Clinton conceded, but spent years calling Trump illegitimate and spreading falsehoods about Russian interference. At one point, half of democrats believed Russia manipulated vote tallies: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-b... (“a 2016 Economist/YouGov poll found that half of Clinton voters thought a foreign power tampered with voting results”).
So what’s the next step in the escalation after that?
The stuff about “sabotaging the electoral college’s vote” is an escalation of what Gore did in 2000–pushing the law to its limit to win the case. What’s the next step after that? If it’s okay to request partial hand recounts only in counties you won (to unfairly get more votes), because it’s technically legal, why is it impermissible to lobby the state legislator to select alternate electors? (Which is technically constitutional.)
Why shouldn’t we do it first, before you do?
We?
> why is it impermissible to lobby the state legislator to select alternate electors? (Which is technically constitutional.)
Evidently you've drunk the Kool-Aid of the ... worthies who push the "independent state legislature" doctrine.
Oh, and: You don't regard Trump's sending a mob to the Capitol (he knew they were armed, the Secret Service had told him), telling them they had to "fight like hell," egging them on via Twitter, and then waiting hours to half-heartedly call them off, doesn't count as trying to sabotage the Electoral College vote count?
What rayiner is talking about here has nothing to do with that doctrine. I explained in another comment 2-3 months back, so I'll just link to that rather than repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37541248
It’s more well-founded in the constitution than some precedents near-and-dear to democrats…
But actually, I don’t think the standard for litigating elections should be whether you can come up with a colorable legal theory to support your position.[1] Thats why I cited the Gore example. Just because there’s a legal theory that supports trying to game manual recounts doesn’t mean you should do it. Because once that becomes the standard (and unfortunately it has) the other side will do it too.
[1] I don’t think you should be able to litigate elections at all. The rules should be set in stone a year ahead and not subject to challenge, and everything should be done in one day with public counting the way the Taiwanese do it.
> Oh, and: You don't regard Trump's sending a mob to the Capitol (he knew they were armed, the Secret Service had told him), telling them they had to "fight like hell," egging them on via Twitter, and then waiting hours to half-heartedly call them off, doesn't count as trying to sabotage the Electoral College vote count?
Is “fight like hell” categorically different than “get in their face” https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/maxine-waters-trump-.... Is lighting cities on fire for months categorically different?
It’s ugly, low-brow politics, like Democrats pioneered. I’d love to ban all of it. But I’m not impressed by efforts to draw categorical distinctions between different events. Either egging on rioting and political violence is acceptable or it’s not. Democrats have apparently decided it’s acceptable.
On that, we agree. But I've come around to the view that SCOTUS should have let the 2000 Florida recount proceed, with appropriate guardrails, instead of just shutting it down.
> Is “fight like hell” categorically different than “get in their face” .... Is lighting cities on fire for months categorically different? ... Either egging on rioting and political violence is acceptable or it’s not. Democrats have apparently decided it’s acceptable.
Your last-quoted sentence just above is nonsense; the first rhetorical question betrays black-and-white thinking; and the second rhetorical question assumes facts not in evidence. (We agree about the "Either egging on rioting ..." part.)
First of all, context matters: It's one thing for a semi-backbencher congresswoman to say "get in their face." It's another matter entirely for the outgoing POTUS to say, "fight like hell" on Vote Counting Day to an armed mob that he summoned, and then to send them off to the location of the counting, and finally to sit watching them on TV (and even encouraging them) as they storm the Capitol and cause elected representatives to flee for their lives.
Second: If you feel compelled to paint all "Democrats" with the same brush, then please don't use Maxine Waters — and sure as hell don't use sporadic acts of arson (NOT "lighting cities on fire for months") — as supposedly being representative of Dems. Otherwise, we could proclaim, "Republicans want to execute Jews who invoke Satan," or whatever TF it was that was said in the moronic video clip that was making the rounds a couple of days ago. Every large group has its outliers, and its idiots, and its dangerous idiots.
No, the machine recount should have been the final word. It doesn’t actually matter what the votes were—from a statistical standpoint it was a tie. It’s more important that the process not seem open to manipulation (and the process happening in Florida was not something anyone could trust).
>,First of all, context matters:
No, baseline political norms must be black and white. Political parties disagree about fundamental things, like God and how to raise children. They often find each other’s values disgusting, and worry about how their kids will fare in the country the other side is creating. These people will never see eye to eye on context-laden issues. The norms must be such that you can operate within them alongside people you don’t like and don’t trust.
> It's one thing for one backbencher congresswoman to say "get in their face." It's another matter entirely for the outgoing POTUS to say, "fight like hell" on Vote Counting Day to an armed mob that he summoned and then to send them off to the location of the counting, and finally to sit watching them on TV (and even encouraging them) as they invade the Capitol and disrupt the proceedings.
It’s a difference in degree (e.g. protests to disrupt the Kavanaugh hearing) not a difference in kind. Especially when you consider something like RESISTANCE—taxpayer paid employees of the federal government basically committing mutiny against their CEO that the taxpayers duly elected.
> Second: If you feel compelled to paint all "Democrats" with the same brush, then please don't use Maxine Waters — and sure as hell don't use sporadic acts of arson (NOT "lighting cities on fire for months") — as supposedly being representative of Dems.
It wasn’t isolated acts of arson. Every storefront in my wife’s office block in DC was smashed. Courthouses were lit on fire in Portland. And the whole Democratic Party sanctioned and egged on the rioting, saying “riots are the voice of the unheard,” for months.
Differences in degree can matter, sometimes hugely.
> the machine recount should have been the final word. It doesn’t actually matter what the votes were—from a statistical standpoint it was a tie. It’s more important that the process not seem open to manipulation (and the process happening in Florida was not something anyone could trust).
Hmm — very interesting thought; you might have a point there about perceived trustworthiness as opposed to actual vote count.
No, that escalation already happened in the 2000 election — and by the GOP: Remember the "Brooks Brothers riot" by Bush's GOP lawyers and operatives, which shut down a recount proceeding in Miami-Dade County?
The opinion piece I linked argues that Democrats pushing the "2016 election was stolen" narrative provided normalization and encouragement for Republicans to push a similar narrative in 2020 - even though the actions taken in response to that narrative were very different.
In turn, I think the 2020 Republican claims have been encouraging pre-emptive 2024 Democratic claims - see below examples - and if Democrats lose in 2024, they've already got these pre-planned narratives at hand to invoke
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-pu...
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/opinions/gop-blueprint-to...
https://progressive.org/op-eds/gop-plan-steal-2024-election-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/democracy-...
According to [0]:
> Trump’s mendacity is arguably the Second Big Lie. Four years earlier, the Hillary Clinton campaign and leading Democrats refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2016 election, by claiming Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. These actions, while certainly not as dramatic or as immediately damaging as the events leading to Jan. 6 (and today), helped bring us to our current situation.
> “He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” ex-President Jimmy Carter said in 2019, continuing to deny Trump’s victory three years after the election.
> “He knows he’s an illegitimate president,” said Clinton, also three years later. She repeated this sentiment in 2020, telling The Atlantic the election “was not on the level,” and again when she called Trump’s win illegitimate. She piled on to this by saying, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” clearly referring to how she saw her 2016 campaign.
That's an opinion piece, but it isn't making up these quotes from Carter and Clinton (and it goes on to reference remarks in similar spirit by Jerry Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, among others.)
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trumps-denial-second-b...