Seeing what's possible in this position, I doubt future US presidents will hold back.

If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.

You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)

And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.

(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)

Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.

But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.

This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?

And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.

So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.

nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.

And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.

I wonder if both parties see the need for that at this point. There still seems a lot of 'but we are the good guys' in both partys blocking deep reform. If I'm honest, it took 2 world wars to partially whack that attitude out of Europe, and it's slowly coming back.

If you have two parties that have much the same policies you do not get necessary change and voting becomes meaningless.

I argue that we have a reasonableness standard we can apply here - "Lack of consideration" is what might void a contract indenturing a 20 year old idiot in an unpaid MLM scheme.

Consideration of the public is a factor.

> "Chicago's 2008 parking meter deal, a 75-year, $1.16 billion lease to private investors, is widely criticized as a lopsided, "worst practice" agreement. The deal, pushed through in 72 hours under Mayor Daley, forces the city to pay "true-up" fees for lost revenue, resulting in over $2 billion in revenue for investors [so far] while the city continues to settle costly disputes."

People are ignored, councils seem to rubber stamp things and the tactic at higher levels is to make a terrible decision and then attempt to use courts to delay any attempt to stop whatever the decision was. When it’s finally stopped, it will be done again slightly different and restart the lengthy court process.

The big problem is long term outsourcing contracts, that serves to get the debt off the government’s books. If anyone else did it they would be required to show the debt under off-balance sheet financing rules, but the government gets to set its own rules and gets away with hiding the real situation. Gordon Brown did a lot of this so he could pretend to have balanced the budget.

Apart from central government a lot of local authorities have done this too. Sheffield's notorious street management contract (the one that lead to cutting down huge numbers of trees) is a good example.

Often when a new party takes power, no big real changes are seen as it is not so easy to implement considering the real world. They have to go down some kind of middle path.

However, historically it made a lot more difference which party was elected.

In the UK in the 80s you knew that if you voted Labour things would bet nationalised, and if you voted Conservative things would get privatised. Since the centrist consensus (e.g. Blair and Cameron) emerged it makes a lot less difference.

That, IMO, is evidence that what has changed is not that the two parties are constrained from pursuing very different policies, but that they no longer wish to.

A few decades ago a very high proportion of Labour politicians were former trade union leaders, for example. Conservative voters tended to be more rural and more affluent.

Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.

I really dislike that this is a thing. Politics should not be a profession. That being said, the obvious way of fixing this (term limits) would just end up giving more power to the civil service bureaucracies, which has problems.

We know how to fix lots of problems, and money is orthogonal to the issue.

Sentences like "They have to go down..." are really a symptom of a static "there is no alternative" view.

Everyone would like that, but it is easier said than done.

> We know how to fix lots of problems, and money is orthogonal to the issue.

Great that you have the answer, so how do we fix it?

The past ~100yr of state policy has made a lot of economic winners out of people in these industries by putting it's thumb on the scale in their favor.

Any reversion to a "natural market state" or perhaps beyond, where the government weighs in to the advantage of those who do not make money on housing or healthcare would necessarily make loser out of all the people who right now benefit from the government having its thumb on the scale where it is currently positioned and they will fight tooth or nail to prevent this.

If you have a jetski which changes direction every 5-10 years that's terrible for long term investment, and terrible from a personal point of view too. Legalise gay marriage, then 5 years later it's oh no, lets make that illegal again.

Best to move to a stable country which isn't run by the whims of a dementia-laden madman.

Political parties are mostly relatively small and under-funded huddles of second-rate individuals, who get told what to do by billionaire-owned media.

It's interesting how many and varied "minor parties" which are more genuinely grassroots have persisted in the UK despite the difficulty in scrounging up funding from the actual public, and despite FPTP being theoretically stacked against them. It's very different to the US, which despite all the talk of Federalism doesn't seem to have local parties at all?

The US seems to restrict the ability of minor parties to stand for election far more than the UK does. It varies by state but from what I have read you need thousands of signatures just to stand in many states.

FTTP does also favour parties with a geographically concentrated base such as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the NI parties. Geographical variations in the US seem mostly to be about which of the two big parties people back.

Is it? What stops the next one being an outlier, or the one after that?

