People say that the midterms are crucial, but the midterms are only likely to be won if Democrats truly unify and apply winning strategies. Sadly the only winning strategies now seem to involve telling stories, not necessarily the truth.
And all of that essentially admits that the next two years are forfeit anyway.
Congress is supposed to control spending and taxation. The administration is claiming a ton of powers related, especially, to spending. Various actions they’ve taken certainly violate the constitution and laws that exist to ensure Congress’ budget isn’t simply ignored by a president. This is another matter for the courts… unless the Supreme Court decides to rule that the radical and unprecedented far-right “unitary executive” interpretation is correct, in which case we’ve just entered a new and far worse era of American government, and it’s all “legal”. I give it 50/50 they do that.
Do they even need to, though? If the president cannot be prosecuted for any official acts, and has the power to pardon any subordinate for ignoring the law, and to fire (and then prosecute) anyone who insists on following the law, what does the law matter?
It is quite a sophisticated set-up, really. You'd think in principle that the courts would decide when the presidency isn't following the law, but the actual power to punish the president lives in the legislature and it makes much more sense when examined in terms of what incentives exist.
It is not. The constitution allows impeachment for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors only.
Isn’t that how they got Clinton?
If the President violates the law, and Congress impeaches and convicts them, and they don’t peacefully step down, and the military/police does not remove them from office/sides with the President, we effectively have a coup and the United States as outlined in the Constitution ceases to exist.
As the risk of deflating your apparently boundless optimism, that ship has sailed. The idea you have of a country operating under the rule of law is not congruent with reality.
At that point, being the ones with all the guns, it would fall to the military to decide who they are loyal to: the Constitution, ex-POTUS, or themselves, and they will act accordingly.
I swear I can not prepare myself anymore for the sheer hypocrisy that is about to happen in four years! You know it’s going to happen, but my issue is the theatre of it all.
But other than that, yeah, the strategy seems to be "who is going to stop us?" It remains to be seen how far he can push things before a critical majority of Republican senators will balk. For all their talk about "muh constitution" over the last few decades, they sure seem quick to abandon some constitutional basics when it's convenient. And even if he gets impeached by some unlikely set of circumstances, it remains to be seen if he actually steps down.
The other remedy that still technically merits a mention even if it's somewhat implausible to happen any time soon is that Congress does still have the power to impeach and remove the president. I don't see it as super likely that Republicans would turn against him at this point, since pretty much all of the internal opposition has been driven out of the party over the past decade, but I'm guessing that it also would have been almost unthinkable for Nixon to go from winning every state other than Massachusetts in 1972 to losing so much support in 1974 that his own party told him that he might as well resign rather than have more than half of his own party's senators vote with the Democrats to remove him from office[0]. Even though I think the people who voted for Trump tend to be much more passionate in their support for him, and the norms for what behavior is considered "acceptable" as a politician have expanded dramatically (not in small part from Trump himself), I think there's still an argument to be made that Trump isn't as popular as Nixon was at this point in second term, and it's at least theoretically possible to imagine a scenario where his support eroded to the point that he lost enough support to continue with what he's doing. Even if his supporters aren't ever going to turn against him, there aren't nearly as many of them that there were for Nixon, so maybe the most likely of the unlikely scenarios for this would be a large enough Democrat majority getting elected during the midterms that they (possibly along with some of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate) could remove him. (This would of course still leave Vance as president, assuming he didn't also get impeached and convicted, so he could pardon Trump, but that still removes him from power for at least couple of years, and Vance being a relatively recent convert to Trumpism doesn't seem like he'd be able to command nearly as much loyalty as Trump himself has).
As for what could actually cause something like this to take place, I have to wonder if the most likely scenario would literally be another pandemic. Not only does the previous one have a reasonable claim to being what caused him to lose in 2020, a lot of the policies he's currently enacting seem like they'd backfire spectacularly in the face of another pandemic (e.g. cutting vaccine mandates in schools, appointing Kennedy as HHS secretary when him being antivax is probably the most well known thing about him, and the recent flirting with cutting Medicaid in order to pay for the tax cuts...)
[0]: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Ri...:
> During the late afternoon of August 7, Senators Goldwater and Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Scott told reporters afterward that they did not pressure Nixon to resign, but simply told the president that "the situation is very gloomy on Capitol Hill." Rhodes told the president he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House. By Majority Leader O'Neill's estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to vote against the obstruction-of-justice article. Goldwater and Scott told the president that not only were there enough votes in the Senate to convict him, but that no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Goldwater later wrote that as a result of the meeting, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished." That night, Nixon finalized his decision to leave office.
Survival of the fittest leads to dictatorship; dictatorships stagnate, because they spend all their energy only on maintaining power. They are efficient in one sense, at maintaining order. But they are centralized and limited in throughput and therefore are never dynamic systems capable of growth and innovation.
Not to pick on albastervlog specifically but HN is filling with posts like the one above, stating "this is illegal, that is illegal", posted by non-lawyers who have no idea whatsoever what is, and what is not, truly illegal.
Why state something is illegal when the statement is false or ambiguous at best? What does it contribute?
Why not instead state the simpler truth: "I don't like that!" or "I disagree with that!" and then get on with the rest of an argument?
This forum is losing relevance b/c posters have
- forgotten about manners and
- forgotten about the logical fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
[EDIT] Bluntly, if you think that was some kind of slanted or out-there take, you aren't paying nearly enough attention.
> forgotten about manners
Why are you complaining about manners? Why not just say "I like that!" or "I agree with that!" and then get on with the rest of an argument? See where this is going?
> - forgotten about the logical fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
This isn't your high school debate club. But just to humor you, you are engaging in "fallacy fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
NIH budgets aren't being cut. The NIH is simply requiring that at least 85% of the grant value goes to the actual grant recipients, rather than being siphoned off by the university for administration expenses.
