Primary voting in the U.S. is seriously screwed up
Jan 19, 2024 13:29:46 GMT -5
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millring likes this
Post by aquaduct on Jan 19, 2024 13:29:46 GMT -5
It's hard to state how crazy I think it is that we believe with such vehemence that we will argue, protest, riot, lose friendships, write volumes ...
...in a system that in a population of more than 300 million people we are given a choice -- that we have no practical say in -- of Joe Biden vs Donald Trump.
And I could comfort myself in the knowledge that our country isn't a monarchy and, as such, the president is (or should be) no more powerful than either of the other branches. Except that the overwhelming majority of our population doesn't believe that, or act on that premise, and the fact that they don't and we still end up with Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump is even scarier.
And, sure, we'll probably end up with the choice of Michelle Obama ... in the same way we ended up with our choice of Bushes or Clintons ... and that comforts me not at all. It just emphasizes all the more that we believe in the royalty that we are not.
I have checked out. Nothing happening today has me any more inclined to check back in.
I had pretty much checked out a couple decades ago and getting the shaft that I did in my Federal job in 2010 sealed it. Didn't see that anybody inside or outside of government had any interest whatsoever in truncating the "rules for thee but not for me" spendathon that is Washington DC.
Barry's stint as President did nothing to change that (and, yeah, it was Barry's EPA that jacked me over). The 2016 election seemed like such a joke, I purposely voted for what I thought was the biggest joke in the race, Gary Johnson.
As I expected, Johnson lost to TV reality star Trump. Same old, same old.
But then on about the third day of his term, Trump announced that he was using a little known provision in regulatory law to cancel Barry's fuel economy rules that had passed as virtually the last thing that jerk did before he left office.
That's odd I thought, that's a serious pro move. What's more, Trump's EPA/NHTSA was going to take the full 5 years alloted to them to issue a replacement, which he did toward the end of his third year. And when his regs came out they barely moved the fuel economy needle. Of course now Senile Joe is back to pushing all electric vehicles for sale by 2035- a disastrous recipe for the country that's so obscure nobody will even know what hit them until long after the totalitarian damage is long past easily undoing.
Then, of course, Trump lucked out and seated 3 Supreme Court justices, breaking the liberal court's monopoly of 40 or 50 years.
And now, despite being out of office for 3 years, that blow to reestablish the Constitutional democracy that this country was founded on is bearing fruit with the pending overturning of Chevron.
There you go. The most influential President in at least a century. You can tell that by how much he upsets the entire DC status quo.
I'm happy to say I'm no longer checked out.