guesswho
2yr ago
If they then went on to unanimously elect Obama's next nominee, which is what happened in the Bork case, then sure, that would be fine.
guesswho
2yr ago
What number of states removing Trump from the primary ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice?
I don't know, maybe 500?
Given that doing that would pretty much guarantee the Republicans a landslide win for whichever candidate they run instead and also for the Senate and House, this would have basically zero negative impact on their political aspirations and instead probably help them a lot.
Whereas, a Supreme Court seat is probably the most influential and consequential position in the entire government, it's the holy grail of political footballs, it's why you turn out to elect your side's president even if you find him tiresome or awful and don't really care who governs beyond that.
guesswho
2yr ago
Changing the filibuster rules and staling a Supreme Court seat are not remotely comparable.
guesswho
2yr ago
I always hear it said that it was appaling that the GOP never even held hearings -- but I don't think, if they had voted no after some show trials, that it would really have helped anyone feel better
If they had voted 'no', and then unanimously voted yes on Obama's nest appointment, as is what actually happened with Bork, people would have felt a lot better.
No one is particularly attached to Garland in particular, they're attached to the seat.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yes, like I said, campaigning.
This is all markedly less vitriolic and existential-threat-invoking than 'literally a fascist, literally a rapist, literally the agent of foreign powers, will end democracy as we know it'.
guesswho
2yr ago
Sure, all of which is a lot less sensationalist and a lot less motivating than 'literally a fascist, literally a rapist, going to end democracy as we know it'.
guesswho
2yr ago
Trump has only been barred from the Republican Primary ballot in CO. Absent a new ruling in a new court case, he will still be on the General Election ballot in CO, and people there are welcome to vote for him.
guesswho
2yr ago
That seems like a logical conclusion, but the courts don't run on logic and everything about this case so far has run on obscure legal theories and precedents rather than logic.
Most specifically, there's nothing about this finding in this case that causes him to be barred from the general ballot, even if it makes sense that he should be based on this finding. AFAIK, there would still have to be a separate hearing and a separate judgement and a separate ruling in order to make that happen.
Maybe that's what will happen, maybe not; the USSC looks to be getting involved, so a lot could change between now and then. But either way, it's something that hasn't happened yet, so blaming people for doing it when they haven't is untoward.
guesswho
2yr ago
In fact it's not connected to appearing on a ballot, convicted felons can get elected to any office they want.
There's a specific narrow provision about Officers of the State being barred from election if they commit the specific crime of Insurrection, which is what's being used here. I think it dates to the Civil War or something.
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean yeah that makes logical sense to me, but so far this whole thing has been running off complex legal minutia rather than common sense. No idea how the law works, how it will work by the time of the general election, how it will be interpreted and applied, etc.
I've searched and not found any analysis of this question so far, I expect those articles will come out over teh next few days and we'll know more.
guesswho
2yr ago
No idea what they're talking about.
I'm sure they'll link something from 4 years ago but who knows what. It's all very tedious.
guesswho
2yr ago
Right, that's what I should have said. They're applying an isolated demand for rigor on the concept of 'convicted of a felony' when it's their guy getting convicted.
guesswho
2yr ago
When we get to N=2 I'll start considering whether the pattern you're talking about exists.
guesswho
2yr ago
Perhaps.
My impression is that Republicans are motivated by a sense of crisis around a pervasive culture war that seeps into every nook and cranny of life and lies behind every public and private institution. The election was stolen by a hundred different election officials and a thousand collaborators covering for them, teachers are transing your kids and teaching them to be Marxists, immigrants are pouring over the boarder and taking your government services, etc. A diffuse, broad crisis that requires decisive and far-reaching leadership to combat.
Whereas I think Democrats have very much focused their own sense of crisis around Trump specifically, claiming that he personally is a threat to democracy and decency and needs to be defeated at all costs.
My impression is that removing Trump from the equation dissipates the sense of crisis and urgency felt by the Democrats, but not that felt by the Republicans.
Republicans may not love the new nominee, but they'll be driven to vote for him out of the fear of the ongoing existential crisis anyway, in the same way that Democrats are historically unenthusiastic about Biden but are turning out anyway to vote against Trump.
I could of course be wrong, but that's my sense of the field.
guesswho
2yr ago
They're going to go apeshit over all of them
This is very much not my recollection of that election, what are you talking about?
Like, they made a big joke out of 'binders full of women', but that's the normal tomfoolery every campaign gets up to (remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?). Obviously they weren't going to say that their opponent is cool and good actually, but I don't think the rhetoric was anything like what's being lobbied against Trump, and the Dem voters certainly didn't have the same visceral hatred and existential dread about him.
So I'm not really sure what you're referring to.
Romney did pretty good in that election, winning more of the popular vote than Trump did in 2020, and that was running against a historic and widely loved incumbent.
guesswho
2yr ago
Randomly, have you seen the Minecraft colonialism video? It's pretty interesting.
guesswho
2yr ago
I really, really wish that it were, it's insane that the government is involved in primaries.
But that is in fact how it works, the two main parties sort of appropriate the infrastructure and machinery of the electoral system of many states, and end up subject to legislation by those states thereby.
I think this is a huge conflict of interest for our Democracy, and that primaries should be purely private affairs managed by teh parties among their own members. But unfortunately that's not how it works.
guesswho
2yr ago
Being removed from a primary ballot in one state is much, much, much smaller than losing a Supreme Court justice.
Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh (and perhaps even Amy Comey Barrett) were subject to far more contentious nominations than anything Democratic appointees have ever been subject to.
The difference being that those are names of 3 Supreme Court justices.
Yes, the Democrats did reject one Republican nominee 35 years ago. But he was rejected after an open and pulib hearing and vote, and then the next Republican nominee that replaced him was unanimously approved. Reagan still filled his seat.
The issue is not that Garland had a contentious hearing, or even that he was not confirmed at his hearing. The issue is that he had no hearing and no vote, the Republicans just pretended he didn't exist.
There has indeed always been acrimony and fighting over SC seats, and using the rules to ratfuck the other party wherever possible.
But this one went beyond the established rules in a way that was genuinely surprising/baffling/outraging to people at the time. A big fight with lots of mud slinging and feet dragging was expected, what happened was just weird
And as such, I really do believe it expanded the borders of what types of ratfucking and acrimony could be reasonably entertained.
guesswho
2yr ago
In that world, this isn't an unprecedented step, and many people are regularly kept off the ballot, and members of both parties are vigorously prosecuted when they are found to have broken the law.
So it's not the case that committing any crime at all makes you ineligible for the ballot. A convicted felon can run for and be elected as President, nothing in the Constitution against that.
The statute being cited in this case is specifically about officers of the state committing insurrection.
Are there past presidential candidates who arguably committed insurrection while officers of the state who you think should have been prosecuted in this way? Who are they, and what did they do?
You can say that Jan 6th wasn't actually a big deal, or wasn't Trump's fault, those are both reasonable positions. But the Senate being evacuated in the middle of certifying electors because a mob has stormed the building and is roaming the halls clashing with security and stealing things from Senator's offices is actually a really unusual thing that hasn't happened a bunch of times before.
Whether or not you think it rises to the level of insurrection, the argument 'if people were being fair we would have seen tons of prosecutions like this before' doesn't actually hold water, because things like this haven't happened tons of times before.
Yes, you and them disagree about matters of fact, and at least one of you is wrong.
I myself am not an optimist, I suspect that they are wrong, you are wrong, and I am wrong about most of our beliefs on all of these topics. We simply don't have the level of truth-preserving information channels it would take to expect to consistently do better than that as a society.
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