Do you see this mess stabilizing without one? I want Republicans to have access to medical care, an equitable economy, and education, god knows they need it.

They openly prefer people like me were dead. There’s no negotiating with that.

I look at it like this:Two sides. One side is completely full of shit and they know it. They also know the other side knows. However, both sides have agreed to keep up the pretense of everything being okay, for whatever reason. I like to call it the “Slow Break-up”.

It’s like when your romantic partner stops showing up for date nights, then they get home late, then they start sleeping on the couch. And eventually you get around to asking, “Is something wrong?” And they’re all like, “No, everything is fine, work’s just been riding me so hard lately, and now I get home so late that I don’t want to wake you up.” Then one day they’re packing their shit to leave, and they look at you and go, “Look, we both saw this coming.”

It’s always “not happening” until it’s already happened. The moment is skipped over where they could acknowledge they misled you, try to make amends, maybe do something about the problem.

But, my overall point is this. A civil war would be like a fight between spouses. Like, a big serious fight. Where there is the possibility that someone’s going to yell “I want a divorce!”. So the divorce happens, but both parties move on, and try to heal. I am on the side that wants to have the fight, move on, and heal.

Let’s be honest. Either way here could easily end in a civil war. The temperature in the pot has been raising for 40 years. The earlier we lance this boil, the better off we’ll be though. Kicking the can down the road allows extremist ideologies to spread more and more. Which does nothing but guarantee more suffering.

A civil war between what forces? An arm of the US military and a small fragment of the population rilled up enough to attempt human wave tactics?

It might lead to a ton of scholastic violence, maybe riots and some attempts on public figures from random idiots…

But let’s assume people go charging out armed into the streets and get organized

But there’s something important to think about. We have a “just in time” food distribution system. Grocery stores would be empty in a couple weeks if food deliveries are stopped, say by blockading roads. The US government and military keeps ungodly amounts of food supplies stashed around strategically too…

The only way it could happen is if part of the military attempted a coup. That requires a split at the top. Plenty of grunts might defect, but grunts aren’t going to do a lot. You need to take entire military bases to keep aircraft running and to get that nice information asymmetry.

We’re living fragile, interconnected lives at the end of the Anthropocene.

We can’t have a civil war. We’re incapable of it.

We could have a little chaos for a few days, it might even be a wakeup call

I agree, but that is vastly different from States just unilaterally disregarding legal precedent. If we get to that point we are way beyond mere protest.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

—JFK

Republicans are working overtime to make that happen.

This is a strange situation, for sure. The age requirement you bring up is a good comparison. Age is something you are, not something you’ve done, possibly done, or definitey not done, so there isn’t as much to argue about.

However, what if some 33 year-old decided to run and had the support of one of the two big parties, and just lied about her age? Presumably, that would require a finding of fact and would be adjudicated by the federal courts, not Congress or each state legislature or Attorney General.

Your example makes it pretty clear that even something supposedly “self-executing” still needs a back-up plan. Another interesting example is the 2000 election, where it was the Supreme Court that arbitrated the final vote, which decided the winner of the presidential election (incorrectly, it seems, based on later statistical analysis). Nasedon these two examples, I don’t entirely understand their reasoning for pushing the decision about eligibility to Congress. While an election is for a political office, the process of running an election is supposed to be apolitical.

What the US really needs is a non-partisan, apolitical, independent federal electoral commission.

The liberals dessented

They most certainly did not. The liberal justices wrote concurring opinions. They very explicitly did not write dissenting opinions.

Right, but Congress votes along party lines so that isn’t much of a remedy. The remedy is just as flawed as the process that leads to political bad acting in the first place. That’s why people look to a (supposedly) non-partisan body like SCOTUS to resolve the issue, and why SCOTUS becoming partisan is such a big deal.

But your larger point that the system has broken down is well-taken. Much of how government functions successfully is based on unspoken conventions and norms of behavior. When a large proportion of the population actually WANTS someone like Trump, you have a very serious problem. No democratic structure or form of government can save the people from themselves forever. Sure, gerrymandering and other dirty tricks make a difference, but at the end of the day Trump really will get almost half the vote. He’s not the representative of some small fringe party who managed to ride a crazy set of circumstances to power, like Hitler did. Trump represents one of only two major parties and will legitimately get support from right around half of those who vote, which is just crazy when you think about it.

