Makeitstop

Honestly, if I was some admiral trying to protect a bunch of R&D projects in development from Trump, I'd probably wrap as many of them as I could into a pitch for a big battleship with his name on it then spend the entire budget on the technologies that are supposedly going into the ship. Put basically no effort into the ship itself, just show him concept art and maybe send him a model or something to make him think progress is being made.

And that's how the party ends up on the run for counterfeiting.

He's almost too charismatic. You can't help but be like "yeah, he's right, maybe Christmas is a humbug..."

Does he live in the mall then?

Even his handpicked board didn't all go along with it. One of them is suing over this, and said their mic was muted so that there couldn't be any objections.

The only thing that should be named after Trump is a maximum security prison that houses every scumbag in this administration along with their accomplices.

Our rule was always that if you bought 50 of something like food or ammo, you don't have to track how many you've used, we'll just assume you're well stocked and resupplying offscreen. The limit only comes back if the party is overtly cut off from resupply, like if they are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island.

This means you can easily have a limitless supply of normal arrows but still have to track your silver arrows, smoke bomb arrows, etc. Or you can invest the money to just have a limitless supply of whatever specialty item you think is worth the cost.

I really hate how many people resent the idea of any kind of student loan forgiveness.

Billionaires set up vast financial systems for the sole purpose of dodging taxes. No bid contracts get handed out like candy to politically connected scumbags. An obscene amount of money gets dumped into insurance companies that only make your healthcare worse. Giant corporations violate laws and rob both workers and customers, and if anything is done at all it will be a tiny fine that's smaller than the profit from their crimes.

All those things that actually harm the rest of us? No big deal. But you suggest that maybe it's a bad idea to keep generations ensnared in crippling debt? THAT'S A FUCKING OUTRAGE!

I mean obviously it wouldn't be fair to have a policy that directly benefits some people but not others. Why should student loan borrowers get special treatment? Sure, I'll fucking riot if anyone touches my tax credits for having kids and a mortgage, but that's different, that's good for society... unlike education. Besides, it's not my fault your generation don't buy houses and start families. Oh don't bitch to me about how you can't afford it, maybe you shouldn't have taken those loans out then...

They didn't rule on the case, they just decided not to immediately lift the lower court's order blocking the deployment. Still better than 95% of their other rulings, but not a final decision.

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.

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.

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.