volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@Durff honestly if America was great before Trump then he wouldn't have been elected in the first place.

Impeaching him might be fun, but it's not going to make America great again. It'll just be more of the stuff that got him elected in the first place.

@tend2wobble we just need to clearly recognize the conflict of interest in this sort of thing.

@ajaykaul10 No. Not really.

Keep in mind that so much of what people are complaining about is this administration relinquishing power, relinquishing control, even as a lot of folks want the presidency to have more control over the country.

So no, we are moving away from oligarchy, and a whole lot of people are upset about that because they were used to using that power.

@TheOldGuy The problem is, the churches don't have enough money to afford it so you wouldn't get it.

@nberlat.bsky.social But that just gets into the eternal issue of special interests concentrating to elect one representative who would have to go up against all of the others vs spreading out to sway all of them a little more in their direction.

It's a strategic question of putting all the eggs in one basket or not, and there are arguments in both directions, with no objective answer.

If the people move out then all of the jurisdictions have those Ds shifting their policies.

@504DR If that was true then he wouldn't have ruled against Trump in case after case, ordering lower courts to prosecute the guy and generally rejecting the stuff Trump was asking for.

Yes, social media is full of misreporting about what the rulings actually say. But that's no excuse to believe these conspiracy theories that just don't jive with the record in front of us.

@RememberUsAlways

@RememberUsAlways people like to point to gerrymandering, but that explanation doesn't hold when Senate elections aren't subject to gerrymandering.

No, we choose these people. The representatives that fail us constantly get support from voters who campaign for them. Just everyday voters do actually elect these people.

Any day of the week congresspeople could act against the administration. They are empowered to do so. But we go out and vote for people who decide, meh, this is fine

We voters vest these folks with that authority, and that's how they use it, so here we are.

But maybe if we stopped letting them shift the blame to the courts we might someday demand that they use that authority differently.

@RememberUsAlways Right. But that doesn't change anything here.

We elect morons, and the reason we elect them is kind of secondary to the fact that we are, indeed, electing morons.

Personally I'm a lot more frustrated with the democratic representatives we reelected who are complicit with this administration. But that's the group we voted for, so this is what we get.

@RememberUsAlways No you're absolutely wrong about how that goes.

The courts were intentionally not given executive powers. They were intentionally not vested with any power to check the executive. These unelected judges are only able to issue opinions, and that's all by design. We don't want to give huge amounts of executive power to people that aren't accountable to election processes.

Instead the power is given to the legislative branch which can impeach and otherwise engage with the executive.

So no, by design the courts absolutely do not have any power to check the executive. Not only are they not the final check, but they're not empowered that way at all.

It's up to the people that we elect to Congress to act against the executive if they see fit.

It is so critical that Americans understand how the government is set up if they care about this kind of thing. And it is really a shame that so many don't understand how functions are distributed between the three branches.

@RememberUsAlways No not at all.

If we elected a wet paper towel that's what we get. Yay democracy.

The premise doesn't fall apart. We get what we vote for, so this is what we got.

It's how the system works. We should probably stop reelecting morons, but we do reelect morons, so I guess we like this.

@Nerde No that is absolutely not what happened, despite so much misinformation that went around social media.

The courts absolutely did not rule that the laws don't apply to the president. The courts say the exact opposite of that.

The more you promote that sort of misinformation, well that actually does undermine holding presidents to account.

But it's a lie. Whoever told you that is either wrong or actively lying to you, either way you should stop listening to them.

@RememberUsAlways wrong branch of government.

It's Congress, not the courts, that have the power to smack Trump down.

And really it undermines democracy to get that wrong.

@HarriettMB But the one has nothing to do with the other.

It's really foolish to categorize people that way and promote such prejudice.

@theguardian_us_news I mean the examples being used to make the case pretty much debunk it and point the other direction.

Authoritarianism? We're all complaining that the administration is giving up power!

@festal

Seems like this pretty much proves that blue sky is not in practice fully centralized.

@vortex

@Nerde No, the courts themselves did not rule that.

Contrary to a bunch of sensationalist news stories and political propaganda, no, they didn't rule that, and that's not how any of this works.

@00Aaron source?

@ben No, section 230 is complicated by double and triple negatives so that all of these political commentators don't seem to understand what it actually means, and its repeal is just as complicated