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Notes -
The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020. Mail-in voting has existed in various states for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, absentee voting has existed for longer, and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020. Indeed, as late as the fall of 2019 PA's mail-in voting bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support.
Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional to the point that we need a redo is a convenient argument to make if your guy loses the election and you're grasping at straws for some excuse undo the result, but let's not pretend that this is an argument based on principle. Would you be making this argument if Trump won?
It's also telling that 2020 is apparently the only election they care about. No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years, and I doubt anyone will protest this year's elections. Hell, there doesn't even seem to be much of a legislative push in red states to completely do away with mail voting, or any serious court challenges raising the secret ballot issue. It all comes back to Trump—shit only matters when he's involved. The entire system is rigged against him and him alone. I've always thought he was a narcissist but at this point I can't really blame him giving the number of people who do act like the world revolves around him.
I have no doubt that democrats would have done something unseemly had trump won in 2020, and I’m open to arguments that they won by cheating, but the fact of the matter is that there is no evidence of democrats having tried anything like changing the actual vote totals or storming the capitol building, and that 2020 faithless electors were all protest votes anyways(nobody thought ‘faith spotted eagle’ would be the next president of the USA).
Look, the breakdown in civil norms and loss of public neutrality and inferno-like culture wars are like 85-90% the fault of the democrats, let’s not blame them for things they didn’t do(and which didn’t happen either).
Why should storming the capital building be any different than when rioters stormed the White House?
People constantly try to paint the Jan 6 protest as something extraordinary, when it was just the right wing seeing what the left had been doing for the past four years and deciding to use a tool that apparently works.
Don't blame the protestors for assuming good faith and not realizing that left-wing protests were being sponsored and applauded by the various institutions kicking around.
I agree that rioters in general (and those rioters in particular) should be punished much more harshly than they have been, but there is a distinction to be made with Jan 6. In the case of Tarrio in particular, he didn't even storm the capital! But he did engage in a seditious conspiracy to overturn the election, and that's what he copped the 22 year sentence for.
The BLM riots, bad though they were, were not the exact same flavour of bad.
I await with bated breath the Russia-gaters and 2016 faithless electors getting 22+ year sentences then.
There you go again - focusing exclusively on elements of an offence and acting like that's the offence in its entirety.
Let's get into the detail. Tarrio was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, 18 USC 2384, which says:
So let's apply this to the 2016 faithless electors. Can we convict them of the same crime?
Two or more persons conspire? Yep, that threshold was met. They agreed on the scheme, and committed overt acts in the furtherance thereof.
In any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? Definitely.
Conspire to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States? Nope.
By force prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States? Nope.
By force seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof? Nope.
Similarly, the Russiagaters do not fall foul of this statute.
So, whatever crimes they may have committed, they were not the same ones as Tarrio, and there is no reason to expect them to attract the same sentence - leaving aside that there are many reasons why two people convicted of the same offence may be subject to different sentences anyway.
They will not attract any sentence. That’s the whole point.
In at least some cases, they have attracted sentences - the guy who cast his electoral vote for Faith Spotted Eagle instead of Hillary Clinton got fined $1000, for example.
Now, you may argue that was a manifestly inadequate sentence - and you may be right. But it's insufficient to simply compare it to Tarrio's sentence because he did not commit the same crime that Tarrio did.
If you want to argue that there has been an unfair application of justice, a good starting point would be to specify the particular crime you think particular people should have been convicted of.
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