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Ah, but if it had succeeded I think Trump would have immediately dumped Pence for someone he considered more fuckable
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I worry that we will find some excuse not to draw the obvious conclusion about Trump, so well grounded in the article. It was troubling, for me at least, to see the New York Times coverage of the article relativize its central finding with this vague but suggestive formulation: “voters remain free to assess whether his conduct was blameworthy.” This wording suggests that Trump can run for president, and that we as voters can then consider his ineligibility for that office alongside his legal problems (which the Times article then rehearses). That is wrong, because it misunderstands what ineligibility is.
Arnold Schwarzenegger would also like to run for president in 2024. He thinks he would win, and he may well be right. But we cannot decide to elect a president who is not a natural-born citizen. This is not an issue we are “free to assess,” because we are governed by the Constitution. For the same reason, we cannot vote for oath-breaking insurrectionists such as Donald Trump. Such people are barred by the Constitution from running for president.
We can have the Constitution, or we can have Trump.
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I hope he is excluded from the election, as that sends exactly the right message to future seditionists and dictator-wannabes.
It seems that the route to this will perforce involve the courts – once some state commits to putting him on the ballot, even for a primary, then and only then can a lawsuit saying “nope, you can’t do that” happen, unless a state refuses the ballot application and someone sues on that basis. At some point, and given the importance and probably the brevity of time of the issue it would most likely be hot-tracked to the Supreme Court.
Until this report’s conclusion came out I would have assumed that that would have been the end of the matter, with certain smug supholes insisting that of course he could run. Now, it seems far more likely that so long as a lower court finds that his actions were indeed sedition, then they’d let it go and might even refer it to Congress to vote on, with that 2/3 majority required to let him run.
Speaking of running, is there anyplace taking bets on when/where he makes a break for it? Even the judges are starting to officially find he’s a flight risk.
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he may have trouble booking a flight
he’s not actually good at getting people to do stuff
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“Let’s make America great again – from this sunny beach that has drinks with little umbrellas and no extradition treaty”??
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If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s Philosophy class is right down the hall .
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I haven’t gotten all the way through their paper yet, but my take so far is that…they might be right. However, they also might not be. And from a practical standpoint, I cannot see any state unilaterally deciding to keep Trump off the ballot, invoking the 14th Amendment. It would provoke the shitstorm of all shitstorms. Trump would almost certainly sue, and probably the GOP as well, and then this gets tied up in court for who knows how long, with the GOP using this to continue to push the idea that Democrats are just trying to silence the political opposition. Whether or not section 3 of the 14th Amendment can be invoked without some adjudicative body declaring Trump an insurrectionist is a question that has never been asked, much less answered, in any authoritative way. I’m all for discussing the issue, but without a ruling from SCOTUS, or Congressional action, I can’t see any state keeping him off the ballot for this.
I did read far enough into the paper to see that they did discuss the fact that Congress could have enacted legislation answering all these questions. Section 5 explicitly empowered Congress to do just that. But they never did. And Congress has a habit of not dealing with these issues. They did the same thing with the 13th Amendment. The 13th bans slavery, but it didn’t criminalize it or specify how to deal with people who still engaged in it. In the years after its enactment, the practice of debt peonage became pretty common in the south. So Congress passed a law banning it. So what happened when people were charged with violating the debt peonage statute? They actually used the defense that they weren’t engaging in debt peonage, than instead the laborers they were using were their slaves. And that defense fucking worked because Congress never bothered passing a statute to criminalize slavery. As a result, the last legally enslaved person in the US wasn’t freed until 1947! Similarly, Congress never enacted any legislation to implement or enforce section 3, so we’re left with a bunch of legal experts and pundits all declaring with great certainty that Trump can, or cannot, be declared ineligible. The truth is, we just don’t know. Maybe we should try, I dunno, but, again, it’s going to kick of a massive shitstorm.
