We need to amend the Constitution to strike pardon power and give the Congress the power to pass property taxes (aka wealth taxes) and regulate donations to campaigns, candidates, parties and partisan causes.
We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.
> 1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term
2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice
I like No. 1.
No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering retirements in the way Art. 1 § 3 cl. 2 staggers the Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some dirty tricks.
You can't police that. The only thing you can reliably do is allocate power. If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote for. This power gets abused in virtually every country where it's normalized.
The safeguards within the justice system are appropriate for prosecuting individuals. They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.
If you don't believe that, then consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose. Except only Texas courts and prosecutors have jurisdiction.
> If you allocate power to prosecutors to prosecute elected officials, you've basically handed them the power to decide who people are allowed to vote for
Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.
> consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose
> Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.
Courts are designed to make decisions about individual cases, not ones that affect the trajectory of the whole country. It’s simply the wrong tool for the job.
> Literally the current DoJ and FBI
Not even close. I don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool. AOC’s district is MAGA by comparison at 33% Trump voters.
The DOJ has thousands of lawyers, almost all of whom are are the most ideological kind of democrats.[1] Law is a very specialized field that attracts a very narrow, highly unrepresentative slice of the population. Normally this is fine because the DOJ’s work doesn’t have much of a political valance.
[1] Every DOJ person I know is a great lawyer, phenomenal at their job, and the most upstanding, orderly, conscientious type of American. But they can’t be trusted with that much power over politics. It’s like how you can’t give the One Ring to Gandalf. You have to give it to the Hobbits.
You can’t give such an ideologically homogenous group of people that much power over elections and candidates. People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively.
You’re getting closer with juries. But the DC jury pool is extremely skewed. Its like Aragorn trying to get a fair trial in Mordor District Court.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with “idealogical homogeneity”. Antisocial beliefs are not owed any representation. And frankly I’d much prefer my politicians to associate on the basis of ideology rather than class or familial connection.
> can’t give such an ideologically homogenous group of people that much power over elections and candidates
Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.
The solution is something more flexible than we have now, but still with a high bar. The check is the courts. America didn’t fall apart when Bob Menendez went to jail.
> People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively
We don’t need them to. Prosecutorial discretion means anyone can charged with anything. The test is whether it sticks. (The FBI already has, and has already abused, the powers you’re concerned about.)
Nobody is suggesting prosecutors be allowed to unilaterally jail politicians. If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.
> Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.
Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession. That’s a solution worse than the problem.
> If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.
You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.
> Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession
“Make corruption cases easier to bring” is “institutional capture of elections”? What?
> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction
If your only issue is with the jury pool, don’t give DC special jurisdiction. A Senator from Montana should be tried there.
It also seems like you’ve forgotten about appeals.
> to make such consequential decisions for the whole country
We have an election system that’s corrupted by social media, money and the electoral college. That means smaller groups of unaccountable people already make consequential decisions for the whole country.
The folks on January 6th were idiots. But they believed they were saving their republic. A lot more people, today, believe we’re at a precipice of losing it due to corruption.
So yeah, if not a jury it could be something more extreme. (At a certain point, not today but not la-la land, it needs to be.) A state or district electing corrupt fuckwits endangers us all—the folks pushing for decertifying elections for shits and giggles set the precedent for this anyway.
> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.
Then it sounds like you need to amend the Constitution. Because that's how our system works. You are indicted by a grand jury in the jurisdiction in which you are accused of a crime and then you are put in front of a petit jury. Both sides agree on who the jury is.
I'm struggling to understand the alternative system you're imagining.
Do we need DOJ to balance between every ideology in order to exist?
We need 50/50 Republicans and Democrats
50/50 Commies and Fascists
50/50 Totalitarians and Anarchists
50/50 Pro-lifers and pro-choicers
50/50 gun fanatics and gun haters
50/50 Dog people and cat people
50/50 People who like asparagus and people who don't
What exactly are you proposing here?
I have a simple proposal: competent people can apply for the job, and so long as they execute their duties without prejudice, they get to keep the job. It's really that simple!
