I hear you. I think the difference is that France has way more worker protections, strong and influential unions, a solid social safety net, and frankly a less ruthless government, so there's less fear of financial ruin for work stoppages.

Meanwhile, corporations in America keep the working poor as close to bonded slavery as they can get away with without pushing them over the edge to violence, though even that equilibrium is starting to shift based on worker attitudes I hear. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government as well as state governments regularly sided with corporations over workers and murdered hundreds of them, and workers mostly lost or had their lives destroyed. The frequency of conflict finally resulted in union protections... like 50 years later. Now most of those protections have been unraveled, and many low-income workers are a few months of missed rent payments away from homelessness. If they lose their job, there will be a dozen people waiting to take that job right after. So asking for a general strike is asking people to face certain financial ruin for themselves and their families.

That said, to be honest, it's a wonder to me that there hasn't been more violence between workers and corporations. As they keep taking things away from the working poor, though, I think it's coming. The problem is that propaganda is so strong that the violence may be misdirected. Either way, worker retaliation leading to a wider conflict is one of the only avenues I can see for systemic change.

That or secession.

You judge a diverse country the size of all of Europe while evidently knowing very little about it. And the fact that you blame another country for your own country's problems means you are pretending to be other than you are. We know our problems come from within.

Oh? How's Lebanon doing right now? Rule of law? Corruption? Press freedoms? Economy and unemployment? It must be all good there given how frequently you post about America.

Now churches will move the line and announce their endorsements publicly ("That announcement was intended for our congregations only!") and dare the IRS to do something about it.

Yeah, it's set to release at the end of next year. I'm pretty excited to see the arc wrap up, but I hope they stop there and don't try to do the rest of the series.

Birthright citizenship was not struck down. Universal injunctions were struck down, which means the Constitution will be applied in any cases where a state has a law on the books or a class action suit has been brought and a statewide injunction has been declared. These suits will wind their way through the courts and may possibly be heard by the Supreme Court.

I'd like to predict the USSC would decline to hear the case because there would be no discrepancies in prior rulings and the legal question would be so obvious, but I've given up trying to predict this court. In any event, I do think it's unlikely they would rule against birthright citizenship, since it would be plainly unconstitutional and there's no real wiggle room to reinterpret it differently.

What motivated you to join this community then?

I hope she gets the big seat someday.

That's not how it works in the US.

Edit: In many other countries the most senior justice becomes the chief justice by seniority, and I was saying that's not how it works in the US. But it looks like there have been four times when an associate justice has been "promoted" to chief justice, which I didn't realize. The first being John Rutledge in 1795 and Rehnquist being the most recent in 1986.

No

2 is right, but the reasons aren't for aggrandizement (at least, not mainly). It's for more power and the legitimacy of that power.

But it seems that they don't need to convene a convention if the Supreme Court and Congress can simply allow Trump to ignore laws with impunity.

A June 27 poll from the Democratic group Priorities USA finds that an astonishing 48% of Americans haven’t heard about Trump’s landmark legislation. [...]

The Priorities USA poll found that only 8% of Americans could name Medicaid cuts as a detail of the bill. [...]

Although Democratic opposition isn’t surprising, KFF also found that 71% of independents and 27% of “MAGA Republicans” objected to it too [when informed about it].

Also

A March poll by the liberal group Data for Progress found that 44% of left-leaning voters would give the party a “D” or “F” grade for its handling of Trump. And support among the broader electorate isn’t any better. In April, Gallup found that confidence in Democratic congressional leadership had fallen to 25%—an all-time low.

They're lawyers and professors: a peacetime government. They don't understand yet that we're at war.

So, a small aside. I have to give some credit to Star Wars, of all things. I'm not really a fan, but after I watched Andor, I looked up wiki articles about what ended up happening to Mon Mothma, aside from that one appearance in Return to the Jedi. It turns out that once the Rebellion won, she became supreme chancellor. She was quick to renounce the powers of the Emperor and pushed an agenda of peace treaties and reconciliation with Imperial remnants. She wanted so badly for things to return to status quo and for the fighting to stop that she intentionally did not root out or hold imperial traitors accountable when the Rebellion won. In the fiction they make it pretty clear that this is what directly led to the destruction of the New Republic some years later.

This is so accurate and exactly what would happen if this boiled over into an actual civil war.