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Interesting comment, and your opinion is very firmly stated. I'm not American and I only have a passing familiarity with US political shenanigans, so I'd be very interested to hear why you are so certain Trump committed an "awful" crime and is going to jail. Are we talking about Jan 6th here? My impression is that nothing he did was worse than the what the Democrats did in 2016 and during BLM (including disputing the election, calls to violence, riots and the storming of the White House during BLM), and that prosecuting political opponents is another step the US is taking toward being a failed state. But I'd be very interested to hear you lay out why this impression is wrong.
Yes, the federal Jan 6 case scheduled to start on March 4 is the one I'm talking about. I think he's completely screwed in the Georgia case and the documents case too, but they're more logistically complicated and are unlikely to go to trial before the election.
I think he went way, way beyond "disputing" the election. He actively tried to stay in power despite losing the vote and despite the courts rejecting his false claims of fraud. He had no legal avenues remaining to stay in power, and he tried to use illegal ones.
Jan 6 was effectively a failed coup. It was an egregious attack on American democracy. Heinous crimes like that should not be tolerated simply because they are committed by political opponents.
January 6 was the culmination of a successful color revolution which had been underway since May of the year prior.
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If Jan 6 was a coup then where are the weapons? That is the huge issue for anyone describing it as a coup.
The basic idea with all of this is to make everything (that Jan 6 was an insurrection and a coup attempt, that Trump incited it, that Trump's words were not protected by the First Amendment, and that Trump is barred from the ballot as a result) common knowledge by repeating it over and over in the media as if it is a true fact, and then not giving any of it a rigorous examination in court, instead relying on the fact that it's all obvious already. Unfortunately much of the right has decided to go along with this, so it will probably work.
The first amendment bit is likely irrelevant. That said, showing that it's an insurrection is still probably a fairly steep bar.
Of course, Trump did try to cheat his way to staying in office (assuming he didn't actually believe the fraud claims, I don't know), but that's not any of the things the 14th amendment bars from office for, as best I read it.
If his words are at issue, the First Amendment cannot be irrelevant.
It's just assumed as the default now, with a very high bar required to overcome it. This is entirely backwards but is the power of the left's control of the institutions.
My own inclination is to think that Baude and Paulsen were basically right on the legal analysis, but not on its applicability to Jan. 6.
They argue for a view intermediate between saying it's limited by the 1st amendment, or that it supersedes it, saying that you should interpret it narrowly in order to understand it in the extent possible, consistent with the first amendment, but if they conflict, then the 14th amendment should be the one you follow.
So you're right, it's not irrelevant, but it's probably possible for someone to do things that would both be protected speech under the first amendment and sufficient from the 14th amendment to exclude from office.
Yes, unfortunately.
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https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21183150-oath-keepers-seditious-conspiracy-indictment
So they were planning for a massively bloody revolution... and left their guns in Virginia?
Yes. It was not a good coup attempt.
Neither is sitting home on the couch bitching -- what makes this a coup attempt and not that?
The part where they attempted to prevent the democratically elected President-elect from assuming power.
So the faithless electors in 2016 were also doing a coup?
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A 50 page document without a citation for what you think disagrees is a bit bad faith. No one is reading for an hour to respond to figure out what you mean.
You asked where the guns were. I linked you to a high profile Jan 6 case involving a lot of guns.
...At the protest? Or is this the sort of thing where my last traffic stop involved a lot of guns, if by that you mean that I had a traffic stop, and my guns were home?
It's the sort of thing where you rob a bank with a gun in your pocket with the full intention of shooting people if you don't get the money, but they just give you the money and you never pull the gun.
... other than the part where they didn't have the guns in their pocket, and didn't have the money given to them?
The guys were dumbasses in a lot of ways, but you're not doing a great job with the metaphors.
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And you can’t give me a summary or copy paste the key point?
Like if every time I replied to a message board post I got a 50 page doc to review well nothing would get accomplished.
"The Oathkeeper people bought various expensive AR-15s both before and after Jan 6, also they had a lot of ammo -- all of which they left in Virginia and went to the Capitol more or less unarmed" would be a precis of the relevant parts.
Ya he knows they were unarmed at Capitol but hides behind some hour long read I won’t read
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The federal case against Trump seems to boil down to if you challenge an election then you have to be correct or you are going to jail. That doesn't seem to be a good precedent to set. He is being prosecuted for things that are entirely legal and people have done before in the past and have not been prosecuted for.
Wait, who's the other president who tried to get their VP to reject legitimate election results?
