THE FRIGGIN' FOUNDERS AND FRAMERS from the start included a dangerous number who hated democracy, or, really, equality and never wanted it to break out in the United States. Some, like the real instead of the Broadway star Hamilton, had more than just monarchist tendencies. The Federalists were pretty much anti-democratic and, so anti-egalitarian, which as far as I'm concerned, means they can all go to hell. And it's not as if the slaveholders among the Jeffersonians or Jacksonians are all that much better. You don't start to get to real models of genuine democratic thinking until you get to the abolitionists and suffragists and they were mostly not in power much or for long.
I'm not enough of a student of the record of the Constitution to be able to go into much detail as to what if any struggle there was between those overtly hostile to democracy and those who may have had a slight, then currently fashionable view of it - Jefferson was not one of the Framers though he was in contact with them - and how that could have resulted in the dangerous choice to invent the presidential system as opposed to a parliamentary system but the results are clearly dangerous to democracy as has proved in the tendencies of one or the other system to produce dictatorships. I think Adams' three branches of competing powers has proven to be pretty much a flop, the Supreme Court turning that into a lame duck in 1803 and making it generally, steadily worse.
One of the safety features of most parliamentary systems is something the presidential system lacks, completely, the forced return of the government to the judgement of the voters through a no-confidence vote of the legislature. Ours has nothing that will do that during even the dangerously long terms of the president, four years being way more than the worst of them needs to destroy the entire edifice of deputed democracy, as we have learned the past three weeks. The Supreme Court and the idiot framers seem to have ensured that that safety feature will not protect us under the most high-powered of executives in the world. Impeachment with conviction and, only then, removal by the anti-democratically rigged Senate depended on that most ephemeral and largely imaginary entity in human psychology, the sense of honor among the elites that would comprise the U.S. Senate,.
Large in the most dangerous things we face in Trump II are the newly invented presidential powers given to Trump by the Roberts Court, as anti-egalitarian a Court majority as that body has ever had in even its antebellum history, and a large part in their excuse in that is the theoretical necessity of an American president being able to wield dictatorial powers during some theorized crisis. That isn't in itself an unreasonable idea. There may someday be such a crisis - the most plausible of those brought on by that deadly gift of 20th century science, nuclear weaponry - and it may be that the regular mechanisms of law making and legislative oversight of the executive will have to be bypassed during such a crisis. I'm sure such a crisis is imagined and addressed in the laws under parliamentary democracies, I would bet most of them far more realistically imagined and addressed than by our corrupt Supreme Court which figures the fixed-term of the presidency into things.
What is remarkable is how that exceptional, provisionally imagined crisis by the U.S. Supreme Court to cover actions of presidents, real and in process as well as entirely theoretical and world-theatening, has been expanded into the blanket impunity that the Roberts Court created.** Mixed with the absolute reality that the Constitutional mechanism or removing the most criminal presidents in our history, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, Trump is a complete and utter fiction, none of the less than a handful of the most criminal presidents ever been impeached, no more removed by conviction in the Senate, insures that what the Courts have created in the American Presidency is a dictatorship EXERCISED WITH DICTATORIAL POWERS AT THE MERE PERSONAL PREDILECTION AND WHIM OF WHOEVER HAPPENS TO BE PRESIDENT AT ANY GIVEN TIME. The Roberts Court majority knew for an absolute certainty that the sitting president, Joe Biden whose presidency is probably the most law abiding one we've had in living memory, would never exercise the powers that they crafted for the next Republican-fascist president, even one as proven a criminal as Donald Trump or any of the previous Republican presidents going back to Nixon who are the record of developing presidential criminality and for whom much of the impunity, granted to the presidency by the presidentially appointed, unelected and, as well, never removed by impeachment Supreme Court; has been created on behalf of.
In a parliamentary system in which the prime minister is elected as a member of parliament and whose retention is based more directly on the support of the electorate DURING THEIR SCHEDULED TERM OF OFFICE* the fear of the members of their party or coalition losing their seats is some measure of guarantee against the Trumpian kind and level of corruption. It isn't a hard and fast guarantee against that though even a Boris Johnson, the Brits' closest equivalent of Trump, was vulnerable to it in the end. That the Tory party in Britain is monumentally corrupt and supported is a product of the same regime of corrupt media, there's a reason that American media corporations are always importing Brits to play that same role here.
The fixed-term American presidency which, in fact, has no mechanism for removal and, now, by those foremost guarantors of electoral corruption, Republican presidential despotism and anti-democratic inequality, the Supreme Court has proven that we'd have almost certainly been better off with a parliarmentary system all along. I may try to see if the motives in inventing the presidential system are discernable in the record of the drafting and writing and peddling of the Constitution but that's of little importance as compared to the reality of it in the history of the country under that Constitution and its definition under the corrupt Supreme Court.
It strikes me that so much of the construction of the Roberts rules of presidential despotism is under the same regime of imaginary crisis as the scenarios that lead to the support of the use of torture by governments in the "ticking timebomb" fantasis, though, as I've mentioned, that paranoid fantasy has been expanded way beyond that to cover things that are no crisis in even the imaginations of even the most irrational of lunatic Constitutional scholars. A lot of it is asserted to be necessary as a mere matter of convenience and expidition. ALWAYS BE SUSPICION WHEN THOSE LAZY-ASSED "justices" START TALKING ABOUT CONVENIENCE AND EXPEDITION. Roberts is constantly whining about the work load, a load that hasn't kept the members of his court too busy to accept the bribes and grift that are offered to them by billionaires with cases before the court. I have no respect for that profession, lazy, pampered assholes held up as secular gods.
I have pointed out here recently that once the fascists have cut a road through the thicket of the Constitutional system that that road will remain open and able to be expanded into a super highway, generally by Supreme Court fiat UNLESS THE THING IS DEFINITIVELY CLOSED DOWN BY ALTERING THE LANGUAGE THAT IT WAS CREATED OUT OF. I think the entire presidential system is the most dangerous aspect of that, it will be a constant danger to not only egalitarian democracy but even the less gangsterish form of liberal democracy with elections. And the racket of "Constitutional" and legal scholarship is full of paid whores who are always finding ways to turn the words of that documents into such roads to oligarchy and autocracy. I have no faith that even a reformed presidential system with the Roberts court impunity explicitly taken out of it will ever be safe from this happening again and likely faster than before. It's not as if the American presidency is a pantheon of saints and angels or even of wise or benevolent leaders. The few, the very few presidencies which break that pattern are too few and far between to give a rational person any confidence that it can be.
* As was recently pointed out by a Canadian member of parliament in response to some idiotic thing that one of Trump's cabinet members said, the members of the Canadian cabinet are all elected by their constituents, not chosen by the fiat of the executive and are all vulnerable in the next election based on their performance in office and as a member of the cabinet, as is the PM themself. Canada and Britain have had some really stupid members of cabinets and even incompetent PMs but none of them have been as stupid or incompetent as Trump and his appointees, and seldom anything like nearly as corrupt.
** It should always be remembered that in the same term they created presidential impunity, they also legalized overt and total corruption through bribery as long as it was bribery on a payment plan, the bribe being paid only after what was bought was delivered. No doubt that proves to be a great benefit to the billionaires and millionaires buying the corruption, payment only for what is delivered. Never let it be said that the Roberts Court doesn't deliver for their patrons.
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