Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I don't understand the relevance. Trump's alternate slate of electors were never certified by the governor of their state. It's also important that counting the alternate slate in 1960 was done with the consent of the joint session. The Electoral Count Act contains specific provisions allowing members of Congress to challenge electoral college votes. Trump's plan relied on Pence having unilateral authority because the majority Democratic House was obviously not going to agree to count Trump's alternate electors.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
On the one hand I agree that Trump was effectively stymied by checks and balances from doing many things he wanted to do in his first term. On the other hand it's not like got none of his goals accomplished. Trump's election (and subsequent Supreme Court appointments) are pretty directly responsible for overturning Roe, for one example. Many of his judicial appointments issue, frankly, insane rulings trying to enact conservative political priorities. Stopped only by the Supreme Court of the United States. The idea that Trump's presidency had no lasting impact on the United States is simply not true.
On the threat-to-democracy front I think the obvious angle is that Trump tried to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election and regularly disparages the legitimacy of any election he loses. Forget the riot on Jan 6th. Here are some simple facts, not reasonably in dispute:
1. As of December 15th 2020 all states electoral votes had been cast and transmitted to the United States federal government. These votes were sufficient to elect Joseph Biden as the next President of the United States.
2. Additionally, some other individuals in particular states purporting to be those states' lawful electors had transmitted their votes to the United States federal government.
3. Thereafter Donald Trump and some members of his inner circle started a pressure campaign to get Mike Pence to declare that, as Vice President, he had the sole authority to decide which electoral college votes were valid and should be counted. They wanted Pence to use this power to either:
a. Count the votes cast in (2) rather than (1) for particular states, ensuring Trump would be re-elected as President OR
b. Declare that no valid votes had been cast from certain states and therefore neither candidate had achieved the needed majority and the election would be decided by the House. Which Trump would almost certainly win.
Of course, the Vice President does not have the power to decide which EC votes were lawfully cast. No Vice President has ever claimed or exercised this power. The abuses it enables are extremely obvious. Why would any ticket ever fail to be re-elected? Indeed, this is obvious because I suspect approximately none of the theories proponents would accept Kamala Harris doing anything like this with the results of the 2024 election.
I think a lot of people freak out about Trump because there is a perception that there is a Way Things Are Done that he neither does not know or does not care about. Sometimes this leads to our system of checks and balances stymieing his policy goals (see the million cases his admin lost for not following the APA) but sometimes it comes down to the bravery of individual people like Mike Pence. This concern specifically is enhanced by Vance being on record that he would not have certified the 2020 results like Mike Pence did.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Does this also apply to Trump? His 74M votes in 2020 is the second most any presidential candidate has ever received. Also beating Obama at his peak.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
What do you mean by "more popularly elected?" Biden's EC margin was lower than either of Obama's and Biden's popular vote margin was between Obama's margins (lower than 2008, higher than 2012). More generally the US popular vote has been trending Dem for a while now. The Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote once (Bush 2004) in the last 30 years.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
The standing objections were obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the law, and there was plenty of commentary available.
I think this is an underappreciated point. I am an interested layman when it comes to law but it was still pretty easy for me to find actual lawyers going through these complaints on social media and explaining the specific deficiencies with them. These are the same deficiencies a court would inevitably point to when they did issue a decision dismissing the case or granting summary judgement. The idea that all the judicial decisions had a partisan motivation seems contradicted by the fact that third party observers could identify the outcome and explain why that would be the outcome in advance.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Yes, as a general matter people have to be tried in the jurisdiction where the alleged crime they committed occurred. What should the DOJ have done? Wasted a bunch of money prosecuting another 200 cases it wasn't going to win?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Maybe you should also read the Wikipedia article?
In late November 2017, six people charged with rioting went on trial. Prosecutors alleged that these six people were taking part in DisruptJ20 protests and vandalism. A jury trial found the six defendants not guilty on all counts in December 2017. On January 18, 2018, the U.S. Justice Department dropped charges against 129 people, leaving 59 defendants to face charges related to the DisruptJ20 protest. By early July 2018, federal prosecutors had dropped all charges against all defendants in the case.
