“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
No mention at all about “former slaves”.
In order to repair the damage, we would have to face up to the fact that we have done the damage. (In the sense that a plurality of voters comprising a plurality of electors chose him again, and he was then enabled and often supported by one of our major parties and some major, supposedly impartial institutions like SCOTUS.)
We are incapable of that, so we’ll paper over the cracks and hope that the retirement of Trump and our general wealth will get us through.
Sounds like what they did in Germany after World War II. It is still illegal for Nazis to run for office. The current AfD party is trying to do an end run around this by adopting far-right policies without the Nazi name. But outlawing the Nazi party did work for a long time.
Problem is, the U.S. Constitution makes it extremely difficult to adopt the needed provisions.
Laws that delegate congressional power to the presidency should be repealed. That would help some.
Re the thread title, De-Trumpification is very important but I’m not confident much will be done to prevent it MAGA from happening again. We’ll see some arrests, which will be worthless as a deterent.
P.S. I’m not suggesting we outlaw the GOP. Rather I would outlaw power grabs like executive emergency declarations, firing heads of independent agencies, the president having a say in tariff rates, and the president and VP having anything to do with elections.
They executed Beria pretty quickly, but compared to de-Nazification, de-Stalinization was low-key. It took years and there a reason why the secret speech was secret.
The cults that were broken by the end of World War II were broken, to the extent they were, by a complete shift in the media.
I hope the cult is broken. Maybe MAGA will just go out of style. But accurate info cannot do it because of how decentralized U.S. media is. (The good part of U.S. media being decentralized is that Trump seems unable to take it over.)
But we can blame SCOTUS who has consistently and flagrantly acted as cover for Trump when he should have been imprisoned and disqualified from holding office. As well as giving him powers to do things that is clearly outside the president’s authority.
We can blame the industries that put their weight behind Trump as punishment for 4 years of prioritized labor rights, environmental stewardship, and enforcement of tax laws.
We can blame a media that has spent 30 years crowing about Hillary’s emails, Biden’s age and every other non scandal, while happily sanewashing a decade of rabid gutter racism, Covid denial, and an attempted coup by a man who has the intelligence of a 3rd grader.
The most important deTrumpification isn’t his tacky bull**** it’s about remaking or destroying the institutions that permitted him.
But that’s my point. We could, but I don’t think we can.
I think De-Trumpification is necessary, and I think the order of priority is:
- Identifying the most egregious abuses of Executive power and
- Correcting them through legislation and Consitutional Amendment;
- Identifying and putting on trial everyone who overstepped and overreached;
- Putting in motion long-term plans to prevent a recurrence
- Putting in motion long-term plans to apologize and atone on the international stage
- the rest of everything.
In reality, as with Merrick Garland, we’ll get partway through #1 and stop, because everyone is petrified of being unpopular.
I thougt the fever would break in 2020 with the loss of the 2020 election, but now I don’t think it’ll break until Trump’s death. Obviously there will always be true believers, as recently as 2019 I ran into someone from Kazakhstan who wasn’t shy about praising Stalin, but I do think the fever will break after Trump’s death. I think we can see Trump’s cult of personality collapsing even now.
What I suspect will happen is many Republican politicians will do their best to distance themselves from Trump. They’ll explain how they signed on to make American great again but were betrayed by someone who was ultimately only in it for themselves. A lot of Republican voters will do the same.
Trump actually was charged, Garland took too long, but the only reason he isn’t in prison right now is the all expansive precedent that rules never apply to Trump.
That’s why fixing the courts is really the biggest thing. As long as we have a 6-3 calvinball court nothing else matters.
Who? The states can still charge crimes.
Not true at all. And he would not have been disqualified in any case.
There were only two Federal Indictments- neither was squashed due to presidential Limited immunity-
*Classified Documents Case (Florida)- dismissed by Judge Cannon. *
2020 Election Interference Case -. Dismissed by the Department of Justice due to policy against prosecuting a sitting or incoming president. A conviction was by no means a sure thing
Nothing to do with SCOTUS.
Georgia dismissed it’s own election case.
Except the election interference case should have been tried in March of 2024, but SCOTUS intentionally slow played every appeal so that they could pull the BS presidential immunity concept in time to derail the proceedings until 2025. Trump wanted to run out the clock, and SCOTUS obeyed.
And it would have taken years to finish and years for the appeals, by which time trump indeed would have been president (elected November) and maybe the appeals would still be ongoing. There is no way a trial would have been finished in 7 months. Hell the pretrial motions would go on that long. And before anyone tries to quote the Speedy Trial Act, the clock pauses while all pre-trial motions are pending. It could not have happened. Period. Big Federal white collar cases take years and years.
Congress could totally reorganize the court. For example they could establish a constitutional court the only court with jurisdiction over the constitution, leaving SCOTUS with jurisdiction only over the things mentioned explicitly in the constitution: suits between states or involving foreign countries. And make the status of the constitutional judges very limited. For example, let it consist of 9 judges from different districts chosen by all the federal appeals judges and for one year only.
Another thing I would do immediately is overturn Citizens United.
I think the US is likely to be slipping into a real depression by 2029 and they will have to act immediately to emerge from that before they get blamed. Of course MAGA will blame the Dems regardless but what can you do?
Would likely take a Constitutional ad.
The UK also has corporate personhood.
In the USA, corporate personhood started in 1886, with Supreme Court case *[Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co]. It was based on several earlier cases-
and all Citizens United did was- *
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 844 (2010): the Supreme Court of the United States held that corporate funding of independent broadcasts of films about political subjects when there is an upcoming election cannot be limited under the First Amendment, overruling Austin (1990) and partly overruling McConnell (2003).[51]
So, it aint just one case- corporate personhood is based upon about 200 years of case law.
Being bound by decisions made 200 yrs ago is part of the problem here, in my opinion.
That was then, they could not have foreseen how that would eventually play out.
Yes, but corporate personhood is necessary for a lot of domains. No sensible person (corporate or otherwise) wants to repeal that. What we want is to place limits on corporate personhood: to make them second-class citizens who can enter into contracts but not have a free rein in the political realm. That can be done with simple restrictions on how corporate persons can spend money.
Mmmm, yipee skipee. Weak sauce at the most.
An explicit or overt campaign dedicated to undoing Trump’s actions would be politically moronic, and I fully expect the Democrats to launch into just such an effort with full fanfare and endless moralizing. Dems haven’t wanted to actually ‘govern’ anything for half a century now, they are quite comfortable being the ‘good cop’ mask of whatever it is our government has actually become.
Any competent governing activities would naturally have to bulldoze Trump’s work simply because his nonsense would be in the way. If the one doing the bulldozing simply crows about the ongoing progress of moving forward, the process of filling in Trump’s potholes along the way can be treated as incidental in the same way replacing a carpet makes a house more comfortable, and hey! the place also does not smell like cat pee anymore.
In my opinion, recovering Trump’s ill-gotten gains would be of far more De-Trumpification benefit than locking him up – besides being more practical.
See:
David Frum in the Atlantic: What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains
I think we don’t know how politically viable de-Trumpification will be, because we don’t know what depths of unpopularity the MAGA movement will have achieved by 2029.
The one important thing is to work quickly. No matter how much people hate Trump you have to fix things before the polish on the new admin wears off.
Things like prosecutions take the time they take, but the main goal should be hitting hard and hitting fast while the right is still cowed. The suite of “fuck Trump and everyone who supported him” legislation should be passed and waiting for the new president to sign the second he or she is sworn into office.
I and hope they use The Auto Pen!