At most universities this change has no impact, since they weren't taking more than 15% to begin with. This change mainly impacts Harvard and similar, as they were previously taking extortionate cuts. Harvard was taking 69%!
That's not how any of this work. All of that money was already going to necessary expenditures, and "administrative expenses" is a crucial part of that.
What happened in these places to arrive at numbers like 69%, was a very thorough audit. The purpose of the audit is to allow the government to determine they are supposed to fund, and it's being bundled into an overhead number because its allows universities to take advantage of economies of scale, freeing researchers to do actual grant research.
But because our current leaders can't understand that, what's going to happen is all of the overhead costs (which again, are efficient) are going to be replaced with direct billing, which is highly inefficient. All of the money we save through sharing resources will now be siloed and duplicated needlessly. Instead of doing grant research, grant recipients will spend more time just doing compliance work instead of actual research.
Look at it this way:
A Harvard researcher asks the government for $100. They allocate an additional $69 on top of that for the university to spend on rent, utilities, legal, publishing, lab facilities, lab personnel, library services, tech support, etc. So the total grant is $169.
If the indirect rate is 0.15, the researcher isn't going to ask for $100 anymore, they're going to ask for at least $154, putting to total grant back to $169. But they're going to ask for more than this because they've lost the economy of scale of the old system. So now they have to pay for direct costs they never had to before - a 20% bump is not unreasonable.
So what just happened? The researcher only needed $100 to do their research. But now because government introduced inefficiencies into the system, the total grant goes up, and the real overhead rate is 100% instead of 69%.
By trying to save money you've actually cost everyone to have to spend more money, meaning total research is going to go down because total research spend isn't going to go up. Such efficient.
Perhaps. A lot of it is also the flip side of an executive order conjuring more government into existence.
The escalation of executive order from administration to administration, and the reliance on courts to make law results in what we have going on today.
Everyone was perfectly fine with the President doing whatever he wanted a couple months ago. Everyone was fine with the vague executive orders being treated as law.
At some point one party needs reign in the presidency while they have it. Democrats chose not to, then ran a losing campaign with a candidate voters did not nominate.
Neither party is principled on a national level. There are some individual exceptions, but they are few and far between.
Everyone was fine with the president doing whatever he wanted a couple of months ago because he didn't abuse his power like the new guy is. When you have someone with self control and the best interests of the country in mind, you don't actually need to reign in presidential power like you suggest, and we just haven't had a Trump in the presidency enough to call a constitutional convention.
> At some point one party needs reign in the presidency while they have it. Democrats chose not to, then ran a losing campaign with a candidate voters did not nominate.
This is impossible given the threshold for a constitutional convention. 2/3rd for proposal and 3/4th for ratification, we are just way too divided for that unless Trump messes up really really bad and we actually survive as the same country to pick up the pieces. The supreme court is the only other body that could interpret the law to restrict executive power, but it is stacked with Trump appointees who have new interpretations of unrestricted executive power, so we shouldn't expect much from them.
Well, it's also just not true that Democrats didn't reign in the power of the presidency when they had control.
They passed a bill and Biden signed it which makes it even more explicitly illegal for President to impound money like Trump tried last term, and is again doing now. That's why we can emphatically say what he's doing is illegal, because he's breaking a law that was passed to curb exactly what he's doing.
Moreover, when Trump argued in court he had broad presidential immunity, Biden argued against that position, thus arguing to limit his own power.
It's hard to claim both sides abuse power when one side claiming total presidential immunity to use the military to kill his political opponents, and the other side says no. The difference couldn't be more stark.
Our own declaration of independence lists our founding principles and tells us what we already know is the answer:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The only answer we have left is to withdrawal consent.
As the article states, these actions are illegal and violate the US constitution.
If "the people who decided to vote" expressed this decision, that decision would be implemented by an act of Congress to alter or eliminate these rules. Congress up until now passed no such law. Thus these changes bear no democratic or institutional support.
If however you frame these series of events as an overthrow of the regime and the start of something entirely different then that's a different debate.
Caesar was elected consul. Hitler was elected chancellor. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Hamas in Gaza, came to power democratically on a platform of 'one election - which will be the last election'. Since the beginning of democracy, democracies have regularly voted themselves out of existence. It's a buggy feature. But democracy isn't the norm at all in history, and the likelihood here seems greater that America is regressing toward the mean than that it has something in its fiber capable of withstanding a hostìle takeover that no previous republic has had.
From an outsider's point of view, that was not the people voted for.
When repeatedly pressed on Project 2025, Trump distanced from it and reassured the American people those were just vicious rumors to denigrate him. The campaign was centered on how Biden was old and senile and responsible for every problem ranging from egg prices to Trump's retreat from Afghanistan. Trump's promises were that inflation would be eliminated, jobs would be created, and minority rights would cease to be a part of the US government agenda.
What the Trump administration is implementing bears no resemblance to his program, and looks like a complete dismantlement of the United States of America, including a complete rejection of it's core values.
The only thing Congress could do is impeach the president and remove him from office, but that seems unlikely when roughly half the country is ecstatic about what he is doing.
A number of his actions are wildly unpopular. The Jan 6th Pardons, and his pro-Putin agenda. His polling is historically poor for a month into a president's term, and there are large protests around the country. In another month, his polling will be completely underwater.
Back in the day much was said about Bush's "historically low" approval ratings too. It was somewhat satisfying to see, but in the end it didn't really seem to matter much. He still got re-elected.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-starts-new-term-with-...
For nonviolent pardons, 42% overall support it (and 76% of Republicans).
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/20/trump-pol...
If you ask those same Republicans if they would pardon a violent offender who committed crimes in an attempt to defend Trump's claims of victory on January 6, you would get a very different answer.
George W. Bush's initial approval ratings were technically historically low, but were 57% gross approval, and +32% net; the lowest (from Eisenhower forward) prior was his immediate predecessor at 58% gross and +38% net.
