The fourth estate is absolutely failing America. The headline ought to be "DOJ wants to break Watergate law", but instead, we get... this. Is Bari Weiss now running the Intercept too? WTAF is going on across the board?
It appears the administration is working with the Federalist Society extremists to try to destroy the government as best it can, at least in all capacities not befitting the monopolization of suppression/silencing/violence against anyone it doesnt like.
That's because everyone else is the enemies of the people! They have a mandate!
Get out of the way, so-called judges, RINOs and communists in Congress, the failing Media, and also the low IQ former MAGA people who helped get them elected. This was a landslide! Also, true republicans don't believe in mob rule, we don't have a democracy, we have a republic. Except if our guy wins by 1% then we totally believe in mob rule and have a mandate, compared to that 1% marginal win, what are laws passed by a supermajority? A mere trifle!
This is a funny take. I'm imagining you unironically telling yourself that ONLY immigration laws matter and you're happy the administration is breaking other ones.
I’m not sure what to tell you if you don’t understand the difference between an elected official actively and purposefully defying the constitution in order to directly weaken our institutions, and people wanting our immigration laws to be less strict.
You probably don't have to tell me anything, because I'd be right and you'd be wrong. "Wanting" immigration laws to be "less strict" (mass illegal immigration in the tens of millions, sensible) != breaking the law. The mental gymnastics people do to fit in with their chosen ideology is insane to see, worse when your mouths open up and try to explain these broken thoughts.
The kind of gymnastics where they're justified burning our society down because that society dared to give nominally equal rights to colored folks. Claiming it's about immigration law enforcement is just the same disingenuous smokescreen as the rest of their movement's appeals to lofty ideals.
Again, even if I agreed with your take on immigration, it’s in no way equivalent to the guy with the nuclear codes actively avoiding the constitutional framework.
Feel free to keep going on about how horrible illegal immigration is if you want. You can keep mentioning it for hours, but it still won’t actually be a real response to anything I said.
So then do you support prosecuting the murderers of Alex Pretti and Renee Good? If it's really about enforcing immigration law, then there is no need to throw away the first and second amendments, right?
I disagree. I think that constitutional scholars have always known that it's not the written laws that hold the executive in check. Our system was designed so that the 3 branches would check each other. The Federalist Paper #51 explicitly calls this out - "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." [0]
The problem with any system like you are suggesting where "we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs" is the same as always - who enforces the law?
The cause of the dysfunction we have now is that congress has failed to check the power of the executive. Congress should have impeached and removed Donald Trump for treason and other high crimes after January 6th. He should have been convicted and felt the full force of the law around his neck for trying to interfere with the function of congress and overthrow the election.
Every problem we face with our government right now traces back to the same issue: Congress is not doing its job. Congress has the power to impeach and remove the president for threatening to nuke Iran. Congress has the power to stop the executive branch from starting illegal wars overseas. Congress has the power to punish ICE for executing citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.
Congress has failed to exercise this power for several reasons, a major one being that both the house and senate are no longer representative of the American people. The house has been limited in membership ever since the reapportionment act and the senate was always designed to favor wealthy landowners in slave states.
This results in placing massively disproportionate power in the hands of a tiny fraction of voters just because they live in the middle of nowhere, which in turn makes it very easy for the rich and powerful to game the system. There is no way forward for us as a country without reforming congress.
It isn't just congress failing to their job. We The People are also responsible for not ousting the freeloaders in congress who are taking our tax money and not doing the job they were elected to do.
We are the final check on making sure that government is serving us and not the other way around. The founders were pretty open about what they expected from us if that could no longer be accomplished within the framework they were putting into place. I'd like to think that we can still vote our way out of this problem, but I fear that between attempts from the government to suppress voters and the surprisingly large number of people content with the idea of a fascist dictator (so long as he's wearing their team's colors) we might have a hard time overcoming the fear, apathy, and learned helplessness in the rest of the population necessary to effectively insist on the changes we need.
I'm not very familiar with the American system, but aren't congress elections prone to gerrymandering which means they don't reflect too accurately the preferences of the people?
