volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@Nonilex No that's not quite what the ruling said.

It's not that Congress is solely responsible for enforcing the amendment but that Congress gets to lay out how enforcement will happen, Congress can authorize courts to enforce it, for example. Or congress can authorize or even require states to enforce it.

But, the court said that the lower court can't skip that democratic process and act without legal authority.

@SteveThompson this is missing the issue that the case hinged on.

Even if the 14th amendment had crystal clear language, what wasn't clear, according to the court, was whether it applied to Trump. That's a legal matter that they said was up to our elected officials to write rules around.

The language is clear but the application is not, and that was the problem.

@popcornreel States can do plenty.

It's just that state courts can't apply federal law without legal authority.

@agrinova It didn't, though, since that's not how an appeals court works.

That question was not before the court, so it could not have answered it even if it wanted to.

Really, these questions are importance are for voters to decide, not for a court.

@Hyolobrika

Thanks. Bookmarked!

@gkmizuno I would have to reread the opinion, feel free to paste me an excerpt saying otherwise, but as far as I remember had Trump been found guilty of a federal charge of treason or insurrection, that would entirely resolve the Court's complaint about Congress needing to pass a law.

That guilty verdict would come as a result of the laws that Congress has already passed.

The problem here is that Trump was being found guilty of something outside of any federal law by a state court.

At least, it would resolve the matter that the court addressed, it would bring up some deeper questions, but it would resolve this one.

@christianschwaegerl I just listed different ways that the amendment can be applied even without a federal law.

It just can't be applied by a state looking to decide unilaterally without legal authority.

Yes, the law can be applied. It is not effectively nullified because it is still in effect, even if this one effect didn't pass muster.

If the people we elect to Congress decide that Trump is fine even considering the amendment, that doesn't mean the amendment is nullified, it means the Democratic process determined that it didn't apply.

And so let's stop electing idiots to Congress.

@Hyolobrika I'd be interested in learning about those proposals.

My concern is that it's like trying to bolt wings onto a car to make it fly instead of starting from scratch with an airplane fuselage: I think the platform is fundamentally not adapted for it, so I'm skeptical that those additions would work in an elegant way.

But I'm interested!

@wjmaggos

@wjmaggos I agree with recognizing that it works, although there are complaints ranging from efficiently issues through feature issues that I think arise directly from that web-based foundation.

Just to name one thing, complaints people have about difficulty in migrating between instances can be mitigated but never truly resolved simply because the web server approach binds users to servers, and there's really no way around that.

@Hyolobrika

@gkmizuno I'll say it again but I fear we are going in circles:

There is no paradox since the court found that the situation you describe is not legally possible. There cannot be an insurrectionist in office the way you describe because the law would not recognize the person as an insurrectionist in the first place.

@christianschwaegerl

No, not nullified. Just because the judicial branch lacks authority doesn't mean the other two branches can't apply the amendment.

From Congress refusing to accept EC ballots listing Trump for the sake of the 14th amendment through executive agencies refusing to recognize Trump's authority due to the 14th, the amendment is certainly not null.

It's just that the court found that the state court lacked legal authority to make the determination which the still existing 14th amendment still provides to the Congress to give that power to the court should it wish.

It is BECAUSE the 14th is still in force, not null, that the Supreme Court recognized congressional ability to write such legislation.

@gkmizuno correct, the question before the court was more open ended, whether the state court erred.

And the court found that yes, the state court was in error because it lacked the legal authority to conclude that Trump is an insurrectionist with regard to ballot access and the 14th amendment.

And so, without the legal finding of being an insurrectionist, there's no paradox of an insurrectionist being in office, because legally the person would not have been found to be an insurrectionist.

The person in office is simply the person in office, as far as the law is concerned, again regardless of what you are I might think about whether the person is or is not an insurrectionist.

But it's the resolution of the situation you're thinking of.

@wjmaggos

Well for what it's worth, my opinion, just an opinion, is that the platform was held back by engineering decisions that came out of a web server world, where everything was focused on servers instead of users.

If you look at the technologies underneath ActivityPub, it looks like developers grabbed a bunch of off-the-shelf web technologies and cobbled them together. Lots of http and webfinger and web certificates, etc.

They could have started more from scratch, but this is the direction they went, and for better or worse, it's going to be a server oriented platform because it was built on server oriented technologies.

I think it was a case of having a hammer and everything looking like a nail 🙂

@Hyolobrika

@McPatrick ps: let me add that this kind of thing happens in legal proceedings all the time

It's just standard for the us legal system, not some special carve out for Trump.

@McPatrick Well if you want to approach it from that direction, what the Supreme Court found was that no court has the legal authority to determine whether Trump is an insurrectionist for purpose of the 14th amendment.

So technically, it couldn't make that determination if it wanted to, because it found that it took lacked that legal authority.

That's not quite how it works, really the court just didn't answer the question because under the way US courts work they can't answer questions that they don't have to answer, and they didn't have to answer that question given their ruling.

Like you said, they didn't answer the deeper question. The reason they didn't answer it is because it WAS the deeper question and the answer to the shallow question resolved the matter before them.

However, yeah technically, even if they wanted to go to the deep question they couldn't have because they found that they legally couldn't.

@wjmaggos It sounds like you might be talking about the actual rollout rather than the protocol itself, which is kind of a different issue.

The AT protocol is decentralized even if nobody takes advantage of that feature. So it could be theory versus reality, and I'm talking about the theory, even if in reality right now the network isn't particularly built out yet.

But speaking of the protocol, as I recall one difference is that, the way you frame it, your mobile doesn't have to talk to A relay. It can talk to multiple relays, as many as it wants, it's in control. The control over who to talk to is distributed down to your mobile.

AP puts everything at the instance level. Your mobile has to talk to your instance, no other instance. And not multiple instances. Your mobile is bound to your instance.

With AP your mobile is really just an extension of the instance. With AT the relays work for the mobile.

@Hyolobrika

@McPatrick No, that's a long-standing principle of how courts in the US work.

It's a long-standing principle that courts should not touch issues that they don't have to touch in order to resolve the question before them. They didn't have to look at the underlying question because they were able to answer the major question without going there.

There are other complications that would have come up had they looked at that underlying question, but suffice to say, it's just how the US courts work.

@McPatrick it's kind of a legal shortcut.

Rather than take up court time resolving something that arguably is something for courts to handle, a thing like age verification is handled by state officers because it's anticipated that serious disputes will be so easily resolved and far between. So they built in a shortcut just to get it done with.

Technically, yes, any dispute about a nominees age could go through the rigmarole of court hearings and evidentiary hearings and due process and on and on, but they figure those cases should be so easy that they'll just use this shortcut instead.

But a question like is this person guilty of insurrection is much less straightforward, so it doesn't get the shortcut. It still has to go through courts.

It's a difference of practicality due to complexity.

@gkmizuno The resolution to the paradox comes from noting that you're begging the question.

This is the core of the quotation that I think you quoted above.

IS an insurrectionist holding office? That itself is the question. Without the legal determination that somebody is an insurrectionist, legally there isn't an insurrection is holding office, even if you are I personally believe that person to be an insurrectionist.

As far as the law is concerned, there's no problem with that person in office, because they have not been legally found to be an insurrectionist, so no paradox.

@exchgr regulatory changes made it more accessible to more people, so with those lower barriers to entry or people found it more valuable.