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babylonsister

(171,074 posts) Wed Sep 19, 2018, 11:41 AM Sep 2018

Trump's Bastard Children

http://prospect.org/article/trumps-bastard-children

Trump’s Bastard Children
Robert Kuttner
September 18, 2018
A president who has already committed several impeachable offenses has no legitimate business filling a high court seat.

Political scientists use the word legitimacy to mean a government that is broadly seen as having the right to govern. Consent of the governed was also a prime concern of America’s Founders.

For most of America’s history, our government enjoyed broad legitimacy. It look a long time, of course, for the national government to regain legitimacy in Dixie. And if you scratch below the surface, many Southern whites still question its legitimacy. But for most of the post-World War II era, our government was seen as broadly legitimate.

Alas, it has not been legitimate since 2000, when George W. Bush, with the complicity of five Supreme Court justices, stole the election. That means citizens might rightly question the legitimacy of policies enacted by Republican presidents and their Supreme Court appointees ever since.

Under President Obama, Democrats soldiered on and sought to find common ground. But Republicans spat in their eye, and doubled down on their own claims that Obama’s entire presidency was illegitimate. Had Hillary Clinton been elected, the Republican game plan was to question her legitimacy as well.

Now, we already have one Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, who is the bastard child of Republicans’ successful efforts to block the appointment of a perfectly legitimate Obama nominee, Merrick Garland. Republicans are hoping to jam onto the Court yet another nominee of dubious legitimacy, Brett Kavanaugh. A president who has already committed several impeachable offenses has no legitimate business filling a high court seat.

Here’s the larger problem. A republic of lost legitimacy has a great deal of difficulty functioning. Failed republics, however, do get legitimacy back. France did it on several occasions, and Germany after 1945.

But we might as well stop pretending that in exceptional America there is an unbroken line of legitimacy winding back from Trump to the Founders. There isn’t. Legitimacy is something that we will have to earn back.

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Trump's Bastard Children (Original Post) babylonsister Sep 2018 OP

Our government is in crisis because it is illegitimate. Moostache Sep 2018 #1

Moostache

(9,895 posts)

1. Our government is in crisis because it is illegitimate.

Reply to babylonsister (Original post)

Wed Sep 19, 2018, 12:10 PM

Sep 2018

Trump should not be President with nearly 3,000,000 fewer votes overall...yet, the system says the Electoral College is the manner in which Presidents are elected...except when they are Democrats named Al Gore...then, it is time to have Brooks Brothers riots to stop recounts and SCOTUS appointment of the president on party lines instead of free and fair elections where each vote counts...

Al Gore was denied the Presidency by 527 votes in one disputed state - FL.
John Kerry was denied the presidency by fewer than 100,000 votes in Ohio.
Hillary Clinton was denied the Presidency by 77,000 votes across 3 states (MI, WI, PA).
In the case of Clinton AND Gore, they BOTH had more total votes overall...

The consequences of these thefts?

Citizens United destroyed the electoral system in favor of an auction house...
Trillions in war costs and lives flushed down a 17+year folly.
Financial crisis that nearly melted down the global economy and a recovery that abandoned many millions to second class lives.
A chasm open between "haves" and "have nevers" in income AND opportunities.

This is the recipe for civil war and dissolution of the union - an illegitimate AND ineffectual government? Why would the will of the people remain behind such nonsense?

When the government becomes THIS dysfunctional - a compromised Legislative, Executive AND Judicial branches, a total loss of checks and balances and separation of powers; and a hyper-partisan divide that makes compromise impossible - then it is either time to elect an entirely new government (literally everyone in service today gone tomorrow) or abolish the existing government entirely in favor a complete reset....maybe a new Constitution can remove the stain of 3/5ths and address specifically what is meant by "well-regulated" or "person"...whatever the ultimate solution, we may very well be living through a kind of end times for the first American experiment...

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