But that's nothing like Trump's "historically low" initial ratings this term, at 48% gross, -1% net, which also dropped by mid-February to 45% gross, -6% net (with a majority -- 51% -- registering disapproval.)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/655955/trump-inaugural-approval...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/656891/trump-job-approval-ratin...
You can hate the guy all you like, but this is 100% false.
> You can hate the guy all you like, but this is 100% false.
It's absolutely true.
His second term started with the second lowest initial gross approval rating (47%) of a Presidential term back to 1953; the worst was his first term (at 45%). But his initial rating was also the worst net approval of any President (with 48% disapproval, for a net -1%, breaking the prior record set by his own first term with 45% disapproval for a net 0%, and having the unprecedented condition of not merely net disapproval but majority disapproval this early in a term.)
AT mid-February, his gross approval had dropped to 45% (and remained the second worst since 1953, again the only worse being his own first term), and his net approval had dropped to -6% on 51% disapproval. As well as having less approval than any term other than his first, Trump is faced with the historically-unusual fact that the not-approving numbers early on aren't mostly neutral, but disapproving.
You're not wrong. However the portrayal of a mandate is a bit of a media fiction. He didn't have notably more votes than any other recent president.
You had to be genuinely gullible to vote for Trump this time, but that wasn't the case in 2016. I'm thinking of the blue-collar union members who voted for the Trump '24 ticket, for example, bitching to everybody who would listen about the price of eggs under Biden. In 2014 they would have been dragging down the Democrats' collective IQ, and now they've switched sides. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are still registered Democrats.
It seems like he's mostly doing what his coalition was hoping he would do? Certainly to a greater degree than in 2016. I have not seen any credible indications of post-election regret from his coalition.
They believed that things were bad and that Trump would make them better rather than worse. If that's not gullibility, I don't know what is.
His voters will ultimately be among his greatest victims... but he'll blame Biden for whatever goes wrong, and they'll lap it up like a dog with a dish of antifreeze, just like they always do.
For those who voted for him I understand the people who are happy about what's happening. Those who claim they didn't "vote for this": they don't deserve to have a vote. The writing was on the wall in clear script.
It's a far stretch to say that this is what the majority of his voters wanted. Certainly many Republican voters have seemed very upset about this stupid blitzkrieg dismantling of core services.
• 77,302,580 voted for this administration (49.8%)
• 77,935,722 voted against this administration (50.2%)
That said, I do agree with the broader point that a narrow victory shouldn't give full control of the complete (federal) government, especially considering how they're going about things. But fixing that requires serious changes to the democratic system and good luck with that.
the United States of America's electoral system.
The Heath Robinson contraption in the US is hardly synonomous with Democracy, at best it's the oldest, creakiest example of a modern democracy.
For example because it’s not only president on the ballot. While I don’t think these results are perfectly representative of the support/opposition (for the reasons you describe) they are still representative.
What really matters is Trump v Harris, and Trump won that both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.
He arguably won a popular vote. That's barely a pop;lar vote mandate.
With what, a compass? This is an absurd statement, I bet they weren't wearing clothes manufactured in America, or using a phone that was built domestically.
The easiest way to fatigue a nation of nationalists is to let the world move on. The Axis forces might have been tired of globalism, but the globalists sure as hell weren't.
More people voted for a candidate other than Trump.
If you want to allege election fraud, don't beat around the bush.
But that's not what's being discussed in this subthread. The media portray Trump as having a popular vote mandate. That's not true
* A massive recession as a result of tariffs, job losses, pullback in federal spending (e.g,. on infrastructure), and general economic uncertainty. * A significant public health crisis (see measles in Texas for example) * Russia continuing to wage war on Ukraine, and possibly further conflicts around the world as the US withdraws from international peacekeeping.
Impeachment. In a functioning government. Because the elected person campaigned on not doing any of these things.
Do I think anyone not drinking the koolade could see this coming? Sure. But that wasn’t the question, the question is what could be done. There are exactly two things, only one of which is legal, which is impeachment.
Why are so many liberals pretending to be offended Trump supporters online? It’s obviously fake.
My company is majority conservative, not one single person I’ve even heard of is mad at Trump - except that he isn’t going far enough fast enough for them.
I have no empathy for such people. If they run the country into the ground, I just hope they suffer too.
If that's extreme I'm happy to be an extremist.
He might be a well known liar, and people might’ve been stupid to believe him when he disavowed Project 2025, but his campaign did not promise to enact these policies.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/donald-trumps...
So he specifically did the opposite of campaign on it then. Most voters weren't going to go and read through his proposed budgets and everyone knows that.
"I'm not a litigious man... that's why I have lawyers." -- Conrad "Skip" Meinhofer IV
If a politician tells a bold faced lie we shouldn't minimize it by saying "oh but everyone knew what he really meant". He lied to voters.
So that’s why it bugs me when I see someone say “he’s doing exactly what he said he’d do!” and the story quickly pivots to “well yes of course he specifically said he wasn’t going to do that but it was obvious he was lying”. A lot of people are living in vastly different information ecosystems, which is why the words coming out of a candidate’s mouth matter.
That's when we knew this would happen.
"we knew this would happen" !== "he campaigned on doing exactly these things"
Perhaps they don’t deserve a vote. But if they don’t then a lot of voters don’t deserve a vote. And maybe we ought to be asking ourselves “what systems have we set up that have led to such wildly underinformed voters? Are there things we can do to rectify that?” rather than just give up on a significant section of the population. Much easier to write it off as a person’s individual failure than consider it as a societal issue.
(not to mention, “they don’t deserve a vote” doesn’t say a whole lot. They still have a vote even if we decide they’re undeserving. We’re all in it together, like it or not)
I can't help that people are this stupid. And if they hurt themselves in the process, good. It'll be a cleansing.
