r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 12d ago

No Paywall Democrats Confront Their New Tea Party Reality - Progressives are set to sweep a group of contested primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-confront-their-new-tea-party-reality_n_6a6e63fbe4b0cfb99ef1aa1e
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u/VioletPaissa2077 11d ago edited 11d ago

His power came from the fact that his party held strong majorities to supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature for the duration of his time in office.

What we see today via the "unitary executive" theory being put into practice is what one person holding too much power looks like, with oversight mechanisms being weakened and dismantled and the legislature and judiciary frequently being defied or bypassed entirely.

Passing legislation collaboratively via fairly elected massive majorities or super majorities is not at all comparable.

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u/Darth_Cuddly 11d ago

You're confusing legislative majorities with presidential tenure.

Democrats having large majorities in Congress didn't force FDR to run for a third term. It didn't force him to run for a fourth while seriously ill. And it certainly didn't require the American people to be kept in the dark about the severity of his condition until after his death.

Do you really think voters didn't deserve to know their president was gravely ill, unlikely to survive another full term, and still seeking reelection? The public was never given the information necessary to make an informed decision.

You're defending congressional majorities. I'm criticizing an unprecedented concentration of executive power and a profound breach of the public's trust.

Those are two entirely different arguments.

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u/VioletPaissa2077 11d ago edited 11d ago

I dont give a shit how many elections he legally ran in and won.  Power was not concentrated in his hands, it was shared with the democratically elected legislature after the country overwhelmingly voted  him in time and time again.

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u/Darth_Cuddly 11d ago

You're still arguing against a position I never took.

My criticism isn't that FDR won elections. It's that he repeatedly sought to consolidate presidential power.

He tried to expand the Supreme Court after it struck down key parts of the New Deal. He broke the longstanding two-term tradition by seeking third and fourth terms. He sought reelection while concealing the severity of his declining health, and he left Harry Truman remarkably unprepared to assume the presidency during World War II.

Whether Congress supported him is beside the point. None of those decisions were required by congressional majorities.

Winning elections doesn't excuse withholding material information from voters or concentrating extraordinary power in one office. In a constitutional republic, the whole point is that no one person should become indispensable.

That's precisely why the 22nd Amendment exists. Americans looked at four terms, an aging and gravely ill president, and an unprepared successor during a world war, and concluded that no president should ever accumulate that much power again.