Paul Ryan: U.S. has 'increasingly lawless presidency'

reply to post by thekaliyuga


Liberty:

Freedom from excessive law.

sounds to me like they are protecting liberty

spirited75
reply to post by thekaliyuga

 

Liberty:

Freedom from excessive law.

sounds to me like they are protecting liberty

Democracy is 2 wolves and 1 Lamb taking a vote on what's for dinner.
Liberty is A well armed Lamb contesting the vote.

double post

More sour grapes from little Eddie Munster.
In 30 years, Paul Ryan's gonna be telling his grand kids about the time he was Vice President, and ran a marathon in 10 minutes.

rupertg
More sour grapes from little Eddie Munster.
In 30 years, Paul Ryan's gonna be telling his grand kids about the time he was Vice President, and ran a marathon in 10 minutes.

And as Vice President he will still have accomplished more than President Obama.

At the very least Paul Ryan has compromised with the Democrats on several pieces of legislation. I don't see cooperation from this White House or the Dems in congress. The Dems certainly like to complain about the Republicans, yet in the end they are just as accountable.

I don't care if there is a democrat in the white house.
I don't care if the Senate is controlled by Democrats.

That is not a mandate by the American people for the Democrats to do what they want. Democrats had 2 years where they controlled 2 out of 3 branches of government and what did it accomplish?

serious question... anyone?

marg6043
reply to post by NorEaster

 

Since I been in ATS politics has been always a hot issue, and more so in the last few years. The site has become stronger not failing.

Talk radio got hotter too...numbers-wise...and if that's all ATS is after then they can easily become the permanent nesting place for bitter, rightwing cranks. Hell, that'd be easy, but I would like to think that a site like this would prefer to be a place where Left and Right leaning Truth can be welcome and can feel welcome.

Stronger is a very flexible and somewhat ambiguous goal when referring to the point of an information portal such as this is. Maybe more valuable to the success of conspiracy illumination efforts might be a more appropriate vision, if what's suggested by the motto "Deny Ignorance" is any indication. The balance between sheer numbers of daily Right versus Left crackpot hypotheses and their enthusiastically aggressive community support is profoundly slanted to the Right, and while that isn't the fault of the moderators or site management, it is a bit of a turn-off for those who either favor a more community-centric view of human society or have no strong view of either competing ideology as having all the answers to our nation's challenges. And this is the threat to the long range relevance of what should be seen as a conspiracy site, and not just a political rant site.

I remember listening to AM talk radio back in the early-to-mid 1980s while working all day long on a variety of production jobs I took after leaving the military. I learned about everything from schizophrenia to Vlad the Impaler to Anastasia (the story of the last of the Romanov family, claimed to have escaped the Russian Revolution executions) to the full history of the Middle East conflict (going back centuries and how the culture itself and its very different version of relative duration is very much a factor in why the modern Western world can't get its dealing with the Middle East right), and all in 4 hour baths of high quality information.

I also remember when Rush Limbaugh showed up, and AM talk radio got "stronger", as the rest of us walked off on it. Hell, who wants to hear the same tired rants against the Liberals and the government all day long. A small slice of each community (older white guys) suddenly found their home, and for each AM talk radio station, that was enough to increase their bottom line. That said, there was never any growth in that business model, and it ended up with the big national shows getting syndicated, which ended the careers of regional radio stalwarts and cemented hard right political talk as being pretty much what AM radio is all about anymore. Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, and whatever skinny hateful blonde woman it is that's being tolerated by them and their kind at the moment.

The swarming of hard right anger on this site in recent years just reminds me of what happened to AM talk radio, and I'd hate to see all Internet forums become rightwing hate nests as well. Most other forums have already accepted this as their fate (it seems) and this is definitely the case on all news outlet comment boards. I guess I just feel as if there's a lot more that could be accomplished if the aim (of too many posters on boards like this) wasn't to swarm over opposing views as if momentary numbers of "ditto" posts were going to make the winning team legally capable of imposing their view on the rest of society.

