Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to remove Trump from California ballot

Newsom's about face on policies this last year as he ramps up his run for presidency is fucking disgusting. Between him and fetterman we're learning that even 'the good ones' will throw their constituents to the wolves when power and money are involved.

Because holding famous, rich important people accountable for their actions would jeopardize the system. It needs that lack of accountability to function in a way that only benefits the wealthy.

I changed that a little. I think capitalism is pretty shitty, but it could do better for many people if the United States government stopped letting rich people bend and often outright break the law.

It does say he's not eligible and the feds won't do it, now it's left up to the states.

I would argue that the constitution not only recommends Trump be removed from the ballot. It almost requires it.

The constitution explicitly states that people like Trump who participated in an insurrection are ineligible for office. This is similar to other requirements for the office. For example, you must be a natural citizen over 35 years old, etc.

Constitutionally, each state chooses how to run their own elections. However, that freedom does not give them the power to go against the other parts of the constitution.

Traditionally, states will not put people on presidential ballots who do not meet the requirements to be president.

But do they have to do that? I would argue that the case with Trump proves that, going forward, they do have to exclude ineligible candidates for president. Because Trump is the first ineligible candidate who is leading in polls.

Every state election he might win is a constitutional crisis. Each state has the duty to follow the Constitution and ensure that Trump doesn't win the presidency. The current method for doing this action is removing him from the ballot.

part of the problem here is that the constitution doesn’t actually recommend removing people from ballots.

Why would anyone keep an ineligible candidate's name on the ballot?

True. Down ballot it would make a difference. Local govts could see substantial improvements.

Treating Trump with any sort of legitimacy is how we got here. We have laws designed exactly for him. He shouldn't go on the ballot. The right is only emboldened because they're constantly getting away with fucking everything, skirting the lines of the law if not outright breaking them. We should entertain him being on the ballot like we'd entertain someone who's 20 or wasn't born in the country – it's absurd.

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I absolutely will not fuck any of them. I hope they all acquire a disease of the genitals that can only be cured with lye and sandpaper.

That's a fairly long post that completely missed the point of what I said while needlessly parsing data that is mostly immaterial to the thesis.

The amount of time people like you spend trying to interpret polling data to support an unrealistic belief that things aren't as bad as they seem then having the audacity to strike a pikachu-face as the extreme right continues to expand and the country regresses is embarrassing.

You should go into politics.

While I absolutely see your point, and am even on the fence about it myself, I also see Trump as a huge threat to the country and the world. He's made his intentions pretty well known at this time what he plans to do in his second term, and it's basically dismantle everything. Couple that with the fact that he was probably only a few key people away from creating a constitutional crisis on Jan 6th, and using that as a reason to retain power. If he purges most of the government and puts in people loyal to him rather than the COTUS, it could go very bad for this country.

Additionally, it appears that nothing can convince his cultists that he is a bad person. It's all out in the open: we have him bragging on tape to mishandling classified information (while not all that long ago they were chanting that a political opponent should be locked up for just that), we have him on tape - and other evidence - of pressuring an election official to overturn an election he lost, we have him - in violation of the law - withholding money appropriate by congress and then secretly calling the recipient of that aid and basically pressuring him into opening an investigation into a political rival.

I just don't get how you could possibly convince these people that he is a bad person when we have so much blatant shit, right in front of us, indicating how bad he is and that only makes him more popular. They live in a bubble where penetrating it is impossible, or they are simply fascists who want this guy to be their god-emperor so it actually part of the plan.

The COTUS is designed to protect us from these types of people. . .and if we aren't going to use when it's so clearly appropriate, and just leave it up to chance of the misinformed public, what's the point of it at all?

One thing which keeps sticking with me that was mentioned on another thread that I agree with, is precedence. If blue/liberal states start trying to remove him from their ballots, what's going to stop the red/conservative states from trying to do the same for Biden?

It may just keep escalating to a larger bickering match between the states akin to children fighting over what channel to watch.

It would take an act of Congress to alter the Judicial Act of 1969, which sets the current size of the Supreme Court.

Democrats consider the preservation of the filibuster to be more important.

Yes I fear it is just misleading hope. Another thread is hoping Dean Phillips can upset a repeat of 2020 Biden v Trump. Who knows, we'll see.

At least Breyer was replaced by Jackson. The Senate is as much to blame as well.

He'll just say theyre RINOs that are agents of the democrats.

Because the Colorado ruling was based on an analysis and interpretation of the US Constitution. SCOTUS is the court of last resort in such matters.

(Edit: "Fascists don't care" part is 100% accurate. That's more than anything what defines fascists, the in-group and the winning being more important than any particular set of laws or norms. "The only way to stop them" is what I think is inaccurate.)

I don't think this is accurate. Trump's a fascist, and he came to power already in the first place, and we survived (so far).

How Democracies Die goes into this in quite a bit of detail with historical examples. Basically my takeaway from it is that the key factors are:

1. Active resistance from within the conservative establishment that got hijacked by the fascists (Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney and etc)
2. The non-fascists taking extraordinary care to preserve democratic norms with their own conduct, not just escalating in kind which leads to a no-holds-barred shit show which the fascists are usually equipped to win.

Point #2 is why I say this is a bad idea.

I'm not saying there's any ambiguity about their legal right to kick him off the ballot. I'm saying it's a very bad idea for them to do so.

Pop quiz by way of example: Does Biden have the legal right to expand the Supreme Court to 100 justices?

Well then, why doesn't he? It'd sure make issues like abortion rights way easier.

Yeah. You can't run a democratic country with 40% of the country thinking the system is rigged against them and wanting to just burn the whole thing down. Kicking Trump off the ballot (in any state, battleground or not) just turns that burner up by that much more.

That's not to say it's as simple as "keep him on the ballot, let him win, end of democracy, o well we tried." I think a much more concerted government effort to combat the propaganda systems (Fox News, all its new runty media children, AM talk radio, and all the new totally-fact-free internet political propaganda) that got us to this place in the first place would be good. I think a more modernized approach to communicating with the electorate by the government would be good. I think younger people in politics instead of just the same old geriatric crew would be great. I think fixing some of the very real neglect that both parties have given to the working class since about 1980 would be good. Basically, fixing the underlying issues that led to people loving Trump in the first place. For as much of a big bag of human shit as he is, there's a reason he was able to come in and scoop up so many votes. Leaving the conditions in place but removing him from the ballot to inflame the fascism is like the worst of all possible worlds.

Yeah. They won't at all understand that it's legit to keep him off the ballot. They already think the election was stolen in plain sight; they'll just assume this is the next undemocratic authoritarian trick.

Of course putting him in prison will also radicalize his base and give him something to play victim about, but oh well. It's more effective by a lot, and more clearly within democratic norms we're trying to preserve by a lot.