• Blooper@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Please, please do this in Pennsylvania. As a “swing state” (Jesus fuck the electoral college has really fucked us) he needs to be removed. Here in Illinois, he’s not going to win here anyway.

      • rickyrigatoni
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        5 months ago

        fucking $70 filing fee to stop a traitor from being on the ballots clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country clown country

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — A petition filed by five voters on Thursday seeks to bar former President Donald Trump from the Illinois Republican primary election ballot in March, claiming he is ineligible to hold office because he encouraged and did little to stop the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    The petition, similar to those filed in more than a dozen other states, relies on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits anyone from holding office who previously has taken an oath to defend the Constitution and then later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the country or given “aid or comfort” to its enemies.

    The 87-page document, signed by five people from around the state, lays out a case that Trump, having lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, fanned the flames of hardcore supporters who attacked the Capitol on the day Congress certified the election results.

    Officials in Colorado and Maine have already banned Trump’s name from primary election ballots.

    The Illinois State Board of Elections had yet to set the petition for hearing Thursday afternoon, spokesperson Matt Dietrich said.

    The board is set to hear 32 other objections to the proposed ballot at its Jan. 11 meeting.


    The original article contains 239 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 15%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    My God, what a sad existence… You really have nothing better to do with the few precious years you have left, than go stand in line, simping for a reality TV star that couldn’t give two shits about you?

    Fucking hell, life is wasted on some people.

    • sh00g@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

      No thanks. One party already does everything it can to disenfranchise voters across the country. I think I’ll stick with the pro-Democracy side of the equation.

      • theodewere@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        you called Trump supporters “voters”, and i dispute that on the grounds of January 6

        it’s like people don’t want to face what happened that day

        • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          70 million people voted for him. There were a few thousand at the capital on January 6.

          • theodewere@kbin.social
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            5 months ago

            have you heard even one of those 70 millions take responsibility or apologize… you haven’t, because they don’t accept responsibility… if they won’t accept responsibility for the consequences of their vote, they don’t deserve to have one… they’re all too fucking ignorant and selfish to be citizens any more…

            • Blooper@lemmy.world
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              While I agree with your anger and frustration, in sure you recognize how dangerous of a precedent that would be. Instead, we should be going full RICO on the entire Republican party.

              A huge chunk of the elected officials on that side of the aisle are actively working to subvert democracy in the US. Endorsing Trump in an official capacity should absolutely be seen as a participatory activity in that context and those elected officials who have engaged in that should be held to account. The justice department should be looking to use this as a sledgehammer if they want to crush the rampant fascism sweeping the Republicans and their base.

              • theodewere@kbin.social
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                5 months ago

                the reason we’re in this mess is none of you take it seriously enough… how many death threats against judges is it going to take… i’m sure Captain RICO or some other superhero will swoop in and set things right…

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Democracy doesn’t mean “everyone gets to vote” lol If that’s your criteria then I’ve got some bad news about the USA…

      • Papergeist@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I agree. More people should read about Lincoln. He held the country together by being magnanimous. The south lost thier greatest ally with his death.

            • Pratai@lemmy.ca
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              You honesty think I’m a Trump supporter, just because I don’t believe people should lose their right to vote because of who they support?

              My god you’re all twisted up , aren’t you?

              Check my comment history kiddo. Then delete your dumb shit.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              I can pretty much guarantee you do not hate Trump more than I do. We can trade anecdotes if you’d like, but I am extremely confident that my actions when Trump was elected were vastly more fucked up and violent than yours.

              That being said, Trump voters should not lose the right to vote forever. Thats anger talking. That’s letting authoritarianism win.

              The only way to escape the poison of that kind of anger is to let it go, man. It doesn’t serve you.

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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      Lol, no. You can’t just make stuff up. Follow the law. If the law is an ass, change it, but not retrospectively. There is enough malfeasance to prosecute as it is.

