politics

The Senate is supposed to impeach him

The House Impeaches.

The Senate convicts.

But you need a supermajority in the Senate, which even the Radical Republicans of the 1870s failed to muster, despite having the half the country under Marshall Law at the time.

The founders never would have imagined something like Unitary Executive Theory would ever take off, as they assumed that each branch would be too selfish to willingly diminish their own power by handing it over to another branch.

edit: On second thought, seeing as half of them didn't know if they wanted an elected representative or a king to rule their new nation, maybe the outcome was all too predictable even back then. Apparently some people, even wise and intelligent people, tend to gravitate towards the mindset that the powerful deserve to rule and the meek deserve to be ruled over as a sort of natural order.

Balance of powers has never really worked. Congress will seldom impeach a president from their own party. Two party system has completely effed the US.

I agree. The pardon is a powerful tool with very real and valid uses, but it only works if the rest of the government is working

The founders couldn’t imagine a president making literally everyone in their party’s congress a scared little bitch.

I agree with you generally. Do they have a specific mechanism for controlling the pardon? Or would they just have to fall back on unpacking and removing the president? Because if that’s the only solution, sure it exists, but yeah the pardon power itself could probably use some work.

Back then, politicians were assumed to be honorable Gentlemen.

https://www.americanheritage.com/verdicts-history-iv-scandalous-malicious-and-seditious-libel

In 1803 the infant American Republic was running a high political fever. The ferocity of the verbal warfare raging between the Federalists, the party created by Alexander Hamilton, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by President Jefferson, has rarely been matched in American politics, even by the diatribes of today’s New Left and Ultra Right.

The first fusillades had been fired during Washington’s Presidency. The Jeffersonians, with not a little help from the Sage of Monticello himself, had set up journalists such as Philip Freneau and Benjamin Franklin Bache with one mission, to deflate and discredit an administration that was, in Jefferson’s view, “galloping fast into monarchy.” They soon had the Father of His Country in a state of near apoplexy. “That rascal Freneau,” as Washington called him, insisted on sending his scurrilous National Gazette, published in Philadelphia, to the President’s house even after he had cancelled his subscription. Freneau spent most of his abuse on Hamilton. Baclic preferred Washington as a target, calling him “treacherous,” “mischievous,” “inefficient,” and sneering at his “farce of disinterestedness” and his “stately joumeyings through the American continent in search of personal incense.”

These verbal guerrillas soon had imitators. Among the more savage was William Duane, Bache’s successor as editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. Washington, he wrote, had “discharged the loathings of a sick mind.” Even this was topped by an English newcomer, James T. Callender. In the Richmond Examiner he declared that “Mr. Washington has been twice a traitor.”

Well yes, but also the concept of honour back then was dictated largely by rich slave owners. So...

That wasn't a mistake. It was absolutely intentional.

It is vital to understand the early American state as a patronage system and the president as the ultimate patrician through which power flows. If you look at early Plantation society, and the subsequent networks of power that flow from landholders to merchant brokers and from yeomen to their wealthy oligarch neighbors, all of this fits neatly together.

The problem the American Founders saw was with the upstart plebians and landless workers. Pardons and vetos check the power of popular judges and legislators, as intended.

Should have gotten rid of it after the civil war

Perhaps the pardon should be a 2/3 vote of congress instead, just to preserve the check on the judiciary

Yeah, the "new Constitution" would be a feeding frenzy and we may as well get called "Free Corporations of America" or something, which is what we really revolted from England: the oligarchs in mainland England had sway over the King and it ignored the colonies until we were overtaxed and hardly represented.

One of my greatest personal fears is that a Constitutional Convention will be used to shove Christianity down our throats. That said, failure to regulate churches has resulted in a group of conservative churches that preach pretty much the opposite of what Jesus said. The document was a series of compromises, far from perfect. The compromise over keeping the government out of religion was to keep the peace and avoid sectarian warfare. We're seeing some hints of that as a result of the Talarico vs Paxton race in Texas.

Thomas Jefferson proposed exactly that, but other founders did not heed his advice.

Citizens united, first past the post, the two party state are the most important ones I think to fix.

That will need the constitution to be rewritten, or amended.

A two party democracy is like a society with bipolar disorder. It's just a one party state with an extra flavor. That's why the oligarchs and AIPAC et al pay off both sides.

When you have that kind of money it doesn't matter, you'll get your way because there's only two parties to bribe anyway.

Chelsea Manning wouldn't have gotten a pardon if you all had implemented that. A lot of terrible people would still have gotten pardons. Your congress is an applause machine right now

your "to sum up" section is longer than the rest of your comment

But how do we deal with the other side after all of this? They've clearly been manipulated by Fox News and social media algorithms. They think they're up-to-date with current events. The media manipulation in the US is staggering. I don't see how we move forward without tearing everything down. It's rotten from the inside out.

And a lot of them were errors of omission. Operating under the assumption that idiots and money wouldn’t undermine the checks and balances or usurp the highest office in the land. They didn’t erect enough barriers to prevent such things.