Originally Posted by
tcaudilllg
Only the president can enforce the law, and unless 2/3 of the Senate vote to impeach (you need a majority vote in the House to even begin the trial) then there is no check at all on their "style" for enforcing it. Palin could easy appoint people who on the one hand (Bush's appointees were very guilty of this, which is why Obama's team is overburdened now trying to deal with the consequences of years of mismanagement), while purging the Senate. She's tried before... as major of Wassilla she tried to purge the local library of people who disagreed with her, but found she didn't have the authority. As governor, she fired the chief of police because he refused to fire an ex-relative of hers who was working for the department. In an interview with Barbara Walters she insisted that if elected vice president she would "purge" the government of corruption from the top to the bottom, however when pressed she didn't respond what the criterion for identifying "corruption" would be.
All these signs point to an intent to wield power about like Adolph ****** did as chancellor of Germany. As chancellor, ****** made sure that his allies got to do whatever they wanted, while his opponents were unfairly persecuted. So very likely the KKK would be marching in the streets again, with large, emboldened numbers; we could be back to the days of lynching; creationism would be mandated to be taught in schools; every abortion clinic closed, etc. But after two years of Palin rule you'd actually have a resurgent Democratic Party with numbers in both chambers far beyond anything you've ever seen, probably enough to impeach her and to force through an agenda the likes of which none of us could predict.... And then there's the possibility that she wouldn't accept impeachment, but would initiate a civil war as a factor of her inability to rationalize compromise.
The point is that the U.S. is too feckless this day in age to resist the assertion by a president of dictatorial powers. Plus you never know what kinds of terror she might preside over if she had a convenient. The parallels between her and ****** are stark in that respect, because in the Communists ****** had a punching bag/rationale for dictatorial exercises of his own. All things considered the situation in the United States today is very, very similar to what it was in Germany in the 1930s: high unemployment, a united Right driven by fury over progressive reforms, and an active foreign/domestic enemy. They talk about how racists and xenophobes elected the Nazis to the legislature... but what they talk less about was that the center-Right Nationalists -- the 1930s German equivalent to the Tea Party -- were a key element of ******'s rise to the Chancellorship. He eventually turned on them of course -- their entire leadership with extinguished the night the German president died and ****** assumed emergency decree powers. Nor did ****** ever actually undo the German constitution: he was legally chancellor right right up to his suicide in 1945, enabled by emergency decree clauses.
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