I don't think that is a fair characterization of what people wanted the Pence to do. The problem was after certification occurred even if the fraud was found it would be unlikely that the courts would allow the final result as certified to be overturned. The idea was to send the contested results back to the states so the irregularities could be properly investigated before certification.
The most similar election was in 1876. It didn't involve the VP rejecting certification himself and infact there was controversy over who had the power to count the votes during certification but there are very strong parallels and no-one was prosecuted for what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
Tbf 76 wasn't handled by our current laws because those laws were designed in response to 76. From Goodyear's "President Garfield":
The Compromise of 77 narrative is also somewhat contrived. Grant had already decided it was time to withdraw troops from the South and Hayes agreed that he would follow him in this policy; they made their decision well in advance of the general election (Garfield approved as well). Likewise, the Democrats at the Wormely meeting who offered to end the Democratic fillibuster were rebuffed because they had no power over their party to actually make this happen, and indeed the fillibuster continued after the meeting, suggesting no deal was made. It wasn't really a meaningful offer anyway - the vote count had already begun and the results were certain, the only issue was how long it would take the fillibuster to end.
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That’s insane. One of those bits of history that gets glossed over in high school, and summed up as “this Rutherford guy ended Reconstruction.”
Worth noting that after the debacle, Congress specifically clarified the situation via law. The Eastman strategy tried to get around this by appealing to Jefferson’s precedent. I don’t know how that was supposed to make the ECA unconstitutional, but I guess that’s why I’m not a partisan law professor.
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... Were you not awake for 2016 or 2000?
Apparently not if I missed Obama trying to prevent the transfer of power to Trump after the election! Can you give me any more details about it?
They did extra legal things to harm the Trumps administration ability to do anything. General Flynn having to answer Logan Act violation issues is a big deal to me since no one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act so the fbi attacking him for it was extremely extra-legal.
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I seem to recall this big controversy about the crossfire hurricane thing.
And you know that SCOTUS case in 2000.
There is a big difference between using recount laws for the purpose for which they were intended (even if those recount laws later turn out to be unconstitutional) and filing lies with the court. Neither Bush nor Gore was ever accused of filing briefs containing false factual claims - the key facts of Bush v Gore (that recounting punch card ballots accurately was sufficiently difficult that there wasn't time for an accurate statewide recount before the electoral College deadline, and that the margin of error of the original count exceeded Bush's margin of victory) were never disputed.
Trump's State court challenges to the 2020 election are criminal if and only if they were based on knowingly false factual claims. Both the Federal and Georgia indictments promise to bring evidence that they were.
The electoral counts of 2001, 2017, and 2021 (and probably a few others I've missed) all included members of congress making motions to dismiss the electoral votes of entire states to change the outcome of the election. To their credit, none of the standing VPs entertained these motions, but "tried to officially overthrow the counted votes" is a bar we passed quite a while ago without much fanfare: none of the representatives making these motions saw consequences from doing so.
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Tell me more about crossfire hurricane. What did they do to keep Obama in the White House and prevent Trump becoming president?
Hey you can “own” your property but we the government get its fruits and we decide what you do with the property. But that isn’t communism since you know you own the property.
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The claim was that he backed Hillary's bid, no? If we narrow it to Obama going for a third term then clearly not.
I'm not aware of any particular action on the part of Trump in Georgia so opening an investigation into a political rival on less than solid basis is at least equivalent.
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There are other ways to challenge an election that don't involve threatening violence, like what Gore did vs Bush. That's fine.
As far as I'm aware Trump is not being prosecuted for threats of violence because he never threatened violence. The federal indictment seems to be around what is being referred to as the 'fake electors' plot and trying to get Pence to reject certification. But if you look at historical challenges to election results the parties who have challenged the results have used similar 'fake electors'.
Interesting, I thought the case against him was based on the whole "inciting his supporters to go shit up the capitol" thing.
the situation is weird because the allegations are part of the text of the indictment but Trump is not actually being charged for incitement or anything else in regards to the Jan 6th riot. his lawyers tried to get that part of the indictment removed because they believed it was irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to a jury but the judge did not agree and let the text stand as-is. here is the text of his motion: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24078250-motion-to-strike-inflammatory-allegations
And here is the judges opinion for reference: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.158.0_1.pdf
An uncharitable reading as to why this text was included in the indictment could be so that third parties reporting on the indictment could muddle things for their audience and give the impression that Trump was being charged for the Jan 6th riots. I believe a similar thing may have happened with the statement by former intelligence officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. If you read the statement on the hunter biden laptop it doesn't actually say anything useful but other people could then portray the statement as saying something meaningful. The way the media works is kind of similar to chinese whispers but if you are aware of this then its possible to manipulate it for your benefit.
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