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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Here’s hoping Congress wakes up and passes laws that curbs presidential power.

There already are laws! They’re not being enforced (enforcement is an Executive Branch function...).

The remedy for the Executive Branch breaking and/or not enforcing laws made by the Legislative Branch is supposed to be impeachment by congress.

true and teh Supreme Court having been packed by trump admin #1 and an incompetent democratic leadership or rather Sith-lord 5D chess playing Mitch mcconell blocking appointments to the court ... isn't helping protect the rule of law much at all.

That was my wishful hope in 2016, today I can't imagine it happening without a very different Congress.

Midterms are next year. Think about who you want in Congress and vote appropriately.

That will only work if Democrats can obtain a veto-proof supermajority in both houses. Good luck with that.

The problem right now is that the Executive Branch is refusing to carry out the existing will of Congress. Passing more bills (that will be vetoed) to tell the executive to do its job isn't all that helpful.

At this point I think only the courts can save us, but I don't think we can rely on SCOTUS to do the right thing. And even if they did, they have no real teeth to force Trump to do anything.

I carefully think we are better off with Democrats controlling both (or at least one) houses of Congress, but that won't magically fix things.

You can at least remove the pursestrings from the executive by changing Congress from the rubber-stamp it currently is.

Maybe, but Trump is already violating plenty of Constitutional and statutory "pursestrings", and so far Republicans have been quite complicit in the process. Even with a reduced presence, they are likely to keep ~34 senate seats [0][1] which is enough to continue protecting him from justice.

How would/should our system recover if a President commits all sorts of crimes with the support of 34 senators?

(Bonus fun fact: The theoretical minimum popular support needed for 34 senators would be 3.6% of the population.)

Between the Epstein stuff and the economy, if it starts to look like Trump is going down Republicans in Congress will start bailing like rats leaving a sinking ship. They may be amoral, but they aren't stupid.

Eventually, but the last 10 years are the story of me constantly overestimating them, so I think we should err on the side of pessimism.

Heck, if would be very difficult to craft any factual account of political events these days that Me-of-2005 wouldn't dismiss as mad ramblings.

Congress has all the power they need, they simply refuse to use it.

You’re welcome to move to the EU. Everything is a committee. Nobody is ever responsible. Nothing ever gets done.

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