Sent a note to my Senators and Congressman:
"ATF Form 4473 is required for any gun purchase and it has an entire section regarding things that disqualify a purchaser from owning a gun, notably line 21, items c and d:
“c. Are you under indictment or information in any court for a felony, or any other crime for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year, or are you a current member of the military who has been charged with violation(s) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and whose charge(s) have been referred to a general court-martial?
d. Have you ever been convicted in any court, including a military court, of a felony, or any other crime for which the judge could have imprisoned you for more than one year, even if you received a shorter sentence including probation?”
Currently, we have, running for President, a person who has just been convicted, qualifying them under line d, and, who is facing 3 other indictments, qualifying them under line c.
If they aren’t qualified to own a gun, and, in fact could be arrested for “felon in possession” should he obtain a gun, how on earth does that allow him to be qualified to lead the armed forces as “Commander in Chief”? Why would he be allowed access to the “nuclear football” which is, really, the ultimate gun?
Can we please get some kind of legislation dealing with this? Either barring convicted felons from the office of the President, or, alternately, highly restricting felonious Presidential access to the military and high order weapons?"
I’m opposed to the idea that being charged with a crime should disqualify someone from office. Simply put, it incentivises putting people in jail for political reasons.
No, Trump should be disqualified for treason and insurrection. Of course, that’s not happening either.
That’s why we have a trial by jury of peers.
An executive branch can issue a pardon, legislative branch can create a law making the crime no longer being a crime and impeach judges.
If those things are not enough, then we have a much more serious problem.
Yes, we do have a more serious problem. Numerous federal judges have been appointed by a treasonous insurrectionist who committed election fraud to take office. The jury of peers will be less effective if there is an obviously biased judge like Cannon.
Judges can’t put you in jail if DA doesn’t bring charges and a jury won’t convict.
Canon is trying to do the reverse, using anything she has at her disposal for the trial to not happen as she knows that this case is pretty much an open shut case.
If being a felon bars you from owning a gun, why should a felon be allowed to command all the guns in the US military?
To play devil’s advocate: You could argue that in this case, the entire nation holds a vote over reinstating the right to own the ultimate gun.
The problem with that is, spin doctoring has gotten too good for this jury and you don’t even need the majority to win.
Being a convicted felon, can he even vote for himself now? I’m pretty sure Florida doesn’t allow felons to vote.
FL defers to the law in the state where the conviction happened, and NY allows felons to vote as long as they are not incarcerated when they need to vote.
Interesting, thanks for the info. I guess we’ll see on July 11th.
Some commentators have solid arguments for why he will get incarceration. More believe he won’t. Nobody believes he will actually spend any time behind bars, because even if he does get prison time, it will be suspended pending appeal. The appeals process will take so long that he’ll be dead before it’s over.
The thing I’m thankful for is that the fucker can’t legally enter Canada right now.
At least not without a waiver.
Generally, because of his criminal conviction and his intention to run for office, there’s a lot of interesting legal questions that will make for new law when we litigate them.
I do like your argument, unfortunately I’m pretty sure most courts will disagree. It’s two fold: first of all if you make felons unable to run, you incentivize people to prosecute someone when they wanna run for office. Secondly, this form is pretty straightforward with what possession or acquisition of firearms means. There is not enough wiggle room to stretch that definition to fit the a guy in his role as president being commander in chief over the military. I think no reasonable court would greenlight that argument.
But in general there’s gonna be very interesting implications.
And they won’t say no
…Because of the implications
Republican congressmen and women and Republican Senators will just say it’s a hoax trial and a corrupt justice system. It’s not a sane world right now.
If their past behaviour is any guide they could also allow felons to own weapons, or at least carve out exceptions for access to nuclear weapons and advanced militaries.
Oh, well if you sent it, I’m sure they’ll listen…
Oregon Senators and Representatives are remarkably responsive… But we need more people to message their Representatives.
The Constitution clearly lays out the qualifications for POTUS. You can’t make legislation that overrides it.
