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On June 09 2023 11:17 ChristianS wrote:@GH: You get how that feels like kind of a cop out, though, right? I mean, fair enough, the undemocratic aspects of the Democratic Party (and US electoral system more generally) are more fundamental and systemic than can be addressed with a change in 2024 primary policies. But you’re the one who came in here touting this specific issue as evidence of their hypocrisy in supposedly valuing democracy! That implies you think something specific they’re doing here is demonstrably undemocratic, in a way that some other policy they could take wouldn’t be. If I ask what that other policy is, and you say “oh, no, the issues are more fundamental and systemic” it kind of feels like you’re not being straight with me, you know? Or, more specifically, it makes it feel like you actually agree that there’s no particular policy here you think the DNC should take instead; your issues with them are unrelated, and you just saw an avenue of attack. I don’t think that’s true – I think you brought it up because you believe they’re being hypocrites somehow. But I’m definitely struggling to see what it is you’re getting at in this specific case. + Show Spoiler +On June 09 2023 05:58 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2023 04:36 ChristianS wrote:On June 09 2023 03:37 BlackJack wrote:On June 08 2023 22:30 ChristianS wrote:On June 08 2023 21:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 21:38 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 08 2023 21:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 21:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 08 2023 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 20:41 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
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Wouldn't something like "I wish the Democrats had had a serious primary (assuming one doesn't occur), but I understand that some potential, up-and-coming candidates might not want to jeopardize their political future by challenging the incumbent and current leader of the party right now - especially when that person is Joe Biden, who has beaten the almost-certain-to-be-Republican-nominee Donald Trump once already" be a reasonable stance to take without needing crazy mental gymnastics? In four years, the field will be clear for new primary candidates anyway. I mean I think those are already pretty ridiculous, but also mostly standard gymnastics for US politics. I'm more referencing how Democrat's primary is going to be observably less democratic than the Republicans who are supposed to be nominating the guy destroying democracy. I think that's just how the incumbent advantage + other candidates thinking about their long-term goals work. We can't force someone to run for president if they don't want to / if they don't think it's worth it / if they want to wait for another election cycle. I don't think it's undemocratic to allow people to not run for president, even if we think other people would do a better job as president than Biden or Trump. While I certainly interpret all that more as structural coercion and corruption built into US institutions/processes, I'm more referring to how they are handling/going to handle RFK Jr.'s campaign. Ah okay. Personally, I think he's a joke of a candidate, but there is still plenty of time to be convinced otherwise. As is to be expected. Thing is, Democratic voters take him more seriously than Republicans take 10 (almost 11) out of 12 of their declared candidates, yet the Republican party (and corporate media) is going to give them + Show Spoiler +(and their supporters, which is basically extended family and people getting paid to help lol) all a more holistically democratic primary than Democrats will give RFK Jr. and ~15-20% of their party voters (or the 50%+ that didn't want Biden to even run). Can you be a bit more specific about what undemocratic measures you think the Dems will take? I doubt they’ll schedule any debates, for instance, but if they claim is “they’re demonstrably more undemocratic than the Republicans” I’d want to see more than that. “Ignore the challenger and pretend there isn’t even a primary” was also the Republican playbook in the 2020 primary (and is pretty standard whenever there’s an incumbent). If your point is just “it’s undemocratic in general how hard it is to unseat an incumbent from the same party as you” that’s maybe true of every elected office in the US. That’s certainly a problem, just not sure if you’re referring to something more specific than that. Being hellbent on reelecting the guy that 70% of the country and 51% of Democrats don't even want to run is pretty inherently undemocratic. Sure it's standard to rally around the incumbent and try to shut out challengers but that also ignores the reality that the incumbent usually doesn't have the majority of even his own party not wanting them to seek reelection. I agree with GH that some mental gymnastics are being done here. "Our unpopular guy has the best chance at defeating your unpopular guy and your unpopular guy wants to destroy Democracy so we are supporting Democracy by supporting our unpopular guy." It's an "end justifies the means" argument which is fine. But let's not pretend at the end of the day they're not trying to give the people what they don't want. I remember several months back talking through the nature of “systemic” problems, and how you can get situations where problems arise out of the rules by which people interact, without anybody in particular really being the *cause* per se? This seems like a fantastic example of it. For a primary challenge you need: 1) a candidate who wants to run, who 2) the voters want as president more than the incumbent. We don’t have both of those things. The fact that most people (including me!) think it would be cool if we did doesn’t change that fact, and it’s not necessarily undemocratic that both conditions are not met. Why aren’t they met? A lot of reasons. Qualified candidates don’t really want to stake their careers on challenging an incumbent when it’s easier to just wait and run for an open seat. Voters tend to favor incumbents for a wide variety of reasons. Primary voters also want a candidate who will win, so that incumbent advantage is self-reinforcing in a primary. If by undemocratic you just mean “This system frequently does not produce the outcomes voters would like,” then sure! Some of those outcomes are impossible, some of them are held up by the system unnecessarily for