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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The only direct power a president has over Congress is the veto.
At any given point in history one branch may have more power over policy implantation than the others, but that usually has to do with special circumstances. Lincoln amassed vast quasi-legal power during the Civil War which Congress had to retroactively approve of to deal with the crisis, but the minute he was dead they broke from their leashes and ran the country over the head of his successor.
From that point on, leading the nation was mainly a Congress dominated affair until the 1900's, when Teddy Roosevelt became president and started carrying public policy on his own through sheer force of personality and basically told Congress "Deal with it." FDR took Teddy's example to heart and from then on, presidents have usually had more influence in shaping policy than Congress. Granted, there were some exceptions, especially after Johnson and Nixon amassed and abused too much power Congress fought back. Nobody cared what Ford or Carter thought for that reason.
edited 14th Aug '16 2:32:00 PM by Parable
So, the officer-involved shooting in Milwaukee...I'm getting the impression that it was a maybe legitimate response by the officer and it boiled into rioting because Milwaukee is just that much of a crappy place to be and stuff boiled over. The suspect was black but so was the officer, the suspect was supposedly armed and fleeing (and the officer's body cam footage supposedly backs it up but it's not been made public) and the official account says officer only shot twice.
Details in the news articles are frustratingly sparse though.
Scott Walker's been putting the screws on Milwaukee from almost day one, so i could see the simmering tensions.
Plus Milwaukee was the site of a shooting of an unarmed man around the same time as the Baton Rouge one (which sucked up more attention because of the rioting), so attention is now being diverted there. I agree riots in support of an armed man aren't a good look at all, though.
I think the problem is that, if Trump loses, people might blame the RNC for not supporting him. The RNC, however, will claim that it didn't support Trump because he had no shot at winning.
edited 14th Aug '16 3:00:25 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34Well that's a grotesque oversimplification at best, an outright lie at worst. Obama, Clinton, Biden, and most of those like them, would be members of the Liberal Party, our centre-left party. Sanders and his lot would be in my party, the NDP. Only guys like Joe Lieberman would have been in the Conservative Party, alongside a majority of establishment Republicans. The Tea Party nuts and the other hardcore conservatives would be largely homeless, or would trend towards some of the hard-right provincial level parties like the Wild Rose. Trump, of course, would be in prison for hate speech.
They'd be right wing in France, certainly.
Perhaps this meme is outdated, as it was born in the Clinton Era, and most of the world has shifted dramatically to the right since.
With Muslims as their favorite punching balls.
UK labour's even more to the right than the conservatives!
edited 14th Aug '16 3:40:22 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.A Democrat would be right wing in China!
edited 14th Aug '16 3:41:36 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34![]()
Not really? Most of the self proclaimed communist states of the world rather quickly dropped most of the left wing economic positions in favor of a command economy not particularly different from the system employed in fascist regimes, or for that matter monarchies.
Centrist Authoritarian is a better descriptor IMHO.
4 states entirely use old and known-to-be-insecure touchscreen machines, 28 states have them in some counties, and that doesn't include the chance the administrative systems that collect and tabulate the votes are attackable.
China's not fascist, though it is highly authoritarian. Fascism and Communism are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though it's not overly common for them to coincide, or indeed, even tolerate each other (the only Commu-Fascist regime would likely be North Korea).
China has a variant of far-left (by American standards) pseudo-communistic government IMO, though admittedly, it's abandoned many of its communist principles. It does end up resembling a cronyist regime, though I'd argue that's simply the horseshoe effect at work (they're simply opposite ways of combining state and business)
edited 14th Aug '16 4:15:52 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34

X3 Trying to enforce the party line, but they have to bribe, make deals with and intimidate, it's not like the UK or similar where the whip can just say "you vote the party line or else we will kick you out of the party and you'll never hold office again".
edited 14th Aug '16 2:01:45 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran