What does that mean in practical terms though? The absolute worst that can happen to trump is he is both impeached and successfully indicted. When the worst case is maybe by some extremely unlikely "luck" he loses his job and has to sulk back into his billions and golden towers, and on the other hand he can gamble with the lives of million of serviceman and the tax money Americans could otherwise spend on healthy food, healthcare, education and other things they need -- why not? He's not up for re-election anyways.
Trumps an unhealthy older man, with no prospect for re-election, and a big golden parachute even in the worst case scenario. The fact the war is all on him is seen as a plus because he gets all the credit for the history books and the mothers of the dead servicemen are just forgotten trash used to achieve his objective.
Trump is acting completely rationally. His MO is to push the envelope until he is stopped. It is mostly others who are irrationally acting in the service of Trump that are acting irrationally.
The US is not a democracy. The majority did not want this war.
Though the majority will help bear the costs, and several family members will grieve dearly for the sacrifice of entertaining some brutal geopolitics that do not serve America first.
America is a democratic republic, not a direct democracy. The only restriction is the president can’t declare war, only congress can do that.
They are pretending these strikes are “preemptive” in response to a nuclear bomb being developed, just like the “emergency” that was declared to enact the tariffs.
If it were a democratic republic, as you say, the representatives would have to vote on war. Representatives would also have to vote before 190,000 pages of CFRs are created by unelected bureaucrats and then enforced as if they were law (sometimes, by the exact same bureaucrats that write the rules they enforce as law [ATF for example]).
Most of what people think they know about this country is a facade. They are living on lies, confirmed to them through the legitimization of a SCOTUS that lies to your very eyes about what the constitution says, so that people don't rebel when a politician tells them peace is war and love is hate.
The majority absolutely voted for this war. You're attacking the democracy when you insist that the elected politicians following through on campaign planks are not representing the country. That's exactly how this works.
IDK, "America first" is practically speaking, the financial interests of the current president and his ruling clique, nothing more. This does serve them by, among other things, distracting from the Epstein files and asserting lucrative control over petroleum-producing nations. These brave servicemen died for that.
What UK Prime Minister lost their office because they were rude and patronising to women?
Starmer is still in office, Sunak lost because the Tories were unpopular and because he didn’t win an election to get the Prime Ministership, Johnson lost because during Covid people stayed at the office a little bit longer and had a birthday party, teresa May lost because she couldn’t deliver Brexit, Cameron lost because he gave people a vote on Brexit, Brown lost for the same reasons as Sunak, Blair lost because of the Iraq war.
You left out Liz Truss, which is understandable really.
Liz Truss lost because she was barking mad, manifestly wildly out of her depth and her and her think tank buddies tanked the economy. She was rude and patronising to women (but only because she was rude and patronising to everyone).
PM Gordon Brown did call a female voter "bigoted" on a hot mic (1) - with some justification actually, as she did say some unpleasant anti-immigrant rhetoric. Mr Brown lost an election shortly after, but this incident was not in itself what brought him down.
I'm not suggesting it, but taking a look at history, a couple notables are the Battle of Athens and Cliven Bundy standoff. Bundy is still grazing his cattle on that land to this day.
Ammon Bundy has held relatively libertarian opinions on immigration for a long long time. Since at least the days of the standoffs. His political ideals are closer to the old time westy classical liberalism (something like founding era anti-federalists with a view of the law that essentially mirrors Bastiat) than they are to neo-conservatism.
I guess by that definition, a bullet is also autonomous. It will strike anything in its path of flight, autonomously without further direction from the operator.
If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
It's an awesome victory. But until the penalty for violating rights under color of law is something real (like serious jail + restitution, barred from further public employment, etc) they will keep doing it.
A good start would be requiring police officers to carry individual liability insurance so that municipalities aren't paying for these lawsuits. If someone can't get insurance, they can no longer be a cop.
It's going to be cheaper for municipalites to have group insurance for this (or self-insure) than to have to pay the police enough that they can afford their own insurance.
The whole point of requiring individual insurance is precisely that insurance will be too expensive for people who are demonstrably high risk in that role, and less expensive for people who are low risk.