The 2nd Amendment clearly says that the right to own guns can’t be restricted and they passed legislation restricting it.
No, the 2nd Amendment clearly says that the right to own guns is for the purpose of a well-regulated militia. The courts are the ones who interpreted that to mean every citizen [1, Heller]. And the courts also are the ones who have afforded such State restriction legislation as being Constitutional [1, Cruikshank].
In any case, it would likely require an amendment to the Constitution to directly change the qualifications for being President.
Jordan spitting some logic. Love it. I’ll do the same when I sober up tomorrow.
Well said
These are people who believe in the death penalty because “courts don’t make mistakes”.
Calvinist Predestination stans when something they don’t like happens.
Calvinism - the progenitor of capitalism (according to Max Weber)
I don’t need more reason to hate Calvinism
Without Calvinism we never would have gotten Calvin and Hobbes. Still not a good reason to actually practice the theory.
What possible reason would he have to do that…? If he wins, he gets off scot free. If he loses then he’ll claim that he won and is being suppressed for political reasons and then get of scot free.
He can’t pardon himself if he wins
In the event he actually gets incarcerated, if he were to win the presidency he could sue claiming being locked up interferes with his constitutional duties as president. I think I know what this Supreme Court would decide on that
This Supreme Court has not always been friendly to Trump, nor his cronies, nor conservative causes. Their rulings are all over the place regarding politics. Here’s a pile of liberal wins.
If you have the pile of links why not post them? This is just a screenshot of truncated headlines masquerading as a source.
One of the headlines is “Samuel Alito Is Mad You Can’t Be Bigoted Towards Gay People Anymore.” This could be an article about the current conservative supreme court protecting the rights of gay people, or it could be an article about how the supreme court is planning to strip rights from gay people. I don’t know because you didn’t actually post a source, you posted a screenshot of a list of truncated headlines.
Part of me wants to just leave America so I don’t have to think about this stuff. Another part wants to stay and try to fix it.
But I’m tired.
There is no way in hell he will see a second of jail time. He needs to, but he won’t.
Yeah I’m not holding my breath
We should not speak of Trump pardoning himself as if that’s a legitimate power he would have, rather than a batshit crazy end run around the obvious intention of the Constitution.
And in any case, he’s been convinced to state crimes, and there’s no legal theory to support the idea that he can pardon himself or anyone else for state crimes.
No but he could pardon himself on any federal charge. It’s not crazy talk
We should assume he pocket pardoned both himself and any person who went ballistic trying to make their state charges federal ones.
Not sure what you mean about making state charges into federal ones
Most crimes have a State and Federal equivalent. The legal particulars of a case deciding which variant a suspect gets charged with. For example a State may have a charge for ‘Intent to Distribute Narcotics’ which a suspect with 10kilos of coke gets arrested for during a traffic stop. The investigation reveals the suspect had driven into the charging state from an adjacent one. Boom: Federal charge now. In Trump’s case they may try, or have tried, to argue that it is a federal case due to the relation to interfering with the national election. IMO this will strongly suggest the pardon plan is their intent because Federal cases are more severe, with higher penalties and stronger conviction rates than their equivalent State variants. The only reason I can see wanting to risk greater penalties is the possibility of getting SCOTUS to rule on the appeal and that Trump could pardon himself if elected.
He won’t need to, it’ll be his “independent” department of justice calling the shots. Sessions and Barr did everything in their power, without committing actual explicit crimes, to keep Trump happy while they were in charge.
The U.S. department of justice does not call the shots in the state of New York.
Right? What do these people think would happen? Trump calls in the military to fight NYPD?
I mean, he’s such a fucking idiot, I wouldn’t put it past him to suggest it.
In other words 51% of independents and 85% of Republicans think he should keep running
Hey now, there’s a 5% section of people who just don’t give a shit (yet still answer polls for some reason).