reasons both sinister and mundane. I’m not saying “a better system doesn’t exist,” but on the other hand “The people often don’t get what they want” is just not a very useful observation. Edit: Maybe this would be helpful: if you say “This sucks man, most people don’t want Biden to run again for a variety of good reasons, and yet he’s pretty much guaranteed to be the nominee,” I’m right there with you. But if you then say “If Democrats *really* valued democracy, they would…” I can’t finish the sentence. If you can, that might help me see where you and/or GH are coming from. If Democrats really valued democracy they would hold primary debates, would be a start. A large reason there are no other candidates is because they can expect blowback from the party establishment if they crossed Biden as the preferred candidate. It's somewhat of a chicken or an egg game where you're insinuating the party is not trying to destroy any challengers to Biden, there just doesn't happen to be any. I'm saying there doesn't happen to be any because they know the party would try to destroy them because they've already decided to circle the wagons around Biden. You're from California. Do you think Newsom really wants to be governor for another 4 years instead of running for President? It can't be nearly as fun to govern California now that it's facing a massive budget deficit instead of a massive budget surplus. He also needs to put his Kayfabe with his BFF DeSantis to good use. Do you think voters wouldn't prefer a charismatic polished politician like Newsom compared to bumbling old Joe? I'd say your 2 conditions are well met and the reason Newsom won't run is not because he doesn't want to run but because he doesn't want to ruffle feathers. Although I acknowledge that you do have a catch-all in that not wanting to run to avoid blowback still falls within not wanting to run. I can’t join you in wanting a debate because if one actually happened (especially between Biden and fucking RFK Jr.), I’m confident I would think “This is stupid, why are we doing this.” More generally, “democracy” doesn’t mean being given a time slot by some centralized power to make your case for yourself only in prescribed and centrally-approved ways. I don’t buy the premise that DNC-granted access to a debate stage is all that fundamental to a candidate’s viability, and if it was, that would be a problem no even if they chose to grant it liberally in this case. But I do think you’re inordinately focused on “blowback” from the party (i.e. party leadership) and under-focused on all the other good reasons somebody like Newsom wouldn’t want to take his shot in 2024. There’s a Democratic incumbent! That means there’s already a guy that Democratic voters know and like, a guy who’s going to have an automatic advantage in looking presidential because he *currently is president.* And what do Democrats want in a presidential candidate more than anything else? They want a Democrat who will win! The incumbent has done that before, and voters know about incumbent advantage, too! If you’re someone like Newsom, do you really want voters viewing you as some kind of traitor who was willing to trash your party’s chances at the White House because you’re too ambitious? There’s a lot of different mechanisms making it so that when you’ve got a friendly in the White House, it’s an extremely risky career move to try to take them down. Term limits being what they are, it’s virtually always smarter to just wait. And that’s true even before DNC party leaders start leaving flaming bags of shit on your doorstep.
I get how you could interpret it that way. It's more to point out that they don't *really* care about democracy (from my perspective so the question rings disingenuous to me) regardless of our opinions on whether refusing to host debates with a candidate that 20% of Democrats say they want to nominate or disenfranchising NH and Iowa voters is undemocratic (which it seems we're just not going to agree on).
EDIT: + Show Spoiler +To address why I mentioned it: I'm saying if the Democrats and their supportive media outlets are going to go all-in on just freezing RFK Jr. (and to a lesser degree Williamson) out by refusing to treat the primary like a serious contest of ideas and candidates (Williamson's support is representative of a substantial part of the party as well) and lean on calling them crazy and the incumbent primary traditions (which in substance are basically newer to politics than Joe Biden is) people outside of the party faithful are going to notice and see the rationalizations for it as flimsy.
If you break it down, it's more than 25% of the party responding to the valid and expressed desire of the majority of the party to put up an alternative to circling the wagons around Biden. Then you have the party leadership responding to that by not holding a real primary with debates where candidates and ideas (granted there's plenty of bad ideas, I wouldn't see myself voting for any of them, and accepting the rationale for the lack of more mainstream candidates at face value)compete for the nomination, while still trying to pretend they are.
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The Trump indictments related to the classified documents has been unsealed. Seven charges including obstruction of justice and corruptly concealing a document or record. Trump's aide is named as a co-conspirator.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0_2.pdf
The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.
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So the attorney that would search the boxes in the Mar-a-Lago storage room for classified documents to give back to NARA for the subpoena, made a arrangement on 23rd May that he would search the boxes on 2nd June. Trump said he wanted to be present, and then in that week had Nauta move 64 boxes from the storage room to his residence. Nauta only moved 30 boxes back to the storage when on June 2nd the attorney searched those boxes and later presented the classified docs to the FBI, signing that this was all there is.
The 34 unsearched boxes left at the residence had the files that contained the nuclear and military secret stuff that were later found in the August 8th raid. On June 3rd Trump talked to FBI and said he was an open book but on that same day Nauta had loaded some the unsearched boxes on Trumps airplane.
Trumps attorneys testified that on May 23rd he suggested some typical dodgy Trump stuff like lying about the documents, not giving them back or destroying them like Hillary.
