Couched:Its not the sitting on the couch thats a problem with him
With respect to the Vice President of the United States of America circa 2026
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Domestic consequences of the 2024 US presidential election: the quickening
- Thread starter Scotttheking
- Start date
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It's not sitting on a counch that's risky in this scenario. It's sitting on a couch after JD Vance has been near it that is the risky bit.
I think the evidence from 2024 suggests people can thwart the intent of the mandate. A little more than 3 million cast useless votes (either voting for nobody or for a party that didn't seat anyone in Parliament) and almost 1.7 million didn't vote at all despite the mandate. I guess it's high turnout overall, at about 73% of registered voters voting for a party that got candidates in Parliament.
Has there been any study to find out if that's effective in getting better candidates elected? Are their votes more effective? Do they at least understand what their government is doing and why better than countries that don't have a mandate?
Well, to be fair - what the US needs isn't to thrash around for a new way to force people to participate in its wretched voting system.
If I were King for a day over there I would:
1) Declare the constitution completely unworkable, and send it to a grand committee to work out the ground rules for the 2nd American Republic.
2) Forbid anyone from ever considering first past the post as a voting system
3) Declare upon my royal backside that if anyone suggested a system where an obvious madman could not easily be fired and jailed, I would fire and jail them.
Yeah, I think at minimum you'd want the head of state and every constitutional officer to have to pass a majority vote of the main legislative body to keep their job, annually.
Parliament is the expression of the will of the people. Parliament (or in the US case, the House of Representatives) is supreme. The other branches are important, and should be bound by law to their appointed roles and should act independent of parliament. But in the end, parliament should appoint or depose the principals of those branches. Yes, even the Senate. But try to do a better job than the UK where appointments to the upper house is a grift these days for prime ministers to toy with. And oh, the Senate is just a judicial review body. It has no ability to initate legislation.
Why are you down on people voting for unsuccessful candidates?
You're still stuck thinking in party mode - "the party got no candidates in parliament".
it's actually not that bad in instant-runoff systems. I guess if people are happy enough with who won, it's fine.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure how 3 really helps. It isn’t that there aren’t mechanisms for dealing with an unfit president. But if the general consensus is you can’t prosecute presidents or even high-ranking officials for obvious crimes, then a different system for doing it won’t change anything.
I won’t pretend to have answers, and it’s not the only problem with US political systems, but not holding the government accountable is definitely enormously problematic. Even ignoring Trump and his Teflon-like ability to evade consequences, it sometimes feels like being stuck in a locked room with an annoyed and mercurial tiger.
At least if presidents knew they would be called to answer for crimes like lying about WMDs, or running or backing coups against legitimate governments in other countries, they might be at least a little hesitant to deploy the cudgel of the US military…
I think the only way we change this idea of you can't punish high government officials for crimes is to actually do it and point out that the world hasn't ended.
I think it's the combination of a few factors:
Mandatory voting
Easy access to pre-voting, mail voting and other methods to ensure everyone gets their say.
Preferential voting, so no vote is ever wasted unless it's a deliberate donkey vote.
An independent body to both manage elections and determine electoral boundaries.
Any one of the 4 would be good, it's the combo of them all that I think works well. We do get our fair share of dropkicks (Pauline Hanson as a glaring example) but they tend to not have actual power, and even if we did elect a Trump-like PM they can be gotten rid of without an election.
Edit: There's even a website where you state your electorate and it'll list the candidates with links to their websites. You can determine how you want to vote and it'll generate an image of the actual ballot paper showing you how to list the candidates in the order you wanted.
Or the world does end. Either way you never have to deal with this kind of crap anymore. Win-win.
It's such a coup (more or less literally) that the DOJ issues a couple of memos that in their opinion it's unconstitutional to press charges against a sitting president and we all treat it like it's an actual law passed by Congress, or even a judgment from the SCOTUS.
A few unelected bureaucrats write some memos and there goes democracy.
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But those mechanisms are completely unworkable.
One requires that the people who were directly employed by the boss, fire the boss.
The second require an unreachable ratio of votes in the upper chamber.
To fix it, require a simple majority vote in the House of Representatives about whether the House has confidence in the executive. If the House fails to pass a motion of confidence, hold a new election within a month, unless the House passes another resolution of confidence. If the House fails to pass a motion of confidence, the whole top level of the executive is fired.
That would put the pressure point where it belongs. The dynamics of the house would change completely, and maybe Americans would start to pay attention to the house elections.
There's no way that would ever go wrong in the US, right?
Well, are things going well now? Parliamentarianism is easier to course correct. I am sure that, in the words of Churchill, that Americans would do the right thing, after trying everything else first. Parliamentarianism seems the quickest way to that point in time.
No, but imagine your rules with a RNC majority in the House and a Dem President. I bet that would go well. Or an RNC majority parliament with Trump, would they do their job then? Of course not.
Regardless, I dont see any appetite in the US for such enormous and game changing change, if anything you see them doubling down, even tripling down, on reinforcing a broken system.
I actually think the dynamics would change so much that the House elections would matter much more than they do today. I don't think the RNC (or the DNC) would exist in a parliamentarianist USA.
And I don't argue for the change, because I don't think it will ever change. People treat that constitution of theirs as if it's a sacred object, despite the fact that by all measurable metrics it has failed monumentally.
chateauarusi
Ars Centurion
I occasionally idly ponder a system which makes the simple assumption that the executive will commit crimes during his (or her) term, so he/she is automatically put on trial on leaving office to see how bad it was and how much time will be served. It's obviously nothing that would ever be enacted in reality but it's fun to imagine.
