Trump Indicted Over Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election

silence7@slrpnk.net to Politics@beehaw.org – 172 points –
Trump Indicted Over Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election
nytimes.com
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About goddamned time

Don't celebrate until it sticks. I have a horrible feeling he's going to somehow weasel his way out of all of these indictments and still pull out a Biden vs Trump rematch in 2024.

Ranked choice voting can't come soon enough.

I'm not celebrating, I'm complaining. The evidence for this case has been a matter of public record for far too long before we even saw this indictment.

Exactly. Any regular person would be in prison for decades if not forever, a dozen times over, in the time it took for them to get even this far. After they're done, they should also look at all the people that obstructed this long too. They're complicit at the very least.

I'll cut them some slack for a few reasons:

  1. Trump was President when he did this shit and charging a President, former or otherwise, is uncharted territory.

  2. My wife quotes the Wire all the time. "When you come at the king, you best not miss." Not only is this uncharted, but nobody can run the risk of doing it wrong.

  3. This isn't only about Trump, this is breaking new ground and setting precedent for posterity. Generations are watching what is transpiring here. This will be taught in history lessons and law schools from now on.

So, yeah, no pressure.

Not completely uncharted, but there's a world of difference between a speeding in a horse-drawn carriage and a serious criminal charge.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that charge was mostly in good humor, wheras attempting to overturn Democracy is kind of serious. :)

Those are good reasons and you won't see me arguing against them.

Still doesn't change my initial gut feeling, as shared in my top-level comment.

I'm not American, so maybe I shouldn't comment, but I think Americans wanting change should pursue Single Transferable Vote (STV).

It's basically a ranked ballot in multi-seat ridings. This is the most surefire way to dismantle a two-party system, give roughly proportional representation, maintain geographical representation, keep extreme fringe parties from gaining wedge power, and allow for choice within a party to eliminate "safe" seats.

I really wish Canada would adopt this system to prevent our descent into American political tribalism.

Ireland has used this system since independence a century ago which suggests it would work pretty well in countries like the UK and Canada too which share a fairly similar machinery of government.

I'm British and I'd genuinely vote for this on a single-issue basis! Unfortunately FPTP means we have a duopoly of two Frankenstein's monster UK-wide parties that in a reasonable electoral system would really be two or three each and will never abolish FPTP on their own as a result, the only chance would be as part of a coalition agreement with a regional party and thanks to FPTP coalitions are rare in the UK system. In 2015 the SNP (Scottish independence party, long-term incumbents there) got 56 seats off 1.4 million votes while UKIP (right wing populist party, very Brexity and went the way of the dodo soon after) got one seat off 8.3 million votes. UKIP were awful in my opinion but that was downright undemocratic.

That will not happen in America ever, because neither of the two parties are interested in real democracy beyond the bipartisan status quo.