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth and sooner or later that debt is paid"
So what is “my propaganda” you’re referring to? There’s just a truth that some people weren’t made aware of.
The propaganda is pervasive enough to not realize its there at all. You shouldn't accuse others of being in their own informational bubble without realizing you're in your own. The desire to disenfranchise is also an extreme authoritarian impulse.
> The desire to disenfranchise is also an extreme authoritarian impulse.
Just as well I didn’t do that then!
We are, unfortunately, a country where the most popular search on Google on election day last November was "Did Biden drop out?".
That's the lack of an educated electorate we have to deal with.
If its just that, the other branches of government. Of course, Congress is not a remedy at the moment, though its conceivable they might move in response to popular pressure more easily than the White House.
Failing that, history is full of examples of ad hoc remedies where a leader unmistakeably exercised authority in a way which upset people without any formal systemic remedy, some of which took the shape of legal process despite the absence of preexisting formal law, and some of which did not.
Trump alone could easily tank almost any R congressman's reelection chances, and with big money backing him now, they can afford to bankroll the competitor's primary campaign.
After all, we're not just talking about an illegal retroactive on-demand line-item veto here, but plenty of other data-points, like a President that has blanket-pardoned criminals who already violently attacked congress in his name.
What's the plan for when the USPS suddenly has "breakdowns" or "misplaces" mail-in-ballots collected from certain districts? Or when IRS tax records from candidates are leaked to opposing conservative campaigns? Citizenships being "revoked" just enough to stop people from voting?
The man could keel over quite morally-blamelessly from a coronary tomorrow, and the record of words and deeds left behind would still be that of a crook, a corrupt politician, and a wannabe dictator.
Mere inaction in a 78-year-old is not reform. If it were, A Christmas Carol would have been a much shorter story.
[1] https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...
The senate was always set up to artificially prop up smaller (by population) states. The House was not. But we've artificially capped the House. Now they both favor lower population states.
I've discussed how the House had its membership artificially capped roughly 150 years into this country's history
The system is setup to balance out two competing interests - the large cities (with large, concentrated populations) and the states (most of which are not so heavily populated, but have most of the land and resources).
It’s a compromise. And necessary for the Union to be balanced - unless Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, etc. should now just become (defacto) vassals to Los Angeles. Which they definitely didn’t sign up for.
The senate works the way it does. The house is intended to be the chamber of the populace. Roughly 100 years ago we artificially limited the house of the commons. The senate never changed.
So why do you keep bringing up the senate?
That was never the deal. In fact, that was clearly not the deal.
And since those cities depend on the resources of those surrounding areas too, it can either be a symbiosis or a war.
Everything you see around you was provided by Biden. Trump is only starting to make changes.
In other words, the excuse you are making is that people voted for the government to start doing borderline illegal or at the very least highly misguided and self-destrctive things that are against the interest of their constituents, and that because the people want those dumbass destructive things the government should comply with those wishes.
That logic only goes so far when we consider the context of the very same government that also denies the people things that are far more popular.
For example, 62% of Americans are in favor of universal healthcare, but we aren't getting that.
82% of Americans are in favor of paid maternity leave.
And yet, our lawmakers have not delivered to the American people those demands.
But here we all are implying that 51% of the country deciding they want to dismantle the US executive branch is enough public support to just go ahead and do so with impunity.
The 2024 Trump presidency is, believe it or not, already a historically unpopular administration by the objective polling numbers. Why should they get to dismantle the government with such a weak mandate?
Frankly, it's bullshit.
[1] This is coincidentally the excuse that every Republican I've ever met including my Fox News Dad makes for the electoral college and gerrymandered congressional districts amplifying rural MAGA votes so that states with majority Democrat constituents are ruled by Republican statehouses and so that Trump and Bush got to win presidential elections without winning the popular vote.
Elections matter.
Don’t think I’m a Trump Fan. I’ve been warning about this exact thing since before the first election. But people had to go and stick the butter knife in the wall socket anyway, and they clearly need to learn the hard way what happens.
What do you expect? A coup? I’m sure you know as well as anyone how that would go right now. Too few people are willing to believe what is actually happening right in front of them. And frankly, wouldn’t that just be being the enemy?
In short: states rights.
E.g. like the President of Ireland, or the King of England (via the Governor General proxy) in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Also, the Electoral College is an archaic anachronism, and may I recommend a system of proportional representation?
Devolution to "states rights" is exactly that, a devolution.
Maybe read up on how it works before rejecting it out of hand?
Britain has a bicameral parliament, with the leader of the majority of the lower house forming the executive, but the head of state retains the constitutional ability to dissolve parliament and order new elections if the current government is unable to function.
Having an apolitical head of state might be worth looking into.
The only people who can possibly think the British empire was centralised are those who have never opened a history book about it.
You obviously haven't opened a history book either, but at the very least, go to Wikipedia before making confident statements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament
Subtle hint - 1707 to 1999.
The “global empire” was systematically disenfranchised under that model, which is a big reason why it broke up, and that was specifically called out by the US when it left.
I mean, there are arguably good examples of parliamentary democracy working at significant scale in a state, but the UK’s government at home while the empire was managed through a bunch of other systems is very much not one of them.
While I personally think the problem with the US system is much more in lack of proportionality in the electoral system used for the legislature , but, even so, I can recognize thet parliamentary government doesn't only work at small scales.
Wait, it doesn't even fit Ireland.
Unless they were talking about population? Then maybe NZ would fit. Is there a New York neighbourhood with 5 million people?
We can't pretend the US is some dinky country in Europe that can be ruled the same way.
We should definitely amend the Constitution to include that.
I'm completely in the second camp and would move back to the US if it were possible to get it adopted at the national level.