Gerrymandering is one the most powerful ways they suppress votes. They also like to do things like limit the number of polling places and put them out of the way with limited hours, pass laws that require documents many people don't have (while making those documents more difficult to obtain), removing the right to vote from people with criminal histories (while more aggressively policing and convicting the people/communities they don't want voting), spreading disinformation about voting dates/times/locations, creating confusing ballots, having heavy police presence at polling places and putting up speed traps/check points near them, making mail-in voting difficult or unreliable, and actively discourage participation with messaging about how voting doesn't accomplish anything or even that your support of a broken/corrupt system makes you complicit in it.
Even our two party/first past the post system discourages voting by limiting the choice people have in who they can realistically support in the first place.
I believe that the problem is that they also set up Congress with its own check, between two houses. They made it deliberately hard to pass legislation, which means they cannot effectively balance the other two branches.
Congress spent decades ceding power to the executive because it realized it could not do anything itself. And now it's stuck.
In a way that might have been preferable. It would raise the bar a bit. No doubt Trump is aware of what happened to Nixon and thought 'ok, so you can get away with it' and then realized that in this situation he could just completely ignore any kind of potential fall out. The thing that boggles the mind is that this could be fixed in 24 hours.
Sure you can, when you're the President. He's got presumptive immunity for all official acts. If election interference is an official act (as they decided in Trump v US), then surely ordering the destruction of all of his records is also an official act.
From an outside perspective this is all looking a great deal like the early days of Viktor Orbán in power, morphing the laws and conventions of Hungary to remain in power.
The differences are that Trump hasn't much left in the tank and never did have a law degree.
Those difference matter little, there are plenty in Trumps orbit who are making the plans and pushing them out, all that's needed is another muppet for POTUS.
Where Trump gets interesting is right now and the near future; he's cornered, losing support, and will be lashing out and bending reality to protect his reputation and ill gotten gains.
It does seem hard to replace his cult of personality. I don't understand how it works, not being part of it.
It's more than just his opinions, which are easily duplicated. It's more than just audacity; anybody can lie boldly. He's got a supreme talent for failing upward that I do not comprehend, but I don't see anyone else with it.
Not that I see it turning out well. At best we return to two more-or-less equally unlikeable parties, except this time with one having a massive thumb on the scales.
> It's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.
They’re not ignoring. They’re saying they think the law itself is unconstitutional.
From the article:
>> In a sweeping new memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ claims the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The department’s edict, which is already facing legal challenges, argues that a president’s records are private, rather than public, property.
The general rule is that even facially unconstitutional laws are usually enforced until a judicial ruling against them. see e.g. all the people who did prison time for municipal handgun prohibitions until District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010).
"This is unconstitional because Trump doesn't like it" is not a very strong argument. The position he's holding is called "Public Office" (not private office) for a reason.
The importers would get the refunds, and any of their customers they charged more for would simply keep the refund. If you paid it directly (like international product order) you probably won't ever get repaid, as they probably deleted the transaction or otherwise failed to record it. Refunds even for importers might be caught up in lawsuits which might never resolve. It's a mess, and SCOTUS did not address the mess.
Trump addressed the press a little while ago on this topic and claims he's not issuing any refunds until courts force him to. He chastised the Supreme Court for not telling him what to do about refunds, and essentially pleaded helplessness to do anything about it until he fights more lawsuits and rulings demanding specific action are issued, musing something to the effect of "I guess that will take another couple years".
He further claimed that this ruling puts his tariffs on a more certain basis(?!) because now he'll use different statutes that have been solidly litigated already (... so why weren't you opting to use those in the first place, if it's truly better? You didn't need to wait on this ruling to do that!) and that the only effect this ruling will have is a brief drop to ~10% across-the-board tariffs while they do the paperwork to bump them back up again under these other statutes. He repeatedly characterized this is good news for his tariffs, while also complaining extensively about the court and insulting the justices in the majority.
For any AI post, there seems like that one person for whom it worked great, and a whole lot where it didn't. Your mileage may vary...
Some things AI does well, many things it may be not worth the effort entailed, and some where it downright sucks and may even be harmful. The question is will it ever change the curve to where it is useful most of the time?
Like any tool, you get better at using it. YMMV indeed.
The author of this article could probably have, for example, written most of this into the project’s Claude.md and the AI would learn what not to do.
Instead they wrote it up as a blog post which is unsurprisingly not going to net quality software.
Having some way for Claude to test what it wrote is critical as well. It will learn on its own very fast if it can see the error messages and iterate on it like any other developer would
Sounds like the author had tests that Claude never ran. Sounds misconfigured to me. Again, did the author learn how to use the tool?
My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.
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