Prominent conservative legal scholars are increasingly raising a constitutional argument that 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump should be barred from the presidency because of his actions to overturn the previous presidential election result.
Prominent conservative legal scholars are increasingly raising a constitutional argument that 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump should be barred from the presidency because of his actions to overturn the previous presidential election result.
Okay but repeatedly and blatantly trying to subvert democracy should mean that you don’t get to participate in democracy anymore for the same reason that you should be banned from a chess tournament if you kick the board over and pull out a gun the first time someone puts you into check.
What if that is legitimately what the people “want” and see voting that way to cast their belief in such a major change?
It’s a government of the people, by the people, for the people. The people get to make the rules at the chess tournament. The courts… work for the people.
I know that would be a particularly bad change, but if the majority of people truly want a pathway for it, what other way is available?
it’s also a government where “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights”. when the will of the people conflicts with human rights, humans rights are supposed to win.
If ¾ of the population wishes to enslave the remaining ¼, should they be able to?
It’s obviously not something we’d consider to be morally justifiable now, although if such a horrendous situation were to emerge, how to stop the 3/4?
In this thought experiment, I’m trying to think about how we could we bake into a democracy the idea that for some issues, a submajority can tell the majority who they can vote for.
Isn’t that kind of the very opposite of the concept?
To be clear, I’d personally never vote for any candidate who was the subject of criminal legal troubles, much was multiple indictments.
It is currently baked in through human rights. Of course you can’t fully defend against attempts to remove these rules - they don’t matter if people don’t keep to them. But that’s why a democracy shouldn’t be allowed to do anything the population wants.