• KombatWombat@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    People should be appointed based on what the people elected you to do, anything else is a betrayal of the constituents. If someone voted for you because they believed you would reschedule cannabis, and you don’t get it done, that is a betrayal of your voters.

    Yes, but “what the people elected you to do” isn’t as straightforward as you make it out to be. Yes, in this case, it means working to get cannabis legalized. But that doesn’t mean by any means necessary. You would certainly lose supporters if you specified legalizing it would require jeopardizing future access to other prescriptions or undermining the procedural standards set by Congress and earlier administrations. The people are electing a president to influence the direction of government, not a tyrant to remake it.

    And then they will face electoral consequences.

    Re-election prospects represent a deterrent, but only a purely reactive one in a system of checks and balances. Constitutional restrictions are better since by design they preemptively address overreach. Namely, the president has to work with other branches to get policy changed. Also, particularly drastic action can result in ending their current term early through impeachment.

    Israel instigated the conflict by…

    I was not trying to say history started on Oct. 7. In fact, my point was that the history of it started long before Biden’s administration and limited how much control he had over it. And you may argue that completely withdrawing support would limit Israel’s options. I frankly think that giving Israel nothing to lose would make them attack with less discrimination than they do now, assuming Biden was even willing to face the massive amount of pushback for that in the first place. Because calling back to your earlier point, that would definitely be against the will of the majority of his constituents.

    The western allies who gave up Austria and Czechoslovakia were expecting consequences; they were expecting Hitler (and Poland, who also got territory from Czechoslovakia) to invade their common enemy, the USSR.

    Is this true? It’s hard for me to believe that two major European powers wanted to stand idly by while a rival power (especially for France given their history) conquered much of Eastern Europe just on the hope it would end up fighting another rival power. Especially since they already had justification to keep Germany declawed from the Treaty of Versailles, and later chose to go to war when it came to the invasion of Poland, which the USSR was much more likely to care about and start a war over.