I know recent history makes it hard to imagine a successful impeachment+conviction when both chambers are controlled by the president's party, but that doesn't change anything; there is literally no other legal path to reigning in an authoritative executive, especially with the 2024 presidential immunity ruling. Party bonds are strong, but at a certain point, even the most loyal congressperson will start to resent being made into a rubber-stamp like the legislatures of Russia & Hungary have been.
B) I really don't think the global scene backs up the idea that truth isn't effective -- there's lots of complex things going on, and some amount of emotional propaganda is always necessary, but we should never abandon the truth. Regardless of how effective it is in the short term, basing a political project on lies means it has no core, and can end up corrupted/way off track in short order.
No there isn't. The text of the Constitution says the opposite: it makes appropriation a necessary condition for expenditures, but omits any clause making it a sufficient one. And the only case law on this issue is Train v. New York, which assiduously avoids ruling on the separation of powers issue. So there is neither any basis in the Constitution itself nor any basis in case law for your contention.
Someone needs to sue to bring a matter before the courts. And in a lot of these cases, there just isn't a party who has standing to do so outside of the narrow scope of say, employment law.
long term, figure out a better politically independent structure (perhaps similar to the fed) for important institutions.
Doesn't matter how many people voted for him or why.
Tight victory means even less in terms of the mandate.
No candidate got a majority of votes. A majority means more than 50% of the votes. In this case, the leading candidate only received 49.5%, which is a plurality, not a majority.
What is really happening is that Billionaires are taking advantage of less educated voters by convincing them to vote against their self-interests. They do so by shifting focus to the "values and cultural issues" of the moment. In the past, it was gay marriage and abortion; today, it's trans kids and DEI. Once these issues dominate the conversation, little attention is paid to the real priorities and actions of these Billionaires: cutting funds to Medicaid, food stamps and other welfare programs, cuts to health insurance subsidies, cuts to education, cuts to medical research funding, cuts to development assistance to the poorest in the world and so on, all to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.
What is the solution? Democrats should shift towards the center on the "values and cultural issues" in order to neutralize the conservative advantage, then they will be able to do things that the middleclass (and lower) cares about, such as healthcare and health research, education, consumer protections and so on, and make the Billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.
The debate can't be on "values and cultural issues", whatever they are, because that plays into Republican strengths.
The only real functional way forward at this point is some form of mass protest or resistance, which I see as unlikely to occur (and which I am not necessarily advocating for here on HN).
Barring that, the reality is that scientific progress will move away from the US and towards our enemies, and we will just have to live with the consequences of the choices we made.
We are in a techno-dystopia where control over attention bandwidth is the only thing that matters.
Remember, mass protest to (push congress to) oust an authoritarian executive has never happened before in the USA -- but we've also never had an authoritative executive to anywhere near this extent before.
Mind you, Trump could still declare himself dictator. But based on what's happened so far? FDR was more extreme.
The comparison doesn't hold water whatsoever.
As for the broader efforts, the New Deal required various things like reinterpreting the Commerce Clause. Look up "the switch in time which saved nine" for why the Supreme Court went along with it.
Not to mention things like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW 2.
No, FDR was the closest thing we've had to a king. There is a reason why the 22nd amendment was passed so quickly after he died.
By the end of this year, I think you're going to look back on this comment and wonder how you ever typed it. FDR's policies are responsible for literally saving the economy and pulling the US out of the Great Depression.
That said, many historians believe that FDR's actions made the Great Depression longer and more severe. Given that most other countries recovered more quickly than the USA, they may have a point. But that is a complex debate. Far simpler is how much executive power FDR wielded.
Maybe, just maybe, the opposition party could quit offering these shit sandwich candidates as an alternative?
I can't believe there's no Democrat politicians out there who could've beat Trump handily. But the DNC seems totally disfunctional in picking candidates.
Americans don't actually understand how the government works either. We pretend there's an election but in reality it's already happened. The majority of districts are 'safe' so whoever wins the primary in a safe district automatically wins the election. The person who wins the primary is almost always the person the party endorses. In practice the party endorsement is the election. The endorsement process is controlled by party insiders so the net effect is that they pick the government, not the voters.
Seriously, I agree with you, but I don't know how to solve that problem either. The DNC is just completely bereft of good ideas and at this point seems about as useless as the Mitt Romney-era Republican party was.
The last one doesn't seem to have been as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_efforts_to_di...
In fact he's putting into play Project 2025, the thing that he explicitly disclaimed knowledge of prior to the elections.
It's a sad sign of the state of US politics that this, which would cause outrage in the past, barely merits a mention amidst all the other rage bait things he's doing.
His barmy executive orders, DOGE, that disgraceful display with Zelenskyy reminds me of the Wizard of Oz trying to distract people from the man behind the curtain.
> In fact he's putting into play Project 2025, the thing that he explicitly disclaimed knowledge of prior to the elections.
He did explicitly disclaim knowledge and awareness.
And he explicitly, previously, called them out as some "good people who have some very strong ideas that would be very good for the country".
What is amazing, sadly, is just how little this impacts or affects him.
Support candidates that appeal to the electorate. Find common ground. Resist demonizing the opposition. Moderates shouldn’t have to choose between polarized extremes. If you are intellectually honest you may see the ripple effect created by unfairly shutting Bernie Sanders out of the democratic nomination in 2016 set the stage for this outcome .
Had this actually happened somewhere, or is it just a hypothetical? Like trans women assaulting cis women en masse in women's restrooms.
Also note that Fox has not won all of her fights, which indicates that trans women are not as dominant as the one fight you mentioned would suggest.
1. Do male athletes dominate female athletes in competition? We know the answer to that is yes, in almost all sports. It's why we have a separate female category, and there is a wealth of evidence to support this - from biological studies by sports scientists to comparisons of world records.
2. Are there any interventions that male athletes can take upon their bodies to entirely eliminate the male physical advantage in sports? From the evidence we have so far, the answer is no. They can be weakened through testosterone suppression, but in general they still retain a significant advantage over female athletes.
