Short and Long Term Reactions

A conservative who is not just a Trump suck-up but has shown not much concern decided yet again to be an anti-anti-Trump critic, a quite annoying breed. 

It did not receive much attention, and I eventually decided to respond. This might have led to more attention. Well, twenty more comments as I begin these comments. 

One reply to a comment noted:

Congress has passed laws. Trump is flagrantly defying them. Congress should either be using the tools at its disposal (hearings, impeachment, lawsuits) to check Trump, or — if it actually agrees with Trump that those laws are bad — it should be repealing them.

Similarly, Trump is doing things Congress never authorized him to do. Congress should either be using the tools at its disposal (hearings, impeachment, lawsuits) to check Trump, or — if it actually agrees with Trump that he should have that authority — it should be giving him that authority.

I pushed back at someone else who said Congress did not have a "duty" necessarily to do these things. Checks and balancing is the role of each branch, with special focus on the courts sometimes overblown. 

The legislative role in upholding constitutional rights (or potentially so) is shown in an interesting article on women's suffrage. It is ever more important when the stakes are congressional power. 

These are things to think about when planning for the future. The time to start planning a long-term response to current problems is yesterday.  Here is a good top 10 list. I'm unsure how much debate many will have with it, except for the expansion of the Supreme Court. It's a question of how. 

Dan Froomkin (generally a good read) also cites another person, providing three categories:

The first is the post-Watergate model, which primarily involves codifying unwritten norms in legislation and executive branch rules. The second is the politically treacherous path of judicial reform. The third, amending the Constitution, is only a dim possibility but still useful to consider, because some of the problems highlighted by Trump lie in the Constitution itself.

The "norms" thing is important. Trump is significant in that he is willing to say "fuck you" to norms. Mitch McConnell did too with Merrick Garland. Democrats are more wary, being more about productive governing, but that can be taken too far. It also gets them a lot of scorn.

Froomkin notes that, in the short term, noncompliance is one method of resistance. Consider how slaves used that tool. If slaves can, people with more power can do it as well. More about the current situation in D.C. is found here. 

The immediate concern here is Trump (including Putin owning him in Alaska, when in a sane world, Putin would be arrested for human rights violations, including illegal aggressive war). There are wider lessons. For instance, what do you do in Florida or Texas if you support trans rights?

My three rules continue to hold: point out a problem, find a way to address it (short and long term), and explain how you would handle things if given the chance.  All matter, but doing only one isn't enough.

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Note: The last two links are two LGM entries by the latest reasonable addition, who, by chance or not, is again a woman. They often talked about foreign policy issues. And, they are my favorite additions to the blog. One was replaced by the blog's weak leak, whose purpose often seems to be to troll.