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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5370 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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American insider baseball? I lack the context to make sense of this.

Edit: Thanks for the explanations, makes sense now.

The destabilization of American politics and thus American society would of course have immense global consequences.

I do have to wonder: how do Europeans react to news like this? If I'm, say, Emmanuelle Macron, then I'm probably gonna be in a mild panic every time news like this breaks, because I'm going to try and pull every political lever in reach to prepare my country for the possibility of the Pax Americana going poof by the middle of 2025.

Not sure whether your question was only refering to European politicians, but I tried in vain to explain to an American I was drinking with the other night that democracies don't put election losers in jail, because that disincentivises all politicians from respecting the results of future elections.

She didn't seem to buy it though. In her view, Trump will go to jail because his actions were treason and everything will go back to normal with no long term consequences.

democracies don't put election losers in jail, because that disincentivises all politicians from respecting the results of future elections.

The trouble we've realized with this ideal is that it also presumes that politicians refrain from doing obviously blatantly illegal things.

In my opinion, this was first realized with respect to Hillary, who faced effectively no consequences from breaking a bunch of laws (besides whatever effect it had on her losing the election). In her case, it was terrible for democracy for her to face any serious legal consequences.

I'm not about to claim Trump has perfectly abided by the law either. It's rather academic though exactly which laws he may or may not have broken and whether anything he did is or is not worse than what Hillary and other prominent Democrats have done. But it sure smells bad that he gets aggressively prosecuted all over the nation, taken off of ballots, etc, and nothing at all happens to any Democrats.

Can you clarify for me, is France a democracy? Because they convicted Sarkozy of corruption after he lost.

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