US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2834

On November 16 2020 19:10 schaf wrote:
Wouldn't tax revenue as percentage of gdp be a good indicator? So in essence how much of created value is put into the state for it's services.

Wiki link says EU is around 36%, USA 24%

Edit: just trying to be helpful, I'm not very versed in economics.

On November 16 2020 16:01 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Trump now straight up claims he has won the election. Congrats on four more years guys.



I like how a message from the president and what official sources say are 180 degrees opposite. That's a nice healthy country :X

Now more than ever it's apparent how weird it is that the US president doesn't have to answer for the things he says. It's nuts how he can just stay inside without facing any questioning or reckoning.

On November 16 2020 21:53 Vivax wrote:


I think he's just enjoying getting tagged by twitter and pretend he's being censored and oppressed so he shitposts on purpose.

On November 16 2020 19:29 ninazerg wrote:


Legally, a candidate does not have to concede the election on election day, or really, ever. It is generally done as a formality when a candidate see that it is mathematically impossible (or close to zero chance) for them to be elected president. Each state will send electors to pick the new President on December 14th, and the inauguration is not until January 21st. Until then, I suppose the President is within his rights to protest or even contest the results of the election.

On November 17 2020 01:16 Mohdoo wrote:


What is technically legal is not the minimum acceptable behavior of a president. This is all really fucked

On November 16 2020 09:10 raynpelikoneet wrote:

Every nation has taken a hit because of covid.
How are the numbers before covid?

On November 17 2020 04:13 Mohdoo wrote:
Anyone doing a good job at keeping track of Trump's various election related lawsuits? Are any of them going well?

Right now my impression is that Trump and company intend to purchase OANN and then use it as their platform. Trump is trying to get people maximum levels of riled up so that these people only trust OANN and flock in droves away from Fox. He will go on TV basically saying "this was literally a coup and it was illegal".

“It’s over,” election law expert and University of California, Irvine Law Professor Rick Hasen wrote in his Election Law Blog on Monday.

“Trump may still say he has won the election,” he noted. “But there is no path. Even the two key federal cases in Pennsylvania do not involve nearly enough votes to overturn the results there even if they were successful (and I don’t expect them to be).”

Hasen explained that the recent slew of losses and withdrawals for the Trump campaign’s always long-shot legal efforts are little more than a prelude to the fast-impending reality of what those lost and withdrawn cases mean in the aggregate.

“There is no path,” he continued, “Rudy Giuliani can say what he wants and the [resident can keep declaring that he’s won, but there’s no plausible legal way this election gets overturned. We are not talking three Hail Marys anymore. We are talking done.”

University of Southern California Gould School of Law Professor Franita Tolson said she agreed with the estimation entirely.

“Anyone who has been paying attention for at least a week, in which the lawsuits became more plentiful but the evidence less so, would say that the writing has been on the wall,” she told Law&Crime in an email. “It is not surprising that the lawsuits are being withdrawn and the litigation coming to an end before judges lose their patience.”

Early on Monday, pro-Trump attorneys withdrew one such lawsuit in Wisconsin. Others withdrawals or dismissals, which should be read as evidence that the evidence simply is not there, occurred in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania as well.

Michael Morley, Assistant Professor at Florida State University College of Law, offered a holistic and similarly pessimistic overview.

“Many of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have been rejected in court,” he said in an email. “Several others have been either dismissed or greatly narrowed by the campaign’s lawyers, so it’s not even contesting enough ballots to impact the election’s outcome. Both Biden’s lead in the Electoral College, as well as his margin of victory in the swing states, are substantial enough that the outcome of the election will not be changing.”

“I think Hasen is 100% right,” University of Kentucky College of Law professor Joshua A. Douglas said. “In fact, I think we could have said that a week ago. The margins are just too large and they have not uncovered anything that could put the outcomes in doubt.”

Eugene Mazo, the Visiting Associate Professor at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, also told Law&Crime that he agreed entirely with Hasen’s understanding of the legal situation.

“There is no viable path for Trump to win,” he said. “The vote differential is too great for a recount to have any chance of succeeding in any of these states, and there’s no legal theory being advanced by the Trump campaign that has any chance of attracting a court’s attention. The only question here is who will pack Trump’s bags for him and place them at the side of the curb on January 20.”

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig was on the same page.

“It’s over and it has been for some time,” he told Law&Crime. “They’re getting absolutely nowhere in the courts, and they’ve got nothing to go on, legally or factually. Even if they did miraculously win a case or two, they have no chance to flip any state’s outcome. And even if they somehow pulled that off, they’d need to flip not one, not two, but three contested states. It’s over.”