As expected, you ignore the actual complaint and just draw specious comparisons, making unsubstantiated claims that "most" of the people at the DoJ are totally democrats, trust me dude.
The comparison was between the current “DOJ” and the Texas AG’s Office. Not just the guy in charge, the whole agency. No matter who you put in charge, an agency of 10,000 lawyers who are overwhelmingly democrats is going to be very different in terms of partisan behavior than the Texas AG’s office.
As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about political donations at federal agencies is public.
>> The DoJ is literally run by trump’s personal lawyer. <<
> As to the political makeup at DOJ, information about political donations at federal agencies is public.
I'm sure many of the rank-and-file at the DOJ DO donate to democrats these days, after all the republican party has demonstrated rank criminality across the last ~ 15 years, which is only getting worse. Anyone at the DOJ who still cares about criminal justice and the rule of law is going to likely support the only remaining party that isn't bending the knee to criminals and con men.
It still doesn't change my original criticism - that the DOJ is run by Trump's personal lawyer - and it doesn't make your whataboutism suddenly relevant.
The alternative being that a criminal can have perma-immunity by simply running for office or getting elected?
> They are not set up to handle matters of national importance that could way the direction of the country or deprive tens of millions of voters of their preferred candidate.
Right, they're set up to ascertain guilt of a crime. Why is it or should it be their concern if people want to vote for that person or if that person has political aspirations?
You're advocating for criminal law to simply not apply to some people. That is fucking insane.
If American voters think the stakes are high enough to overlook corruption, isn’t that their prerogative? Voters are the source of truth in a democracy.
No, that's why there's nowhere in any legal code in the US that "running for office makes you immune to criminal charges."
These are two completely distinct systems. By design.
I remember that you are a foreigner (from some corrupt third world county if I recall?) with a limited understanding of American legal history and political culture, but the idea that voters simply get to decide who is a criminal or not is flatly contrary to America's culture.
> And it's not because nobody before Trump ever did anything rising to the level of paying off a porn star and calling it "legal expenses." It's because we have had a taboo against prosecuting politicians.
Are you somehow under the impression that is the actual complaint about illegal behavior and weaponization of the government? You won't be able to contribute meaningfully to this discussion if you insist on pretending that the hush money payment is the limit of the criminality being discussed here.
Please go do some research into the recent actions of the DoJ before trying to defend them like this, irrelevant whataboutisms will not move this conversation forward.
No, but is it a reasonable assumption to think it is Zero? Or that the upkeep is Zero too? No.
The blogpost literally says he's making this his full time job. What's reasonable is to ask how that will pan out. And to, after answering oneself, tell the relevant party to be weary of it.
If you think this kind of over-abundance of laws and regulations is exclusive to democracies, early 18th century France would like a word. It’s a problem that plagues most places. Laws compound upon themselves as time goes on. It is less about keeping everyone happy so much as it is about keeping stakeholders happy. If it wasn’t a democracy, those stakes holders would just be oligarchs, nobles, the military, etc.
I have this conversation with neighbors almost weekly, and I’ve had a bunch of them just say that I’m wrong with no real evidence or, and this is verbatim, “it doesn’t feel safer.”
This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, but it applies to police as well. In Georgia they had to pass a law telling police they couldn’t arrest parents who let their kids go outside by themselves. The inciting incident literally had a police officer lecturing a mother about how many sickos are out there and then putting her in cuffs because her 10-year-old was a mile away by himself. Even since then, DFCS has been caught bullying parents into signing an agreement saying they were negligent and agreeing to a restrictive safety plan because they let their kid go to a nearby playground by themself.
It is insane and depressing about how people willingly restrict their lives and their kids lives because of the mistaken belief that the world isn’t as safe as it was when they were a kid. Not only that, but if you let your kids play outside without you, then you risk your neighbors calling the police on you and having to deal with whatever bs comes from that.
I have feeling that how safe you feel is correlates strongly to your media diet, and weakly to your surroundings. I'd be curious to see what studies have been done.
A friend of mine had the cops called on her by a neighbor because her kids were playing in the front yard and she wasn't out there with them.
