alt Hacker News> setting up the president as the sole power center is an inherently unstable system.
Autocracies can be very stable... for a while depending on how much people are able to protest (or not). You could argue that N Korea has been "stable" (from the standpoint of the ruling family) for over 60 years.
> There is a very good reason why the founding fathers built in an elaborate system of checks and balances.
Sure that's what we were all taught in school. But it turns out that the whole system is heavily dependent on the executive branch "doing the right thing". But what good is it for the Judicial or Legislative branches to rule against the executive when the executive is in charge of enforcement? Even Nixon was eventually able to be shamed into doing the right thing, but if we have a president who can't be shamed into doing the right thing... well, I suspect we're about to find out, but my guess is that the checks and balances aren't going to be effective.
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> Autocracies can be very stable...
Sure, if you kill all dissenters , keep population terrified and into the dark, remove all sources of information with propaganda then things could stay like that for a while.
All of the checks and balances are kind of predicated on the idea that each arm of government who actually bother to protect their own powers, and use those powers to rein in misbehaviour of the other branches.
But both congress and the supreme courts seem to have decided that personal ideological principles are more important than the maintenance of the U.S. democratic foundations. The Supreme Court has basically ruled that the president is above the law, and congress has refused to use its powers of impeachment to prevent the president from running roughshod over congresses laws.
Nixon wasn’t shamed into doing anything, he was threatened with very credible impeachment, and decided that getting out fast on his own two feet, was better than being taken out slow by the ankles via impeachment. But the modern Republicans have demonstrated time and time again, that as long as they’re “winning”, they don’t give two hoots how much damage they do to US democracy.