GhostofJohnMuir posted:

didn't see this posted, the rumors are true, and weisselberg has pled guilty to perjury for his testimony in deposition and the civil trial. ag is suggesting five months in jail. really curious how this might effect civil trial given enrogon's interest in the subject before the penalty judgement

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/ex-trump-cfo-weisselberg-plead-guilty-perjury-civil-fraud-case-rcna141612

Mokelumne Trekka posted:

A good question because a "sufficiently captured Congress" would merely require 50 Senators willing to ban a candidate if the the nuclear option is used, plus a House majority. Someone may need to help me here if this is incorrect.

There is little reason to not expect the nuclear option being used frequently in the future.

haveblue posted:

Passing a bill to the effect of "you, specifically, are not allowed to be president" would be a bill of attainder and thus not allowed*. It would have to take the form of nationwide standards for disqualification, probably based on conviction for a list of specific crimes that cause amendment 14 section 3 to apply








*assuming the courts are still impartially applying the constitution to their decisions at this point

Mokelumne Trekka posted:

A good question because a "sufficiently captured Congress" would merely require 50 Senators willing to ban a candidate if the the nuclear option is used, plus a House majority. Someone may need to help me here if this is incorrect.

There is little reason to not expect the nuclear option being used frequently in the future.

selec posted:

They don’t pay attention to them. Polling is good for rhetorical purposes, but popular preference doesn’t affect policy.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...4D4893B382B992B

DarkHorse posted:

Conversely, what's stopping a sufficiently captured and motivated Congress from deciding that their opponents have engaged in insurrection (by e.g. voting for the wrong party)?

BigglesSWE posted:

An interesting wrinkle in that regard is Trump himself bragging about his great work overturning it (meanwhile claiming, somehow, that everyone loved it and wanted it gone). On the one hand you’d think that’d convince people to blame the idiot, on the other hand, the guy is a known liar to an almost stupendous degree, so if you truly don’t know the influence he’s had on the SCOTUS of the past few years, but you know he’s a liar…

DarkHorse posted:

Forgot about bills of attainder, but how the gently caress does this SCOTUS ruling jive with that policy? Who the hell decides that someone has engaged in insurrection then?

Conversely, what's stopping a sufficiently captured and motivated Congress from deciding that their opponents have engaged in insurrection (by e.g. voting for the wrong party)?

Yeah that's what I was thinking too

KillHour posted:

Interesting paper. I didn't have time to read it deeply, but I agree with the overall assertion that interest groups and economic/political "elites" have an outsized influence on actual policy, but I do still think that politicians pay attention to polls, and populism certainly has an effect on politics, especially in the long term.

Even if you're just making a point, answering a poll with 1000 respondents means you get to swing the outcome 0.2% vs someone who answers the opposite of you. That's outsized and substantial compared to a single Tweet, even if the poll itself isn't going to change the world.

gregday posted:

Kind of feeling like this whole "checks and balances" thing was always a load of horseshit.

Main Paineframe posted:

Congress would pass a law saying that "under conditions A and B, entity C could initiate proceedings following procedures D to officially disqualify the person".

The power to disqualify belongs to Congress, but that doesn't mean that only Congress can disqualify. Congress can pass a law delegating that disqualification power to some official or organization, to be used under a set of conditions and rules delineated by Congress. Congress doesn't have to directly initiate and carry out each and every enforcement action itself, it can pass a law delegating that enforcement power to someone else. It's just that they have to explicitly pass a law that explicitly does that; the current Court isn't going to simply invent an implicit grant out of thin air for the purposes of convenience.

That study is, unfortunately, not terribly reliable. It's highly disputed and has faced numerous rebuttals, due to substantial methodological issues in the paper (many of which derived the fact that the paper defined "economic elites" as people with an income above $160k and "average citizens" as people with an income below $160k).

Other scientists who reanalyzed their data with a somewhat more useful division of categories found that median-income Americans got their way just as often as upper-income Americans did, at least when they disagree on issues (which they often didn't). The actual losers were the extremely poor, who exerted almost no political influence at all and also were far more likely to disagree with both median-income Americans and upper-income Americans.

selec posted:

Can you link to any of this

quote:

In a recent, widely referenced article, Gilens and Page (2014) compare the influence of upper and middle-income citizens and find that the preferences of the former are all that matter for policy representation. Here, we reconsider that work, examining just how often the rich win, and the kinds of policies they get. We find that the rich and middle agree more than 90 percent of the time, and when they disagree, the rich win only a little more often than the middle, specifically, 53 percent of the time. Even when the rich win, the resulting policies do not lean systematically in a conservative (or liberal) direction. Further analyses incorporating the preferences of the poorest Americans produce similar results: we find only slightly greater responsiveness to wealthier citizens. It may be that these differences have substantial consequences for policy and citizens, particularly as they cumulate over time; it also may be that the differences do not matter very much, and that other divisions in the electorate or other political actors are more relevant for inequalities in policy representation in the United States.

quote:

In a well-publicized study, Gilens and Page argue that economic elites and business interest groups exert strong influence on US government policy while average citizens have virtually no influence at all. Their conclusions are drawn from a model which is said to reveal the causal impact of each group’s preferences. It is shown here that the test on which the original study is based is prone to underestimating the impact of citizens at the 50th income percentile by a wide margin. In addition, descriptive analysis of the authors’ dataset reveals that average Americans have received their preferred policy outcome roughly as often as elites have when the two groups have disagreed with each other. Evidence that average citizens are effectively ignored by the policy process may not be as strong as is suggested by the authors.

