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Growing up in the US, decades ago, I was cautiously optimistic about the future for the US government:
Sure, folks had ideological, philosophical, and political differences, but we'd keep on having a big social conversation, challenging each other, to come to a positive consensus, all as the government itself continued to maintain its core functions, shaped by the ongoing debate.

It seemed at the time as if we were working with a rough draft, and things would keep getting better. The government had good bones, to borrow an analogy.

The thing I find so depressing about as the
nominee isn't ideological. It's that we're now facing a race where the idea of actually administering a functional government isn't even a significant issue to voters. I never see it coming up in mainstream conversation from either the left or the right.

This is one reason I'm so obsessed about , because in my lifetime it's regressed so terribly, from a functional government that's responding to productive debate to one where functionality isn't particularly interesting to the average voter.

The US population has lost faith in government over this time, but the problem is, well, that's what they voted for by nominating people like and Trump.

It's why Super Tuesday was a symbol of this regression of the US government to me, even if it had become inevitable.

@lin11c we can easily refute that by pointing out the uncountable executions of presidential power that happen every single day without Supreme Court involvement to affirm the presidency.

And no, that was not in the SCOTUS ruling.
@IAmDannyBoling @Stinson_108 @atrupar

@ClaraListensprechen4 if you think I said anything about only Republican candidates then you misunderstood my comment.

@gkmizuno oh, maybe that's what inspired the thought :)

I went to skim the ruling again to double check something and must have forgotten that you said that.

@Hyolobrika no, the presidency is a legally defined office, really the result of a legally defined process.

Anything that happens outside of that legal definition is not presidential.

Anyone can claim to be president, but unless they meet that legal definition, they are no more president than I am.

@atrupar @Stinson_108 @IAmDannyBoling @lin11c

US Politics Trump 2nd Term not inevitable 

@ianRobinson last I heard it's mathematically impossible for Trump to win with only Republican votes, so I'm mainly thinking of the never Trump independents giving him a difficult path to winning.

Mainstream Republicans seem to underestimate that.

@spectral I wouldn't go down that road. Basic knowledge of civics and how voting works seems to be a really big factor in this, from what I've seen, and while that may be correlated with university education, it's not a correlation we have to live with.

Knowledge of basic civics should be accessible throughout the population expected to live under the government, and to vote for governmental representation.

I'd say that's more about access to quality, informative mass media and primary education than university, or it should be.

@pbump

@lin11c

In which cases did the SCOTUS do each of those?

In my experience such claims are debunked by going to the actual rulings to see that the Court didn't actually do whatever some special interest is claiming.

@jpanzer effectively the Court said that the process for electing federal officials was a federal process, even if states are delegated roles to play in the process.

And enforcement of the 14th was not within that delegation, but perhaps it could be if Congress extended that delegation.

For distinguishing, I don't think they touched those other issues in the ruling, but they did spend some time discussing them in oral arguments (and I'm sure elsewhere).

Among other distinguishing factors that was brought up was that Congress can allow an insurrectionist to serve but can't allow someone underage to serve.

This issue that the 14th gives Congress a way to "remove such disability" seemed important to the final ruling.

BUT, at oral arguments it was suggested offhand that MAYBE those other enforcements were illegal as well. It just wasn't before the Court in this case.

@thisismissem under GDPR is it sufficient to merely request deletion, or does it have to actually be done?

How does GDPR handle something like email, if I email a picture around and then want to delete the picture, what happens to copies on other email servers? Does GDPR care?

Erasure is tricky in distributed systems, but I'm sure GDPR considered the email example since it's not new.

@neil

@lin11c who, legally, would have executed that immediate detention? Under what legal authority?

This is why the matter of presidential authority is so critical to the functioning of the US system.

@IAmDannyBoling @Stinson_108 @atrupar

@IAmDannyBoling I didn't say that would be the end of it. I said he wouldn't be president.

He would have lost authority of the presidency because he would no longer be president.

If he were to storm the White House and take over the government, somehow, fine, but he wouldn't be doing it as president because by definition he wouldn't be.

Why is this important? Because the entire system that answers to the president would go through the normal systems that prevent anyone who's not president from acting.

He would fail because the actual president has plenty of power to repel such an attack.
@Stinson_108 @lin11c @atrupar

@gkmizuno I wouldn't--and the Court didn't--say 2383 was *tied* to 14A directly. As I recall 2383 predated the amendment after all. The Court only cited it as an example of relevant Congressional action.

2383 is separate but relevant. A citation of guilt under 2383 is one way the 14A question might have been resolved in the case. Still a separate, parallel procedure.

But here's a different thought that sheds light on the whole thing: was 2383 constitutional in the first place? Can even Congress by statute interfere with constitutional offices like that?

It may be that you'd need to think about it the other way around: **14A enables 2383, not the other way around.**

I make this point to illustrate that 14A remains in effect even if it's not applied. 14A continues to enable Congress, empowering Congress, whether Congress chooses to use that power.

That's the real impact of 14A in this framing. It authorizes things like 2383.

@lin11c Read the ruling.

Then you don't have to rely on what those people are telling you about it, when they're telling you things that don't match what's in the ruling.

@lin11c that may be good enough for you, but it's not accurate, so it's not good enough for me 🙂

Again I believe I linked to the ruling so you can read for yourself exactly what it said and not have to rely on these third party accounts which are so often really wrong.

@jpanzer the critical point is that this was found to be a federal process, and off the top of my head I can't think of anywhere else that state courts can enforce state laws against federal processes specifically.

The best I can think of is, say, local zoning laws preventing a federal agency from building where they want to, but those are laws of general applicability and not targeted specifically at regulating federal activity.

Yes, when the federal government is silent toward private activity, states can step in, but the huge difference here is that this is a state acting directly against the federal government, which changes it completely.

As for the pocket veto framing, no the amendment is still 100% in force. It's just that, as the court frames it, the actual force of the amendment is in handing congress authority, which it still has, whether it chooses to apply it or not.

As per this ruling, the amendment stands, it just doesn't do what a lot of people want it to do.

I remain struck by hearing a voter say he would be voting for over in the primary purely because Haley can't win the primary.

Not the general election, the primary.

That he was voting in.

The most charitable interpretation I have for this is that he wanted to feel good about having voted on the winning side of the primary, fitting in with the crowd.

But really, I think so many voters simply don't know how voting works.

@jpanzer I agree that there is tension here between the grant of states to conduct their elections vs saying that this goes too far.

The Court does recognize that in its ruling, though, but goes through history and practicalities to draw the distinction, much like 1st Amendment cases draw distinctions between permissible and impermissible actions, when both impact speech.

One thing they highlight is that the 14th Amendment was specifically about taking power away from states, so it's weird to cite that in ways that would empower states over the federal government.

It sounds reasonable, if not rock solid, to me.

This action was not a minor, incidental regulation like setting the hours for a polling place. It was an outright policing of a federal candidate, which makes it something of a different level, analogous to viewpoint discrimination of speech.

@lin11c see the linked ruling.

You can see exactly what the Court ordered, and what it didn't.

Yes, there are a lot of reports that didn't reflect what was actually in the ruling.

@thisismissem ha, it's more a question of how did this NOT happen :)

It's a feature they haven't finished yet. They probably should have put more priority on getting it done.

To say the least...

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