One way to understand the constitutional grant of powers to the president is that the president can do *literally* whatever he wants as long as he can hold onto the votes of 35 senators in his party. Which is...kinda grim when you think about it!
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This goes back to the key flaw of the institution design, which was the belief that the differnet branches would be jealous of their own power, and check each other, but that's not really how it's worked out and very much not how it works under conditions of intense polarization
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Replying to @chrislhayes
Great concept as long as there are no parties. Founders hated/feared parties. Within a few years, they were all in them and maneuvering for power. Oops.
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Replying to @yeselson @chrislhayes
The chief structural lever was supposed to be the House's power of the purse. Putting huge chunks of the budget on self-renewing autopilot & making brinksmanship over all-or-nothing budgets the only Congressional input to lines of spending has neutered the people's House.
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Replying to @baseballcrank @chrislhayes
There’s something to that, but hyper partisan parties are mucking things up.
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Replying to @yeselson @chrislhayes
No Senator in US history has voted to remove a president of his/her party from office. So we don't exactly have a lot of positive role models on this to compare to.
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Replying to @baseballcrank @chrislhayes
True enough. Now we’ve gotof n of just two so far. And it does seem as if quite a few Republicans were prepared to impeach and ultimately convict Nixon, but we didn’t get that far so we will never know for sure.
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They told Nixon they had the votes. We'll never know how many they had. But the guys who won POTUS noms after that were Ford, Reagan, Bush & Dole - not Howard Baker or Goldwater.
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Replying to @baseballcrank @chrislhayes
Yup, entirely so. The direction of the party would not imply that removing Nixon would have been popular with the rank abd file (even though Nixon’s poll had tanked.)
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