Whats not entirely clear for me is how much Nauta knew, was he just errand-running the boxes back and forth or did he know that at that 2nd June date the attorney needed to have every box to comply with the subpoena. Like did he actively hold back the 34 boxes or did Trump just tell him move boxes X to Y.
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Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf)
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On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf)
31 counts of Willful retention of Defense information
1 count of Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice
1 count of Withholding Documents
1 count of Corruptly concealing a Document
1 count of Concealing a Document in federal investigation
1 count of Scheme to Conceal
2 counts of False Statements and Representations
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On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf) This is the document case, not jan 6th so treason isn't a thing unless they could prove he gave 'enemies' of the US access to them.
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On June 10 2023 05:46 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf) This is the document case, not jan 6th so treason isn't a thing unless they could prove he gave 'enemies' of the US access to them.
Shit. That quick excerpt above kind of suggests he was trying to set something up. This sounds like an open and shut case really. But he's rich and a former president. Hopes are low. Good ammo for his opponents to keep him from running or being elected. Won't stop the grift though
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On June 10 2023 06:16 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2023 05:46 Gorsameth wrote:On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf) This is the document case, not jan 6th so treason isn't a thing unless they could prove he gave 'enemies' of the US access to them. Shit. That quick excerpt above kind of suggests he was trying to set something up. This sounds like an open and shut case really. But he's rich and a former president. Hopes are low. Good ammo for his opponents to keep him from running or being elected. Won't stop the grift though It sure does, but suggesting and proving are very different things. And I when aiming for someone as big as a former President you don't want to miss.
But even being rich and 'powerful' I don't see him getting out of most of these charges. Him taking the documents and refusing to return them seems very open and shut based on all the evidence about boxes being moved around.
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On June 10 2023 06:23 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2023 06:16 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:On June 10 2023 05:46 Gorsameth wrote:On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf) This is the document case, not jan 6th so treason isn't a thing unless they could prove he gave 'enemies' of the US access to them. Shit. That quick excerpt above kind of suggests he was trying to set something up. This sounds like an open and shut case really. But he's rich and a former president. Hopes are low. Good ammo for his opponents to keep him from running or being elected. Won't stop the grift though It sure does, but suggesting and proving are very different things. And I when aiming for someone as big as a former President you don't want to miss. But even being rich and 'powerful' I don't see him getting out of most of these charges. Him taking the documents and refusing to return them seems very open and shut based on all the evidence about boxes being moved around.
What about the potential sentences? Is it what he's being charged with lengthy or does it mostly amount to a slap on the wrist? Being that he still have Jan 6th to answer for, shouldn't this, at the minimum, DQ him from running? Can he get charged/sure later for fraud for his campaign alone?
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On June 10 2023 06:32 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2023 06:23 Gorsameth wrote:On June 10 2023 06:16 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:On June 10 2023 05:46 Gorsameth wrote:On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf) This is the document case, not jan 6th so treason isn't a thing unless they could prove he gave 'enemies' of the US access to them. Shit. That quick excerpt above kind of suggests he was trying to set something up. This sounds like an open and shut case really. But he's rich and a former president. Hopes are low. Good ammo for his opponents to keep him from running or being elected. Won't stop the grift though It sure does, but suggesting and proving are very different things. And I when aiming for someone as big as a former President you don't want to miss. But even being rich and 'powerful' I don't see him getting out of most of these charges. Him taking the documents and refusing to return them seems very open and shut based on all the evidence about boxes being moved around. What about the potential sentences? Is it what he's being charged with lengthy or does it mostly amount to a slap on the wrist? Being that he still have Jan 6th to answer for, shouldn't this, at the minimum, DQ him from running? Can he get charged/sure later for fraud for his campaign alone? Note I have no clue on this and just repeating what google says but individually the charges are 5-20 years depending on which and if found guilty on all counts it adds up to 75 years.
But I have long since held the belief that they are not going to lock up a former president because that would be a security nightmare. So at worst he would be looking at house arrest for the rest of his life.
In theory it could disqualify him from running as there is a law that prohibits anyone who is convicted of stealing classified documents from holding any office.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071
However that would almost certainly get challenged in the SC (if still relevant at the time) and the constitution has no such limit, only amendment 14 which prevents anyone convicted of insurrection or rebellion holding office. Which isn't going to happen in the Mar-A-Lago document case. But in theory could be possible in the jan 6th case.
