BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

kenberg, on 2023-December-20, 11:00, said:

This specific case was not brought for the purpose of establishing criminal charges for the act of insurrection.

It is limited to determining whether or not Trump is eligible to be on the primary ballot in Colorado.

hrothgar, on 2023-December-20, 13:13, said:

Probably we agree that others besides me think that if a person is guilty of insurrection then the penalty should be something more than being denied a place on the presidential primary ballot in Colorado.

Things have become weird. Very weird. Maybe I will just leave it at that. We can probably all agree that things have become very weird. Agreement on anything is difficult these days, but we can agree things are weird.

shyams, on 2023-December-20, 11:44, said:

There is no doubt the DNC has more control due to superdelegates. The GOP is stuck with whomever their primary voters clamor for. That is how we got Trump. In the good old days of smoke filled rooms he would never have made the ticket, as both Wallace and Huey Long failed.

shyams, on 2023-December-20, 11:48, said:

You are confusing a criminal conviction with a finding of the Colorado supreme court that indeed found in their ruling that Trump had committed insurrection.

kenberg, on 2023-December-20, 15:08, said:

No doubt

However, there are other consideration at play. For example, Judges don't get to do whatever they damn well please.

Personally, I place this higher than my personal desires for vengeance.

I am hoping that Trump ends up in jail.
He is certainly facing a whole bunch of criminal charges in various trials

None of these currently involve claims of insurrection, largely because Jack Smith seems to prefer to press a narrow set of charges to try and get a decision rendered before the November elections.

Perhaps others will get filed down the road...

Winstonm, on 2023-December-20, 15:14, said:

In the "good old days, Democrats would not have chosen Obama as a candidate either. A lot of things have improved since then.

The real question for the Colorado case is whether the POTUS is an officer of the United States for the purposes of the 14th Amendment, Section 3. Anyone looking into the debates of the 39th Congress can see very quickly and easily that this was completely understood to be the case. Indeed the logic of Republicans (for they led the move to restrict Confederate leaders in post-war politics) creating legislation to restrict every office except POTUS and VPOTUS is completely ridiculous. I have no doubt that the 6 conservative Justices will find some way - indeed leading conservative lawyers like Ty Cobb have already started laying the groundwork on this - but any normal reading of the history and logic of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment will tell you that POTUS and VPOTUS do qualify as offices for this case.

shyams, on 2023-December-20, 11:44, said:

The fact is that Clinton won the pledged delagates in the primaries by 2271 to 1820, and the popular vote 55.2% to 42.1%. That's without the overwhelming vote of superdelegates.

The basket of deplorables were never going to vote for Clinton, or any Democrat. What lost the election was Putin hacking the DNC computers so he could get his stooge Trump into office, and James Comey breaking every norm and regulation of the FBI to announce that Clinton was under investigation in the last months of the election. That swayed enough independents and some Democrats to either not vote, or vote for Trump in the swing states.

I thought at the time that Clinton was a much stronger candidate than Sanders, but with Putin's hacking and Comey's unethical breach of FBI procedure, maybe Sanders would have been able to win.

hrothgar, on 2023-December-20, 15:22, said:

Many Trump and other republican appointed judges would strongly disagree with that. Usually between 4 or 5 of Supreme Court justices, Aileen Cannon overseeing the Trump documents case, etc, etc. Lower court judges may be overruled, but that's not the case for the Supreme Court.

kenberg, on 2023-December-20, 15:08, said:

"Things" - as Hunter S Thompson remarked in 1974 - became weird a long time ago.
50 years later, there are 4 times as many people on Earth.
I'm betting that the relationship between population and weirdness is non-linear.

johnu, on 2023-December-20, 16:25, said:

The analysis I have seen suggests that Comey's statement caused a roughly 4 point swing in the final tally. If you have to point at one single event that decided the election, this is the one.

While I realise that opinion polls aren't worth much, I must point out that:

* In a hypothetical contest between Nikki Haley and Joe Biden, Ms Haley is projected to win very comfortably (a 17-pt lead according to WSJ)
* If Trump were facing off Biden, his lead is narrower; between 2-pts and 6-pts (different surveys yield different results)

Are the Dems sure they want Trump eliminated from the contest?

Winstonm, on 2023-December-20, 15:14, said:

This reads quite similar to those right-winger tweets that begin with "The USA is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic"

Do you have a point?

Democracy means the will of the majority.

When you boast about how superdelegates are vital for your party's democracy, well I guess there is no point in pointing out how silly your point was.

shyams, on 2023-December-20, 23:29, said:

If US democracy was the will of the majority, there would only have been one Republican President elected in the last 35 years and the House of Representatives would look very different from its current form.

Gilithin, on 2023-December-21, 03:09, said:

To quote Gino D'Acampo (a chef) from a famous incident on a UK Morning TV show,
... "If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike"

shyams, on 2023-December-21, 08:11, said:

To quote Winston (a bridge player) from a recent BBF post,
... "Do you have a point?"

Gilithin, on 2023-December-21, 09:40, said:

My 2-sentence post to Winston's query was to clarify why I think "superdelegates" are non-democratic and to refute an earlier post by him which found fault in RNC's "no superdelegates" method.

You honed in onto the first of two sentences, discarded all context from the preceding exchange between Winston & me, and made a sweeping statement to demonstrate your own thing. So yeah, your "if-then" assertion deserved a more fanciful "if-then" retort!

---
I am aware of Electoral College, Gerrymandering and all such "issues" --- these are known features, nothing that could not have been countered by the Democrats over the past 50 years.

In my opinion, the Democrats are good at losing. And if they do win somehow, they are great at frittering away their power. The Democratic Party has the potential to deliver huge change for the American people! The GOP doesn't even hide that their agenda is entirely for the wealthy 0.1% of Americans.

shyams, on 2023-December-20, 23:29, said:

Currently, Democratic superdelegates can only vote on 2nd ballots or later, ie no candidate has a majority of the pledged delegates. At that point, there has to be some kind of backroom deal made to get a majority of the votes, either from superdelegates or from pledged delegates switching votes, or both.

In any case, the allocation of delegates to states is definitely not "democratic". Delegates are allocated to states by the states popular vote in the previous 3 elections (ie blue states get more delegates than red states), by the states electoral votes (which has already been shown to be "undemocratic") and when the primary is held (WTF???).

Also, many states use a caucus instead of a primary election. Only a few hundred voters in the state who are able to show up at the caucus can determine an entire state's delegates. People who live a long distance away, are working or otherwise time restricted, or can't travel to the caucus site are disenfranchised. Also, some primaries are open to independents, and even members of a different party. Why should they be able to have a say in the Democratic party nominee for president?

Shyams
Your bias makes you look stupid.
I did not brag about superdelegates. I pointed out that the DNC has more control and is therefore less democratic. If you are too stupid to understand that more control equals less democracy that is on you. And as far as smoke filled rooms it is historical fact that party leaders at one point in time prevented demagogues from being on party tickets, totally undemocratic and I offered no judgement if that was good or bad only that it would have kept a populist demagogue like Trump off the ticket.
Stating historical fact is not my opinion regardless my opinion of a Trump candidacy.It also kept Huey Long, George Wallace, and Henry Ford out of the White House.
Not democratic at all.

PS: As you might have noticed, I get peeved when falsely accused,
goes back to my freshman year in college when I was accused of starting a fire when I was in a town 30 miles away.

Every form of government had plusses and
minuses and only by dispassionate dialogue can we reach a reasonable consensus.