i think a lot of the dysfunction in our government arises bc the founders thought of the executive branch in terms of either the king or a colonial governor appointed by the king (or an absentee proprietor)
in their experience, the executive didn't exist in the same world of electoral politics as the elected legislature, and so even legislators who were rivals to each other were often united in defense of institutional perogatives against the alien executive
"checks and balances" just doesn't work the way it's supposed to when the president and one of the factions in the legislature are part of the same supra-institutional faction!
like the idea gets trotted out in periods of divided government, but it doesn't really work the way it was envisioned, in which the legislature and executive would be at inherently at odds and check one another no matter which faction controlled either of them
if you can't get 2/3 of one branch of the legislature to convict a president who literally sent a mob to murder them, that seems like pretty strong evidence that "checks and balances" only works between political parties, not branches of government
yeah it remains wild to me that all these guys went into government saying "the worst thing are political factions" and then immediately went and started political factions
i read this book a few years ago and it's really, really interesting! his take is that the "first party system" of federalist and democratic-republicans was really quite nasty because neither side saw the other as truly legitimate amazon.com/Failure-Foundi…
both factions saw the other as betraying the revolution's original ideals. when the federalists started getting squishy on the war of 1812 just in time for the dem-rep government to pull a tie out of the jaws of the defeat, the d-r's used that an opportuntiy to hammer them
they called monroe's term "the era of good feelings", but in fact former federalists were mostly frozen out of any government or patronage positions. the idea was that w/the federalists gone, the no-party vision of the founders could finally be realized
but within a few years the democratic-republicans broke up for good into rival factions, because it turns out one-party states are stable in democracies

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More from @jfruh

13 Feb
i'm genuinely wondering how unusual this situation is. is there a straightforward metric that would determine the census cycle where the "most americans were represented by the fewest senators" or something?
bc i'm a huge fucking nerd, i actually did the math on this and can say that it Has Been Ever Thus. for each census (plus the 2020 estimates) i added up the population of the states, starting w/the smallest, until i got to about 1/3 the US population
then i looked at what % of the states (and therefore the senate) that 1/3 of the population represented. for all of US history, 1/3 of the pop has controlled more or less 2/3 of the senate! Image
Read 7 tweets
13 Feb
going on a deep dive as to what celebs are on cameo. did you know stephen tobolowsky is on cameo. thinking a lot about this five-star review and what age the son in question is
like probably it's an adult but what if he's a little boy. what kind of little boy gets a stephen tobolowsky cameo for his birthday? i think we all know the answer to that ... a lucky boy
anyway, the fact that all these people are on cameo geuninely shocked me
Read 5 tweets
12 Feb
this is a great thread and if you've only experienced some of these in a car please know that they're even worse for pedestrians
this one always gets my vote for the worst. it's almost impossible to get from one side to another on foot w/out having to wait through two complete light cycles. whomst amongst us has not somehow taken 20 minutes to get from the vista to vons
this one is also extremely nutty and frankly has to be seen in 3D to really understand how weird it is
Read 4 tweets
12 Feb
i get the outrage on stuff like this but it really just drives home the fact that a senate impeachment "trial" is a political process, it is not subject to any of the rules or codes or norms that govern actual judicial procedure!
its only power is to remove someone from office and also bar them from holding further office, not send someone to jail! and i mean, lots of the case against trump is in the form of hearsay (quotes from media reports, for instance) and wouldn't stand up in court anyway
impeachment is honestly just a wildly weird and anomalous process that unfortunately allows political actors to pretend it's a judicial procedure when that's convenient but also behave in ways that wouldn't fly in a real cour when they need/want to do so
Read 5 tweets
11 Feb
forced to spend nearly all my time at home due to a mysterious new virus known as "the rona," for more than a year much of my social life has been conducted via various computer networks. not sure all my online "friends" are exactly who they say they are
because i'm not a teen, i guess this is probably more like the most cyberpunk thing that has ever happened to me in real life
a fun fact is that up till about a year ago i was idly considering doing a novel or screenplay that would basically be written with the tone of a dystopian YA story but set in the present day
Read 5 tweets
14 Jul 20
this is a really interesting look at the mechanism by which masks protect both wearers and others: they reduce the amount of coronavirus we ingest, and we now know that lowered viral loads = milder cases of COVID-19 latimes.com/california/sto…
anti-maskers love to tell you that "cloth masks can't block all virus partiles" or ask "if your mask protects you, why do i need to wear one?" this is a mistaken view of the relationship between infection and disease, where if a single virus gets through you've "lost"
in practice, reducing the flow of viruses through the air, which cloth masks achieve, reduces the number of people who get infected and the severity of those infections. in the czech republic, where masks were mandated in march, death rates didn't go up when infection rates did!
Read 4 tweets

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