“Unlikely Trump will ever be tried for the crimes he committed,” says ex-Judge J. Michael Luttig
It’s not a hard question, or at least it hasn’t been before: Does the United States have a king – one empowered to do as they please without even the pretext of being governed by a law higher than their own word – or does it have a president? Since Donald Trump began claiming he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two courts have issued rulings striking down this purported right, recognizing that one can have a democracy or a dictatorship, but not both.
“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power – the recognition and implementation of election results,” states the unanimous opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, issued this past February, upholding a lower court’s take on the question. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and have their votes cast.”
You can’t well keep a republic if it’s effectively legal to overthrow it. But at oral arguments last week, conservative justices on the Supreme Court – which took up the case rather than cosign the February ruling – appeared desperate to make the simple appear complex. Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, argued that accountability was what would actually lead to lawlessness.
Electoral reform won’t make blue states more blue. More people turning out doesn’t matter if they’re already voting for you, so you gain nothing. It would result in minor parties getting elected more often, which would weaken the power of the DNC. Obviously, the DNC doesn’t want that.
You are correct, the objective of ranked choice voting is not to empower the two existing parties. It is to create a system that it amenable to having more than two parties so of course the powers that be who benefit from that system don’t want that - which is why it needs to be pressed because the two major block parties increasingly obstructionist and diverging will eventually cause a civil war. Smaller parties allow for more nuanced takes requiring cross party concensus and break up the stratification. If the game of democracy ends the Dems will end up with their heads on a plate so whatever kickbacks they receive from the status quo won’t be worth jack.
We already functionally have that fight in the primaries (both in the DNC and RNC brackets). And we do have a rump base of Tea Party Republicans who routinely sabotage the Republican majority in the House. We have an even smaller rump base of progressives in the Dem party who mostly just exist to get censured by the Ethics Committee for being too antiwar or pro-Palestinian.
3rd parties have their own primaries and don’t effect DNC or RNC primaries
Winning a primary as a member of a caucus in a major party gives you better odds of taking a seat than winning a primary in a 3rd party.
So people tend to endorse internal party caucuses, which then function as de facto third parties.