• dudinax@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed. They weren’t able to provide perfectly for these eventualities, which also was well understood at the time.

    The constitution clearly doesn’t allow a president to be removed from office by a prosecution, but it just as clearly doesn’t offer any immunity to a prosecution for presidents and not to mention ex-presidents. There’s never been a presidency, including Donny’s, where a criminal charge was even contemplated that would have impinged on a president’s legitimate duties.

    • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      The founders did anticipate direct democracy, the two-party system, and demagoguery. These were much discussed.

      …and notably not a part of the constitution they eventually drafted, which was my point. Rather than try to build a democratic system with effective safeguards against demagoguery, they chose to have a system where only “the right sort of person” got a say in the running of government, and assumed that the separations and limitations of power they wrote in to the rest of the document would be sufficient protection against bad actors in that scenario. Now, we have (more or less) representative democracy, but with no additional guardrails to protect against someone like Trump, and SCOTUS is peeling away what we do have day by day.