Its going to take decades to recover from the whims of the US population (the plurarity of whom voted for this)

Are we supposed to back to the good ol' days when the <pick federal agency> could hold a press conference announcing some grand new plan with <pick industry group> key person and <pick billionaire> standing in the background smiling because they know their people ghost wrote it to their benefit and the press would unanimously gush about how good it is if not copypasta the press release entirely?

Institutions are basically bankrupt of trust in the eyes of the public. Between that and the modern information distribution landscape the status quo circa like 1930something-2010something where the administrative parts of the state could "just do things" without organized resistance by the parts of the public that were on the losing end is likely never coming back.

Whatever you, and everyone else, wants to use state power to accomplish will likely have to dial back their ambitions and prioritize in accordance with the new reality of how much you need to fight for each thing, basically realign policy targets to be closer to the fat part of the "what everyone wants" bell curve. Maybe from there there will be a decades long re-accumulation of trust, but we don't know what the world will look like in the future and that may bring us to a very different status quo than the one we're exiting.

I know we all like to whine and screech about billionares and moneyed interests, but I think the new status quo is probably a bigger problem for them and other "string pullers" than the median member of the public who's getting shafted by it. Remember, the "status quo" of the last 100yr is what created the problems we have to clean up today and in the future.

Get back to the rule of law.

All this crap has been happening forever. It may very well be happening more now (probably is, IMO), but it's happening in the open. It's all being litigated. Every capricious decision that would have sailed right over the heads of the non-thinking morons with a simple stamp of approval, maybe a small lawsuit in particularly offensive cases, is now being scrutinized and seriously litigated, because the agencies and other "legitimizers" involves have burned through their stored trust, and now everyone is watching everything they do.

I see that as a huge improvement.

Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.

Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?

The Supreme Court doesn't choose which docket to “use”; the interim docket (sometimes calls the “emergency docket” or “shadow docket”) is where applications for immediate action on cases that have not reached a final decision in lower court are handled. Decisions on the interim docket are more likely to be unsigned orders, but that's as true of the ones the administration has lost as the ones it has won.

This is factually untrue; the Court, in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), held that the President has:

(1) absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of core constitutional powers, (2) presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts, (3) no immunity from criminal prosecution for unofficial acts.

This is—while still problematic—very far from the President being “immune to all laws”.

Its not quite that high of cases (21 out of 25 where the administration is a party in 2025, per [0], with one additional loss since the beginning of 2026 (Tangipa v. Newsom [1] seeking an injunction barring the CA redistricting map, where the administration wasn't in the heading but was a party as a plaintiff-intervenor.) Note that all of the decided cases at issue are interim orders (orders concerning actions before the final decision on the case, where the Administration either wants an injunction or wants to not have an injunction against it, mainly), and reading the track record of the cases that actually get decided on the interim docket neglects the effect of the Administration's losses there on which cases it could appeal it chooses not to so they never reach the docket at all, as argued in [2].

[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-...

[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/tangipa-v-newsom...

[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/interim-docket-blog/#the-federal-...

They will simply have less goodwill when an American team is on the other side of the table, and give less benefit of the doubt. (as compared to say if a Swiss team is on the other side of the table)

No, it isn't. This administration is a rupture. It is the beginning of a new normal. Future presidents will try to emulate this guy.

You could say "outlier" when he lost in 2020. You can't say that after he came back. The American people wants this authoritarian populism. The SCOTUS enables it. And the world shouldn't trust both the American people and its crumbling institutions.

the shape of how things actually work is what’s left when constant churn (and now budget blocking) is a fact of life

Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.

It is an interesting question of what changed in terms of ability to execute, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creep, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.

    > US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

It looks pretty steady around 17%. It was as high as 20% in the late 1990s. However, this does not include state and local taxes. I could not find a source for it. What is your source of information?

However, my main point was to refute the idea of some mythical past where the government was massively more funded, and therefore more competent and capable.

This also ignores the effect of the growing pie over time, but that is somewhat a tangent.

If someone is referencing back to the 1930s tax rates, those total receipts were closer to 10% of GDP when things like the Hoover Dam and Interstate System were being built.

Today, the rates are closer to 30% and the GDP being taxed is 25-30 times larger, controlling for inflation.

To me, this suggests that the reason we can't perform infrastructure projects is not lack of funding

These are the proportions we are talking about. It begs a lot of questions.