      Faith in democracy requires a belief we are all equal before the law.

  • vlad@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    I don’t like the guy, but idk if trying to keep him off the ballot is the right play. It seems desperate. It’s giving him even more credibility.

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      5 months ago

      He is guilty of insurrection and there’s a phone call of him committing direct electoral fraud.

      It’s very reasonable and within legal precedent for voters not to want someone committed to being a dictator and guilty of insurrection on a ballot.

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        Also, the constitution seems to require it.

        You can’t just ignore the constitution, even if you disagree or find it inconvenient.

        It’s the supreme law of the land and it must be followed.

        Otherwise, California might as well send 10 senators to Washington. That would be fair, compared to Wyoming. And since we are ignoring the Constitution, what’s an extra Senator or 8 between friends?

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      It’s not a matter of “the right play” or lending his nonsense credibility. Donald Trump is constitutionally ineligible to hold office. Some states have laws prohibiting people who are ineligible from appearing on the ballot.

      Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot run for president, either. He is legally prohibited from appearing on the ballot. If he petitioned to be included on the ballot, and was refused, it wouldn’t be a play or violating the rights of Arnold’s supporters.

    • butt_mountain_69420@lemmy.world
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      “Desperate”- some would say it’s their legal obligation as a citizen to protest an insurrectionist cunt being on the ballot.

      If he had been arrested, tried and ****** in 2021 this wouldn’t be an issue. Doesn’t really matter anyway; with the electoral college, red states dominate though they have less population and fewer teeth. My measly little anti-trump vote goes right in the shitter.

    • thefartographer
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      “That Jeffrey Dahmer guy is one naughty fella, but idk if calling the cops on him is the right play. It seems desperate. His arrest is giving him even more credibility that he’s a famous serial killer.”

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      It might be political hay for him to be disqualified. That’s a huge problem.

      It also might be a bad argument; there’s definitely SOME kind of due process requirement implied that it is hard to tell if Trump has satisfied. I think he’s an antidemocratic insurrectionist wannabee tinpot fascist, but whether that legal hurdle has been cleared is a question unanswered.

      On the flip side, there’s little worse for our democracy than the law deciding not to go after Trump because he’s so politically powerful. The law says insurrectionists are disqualified. So these challenges have merit and should be allowed to play out, just as the justice department ought to investigate and prosecute and all these other things. We’re abandoning rule of law if we say that we aren’t going to prosecute for political reasons.

      And the due process concern? That’s what’s going through the courts now. This may be the process due. And if it isn’t, the courts will have to tell us what the requirements are.

      Too bad the outcome will probably be the SCOTUS doing their usual chickenshit nonsense and saying it’s up to the legislature to define the process so that they can protect their Very Special Boy.

    • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)@badatbeing.social
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      5 months ago

      He launched an insurrection to overthrow the US government, then gave aid and comfort to those combatants. He has then gone on record saying he plans to pardon those combatants upon taking office. He also has plans to round up his political rivals on day one of “being a dictator”, as well as using the military to lay waste to any and all protesters. He has called immigrants verman “poisoning the blood of our country”, which I’m sure wouldn’t go hand and hand with vigilante justice in rounding up and executing anyone the maga folks find to be an “immigrant” in the same vein as the Salem witch trials (or people of color).

      How anyone can look at just those things, with a longer list growing by the day, and see him as a viable candidate is mind boggling.

    • ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world
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      If you don’t think taking him off the ballot is the correct decision it’s because you’re an enemy of the United States of America.

    • IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
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      Well we could debate taking the driver’s license for people involved in a DUI about the same as this topic in the vein of “is this the right play?” The notion is that folks who are apt to take the mechanisms of Government and use them as such to violate an oath they took to defend the Constitution, are likely folks we don’t want to hand back control of those mechanisms so they can get another crack at it. Sort of how we don’t give folks in a DUI back their license until there’s been a clear “rehabilitation” or if we want to be pure cynical “a debt to society paid”. The point of not giving them their license right away is because they could potentially do a lot of harm with it being just handed back to them.