I know it won’t happen, but what would happen if Trump dropped out after formally becoming the Republican candidate?
https://abcnews.go.com/538/biden-trump-suddenly-leaves-2024-race/story?id=106136493
From the conventions to when ballots are printed
The national conventions are a key turning point in our hypothetical calendar. Before them, primary voters, or delegates selected through the primary process, would still have the ability to choose their party’s nominee. After the conventions, though, the Democratic and Republican national committees would inherit that power.
Both the DNC and the RNC have enshrined in their rules a process for how to fill a vacancy on the party’s ticket after the formal nomination has already taken place. For Democrats, there is only one option: Chairman Jamie Harrison would confer with Democratic leadership in Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and would then take the decision to the DNC, according to the party’s call to convention.
The 483 members of the DNC — who comprise the chairs and vice chairs of each state Democratic Party committee as well as members elected from all 56 states and territories, plus Democrats Abroad — would vote on a new nominee. There are no rules governing who the nominee has to be; the nomination would not, for instance, just go to the former nominee’s running mate or the person who won the second-most delegates in the primaries. They just need to get a majority of party members to vote for them.
Experts say that could be a political mess, with various factions of the party pressuring members to choose one nominee or another. “They would have all sorts of internal politicking. There would be competition between various factions within the party,” Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School, told 538.
For their part, Republicans have two options for filling a vacancy, according to the party’s rules. Like the Democrats, they could choose to have their committee members vote. There are three RNC members per state and territory, but they get to cast the same number of votes their state or territory’s delegation was entitled to cast during the Republican National Convention. If members of a delegation aren’t in agreement on who to support, their state or territory’s votes would be divided equally among them. In order to become the nominee, a candidate must secure a majority of votes.
But the RNC is also “authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies” by reconvening the national convention.
In either case, the results of all of the primaries and caucuses would no longer formally matter. While the primary results would be one source of information for the members (if they vote) or delegates (if they reconvene the convention), they wouldn’t be bound to choose the person who came in second in the primaries. They don’t even have to choose somebody who ran in the primary.
Beyond their distinct rules, Pildes did not think there would be much difference between how Democrats and Republicans would deal with a candidate’s death. The RNC is much smaller than the DNC, which could have an impact. “It’s always easier to reach decisions in a smaller body than a larger body, and so that might be a significant difference in the way the two parties are governed,” Pildes said. “But other than that, I don’t think there’s a dramatic difference.”
[continued in child]
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From when ballots are printed to Election Day
However, if either party nominee dropped out or passed away after ballots were printed, then it would be too late to officially replace them on the ballot. In that scenario, millions of Americans would cast ballots for the inactive candidate with the understanding that their Electoral College votes would really go to someone else — probably someone designated by the DNC or RNC.
“The reality is, when you vote for president, you’re never voting for that person. You’re voting for the elector to cast a ballot for that person at the Electoral College meeting in December,” Brown said. “I would imagine what would happen is that parties would indicate to the electors who they should vote for.”
From Election Day to Dec. 17
Next, let’s say we make it to Election Day without incident and voters choose a new president — but then the president-elect passes away or becomes incapacitated before the Electoral College votes on Dec. 17 to make their win official. This could be a messy political situation as well.
According to the National Archives, there is no prescribed process for what to do if the president-elect dies between Election Day and the meeting of the Electoral College. (It would not automatically be the vice president-elect, as, legally, the presidential line of succession would not have kicked in yet.) So the (ex-)president-elect’s electors would essentially get to pick the president. “A whole bunch of Americans don’t realize that the electors are actual, real live people,” Kamarck said, who could theoretically choose for themselves whom to vote for.
There is historical precedent for this: After the 1872 election, which was won by Republican Ulysses S. Grant, Democratic nominee Horace Greeley died on Nov. 29, and his electors’ votes went to various other people. According to Pildes, whether this could happen again depends on the state, as some state laws address this possibility while others do not.
There have also historically been “faithless electors” who have not voted for the candidate who won their state. Some states have laws prohibiting this, but in an emergency situation, state legislatures could change the rules to allow them to do so.