Yes, elections do have consequences, but not in places like this. Overwhelming ditto numbers just makes a site like this banal, and way too predictable to be considered interesting for an actual majority of people who may check back in now and again. Seriously, how many ways can "we need to impeach Obama, now" be expressed without sounding really f*cking tiresome?

Another blame the right/left for the failings of the government thread. When are people going to learn that it isn't the fault of just one party but BOTH of them? Stop blaming one party or the other for our government's incompetency, neither party has your or my best interests at heart. If you vote Republican or Democrat you are part or the problem, both parties need to go.

Krazysh0t
Another blame the right/left for the failings of the government thread. When are people going to learn that it isn't the fault of just one party but BOTH of them? Stop blaming one party or the other for our government's incompetency, neither party has your or my best interests at heart. If you vote Republican or Democrat you are part or the problem, both parties need to go.

Which will never, ever, *ever* happen UNTIL we get all of the private money out of politics except for maybe a $250 limit on private citizen contributions only.

Anything and everything else are just feel-good band-aids and/or other forms of self-delusion.

Corporations are people? The idiocy of that statement is astounding...

PACS & SuperPACS? What the hell were we smoking when we let that happen?

What this country really needs at this point is something to really shake-up the populace.

Unfortunately most of those kinds of things fall into the bad category.

It's a crying shame to see what this country has become. We'd be better off just changing that famous line to "We the sheeple". Far more accurate...

I have seen the enemy...and it is us. Courage has left the building...

The best part is - we all know it and don't give enough of a flying f#ck to actually DO anything about it. As long as our iPads work and we can buy a bag of Reese's pieces all is well with our worlds. And we will all get exactly what we deserve.

I will from now on term myself a political atheist. Saw that term in another thread here recently and really liked it.

Nephalim
reply to post by xuenchen

 

mmmm I dont know about that. Your position requires a 100% voter turn out, and excludes the people who voted against a candidate.- addition

I would suppose though if a representative is actually doing his job, he wouldn't care about party lines. He or she would take your issue up all the same and put his or her personal positions aside.

edit on 2-2-2014 by Nephalim because: (no reason given)

The people in office were voted by the majority in their regions. The president is not bending the rules, he is violating the laws of the land and breaking the law, for he is forced to deal with people's elected representatives no matter what parties they are in. And its best if one party doesnt have most of the votes, majority governments are notoriously villainous. As in our country.

reply to post by thekaliyuga


Doing nothing is the best we can hope for with congress. Normally they spend their time screwing things up. If they did nothing for the rest of the year it would be the best year for congress in our lifetimes. Finally we have a congress that isn't working against us because it isn't working at all. Nice improvement, seriously.

As for Obama killing people without a trial, doing guess-based drone strikes, supplying arms to drug lords, etc etc etc, its really not something you're going to be able to spin into a good thing.

Unity_99

Nephalim
reply to post by xuenchen

 

mmmm I dont know about that. Your position requires a 100% voter turn out, and excludes the people who voted against a candidate.- addition

I would suppose though if a representative is actually doing his job, he wouldn't care about party lines. He or she would take your issue up all the same and put his or her personal positions aside.

edit on 2-2-2014 by Nephalim because: (no reason given)

The people in office were voted by the majority in their regions. The president is not bending the rules, he is violating the laws of the land and breaking the law, for he is forced to deal with people's elected representatives no matter what parties they are in. And its best if one party doesnt have most of the votes, majority governments are notoriously villainous. As in our country.

People should not speak when they don't know what they are talking about. President has not broken any laws. He has the right to use executive order when he deems it necessary. Every president does it, Obama has actually done it far less than bush did.

As an independent i would agree that they, dems and republicans, are both wrong. In this case it happens the Republican group actually conspired to say no to everything and bring the government to standstill. This should be against numerous laws and they should be prosecuted.

The people should rise up and throw all of these bums out on their arse. If there were ever a time for revolution it is now.

For change to happen we must have

1st term limits, two terms is more than enough time.

2nd true campaign finance reform. The supreme Court needs to stay out of the writing law biz. That is not why they are there. What they did was tantamount to treason, allowing foreign entities to give millions to campaign. Because of what the supreme Court did the campaign refinance will have to be an amendment to the constitution so they can't touch it.