Are the projects really comparable? Did competence change? Did the working environment?

Every regulation, whether it's environmental, DEIA or anti-fraud, adds a few steps to each project. With enough regulations and enough steps, things just slow down to a crawl.

As governments and legal systems get older, they get into more and more situations where a bad thing happens, and the politicians must show that they've done something to stop a similar thing from happening again. Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call. This results in more and more layers of regulation being added, which nobody has an incentive to remove.

Sure, there are such cases, but a lot of regulation was written in blood, and the price that affected individuals or even our whole species paid was often monumental:

Having cancer literally eat the workers faces is not acceptable (=> radium girls), nor are mistakes like leaded gas or CFCs.

Everytime people advocate for big immediate gains from abolishing regulations, you can be almost certain that they are selling toxic snake oil.

Current US admin seems no exception, especially when comparing related promises with actual results (e.g. Doge).

edit: I'm not saying that pruning back regulations is bad, but it needs to be a careful, deliberate effort and big immediate payoffs are often unrealistic.

Correct, but the tax system is nonetheless quite effective at setting behavioral incentives and disincentives. Higher income and estate tax rates incentivize capital being locked up in investments instead (for lower capital gains taxes); those investments put people to work and are subject to Labor negotiating higher compensation. Allowing donations to non-profits to deduct from other taxes allows private individuals (compared to a government bureaucracy) to more efficiently fund social welfare programs, which incidentally, also put people to work in the administration of such programs.

Funding government is not the sole goal of higher taxation rates, but rather, also how incentives in society are shaped.

There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.

The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.

Another way of saying it is China took the most advantage. And it has gone way overboard in taking advantage. So the backlash is expected and necessary.

Part of fixing things involve doing things that seem like it's destroying the order that the US created itself.

The conditions the average Chinese works in are abysmal, even from the American point of view.

"They eliminated poverty... but at WHAT COST? They did good things but they trampled on the intellectual property of our beloved billionares? *sob*"

All the while going into a demographic death spiral. Partly cause by the draconian 1-child policy, which attempted to fix the pronatalist policies of Mao.

I'm not saying China is the best and whatever, just saying they've proven every "China is about to fall" headline that has been circulating around for the past 15 years. Maybe we should learn some things from them.

When you have massive buildups with no hope of returns, it's a a bad financial decision and the public carries the debt burden.

Pure BS

Not a fan of CCP but pretending like there was no extreme poverty in China before CCP is insane position.

(not sure what you mean by "corruption we tolerate in US allies"?)

There is extreme corruption in the U.S. as well, but we've legalized it so it disappears in statistics.

This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)

We also have endemic corruption siphoning off funds all over the place, ESPECIALLY in the big projects that have the attention of the current administration.

Sure, but that's contingent on

1) the voters being well educated and not constantly brainwashed by various types of propaganda pushing them to vote against their own interests (see the Germans being anti-nuclear and pro-Russian gas since the 80s) and

2) the voters being trust and having an actual say in how their country is run, because if whoever gets voted into power just does the opposite of what the voters want "for their own good", then you're not a democracy anymore, you're just a well functioning state (if that).

Now, recently, they had a very good run. This must be admitted and even celebrated.

But the aforementioned flaw is still very much present.

Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.

Unless, of course, you assume (the ideal to be) an entirely anarchist business environment where whoever-with-resources can do whatever. Democracy, though, is not that.

I’m a supporter of it regardless of the cost, but for a “long term” project look at the California HSR, which was directly approved by voters 19 years ago and we’re still debating how to fund the majority of it, let alone actually build what we voted to construct and open in its entirety within 10 years.

That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society

That aside: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...

Edit due to rate-limiting: that makes two of us.

>raises the possibility that the order halting construction will ultimately be held to be arbitrary and capricious.

But guys like Trump aren't arbitrary or capricious.

There's a pretty good consensus that he would have to be a lot more sensible by nature to reach that level of sophistication.

I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true. One big transition point in my thinking was in July of last year, when I remembered how much he'd bragged in March that the Department of Education would soon be shut down. He does a large number of terrible things, yes, but he also can't do most of the terrible things he says he's going to do.

I don't have to "check back in a few months." Look at what he's accomplished in only one year: https://www.project2025.observer/en . Far more than he was able to do in his four previous years in office.

