volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@christianschwaegerl keep in mind that the minority dissent was not accepted by the Court, which is why it was a dissent.

You can't put too much stake in those claims on their face, as the Court didn't accept them as correct.

@panamared27401 SCOTUS didn't say states can't interfere in federal elections.

It said that states can't use this federal claim without federal statute as the basis for acting.

States can still interfere, just not this way.

@christianschwaegerl only with regard to state ballot access.

A state cannot act based on this federal claim without federal authorization, but that doesn't mean the amendment can't come up in many different federal contexts.

For example, if Trump takes office and attempts to issue any order at all, that order could be challenged by the one impacted by it as invalid since the 14th says that Trump can't be president.

Or, the 14th still provides cover for the normal procedures to find the presidency vacant, triggering the normal line of succession.

This ruling doesn't nullify the 14th. It just limits what states can do.

@gkmizuno but the court did not say that the Constitution can only be enforced by a law signed by Congress.

What it said was much narrower, much more specific.

What it said was that state actors can't use this particular constitutional provision as basis for action against a candidate without federal authority.

The Constitution can be enforced in many ways with and without congressional legislation, it's just that states can't use this federal claim in their election systems.

It's not a paradox, it's a detail of what the court said is the constitutional design.

@Geoff

*Edit: Well, see my last paragraph below because what you're asking is a complicated question based on perception 🙂*

Yes, something a lot of people misunderstand: by law the EC counting is not at all ratification. It is a counting of ballots including processes for questioning ballots, so it can't be ratification because there was not yet a count to ratify.

In other words, despite what so many say, there was not an election for congress to recognize or certify or whatever word you want to use because they were in the process of going through the election. It had not happened yet.

One reason this is really important is because they were going through the process that was there specifically to avoid something like the January 6th riot, but because so many were denying that the process existed, many rioters ended up misled as to what was going on.

It's akin to somebody attacking someone else when they feel wronged because they were told that courts didn't exist so that option wasn't there for them.

Or, well this is complicated, on the other hand maybe you are absolutely right that the rioters were trying to prevent ratification, which is a shame because ratification wasn't actually happening, they were trying to prevent something that wasn't real in the first place.

@RejoinEU

@wjmaggos I think that the AT protocol is MORE decentralized, not less, because of that: it decentralizes past servers/ instances, so that there's less server to server interaction is a result of being less centralized around servers.

@goodreedAJ It doesn't change it, though, it wasn't really touched on by the opinion which was focused on the election process.

Other implications of the 14th remain untouched by today's opinion which did not address them.

@Teri_Kanefield

@Stinson_108 sure, because we elected representatives who are jerks and do bad things.

We should stop electing and re-electing those people.

That's not Trump's deal, that is us, we elected and re-elected them.

It's not except that Trump is de facto Speaker of the House. It's as per our voting, this is how the office of Speaker is being conducted.

And we can change it anytime we decide to stop re-electing idiots. But it's up to us.

@fluxed I don't think that's right as the ruling pretty clearly recognizes mechanism to keep insurrectionists from holding federal office.

@christianschwaegerl No, not at all.

The ruling does nothing to nullify the 14th. It merely says that federal ballot access with regard to the federal question is a federal matter to be handled by federal law.

That doesn't mean an insurrectionist is qualified for office. It just means the balloting itself is a federal matter.

@wjmaggos what about ATProtocol prevents decentralization?

From what I've read it promotes it better than the protocols here.

@gkmizuno correct. The Supreme Court said that this part of the Constitution has no power of enforcement, but rather, that it authorizes Congress to create powers of enforcement.

There's no paradox. It's simply a question of governmental process, like any other. If we don't care to elect representatives who would create those mechanisms, well, I guess it's not important to us.

@LouisIngenthron the CIC who is nonetheless restrained by law.

He's not a dictator. The president has only the authorities vested by law, including with regard to the military.

The top bureaucrat charged with implementing congressional preferences as to how the military is to be used as well.

@gkmizuno No, because the Supreme Court left open congressional ability to create a process by which 14A 3 would be enforced.

Congress is not required, Congress is authorized.

And Congress is authorized to create remedies.

It's not cut off, it's the opposite, it's emphatically allowed.

@bigheadtales Glad to help!

@LouisIngenthron meh. I wouldn't say this is about justice. That's more a matter of criminal law.

This is about choosing the administrator of the executive branch of the federal government.

Justice is about figuring out who needs to go to jail. This is about figuring out who we want to trust to tell the IRS how to mail refund checks.

@WorMP3 exactly.

I'm eternally frustrated by friends who simultaneously complain about what Congress does even as they keep excitedly re-electing the exact people doing the thing they are complaining about.

So I try to highlight the importance of electing better congresspeople, or more to the point, the importance of ending the reelection of bad ones.

@bigheadtales careful with those assumptions about my political leanings. No I'm a emphatic liberal and I sure wish the rest of y'all would stop being so authoritarian.

But anyway, I did correct you. The court didn't say that. There's your correction.

@LouisIngenthron they will if we stop re-electing jerks.

But we keep re-electing jerks.

And so we get the government we elect.

We should stop re-electing jerks, but history says we will keep doing it, so.

@iuculano this decision didn't favor Trump. It favored voters and the federal design of the US as the justices laid out in their opinion.

This was not about Trump.