The idea that you actually need courts behind you is laughable. Power is enforced through the threat of violence, this is how law enforcement functions. Courts do not have soldiers.

Know who does? Commander-in-Chief, now with full immunity for any official act, like, giving orders to the military.

One could say perhaps the soldiers themselves would be afraid of prosecution and would disobey orders, since they don’t get immunity. Until the President pardons them anyway.

Otherwise only one last line of firm defense remains: the oath each serviceman takes to defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. That might make someone disobey an illegal order.

Remember the write-in uncommitted thing? Those were primaries.

Ah, it’s last year vs this year. I get it.

7-8 billion actually. But I suppose they rounded up.

https://thehill.com/business/4750201-john-deere-laying-off-hundreds-of-midwest-workers/

I think it’s safe to assume that a person wants their society to function smoothly. But yes, I suppose it is technically different.

The DNC does not decide if AOC runs or not, just like they couldn’t choose whether Bernie ran or not. Otherwise they would have.

AOC decides if AOC runs.

I don’t share your optimism that she would sweep though, I think she’d come across as too young to a lot of voters. I’m hoping she picks up a Senate seat soon, and then runs from that in the future. I think it’ll put her in a better position to win.

De-platforming has proven ineffective. The best thing to happen to Trump was getting kicked off Twitter. Now he gets to spout all his bullshit and radicalize his fanbase with minimal pushback and reduced awareness from the public at large.

If de-platforming genuinely worked, then anti-semitism would have died out by now. But it won’t so long as people can form their own communities and recruit under-the-radar.

Inherent to democracy, no. Inherent to a well-functioning society in a world where changing circumstances are inevitable, yes.

Fortunately we’re not fully there yet. Still several steps away.

Been hearing that line for a long time. No point in it.

Bout time.

Well, a lot of them were purged over the past few years. Fascists doing their thing you know. Things change though, that is one certainty. Not very predictably either.

Also note, I didn’t exactly say it would be easy. Simply possible. Where, say, an amendment that made voting mandatory would be actually fully impossible.

I did. I saw a tired old man and a used car salesman. More importantly though, is I don’t think almost everyone gives two shits about debates or polls. They know these two guys, know them well. What they offer is clear.

Additionally, I don’t think a President has to be spry. They just need to be good at delegation, that is by far the most important skill. If you think about monarchy, the king did not need to run everything. Simply assign the tasks to people who did know all the details. Generals run the army. Finance ministers run economy. Diplomats run diplomacy. Etc.

No, there’s a lot of us that don’t want to surrender the incumbent advantage for the very common backlash-against-the-last-party phenomenon we’ve seen many times in the past decades.

We’re just not as loud as everyone else, and our position makes terrible clickbait.

It’ll definitely take some time, effort and big time coalition building. I doubt this specific one would be as impossible as it might seem though, due to the specifics.

Small govt types could be convinced to support something limiting executive power. That’s all the libertarians and some conservatives. In a bloc with liberals and progressives, it could reach 2/3rds support with the populace. Barely. Then 2/3rds the states would have to ratify.

The fact that it would be for limiting the power of govt, is critical though. Fascists don’t want small govt and just lie about it, but many people actually do. That becomes a middle position liberals can work with in a case like this, since we support separation of powers.

It’s a battle that’s been going for centuries, bigger than any one of us. Taking it personally only has drawbacks, it’s not required for motivation. Breathing exercises can help.

Someone must always make decisions, a world where no decisions are made would devolve into a Mad Max type thing, where the fact that we are members of the animal kingdom would become very readily apparent. We used to decide these things with trial by combat, where the most skilled warrior (or who chose the most skilled as their champion) was right because God apparently said so, by making him so good at fighting. Still a person making a decision. Not far off from a world where you decide if someone was a witch by trying to build a bridge out of them.

The modern trick is dividing up the decision-making power so much that nobody can assemble it all into their personal toolkit and fully embrace corruption with no consequences.

Ah. Well, if all official duties of the Executive are immune to all laws lower than the Constitution itself, which itself bars him from very little and gives the Executive responsibility for enforcement of all laws, I guess a Constitutional Amendment is ultimately required then.

Authoritarians are irritating.

Very well summarized, I think this hits the majority of the most relevant points.

Well, I am not that guy for the record. But if you read the article it said he automatically rejects any candidate that advocates for gun control. So, that means Biden is flat out for him, along with pretty much the whole dem party.

The amusing part to me personally was that such a person would normally just vote gop. But that specific guy cannot, for fairly obvious reasons.