I don't know what world people here live in, but I am not expecting kids in a front yard in the middle of the day in a quiet neighborhood on a dead end road to be snatched up.
Could it happen? Sure. Should we force our kids to live under fear that it will happen as soon as a parent isn't watching them? Absolutely not.
I heard about this story somewhere and couldn’t really believe it. I also thought that the US/German comparison videos about the fact we Germans let our kids go to school alone etc are a bit over the top.
Seems no.
But to be fair. Also in Germany things around security have changed. Where it was normal in my youth that my parents had actually no clue where I was while I was roaming the streets of Berlin (Courtesy to a Berlin wide public transport ticket I got for school). Today that doesn’t fly anymore. Kids have phones and get tracked every step. It’s the more controlled level of freedom.
Another connected anecdote that left me puzzled at the time: I spend some days in D.C last year (right before the National Guard got deployed) and wanted to do a short run from the Hotel. It was already going dark and I didn’t check for the weather and asked at the desk if it was ok outside to run. The answer was “yes it’s pretty safe around here.”
See my mind never made the connection that something harmful would be out there waiting for me.
> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,
Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.
There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...
Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!
Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.
I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.
The internet has enabled essentially instant communication between any two or more parties anywhere on the planet.
The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one, with less warning, and the impact will be more widespread.
Or ...
We'll all see it coming ahead of time, behave perfectly rationally, and avoid the crisis entirely.
Based on how we handled 9/11, and spent 20 years and $20 trillion to get 1 guy, im preparing for the former, not the later, because most people are not rational in the face of a crisis.
> The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one
For sure, and for reasons we can't imagine today.
I sometimes think about nuclear accidents. It seems very unlikely that we've already seen the worst accident that will ever be. Same goes for so many technologies less than 100 years old. Safety standards need to go up in parity with the scaling up to keep MTBF in check. Given what I've seen of human greed, I hold only partial hope that'll happen as energy demands increase. Hopefully batteries, wind, solar and regulatory oversight are enough.
This is so depressing; my parents in the late 60’s/early 70’s would be serving a life sentence for negligence according to current standards, given how utterly (but basically harmlessly) feral we were back in the day.
The issue is overpopulation. In an underpopulated area neighbors tend to be neighbors, in an overpopulated one they tend to call police on your noisy kids to take you down a peg.
I think it's only safer since we're doing less. We're more immobile; sitting on our phones, TVs, iPads. We order stuff online instead of going to the store. There's also less adventure without immediate reconciliation. We can corroborate if what we're doing out-and-about is correct from a simple google search anywhere, which reduces person-to-person interaction.
I get it. Like 90% of the Republicans platform is the dumbest policies imaginable. It’s like saying you agree with a bunch of drunk, belligerent, clowns. You’d want people to know that you don’t paint your face and piss your pants too.
You really think that the democrats are much better? It seems like they are more concerned with their image than actually doing anything. Or if they do, it seems like they are more interested in the symbolic aspect of it and to perpetually keep the problem, such as how they deal with homelessness.
Honestly, the killer smartwatch feature for me is being able to quickly click a button to find my iPhone. Everything else I use it for feels like I'm just trying to justify spending hundreds of dollars on it. I record all my workouts and my sleep patterns etc., but I never use that data for anything. I wish I could buy a $10 digital watch that also had a "find my iPhone" button.
I feel like that sounds less weird when you really start to think about it. There is lot of chicken being processed. And the margins must not be great and competition between suppliers must be at least somewhat fierce...
So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.
My wife works in autism services. Insurance companies are the bane of her existence. Every six months (sometimes less), she has to write a huge report justifying services. These reports are frequently over 100 pages and she is only slotted so much time to do it, so she ends up doing a ton of unpaid work. The entire business model is to drown the practitioner in paperwork then use “peer reviewers” who are nurses that don’t know anything about the treatment to deny claims then waste the practitioner’s time on appeals in the hopes that people will give up. AI has obviously made this process easier and the insurance companies absolutely hate it.
