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Guilty verdict's not a huge surprise: even before the trial started, the best Trump could really hope for was a hung jury.
Sentencing is set for July 11th (hilariously, less than a week before the RNC). There's a lot of procedural messiness here -- even by the low standards of state trials, this was a clown show, and that's before you get to the Biden campaign (!) sending Robert DeNero(?!) to argue for conviction in front of the courthouse -- but appeal is going to be a clusterfuck just as a matter of timing. Trying to get an appeal in the four months between sentencing and the election is unlikely, the first two levels of appeal will still be dealing with New York judges, SCOTUS doesn't like taking appeals directly from a trial court (might do it anyway?), and even if everything lines up perfectly, most avenues for success on appeal still only kicks the case back down.
In the short term, it's not really clear that appeal matters. Given the Carrol verdict being reported as Trump being 'found guilty of rape', I dunno that many people even considering voting for Trump will care that he's a felon; anyone who does won't care or notice about a technical appeal remand a month before the election. Republican bloodlust for lawfare aren't going to be sated, whether Trump wins or loses, by an admission of legal oopsie, whether before or after the election. Supposedly there's an array of moderates that will "kick and scream and shake my fist impotently at the sky before casting a meaningless vote against" Biden in the case of continued escalation, but I'm not holding my breath. I guess if Trump loses by anything less than an absolute landslide and the conviction is overturned after the election (or worse, after January 20th!), it'll radicalize people more?
Yay?
Longer-term... this is gonna get messy. There is very little argument to Republicans against goose-for-gander here, and while professional Democratics think they're much less vulnerable to criminal lawfare (and that the Republicans that were get elected won't be willing to risk it), whatever extent that's true today, it's not going to stay that way for long: there's no way someone can campaign against the platform of going against various scuzzy Dems. And while Dem politicians are sure that they can avoid stepping into Texas, the phrase 'conspiracy jurisdiction' is going to become Very Interesting in the next five or six years.
Except the only one needed — it won't work. Because they lack the power of the left, lack the means to strike back. It's like arguing that an unarmed man being shot at should "shoot back" at his attacker with the gun he doesn't have.
The Dems have all the power, all the institutions. We on the right are an already-defeated remnant, doomed to feeble, pointless lashing out as we go to our inevitable doom.
(Maybe it would be better to just spare ourselves the suffering and end it all, like the equally-doomed Sicarii at Masada.)
That's an argument that it will not win; it's not an argument against doing it. Indeed, if actually sure you're really doomed, a lot of arguments against escalation -- what happens with the next step on the wheel, what if we could delay or bargain -- become a lot less compelling. Even doomed lashing out can be expensive, and there's a lot of self-defense arguments about how dangerous 'unarmed' people can be.
I don't think we're there, yet, though I'll admit the last week has not been encouraging.
So, what, does the unarmed man of my analogy point his finger and shout "pew, pew" then?
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Trump’s preferred AG is literally Ken Paxton.
Suffice to say, if he’s re-elected, things could get interesting for democrats real fast.
Except this has now guaranteed that won't happen.
How so? An Attorney General is only one man; how much could he do with the entire rest of the Justice Department (and probably much of the court system) actively opposing him?
Venue shopping, high level personnel replacements, etc are games that two can play at. Legal personnel might lean blue, but it’s not like the pool of conservative talent is literally zero.
And a nakedly political prosecution isn’t going to stop people from voting trump. The ‘but he’s a convicted felon’ brigade wasn’t going to vote for him anyways.
I dispute this. When the opposing team is cheating, trying to "cheat back" does no good when the referees are on the opposing team's side.
Again, Ted Stevens says otherwise. And even after Stevens's conviction was overturned on appeal, that just changed some people's views from "convicted felon corrupt politician" to "convicted felon corrupt politician who 'got off on a technicality.'"
(Indeed, that's how some people view the entire appeals process — "overturned on appeal" = "scumbag who got lawyers to get him off on a technicality," and if a person were really innocent, they'd never have been convicted in the first place. At least for some, it seems to come down to a mental model of systems accuracy wherein a system can only ever err "on one side" or "on the other" — that is, it either produces only false positives, or only false negatives, never both. And since guilty people obviously go free quite often — that whole "better ten guilty men go free" — thus our justice system is "too lax" — makes false negatives — and so cannot simultaneously be "too harsh" and convict innocents.)
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