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zataomm  11mo ago (text post)   5801 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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With all due respect to Australian democracy, were any of those 15 removed frontrunners to an election of the executive and/or leaders of the opposition?

Australia is a little different compared to the US. That a province can cast out some leaders tells us nothing about whether the imperial core can do the same thing.

As AshLael said, one was the leader of one of the parties in the ruling coalition.

The analogy is not very exact, though, because the results of the dismissals weren't "oh hey, your opponent wins by default", they were either "next person on your party ticket takes the seat" in the Senate cases, or "have a new election" in the HoR cases (and in all of the new elections the same party - and in some cases the same person, having resolved the eligibility problem in the meantime - won again and kept the seat). There were only two cases where the same party didn't hold the seat afterward, one because the guy was found to be eligible but resigned anyway, and one because the disqualified person had run as an independent and thus had no party.

This is very different from "a major party is not allowed to contest X position, opponent wins by default".

Should also be noted that the CW is significantly more subdued here in Oz.

This is very different from "a major party is not allowed to contest X position, opponent wins by default".

That's not what is on the table. It perhaps feels that way to Trumpists, because Trumpism is populist movement and thus first and foremost a cult of personality.

Most of the time, even senior party figures are largely replaceable. If a couple of senior senators got disqualified from either party, people would care infinitely more about the replacement process than the people ejected (they're not even necessarily unpopular - as has often been noted, Congress has terrible approval but people like their guys - but their supporters just aren't attached enough to stand by them if they got into real hot water). In the case of Trump, his followers regard him as irreplaceable and are hostile to even considering alternatives. As such, the possibility that he performed some disqualifying act feels like total disenfranchisement even though the GOP still gets a nominee (who probably fares better) (plus the Supreme Court, ~half of Congress, half the state governments, etc...).

If Trump is disqualified, Biden will not win by default either. There will still be a Republican presidential nominee, and that person will have a similar chance of beating Biden.

... that depends a lot on the timeline and processes.

August 30th is the last day for a major party to fill a vacancy in Colorado, for one example. One of my frustrations with Unikowsky's analysis is that he's talking about things in the frictionless spherical plane sense. Forget the hard questions like whether Gorsuch goes hypertextual a la McGurt or not; the difference between an instant denial of cert, a GVR-with-direction, a reversal, and a request for briefings is a big deal, even assuming that they'd all result in the exact same conclusion eventually.

Yeah, I think the Supreme Court will be rather more mindful of the practical impact of a non-decisive ruling than Unikowsky is.

Not for the case of him winning the (overall) primary and being disqualified in the general in some states.

In addition to the culture war itself being more subdued, Australia's geographics and economics make give the different factions a lot more inertia, and make disruption a good deal less direct to those impacted. Forget COVID: the recent fishing restrictions would have been gotten a Bundy-like in the United States.

Could you explain how Australia’s geography and economy has such an impact on its politics?

The most immediate controlling characteristic is temperature: you can have a temperature swing of twenty degrees farhenheit going thirty miles inland, in a country that's already pretty toasty throughout its spring, summer, and early fall. Which has never had a surfeit of fresh-water rivers. So a majority of the population lives almost exactly on the coastline, and more than a third live in Sydney or Melbourne. On the east, inland settlement was driven by tapping a single massive aquifier; on the west coast, it mostly wasn't.

This has lead to a massively urbanized population, spread across a handful of major cities.

Americans tend to think of Australia in the same way Europeans think of America. Where Brits think of the various states like taking a half-hour train ride to London, Americans think of the various territories as states like the American southeast. But driving from Adelaide to Perth is a longer trip than going across all of Texas, it's got the same scope of planning requirement, and if you're in Perth, it's your mode of comparison (going north is worse!).

Ok, economics. Work in the country is heavily bifurbicated, with resource extraction and agriculture providing a vast majority of economic exports along with a nature tourism industry, and then on the other side the finances/state agency/urban service sector. Manufacturing used to span the gap a bit, but it collapsed over the last couple decades, even more so than American manufacturing did. Construction kinda tries, but doesn't really.

((There's some policy stuff that augments this; the backpacker visa being one of the most obvious to outsiders by providing a massive labor force of mobile non-voters who get changed out every few years; among other things, they're why the rural/far-suburban service sector is a non-actor in politics.))

As a result, rural areas have basically no political (the National party has been a joke for a long time) or cultural (except as villains) importance, while urbanized voters face strong economic and environmental pressures toward communitized interests.

One was the leader of the National Party and the Deputy Prime Minister.

So high profile and scandalous, but not to that exact level?

The equivalent to the NP would be one of the major factions in a major party, so it's as if they did it to Ted Cruz or Elizabeth Warren. Still think it would be a major escalation and a very ill omen, but it doesn't seem to be on the level of doing it to Trump somehow.

Probably the more controversial aspect was that several Senators were replaced by people who then defected to other parties.

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