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On June 10 2023 01:50 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2023 11:17 ChristianS wrote:@GH: You get how that feels like kind of a cop out, though, right? I mean, fair enough, the undemocratic aspects of the Democratic Party (and US electoral system more generally) are more fundamental and systemic than can be addressed with a change in 2024 primary policies. But you’re the one who came in here touting this specific issue as evidence of their hypocrisy in supposedly valuing democracy! That implies you think something specific they’re doing here is demonstrably undemocratic, in a way that some other policy they could take wouldn’t be. If I ask what that other policy is, and you say “oh, no, the issues are more fundamental and systemic” it kind of feels like you’re not being straight with me, you know? Or, more specifically, it makes it feel like you actually agree that there’s no particular policy here you think the DNC should take instead; your issues with them are unrelated, and you just saw an avenue of attack. I don’t think that’s true – I think you brought it up because you believe they’re being hypocrites somehow. But I’m definitely struggling to see what it is you’re getting at in this specific case. + Show Spoiler +On June 09 2023 05:58 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2023 04:36 ChristianS wrote:On June 09 2023 03:37 BlackJack wrote:On June 08 2023 22:30 ChristianS wrote:On June 08 2023 21:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 21:38 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 08 2023 21:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 21:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 08 2023 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 20:41 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
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Wouldn't something like "I wish the Democrats had had a serious primary (assuming one doesn't occur), but I understand that some potential, up-and-coming candidates might not want to jeopardize their political future by challenging the incumbent and current leader of the party right now - especially when that person is Joe Biden, who has beaten the almost-certain-to-be-Republican-nominee Donald Trump once already" be a reasonable stance to take without needing crazy mental gymnastics? In four years, the field will be clear for new primary candidates anyway. I mean I think those are already pretty ridiculous, but also mostly standard gymnastics for US politics. I'm more referencing how Democrat's primary is going to be observably less democratic than the Republicans who are supposed to be nominating the guy destroying democracy. I think that's just how the incumbent advantage + other candidates thinking about their long-term goals work. We can't force someone to run for president if they don't want to / if they don't think it's worth it / if they want to wait for another election cycle. I don't think it's undemocratic to allow people to not run for president, even if we think other people would do a better job as president than Biden or Trump. While I certainly interpret all that more as structural coercion and corruption built into US institutions/processes, I'm more referring to how they are handling/going to handle RFK Jr.'s campaign. Ah okay. Personally, I think he's a joke of a candidate, but there is still plenty of time to be convinced otherwise. As is to be expected. Thing is, Democratic voters take him more seriously than Republicans take 10 (almost 11) out of 12 of their declared candidates, yet the Republican party (and corporate media) is going to give them + Show Spoiler +(and their supporters, which is basically extended family and people getting paid to help lol) all a more holistically democratic primary than Democrats will give RFK Jr. and ~15-20% of their party voters (or the 50%+ that didn't want Biden to even run). Can you be a bit more specific about what undemocratic measures you think the Dems will take? I doubt they’ll schedule any debates, for instance, but if they claim is “they’re demonstrably more undemocratic than the Republicans” I’d want to see more than that. “Ignore the challenger and pretend there isn’t even a primary” was also the Republican playbook in the 2020 primary (and is pretty standard whenever there’s an incumbent). If your point is just “it’s undemocratic in general how hard it is to unseat an incumbent from the same party as you” that’s maybe true of every elected office in the US. That’s certainly a problem, just not sure if you’re referring to something more specific than that. Being hellbent on reelecting the guy that 70% of the country and 51% of Democrats don't even want to run is pretty inherently undemocratic. Sure it's standard to rally around the incumbent and try to shut out challengers but that also ignores the reality that the incumbent usually doesn't have the majority of even his own party not wanting them to seek reelection. I agree with GH that some mental gymnastics are being done here. "Our unpopular guy has the best chance at defeating your unpopular guy and your unpopular guy wants to destroy Democracy so we are supporting Democracy by supporting our unpopular guy." It's an "end justifies the means" argument which is fine. But let's not pretend at the end of the day they're not trying to give the people what they don't want. I remember several months back talking through the nature of “systemic” problems, and how you can get situations where problems arise out of the rules by which people interact, without anybody in particular really being the *cause* per se? This seems like a fantastic example of it. For a primary challenge you need: 1) a candidate who wants to run, who 2) the voters want as president more than the incumbent. We don’t have both of those things. The fact that most people (including me!) think it would be cool if we did doesn’t change that fact, and it’s not necessarily undemocratic that both conditions are not met. Why aren’t they met? A lot of reasons. Qualified candidates don’t really want to stake their careers on challenging an incumbent when it’s easier to just wait and run for an open seat. Voters tend to favor incumbents for a wide variety of reasons. Primary voters also want a candidate who will win, so that incumbent advantage is self-reinforcing in a primary. If by undemocratic you just mean “This system frequently does not produce the outcomes voters would like,” then sure! Some of those outcomes are impossible, some of them are held up by the system unnecessarily for reasons both sinister and mundane. I’m not saying “a better system doesn’t exist,” but on the other hand “The people often don’t get what they want” is just not a very useful observation. Edit: Maybe this would be helpful: if you say “This sucks man, most people