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What’s the quote from Death Race 2000 (the original)?
(Interviewer): Frankenstein, can you give me an exclusive? How are things abroad? How is Mr President? Is he still in Moscow?
(Frankenstein): Mr President is in his summer palace in Peking.
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Oh that’s a relief. The memories of the 4-year unceasing torrent of things that made our country worse must have just been a bad dream. Thank gods
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What exactly are you basing this on?
Biden wasn’t my top pick but I’ve seen nothing to indicate significant cognitive decline. Certainly not as much as for TFG.
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I hit the
on that one ages ago, for good reason/s.
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He was a shitty president, and he hurt a hell of a lot of people with what he did get done. So no, 4 more years of a Trump presidency would not be something we could shrug off. It would be the end of our constitutional democracy.
He put children in cages, and separated them from their parents. He destroyed lives. His decision to not roll out a national mask mandate (which was taken because it was hitting cities, especially Black communities, hard) ensured that the US had one of the highest death tolls in the world. His foreign policy was a fucking disaster, that helped to pave the way for what happened in Afghanistan. He’s completely fucked any chance of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine. He was a friend to dictators everywhere and he called many of our allies “shithole countries” because of the skin color of the citizens. He was an utter fucking disaster, and not just by being fucking incompetent.
Honestly, I don’t know what 4 years YOU lived through, but clearly it was not the one that I did.
Seriously, dude, turn off Fox news, and get some perspective. Yes, he’s old, and it would be nice if we had a younger guy running. But he’s not some doddering old guy. You’re confusing him with Reagan, who most likely WAS already suffering from the impacts of Alzheimer’s towards the end there. Biden is as sharp as you can ask from an 80-something year old man.
Pretty much only people who watch nothing but right wing news believe that shit, because they all edit videos of him stumbling over words (since, you know, he’s got a stutter, for Christ’s sake), or doing something weird, or whatever… Anyone who watches normal news channels (corporate as they might be) gets a very different view of him. Again, he’s old, for sure, but I’m guessing when he stumbles over a word, that’s because of his stuttering, not due to some sort of cognitive decline.
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Trump would “get done” the one thing that matters: transforming the US into a fascist dictatorship where he doesn’t have to worry about criticism from disappointed supporters or anyone else.
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And of course, he “got done” one of the single most destructive thing for equality in this country, gave us the current right wing SCOTUS that has gone about gutting people’s fundamental rights…
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No one here should have to tell another poster to quit watching faux “news.”
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But I’m not sure where else someone would get the idea that Biden is some doddering old guy, since it’s only the right wing outlets that frame him that way. And no, the “left wing” (meaning the major outlets that are not fox) aren’t covering anything up.
Although I’m guessing that there are probably some leftist networks (the tankie left) that might frame Biden that way, too?
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Plus what he didn’t get done included some very important government functions – for instance handling the hurricane in Puerto Rico and the outbreak of Covid-19, resulting in over a million deaths. From that alone, saying he’s too inept to be a problem is like saying a chicken is too inept to fly an airplane. Cool, that means making them the pilot is going to get everyone killed.
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IIRC on the tankie left Biden is a power-crazed imperial puppet-master using Ukraine as a battering ram to destroy Russia.
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I know it’s cool and fashionable to assume that the government does nothing worthwhile, but that’s because when they do stuff that works, then it just becomes seamless and invisible to us. Like the interstate system, or the EPA having cleaned up quite a lot of environmental damage over the years, or the existence of our national parks system… How many people have been saved by the social security act, something that even people on the right want to keep…
Trump was literally one of the worst presidents we’ve had - he rivals Andrew Johnson, if you ask me. Johnson had enough push back from congress, fortunately, that he was just neutralized, but Trump had enough assholes in congress willing to go along with his shitty policies that he did some real damage.
I’m sure they’d lean into the incompetent narrative if it suited them. Some of them are just as unhinged as the far right is…
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