It’s possible that the party would coalesce around a new candidate (for example, the vice president-elect would be a logical choice) and its electors would vote en masse for that person. Brown said the DNC or RNC would likely signal to electors whom they should vote for. That could be Harris on the Democratic side or Trump’s still-unannounced running mate on the Republican side. But Brown emphasized that some states would need to adjust their faithless electors laws to allow for this.
If the electors cannot agree on a single alternative and no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, the election would fall to the House of Representatives — a procedure known as a contingent election. The Constitution stipulates that each state’s House delegation would cast a single vote for president, with a majority of states required for a candidate to win, and the Senate would elect a vice president based on a majority vote of its members individually. But Brown said that this is a highly unlikely scenario, as the electors would most likely listen to guidance from their party.
From Dec. 17 to Jan. 20
If the president-elect dies or is incapacitated after the Electoral College votes but before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2025, the law is clear: the vice president-elect would be inaugurated instead. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution says, in part, “If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President.”
Thanks, that was interesting reading.
I’m noticing that there’s still some interesting gaps despite all that. There are very few provisions for a president-elect resigning or refusing to accept the office of president at various stages in the post-election process. It seems the constitution has some concern for the outcome if they die, but not if they simply ghost the country.
Okay, interesting, thank you. What a shit show that would be in either case.
They’d pick someone else, probably whoever was the #2 candidate or the VP pick (with them choosing a new VP, since the election hasn’t happened yet). The electoral college can pick whoever it wants, so as long as the party has consensus I don’t see it being a huge deal.
Nikki Haley stood down her campaign but didn’t actually conceed. she’s still technically in the running for president. so i imagine it would default to her
Yeah, my theory for why she stayed in so long was because she was waiting to see if one of his trials caused him to drop out. Also, my understanding is that political parties aren’t obligated to select the candidate primary voters choose, and the leadership could just go into a back room and pick whoever they like.
A lot of it depends on timing.
There’s a really good fictional take from before Bush/Gore, called “The People’s Choice” by Jeff Greenfield of all people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Choice_(novel)
Candidate wins the election, but dies before the electoral college votes.
So… the VP guy wins? Yeah, no. He wasn’t the candidate and can’t assume the role of President because he was never affirmed as Vice President.
So… the other candidate wins? Yeah, no. They didn’t get enough electoral college votes to be President.
So it all comes down to faithful and faithless electors.
Then the republican party would pick someone else.
This election will be won at the margins. Shit like this matters. Our task is to stoke their discontentment.
Independents will be so important
So will the extreme left.
They seem to have this idea that holding their vote for Biden hostage over Israel is morally just in spite of a mountain of evidence that tells us violence within this country against minorities, women, and lgbtq folks (which is already openly on the rise) will sky rocket if Trump wins…oh and all the authoritarian fascist stuff that is straight out of a dictator playbook when seizing power with no intent to ever relinquish it…but nevermind that.
I agree leftists will be important but there are just more is the independents. A lot of those leftists are young (ie: people who rarely vote anyway)
So like every other election: A couple thousand people in some county in PA or MI you’ve never heard of will decide the presidency, regardless of what most people want.
Yes. “Democracy”. My only dispute with your statement is that it’s a few tens of thousands of votes.
Tens of thousands?! That’s a landslide!
Trump’s conviction isn’t going to be the big turning point of this election. What happens after his conviction will. If he continues to spew vitriol about the judge, prosecution, and jury, eventually one of his followers will commit an act of retribution. That puts Trump in a difficult spot, because his core likes this kind of stuff. He will want to show his support, but if he does, it will again show he encourages domestic terrorism. If he does anything other than condemn the attack, his support among moderates will fall away, just like it did after Jan. 6th. If he does condemn the attack, his core may protest, like they did when he changed his opinion on the COVID vaccines.
Yeah that would be weird to see Trump forced into awkward rambling doublespeak that doesn’t make sense if you listen to the words.
XD
I listen to the words and then arrange them into an order that doesn’t contradict my preconceived notion that Donald is the good one.