I don't think it was even their opinion that it was unconstitutional, just that it was against policy.
Churchill was unrealistically optimistic.
Seeing how parliamentarian systems are currently working in real time in the UK and Israel, I doubt that the IOKIYAR norms currently in force in the US political ecosystem would even slow down much less stop. "Hippie-punching" would remain a popular political pastime.
He also said the best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter. So, not always an optimist
To be fair, Churchill well preceded the days of social media, news media concentration, and the bad-faith dealing that has dominated American politics of recent years.
Are they? It seems Likud has dominated Israeli politics for a quarter of a century if not longer, with a PM who's both a domestic and war criminal.
UK politics, there seems to be deep discontent and they did Brexit.
Maybe the problem is that Russians and fascists have learned to game or hack democracy.
I think the US, Israel, and UK all got the results under discussion mostly by indulging in home-grown bigotry.
As far as the UK goes I for one consider the current PM to be tainted by the Epstien scandal. Same for the US President.
On the basis of that, it can be considered that they are acting for a foreign power.
As such they fall foul of espionage/sedition/treason.
On the basis of that, it can be considered that they are acting for a foreign power.
As such they fall foul of espionage/sedition/treason.
The hack in question being the selling of bigotry and exceptionalism to nationalists, and there just so happen to be a lot of buyers.
The SAVE Act has apparently died in the Senate, which is nice. The GOP will have to find another way to cheat in the elections this fall.
Thompson Reuters fired a whistleblower for bringing an open letter to leadership about how ICE's use of their information databases violated company policy, public statements, and perhaps constitutional rights.
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/21/nx-s1-5786915/ice-immigration-enforcement-data-thomson-reuters
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/21/nx-s1-5786915/ice-immigration-enforcement-data-thomson-reuters
She formed a group of other employees and drafted a letter to their higher-ups about the issue.
Sadly familiar in today's work environment in the US. The word "investigation" is thrown around but really it's just a figleaf to invoke when you've already decided to fire someone.
I sit on a local school board and recently we were considering signing up for CLEAR to help with our process to confirm that families that register for school actually live in the district (right now it's mostly our sleuthing plus some private investigators - CLEAR would absolutely save us money).
I quietly raised concerns about CLEAR & ICE (I posted about it a while ago in The Lounge, asking technical questions of Ars denizens) and we decided not to pursue using the product.
I quietly raised concerns about CLEAR & ICE (I posted about it a while ago in The Lounge, asking technical questions of Ars denizens) and we decided not to pursue using the product.
On the first item: Hooray!
On the second: Unfortunately, they have already deployed dozens of different ways....
We still need to overcome them, of course.
Okay, where is the SPLC getting that it has failed in the Senate?
Last documentation on H.R. 22 shows it was received by the Senate on April 10th, after it passed the House.
No votes up or down, no movement at all.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22/all-actions?s=1&r=5&hl=Save+act
I decided to check the Congressional Record for 20 April. If something had happened last week, congress.gov would have been updated by now. If it had happened yesterday, maybe not.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2026-04-20/pdf/CREC-2026-04-20.pdf
SAVE isn’t mentioned once. I did look for ‘22’. There are 88 instances of “22”, but none in reference to H.R. 22, the SAVE Act. There is also limited instances of ‘voting’, none of ‘voter’, and while there ARE 62 instance of ‘vote’, non pertain to the SAVE Act.
There is effectively no time limit on when the Senate can act on it (bring it to the floor, refer to committee, etc). If the bill hasn’t passed by the end of the Congress (so, start of 2027), then it expires. Until then? Further activity is up to the Majority Leader.
Finally, the SPLC is the only org I can find talking about it “failing”. The only other things I can find after a cursory search is sites referencing… the SPLC.
I suspect that is more than a little bit of hopeful/wishful projection by the SPLC, and nothing more.
Edit: Unless they are saying that because it isn’t explicitly in the budget resolution game-plan that Lindsay Graham has released, but that is FAR from becoming an actual Budget resolution at this point. Plus, you know, the House being involved. But that is strictly conjecture by me on the SPLC’s possible reasons for making a declaration like this.
The bill is being filibustered by Democrats in the Senate, so it can't advance to cloture.
And? That was the case two weeks ago. Nothing has changed. What made the SPLC declare that it has failed now?
Thune hasn’t completely ruled out trying to pass parts via reconciliation. He’s come out against (but again, hasn’t completely ruled out) changing some rules around temporarily to get around the filibuster as it stands currently.
It’s just sitting there, like the overwhelming majority of bills that pass the House. It was dead on arrival until the Republicans started talking about trying to get it passed via ‘other’ means, and they’re still talking about it. So, again, what made this announcement particularly more relevant yesterday than two weeks ago?
Sort of not kidding: the Trump-as-Jesus AI image thing.
Between that and the Iran War we're seeing cracks in the GOP coalition and more people on the right willing to openly criticize Trump. It could be a sign of Trump's grip on the base weakening, and that makes it easier for Senators to just blow off his demands and attempts at bullying them.
Tucker Carlson publicly apologizes for endorsing Trump
Interesting that Carlson characterizes what he did as misleading people. So, like, lying.
But I have no illusions that this is really driven by anything other than self-interest. This is just what happens when puppeteers start to lose control of their puppet. In fact Carlson alludes to this later:
For almost fifty years the GOP has tended to elect presidents that aren't supposed to make their own decisions, instead following the dictates of the oligarchy. What we're seeing here is a fracture in the oligarchy, presumably the Putin wing getting iced out by the techbros and Heritage Foundation. It won't be enough to get Trump removed from office--the Epstein class knows they're all going to jail if they lose power.