Trump is demonstrating one of the Glaring Weaknesses in our Constitution

[kennetha]

There are many weakness. But Trump is showing that the executive in our system is too unconstrained.

First, there is no way except impeachment or the 25th Amendment to remove a president. There are no recall elections of the executive -- as there is in many states. There is no possibility of votes of no confidence -- as in all Parliamentary Systems. There is no possibility of Early Elections, as in Parliamentary Systems -- where these are designed to test the continuing mandate of the governing party.

And the process of Impeachment or the application of the 25th Amendment are both extremely difficult and cumbersome to initiate and carry through.

There reason for all this is that Founding fathers seemed to have had far too much confidence in the Separation of Powers and with it the power of institutional jealousy.

In particular, they thought that the Congress would be too jealous of its institutional prerogatives to ever allow the Executive to run roughshod over the legislature.

But they did not foresee the consequences of the rise of the Charismatic Presidency and a highly Partisan Legislature that was more jealous of party prerogatives than institutional ones.

Moreover, they put the presidency almost entirely beyond the reach of the people (through mechanisms like recall elections). Since they did not think of the President as elected by the people, this is perhaps understandable.

But they also did not endow the electoral college as a standing deliberative body that could exercise power over the president once it had elected that president.

The result is that designed the presidency to be quasi-kinglike, in the sense that though the presidency is subject to the weakly limiting constraint of occasional and recurring election and the checks and balance of institutional competition among the branches, he is otherwise nearly impossible to remove from office. That is a very bad thing, when the presidency is a mendacious, evil, traitorous, incompetent fool, and the people at large despise him, and the Congress, is controlled by a party subservient to him.

Our current situation proves that the Founders were not prescient and did not really think through all the ways in which this system could go wrong.

Unfortunately, they made their constitution extraordinarily to amend. So we are stuck with their somewhat archaic design.

[dem4decades]

1. They should have thought of 2 senators for every shit state and gerrymandering too.

Cause both of those have killed the republic.

[uponit7771]

6. +1

[Maven]

11. +1

[shanny]

2. They didn't want to give too much power to the people.

Hence all the built-in impediments to the popular will and the ability to change.

[Takket]

3. couldn't agree more. the constitution is in need of a major overhaul.

The rethugs have has about 230 years to figure out how to exploit every loophole, ambiguity and shortcoming of the Constitution and exploit it they have.

[BigmanPigman]

4. I just read today that section 5 of the 25th amend was just

adopted on 1967. It was a very good article from Rolling Stone and was about the moron's decline mentally and how impeachment and the 25th will be difficult without Mueller.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-madness-of-donald-trump-removal-25th-amendment-w504149

[brush]

5. Kudos for broaching this topic. The three fifths compromise and it's sway on the electoral college..

is a major and on going flaw.

We need to re-do the Reapportionment Act of 1929 as well that set the number of representatives in the House at a permanent 435, thereby grossly affecting and limiting the representation of major population centers.

California, New York and the other larger states should have many more representatives. If that were the case the repugs wouldn't control the house and we wouldn't have had Ryan pushing through the Houses' version of that horrible tax scam bill.

[Yupster]

7. On the other hand

the powers of the presidency was very limited in those days. Whatever the president did or didn't do in 1830 didn't effect the average person's life who was living in a small town running a family farm. No income tax, no social security, medicare, food stamps, department of education, food inspectors. In short, it just wasn't considered that important who the president was, and the electors would never elect a crazy person anyway since the electors were chosen by the state legislatures.

[kennetha]

9. Not True

The reason that Alexander Hamilton fought so hard to deny Aaron Burr the presidency is because he VERY MUCH thought it mattered who the president was. He did not think that the young Republic and the Republican form of government could possibly survive a Burr presidency.

He stopped Burr from becoming president ... almost singlehandedly .. but it cost him his life, in the end.

[Kentonio]

12. Alexander Hamilton wasn't just an average guy in a small town

[Yupster]

13. If you think about all the ways you interact with the federal government today

the vast majority of them didn't exist 200 years ago.

The only way the average person interacted with the federal government back then was the mailman, and even he was a local guy.

Just as a for instance, my business life has been completely turned on its head this year as I've tried to comply with the "Fiduciary Rule", written by the Department of Labor. I'm working Saturdays for the first time in 15 years. I'd guess I'm spending an extra 10-15 hours a week just to comply with this rule. Whatever the good intentions or expectations of the people who wrote the rule have been long buried under a mountain of paperwork and pointless clicks on my computer.

A person 200 years ago would have nothing like this experience and would not be effected that much by whatever happened in Washington, especially not by anything the President did. Not even that much by Congress.

[DFW]

8. For 1787, the Constitution was a masterpiece of legal engineering

No one in 1787 could have imagined huge western sparsely populated states getting a disproportionate minority of people represented in the Senate (even the Louisiana Purchase was a quarter century in the future), gerrymandering, the electoral college deliberately electing someone obviously NOT the choice of the electorate, especially one so obviously unqualified. Madison and Jefferson set the government up so as not to be subject to the constant intrigue of the constant assassinations and changing of Emperors like the Roman empire. They set up the Constitution to be amendable by a two thirds majority of 13 (expecting a few more, but not 37 more) States, not 50. They could no more imagine Republican electoral fraud or cyber interference by Russia than they could imagine crossing the Atlantic in 8 hours instead of 8 weeks.

[kennetha]

10. The EC was a SOP to the slave holding states

The first thought was direct popular election of the President. The South would not go along. It would not go along because although the South was populous, not that many people could vote in the South so that it would carry very little weight in a direct election.

Madison and Jefferson did not "set the government up." Jefferson wasn't even at the Constitutional Convention.

[LisaL]

14. I bet they never envisioned someone like Trump.

[malaise]

15. The No Confidence vote in Parliamentary Systems can be just as problematic

Parties rarely vote No Confidence in their leader.