Tulane Law Professor Ross Garber, an election litigation expert who is typically a voice of caution on such matters, also agreed with the categorical take on how President Donald Trump’s legal options are not long for this earth.

“I don’t think the president or his lawyers or surrogates have identified any conceivable path for him to retain the presidency,” he told Law&Crime in an email. “The big question now is how far he and his supporters will go to advance an agenda to help Trump personally and to undermine the legitimacy of a Biden Presidency and ultimately the underpinnings of our democracy itself.”

A recount in Georgia’s presidential race found more than 2,600 ballots in Floyd County that hadn’t originally been tallied, likely helping President Donald Trump reduce his 14,000-vote deficit to Joe Biden.


Trump could gain about 800 net votes from the newly discovered ballots, said Luke Martin, chairman of the Floyd County Republican Party.

The previously uncounted votes were cast during in-person early voting at the Floyd County Administration Building, which includes the county’s elections office, Martin said. Over half of 5,000 printed-out ballots cast on an optical scanning machine weren’t initially recorded.

“It’s very concerning,” Martin said. “But this doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue. I’m glad the audit revealed it, and it’s important that all votes are counted.”

Elections officials in Floyd County in northwest Georgia didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The Rome News-Tribune reported that the county’s elections board chairman tentatively confirmed that more than 2,500 votes were recorded during the recount than on election night.

Martin said these ballots could rectify a discrepancy between the number of people who checked in to vote early and ballots that were counted in Floyd County.

The issue appeared to occur on an optical scanner that stopped working after a couple of weeks of early voting, Martin said. County election officials were supposed to rescan all paper ballots cast on that machine, but roughly half of them weren’t recorded.


It’s unclear whether the problem was caused by poll workers or an issue with voting equipment, Martin said. Similar issues haven’t been discovered in other counties, which led Martin to believe the problem was caused by the county’s elections administration practices.

In Other News

Martin said these ballots could rectify a discrepancy between the number of people who checked in to vote early and ballots that were counted in Floyd County.

On November 17 2020 04:06 farvacola wrote:
Though there are many Trump and Friends courtroom losses to discuss these days, one recent decision deserves mention because of how incredibly severe and unusual the relief is. A federal judge hit DeVos and the Department of Ed. with a permanent injunction that prohibits them from doing their "we love private and charter schools" thing with CARES Act funds. It's not all that uncommon for government actors to get hit with preliminary injunctions, but permanent injunctions, which basically say "you can never, ever do this," are fairly rare and are a good indicator of how severe the alleged bad acts are.

Judge approves permanent injunction in Nessel’s lawsuit against DeVos over private school funds

On November 17 2020 08:29 iamthedave wrote:


What's she been doing that's so bad? While obviously Betsy DeVos is evil, isn't it in the education department's remit to help states fund private schools?

1. Making states and local education agencies (LEAs) calculate shares of CARES Act funding for private schools “in a manner inconsistent with Title I’s calculation for equitable services to private schools”
2. Requiring that CARES Act funds supplement other funding sources
3.Limiting CARES Act fund distribution to only public schools that are eligible for or participate in Title I
4.Taking any adverse action against school districts that relied on the original guidance or interim final rule before the plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction entered.

In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.

The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” Raffensperger said of the threats, “particularly when it comes from people on my side of the aisle. Everyone that is working on this needs to elevate their speech. We need to be thoughtful and careful about what we say.” He said he reported the threats to state authorities.

The pressure on Raffensperger, who has bucked his party in defending the state’s voting process, comes as Georgia is in the midst of a laborious hand recount of roughly 5 million ballots. President-elect Joe Biden has a 14,000-vote lead in the initial count.

The normally mild-mannered Raffensperger saved his harshest language for U.S. Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who is leading the president’s effort to prove fraud in Georgia and whom Raffensperger called a “liar” and a “charlatan.”

Collins has questioned Raffensperger’s handling of the vote and accused him of capitulating to Democrats by not backing allegations of voter fraud more strongly.

Raffensperger has said that every accusation of fraud will be thoroughly investigated, but that there is currently no credible evidence that fraud occurred on a broad enough scale to affect the outcome of the election.

The recount, Raffensperger said in the interview Monday, will “affirm” the results of the initial count. He said the hand-counted audit that began last week will also prove the accuracy of the Dominion machines; some counties have already reported that their hand recounts exactly match the machine tallies previously reported.

“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” he said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Doug Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”

In the interview, Raffensperger also said he spoke on Friday to Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims about voting irregularities.

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffspenger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested, as counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.