      And you’ve indicated that it seems desperate. And yeah, the whole mechanism of disqualification and the whole fact that treason is one of the very few things in criminality that’s laid out by the Constitution, is such because nobody wanted people to just randomly start firing off disqualifications. It’s made to be a really, really, really, really last resort kind of thing. It’s supposed to be something that we try all these other hundreds of things first before using. So if it feels desperate in the sense that the word is defined as Having lost all hope; despairing it’s because there isn’t a lot of hope that the GOP has pulled itself together enough to prevent someone who incited people to storm the capitol and attempt to upend an election from taking the nomination again.

      None of this developed in a vacuum. Trump has done and said things that few other Presidents have said and done and all the mechanisms before have in one way or another nixed the person from returning. Those functions have stopped working and that’s getting more into a complex topic about why and it’s a long history. But I can tell you there was a transformation of the GOP and how they conducted themselves pre/post Haley Barbour and it especially came to a head with Reince Priebus and you can get even deeper on how our forcing of a two party system has led to this.

      But in summary, the GOP as a political apparatus has a great deal of control ceded to them via codification in various State laws. They are absolutely not just some group of folks coming together, lots of States have laws, rules, or regulations that basically establish them that say 3rd parties don’t get to enjoy. But the GOP has lost a lot of internal control and regulation of their own apparatus, I mean look how shit show the 2016 GOP primary was. Look at the 2024 GOP primary and how the person leading the nomination isn’t even in the apparatus ran debates. There’s zero control mechanisms working within that political group. That’s problematic because the GOP gets a free pass to get on the ballot in pretty much every State, by default they show up there.

      So you’ve got a group that gets to be in the election without the normal State level checks and balances but that group has lost complete control over their political machine. That’s so many red flags that it is a red flag factory. So with all of those controls failing within that party, yeah, we’ve got to pull the emergency brake here. It is a big deal.

      It’s giving him even more credibility

      Well I’ll say this. Trump makes the point that the political elites run the show and what not. And yeah, as far as the two party system goes being forced down us, yeah, no disagreement there. But he advocates “none” for political apparatus control and that’s too far the other direction. And that’s actually a worse direction. Ideally I’d like something in the middle, but if we’re making it binary, I’ll keep the two party system as it is (just a personal taste).

      And I think that really sums up what we saw in 2020 and what we are looking at for a 2024 run. You’ve got two really bad options here. One is obscenely bad and the other is just bad in the business as usual kind of way. So with all that said, as far as granting him “credibility” yeah, it highlights something wrong with what we got. But holy shit, there’s no part of what Trump is offering that we want to replace what we got with.

      You know here in Tennessee I’ve heard a saying that came about with Governor Ray Blanton. “If you think the professional politicians are bad, just you wait till the amateurs show up.” I get what Trump is spitting here, but best I can do is buy about 10% of it because the other 90% is pure madness. So he, in my book, doesn’t get points for saying something that surface level is correct but deep dive into is a sea of authoritarianism horror.

    • randon31415@lemmy.world
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      All the other crimes he has committed require a conviction to have consequences. Considering that it took 3 years to charge him with things everyone saw with their own eyes, convictions would come too late to stop him from becoming president again and just pardoning himself. Disqualification doesn’t need a conviction.

    • acutfjg@feddit.nl
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      You think following procedure when someone commits insurrection is desperate? It seems desperate to move the goal posts when you don’t like the outcome

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      He’s ineligible for office. What kind of play is it to allow constitutionally disqualified candidates to run?

      …like even if they weren’t compromised by hostile foreign states.

    • Courts should do their job and remove him now and give Congress time to overturn it if they so choose or if constituents pressure them into doing it. Or amend the Constitution to change election law so he’s eligible without congressional approval.