You can’t really have checks and balances that survive those supposed to safeguard them allowing the system to be dismantled. Not to mention apathy or active wish from the public towards the system being dismantled.
7th grade for him saw the government well on its way to setting up the coming storm
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I was having a good night I didn’t need this reminder
… today …
America was built on the ideas of freedom and equality by slave owners who didn’t think women should be allowed to vote.
I mean, they did give an earnest try at preventing a king from happening, and it did work for a couple hundred years.
Don’t forget they were also terrified of democracy. The Senate is one of the most comically anti-democratic institutions ever concocted. Wyoming has as much power as California. I mean it beggars belief that anyone but a complete imbecile could agree to something like that.
For an united states sort of setup having one level of government representing the states particularly makes sense to me. EU has a similar setup (but much more complicated) and a suggestion that it’d just be based on popular vote would cause a civil war.
The EU has a representative setup, which is democratic. Nothing like the US Senate, which is designed to rob people of representation.
Again, governments justify their existence by serving people, full stop, not arbitrary land masses. What’s next, a tertiary chamber of Congress for corporations?
The EU has a representative setup, which is democratic. It is nothing like the US Senate, which was created specifically to undermine democracy.
I’m just saying Council of the European Union and European Council vs. European Parliament is same sort of separation between “popular vote” and member state governments and the reasoning is similar. There’s been a lot of discussion about how singular states can stop the will of the rest of the EU and so on. Taking away that veto is a real hot button issue.
Again, governments justify their existence by representing people, full stop, not arbitrary land masses.
Ostensibly the states should represent people, that is specifically their state’s people. Whereas congress and president should be more about the whole federation, as I’ve understood it. How well that works, well, that’s another matter.
What’s next, a tertiary chamber in Congress for corporations?
Ireland has something a bit like that:
"Most members of the Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Oireachtas (parliament) of Ireland, are elected as part of vocational panels nominated partly by current Oireachtas members and partly by vocational and special interest associations. The Seanad also includes two university constituencies. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_Commercial_Panel
If a federal government that levies taxes and enacts laws affecting individual citizens represents “states” in a manner disproportional to the population, the result is undemocratic.
This is a normative fact.
You can’t argue that giving some citizens hundreds of times the voting power over others is somehow democratic. Or is a person in California and Texas worth less than someone living in Alaska or Delaware? Why do they get less say in how they are taxed?
1 person, 1 vote.
You are thinking of democracy as a binary thing instead of as a sliding scale. Not to mention you can have democratic form of government that isn’t very democratic or representative in actuality.
Federations often have that sort of two tiered setup where there’s general population vote and a level where each state can represent themselves as the states. The idea makes sense when you think of it as a federation of separate and equal units, with the state tier you make sure every state is equally represented. Otherwise they might not want to be part of the whole federation. Of course it can be horribly uneven when you consider the populations. But that’s not too different from EU, where amount of MEPs differs but council seats and number of commissioners stays the same. Both Germany with 83 million people and Malta with 0,5 million people have the same number of council seats, commissars and both have veto rights. Unsurprisingly it’s a topic that sometimes gets heated, but like i said, without it there’d be outrage because everyone would be worried of core big countries deciding everything. Many countries would probably fuck right off from the Union.
I think there’s been some misunderstanding here. None of this is some value take from me or me arguing for or against something. I haven’t at least consciously given much of an opinion on this, I’ve just described the reasoning behind the system and how it makes sense to me from the member state perspective.
Democracy is not binary. That is why democratic scholars consider the United States to be what’s called “a flawed democracy.”
And the Senate is one of those flaws.
The idea makes sense when you think of it as a federation of separate and equal units
That’s the problem. California and Wyoming are separate, but they are not equal! (Arguably they’re not even separate.) Wyoming has 1/40th the population. One person in Wyoming has the same voting power as 40 Californians to determine their own laws and taxes. That’s reminiscent of taxation without representation. For all practical purposes, the people of California have been disenfranchised by the US government.
Lastly, how Ireland, or Star Wars, or anyone else organizes their federal system has no bearing on whether the US Senate is in fact anti-democratic. 92% of the countries in the world are not full democracies.
It’s not democratic from a person level, but it is more democratic from a state level. At the time they hadn’t quite figured out if they wanted to be a country or a collection of states that sometimes work together.
Democracy is a system of government whose power is vested by the people (“demos”). Notice that the Senate does not legislate on behalf of people. Instead, it represents the interests of arbitrary often unpopulated land masses. It is as stupid as it sounds and the exact opposite of democracy.
One of the main arguments by Senate proponents during the US founding was that democracy was unacceptable. “Government by the people for the people? What gives these people the right…” etcetera. If you want quotes I’ll dig them up, but that’s the vibe.
“Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. […]
No. In fact, two democracies have never gone to war with each other. Why would they?
Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man’s life or property will be secure." - John Adams (1807)
Ah, redistribution of wealth and moral progress, terrifying. In case it’s not obvious from these pathetic quotes, John Adams was a moron.
Guess I should have said, it’s not democratic it’s Republican. And the question being what should legislature represent. I’m curious how the EU works as a governing body, is there proportional representation? Or does each county get an equal vote. Sorry for my ignorance.
Also yeah John Adams is a bit of a baffoon there.
The EU uses the ‘d’Hondt method’ which is a mathematical formula for proportional representation systems.