don’t want Biden to run again for a variety of good reasons, and yet he’s pretty much guaranteed to be the nominee,” I’m right there with you. But if you then say “If Democrats *really* valued democracy, they would…” I can’t finish the sentence. If you can, that might help me see where you and/or GH are coming from. If Democrats really valued democracy they would hold primary debates, would be a start. A large reason there are no other candidates is because they can expect blowback from the party establishment if they crossed Biden as the preferred candidate. It's somewhat of a chicken or an egg game where you're insinuating the party is not trying to destroy any challengers to Biden, there just doesn't happen to be any. I'm saying there doesn't happen to be any because they know the party would try to destroy them because they've already decided to circle the wagons around Biden. You're from California. Do you think Newsom really wants to be governor for another 4 years instead of running for President? It can't be nearly as fun to govern California now that it's facing a massive budget deficit instead of a massive budget surplus. He also needs to put his Kayfabe with his BFF DeSantis to good use. Do you think voters wouldn't prefer a charismatic polished politician like Newsom compared to bumbling old Joe? I'd say your 2 conditions are well met and the reason Newsom won't run is not because he doesn't want to run but because he doesn't want to ruffle feathers. Although I acknowledge that you do have a catch-all in that not wanting to run to avoid blowback still falls within not wanting to run. I can’t join you in wanting a debate because if one actually happened (especially between Biden and fucking RFK Jr.), I’m confident I would think “This is stupid, why are we doing this.” More generally, “democracy” doesn’t mean being given a time slot by some centralized power to make your case for yourself only in prescribed and centrally-approved ways. I don’t buy the premise that DNC-granted access to a debate stage is all that fundamental to a candidate’s viability, and if it was, that would be a problem no even if they chose to grant it liberally in this case. But I do think you’re inordinately focused on “blowback” from the party (i.e. party leadership) and under-focused on all the other good reasons somebody like Newsom wouldn’t want to take his shot in 2024. There’s a Democratic incumbent! That means there’s already a guy that Democratic voters know and like, a guy who’s going to have an automatic advantage in looking presidential because he *currently is president.* And what do Democrats want in a presidential candidate more than anything else? They want a Democrat who will win! The incumbent has done that before, and voters know about incumbent advantage, too! If you’re someone like Newsom, do you really want voters viewing you as some kind of traitor who was willing to trash your party’s chances at the White House because you’re too ambitious? There’s a lot of different mechanisms making it so that when you’ve got a friendly in the White House, it’s an extremely risky career move to try to take them down. Term limits being what they are, it’s virtually always smarter to just wait. And that’s true even before DNC party leaders start leaving flaming bags of shit on your doorstep. I get how you could interpret it that way. It's more to point out that they don't *really* care about democracy (from my perspective so the question rings disingenuous to me) regardless of our opinions on whether refusing to host debates with a candidate that 20% of Democrats say they want to nominate or disenfranchising NH and Iowa voters is undemocratic (which it seems we're just not going to agree on). EDIT: + Show Spoiler +To address why I mentioned it: I'm saying if the Democrats and their supportive media outlets are going to go all-in on just freezing RFK Jr. (and to a lesser degree Williamson) out by refusing to treat the primary like a serious contest of ideas and candidates (Williamson's support is representative of a substantial part of the party as well) and lean on calling them crazy and the incumbent primary traditions (which in substance are basically newer to politics than Joe Biden is) people outside of the party faithful are going to notice and see the rationalizations for it as flimsy.
If you break it down, it's more than 25% of the party responding to the valid and expressed desire of the majority of the party to put up an alternative to circling the wagons around Biden. Then you have the party leadership responding to that by not holding a real primary with debates where candidates and ideas (granted there's plenty of bad ideas, I wouldn't see myself voting for any of them, and accepting the rationale for the lack of more mainstream candidates at face value)compete for the nomination, while still trying to pretend they are.
Yeah, I’m not sure how much we disagree on at the end of the day. The DNC are, fundamentally, a private organization dedicated to… well, that could get a little complicated to enumerate fully but it’s probably good enough for now to say “electing Democrats” is their main purpose. On a few important aspects of their governance (who they nominate, chiefly) they’ve been forced to introduce some direct voting and due process into their procedures, but otherwise, they seek their goals as best they see fit.
I don’t think that organization should get to decide whether or not a primary challenge happens. And officially, they don’t. Thing is, both parties have enormous persuasive power over their rank and file voters; if the Democratic Party says “we don’t think a primary challenge is a good idea,” most Democrats will believe that’s probably best. If we somehow legally obligated them to hold presidential debates every cycle, it wouldn’t really matter because party leadership would still say “we think it should be the incumbent” and their voters would still mostly say “yeah, okay.” That can be a bit different for, say, a congressional seat, but for president? It’s never not gone that way.
If you want to say more generally “party politics isn’t really democratic, something something manufactured content” fair enough, I think there’s a good argument there. But I don’t think there’s anything hypocritical about the DNC saying “when we don’t have a candidate we hold debates to find the best candidate, when we do have a candidate we just say ‘vote for our candidate.’” It’s pretty consistent with what political parties do and what their nominal purpose has always been. And spending about two seconds looking at RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson, I don’t think going out of their way to publicly explore the notion “maybe we should nominate one of these guys instead?” would help address any of the fundamental problems with the DNC, our democracy, or the American government in general.
