The US is part of the world.

The Constitution is set up so that a single representative civilian citizen is elected by all the other citizens to oversee the nation. That person occupies the Executive Office.

Constitutionally speaking, the representative of the people decided that the Justice System was being used punitively. The Constitution grants the Executive Office the power of pardons explicitly in case the Justice System is being used punitively.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature.

What you're exercising here is called whataboutism, and it's a really shitty thing to do.

My take is that he thinks his son wouldnt be safe in prison under Trump. And that is a reasonable assumption imo.

Reading this I just realised I can no longer tell if Americans mean could or couldn't when they type could.

In all fairness, I doubt he remembers making that promise in the first place.

Hell yea brother' president is above the law!

Because it's hard for a committee of 334,000,000 to make decisions? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question though. Are you suggesting more of a bottom-up, local-first way of running things? I think there would still have to be representatives at various levels, for the same reason.

Legislation is still pretty complicated, having professional legislators makes sense just as a technical profession.

We could certainly stand to have more direct input though!

We don’t build bridges by committee, why would politics be better?

It’s a specific skill set to understand legalese and the processes

TBF I don't think a system of thousands of referendums would be much better. What I take bigger issue with is the electoral college, but I don't have a good solution in mind. Popular vote wouldn't be much better, especially because of how it would affect campaigning.

I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone's identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn't work great with cell phones. There's other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

I dunno. There's probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren't exactly incentivized to get it right.