I wonder to what extent this is because Nixon was just a rotten power-hungry jerk and not, like Trump and Johnson and a lot of the other current Repubs, people who’ve convinced themselves that God/Jesus put them here to do all this to the country.
If you could convince yourself that you were chosen by a god for your role, it’d probably up your arrogance and delusion quotients pretty substantially, I’d think.
And of course in Nixon’s day, the unitary executive theory was just beginning to get off the ground. Now it seems to be fully airborne and conducting some sort of blitzkrieg.
According to current conservative thinking, to make courts function properly will require extreme terror and punishment. Shaved heads. Chains. Long, harsh prison sentences. Excommunicado for guilty court districts. Make it so awful they won’t even watch crime shows on tv.
How is it that our Dem leaders are still being “stunned,” floored, shocked, surprised, etc? Who the fu*k have we been electing to lead the Dem party all these years? Are they just stupid? Can they not see what is happening in broad daylight, hear the words of the enemies of democracy, and prepare both to fight back and go on the offensive? Seriously, how can these actions still be stunning our Dem leaders???
We should all help the system to crash by calling and asking questions about our benefits, past, present or future, what is going on, and any other questions we can think of. We have to help them to fail, bigly. If crashing the computers and clogging the phone lines will speed up the process of failure, we all need to call 2-3 times per day, and just sit on hold while on speaker if necessary. LET THEM FAIL (and help them if you are able).
Nixon had his faults but he wasn’t out to destroy the country. He also advocated for and signed into law all of the major pieces of environmental legislation. And a bipartisan Congress stood up to him.
It is definitely a pattern we have seen. Yet, this should be easy for Democrats because something is Constitutional or it isn’t and the Democrats need to do better on messaging. For example, “the Constitution says this about what is being proposed. Do you think the Constitution is wrong and should be changed? What exactly are you saying here?”
That would be wonderful but that will happen when pigs fly.
Process and institutional norms are in the Democrat’s DNA … even if that’s not the case for the other side. It’s like an evolutionary tic for Democrats. I’m afraid that the only thing that will make Democrats change is when they are naturally selected by the political environment for extinction. They must change and adapt to the new environment or die.
We’re in the midst of of it. Today (Tuesday) brought more assaults on the law (unfund the courts, going after another major law firm), TPMs article on the removal of Venezuelans to a torture prison being paid a large sum of money to incarcerate them and a chat on bombing Yemen that a prominent journalist was shocked to find himself a part of. And another one in on the chat was using his phone in Moscow (Witkoff). Rachel Maddow just said “things are rapidly disintegrating here.”
I thought Hawley’s statement about having more Republican justices on the courts and even expanding the number of districts was kind of conservative boilerplate for decades. They would be gleeful having a Federalist Society paid for district in each state. Now Mikey Johnson wants to shrink the number of judicial districts? We all know that he wants to go after the supposedly liberal leaning ones.
Holding the very concept of “checks and balances” hostage to the whims of one man. And they dare to call themselves “Republicans” while going full-throated [sic] monarchist.
Yep. He did a fair number of things that showed he was interested in improving the country. His big flaws were mostly being power hungry and vindictive on a personal level…Not the same thing at all, really. I don’t think the country has previously seen anything like what we’re seeing with Trump … Plus, now our biggest problem is having the president’s own party falling for the thing totally, I think. That bipartisan group of Senators was a saving grace in the 70s. But when we seem to have lost a whole party to a ruling criminal, it’s hard to see what recourse there can really be.
I would not put those two on the same level for … well, anything.
The patient himself has no god but Mammon. He’s bought into the “I was sent by God” line because it benefits him, not because he believes it, or anything else for that matter. Truth is whatever helps close the deal. Nothing more, nothing less.
House Squeaker Insurrection Johnson, for his part, does believe. But so did the Pharisees. It will be held against him, not for him, in his exit interview.