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On June 10 2023 01:50 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2023 11:17 ChristianS wrote:@GH: You get how that feels like kind of a cop out, though, right? I mean, fair enough, the undemocratic aspects of the Democratic Party (and US electoral system more generally) are more fundamental and systemic than can be addressed with a change in 2024 primary policies. But you’re the one who came in here touting this specific issue as evidence of their hypocrisy in supposedly valuing democracy! That implies you think something specific they’re doing here is demonstrably undemocratic, in a way that some other policy they could take wouldn’t be. If I ask what that other policy is, and you say “oh, no, the issues are more fundamental and systemic” it kind of feels like you’re not being straight with me, you know? Or, more specifically, it makes it feel like you actually agree that there’s no particular policy here you think the DNC should take instead; your issues with them are unrelated, and you just saw an avenue of attack. I don’t think that’s true – I think you brought it up because you believe they’re being hypocrites somehow. But I’m definitely struggling to see what it is you’re getting at in this specific case. + Show Spoiler +On June 09 2023 05:58 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2023 04:36 ChristianS wrote:On June 09 2023 03:37 BlackJack wrote:On June 08 2023 22:30 ChristianS wrote:On June 08 2023 21:56 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 21:38 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 08 2023 21:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 21:14 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 08 2023 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 08 2023 20:41 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
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Wouldn't something like "I wish the Democrats had had a serious primary (assuming one doesn't occur), but I understand that some potential, up-and-coming candidates might not want to jeopardize their political future by challenging the incumbent and current leader of the party right now - especially when that person is Joe Biden, who has beaten the almost-certain-to-be-Republican-nominee Donald Trump once already" be a reasonable stance to take without needing crazy mental gymnastics? In four years, the field will be clear for new primary candidates anyway. I mean I think those are already pretty ridiculous, but also mostly standard gymnastics for US politics. I'm more referencing how Democrat's primary is going to be observably less democratic than the Republicans who are supposed to be nominating the guy destroying democracy. I think that's just how the incumbent advantage + other candidates thinking about their long-term goals work. We can't force someone to run for president if they don't want to / if they don't think it's worth it / if they want to wait for another election cycle. I don't think it's undemocratic to allow people to not run for president, even if we think other people would do a better job as president than Biden or Trump. While I certainly interpret all that more as structural coercion and corruption built into US institutions/processes, I'm more referring to how they are handling/going to handle RFK Jr.'s campaign. Ah okay. Personally, I think he's a joke of a candidate, but there is still plenty of time to be convinced otherwise. As is to be expected. Thing is, Democratic voters take him more seriously than Republicans take 10 (almost 11) out of 12 of their declared candidates, yet the Republican party (and corporate media) is going to give them + Show Spoiler +(and their supporters, which is basically extended family and people getting paid to help lol) all a more holistically democratic primary than Democrats will give RFK Jr. and ~15-20% of their party voters (or the 50%+ that didn't want Biden to even run). Can you be a bit more specific about what undemocratic measures you think the Dems will take? I doubt they’ll schedule any debates, for instance, but if they claim is “they’re demonstrably more undemocratic than the Republicans” I’d want to see more than that. “Ignore the challenger and pretend there isn’t even a primary” was also the Republican playbook in the 2020 primary (and is pretty standard whenever there’s an incumbent). If your point is just “it’s undemocratic in general how hard it is to unseat an incumbent from the same party as you” that’s maybe true of every elected office in the US. That’s certainly a problem, just not sure if you’re referring to something more specific than that. Being hellbent on reelecting the guy that 70% of the country and 51% of Democrats don't even want to run is pretty inherently undemocratic. Sure it's standard to rally around the incumbent and try to shut out challengers but that also ignores the reality that the incumbent usually doesn't have the majority of even his own party not wanting them to seek reelection. I agree with GH that some mental gymnastics are being done here. "Our unpopular guy has the best chance at defeating your unpopular guy and your unpopular guy wants to destroy Democracy so we are supporting Democracy by supporting our unpopular guy." It's an "end justifies the means" argument which is fine. But let's not pretend at the end of the day they're not trying to give the people what they don't want. I remember several months back talking through the nature of “systemic” problems, and how you can get situations where problems arise out of the rules by which people interact, without anybody in particular really being the *cause* per se? This seems like a fantastic example of it. For a primary challenge you need: 1) a candidate who wants to run, who 2) the voters want as president more than the incumbent. We don’t have both of those things. The fact that most people (including me!) think it would be cool if we did doesn’t change that fact, and it’s not necessarily undemocratic that both conditions are not met. Why aren’t they met? A lot of reasons. Qualified candidates don’t really want to stake their careers on challenging an incumbent when it’s easier to just wait and run for an open seat. Voters tend to favor incumbents for a wide variety of reasons. Primary voters also want a candidate who will win, so that incumbent advantage is self-reinforcing in a primary. If by undemocratic you just mean “This system frequently does not produce the outcomes voters would like,” then sure! Some of those outcomes are impossible, some of them are held up by the system unnecessarily for reasons both sinister and mundane. I’m not saying “a