People have no idea how inefficient the U.S.’s healthcare system is. And it isn’t just the private companies. A ton of states purposefully overburden and underfund their Medicaid systems for ideological reasons. Then the private insurance companies adopt the same practices later.
In most states, the answer is fixed by law at either zero or one depending on whether you count insurance, because medical practices must be wholly owned by doctors.
It does, but how often do you see people argue that California and Texas are paradises where healthcare is affordable because the profit-seekers have been driven out?
Inefficiency is their business model. They just soak $$ into their system. More overall revenue even if most of it is some rube goldberg machine of apathy.
From time to time, I see similar claims like this on HN: "doing a ton of unpaid work". The full quote:
> These reports are frequently over 100 pages and she is only slotted so much time to do it, so she ends up doing a ton of unpaid work.
What if she refuses to do the work unpaid? This seems like an open-and-shut case with the US Dept of Labour. There is a whole page that explains how to make a claim here: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints Also, if she is part of a labour union, she can raise concerns with them.
> A ton of states purposefully overburden and underfund their Medicaid systems for ideological reasons.
Can you provide some evidence for this claim? Also, does this affect the state(s) where your wife works? From what I found, 66% of Medicaid is paid for by the federal gov't, and the remaining share is funded by each state.
The most obvious example were the 10 States which refused to accept increased Federal funding for Medicaid that was made available with the passage of the ACA, which seems largely ideologically driven.
Otherwise the situation is more complex than the original comment suggests, and I can only speak to one state (Idaho), but I don't think the scenario is uncommon in other GOP controlled states and isn't limited to Medicaid.
Idaho has cut taxes in the state for five consecutive years, largely (IMO) on an ideological basis. This had the result, desired by many in a deeply conservative legislature, of creating budget deficits. Even the GOP is normally wary of espousing cuts directly to the state's contribution to Medicaid, but the deficit gives them cover to reduce funding and introduce barriers to service like caps on authorized services and new work requirements. Even when revenues were higher than expected for FY 2026, the governor's office had to act to actually retain those unexpected revenues as it was pretty clear that the Legislature was going to look to claw them back and continue drive down State spending. It's worth noting that health services, including Medicaid funding, represent about a third of the State's budget and their largest portion of the budget.
This whole process has been playing out in public education funding in the State for years as well. Coincidentally, charter school enrollment has increased by roughly 35% over the same 2021 - 2026 period.
Attacking a policy, program or institution financially and then pointing to the deficiencies of those same programs to further fuel funding and efficacy reductions is a pretty well established tactic in US politics as I'm sure it is elsewhere.
Depending on the competition for her job and the state laws, she would either be put onto a performance management program, or fired. I've been through this before. The HR approved response is that they expect those 100-page reports to be complete within normal working hours, and a failure to achieve that means you are unable to fulfill the requirements of the job.
Of course those in high demand who can easily move to better employers will often do so. However there is a lot of friction when moving jobs. It's very time consuming, mentally demanding, and risky. I've seen incredibly talented staff treated awfully in my years, and they refuse to leave for various reasons.
If enough people are fired for this reason and file complaints with DoL (US Dept of Labor), then surely the DoL will open a case against the company for unpaid wages. If I recall correctly, for a while, Amazon used to force staff to arrive early (before shifts) but did not pay them for it. DoL got involved and the rules changed. To be clear: It is difficult, but not impossible, to make labor practices change with the help of DoL.
EDIT
This part should have appeared first: I agree that your scenario is the most likely outcome, even if I think it is reprehensible!
I agree, but I do think it makes the book industry more difficult. A flood of books makes it makes it harder for new authors to make it. Just like a new youtuber has a very difficult time. Eventually publishers will turn to AI just to deal with the volume on submissions, and then it will become just like YouTube, where an algorithm decides who wins and loses.
At the same time, readers will have to sift through an insane amount of books to find what they like. It is already kind of like this, even before AI. This causes people to rely more on reviews and word of mouth, which becomes a volume game and is also influenced by the algorithms.
I don't think it is the end times for literature, and for those who put the work in, they can find their places. But it is a whole new set of challenges.
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