Trump is basically doing all the things that he wanted to do in his first term, but that were slow-walked, stonewalled, and sandbagged by the so-called "adults in the room." There are now very few if any of those adults left, and that includes judges who are willing and able to put a leash on him.

If you're not deranged, you're not paying attention.

In any case, once again: yes, some of Trump's actions are being blocked by the courts, and the Republicans are working to fix that by installing captive, corrupt, or incompetent judges.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.

That's an abuse of the judicial system. Politicians are elected exactly because the voters perceive a need to change the execution of government's functions.

The thing is, you cannot beat human moral qualities with formalist means. People who come to power by raising hatred towards their political opponents will always find a way to subvert policies even if not cancel them.

Long-term policies should be established through consensus among all parties, not though legalistic bureaucracy.

Elected politicians can change laws and rules going forward, but there should be obstacles at changing past laws.

Congress certainly has the power to change this if they want to. But without something like the APA, private businesses exposed to federal regulation would struggle to make any plans beyond the current US Presidential term. So they do not want to.

Well, this is sort of against the spirit of the US constitution, at least as explained in the Federalist. I might even call it an abuse of the Legislative system.

I'm not speaking very confidently here, but by the spirit of it, the Congress should not do this much of micro-management of the Executive.

Surely the Congress should pass the laws which _prevent_ the Executive from doing stupid things, in particular collecting too much taxes, but it shouldn't really tell the Executive "do this, in this particular way".

To be honest, I suspect that the actual _reason_ every administration tries to undo as much of the actions of the previous administration as they can is because due to the amount of limits imposed on them by the Congress they they cannot do much else. Fighting the Congress is much harder than fighting the previous administration.

I seriously suspect that if the amount of regulation is decreased, it will actually be beneficial to long-term policy stability, because instead of fighting the decisions of the previous administration the current one would be busy with it's own projects.

Dozens of new GW+ wind farms came online in the last four years. This concerns a few projects in a few particular locations that are exposed to federal interference. It has impacts on the market but the market is larger than these minor disturbances by an order of magnitude.

> while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.

We have private business in this country. They're doing just fine.

Thats not that much is it given the size and energy demand of the country? And that's over the past 4 years, you'll only see the true impact of this in the next 6 years.

> This concerns a few projects in a few particular locations that are exposed to federal interference

Markets are driven by a lot of feelings too. If you're trying to build a wind farm now, why on earth would you do that in the US? There are just many better options.

Your private businesses will happily skip over the US if they understand markets. Don't row upstream, find a place where your investment is wanted

No, but there's demand everywhere. So it's all down to how likely you are to get your money back?

And this is for adding power to the grid, if you have a major single customer you're already adding a ton of risk to your project... What if the datacenter is no longer needed after a few years or isn't completed ever?

What is it relative to these 5 projects?

> you'll only see the true impact of this in the next 6 years.

Are these the _only_ new projects that could _possibly_ be built in that time frame?

> a lot of feelings too

The feelings of those with money not of the general population.

> If you're trying to build a wind farm now, why on earth would you do that in the US?

You just said. "The size and energy demand of the country." Or are you proposing that no one would build unless we remove absolutely all risk for them? I'm not sure you and I mean the same thing when saying "private business."

> happily skip over the US

I believe this is a worn out trope. Please show some evidence this has actually occurred.

> find a place where your investment is wanted

Ah.. the "amazonification" of America. "Businesses shouldn't compete or take risks!" You seem to say. We must bend over and make them happy before they can deign to take our dollars. Perfectly modern and utterly ridiculous.

No, but a lot of the coastal waters are federal land (water? :D) which is why this is a problem to begin with. Wind at sea has a lot of benefits, no neighbors, nothing to interfere with the wind, typically very predictable power generation. So yes, you can build a lot on land, the US has plenty of space for that but that'll be subject to a LOT more pushback from the general public.

> The feelings of those with money not of the general population

And those with money are the ones making the investment decisions, no?

> You just said. "The size and energy demand of the country." Or are you proposing that no one would build unless we remove absolutely all risk for them? I'm not sure you and I mean the same thing when saying "private business."

You've followed all the rules, got all the permits, you're building and have invested x amount. And NOW the rug is pulled from underneath you? That's not a very comforting world to be investing in.

