SanAndreasX said:
The House of Representatives could theoretically impeach the President as many times as they want, but it doesn't matter when there is no way the Senate will vote to convict. And the Senate has a position called Senate Majority Leader, which is defined entirely in Senate rules and not by the Constitution as the Speaker of the House is, and the Senate has chosen to give him virtually limitless power, which includes single-handedly grinding the entire Senate to a halt by refusing to bring legislation to the floor, refusing to hold hearings for Supreme Court Justices, and possibly even refusing to even hold an impeachment trial. The current leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is honestly one of the biggest problems in government right now. A lot of issues effecting the entire country are being held hostage by a man who is only voted on by the residents of one state with a small population and an even smaller economic footprint.
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I think a conversation that's definitely worth having is whether the Senate should have greatly reduced power or if it should even exist anymore. It's rare for the upper house of a bicameral legislature to have that much power, and honestly, the Senate has long been a graveyard for meaningful reforms.
I would go into more detail, but I don't want to go too far off topic. Perhaps the U.S. Politics thread would be better suited.
SanAndreasX said:
The problem is that when a large portion of armed citizens support a tyrannical government, they effectively turn into a paramilitary force for the government. But the armed militias sure showed up in force when they couldn't get their hair cut.
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They've always been selective like that. It's like they talk a big game about supporting the Constitution, but do they really? Perhaps most pertinent to the current crisis is this:
"No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" — Fifth Amendment
"…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." — Fourteenth Amendment
What part of this do some cops not understand? Did they not swear an oath to uphold the law, including the Highest Law of the Land? There have been too many cases of cops doing what amounts to little more than an extrajudicial execution, depriving Americans of their lives without due process. Police training and police culture helps foster this grotesque malfeasance and disregard for the lives and liberty of the citizenry. The entire reason any these protests or riots are even an issue today is because the police are guilty of this heinous dereliction of their duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. And it's a problem that's existed for many decades. There has long been something fundamentally broken in what passes as a "justice" system in this country.
Yet a lot of people, mainly on the right, are fine with this. They're absolutely fine with this authoritarian police state business so long as the ones being hurt or inconvenienced by it are "those people." In other words, people that don't look or think like them. That's exactly why they can scream until they're blue in the face about the quarantine, even if that temporary and minor reduction in liberty did come about through due process and for perfectly legitimate reasons (i.e., preventing the spread of a deadly and highly contagious disease), and then turn around and demand blind obedience to the authorities. Because it was never about freedom or liberty as a concept. As far as they're concerned, it's about their freedom and liberty alone, and everyone else can go get fucked. It's also the same mindset that lets them rail against bans on incandescent light bulbs as a most perfidious tyranny, yet see no problem with the government locking up gay people for being gay (seriously, go back and look at the outrage over the Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003), or controlling women's uteri. It's the same mindset that lets them see no problem in right-wing protestors hanging Obama in effigy and carrying blatantly racist placards, or screaming in police officers' faces and intimidating elected officials because they can't get a haircut, yet find it permissible to go into an apoplectic rage over and demand punishment for kneeling football players.
And there is most definitely a racial aspect to it. Here in the South, there's still a lot of people alive who were around during the Jim Crow era, and that culture of white supremacy was ingrained into many. And those racist white Boomers and Silents passed those attitudes on to their children and grandchildren. There are people my age and younger (I'm 40, meaning I was born 16 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act) that venerate the Confederate States and have no problems referring to minorities by using racial slurs. Hell, just look at all the young white men that showed up to "Unite the Right" and other alt-right/white nationalist rallies. Crushing the Confederacy, ending slavery, and passing the 14th & 15th Amendments didn't end racism. Passing the Civil Rights Act didn't end racism. And here we are 50 years after the end of Jim Crow and the same bullshit just keeps happening.
Racism is like a cancer, and even if it's gone into remission it can always come back. But racism is learned behavior. It can be unlearned, and we can make it hard to be effectively taught in the first place. I grew up in a conservative, Baptist, Republican household in South Carolina. My father's side of the family in particular had a lot of highly racist attitudes. But my mother always told me to not be an asshole towards people for things they can't help (unfortunately, in her later years she developed a nasty anti-immigrant attitude). So I don't judge people by the color of their skin, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, or any other characteristic they can't help. I judge them by the content of their character, by the actions that they do have control over. And I have seen more than my fair share of people who are ugly to the core, who are simply incapable of caring about the lives of others, who operate on a Social Darwinist "Dog-eat-dog/I've got mine, Jack/You're on your own/Every man is an island" worldview that also tolerates all sorts of bigotry towards others deemed not part of their in-group. It's the mentality that has resulted in many Americas, especially they're not straight white men, being abused, maimed, and killed by their own government in plain violation of the Constitution and simple human decency.
People need to make their voices heard, in the streets, in the media, and at the ballot box. This year has been an absolutely shitty parade of ceaseless misery largely because of the failures of our so-called leaders. Let's hope it ends on a better note.
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