I was about to turn on my audiobook of "Jewish Space Lasers" when the car radio came on with the SCOTUS hearing to determine if Colorado can ban Trump from the ballot. I only stopped because I heard Justice Thomas ask a question! (Thomas is famously silent during oral arguments.)
It seems like they were indifferent to Trump's shitbag of a lawyer's arguments. However, they all were extremely skeptical of Colorado's lawyers. As I continued to listen, it seems like everyone in the court *really* does not want to rule on this. I think they're going to punt and say that the President is not covered under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, or some other technicality that does not actually resolve the issue.
The claim that the Presidency is not an Office is just the dumbest fucking argument.
I don't think there's an actual substantial legal question here, it's just that they don't want the answer. And one of Trump's lawyers (Habba) even made the point that obviously 3/9 of the court owes Trump personal loyalty, which is... actually pretty much not the way you're supposed to talk about this.
Given how much of a drag he's been on their election performance, I gotta think there's a temptation here for them to rule against him, because if they do, they give the Republican party any chance at all of recovering, and the only people who pissed off his base are people with lifetime appointments who don't have to worry about being primaried out next year.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
There's a temptation to rule against him, especially since it would be a much, much easier opinion to write. But this SCOTUS has proven repeatedly its willingness to go the extra mile with tortured logic and unreasonable reasoning, so it's a tough one to call.
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hide, witch, hide / the good folks come to burn thee / their keen enjoyment hid behind / a gothic mask of duty - P. Kantner
From what I've been reading, the conservatives on the court have been expressing the view that it would be bad (for democracy lol) if individual states had the power to remove candidates from the ballot in a presidential election.
However, nowhere have I read that the MAGA lawyers have put that up as one of their arguments. Is there a precedent for the court dismissing all the arguments made by one side and then deciding for that side on grounds they just made up themselves? Has this happened often?
From what I've been reading, the conservatives on the court have been expressing the view that it would be bad (for democracy lol) if individual states had the power to remove candidates from the ballot in a presidential election.
However, nowhere have I read that the MAGA lawyers have put that up as one of their arguments.
That comes up as a sort of subpoint in several arguments the MAGAts did make, including: states can't use Section 3 of the 14th Amendment because it's not self-executing, i.e., requires implementing legislation from Congress, and no such implementing legislation currently exists; and Section 3 doesn't actually authorize keeping anyone off the ballot but rather prevents certain people from holding certain offices unless 2/3 majorities of both houses of Congress say otherwise.
They're also making a sort of "independent state legislature" argument here. The constitution places the job of selecting presidential Electors solely in the hands of state legislatures. Like every other state, Colorado has an election code that sets out a process for selecting Electors, and the legislatively-approved process doesn't involve state courts telling the secretary of state to keep someone off the ballot. I think that's wrong as a matter of state law, but I also think the Supreme Court won't need to address the "independent state legislature" stuff at all.
Following today's argument, I'd be surprised if even one justice voted to affirm the CO Supreme Court.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
Which is weird, because so far as I can tell, the CO court is just obviously right; the problem is that it's socially awkward to say "uhh actually no that really is just obviously an insurrection" and then have another insurrection over it.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
As soon as I found out there's a 'kick the can down the road and hope we don't have to deal with it' answer, I would be surprised if they went with anything else.
I am not actually aware of definite evidence that campaign spending particularly works. Alternative theory: Popular candidates have an easier time fundraising.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
I think there are diminishing returns and it's affected by what kind of race it is.
We certainly have counterexamples like McGrath running against Mitch McConnell and getting tens of millions of dollars and still losing by about as much as you'd expect.
The higher profile the race is, the more news coverage there is. The news coverage has a larger effect on the race - earned media is worth more than paid media. And the more earned media/news coverage there is, the less important the candidates' ads are since they're a smaller percentage of what voters hear about the race and they probably trust the news more than political ads anyway.
There's also the issue that in high-profile races, it tends to be that both candidates are well-funded, so when both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have hundreds of millions of dollars in funds, you can think that money doesn't matter. But we didn't run the counterfactual where Mitt Romney had no money and Barack Obama had the same amount.
So in that McGrath case, it's true that she raised tons of money, but McConnell also raised tons. Not quite as much, but he wasn't getting dwarfed by her.
For president, the money is a lot less important both because it gets wall-to-wall coverage and because both candidates will be raising massive amounts of money regardless. They will have enough to be on air with ads in major states, and normally neither side will have a large advantage in ad airtime.
But Trump may be putting that to the test - if his legal woes drain the bank and he can't match Biden's volume of ads, we'll get some more data I suppose.
I do think that money probably has more effect in lower profile races though (state elections aside from federal and governor). When your money makes it so you can be on the air with ANY ads while your opponent can't even afford TV advertising, that may make more of a difference.
At any rate, it's certainly not the case that you can just simply buy a senate seat. We saw Democrats give massive amounts of money to races in KY and SC and it didn't make an obvious difference. But that's not the same as it having no effect... There are so many other factors, so you need to really look at a lot of data to tease them out.
There are other things money pays for. I'm pretty sure effective local campaigns rely on get-out-the-vote and other campaign coordination efforts, and effective polling to know where you need to focus your effort.
The less support downstream candidates get from the national party, the less effective those campaigns are. I recognize that even spending all their money on getting Trump elected may still result in not only Trump getting elected but getting a majority in one or more house of congress.
Right, you can even think of things like candidate recruitment.
You might be able to identify races where a high-quality candidate would be able to win, but polling costs money and it's getting more expensive. But most high-quality candidates don't want to be the sacrificial lamb, so getting that polling first is helpful there...
It's just too bad that Trump can't drain the Republican committees for congressional, gubernatorial, etc. campaigns so that he can pay more legal geniuses like Alina Habba.
But Trump may be putting that to the test - if his legal woes drain the bank and he can't match Biden's volume of ads, we'll get some more data I suppose.
Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir
It's just too bad that Trump can't drain the Republican committees for congressional, gubernatorial, etc. campaigns so that he can pay more legal geniuses like Alina Habba.
He'll drain the pockets of the MAGAts. The year's going to be filled with appeals for donations.
Yeah, true, get-out-the-vote things can and do matter, if you bother to do them, a thing the Dems have historically not been great at, but the Republicans have recently started basically actively opposing. Which has produced the expected outcomes. Like, the reason the GA senate runoff in 2020 went to the Dems was in part that fewer Republicans voted, and one reason for that might have been the intervening months of "voting is fake" resulting in thousands of voters staying home because they thought elections were fake.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Basically, it's difficult to predict which ads are most effective, ergo campaigns need to run experiments, but running experiments at scales necessary to get good results is expensive.
Of course, the value of experimenting also increases with the larger your budget for advertisements is...
I don’t want this fool to be the republic nominee and quite frankly I’m disappointed in the republican constituents. How can they be so fucking stupid? DeSantis is a perfectly capable nominee. I can only hope he is up against Biden this fall.
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What are sleeping dreams but so much garbage?~ Glen’s homophobic newsletter
DeSantis? The one who decided to sabotage his state's budget by a couple billion dollars in order to punish a private corporation for making a statement on a political issue, which is pretty much the most perfect example of first amendment protected speech one could imagine? How the fuck is that "capable"? By rights he shouldn't be considered eligible to hold office, he has fully and entirely rejected the concept of constitutional rights as a thing people can have.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
Re: Good King Trump
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