3rd strong third independent party. This party's only platform is to make the other two talk to each other and compromise. It would have to take enough seats in Congress to force this change.

4th get rid electoral college. It was never meant to be what it has become. It is time that the popular vote elects the president. The founders never meant the college to override the popular vote. The college has become corrupt and manipulated, it is time to do away with it and let the popular vote, the people elect the president.

The election should not be about money like it is now. Just get on the stump and state your platform. Free news op ads. Free debates on national tv. Free radio debates. That is all you need, not gazillion tv commercials lol.

Change can happen if we make it happen. Come on folks let's make it happen.

The Bot

reply to post by fractal2


Great post. At this point, the best we can hope for is a stalemate in government. If we were to let Obama run their agenda, we would be in far worse shape than we already are, the middle class would be more decimated, and the elite's grip even tighter. That being said, outside of the Tea Party, the Republicans are all too happy to knuckle under to the communist agenda as well, so I reiterate, a do-nothing Congress is the best we can hope for.

reply to post by Riffrafter


Why is private money in politics? The plus side of any given business regulation is that you help a select few (while hurting untold others). On the minus side you will always have corporations spending money to get the regulations more in their favor. The solution that works is let consumers regulate corporations individually and democratically and through civil court systems and consumers unions.

The solution that fails the worst is a 50/50 blend of government and private control, which is on track to happen inside US borders. The regulations are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages. Each page is generally ineffective while inviting lobbyists to ask congress to change them to be more favorable to them at the expense of their competition. Are you are going to say we need lots of business regulations but the businesses subject to those regulations should not be allowed to put their word in? Its those business regulations that are the money in politics. You wipe out those regulations and you wipe out money in politics.

Lawmakers rarely contemplate that regulations help big business while hurting small business. One glaring example is the 11 year old who recently had her cup cake business shut down because she has to buy a professional kitchen "for our own safety". That little girl didn't have the money she needed to put the money into the politics, so she lost out.

This is of course entirely disprovable. Anyone reading this could chart a graph of the size of business regulations along side a chart of the graph of average business size on the same timeframe.

thekaliyuga

OK your right, the prezi is bending the rules, but he may have good reason...

Yeah, don't think so.

The ends justify the means has been the mantra of this admin since day one.

There are rules in place for a reason.

I have always believed this to be a nation run on the rule of law, yet you so eloquently suggest that the very branch of government responsible for enforcing those rules should be aloud to bend the very same? The congress does not work for the president, it works for the people, and it should always base its success on quality, not quantity. It is time to hold the executive branch accountable.

Wait so it's ok for the president to break the law because a majority of the population won't just say ok and bend over for him?


That's the most twisted and blatantly stupid logic I've heard in a long time.

This president is wholesale slaughtering everything this nation should stand for, yeah republicans do crap like this too sometimes and it's WRONG WHEN THEY DO IT TOO!!!

There's not an EXCUSE... well because he can't get what he wants any other way it's ok...

NO IT IS NOT

The reality is the republicans are doing EXACTLY what their constituents are demanding! Which is holding the line with ZERO backing down on issues that their constituents feel strongly about!

You can't just ignore the constitution because it's getting in the way of your "vision" that's not how it works for a very good reason.

The reality is the Obama administration does NOT have the support to be doing the increasingly tyrannical and blatantly unconstitutional things it's doing in ways that don't even have a real legal precedent... Why do you think BHO is ruling so much through EO's?

Is it maybe because there's not really a well established process for overturning them even when the overhwhelming majority of the population is against them?

Now I have no love for the republicans either, but I will say that what's been going especially in the last 2 years is quite frankly disturbing at a very deep level. And unlike you apparently, I'd be opposed to this behavior no matter WHO is doing it!!!

You apparently only have a problem with it when it's not "your team" doing it.