There is also the question of whether an impaired male athlete should be considered equivalent to a female athlete for the purposes of eligibility in the female category. This is more of a philosophical question and leans heavily on whether one believes that "trans women" are women or not. Is it fair to impose this belief on others who do not share this belief - particularly female athletes who may fundamentally object to being compelled to compete against men?
It's almost like what they say they are concerned about isn't what they are really concerned about.
At this point it's hundreds of male athletes competing in women's and girls' sport: https://shewon.org/males
The thing is, the best athletes frequently have genetic privilege that others don't have, whether it be extra long or extra short limbs, being extra tall, having higher than average testosterone levels, etc. There is no level playing field.
I don't know what the best answer is, but what we are seeing now is pretty ugly.
In most cases though it's very obvious when a male is in a women's event. For example, no-one is going to mistake this male, who competes in women's cycling, for female: https://i.ibb.co/N6ZBzh4K/F4-Svyxt-XYAAMpc-M.jpg
The best athletes often do have some sort of genetic privilege, that is true. But look at the world records of pretty much any sport and compare the most elite male athletes with the most elite female athletes: the difference is massive. Even having advantages in limb length, lung capacity, and so on doesn't overcome the physical advantage of male development.
Careful, you're spreading a little falsehood there, Trump got 49.81% which is not a majority. His first term was 46.09%.
Every other winner of the past 6 Presidential elections got >50% except for him.
The constitution is stronger than a narcissistic moron, these actions are illegal.
Congress has completely abdicated their Constitutional mandate to control the purse and the executive branch is illegally impounding billions of dollars. It really is a constitutional crisis. The 'right' way to do this would be to draw up a budget (not a CR) that closes NIH and USAID and whatever else they're so desperate to destroy - but that would take 60 votes in the Senate and would subject them to months of terrible press while they negotiated it, so instead they're just ceding all authority to the President and Elon and letting them take a sledgehammer to our collective government. Sheer embarrassment.
And, given the American justification of the right to bear arms, such a response is coded into American culture's DNA.
Unless all the 2FA proponents were lying about needing those guns to prevent tyranny?
No, the 2nd amendment does not codify terrorism because your side lost a vote that will be run again in four years.
We are going down a very dangerous road, and it's not one that can be fixed by drafting a nice bill or focusing on local politics.
Liberal nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan was not sane. Continued escalation of Ukraine war was not sane. Mass immigration from 3rd world and open borders, mixed with subsidization of these groups with welfare and social spending while they commit more crimes and work less is not sane.
This anti democratic talk ("I don't like the outcome so the system has failed and must be burned down and my political opponents deserve violence against them") is the kind of thing that deserves a call to the FBI or Secret Service to be honest. No one likes violence against them, not just CEO's but even regular people voting for their interests like more than half of the country you're calling for violence against.
How is an unelected billionaire a representative of the people?
Maybe he's a symptom of the "burn it all down" mindset that seems to find outlet through Trump, a mindset I have sympathy for, but in the end, he's just another elite who is trying to subvert the government for his own ends.
Absolutely nothing about what's happening is a surprise. Anyone claiming otherwise is either lying or so uneducated that they shouldn't be voting.
That said, both the Dems and the GOP are there doing the bidding of lobbyists and the wealthy... if we had an actual populist party in the US we wouldn't have ended up here. At least, not so quickly.
we need an actual populist party that gives people more to vote for. As it is, both parties support the “elites” and that leads to a disillusionment with democracy and a slide towards fascism.
He repeatedly denied knowledge of the Project 2025 plan that's now in action.
Zero sympathy for Americans that voted for this and the ones that stayed home.
I feel bad for the ones that voted Kamala and for the West.
You're arguing what you think would happen if Trump was elected.
OP is saying something different. He's saying the among the people who voted for Trump, some believed something else would happen and they might feel defrauded.
We've seen a lot more corporate supplication to the admin this go around. Some are saying the moderation and media coverage is a little too sparse on criticism like we see in these town halls and protests.
I know I will get beat up for this comment but someone has to say it. I believe this direction is well deserved. Clearly they were given far too much trust and were operating as a rogue organization for far too long. Developing bio-weapons and dual use medicines on college campuses and then moving them to China once called out by Obama is cavalier, aggressive, dangerous, wanton disregard for life and absolute folly. And that's just what we know about. They can not take their own work seriously. To be clear I am not opposed to developing bio-weapons and dual use medicines rather I just want the people making these things to put a tremendous amount of safeguards friction and security around them. Move all the weapon development to highly secured military installations that are far away from everyone and require extensive scans before boarding a jet required to travel to that location and that is just to start their assignment. Once there they will have no privacy and will not leave until their work is completed and fully vetted.
Quietly? "Owning the libs" is their whole identity.
Not that I want anyone to lose their benefits, but perhaps there will be a sea change when people start losing their Medicaid, SNAP, Social Security, Veteran benefits, just being able to forecast the weather reasonably well, flu vaccines, safe and competent air traffic control -- oh what else is on the chopping block...
Compared to the previous playbook of making changes and then blaming the effects on the next administration. While taking credit for everything good kicking in from the previous administration of course.
This was last seen in the 1990s, which Clinton fixed with tax increases, fiscal austerity and a strong real economy.
It remains to be seen, but I don't trust Trump or any of his loyalist appointees to steer the ship well.
The NIH isn't being slashed and burned. It's simply redirecting more of it's funding to actual grant recipients, to do actual research, rather than allowing NIH funding to be siphoned off by the universities for largely unrelated purposes.
Harvard siphoned off a whopping 69% of the grant amount, and it's not going to funding equipment or similar, those expenses also comes out of the remaining 31%.
If people actually cared about increasing the overall NIH research output, they should be supportive of these changes.
