That "is a sore loser" point is really important! It's not just that he complained a lot about the election. He encouraged his protestors to march on the Capitol on January 6 and then when they started a riot he sat in the White House and did nothing about it for several hours. Since then he's started describing these rioters as heros an…
That "is a sore loser" point is really important! It's not just that he complained a lot about the election. He encouraged his protestors to march on the Capitol on January 6 and then when they started a riot he sat in the White House and did nothing about it for several hours. Since then he's started describing these rioters as heros and talking about pardoning them. In my opinion this is a much bigger threat to the rule of law and democracy than court packing.
Also I think you're overstating the dangers of the filibuster and court packing. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution and I don't know of any other liberal democracy with a de facto 60 percent threshold for passing legislation. If we abolished the filibuster you'd still need agreement by the House, Senate, and president to pass legislation. That seems like plenty of checks and balances.
I'm not in favor of the filibuster but there are plenty of liberal democracies, including the UK and Canada, where the legislature has the power to overrule judicial interpretations of the Constitution. I like the US system better, but I don't think it would be a catastrophe if we ended up with a UK-style system with legislative supremacy.
While it's true that places like the UK and Canada are doing kind of okay with legislative supremacy, there are important protections (full free speech, as noted in my piece) that they're missing out on.
It's certainly true that what Trump did on January 6 was bad. Exactly how much weight to put on it, everyone will have to judge for themselves. The Harris guest post, naturally, ends with a whole section on it.
That "is a sore loser" point is really important! It's not just that he complained a lot about the election. He encouraged his protestors to march on the Capitol on January 6 and then when they started a riot he sat in the White House and did nothing about it for several hours. Since then he's started describing these rioters as heros and talking about pardoning them. In my opinion this is a much bigger threat to the rule of law and democracy than court packing.
Also I think you're overstating the dangers of the filibuster and court packing. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution and I don't know of any other liberal democracy with a de facto 60 percent threshold for passing legislation. If we abolished the filibuster you'd still need agreement by the House, Senate, and president to pass legislation. That seems like plenty of checks and balances.
I'm not in favor of the filibuster but there are plenty of liberal democracies, including the UK and Canada, where the legislature has the power to overrule judicial interpretations of the Constitution. I like the US system better, but I don't think it would be a catastrophe if we ended up with a UK-style system with legislative supremacy.
Those are valid points.
While it's true that places like the UK and Canada are doing kind of okay with legislative supremacy, there are important protections (full free speech, as noted in my piece) that they're missing out on.
It's certainly true that what Trump did on January 6 was bad. Exactly how much weight to put on it, everyone will have to judge for themselves. The Harris guest post, naturally, ends with a whole section on it.