Unity_99

Nephalim
reply to post by xuenchen

 

mmmm I dont know about that. Your position requires a 100% voter turn out, and excludes the people who voted against a candidate.- addition

I would suppose though if a representative is actually doing his job, he wouldn't care about party lines. He or she would take your issue up all the same and put his or her personal positions aside.

edit on 2-2-2014 by Nephalim because: (no reason given)

The people in office were voted by the majority in their regions. The president is not bending the rules, he is violating the laws of the land and breaking the law, for he is forced to deal with people's elected representatives no matter what parties they are in. And its best if one party doesnt have most of the votes, majority governments are notoriously villainous. As in our country.

Ok write a list of the actual laws HE broke. Times and dates as well please.

and the rest of you, please go look at election numbers. You cannot possibly think within the realms of reality with these low participation rates that you are actually represented by the person who "upholds your values." 26 million people in Tx alone. How many of us do you think vote on any level? wtf do you guys think 26 million peopel voted for rick perry? No offense Rick.

reply to post by Nephalim


He has violated the Constitution by making recess appointments while the Senate was in session. This case has gone through several levels of the federal court system, with 3 rulings from appeals court that his action violated the Constitution. Only the Senate can declare itself in or out of session, as the courts reaffirmed when they ruled against his administration on the appointments.

The President has violated the Constitution by using Executive Orders to modify the manner in which laws are enforced. executive orders can only be applied to executive entities and cannot be used to circumvent the Legislative in terms of creating / removing or modifying current laws. The Use of executive orders cannot be applied to the citizens of the united States nor can those orders "create" law.

The President has violated the law by refusing to enforce federal Law (failing to execute his requirements under the Constitution). Article 2 section 3.

The President has attempted to use executive orders to enforce UN treaty obligations that are in violation of the US Constitution. This action is a violation of US Supreme Court ruling in the Head Money Case, which established the relationship between foreign treaties and its application under US law.

The President has violated the Constitution by bypassing the US Senate when it comes to treaty ratifications.

The president / Cabinet members have violated the law with regards to Benghazi.
The president / Cabinet members have violated the law with regards to changes to Obamacare.

The President has violated the Constitution, namely Separation of Powers, by taking actions reserved solely to the US Congress.

The President has violated the UCMJ by publicly speaking on military criminal investigations / giving his opinions on those incidents (Undue Command influence).

The President has violated several amendments to the Constitution with regards to the NSA.

The President / cabinet have violated Federal Law as well as violated the sovereignty of Mexico via Fast and Furious.

Obamacare violates the US Constitution as any tax bill is required to originate in the House, NOT the Senate.

The President / Cabinet have violated the 1st amendment with regards to freedom of religion by requiring certain religious groups to take actions that violate their own religion (contraceptive / birth control),.

The EEOC attempted to reinstate a member of the group that the Us Supreme Court had already ruled on, resulting in his removal in the first place.

The presidents use of the EPA to enforce "environmental treaties" that have not been ratified by the Senate.

Selective and illegal prosecution via the DOJ through Eric Holder and Obama.

The presidents illegal use of executive privilege in an effort to prevent a criminal investigation of the DOJ.

The use of executive orders to modify laws.

The use of Executive orders to increase pay of federal workers.

The use of OPM to make changes to Obamacare (how certain sections will apply).

The President violated the Constitution by failing to submit budgets by the required date.

ALL events occurring from the 1st ay he took office up until now.

I can keep listing if you wish.

With this being said, the President has committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Before someone tries and argues this point, a high crime and misdemeanor with regards to Presidential Impeachment are defined by the US Congress and not the law / court system (per the Constitution as well as Supreme Court Rulings).

reply to post by Xcathdra


Ok now how much of that was carry over from the last admin and congress would you reckon?

Nephalim
reply to post by Xcathdra

 

Ok now how much of that was carry over from the last admin and congress would you reckon?

Actually none of it is a carry over. While the Bush administration had a program in place for guns, Obama / Holder are the ones who created Fast and Furious, where the guns were allowed to cross into Mexico. Since Obama invoked executive privilege in an effort to prevent a congressional hearing / criminal prosecution, Congress had to find Holder in Civil and Criminal contempt of Congress. The civil contempt will allow a judge to decide if EP is applicable to this area.

It wont be.


Everything else in the list originates solely with the Obama administration.