alt Hacker NewsThe executive can't bypass the courts with an executive order, unless you've seen something I haven't. The reason Congress doesn't do anything is because it ceased to be a functioning body sometime around the AUMF. Congresspeople realized that doing anything other than what the donors paid for is fraught with risk. Better to watch things being done and complain about it. The UK went the same way, concentrating all power in the current government with even backbenchers being absolutely powerless.
I guess the only thing saving the EU from the same fate is its powerlessness and indecisiveness. The people who run it are certainly insane in the same way as the leaders of the UK and the US. You're both crippled from your lack of federalization and protected by it.
edit: In the US, our real problem is that our executive (including the intelligence agencies) can do whatever it wants without an executive order or a coherent legal rationale, they will simply never be prosecuted. The next executive will proclaim that the illegal acts under the last one will never be tolerated again, pardon everybody who did it, and make those acts legal from now on.
> The reason Congress doesn't do anything is because it ceased to be a functioning body sometime around the AUMF.
That was kind of my point, I just didn't want to write an essay about it. Congress does nothing therefore the only tangible change happens from one guy signing whatever he wants to sign into the law, effectively reducing three branches of government down to one. That said, I sure can point to for example Trump essentially taking over the power to impose tarrifs away from the congress and congress doing absolutely nothing to assert what was previously widely understood to be 100% within their authority. Or dozens of people that were deported despite various courts literally ordering the administration not to do that, Kilmar Abrego Garcia being just the first of them.
> I guess the only thing saving the EU from the same fate is its powerlessness and indecisiveness. The people who run it are certainly insane in the same way as the leaders of the UK and the US.
Now here we vehimently disagree. Nobody "runs" the EU. You need something like 500 people to agree on something for it become a law. Each of those represents their nation, their party, and their EU-level coalition. The biggest countries don't get to impose a change on smaller countries, the smallest countries don't get to do so either.
It is by far the most complex political system we have in the world for a very good reason. It came from decades of negotiating and re-negotiating between countries. It set some base standards that apply equally to otherwise incomparable nations. It is not meant to move fast and break things, it is meant to be slow and ineffective because every decision it makes impacts people that have absolutely nothing in common except the fact that they all volutarily joined the EU. From Finland to Portugal, from Cyprus to Ireland. Seriously, name me one other thing that those four countries have in common. Two of them are not in NATO, one of them is not even in Europe geographically-speaking, but I guess they all kinda like football? The fact that the EU does anything at all is a miracle of human cooperation.
And we're comparing it to one guy with questionable mental capacity (to say the least) signing things into law. Give me a break. The biggest "problem" with the EU is that at least 95% of the population that like to shit on it as an institution haven't invested more than 10 minutes into trying to understand how it works, yourself very much included.