this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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I think it's high time America significantly reduces the power and influence a president has.
Will we do that? Almost certainly not. That would most likely require numerous election cycles where we vote intelligently to create the political environment where something like that would be possible.
And if there's one thing I've learned in my life in this country it's that Americans are dogshit at voting. Which is unfortunate considering how many people died to give us the right.
The president doesn’t really have this much power. It’s just that we have a complacent Congress, that isn’t enforcing existing law. It also doesn’t help that we have a majority on the Supreme Court that have decided to give Trump just about anything he asks for.
One of the big problems is that the world continuously gets more complicated and needs commensurate regulation, but the legislative branch can only handle so much complexity and expertise directly. So it has been delegating more and more of its regulatory powers to agencies that are supposed to be staffed with the experts that can handle that complexity and have that expertise.
But in our system "executing" the law is under a different branch, controlled by the President, so it in effect transfers that power to that office. Congress can't just "take it back" without solving that underlying problem, or the power they take back will vanish due to their lack of capacity to execute it effectively for the good of the people.
It could absolutely function orders of magnitude better. They would have to stop spending 90% or however much time they spend fund raising and meeting with lobbyists.
Stop making decisions/voting on proposals that are hundreds or thousands of pages and voting on it after a day or 2 of review.
Completely remove "riders" from said proposals so that only the issue at hand is being voted on an not unrelated bullshit they want to push through without anyone noticing in those hundreds of pages that no one reads all of.
And for fuck sakes disallow anyone other than the representative who brings it to the table to actually author the god damned thing. Fucking parasites
all they really have to do is move all the departments under the congress. They can have the president still bring forth canidates and the congress votes to whittle them down until one gets over 50%. If none get over 50 the president has to produce more canidates. Maybe make a department to identify canidates that get mixed in as well. then the departments work relatively independently with the president acting as a central source of data management and he brings to congress any necessity for the deparment head to change policy.
Every word of that is true and it hurts...