Or to put it in more general public sense. You want to build a house in city X. You get a plot of land, get an architect to draw up what you'll build, you get all the permits and are halfway through construction and THEN the city revokes your permit. You tell me, but I wouldn't try building anything there again because they are just unreliable. You go to the city next door.

> I believe this is a worn out trope. Please show some evidence this has actually occurred.

Happy to, compare these 2 charts.

USA: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...

Europe: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...

The US is basically just switching to gas power. And if you look at % of energy mix you'll see that wind is mostly flat as a % of the whole electricty generation. So yes, much much more money/investment is going into renewables in Europe. And as unpredictable as policy can be there too, they typically have the understanding to only change rules for NEW projects not existing ones.

> Ah.. the "amazonification" of America. "Businesses shouldn't compete or take risks!" You seem to say. We must bend over and make them happy before they can deign to take our dollars. Perfectly modern and utterly ridiculous.

Businesses should take risks and be rewarded for them. But take the building a house example above, would you agree that in general rules shouldn't be changed during the game/on existing projects?

If the Fed falls and monetary policy is subject to the political whims of a tyrant that only cares about himself, then we lost reserve currency stays and we are ducked so hard by simultaneous inability to continue the deficit and a need to pay back interest at far far higher rates. It would cause a spiral in the US economy like we have never seen. Or in the best case just a gradual switch from USD to other standin currencies causing a decade or two of recession in the US, best case.

So far most businesses have not jacked up prices from tariffs because they are hoping they can have the US Supreme Court overturn what look to be obviously illegal tariffs that should have been enacted by Congress rather than the king (we fought an entire revolutionary war over this!). If the Supreme Court doesn't overturn tariffs then we are at risk for inflation going up to 1970s levels.

The state of private business in the US is best represented by the meme of a dog sitting at a kitchen table saying "this is fine" while the house burns down around him. The firefighters may come, but they had better come soon.

Where are you deriving this from?

> is best represented by the meme

Ah.. well that offers a guess.

See for example the numerous wars against native Americans in the 19th century; even in some Washington US museum they admin the natives were not wrong when they had to assume any peace treaty was not worth the ink it was written with (and meant "we're only regrouping and will attack again in less than 5 years").

Either we live in a democracy or we do not. Democracy determines the correct path by wobbling between two incompatible options - implementation and repeal. That which is implemented by one side, but not repealed by the other survives as the appropriate path.

There is no alternative to this - without abandoning democracy and universal suffrage.

Remember that democracy is the worst way to run a country, except for all the other.

Sadly this is an inherent weakness of the US constitution. It's old and it was written at a time where we didn't have enough experience with democracies.

In a modern parliamentary democracy you vote parties which form coalitions and settle on one of the party leaders (in general the one with most votes) as prime minister.

This means that:

- other parties are still involved in the legislative process. In a presidential republic with the president holding executive power, other parties are not represented at all. Trump doesn't need approval on his actions neither by opposition nor his own party. In a parliament, many members will support continuity on many topics rather than change if it doesn't make sense. They still vote based on their conscience, not just on their affiliation.

- the executive depends on its effectiveness and for staying in power on the support of its parliament members. If some members of Giorgia Meloni's coalition don't like the direction she's taking they are not gonna vote her proposals and ultimately she may need to resign if she gets a vote of no confidence. Removing a president in countries like US is extremely difficult in comparison, and the executive has no checks, neither from opposition nor its own party to go in whatever direction a single individual decides to go.

Seriously, what Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, etc, all have in common? They are presidential republics. Single individuals hold too much power and have little checks from their own party members, let alone a parliament. It's no coincidence that the last parliamentary democracy to turn into authoritarian state has been Sri Lanka over 50 years ago: it's difficult for individuals to grab power, as there is a long checklist of things that need to happen. In a presidential one?

It's very simple: a single individual can claim popular mandate, building a personality cult is simple (you don't vote parties, you vote individuals), a single individual holds executive power and is very hard to remove.

Presidential republics are more effective than slow parliamentary ones, but we should ask ourselves if our focus in 2020s, in advanced economies where things are objectively fine, isn't slow refinement instead of sharp turns.

(I'm not even American and I know this)

The constitution was meant to be a living document, adjusted over the years as the world changes.

