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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Not an american but is the famous american "checks and balances" need to be turned off and on again or smt? It doesn't seem to be working.
The "checks and balances" depend on putting ambitious people in different parts of the government, and giving them competing roles. Then, naturally, excesses get curbed because no one part of the government would want to cede too much of its power to the other.
It did not forsee a future where the leaders of the other co-equal branches of government would subjugate themselves to the President's ego.
I'm American and I'm not convinced it was ever turned on. Pretty sure it was theorized and marketed well and all of you believed it as much as we did.
Just part of the elementary school indoctrination.
The real tip off was that we had a song for how great the flag is :)
They ripped the CPU out of the socket, cut traces around the motherboard, stole the ram and paid off the IT staff and management to look the other way.
Apparently, and who would have guessed it, laws only work when people are willing to follow and or enforce them.
It's definitely not working now. It got destroyed after 9/11 - Bush was only too happy about the opportunity to make some changes that had already been waiting in a drawer for who knows how many years - and it's honestly a miracle it took so long for someone to exploit its absence to its fullest extent.
But arguably it all went downhill long before Bush.
Checks and balances is working exactly as the founding fathers envisioned.
...by cashing checks and hoarding balances.
The founders were mostly slave/land owning robber barons. Washington was one of the most wealthiest people in the colonies…
Yeah the only reason they didn't want to remain a colony was because they thought they could become more wealthy personally breaking off from the British empire, seizing more land from the natives, and taking more land from Britain's other colony of Canada.
Then bind all the states and their settlers and natives by saddling them with national debt to lock them into a unfettered capitalist experiment on an unexploited resource rich land with the moral framework of civilising and subsuming the native population.
The checks and balances are working mostly as intended. The purpose of the system is:
As far as I can tell,
Besides, even when someone like Mamdani gets elected, they can't effect any meaningful change because they are "checked" by the pro-capitalist legislature and "balanced" by the corrupt judiciary.
It doesn't need a reboot, it needs a complete realignment of who's in charge.