NIH grants are awarded in terms of direct costs, and indirect costs come on top of that. If you have a $500k/year grant and your university has negotiated 69% overhead rate, NIH pays the university $845k/year. If the overhead rate is slashed to 15%, the university gets $575k/year.
The remaining $270k/year probably won't be spent on anything, as the entire point is supposed to be cutting government spending.
Labs which had years of funding lined up are suddenly contemplating layoffs, ending research midway.
It is devastating, stupid, and frankly, I am beyond angry. And I am also seeing the possibility that everything I've worked so hard to achieve over the last 20 years go to pieces.
We will have no king here, and we need to start remembering that fast.
For instance Texas medical schools/institutions would previously take as much as half the money in a US grant from the researcher and use it for whatever they wish. I believe Trump's measures are intended to cut back on such situations.
I'm fairly certain the institutions will find a way around Trump's measures, given time. It's a cat-and-mouse game.
I'm pretty sure they're counting on that, which is why they're doing this in the most disrespectful way possible.
it's hard to see surprise cuts as anything more than willful vandalism and a gift to global competitors.
time to donate time and money to their opposition. one month in and they've already proven themselves a failure.
You can argue that these measures are not serious or not a real threat or things like that, but it would be inaccurate to say that the prevailing R view is that there is no possibility of term-limit shenanigans.
From an outsider's point of view, anything that the Trump administration is doing sounds an awful lot like the total destruction of the United States government, and consequently the country.
Let's put it this way: there have been military coups that did a far better job at preserving state institutions, even after purging the regime. The Trump administration clearly has a different goal in mind, from internal government structure to international relations and even alliances.
As Obama said, elections have consequences. Do you think there should be a permanent bureaucracy that is totally unaffected by elections? Or put it this way, hypothetically if James Bowman takes power for the next 8 years, and the other side has had 12 years to implement and entrench their institutions, are you really going to object to your side reversing it when the pendulum swings back your way?
I don't think you have a good grasp on what is happening, both in form and extent. You're making it sound like the Trump administration is refreshing bureaucrats, where in reality it's completely dismantling the whole federal state while imposing a totalitarian agenda. It's destroying public health services, education services, security services, even R&D. To top things off, the Trump administration caused irreversible damage to decades-old alliances, if they aren't destroyed already, which where at the core of US's global hegemony.
You're talking about bureaucracy as if the only impact this has is some pencil pushers losing a job. It's not. It's the death by suicide of the United States as an ideal, and a global leader. The Trump admin leaves behind a huge power vacuum that will inevitably be filled by another party, and odds are it ain't pushing freedom nor peace.
with respect to common core, as far as i can tell, nationalization efforts were initiated under bush ii, and then driven over the past two decades by institutions, states and federal support. some states follow it, others do not. i don't see your point.
We had 60 years of near-total Democratic control of Congress until, in the 1990s, the Democrats abandoned New Deal policies in favor of neoliberalism. Even this was a culmination of what began decades earlier, specifically that real wages stagnated and the wealth and income gaps grew starting around 1971 [1].
On the other side we have the Republican Project, a 50+ year effort to take over the government and reshape America as a Christian theocracy. Why? White supremacy, never getting over the end of chattel slavery, manifest destiny, all that. And it all started with the end of segregation and the effort to fight that using the issue of abortion as a weapon.
We have a Supreme Court that will go down in history as with the likes of Dred Scott. Citizens United, Dobbs, the historical tradition test, major questions doctrine and of course completely inventing presidential immunity out of thin air. But it's not just them. It's every layer of the courts thanks to pushing "originalist" propaganda (which was invented in the 1980s). Certain judges completely slow-walked prosecutions to benefit Trump directly. And brazenly.
Thanks to the takeover of states in 2010 in particular, districts are gerrymandered to hell to the point where, for example, Republicans managed a supermajority in Wisconsin despite getting 38% of the vote.
But what makes this fatal is there is absolutely no opposition to any of it. The Democratic Party are complicit in all of it. They are controlled opposition. They are more concerned with lining up their post-political lobbying and consulting careers than effecting any real change or opposition. In fact, the biggest threat to the Democratic Party isn't fascism, it's progressives. If the DNC opposed Trump half as well as they opposed Bernie Sanders, we'd be living in a very different world.
In the last election, Kamala Harris offered absolutely nothing to voters. Every policy was vetted by her brother to make sure Wall Street approved. Kamala Harris would rather lose an election to Trump tha adopt any progressive policies, desppite progressive policies doing incredibly well in ballot iniatives (eg minimum wage increase passed in Missouri, a deep red state).
The Democratic establishment will tell you progressive ideas aren't popular despite electroal evidence to the contrary, namely Obama's 2008 campaign, which was an electoral blowout. Sadly, Obama quickly abandoned any such policies.
None of what is happening now is intended to make anything more efficient. It's just destruction of the state that regulates and occasionaally holds billionaires accountable. Food, drugs, health, housing, education... everything is going to get worse. And it's nothing to do with the deficit either. The budget blueprint has $2 trillion in cuts and (drum roll please) $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
These people and the voters idolize (even fetishize) a very narrow window in history: the 1950s. Yet they never look at the policies that were in effect at that time, specifically much higher taxes. Plus, all these middle class families had underpaid help thanks to segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism.
And on the foreign policy front, the administration is destroying the instruments of its own soft power (eg USAID). They keep telling us "China is the enemy" while creating a massive power vacuum China will happily fill.
At least in China you have better infrastructure, public transit, high speed rail, affordable health care and better access to education.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-nih-repe...
The OIG also made clear the NIH and EcoHealth did not have proper oversight:
https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2023/the-national-institutes...
Edit: I missed the bit about the funding being specific to COVID 19. The CIA endorsed the lab leak hypothesis with low confidence, but I'm not sure that there's hard evidence that this particular funding corresponds directly with a particular strain that is believed to be what became COVID. If it was, I doubt any evidence that would prove it still exists.