better system doesn’t exist,” but on the other hand “The people often don’t get what they want” is just not a very useful observation. Edit: Maybe this would be helpful: if you say “This sucks man, most people don’t want Biden to run again for a variety of good reasons, and yet he’s pretty much guaranteed to be the nominee,” I’m right there with you. But if you then say “If Democrats *really* valued democracy, they would…” I can’t finish the sentence. If you can, that might help me see where you and/or GH are coming from. If Democrats really valued democracy they would hold primary debates, would be a start. A large reason there are no other candidates is because they can expect blowback from the party establishment if they crossed Biden as the preferred candidate. It's somewhat of a chicken or an egg game where you're insinuating the party is not trying to destroy any challengers to Biden, there just doesn't happen to be any. I'm saying there doesn't happen to be any because they know the party would try to destroy them because they've already decided to circle the wagons around Biden. You're from California. Do you think Newsom really wants to be governor for another 4 years instead of running for President? It can't be nearly as fun to govern California now that it's facing a massive budget deficit instead of a massive budget surplus. He also needs to put his Kayfabe with his BFF DeSantis to good use. Do you think voters wouldn't prefer a charismatic polished politician like Newsom compared to bumbling old Joe? I'd say your 2 conditions are well met and the reason Newsom won't run is not because he doesn't want to run but because he doesn't want to ruffle feathers. Although I acknowledge that you do have a catch-all in that not wanting to run to avoid blowback still falls within not wanting to run. I can’t join you in wanting a debate because if one actually happened (especially between Biden and fucking RFK Jr.), I’m confident I would think “This is stupid, why are we doing this.” More generally, “democracy” doesn’t mean being given a time slot by some centralized power to make your case for yourself only in prescribed and centrally-approved ways. I don’t buy the premise that DNC-granted access to a debate stage is all that fundamental to a candidate’s viability, and if it was, that would be a problem no even if they chose to grant it liberally in this case. But I do think you’re inordinately focused on “blowback” from the party (i.e. party leadership) and under-focused on all the other good reasons somebody like Newsom wouldn’t want to take his shot in 2024. There’s a Democratic incumbent! That means there’s already a guy that Democratic voters know and like, a guy who’s going to have an automatic advantage in looking presidential because he *currently is president.* And what do Democrats want in a presidential candidate more than anything else? They want a Democrat who will win! The incumbent has done that before, and voters know about incumbent advantage, too! If you’re someone like Newsom, do you really want voters viewing you as some kind of traitor who was willing to trash your party’s chances at the White House because you’re too ambitious? There’s a lot of different mechanisms making it so that when you’ve got a friendly in the White House, it’s an extremely risky career move to try to take them down. Term limits being what they are, it’s virtually always smarter to just wait. And that’s true even before DNC party leaders start leaving flaming bags of shit on your doorstep. I get how you could interpret it that way. It's more to point out that they don't *really* care about democracy (from my perspective so the question rings disingenuous to me) regardless of our opinions on whether refusing to host debates with a candidate that 20% of Democrats say they want to nominate or disenfranchising NH and Iowa voters is undemocratic (which it seems we're just not going to agree on). EDIT: + Show Spoiler +To address why I mentioned it: I'm saying if the Democrats and their supportive media outlets are going to go all-in on just freezing RFK Jr. (and to a lesser degree Williamson) out by refusing to treat the primary like a serious contest of ideas and candidates (Williamson's support is representative of a substantial part of the party as well) and lean on calling them crazy and the incumbent primary traditions (which in substance are basically newer to politics than Joe Biden is) people outside of the party faithful are going to notice and see the rationalizations for it as flimsy.
If you break it down, it's more than 25% of the party responding to the valid and expressed desire of the majority of the party to put up an alternative to circling the wagons around Biden. Then you have the party leadership responding to that by not holding a real primary with debates where candidates and ideas (granted there's plenty of bad ideas, I wouldn't see myself voting for any of them, and accepting the rationale for the lack of more mainstream candidates at face value)compete for the nomination, while still trying to pretend they are.
CS does a fruitless endeavor humoring you. Every time you post about the Ds, it just looks like you're reaching for any tiny thing to hate them for. You're not offering anything besides shallow critiques and trying to force something to be an issue when it really isn't.
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As an outsider its funny reading complaints about how primaries are not democratic enough when US parties are massively more open and democratic about choosing their leader then any examples I know. Including other 2 party systems.
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On June 10 2023 07:46 Gorsameth wrote:
As an outsider its funny reading complaints about how primaries are not democratic enough when US parties are massively more open and democratic about choosing their leader then any examples I know. Including other 2 party systems.
The goal isn't to be better than worse things. The goal is to build the best system of government we can. And parties have unique control over how they do things internally, so they have an opportunity to make changes to how they run their own elections. It could be significantly better, but there are people in power who prefer not to make improvements.`
I think its reasonable to frame that as unacceptable
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On June 10 2023 07:46 Gorsameth wrote:
As an outsider its funny reading complaints about how primaries are not democratic enough when US parties are massively more open and democratic about choosing their leader then any examples I know. Including other 2 party systems.