The reason the DOJ dropped the charges is because they lost every one they brought to trial.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I agree, the Trump White House should not have put pressure on social media to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
The point is that if you're going to be mad at someone it should be congress for allocating money in a dumb way. It makes no sense to get mad at FEMA for not exercising discretion they don't have.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Totally incredible? Like, what is the actual evidence people are giving? Here's an article quoting multiple NC state, FEMA, and federal government officials about the effort. Here is a post by an actual Asheville resident describing the scale of the federal response. The contrast is with, what, anonymous sources "on the ground"?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I feel like one obvious difference between DACA/DAPA and TPS is that TPS is Congressionally authorized (by the Immigration Act of 1990) while DACA and DAPA are purely executive action. The TPS program is also not limited to people who initially lacked a lawful status like DACA and DAPA are. The Sanchez decision is limited to unlawful entries. If you were in the United States lawfully when you were granted TPS you can still get permanent resident status like anyone else here lawfully for an extended period of time.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Project 2025 already believes they don't need a further ban. The Comstock Act already arguably bans mailing drugs used for abortion. It even calls it out indirectly on Page 459:
Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.
Trump wouldn't need to sign any further laws to effectively end abortion nation wide, in their view.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
The Results section of the 1796 election article has some details. The short version is that parties failed to unite around VP candidates. If Pinckney had won every VP vote for the Federalist party he would have beaten Jefferson easily. Part of it seems to be they tried what I mentioned in my last sentence, coordinating so that the President ended up with fewer ECs than the VP, but too many people voted for other candidates. Note that the 1800 election didn't have this problem, and by 1804 we had the 12th amendment.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I think this misunderstands how states that allocate EC votes proportionally work. They are not allocated proportionally according to the popular vote of the state. Rather, the states allocate one vote for the overall state winner and then one vote for the winner of each Congressional district. A description here. So the vote-getting is still winner-take-all at the level the voting is occurring at. Presumably whoever won NE-2 would get both votes, same as ME-2.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
I am not sure it would change much. According to the original language in the Constitution Electoral College members vote for two Persons, which I imagine have to be different people. Presumably each states' electors would vote for the President/VP that won their state same as the current procedure. This means the same President and VP probably win. Although this means the President and VP would always have the same number of EC votes so every election would go to the House. You could end up in a situation where the same two people are President and VP but which one is which is decided by state delegations in the House. Or maybe some coordination mechanism evolves for sufficient electors to vote for neither candidate such that the same President and VP win but with the President having, like, one more EC vote.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
From the 2025 Mandate For Leadership Page 455 and 456:
Data Collection. The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.
Comparisons between live births and abortion should be tracked across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers and whether better prenatal physical, mental, and social care improves infant outcomes and decreases abortion rates, especially among those who are most vulnerable.
The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 20239 would amend title XIX of the Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act to improve the CDC’s abortion reporting mechanisms by requiring states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.
The CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.
Sure there isn't a literal "every state should have report every pregnant woman to the feds" merely "every state should have to report how every pregnancy ended to the feds." If you think the latter wouldn't be used to prosecute alleged violations of a federal abortion prohibition you're a fool.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Temporary Protected Status and Asylum are different legal protections, with different criteria and processes. More generally, what does the term "illegal immigrant" refer to? I am under the impression it refers to people in the United States without a legal status that permits them to remain. That very literally does not include people with TPS (like the Haitians in Springfield have). if "illegal immigrant" includes even people who have legal permission to be here, what precisely are the boundaries? Are there green card holders who are "illegal immigrants?"
It's also kind of funny to hear Vance complain about the CBP One app since it was launched in... October 2020 by the Trump administration!
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again.
Forget election denial claims. What ought to be disqualifying is his statement that he would not have counted the lawfully cast electoral college votes. Nobody should be Vice President who cannot affirm the simple fact that the Vice President's role is ministerial, a fact Republicans would instantly discover if Kamala Harris acted otherwise.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Is 8 years (two presidential terms) really so long? Bush was 54 when he was elected in 2000. Obama was 47 in 2008. Harris will be 60. She's younger than Trump (70) and Biden (78) were when they were elected, but is solidly middle of the pack among presidents since 2000.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
If our robots do not take care of us as well as we would like then we are back in the case that there is productive work for human labor. If there is a gap between how we want our lives to be and what robots can provide why aren't we filling that gap (partially or totally) with human labor like we are today?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
OK, but in a world where robots do all useful work there's no reason you couldn't be at home with your family! I took the point about the old folks home to be a concern about a kind of listlessness or malaise with lacking something productive to fill ones days with.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
For some (many? most?) people likely yes. The thing that is bad about being in an old folks home, today, is the "old" part. If I were free to spend my time however I wished at my current age, that would be pretty great!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
What is it you are envisioning needing this leverage to do?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Are jobs good in themselves?
Either these machines are going to be so great that there is no use human labor can be put to that satisfies human wants (which sounds utopian to me) or there will still be productive uses of human labor to satisfy human wants (i.e. jobs).
Is it supposed to be a defense that the classified documents he had didn't have coversheets?
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