Honestly, lab escape has always been plausible to me, but there's sadly so much politics in assessments of lab-escape by governmental non-scientific agencies, whether it be the "oil on troubled water to placate China" potential bias or "blame China for it as part of an economic biffo" potential bias, that I hold out no hope of ever finding the truth.
Because China was never going to allow investigations by anyone, WHO, UN bodies, whoever, into the physical facilities and processes and data thereof, of that lab in Wuhan.
And, gain of function is an ethically dubious line of research, especially debated amongst scientists, and I'm dubious on it also.
But it's not illegal, and it has some scientific value. (Whether the value is worth the potential risk, well, scientists, debating, so yeah)
So then it comes down to...
Did NIH exceed any policy boundaries set when funding GoF? Did they contradict any laws?
Did they ignore a preponderance of evidence when making this decision?
If not, then using this as justification for crippling the NIH is solely based on personal agenda.
I have no particular dog in this fight but "NIH did ~~9/11~~ Covid-19!" is a really long bow to draw. (Which is how I read the original comment, not yours, to be clear)
Edit: there was also a legal moratorium on GoF funding from 2014-2017, though I don't know when EcoHealth was funding Wuhan. I'm assuming it was during the moratorium, based on some hazy memories, but I wouldn't put money on it either way. End Edit:
He served as the head of NIAID (NIH institute of allergies and infectious diseases) from 1984 to 2022.
To play devil's advocate, the culture in place that allowed such poor oversight (per my previous links) and hubris can't be fixed by adding some new policies. It can only be removed by rebuilding the department under people who were not a part of the original culture.
What we're seeing now is part one of that without knowing what part two is. There might not even be a part two, though I personally think it'll be somewhere in-between what it used to be and the doom prophets who say this administration is the end of the US government.
Link?
Are you perhaps refering to a Letter to Science titled Protect US racial affinity groups published 27 Feb 2025? - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq4733
> These kinds of experiences have completely shattered any credibility that mainstream scientific establishment has for me.
Is it true that a letter to a magazine has shattered the credibility of papers such as TIGR-Tas: A family of modular RNA-guided DNA-targeting systems in prokaryotes and their viruses for you?
That seems ... oddly fragile.
And even if you believe it is, and that the SCOTUS — which ruled that DEI admission requirements at Ivy League universities discriminated against Asian applicants — is part of this white supremacist conspiracy, you should not be making that case in a scientific journal as if your scientific expertise has anything to do with that opinion.
It reminds me of when 1,000 "medical professionals" wrote an open letter saying that protests against lockdowns were a public health threat, but that protests promoting the BLM narrative were not:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-lette...
“However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”
It sounds like right-wing hyperbole until you actually read their own words.
It's a letter to the editor .. it's not being "masqueraded as science", it is openly declared as an opinion held by some scientists.
Scientists are not homogenuous in opinion, there is a long history of differing opinions in letters to editors in science journals.
Are you
* ignorant of this, or
* delibrately misframing it?
> That these individuals are abusing their scientific authority in such a flagrant way.
Again, it's a letter to the editor expressing the opinion of some. The horse you've climbed up upon here appears quite high.
> Eliminating taxpayer-funded DEI programs is not "white supremacist ideology".
^F "white supremacist" in https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq4733 and the only use of the phrase is:
The current political climate is tremendously hostile for BIPOC scientists. [..]
.. institutions must resist by taking legal action against civil liberty violations that result from anti-DEI directives. ..
As political parties in the US and beyond seek to recodify white supremacist philosophies, STEM leadership must take urgent action to protect and support all members of our diverse scientific community.
You have badly paraphrased an assertion that "anti-DEI directives" (those directives stronger than simple removal) are resulting in civil liberty violations (ie. the racists feel emboldened).
The only thing I see here is an opinion piece expressed in a letter to the editor and whole lot of puffery, lambast, and smoke in response.
The letter states: "As political parties in the US and beyond seek to recodify white supremacist philosophies, STEM leadership must take urgent action." This clearly implies a link between anti-DEI efforts and white supremacy. This is an inflammatory leap, and tying it to their PhDs, let alone to Science, disgraces the scientific establishment. And your claim that this doesn't refer to anti-DEI efforts is disingenuous. There is no other phenomenon at play that the alleged "recodification of white supremacy philosophies" could be referring to. The letter is a reaction to the anti-DEI program and is plainly implying that this program amounts to recodification of white supremacy philosophies.
They’re using their credentials as a bully pulpit to push a narrow ideological viewpoint. It’s dogmatic and unethical and the decision by Science to give this a platform further undermines the credibility of the scientific establishment.
Racial affinity groups promote segregation, clashing with the color-blind foundation of modern science. They are indefensible, and attempts to legitimize them by labeling critics as white supremacists are intellectually dishonest to a shameless extreme. Claiming that disallowing these racial-identity groups in taxpayer funded institutions amounts to promoting civil liberties violations by emboldening racists is just more totally baseless and inflammatory smear tactics to maintain programs that reject colorblindness and thereby promote racism.
While they keep conjuring up the racist right-wing boogeyman, actual codified racism — ruled on by the Supreme Court — pervades academia. Racial affinity groups, propped up by this broader racial privilege ideology, have fueled discrimination across academia, where applicants are judged heavily by race. Yet these ideologues have the gall to claim the real threat is to so-called disadvantaged groups. It’s a sham, and the evidence proves it.
You're defending atrocious behavior by people who are brandishing their scientific credentials to legitimize it.
Nonsense. I have done no such thing. Please don't lie and misrepresent, that's simply dishonest.
You're overstating the importance of a letter to the editor that expresses an opinion.
So overstating that importance it's both comical and reflects poorly on yourself and your credibility in making any statements about science.