“Unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed,” says ex-Judge J. Michael Luttig
It’s not a hard question, or at least it hasn’t been before: Does the United States have a king – one empowered to do as they please without even the pretext of being governed by a law higher than their own word – or does it have a president? Since Donald Trump began claiming he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two courts have issued rulings striking down this purported right, recognizing that one can have a democracy or a dictatorship, but not both.
“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power – the recognition and implementation of election results,” states the unanimous opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, issued this past February, upholding a lower court’s take on the question. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and have their votes cast.”
You can’t well keep a republic if it’s effectively legal to overthrow it. But at oral arguments last week, conservative justices on the Supreme Court – which took up the case rather than cosign the February ruling – appeared desperate to make the simple appear complex. Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, argued that accountability was what would actually lead to lawlessness.
Ranked Choice only matters when you’ve got a third position that successfully triangulates between the other two positions.
But when Democrats already do all the triangulation and Republicans simply push conspiracy theory to the farthest rightward fringe, and Republicans still win by large margins in big states, there’s no material benefit to ranked choice voting.
Any 3rd party simply becomes the whipping boy of the other two parties. Ranked choice won’t change that. Republicans will still despise Libertarians and Democrats will still despise Greens.
And a private corporate news media that profits off fear and resentment won’t make these peripheral parties more appealing.
You have zero conception of how ranked choice voting works.
When one party is winning 50%+ of the vote by fielding increasingly far-right candidates to an audience of increasingly far right voters, the only thing Ranked Choice Voting accomplishes is to change the mechanism by which a new far-right candidate wins the seat.
Hold it!
Uhh…
What on earth are you talking about?
Guy A: 52% of the vote because Far-Right
Guy B: 48% of the vote because Moderate and we have this lingering progressive block dragged along for the ride.
Ranked Choice Guy: “If we can just convince 2% to go for Guy C and then Guy B and then Guy A, then Guy B will win!”
Guy C: Splits Guy B’s vote in the first round, but doesn’t win any of Guy A’s vote, because he’s not the Most Far Right Guy.
Guy A Still Wins.
Ranked Choice Accomplished Nothing.
This basically describes how things work now… It should be more like GuyA: 42% GuyB: 38% GuyC: 20%
So guyC gets cut and most of his votes go to guy B
Starting with guyA having 52% means he would have won outright
That holds when you have a 58% “moderate-left” swing.
It doesn’t hold when you’ve got a 52% “far-right” swing.
Right. And that’s the problem Ranked Choice Voting can’t solve. When you have a poll of far right voters who control the election, you’re still going to get far-right candidates.
The question is why states like Florida and Texas and South Dakota and West Virginia are so chronically overwhelmed with far-right voters. And the answer we’ve seen - time and time again going back to the end of Reconstruction - is that states don’t want minority groups or young people or poor people to participate in elections. So they disenfranchise these groups, by hook or crook.
And absent a fix for this systematic disenfranchisement, you’re just shifting around deck chairs on the Titanic.
I see what you’re saying… Yes I agree, the election system itself needs to be corrected so everyone has equal opportunity to vote
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They don’t. And politics isn’t so easily boiled down to a single axis - Democrats are focused on social issues that are easy to repeal. This will save the lives of minority groups right now, but allow billions to die from climate change.
What part of the Russia-Ukraine War, the Inflation Reduction Act, or the CHIPS Act strike you as “social issues”?
Climate Change is and always has fundamentally been an economic issue. We’re not trying to keep the Earth from spiking ten degrees because we’re obsessed with the Spotted Owl. This shit is threatening trillions of dollars of accrued real estate and trillions more of agricultural output.
I mean focused in the literal sense, and didn’t mean to imply exclusively. You did provide examples of things the Republicans can simply undo, rather than improving our representation in goverment.
It’s fair to say that everything has at least some economic component. Climate change is a bit more than that because our lives have no value in their calculations. The trajectory we’re on now already maximizes the net present value of real estate.