Trump don’t care.
Whatever he does his follows will either: say the attack was commited by ANTIFA and is a false flag or say Trump never condemned the attack or never showed his support
Why do you think it will be “the big turning point of this election” when he’s already encouraged the Jan 6 insurrection? He literally could murder someone in NYC like he said and nothing would change in polling. It’s a ridiculous situation.
I’m acquainted with a few felons who got the maximum sentences allowable for their crimes. Why? Lack of recognizance.
When your famous, they just let you do it
How are those numbers so low. Jesus Christ
Man, you’re right. And here I was thinking “wow, 15% is more than I expected.” What a sad realization that is.
Your standard bell curve. Stupid people can’t see things coming so they always try to act like no one can see something bad coming. Truth is that trump is everything he accuses biden of but worse.
What do they mean by “independents”? Are we talking NPA, AIP, or both?
I’m more obsessed with the idea of being a republican this long, and only now changing your mind about 45. The list of things about him which are twice as bad alone is stultifying.
A lot of people still have trust in the courts. They hear conservative media saying “these are just left wing accusations,” and don’t think he has done anything wrong.
However, now that he has a conviction, a growing number of people are leaving him because they courts are infallible (to them).
I know it’s wishful thinking to think he will get jail time in July, or that he will get any other conviction before November.
But once you’re a felon, you’re a felon. And he’s a felon 34 times.
It’s so baffling though. Sincerely believing “these are just left wing accusations” and maga/swamp slogans, maps onto “the judge had a conflict of interest, this was a witch hunt” etc., by the exact same route of illusion.
The only way I can make sense of this, is to assume that we’re not really dealing with sincere belief. It’s hard to imagine a rational Republican that stood behind the former president through everything since the birth certificate thing, and are now somehow chastened. Maybe they simply think it’ll be a bad look for their guy to be wearing an ankle bracelet on inauguration day / in the first 100 days in office, and it will compromise their party’s future election chances. A question of ‘ick’ factor, and not some extension of actual values and beliefs, like we might hope. “Convicted felon” is a soft Dean scream, maybe.
You’re looking for rationality from irrational people.
He lost one. And, there has only been one president in US history to server two nonconsecutive terms. Grover Cleveland (1885–1889 and 1893–1897).
The only other I can think of who ran again after they lost after their first term is Teddy Roosevelt. The rest retired gracefully?
Dean had already lost Iowa by that time, it was pretty certain he wasn’t going to win. The scream was awkward but more coincidental than cause IMO.
But yeah, anything that drops Donald out of the race would be nice.
I know a registered Republican who has never voted for the Republican candidate in the general election.
She says she agrees with the concept of fiscal conservativism, but every candidate she votes for in the primaries always loses to some intolerable asshat. Except she did like McCain, but she liked Obama even better.
Trump pushed her so far as to donate to the Democrats, but she is still registered Republican.
I know another registered Republican who did vote Republican back in the 80s, but at least says he hasn’t recently, similar reasons. He stays Republican mainly because he doesn’t see any point in bothering to change. Where he lives is die hard red so he knows the Republican primaries are his only chance to influence any candidate as even if he likes a Democrat, they will automatically lose. He votes Democrat in the general, but considers participating in the Republican primaries his best shot at mitigating the bad of the modern Republican party.
That’s at least within kicking distance of sanity
The first one is just delusional. The Dems are the fiscal conservatives. Repubs want to sell off the country to billionaires, foreign or domestic is fine.
The second one, registering for the one primary that matters in a shithole district is the only sane option IMO. The primary is the real election for places like that. It would be foolish to throw a vote away to make a statement the party will never listen to.
Yeah… I’ve heard a lot of voters in deep red districts do what the second one does. Granted, never met any myself so this is hearsay, but it does make sense. If your only realistic influence is to bolster the least bad candidate in local/state/federal elections, you’re practicing harm reduction by doing so.