Some of the additional expense would be due to an individual risk profile, and some of the expense would be due to lack of bargaining power. The expense due to individual risk profile is a feature. The expense due to lack of bargaining power is not.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with how bargaining works, but you only get the price break if you can come in as a large unified group. Having millions of individuals doesn’t result in a price break. Eg There are millions of private individuals buying health insurance in the US, but they have no bargaining power unless they purchase as a unified block. Individual health insurance policies are notoriously expensive.
Ultimately it's the civil authorities and upper brass that want these intrusions. The insurance issue is easily worked around by hiring green recruits at a very high "bonus" to be used as basically burner employees to burn through their insurance and do the illegal stuff under their identity.
It has to be a criminal thing because the top brass and civil servants need RICO like prosecution and tossed in jail along with the guy who gets the insurance ding.
It’s already a (very real) crime to do a Conspiracy to deprive someone of their civil rights, which is what you’re talking about. Occasionally someone gets sued under it, but it’s rare.
I don’t disagree, but can we really claim to have the rule of law if there is a class of people who can flagrantly violate criminal law and court orders and suffer zero criminal consequences?
Mayors, prosecutors, merchants, and local press get co-opted by police. This leads to systemic failures that, unfortunately, make dealing with this in criminal law less workable. Sometimes you gotta do what works.
Before that we need a vast overhaul of qualified immunity for state officials and expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials. It is incredibly difficult to sue state officials for violating your rights because of how qualified immunity works and Bivens is even weaker when it comes to suing federal officials.
> expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials
I don't expect Congress to do so in the foreseeable future (regardless of how the 2026 midterms go), but I hope more states will adopt "converse 1983" laws [1].
Yes, an awesome victory. But I believe a tech solution is gonna be superior to any legal solution. Any data considered "private and sensitive" should be accessible only by the person who owns it. Full stop.
Tech solutions are toothless without laws to prevent authorities from detaining people indefinitely until they surrender access to their data. Efforts to prevent authoritarianism need to think more from the perspective of autocrats.
The only two atomic weapons ever deployed weren't even targeting Nazi Germany, but Japan. Dark but true: they were both deliberately and knowingly targeted at civilian populations.
"Needed to win the war," no. The US could've continued to firebomb and then follow with a land invasion, which would've killed both more Japanese and more Allies.
Was it the best path to end the war? Certainly.
The modern argument around targeting civilians or not was not even relevant at the time due to the advent of strategic bombing, which itself was seen as less-horrific than the stalemated trench warfare of WW1. The question was only whether to target civilian inputs to the military with an atomic weapon (and hopefully shock & awe into submission) or firebomb and invade.
Since at least the progressive era (see the switch in time that saved 9), and probably before, the courts have largely just post facto rationalized why the thing they do or don't agree with fit their desired pattern of constitutionality.
SCOTUS is largely not there to interpret the constitution in any meaningful sense. They are there to provide legitimization for the machinations of power. If god-man in black costume and wig say parchment of paper agree, then act must be legitimate, and this helps keep the populace from rising up in rebellion. It is quite similar to shariah law using a number of Mutfi/Qazi to explain why god agrees with them about whatever it is they think should be the law.
If you look at a number of actions that have flagrantly defied both the historical and literal interpretation of the constitution, the only entity that was able to provide legitimization for many acts of congress has been the guys wearing the funny looking costumes in SCOTUS.
I agree with your premise because this seems to be the modern interpretation of the courts, but it is not the historical interpretation.
The historical basis of the bill of rights is that they are god given rights of all people merely recognized by the government. This is also partially why all rights in the BoR are granted to 'people' instead of 'citizens.'
Of course this all does get very confusing. Because the 4th amendment does generally apply to people, while the 2nd amendment magically people gets interpreted as some mumbo-jumbo people of the 'political community' (Heller) even though from the founding until the mid 1800s ~most people it protected who kept and bore arms didn't even bother to get citizenship or become part of the 'political community'.
Trumps an unhealthy older man, with no prospect for re-election, and a big golden parachute even in the worst case scenario. The fact the war is all on him is seen as a plus because he gets all the credit for the history books and the mothers of the dead servicemen are just forgotten trash used to achieve his objective.
Trump is acting completely rationally. His MO is to push the envelope until he is stopped. It is mostly others who are irrationally acting in the service of Trump that are acting irrationally.
reply