If with "other two-party systems" you mean the UK, I'm not sure how much they care about direct democracy in the first place. They have a king and no constitution, and the whole thing hangs together by tradition and juris prudence. The US had a revolution to get away from that.
In a multi-party system it's far less important how parties choose who will be their leader, because if you don't agree, you have a plethora of other parties to vote for with somewhat similar but not identical ideas. Spain used to be a 2-party system, and the system does favor few parties, but even in Spain, there have always been a minority of regional parties in the parliament, and the growth of Ciudadanos set off an explosion of other national parties, such that it seems unlikely any single party will win an absolute majority in the next election, just as they didn't in the previous two elections. The left is split among Sumar-Podemos and PSOE, and the right is split among Ciudadanos, PP and Vox. And then there are all the regional parties that only run in a single state, but all together also take a not insignificant number of seats.
The Netherlands probably has a problem where the political fracturing has gone too far, and there are too many egos and ideas flying around to ever form a coherent coalition.
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On June 10 2023 06:23 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2023 06:16 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:On June 10 2023 05:46 Gorsameth wrote:On June 10 2023 05:21 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Was treason mentioned? (sorry, running around ragged, no time atm to check the pdf) This is the document case, not jan 6th so treason isn't a thing unless they could prove he gave 'enemies' of the US access to them. Shit. That quick excerpt above kind of suggests he was trying to set something up. This sounds like an open and shut case really. But he's rich and a former president. Hopes are low. Good ammo for his opponents to keep him from running or being elected. Won't stop the grift though It sure does, but suggesting and proving are very different things. And I when aiming for someone as big as a former President you don't want to miss. But even being rich and 'powerful' I don't see him getting out of most of these charges. Him taking the documents and refusing to return them seems very open and shut based on all the evidence about boxes being moved around.
Yeah the thing is that we've actually known Trump to have done this and he's basically bragged about it at every chance. Except he's not handing the classfied papers to foreign individuals like some sort of traitor but probably just flexing papers for flexing sake to Florida's dentists or plastic surgeons who visit his club.
It seems pretty open and shut based off what we already know publically, because Trump has been super open about flexing his time as president for personal ego-related gain. Pence and Biden also did similar things in that they took some classified papers with them probably as mementos or had them shuffled with their other personal belongings but they handed them back the minute they were asked to return said sensitive information back...because they're not huge ego-goblins.
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It is very likely some of the documents he refused to return, which we know are the particularly top secret ones regarding nuclear stuff, are no longer in his possession. If he sold them, traded them, or somehow lost track of them, it would explain why him and his team took the approach they did.
There was a point in all this when it was possible he could avoid an indictment altogether by delaying, stonewalling, and other similar methods of preventing the legal system from progressing. But as that possibility vanished, still not returning the documents paints a very grim picture IMO.
When it became clear Trump was extremely likely to end up in prison, anyone in his position would have done all they could to return the documents, beg for forgiveness, and have a chance at avoiding prison. For him and his team not to have done that, when it is clearly the best idea, shows he was not able to. He just straight up doesn't have those documents anymore.
The real goal was to prevent the US government from realizing he doesn't even have the documents anymore. They are in enemy hands now. Basically the worst possible case scenario.
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The most just result would be for a juror to nullify the case and force a mistrial, and then for another juror to do the same when they retry. They brought the case in south Florida rather than DC, so there's a chance. Garland was clearly exercising prosecutorial discretion for a long time, but then when he turned it over to a special counsel, that meant he unleashed a pitbull with instructions to destroy everything in its path. Not worth it to tear the country apart when the substantive crime is that a former commander in chief had documents with national defense info. Not when Hillary's private email server with classified docs, from which she unilaterally deleted half of the content, wasn't prosecuted on the basis of prosecutorial discretion. It's considered so insignificant that it's just a silly meme. Yet she served up the business of the secretary of state to nation state hackers on a silver platter.
The 2020 election & Jan 6 cases are the only justified indictments of Trump. The rest is just bloodthirsty democrats who are blinded by their passions around trump.
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Northern Ireland23756 Posts
On June 11 2023 15:31 King_Charles_III wrote:
The most just result would be for a juror to nullify the case and force a mistrial, and then for another juror to do the same when they retry. They brought the case in south Florida rather than DC, so there's a chance. Garland was clearly exercising prosecutorial discretion for a long time, but then when he turned it over to a special counsel, that meant he unleashed a pitbull with instructions to destroy everything in its path. Not worth it to tear the country apart when the substantive crime is that a former commander in chief had documents with national defense info. Not when Hillary's private email server with classified docs, from which she unilaterally deleted half of the content, wasn't prosecuted on the basis of prosecutorial discretion. It's considered so insignificant that it's just a silly meme. Yet she served up the business of the secretary of state to nation state hackers on a silver platter.
The 2020 election & Jan 6 cases are the only justified indictments of Trump. The rest is just bloodthirsty democrats who are blinded by their passions around trump.
I’m not sure how much more cut snd dry (allegedly) you can get that ‘do you have secret documents you’re not meant to have?’ ‘Did you lie and said you returned everything?’
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EPT
