Biden prepping to endorse sweeping changes to Supreme Court

Judges should maintain no conflicts of interest (this is the proper standard), but now (to some) it has shifted to allowing judges to accept millions in gifts unless it can be conclusively proven that a judge reversed a decision based on those gifts.

This normalization of corrupt judges is what we call lowering the bar to an unacceptable level (or acceptable for some).

 

Can you find a lower bar?

 

How would you even be able to say if it was that or not? What's fixing an election? Republicans already do that. Less polling stations in urban areas, less hours, get rid of mail in ballots, require IDs, discard ballots, purge voter rolls, try to block valid ballots being counted, and more and more.

What do you think a fixed sham election is?

 

None of those things.

Where you (as a legal voter) are not allowed to vote for your candidate of choice, or your vote is not counted.

 

Violations of democratic norms, such as asking the AG to fire prosecutors who investigate the POTUS, scheming fake/alternate electors to overturn the election, convincing thousands on Jan 6 to ransack the House to delay the certification, and so on, are now rationalized as acceptable and unaccountable. I remember when Mitch McConnell gave a speech that Trump is very guilty, but that the Senate cannot convict a private citizen, though that's okay, because former POTUS are not immune from the criminal justice system. Well, the SCOTUS answered that. POTUS direction to staff to illegally scheme to overturn the election result is immune, even as a private citizen. (Thomas also took the opportunity to give Cannon the legal tool to kill the mishandling of confidential material case). This is what violations of democratic norms look like. Saddam Hussein's election style is such a laughable low bar. These are stepping stones to America's new style of "democracy," one that is the Court has now participated in damaging.

(about those constitutional guardrails...)

Link
McConnell on Impeachment: “Disgraceful Dereliction” Cannot Lead Senate to “Defy Our Own Constitutional Guardrails”​

“In one light, it certainly does seem counterintuitive that an officeholder can elude Senate conviction by resignation or expiration of term.

“But this just underscores that impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice.

“Impeachment, conviction, and removal are a specific intra-governmental safety valve. It is not the criminal justice system, where individual accountability is the paramount goal.

“Indeed, Justice Story specifically reminded that while former officials were not eligible for impeachment or conviction, they were “still liable to be tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice.”

“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.​

 

The bar for lawyers is always lower...

 

I am not looking for ambiguity. If Trump wins in 2024, there is a close election in 2028 (say one state is the linchpin like in 2000), and people maintain that the final officially accepted result is not what really happened (again, like in 2000), I don't want any argument. There have to be clear terms to the bet, and I laid out what they are. No one is forcing anyone to accept. If you think the bar is too low, don't accept the bet.

 

Ok, so you believe that if an election is fixed so that one candidate is guaranteed to win - those in power do what they have to for that result. Find some legal loophole or means to throw out ballots - that's still a democracy?

Russia is a democracy by your definition, which is laughable.

 

The bar for this lawyer better have some Irish whiskey tbh

 

I don't think your scenario fits what I said, which was that you (i.e. eligible voters) need to be able to vote for whomever you choose and that your vote needs to be counted. Requiring ID to vote, having fewer polling places, eliminating mail in voting, purging ineligible voters from the rolls, and allowing challenges to possibly invalid ballots do not constitute a sham election.

 

Some election official decides to declare all ballots from a heavily democratic district as "invalid" for some made up reason. That tips an election. To you, it's perfectly fine as you trust that official, even if that official is only doing it to change the result of the election. So to you - democracy when in reality it's not.

 

Part of the Calvinball bullshit game that these dictatorship guys play is to absolutely claim that they are the most democratic people on earth while rigging everything in their favor - e.g., the German Democratic Republic, the People's Republic of China, Orban's Hungary, DeSantis' Florida and Putin's Russia which is absolutely fixated on having sham elections every five seconds.

And of course, the intellectual godfathers of the modern alt right movement - Nazi Germany was entirely set up under the Weimar constitution and claimed to be in technical compliance with it up until the bitter end.

 

As that explicitly does not meet the criteria I laid out, it is non-responsive to what I said. What if instead 2,000 ballots are declared invalid because they don't have a signature on the mail in envelope (and that is a requirement to be a valid ballot in that state) and counting or not counting them swings the election? Is that a valid democracy? It all depends on the specifics. No, a sham election is not a valid democracy. Yes, there are frequent election lawsuits in US elections. Is the US a valid democracy?

 

You are dodging the fundamental question - I am not talking about lawsuits or valid challenges or even challenges. I'm talking about fixing elections.

President instructs officials to throw out enough ballots in the rights states to get the results he wants. Said election officials claim these were invalid ballots to placate the public.

Is that a democracy?

 

I already said that knowingly throwing out valid ballots would not qualify as a real election, so I don't know how I am dodging that question.

I don't know how I could be more explicit than that.

 

So you do know that Trump tried to do exactly that and nearly got away with it?

 

Yet somehow Biden got 81 million votes. The most ever and mostly mail ins.

81 million votes LMAO

Nobody should turn in their vote counts until Fulton/Maricopa/Pittsburgh/Philly/Detroit/Minneapolis turn their vote counts in.

 

There's also nearly 170 million registered voters. The most ever!!!

I guess Trump should have just declared himself the winner by fiat and refuse to leave even though he had no proof.

Oh wait, he did.

And I voted by mail in, I guess my vote should not have counted by your logic.

 

He did and until Georgia, Pennsylvania etc .... stopped counting votes so they could figure out how many votes they needed to win, he was winning. COVID opened the door for widespread cheating. Mail in voting. SMH, people gave up their lives for the right to vote and people other than military and the elderly should have to get off over the couch and go to the polls if they want to vote.