Welp, I’m not very impressed with Garland, either, so far.
Wake me up when all the speakers at the Treason Rally are being publically frog-marched to a waiting Black Maria.
That’ll do for starters.
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How is it that he’s still walking around loose after all this time? And what about prioritizing the already comprehensively-proven crime of mishandling state secrets?
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Garland is in a tough place. If he charges Trump, but the court fails to convict him, we are in a much, much worse place than if he did nothing at all. In the eyes of Trump’s lackeys, Trump would be exonerated, and it was all a big political show. Look at what happened after his first impeachment.
I think Garland should do it, but this is really a risky move. Failure would be catastrophic.
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I guess I don’t understand this mentality. With the level of evidence against him, any jury or judge that failed to convict him would fail to convict him regardless of any amount of evidence.
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Merrick Garland and the Slippery Defendant.
Huh, thought I’d read all the Lemony Snickets’.
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If you read even one, then you have read them all.
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Maaaaybe the slippery defendant will slip and fall on a slippery slope sliding his saggy white ass and broken neck into a slimy wet dying hole.
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Merrick Garland is your standard weak-kneed, do-nothing, right-wing Corporate Democrat. (They are a dime-a-dozen in money-drenched Washington, owned by Wall Street.)
He will most likely DO NOTHING about blatant treason, treachery, sedition and violence. These losers aren’t fighters–they are glad-handers, back-slappers and money-grabbers.
Your average 11-year old could beat their asses without breaking a sweat. Corporate Democrats are simps and wimps and losers and lame’os.
You want something to get done, you gotta get a Bold Progressive or a Strong Liberal like Bernie Sanders, AOC or Ayanna Pressley, to do it.
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Hell yeah! Bernie Sanders is an ass kicker and a bold visionary with strong principles and big beliefs.
One Bernie Sanders is worth a thousand Do Nothing Corporate Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden or Joe Manchin.
Failure of a prosecution might be catastrophic. Failure to prosecute WILL be catastrophic, in the sense that it will green light every future attempt to mount a coup. And one of them will succeed if there is no downside to failure.
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With the amount of Americans that don’t vote the jury should be drawn from those who didn’t vote in 2016 and 2020 and never watch news or have a Meta account… Though they wouldn’t be able to get time off from their precariously held jobs.
<rant>
The USA doesn’t know how to run elections. You need the Australian model. What you need are independent electoral commissions at National and State level. They draw the boundaries of the electorates. Political parties get input into the process after the initial proposed boundaries are revealed then the commission makes the final determination.
These days along with postal voting there is early voting in the two weeks before polling day. In the recent Federal election nearly 50% of the electorate voted early. On the day itself you can vote in any polling place in the electorate or absentee or via a declaration vote in any polling place in another electorate in the State. If in a Federal election you can vote if you are interstate at the office of the Returning Officer in each electorate.
Of course we use preferential voting not first past the post.
When mandatory voting was introduced in the 20’s a conservative parliamentarian said that it was the government’s responsibility to enable everyone to vote. They’re not so keen on that these days though, as they want voters to now bring ID.
The rolls are now computerised, so while you are still asked if you have already voted, the polling officer no longer has to draw a line next to your name. Which if they were inaccurate could result in you being fined for not voting and the person above or below you in trouble for voting twice when the physical rolls are scanned later. Though this would be cleared up when you complained that you did indeed vote.
We don’t need complex computer systems or levers or chads to vote. We use pencils and paper. THOUGH THE COMMONWEALTH SENATE BALLOT PAPER CAN BE MORE THAN A METER WIDE. We don’t need to number all the squares anymore, just number six squares above the line or twelve below. Though there are rugged individualists who will start with those they hate the most and then number backwards for the usually more than 100 candidates.
In Queensland the Australian Labor Party, of which I am a member, got rid of the upper house in the 20’s. Though they had to send in the suicide squad in twice to get it done. Queensland had the first Labour government in the world in 1896.
The USA has far too many levels of government. We only have Federal State and Regional governments. We don’t elect dogcatchers and prosecutors down here.
<rantier rant>
And don’t get me started on the US Law Enforcement Industrial Complex. Every Podunk hamlet has their sheriffs or police department. Even learning institutions and railways have them. There are thousands of them.
Australia survives with a single State or Territory police service / force per each of the six States and two Territories. We also have the Australian Federal Police who like to think they are ‘agents’ like the FBI. So we have fewer institutions to inquire into when our black and brown citizens are shot by them or our First Nations people die in police or prison custody. It’s only been about thirty years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and still we kill them when locking them up more than the rest of the population.
</rantier rant>
</rant>
Maybe this was too long???
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What he isn’t is a liberal. He’s a social democrat.
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For the most part, you’re describing the voting rights bills that have already passed in the House of Representatives. In some states, what you describe is already the norm. In Oregon, we already vote 100% by mail. The ballots are marked Scantron style. We have automatic registration. The only thing that I don’t think has been discussed seriously is mandatory voting.
Regarding jury selection for a hypothetical trial of #45, voting history is private. It cannot (and should not) be used as a criterion. However, it would be perfectly reasonable to ask potential jurors, under penalty of perjury, whether they believe the Big Lie. That would constitute an free exclusion for any potential jurors who answer yes. That would exclude most Republican voters by default.
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That’s not unique to Australia. Almost every country in the world uses paper ballots because they work and they create their own audit trail. Voting machines solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
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Though, to be fair, the Dominion voting machines that took all that heat in the 2020 US election also create an auditable paper trail - they just print out your votes for you to review and turn in while making sure the scannable bubbles are fully filled. That latter feature is solving a problem - incompletely filled selection bubbles cause a not-insignificant number of hand-filled ballots to miss votes.
Typo corrected - thanks @ClutchLinkey !
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Funny typo alert. I think?
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We…we just put a cross in the box?
The ballots are counted by hand and it is usually done after a few hours in the entire country.
I, no joke, only know the concept of colouring in little bubbles from American movies.
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