This is the opposite of the US senate.
It’s important to note that there’s no distinction between a democracy and a republic: a republic just is a type of (representative) democracy.
The United States is a republic, true, but there are aspects of our government that are undemocratic and vulnerable to corruption. The Senate is one of these aspects. The Supreme Court is another, so is the electoral college, and the influence of money, and the enormous power of the chief executive.
The first two political parties were formed around that very debate.
Too bad Jefferson didn’t rap.
Just had that fever.
The founding fathers were correct. A pure democracy is also known as mob rule. Anytime you can get 51% to agree with you, you can do whatever you like.
If 51% vote to take the homes of black people, that’s decided and done.
Which is why modern democracies are all some form of representative democracy. Which in theory is supposed to act as a sort of check and balance on the system.
I’m not following your argument, though I am slightly drunk. The disproportionate representation that’s the focus of the post means that less than 51% of the populace could wield the levers of power in the Senate. That’s minority rule, which is even worse than mob rule.
I get that mob rule is bad, and that we need checks in place to curb the possibility of abuses of power, but I see that as necessitating laws for super majorities and ranked choice or other ways of ensuring less extreme representatives getting into power.
Not exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
Most places wanted no slavery.
The original tryanny of the minority was the planation owners that would not join beyond the Articles of Confederation unless they could continue with the slavery.
Women were still held down as they had been hisrorically, damn near everywhere. Not realy unique here.
But they got it started and we changed some things. We just didn’t change enough, or perhaps changed the wrong things.
Maybe it’s time you guys rewrote your constitution into something more modern instead of treating the old one as a holy scripture handed down from Olympus.
But I doubt that’ll ever happen.
The document is open to interpretation. It can mean anything you want it to mean. For example, the first amendment is used to guarantee that unlimited amounts of money can be spent on election campaigns. So I’m not sure rewriting the thing would accomplish anything other than forcing the oligarchs to figure out new legal loopholes.
Or let people with money/power now write whatever they want. Because who is going to stop them?
Trump is about to rewrite our Constitution, just not the way it should be written.
If he does, at least it’ll show that it can be rewritten.
Why do people pretend like a piece of paper matters. Trump has all the power and there are no checks and balances left. Imagine if he breaks the constitution, are zombie Washington, Jefferson and Franklin going to rise from the grave and enact vengeance?
Every rule that’s been broken was unbreakable until it was broken.
Like all those amendments did?
Now is definitely not the time to rewrite the constitution. Could you imagine what the powers that be would do to it?
Subscription based rights.
Already in effect. Lost of basic services require a mailing address, which means either rent or property taxes. Medical care often requires a job to grant insurance, and any chronic or ongoing illness is the definition of a subscription.
I’d like the 1st amendment to be altered slightly. Sure, everyone should be free to speak without government sanction but that shouldn’t mean freedom to lie. Fox and the rightwing have been abusing the shit out of it for years.
This is a terrible, horrible idea. It would give the government the power to censor anyone and anything, and all they have to do is claim that the thing they are censoring is a lie.
Well treating lies to be as valid as fact has brought you half a population living in their own reality and Trump as president.
Placing exceptions on the freedom of speech does not mean that lies will get silenced. It means that whatever the government wants to censor will get silenced. Because the government will be the one who does the censoring. Or, if the censoring is not done by the government directly - the government will still be the one appointing the organization who does the censoring.
The freedom of speech must be protected - even if it means letting bad agents spread their lies uncensored. Because if you try to give the government the power to censor them, you’ll end up with a new Department of Truth led by Alex Jones (who is now unoccupied)
So basically you want to give trump the power to censor you because he says you’re lying?
How would you tackle the lies or are you happy that Fox is able to conjure up its own version of reality with no pushback?
I wouldn’t. I would teach people critical thinking skills so they can tell a lie from a truth. How would you determine what is a lie and therefore needs to be censored?
Instead of modifying freedom of speech, make large-scale lies jusification to banish someone from the industry, like sex-offenders and schools.
Still a bit vague and as always figuring out what’s true is hard and ajudicating truth is even harder, but any errors won’t be nearly as bad, and it would still be effective.
The core issue here is still agreeing on truth though. Can you define a method of ajudicating truth that can’t be misused by an overwhelming amount of bad-faith actors? Can you bind an organization to a method even if every member wants something else?
Please don’t treat the freedom of speech (or any other important democratic right) as a creative limitation…
My teacher in middle school did specifically call out that it would take a project over several decades to co-opt the system.
Well, they’ve been going after the judgeships for decades.
Yeah. That’s exactly what happened.
When I was growing up, they told us the US was the greatest country in the world. Now that I’m older, I realize it’s one of the worst in the Western world in nearly every statistic.
So…the us is the greatest at being the worse!
A lot of people are being shown that a lot of stuff that kept their country going was decorum, shame and tradition, not rule of law.
Interesting take on The Social Contract.
But basically when your entire socoety is disingenuous to some extent, shit falls apart eventually.
Turns out it only works if the population doesn’t believe they want that.
To be fair we were lied to growing up. Be nice to others and santa.
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I’d believe it when I see it
Checks and balances wasn’t about avoiding fascism.
It was to make sure all three branches of governments stayed in power over the body politic.
And they still are in power.
I was sure that preventing tyranny was part of the deal?
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