The Artificial Kid posted:

Given that previous uses of the 14th didn’t require an act of congress, and given that Trump’s status as an insurrectionist was determined as a matter of fact by the lower courts why, other than cowardice and malice, could the Supreme Court not have determined that Trump was an insurrectionist under the 14th amendment?

Main Paineframe posted:

Sure.

The Supreme Court decision explaining in detail how they think the enforcement power constitutionally works is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf

As for the Giles/Page study, here's a couple of rebuttal papers that re-analyzed their data, covered the various methodological issues, and looked at how the results changed with a slightly more sane class divide:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160606165216/https://jabranham.com/papers/MPSA-when-do-the-rich-win.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20160220061153/https://rap.sagepub.com/content/2/4/2053168015608896

They're the actual papers, not journalist-written summaries, so they're a bit wordy and mired in statistical details, but the abstracts are digestible enough:



(these are different studies from authors who independently reanalyzed the Giles/Page data in different ways, so their analysis and conclusion are both going to be somewhat different, but they both identified similar weaknesses in the original Giles/Page study and found that their own results substantially contradicted what Giles and Page found).

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The argument is that the state courts should never have had jurisdiction to make the factual determination. I'm not happy about that but can see the argument.

The greater shame is that they dillydaddled on the immunity case. It's wholly meritless and they could have ruled inside a week if they wanted to; they have before, in Bush v. Gore.

The Artificial Kid posted:

Given that previous uses of the 14th didn’t require an act of congress, and given that Trump’s status as an insurrectionist was determined as a matter of fact by the lower courts why, other than cowardice and malice, could the Supreme Court not have determined that Trump was an insurrectionist under the 14th amendment?

mdemone posted:

Hell I even agree with the first point. You'd have states getting up to dumb nonsense now that the barn door is open.

You're right about immunity though. It's a stain upon the institution that they are hearing the case.

Xiahou Dun posted:

I wouldn’t use that line of attack because there isn’t a problem with them hearing the case necessarily. It’s a (silly but) novel question about the US Constitution and they’re the US Supreme Court. It makes complete sense that they’d want to hear it.

The problem is that there were/are ways they could’ve done that without giving Trump his delay. If, for example, they’d taken the case in December and were already done (with a sane ruling), I don’t think anyone here would object.

Xiahou Dun posted:

I wouldn’t use that line of attack because there isn’t a problem with them hearing the case necessarily. It’s a (silly but) novel question about the US Constitution and they’re the US Supreme Court. It makes complete sense that they’d want to hear it.

The problem is that there were/are ways they could’ve done that without giving Trump his delay. If, for example, they’d taken the case in December and were already done (with a sane ruling), I don’t think anyone here would object.

DarkHorse posted:

Super Tuesday, when over a third of all major party delegates are decided, is tomorrow. By taking this case SCOTUS has denied the Republicans party and the American people from having a candidate other than Trump for the RNC. It dramatically raises the stakes of their ruling, so if they don't decide quickly they will almost certainly not decide until after the election, which effectively puts their thumb on the scale for Trump's benefit even if they ultimately rule against his batshit argument.

Pillowpants posted:

Is it time to start freaking out yet? The courts have failed us and we are relying on Americans to do the right thing?

Angry_Ed posted:

This would only matter if the Republicans wanted a different candidate. They don't.

Pillowpants posted:

Is it time to start freaking out yet? The courts have failed us and we are relying on Americans to do the right thing?

Pillowpants posted:

Is it time to start freaking out yet? The courts have failed us and we are relying on Americans to do the right thing?

Keisari posted:

I wish Churchill was still with us.

Crows Turn Off posted:

The general voter is mostly unaware of actual policies or statements by candidates.

For example, most people have no idea Trump says he is going to be a dictator:
https://newrepublic.com/article/179548/poll-voters-trump-dictator-threats

I think with Trump being out of the view of the public mostly for a while, people have forgotten how loving terrible he is.

But it can't stay that way forever, once he is campaigning and being public, hopefully people will be tired of him again.

The Democrats need to ensure people actually hear about these things, though.

Crows Turn Off posted:

The Democrats need to ensure people actually hear about these things, though.

Platonicsolid posted:

I want to say that's the ad that cuts itself, but knowing how partisanship colors everything, greater awareness will just increase Republican approval of fascism.

mobby_6kl posted:

On the other hand you have dems mad at Biden for (mostly) bullshit reasons.

mobby_6kl posted:

To keep this on-topic, this is why there should be laws to protect democracy against dictators and not just rely on trust that the minority won't ever elect happily elect one.

Cimber posted:

Oh! Right! Democratic messaging! That'll save us!



_{We're doomed}

Tesseraction posted:

Not sure the guy who wanted to re-arm the Nazis to march on Stalingrad is the one you want to want back of the three from Yalta.

Platonicsolid posted:

Keisari posted:

I tried to reference the quote "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else" that he allegedly said.

Ither posted:

Is there a reason why the octahedron is missing from your avatar picture?

Keisari posted:

I tried to reference the quote "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else" that he allegedly said.