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Republicans control all three branches of government. This was the best recourse you could find? Republicans could easily have looked for a solution that favored the power of the legislative branch (where they have a structural advantage) or the courts (where they'll soon have an incumbency advantage.) Instead, they gave the power to the presidency? Seriously?
This part I agree with. That's why I'm so confused: why are the republicans giving the democrats the ammunition they need to win the divorce?
But Democrats managed to create a fourth, unaccountable, branch aligned largely with themselves. So the first order of business is to tear that branch down and/or put it under Constitutional control.
And also control of the legislature and the courts doesn't count for much if laws and judgements can simply be ignored. Illegal immigration was always illegal. The federal government spent at least dozens of billions of dollars directly supporting and subsidizing violations of the law. Ditto for drug laws and many laws protecting the ownership of firearms and practice of Christianity. Ditto for Bruen and Heller and any other decisions Blue Tribe doesn't like.
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We pass Federal laws and secure Supreme Court decisions, and Blue Tribe state governments, circuit courts, and large portions of the federal bureaucracy simply ignore them. Immigration and Guns are two issues where this pattern is more or less undeniable with a history stretching back decades; recently, we were surprised to learn that basic law enforcement was one of these as well. This has actually been a long-running conversation here on a number of threads, and is the reason why Red Tribe is currently doing what we're doing: We've lost faith in process as an impartial arbiter of outcomes, because we have, as a tribe, caught on to how "Manipulation of Procedural Outcomes" works.
We don't think the allocation of Ammunition works the way you seem to think it does. If you have five bullets and I have no bullets, and I pull a lever that gives both of us five bullets. there's a sense in which I'm "giving you more ammunition", but that doesn't make pulling it an obviously bad idea.
We already know that Blue Tribe ignores any law it doesn't like, and we already know that Blue Tribe is entirely willing to abuse power against us in lawless ways without significant consequence. Either we get to exercise meaningful power too, or the power should be denied totally. This is us attempting to exercise meaningful power. When Progressives get the Presidency again, we'll work on the "ignoring laws we don't like part". If it is not, in fact, possible for us to use power the way Blue Tribe does, we need to know that. If it is not, in fact, possible for us to ignore laws the way Blue Tribe does, we need to know that as well. We need legibility more than anything, and the current strategy does a good job of producing it, in my view.
In any case, the cumulative effect of this back-and-forth wrenching will not, I think, be a net increase in state capacity and control.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the bully power of a president with full regulatory authority over the corporations and therefore culture of the united states.
But oh well, at this point we're still discussing counterfactual. I wish I could just remindme! 8 years.
Unless-- do you have a manifold account? We could make some prediction markets to resolve this.
We have already had corporations coordinate economic warfare against Red States. We have already had the Federal Government use regulatory power to turn corporations into tools of repression against Red Tribe power centers and interests. What we lose in additional power used against us, we gain in legibility, in additional ability to coordinate common knowledge that we are, in fact, being repressed by unaccountable state power, and that we should escalate further until that repression is defeated for good.
I bet with my life choices, and my bet is that my side will win and my children will inherit a better world than the one we have now. You should do likewise.
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