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Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

There is still a very clear balance of power.

All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.

There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.

This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.

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Balance of powers has nothing to do with party; it’s about the ability of one branch of government to operate without constraint by the other branches of government. It was instituted in the US by people who were trying to take lessons from history; both recent (the Intolerable Acts) and ancient (Appius Claudius, Octavian, Alexander, the Thirty), and it’s been forgotten by generations who’ve come to take its protections for granted.

If that were true then we wouldn't be watching a collection of circus performers get confirmed by congress.

Looking at the past voting records, Democrats often vote as a block in both houses of Congress. The same can't be said about Republicans.

I feel like that's pretty disingenuous to say that. They have both been increasing party line voting for decades. https://rollcall.com/2021/03/03/no-quarter-for-centrists-in-...

Trump has definitely purged the Republican party of its most moderate members, leaving him surrounded by only the most radical of sycophants. Why do you put so much trust into your institutions? Trump has promised that "we won't ever have to vote ever again", he has been made untouchable by the supreme court, and is now passing budgetary laws without congress.

The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.

I think fascism is about totalitarian dominance of the population by the government, no?

Seems like cutting taxes and bureacracy does the opposite.

Unless “fascist” and “nazi” means “people I don’t like”.

Your definition of fascism is deeply flawed, it would include kingdoms which are not automatically fascists, for example.

I go by this [1] definition of fascism, which the current republican party fits almost perfectly.

Trump rules almost unopposed, and is further consolidating his power with each passing day. Neither court nor congress can harm him anymore. That you may still believe he is fighting for freedom, peace and democracy is baffling, with everthing that's been happening in the past 2 weeks.

Indeed, I don't like fascists and nazis, sue me.

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

This is a naive, context-free misunderstanding of the present moment based on supposedly intuitive truisms. The Republican party is Trump's party and has been for years now. Pretending there is that much variation that matters is ridiculous and can be remedied by reading any piece of news from the last few years.

The US is now a formal democracy, but it doesn't work as one. There is one guy making decisions, the remaining are either too feeble to do anything about or just fine with the status quo. Yes, there are formal avenues for responses, like the judiciary system, but they've been made toothless. The very fact that Trump is back in the WH is proof of this.

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