Bad!
“First of all, there are no federal libel laws.”
I know that ineptitude is not an impeachable offense per se, but I think the Founders didn’t really think through just how incompetent a president the American public might elect to the office. I think that there should be some kind of basic competency test that assures that the President of the United States has some basic understanding of how governance and law actually work.
Stranger
^This deserves some recognition. (“Unpresidented” is perfection!)
Frankly, I was surprised that Trump and his staff bestirred themselves at all, to try to get some stuff done last week;* surely it was safe to assume that no matter how few accomplishments Trump racked up, he’d simply lie about his 100-days record–now and for years to come.
*https://thinkprogress.org/trump-white-house-100-days-accomplishments-release-errors-ebae8fe13d92
As good as it is, “unpresidented” is not something that Smapti made up…Trump actually tweeted it a couple of months before the inauguration, in a tweet that was complaining about China “stealing” a scientific data drone.
Well, that is depressing. (Trump truly is parody-proof.)
My apologies if it’s already been mentioned, but did anyone catch the fact that EPA climate change data has been removed from the website?
This crosses a dangerous threshold from rhetoric to actual policy. The policy of this administration is that facts simply don’t matter.
There was a desperate attempt to save it in January, in the expectation that the vandals Trump appointed to his cabinet would do it. Don’t know if they got it all.
Agreed. I used to think we had a whole system in place designed to keep morons like Trump from ever becoming president. Then I was reminded that said system is simply the American electorate, which I ended up overestimating by several orders of magnitude.
The GOP were talking about impeaching Hillary Clinton from day one. This is pathetic that they have nothing to say about this.
Trump can’t obviously do this, but even if he could all it would mean is he, his followers and the media outlets that lie constantly (conservative media) would be drowning in lawsuits.
They’re not going to change libel laws. They’re just testing the political temperature with that one. What they’d rather do is exploit some national emergency and declare it illegal to ‘incite criminal acts against the State’ or something to that effect – sedition laws and the like.
The system isn’t geared so much to preventing an imbecile or despot from being elected, but to limit the amount of power he could effectively wield. However, it assumes that the judicial and legislative branches of the government would counter the bad actions of the executive. The former has done a credible job so far, despite Trump’s attempt to brand judges ruling against his executive orders to ban Muslim immigration as illegitimate. However, while Congress has effectively stalled the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it was due to internecine fighting rather than principled rejection of a nonsensical and ill-defined agenda.
Our system for preventing this kind of thing from happening is participation by an informed electorate. Unfortunately, we have a lot of voters who are either ignorant or intentionally obtuse to the fact that Trump is not going to carry out the majority of his campaign promises and that it would be disastrous for the nation if he did.
Yeah, well, I think that a few “so-called judges”–even Neil Gorsuch–would take issue with that kind of overreaching abuse of power, and Trump has nowhere near the political base to pull that off even if it were popular among his supporters.
Stranger
Yeah, I remember George W Bush was an unpopular president in the spring of 2001. He ended up passing the USA Patriot Act with hardly any opposition months later. Times and political dynamics can change.
Fair point, and even worse was the fact that the Patriot Act was clearly drafted well before the attack and its promoters were awaiting just this kind of event to push it through Congress before anyone even had a chance to read or question it. But I don’t think Trump, Bannon, et al are nearly as sophisticated and canny as Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, et al, but your cautionary note is nonetheless taken.
If you’re concerned about some kind of attempt by the Trump administration to completely undermine the Constitution–and you should be regardless what you think of their competence–donate your Christmas and birthday money to the Center for Constitutional Rights, American Civil Liberties Union, The Constitution Project, and non-profit investigative organization ProPublica.org. If Trump’s efforts are mired in legal challenge and constant scandal it will hopefully forestall dire changes until such a time as the government can return to something approximating sanity and reason.
Stranger
The AP is reporting, from anonymous sources, that Sebastian Gorka and his Neanderthal-sized cranium will be leaving the White House. It’s unclear if he will be reassigned to another administration position.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/04/30/us/politics/ap-us-trump-adviser.html
The Neanderthal Anti-Defamation League is on line 2.
Mike Pence says that Trump didn’t change his stance on NATO, NATO changed to move towards him.
I’m always amazed at how readily even a Super Christian will lie for purely earthly gains.
If only that were true. They are lazy and witless, but not ineffectual. As I have posted before in one of these Trump threads, his appointment of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court has fucked us up for probably the next several decades, so even if he doesn’t do anything else, he’s done more than enough.
I’m thinking the founders were quite aware. Thus the restrictions on popular voting in the Constitution at the beginning. Neither senators nor the president were intended to be a popular vote.
True enough, some of our founders pretended to be aimed at political equality for all, but didn’t really mean it. Others didn’t even pretend, they had not the slightest interest in establishing an egalitarian democracy, their first interest being establishing a nation that reliably paid its war bonds.
But let it be also noted that even the hypocrisy was a major advance.
First its a fantasy, then its impractical, then its too soon, and then it happens. First you got your thesis, which is a set idea, and then you get the opposite idea, your antithesis, and then…hey, quit shoving! I’m posting here, knock it off with the pushing…all right, all right, shit, where’s my hat…