Destroying democracy in order to save it
Published by marco on
A while back, I read the article Colorado Lawsuit’s Strategy for Keeping Trump Off Ballot Is Starting to Spread by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post), which is about subverting democracy in exactly the ways that the author fears that Trump would.
These people are rudderless, adrift. They have no sense or irony, no morality, and no self-awareness. It makes them so stupid. This mess is just embarrassing for everyone involved.
This gleeful horseshit where people are delighted that they’ve found some old clause of some document that seems to kind of maybe apply to Donald Trump if you take all of the allegations at face value—while reveling in the fact that the article you’ve found applies without a conviction, so you don’t have to bother with the pesky interference of a justice system—has got to stop.
These people don’t realize that their fervor in preventing what they deem to be the greatest threat to democracy ends up making them do things or support things or say things that make them actually a much-greater one. If you think your job is to stop Donald Trump from being elected, then do it by finding an alternative that people find more appealing, not by shoving a turd sandwich in their mouths and ordering them to chew.
What the hell, people? You’re perfectly happy doing something so anti-democratic in order to get your way and claim that you’re “protecting democracy”. If that’s the best you’ve got, then please shut up and sit down while the adults hash this one out for you.
If you’re interested in more detail, then the article Donald Trump Should be on the Ballot and Should Lose by Steven Calabresi (Reason) talks about how the constitutional angle is almost certainly a non-starter.
“[…] the University of Pennsylvania Law Review law review article by William Baude and Michael Paulsen, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, which argues that former President Trump is disqualified from running again for President. A draft law review article taking issue with Baude and Paulsen, co-written by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tilman, entitled Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen makes a good case that what happened on January 6, 2021 was not an “insurrection” and that the Baude/Paulsen reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong. I think Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman are more likely right than not. At a minimum, this is a very muddled area of constitutional law, and it would set a bad precedent for American politics to not list a former president’s name on election ballots given the confused state of the law surrounding Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Anyway, this was a couple of months back, and I haven’t heard anything about keeping Trump off the ballot anywhere. I just hear about how he’s polling much better than all of the other Republican candidates combines—and polls much better than Joe Biden.
Instead of keeping Trump off the ballot, I’ve heard that the remaining Koch brothers are backing Nikki Haley—who’s even more cuckoo for cocoa puffs than Trump. It wouldn’t matter if she ended up being the Republican candidate. Just like there is half a country full of people who would never vote for Trump, there’s half who would never, ever, ever vote for Biden.
Biden’s a shit sandwich. Even his own party hates him. God knows why they’re running him, but they are.
You know the New Hampshire primary? The first one in the nation, ever election? Yeah, that one. Well, the DNC didn’t like Biden’s chances there, so they pulled him off the ballot in the Granite State. They then announced that the first state to vote next year would be South Carolina, which loves Biden for whatever reason.
Funny story: some other dude’s slated to win the Democratic primary in New Hampshire—because the Granite State does not like to be told what to do. Now the DNC is backpedaling and, since it’s too late to add Biden to the ballot, they’re running a write-in campaign for Biden in NH. I am not kidding.[1]
It’s almost like the Democrats are trying to let Trump win.
Maybe they feel sorry for having stolen the election in 2020.[2]
[1] See, e.g., Biden supporters’ New Hampshire write-in campaign risks underscoring the president’s vulnerability (NBC News)↩
[2]
This footnote is for,
- the irony-challenged
- those who are not strong native readers of English
- those who don’t know me or my politics
For the record: I do not believe that the election was more crooked in 2020 than in any other year. I think both parties work very hard to steal every election, with varying rates of success. It is technically true that the Democrats stole the election in 2020, but that is true of nearly every election in the U.S.
Bush stole it in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats spent years bitching about having had the election stolen by Trump in 2016, until they segued into the Russiagate farce. Trump and his coterie of hangers-on are bitching about it having been stolen in 2020.
They’re all right, but that’s how it works. Election theft is baked in.
There is so much gerrymandering, obscene campaign contributions, and voter-disenfranchisement … how could you think these elections weren’t stolen? Or do you still believe that the U.S. has an actual, functioning democracy?
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