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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5340 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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I'm not sure I fully understand the potential consequences for this decision - like, what are the odds that this decision will lead to some extremely bad outside side effects (like eg. armed protests, insurrections, civil war)?

I'm sketching this out, feel free to iron man, something like there are significant write-in ballots, they don't get counted, and as a consequence, the US sees organized armed revolt?

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like trying to prevent a populist candidate from running via technicalities is not the most effective option?

The ironman and steelman of worst-plausible-case are bad enough I’m not willing to discuss them openly. There’s options here, even if never genuinely implemented, where simple explicit proposal by high-profile actors would at best undermine both parties’s trust in federal elections and systems as a whole, and more likely drive open attacks.

The more intermediate case ‘just’ destroys conservative trust in the judiciary. Either SCOTUS punts, lower courts defy rulings, or procedural gamesmanship drives through changes faster than they can be seriously reviewed for lawfulness. This doesn’t even necessarily require Trump be off the ballot: stupid gimmicks like prefixing his name with ‘felon’ wouldn’t even need to work to have a massive social impact

The good news is that there are off-ramps still available, some under no one’s control but fate.

What's the difference between an ironman and steelman?

At least as I've seen it colloquially used in the ratsphere, iron is 'softer' than steel, sometimes with the implication than iron is something present in nature (if rare), while steel is mostly man-made. Might be derived from DoD framing of increasingly higher-order languages.

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