But the very opposite happened, it became Holy Scripture, unchanging and never evolving.

The whole American system was based on the idea that the ruling class cared for "reputation", "honor" or "legacy". It was wholy unprepared for people who just don't give a fuck about all that and actively wipe their asses on existing rules and conventions.

Like going in front of Congress and just ... lying. Provably, verifiably lying. Zero recourse, the shame of lying used to be enough. And because of ancient decorum rules, the congress can't even say "you're lying" and google the facts right there and then, they have to do this idiotic perfromatic dance of asking the same question repeatedly and getting a word salad non-answer back for hours.

Or just not going for the inquiry because, why would you? There's no penalty past "losing face" for not going. Why bother.

The system was flawed from the start, but the people were still in there for the best of everyone so it held together and mostly worked. Politicians respected one another as people and humans, even though they differed in opinion.

I personally can't see a way back for USA without a massive purge in the government followed by actual ironclad laws and processes set in stone to prevent anything like this from happening again. Let congress google basic facts, let them call people liars to their face, give them their own execuitve branch that can drag people for hearings by force if needed.

And copy the German Federal Constitutional Court[0] system, they have term limits and people are nominated through multiple channels.

So you end up talking with individuals where "the 2nd amendment says I can have guns, it's in the constitution" and "my favorite president should go for a third term, the 22nd amendment is just a technicality".

Of course, it never really worked out that way. We're simply at the end of that very long line.

Quite simply the US had founding fathers who were ahead of their time, and some uncharted waters ahead of it.

This set the example for the decent navigators who took the executive positions, but momentum can only last so long.

You need decent people to come along on a regular basis to refresh the progress.

The very system that allowed for a gifted individual to have an outsized positive outcome, has always posed a real vulnerability if the decency is compromised. Whether that is a "natural" lack of decency or if compromises escalate over time, that's a weakness which is magnified when it does show up.

Different presidents have had this problem from time to time.

When you start with a country where the big advantage is being ahead of its time with an emphasis on more decency than average, it doesn't take somebody completely behind the times or absolutely disgusting to do serious damage. Even dropping the ball one time can be a major setback.

Just ask every respectable President in history.

The answer is contract law. Pulling the plug out of a project costs money.

Obviously this still requires a level of sanity which may no longer exist in the US.

Simple. You begin constructing an offshore wind park when someone competent is president, pause the project for four years during Trump's term, and then resume work to complete it.

>...According to Suetonius, Caesar's assassination ultimately occurred primarily due to concerns that he wished to crown himself the king of Rome.[13] These concerns were exacerbated by the "three last straws" of 45 and 44 BC. In just a few months, Caesar had disrespected the Senate, removed People's Tribunes, and toyed with monarchy. By February, the conspiracy that caused his assassination was being born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar

Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R

> creates the laws, the executive

Donald Trump (R)

> executes the laws, and the judiciary

SCOTUS (5-4 R)

> interprets the laws.

So Republicans create, execute, interpret, and enforce the laws. Congratulations on discovering how the party system works. Guess you're Big Poland (PiS) now. You can watch this on the news: Fox (R-Murdoch), CBS (R-Weiss), or read about it in the Washington Post (R-Bezos)

(snark aside, the situation where there's popular demand for authoritarianism is very dangerous, difficult to unravel, but like in Poland, it can be done once the public realize their mistake)

It's the Senate, not "Congress". Colloquially, "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives.

>SCOTUS (5-4 R)

> interprets the laws.

Actually, it's 6-3, not 5-4.

I get that you're not from or live in the US. Please understand, I'm not trying to insult or demean you. But you're making statements that are not true.

I believe the term is "FTFY." And you're welcome.

FTFY

You said

> "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives.

Which is incorrect and what I was responding to. Reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your strong suit either eh?

I needn't say any more, do I?

Colloquially, "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives.

Colloquial (adjective):[0]

1a: used in or characteristic of familiar and informal conversation

Did you just not know the meaning of that word or did you intentionally decide to ignore it?

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colloquial

"Congress" is the name of the whole bicameral legislature, not either one of the houses, though "Congressman" or "Congresswoman" refers to a member of the House of Representatives.

GP said:

>> The legislature >Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R

I said:

>It's the Senate, not "Congress".