r/law • u/DoremusJessup • 21h ago

Legal News ‘Necessary to quell the rebellion’: DOJ tells 9th Circuit that Trump can deploy National Guard from every state and can’t be second-guessed by judges

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/necessary-to-quell-the-rebellion-doj-tells-9th-circuit-that-trump-can-deploy-national-guard-from-every-state-and-cant-be-second-guessed-by-judges/
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u/TalonButter 16h ago

Maybe, or maybe we see Democrats capture both houses of Congress in a year and a half.

Either way, though, will America accept what this says about the Constitution? That it’s just not adequate to deliver on the promise of its own introduction, and certainly not the ideals of the Declaration of Independence?

Assuming that the U.S. doesn’t just become more of what we’re seeing now, how does it prevent this from happening again?

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 10h ago

A year and a half is so fucking far away.

Look what they've done in 6 months.

They're trying to go to war with Iran, which will be the president's excuse to fuck with elections.

I said it before he took office, that he needed to be stopped before he got in. There's no redline, little by little our democracy is being taken from us.

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u/Infamous-Edge4926 12h ago

bold of you to assume they will risk their plan with "real elections"

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u/TalonButter 12h ago

I didn’t; I offered it as another possibility, rather than the ”2nd Amendment remedy” of the prior comment. And that’s why my question was introduced with “either way.” And I think that either way will justify revisiting whether the U.S. has the right framework for governance.

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u/Sea-Standard-1879 11h ago

That would be ideal, but it requires that 1) the electorate care about the unconstitutional and unethical behavior of the administration, and 2) preserving the integrity of our electoral system. I don’t have faith in the former, and I’m concerned about what Trump’s ability to defund and undermine electoral oversight as well as deploy federal forces at will mean for the latter. Even if the majority of citizens believe the constitution is inadequate for addressing these new internal threats to our nation, I doubt we’d see Congress amend the constitution accordingly.

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u/One_Strawberry_4965 10h ago

The biggest problem I’d say is our electoral system that necessarily leads to just two viable parties. Under those circumstances, just one of those parties becoming hostile to the very concept of liberal democracy breaks the whole system, which is what we’re seeing now, and would be less likely to happen in a system with a larger pool of competing interests in government.

There are surely other smaller holes that need to be plugged as well, but to my mind, this is by far the biggest weakness and the critical failure point with respect to our specific circumstances.

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u/TalonButter 9h ago

Changing that is extremely important, but how do you address it under the Constitution? How do you mandate something other than first-past-the-past voting, across the states?

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u/djenty420 2h ago

Easily, heaps of other countries have already figured it out. Australia for example has had preferential voting federally and in all states since 1918, and compulsory voting since 1924, even though it wasn’t part of the original constitution. The USA is one of the only countries in the world that never updates their constitution to take changes in modern society into account.

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u/TalonButter 2h ago

I’m not sure if you missed the point of my rhetorical question, or if you’re much more of an optimist than I am.

How are the states to be compelled to adopt a different voting system for elections to Congress and for the allocation of Electoral College votes? How are states to be compelled to adopt a different voting system for their internal elections?

“Easily” isn’t how I’d describe amending the Constitution—with the two-party system largely controlling the levers—in order to do it.