the president of the US doesn’t have as much power as our current one thinks he has. It’s just that no one involved in the checks and balances procedure has the balls to stand up to him and say “no,” or they don’t have the power to do so in a way that would impact anything. And the ones that do decided just before the 2024 election that a sitting president can’t be charged with any illegal shit he did as president, so even the ones that CAN say no to him just get brushed off or outright told “fuck you”
Comment on Why democrats under Biden administration didn't release Epstein files?
selokichtli@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Sorry to answer with other questions, but as a foreigner I have to. Do investigations like this can just be published by the POTUS? I’m my country, it works be the sole decision of the AG, and they would probably won’t publish anything because it could end up damaging the investigation. Or so they’d say.
It’s really baffling the power of the current POTUS, having all the power of the state in his hands. To me, him just telling Pamela Bondi what to do in such a delicate matter feels just wrong, as in lacking the due seriousness on the matter, utterly sloppy and populist in a bad manner.
Battle_Masker@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
They don’t have the power to say “No” because they probably have a big shitty laundry list of their own they want to hide.
TheFogan@programming.dev 1 day ago
I’m my country, it works be the sole decision of the AG
It works like that… but the problem is effectively we give the president the power to fire and replace the AG. So… in short, the AG is hand picked by the president and then approved by congress.
With a crazy president like this that effectively has 100% of his party members in congress intimidated to back every one of his picks, the AG is basically his hand picked employee.
dave881@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes and no.
In the US the Judicial branch is responsible for the the courts and interpretation of the law / constitution, but the Executive branch is responsible for the execution / enforcement of the law. I think that in other parts of the world it is common for the AG to be part of the Judicial branch, but here they are part of the Executive branch.
As I understand it, there are parts of these investigations/prosecutions that the AG can release under their own authority (or by direction of the President) but other parts that are under seal and require authorization from the courts.
wjrii@lemmy.world 1 day ago
One of the recurring themes I keep coming back to in all this is that the US has a uniquely bad situation with regard to its Constitution. We worship it as an infallible and complete guide to running a democratic republic, but really it’s extremely old, extremely vague, and depends on goodwill and sensible interpretation to function. We have neither the explicit understanding that everything is old AF and cobbled together and dependent upon custom and moderating tyrannical sensibilities like the British, nor the unwieldy but straightforward comprehensiveness of EU treaties and certain other lengthy modern written constitutions.
This feeling you have is exactly how presidents of either party would have felt for the last 80-100 years. The idea of a largely independent Department of Justice was considered eminently sensible and moral and even to the realpolitik set it provided outer bounds of what was politically possible and so they would nudge and tug at the edges, but never blow right past it, lest they suffer Nixon’s fate. I think we make a mistake to say that Trump is stupid in a binary yes/no sense, but he is deeply uncurious about things that donm’t interest him, so when people tell him “The Constitution doesn’t actually say that,” his eyes gleam and he just does whatever he might get away with. And because we have a Supreme Court dominated by the idea that the US Constitution is more akin to a piece of computer code than a framework for sensible governance, they simply throw up their hands and say, “whelp, it didn’t SAY that the administration of justice should be handled with integrity, so guess we makin’ a fascism now.” Better vote them out, except oh wait the Constitution also doesn’t say you can’t fuck with the elections either.
One of my anxious worries lately is that at the end of this term, Trump will look at our term limits amendment and parse the verbiage with a simple literalism and Clarence Thomas et al will back him up. It says you can’t be elected president more than twice, so why not simply run for VP and then have your patsy resign five minutes after swearing in? After all, we’re mindless textualists now. We didn’t want an FDR type getting overly entrenched in the machinery of power, but we clearly meant to allow loopholes that are significantly less democratic!