- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Summary
California officials warned that Trump’s order to release massive amounts of water nearly caused severe flooding for farmers.
Trump boasted about the move, claiming it would help fight wildfires, but experts said the water couldn’t reach affected areas, which are over 200 miles away.
The Army Corps of Engineers initially planned to release water at maximum capacity but scaled back after urgent pushback.
Experts warned the water could have been better used months later for irrigation.
We have three branches in the federal government - executive, legislative, judicial. Legislative creates laws. Judicial basically decides when they apply/arbitrates their implementation. Executive branch is the actual meat of the entire thing, containing basically every other federal government institution, which is (in broad strokes) a giant hierarchy with the President at the top, with the ability to override every decision. It’s because the people who designed this system had monarchism as their primary frame of reference and basically designed “monarchism with a couple restraints”. People like to think it’s democracy with checks and balances, but the democratic elements are worthless and the checks and balances have completely failed.
This is why I’m glad we don’t directly elect our head of government in Australia.
People bitch “oh we’ve had 5 prime minister’s in 5 years!”. Better that than a president that can only be stopped by 2/3rds of the senate.
That and Australian cabinet members (who are the executives of the various departments), who can be removed by the prime minister, at least are somewhat covered by the fact the prime minister only has this power while a simple majority of the parliament allows it.
I’m not claiming we’ve got democracy figured out over here, and suffer from a lot of the same shit as the US because of capitalism and corruption.
But hell, US-style elected constitutional monarchy is wild.
And we’re still under an actual monarchy lol
Mmn…2/3 of the House and Senate is what’s required to override a veto, if the the President doesn’t want something to pass. But the President can’t just pass something without a majority vote.
Anyway, you don’t have to solve that problem by handing control of the executive to the Congress (House + Senate). You can have popular referendums, popular recalls, more frequent elections. Having high turnover in that job is a good thing, because the job itself has way too much power. Abolishing the job would be better. The idea that “one guy has to be in charge” causes extreme problems.
We elected Trump. The Democrats had the opportunity to run an opposition candidate, and opted not to.
That would be less profitable.