going to get rid of conservatives. There are always going to be shitty humans who believe their in-group needs to be protected and the out-group needs to be bound. Shitty, scared, little shit bags that will blame brown people or queers or whatever, anything, so they can think down familiar paths and avoid any hard introspection.
So I don’t know. You don’t stop building a home because the elements are always trying to tear it down. But you can’t punch the wind in the fucking throat so hard they cry and vomit at the same time, so maybe it’s not quite the same as a maga hat.
We already require the President and Senate to agree to appoint a Justice. The problem there is the Senate gives each state equal representation with no regard to their population (this has been an issue since before the country was a country) and there’s absolutely no way that enough rural states are going to vote to change that system.
The president can nominate anyone, but they have to be approved by the senate. Every justice we had made it through that process, most before they scrapped the filibuster.
Legislation doesn’t have to have support from both parties either. The filibuster rule makes it possible for a minority party to hold up certain things, but there is no requirement that anything be supported by both parties.
And even if we did have a system where a majority of both parties was required to approve a judicial appointment or attorney, that would just break the system even more. It would give a veto to the Republicans for every appointment regardless of which party is in the majority and they would gladly leave half the government vacant when they don’t hold the white house, or make such extreme demands that it wouldn’t matter which party the president belongs to. This would just give the most extreme group more power to grind the government to a halt and hold the whole system hostage.
Yes, they should be. Unfortunately, those laws can only be written, enacted, interpreted, administered and enforced by people. Laws have no power on their own. And we have to have a process for determining who is in a position to oversee those laws. Some of those people are elected. Some are appointed. Some are hired or promoted independently within organizations that answer to elected and/or appointed officials. And there is necessarily a trade off when balancing power between elected officials (who are going to be the most politicized but also the ones who are answerable to the people directly) and those who are more independent (who can be less vulnerable to momentary political currents but also never have to answer to the general public).
As I said, there are many flaws in the American system, some of which are very big. But we also have numerous mechanisms that should prevent situations like this. The problem is they all require someone to do their fucking job and push back. Many of those furthest removed from electoral politics have been doing a lot to uphold legal and ethical standards. But when the elected officials and their appointees at the highest levels are either actively undermining the law or simply failing to do their duty to defend the law, it isn’t the law that’s at fault.
That’s not a requirement for impeachment and removal. That’s an independent power of Congress.
If only I’d posted more than one sentence, maybe I could have addressed the issue of impeachment… even though the comment I was responding to specifically mentioned the legal system, and the point I was making was about how no legal safety mechanism can function when the people in charge of it are corrupt, which is a problem when the people at the top in all the branches of government are corrupt.
that would be doing “something”
You think the people blatantly ignoring the law will miraculously start listening if the Democrats take back one of the branches?
It’s past the deadline already no? She was told to release documents, and instead she released rectangles. One would expect someone at her age to know the difference between English letters and big rectangles.