Late Night Drafts; Morning Confusions: part II

Presidents: why bother?

Alright, so, let's get the basics out of the way. The American government is set up as such: there are three branches of government. The Legislative branch makes new laws. The Judicial branch, which basically makes sure people follow the laws (the court system is held within this branch). Finally, you have the executive branch. This branch is basically the President, Vice President, and his little peanut gallery (aka his cabinet).

The Presidents job is essentially to say "yay" or "nay" to everything. If a bill makes it through congress, it goes to the President, who basically has the power to sign it into law or to say "herp derp I do what I want," veto the bill, and sent it back to congress, who can revise the bill and try again. Or, if they receive 2/3rd's majority, can overthrow the presidents veto and make it a law anyways.

Sooooo... why? What's the point of the President again? He approves bills that have already gone through a vigorous screening period that can last years just to get tossed back and forth between the House of Representatives and the Senate (which together make up Congress)? And even if he doesn't like the bill Congress can pass it regardless of what he says?

Here's a quote from WhiteHouse.gov. "In order to pass legislation and send it to the President for his signature, both the house and the Senate must pass the same bill by majority vote. If the president vetoes a bill, they may override his veto by passing the bill again in each chamber with at least two-thirds of each body voting in favor."

Oh yeah and also the Pres can even have his personal appointments denied by Congress. What's that? The President is kind of a useless figurehead? "Many of the duties as head of state are ceremonial and convey no real power." - Wikipedia.

One of the main jobs of the President is to plan the country's budget. However, even when he does that, Congress can just be like "naw man you're dumb," and throw out his budget.


The President does have executive power, however. If he wants to, he can just be like "bam, I made this law up out of thin air and there's nothing you can do about it." That's fine and dandy, I guess, as long as you want a dictator.

What I'm getting at here is why should we even have a president? People will try to tell you that we need all three branches of government to have "checks and balances" and to make sure that no one branch gets out of control. We could accomplish the same thing with two branches. The President can stonewall a perfectly good bill so it doesn't become a law just because he doesn't like it. That's not balanced at all, in my opinion.

So I'd like some honest feedback here. And I mean real feedback. Not the typical "no... just no," that I get when I put out some crazy idea. Yeah Matt, I'm talking about you. And I still think that this country could get itself some help if it started up some factories. It'd be creating jobs, we'd be creating goods that we could export, we could use renewable energy to run them. But no. You never listen.

I swear, I'll revolt all over this business.

Look, since the government obviously doesn't have anything better to do with its time than declare that pizza is a vegetable and enforce the same internet censorship used to such countries at Libya (you remember, that one that had all those protests and stuff about how they wanted their internet back) and China (you know, the Communist one), I honestly don't see why we keep them around at all.

Seriously. I hope they had just gotten out of a thirteen hour debate about how they're going to get us out of debt, and on the little coffee break were like, "man, pizza has a lot of veggies and stuff, let's make it a veggie too." Bam, done in five minutes, then back to the big problems. Don't waste America's time like this, Congress. It's not funny anymore. And leave our Internets alone. We're out of jobs, we're out of money, and if you take the internet away, it's the freaking last straw. Revolt, anyone?

Where's Guy Fawkes when you need him.

If you don't already know what's going on, please educate yourself on why America as we know it is about to change forever, if we don't do something. Do you want to end up like Libya?

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

To e-mail your representatives, please visit this site: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

"What PROTECT-IP will do is cripple new start-ups because it also lets companies sue any site they feel isn't doing their filtering well enough. These law-suits could easily bankrupt new search-engines and social media sites. And PROTECT-IP's wording is ambiguous enough that important social media sites could become targets. Lots of trail-blazing websites could look like piracy havens to the wrong judge. Tumblr, Soundcloud, an early Youtube, wherever people express themselves make art, express themselves, broadcast news, or organize protests..."