President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

And very much not in the spirit of our system of governance.

I realize the barn door was opened a long time ago so there isn't any going back easily, but the judiciary is not supposed to be a shadow legislative branch, with all the power to make law but none of the accountability of elections that our actual legislators are subject to.

But that is what the judiciary was misguidedly turned into during the last century.

For me, a solution that doubles down on that by politicizing it even more the way you just argued, is a really bad idea.

The consequences come later when people with politics and social ideas that differ from yours, then feel justified to take a step to pack a court in an even more perverse way, to get on people who will legislate from the judiciary in ways you don't like. And then you'll be opposed to that kind of subversion. And so on and so on.

I believe most of the problems we have today in this regard stem from the Warren court. In some cases, what they did was the moral thing to do, obviously (something like Brown vs. Board of Ed), but it shouldn't have been in their purvue. Our courts don't exist to make the laws that the actual legistators that are elected to do that job won't. It may be a quicker ends that some people want, but the means used have created long-term and structural problems.

The consequence of that has been that what should be a relatively nuetral body (to the extent it can) that is constrained by the Constitution, now can just ignore the Constitution and set social agendas for the country. Get a majority of people whose social ideas you like (assuming I know you well enough to say this), and voila, abortion is legal. Change that majority and suddenly abortion is illegal. Nothing in the constitution changed, which is the absurdity of pretending that their integrity hasn't been damaged and we have allowed our checks and balances to fall out of balance. What actually changed was that in the interest of ends justifying the means, some people's zeal opened a barn door that should have never been allowed to open, and they didn't consider what the likely consequence was going to be.

 

Obviously, this is one area where you really want something in place that allows whistleblowers to feel comfortable doing the right thing without fear of retribution.

A person in a position of power can do so much harm to the country by putting up American foreign policy for sale for their personal or financial or political ambitions. To the extent that someone in the intelligence services might be privy to that happening when the rest of us are going to be in the dark, it's one of the most vital areas I can think of to have whistleblower protections in place.

Without Mark Felt, for example, do we find out what Nixon was up to?

For whatever his reasons, Felt was willing to step up without a whistleblower law in place. But others might not feel as comfortable.

What happens now, is you are a potential whistleblower. Unless you are fearless and have a very strong moral compass, you:

1) Are saying to yourself, "Why bother?" It's not going to make a difference. A Bill Barr type hack can just squash it and my career is destroyed.
2) And more importantly, you are saying, "I am going to be subject to a character assassination." Because this kind of attack the messenger with all kinds of crap has become the norm now.

The fact that that kind of thing resonates with anyone is what personally boggles me the most. When I see someone attack the messenger and ignore the message, it usually raises my antennae even more.