What the actual fuck happened that we stand on the precipice of such madness?

Can I just watch les mis? Does singing wolverine miss anything important?

Yeah, the Supreme Court’s record on key issues is not great. Citizens United, for example, is at the root of a lot of the current troubles.

But a big part of the problem is actually the structure of US democracy itself. US democracy was set up primarily to prevent tyranny, and it does that through separation of powers. And it has been successful in that regard. However, the structure the founders created also causes gridlock on key issues.

In the US, it is relatively rare for one party to be fully in charge for any length of time. In a Westminster-style parliamentary system, on the other hand, a majority government usually gets a chance to implement their program and then they deal with the consequences in the next election. The role of the opposition is to point out all the stupid things the government does. When something goes poorly, it is clear who is to blame.

One of the problems with the US system is that the parties can legitimately blame each other when nothing gets done, which means they can avoid accountability.

In parliamentary systems, the government of the day bears the blame for fuck ups, whereas in the US system there is a tendency to blame the institutions. Perhaps that’s why you see surveys in the US where people strongly approve of their local representative, but have very low approval of Congress overall. This lack of power and accountability for the government is also why the Supreme Court is such a huge force in the US. Gridlock doesn’t change the fact that decisions need to be made, so more and more key decisions are being made either by the Supreme Court or by presidential decree.

Also, having a President is just a bad idea. I believe the US only has a President because Washington was so revered at the time. Having such a singular, king-like office with actual power inevitably creates a cult of personality. In contrast, parliamentary systems turn the king or his representative into a powerless ceremonial position that stays silent on political issues.

5 said the text means the opposite of what it says. Four said enforcing it is up to the federal courts, not state courts.

Both said that that one state couldn’t decide it. The majority did take a more radical stance, but to say this is the SC court being corrupt when democrat appointees also wrote concurring opinions in regards to the actual ruling was the claim I was criticizing

Who bribed them?

That is a pretty clearly different form of ambiguity, the ambiguity here is that the 14th amendment does not state how to enforce the law, and does not delegate that enforcement to the states.

Such power over governance, however, does not extend to federal officeholders and candidates. Because federal officers “ ‘owe their existence and functions to the united voice of the whole, not of a portion, of the people,’ ” powers over their election and qualifications must be specifically “dele- gated to, rather than reserved by, the States.” U. S. Term 7Cite as: 601 U. S. ____ (2024) Per Curiam Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U. S. 779, 803–804 (1995) (quoting 1 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States §627, p. 435 (3d ed. 1858)). But nothing in the Constitution delegates to the States any power to en- force Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates. As an initial matter, not even the respondents contend that the Constitution authorizes States to somehow remove sitting federal officeholders who may be violating Section 3. Such a power would flout the principle that “the Constitu- tion guarantees ‘the entire independence of the General Government from any control by the respective States.’ ” Trump v. Vance, 591 U. S. 786, 800 (2020) (quoting Farmers and Mechanics Sav. Bank of Minneapolis v. Minnesota, 232 U. S. 516, 521 (1914)). Indeed, consistent with that princi- ple, States lack even the lesser powers to issue writs of mandamus against federal officials or to grant habeas cor- pus relief to persons in federal custody.

• quoting the majority ruling

But they do agree, that Section 3 provides no other method for enforcement, that is the ambiguity. But the ambiguity is easily resolved by section 5 of the 14th amendment:

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

• section 5 of the 14th Amendment

Although only an individual State’s action is at issue here, the majority opines on which federal actors can enforce Section 3, and how they must do so. The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amend- ment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other po- tential means of federal enforcement.

This is the minority then saying that’s not clear enough, because while section 3 prescribes no means of enforcement and then section 5 explicitly says congress has the power to enforce it- they say it is ambiguous because it doesn’t say only congress has the power to enforce it explicitly. I personally prefer to agree with the majority and say since it doesn’t give random people the right to depose the president- then they probably don’t have the right unless new legislation by Congress who does explicitly have the power says they do.

The Constitution does however err on limiting impedances to popular democracy, especially post-Civil War

deleted by creator