I’m registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries. In general, I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, I may not love them, they may not be my first, second, or even third choice of candidates, but they’re OK enough. They kind of mostly fall on a spectrum from “meh” to “pretty good.”
Republicans, on the other hand, fall on a spectrum from “outright evil fascist psychopaths” to “meh,” and I’d like to try to head off the worst of them before they get to the general election.
With the way Republicans have been going for the last few decades (fielding very few “meh” candidates in the first place and electing even fewer while skewing further and further into crazytown) it’s going to be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election, but I’ll try to pick the least bad one in the primary so hopefully it comes down to a contest of “meh#1” vs “meh#2” (or, dare I dream, “meh1” vs “pretty good”) since roughly half the country is going to vote for whoever has an “R” next to their name, might as well try to leave them with the least offensive R possible.
Ideally I’d like to push the Republicans to occupy pretty much the same space the Democrats do currently and have the Democrats move further left. In pretty much any other halfway functional democracy, our Dems would be considered a conservative party.
There’s a handful of Republican talking points I could kind of get behind if they weren’t using them as covers for their personal greed, racism, religious fundamentalism, etc. but at best the things I would otherwise tend to agree with them on over the Democrats are only paid lip service at best, more often they outright work against them, and very often they take the absolute craziest possible interpretation of one of their supposed ideals and run straight off the deep end with it.
Okay, now I have a type specimen for “actually sane registered Republican”. Cheers
If we want to get a bit weird with it, I’m a Republican because of Trump, not because I like him, but because I want to vote against him at every chance I get. Before this I bounced around between being registered independent and various 3rd parties.
Overall I do tend to consider myself to be somewhat conservative but the Republican party always manages to go off the rails in a direction that is totally against my personal understanding of what conservatism should be. Pretty classic example is gay marriage. When I look at marriage through the ideas of small government, the constitutional separation of church and state, etc. my position is more that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage full-stop. The idea of marriage is between you, your partner(s,) and whatever god or gods you do or don’t believe in, want to say you’re married, go for it, as far as the government should be concerned “marriage” shouldn’t have any more legal standing than being best friends. And as for all of the stuff with taxes, inheritance, etc. that the government does kind of need to concern itself with, that doesn’t need to have anything to do with marriage, if you want to share your benefits of file your taxes jointly with your friend, cousin, spouse, neighbor, barber, or have them designated to be the one who can make medical decisions, or to inherit your belongings after you die, that’s between you and them and the government is just there to make sure the paperwork is in order.
So when the options are the party that is open to more people getting married, and the ones who only want very narrow definitions of marriage, neither really fits my views, the “conservative” narrow definition of marriage is arguably technically closer in some senses to my ideal “the government doesn’t concern itself with marriage” situation, but in spirit the “liberal” system is closer to what I want.
I think we would all gladly trade a million proto-fascists for just one more like you. Thanks for the breakdown, it all checks out.
Independents are people who don’t identify as democrats or republicans.
Many independents are more progressive than mainstream dems. Some aren’t. But we’re a spectrum and it’s stupid to treat us as cohesive.
Thanks. That’s precisely why I’m wondering. By their token I’m “independent” as a NPA… but I’m NPA because there isn’t really a home for leftists in American politics.
There’s actually a fair number of millennials who are independent because the dnc is a bunch of boomers that can’t stand that we’re functioning adults, and not because we’re necessarily more progressive than, say, AOC.
Hahahaha… When has he ever listen to the opinions of others?
Oh, all the time when it involves things that aren’t centered around him. In those cases he will usually take on the opinion of the last person that he spoke to (that knew how to butter him up first)…
Forgot to include 100% of democrats
Not really. If he drops out some GQP sycophant could get elected.
This sounds like a bad poll, frankly.
Bad for Trump, yes.
Oh well THAT should really get his attention. I guess he’ll quit now.
But but Biden today personally raped and then shot 200 Palestine children! I saw it with my own eyes!! /s
He even threw his shades on after and tossed bibi another $69,420,000,000 saying “that’s for the ones I missed!”
