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Brandon Strikes Again


I_M4_AU

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At least we know who is *they* are.  It’s the Easter Bunny that won’t let Joe answer questions or go to Ukraine.

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Truth really is stranger than fiction at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

This meme seems appropriate for what's going on in that snippet...

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...and while we're on stupid s*** that is not even up to the threshold of being performative...

Who in the blue hell wasted their time making a big-assed mask FOR THE COSTUME BUNNY?

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Says the MAGA who likes to accuse others of being "obsessed" with Trump. :rolleyes:

(Get back to us when Biden poses a direct threat to our democracy.)

 

 

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2 hours ago, homersapien said:

Says the MAGA who likes to accuse others of being "obsessed" with Trump. :rolleyes:

(Get back to us when Biden poses a direct threat to our democracy.)

 

 

Two things can be true at once.

OK Groomer.

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A conservative insider’s stark warning about Trump and 2024

In the dispiriting saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization against democracy, this week brings good news and bad news.

The good news: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is likely to survive a GOP primary challenge backed by Donald Trump in retaliation for Kemp’s refusal to help overturn his 2020 loss. If a willingness to respect election losses doesn’t turn out to be a dealbreaker in GOP primaries, that will be welcome.

The bad news: Trump’s allies are escalating efforts to get swing-state GOP legislatures to revisit and overturn the 2020 outcome. This is gaining support from some Republicans running for positions of control over future elections, which bodes rather badly.

The stakes are high in this struggle over the GOP’s future posture toward democracy. And a new book by a conservative movement insider helps us make sense of those stakes, why things have come to this, and the prognosis for a good outcome in that struggle.

In “The Right,” author Matthew Continetti warns that Republicans must wean themselves off the personality cult of Trump and fealty to his 2020 lies in order for conservatism to remain a viable ideological project. The 2024 election is a big test.

“Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump won’t be easy,” writes Continetti, who has held various positions inside conservative journalism and think tanks over the years.

But this gives rise to a question: Why are so few Republican lawmakers inclined to undertake this project of disentangling from Trump in the first place? Here’s where Continetti’s history of modern conservatism is illuminating.

In the book, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election through extraordinary procedural corruption and then the incitement of mob violence occupy a more prominent place in the story of conservatism’s evolution than movement thinkers usually ascribe it.

That’s because, in Continetti’s telling, those events partly represented long-festering tendencies inside the movement and the GOP. When racist, white supremacist and alt-right elements sought to violently overturn democracy, he writes, “all of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open.”

To illuminate these tendencies, Continetti tells a story of conservatism that has often been marked by an elite inability or unwillingness to police extremism, and at times an active embrace of it.

For instance: The right’s noninterventionist streak during the lead-up to World War II too easily collapsed into Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism and flirtation with Nazism. The anti-communism of the 1950s too easily shaded into support for Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.

Then in the 1960s, conservative elites were slow to purge John Birch conspiracism. And for too long they humored “states rights” as a smokescreen for opposing the dismantling of legally enforced white supremacy.

More recently, when Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried to edge the GOP in a pro-immigrant, facially aspirational direction, the base lurched the other way. It embraced right-wing populism, the angry anti-immigrant demagoguery of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan and the resentment-soaked “Own the Libs” theater of Sarah Palin.

The through line here is that conservative elites have perpetually kept fuzzy the boundary between elite conservatism and right-wing mass politics, to mobilize large popular constituencies. As John Ganz notes, again and again conservative intellectuals have “fastened themselves like barnacles onto demagogic movements.”

Trump hastened the erasure of that boundary with his unabashed nativism, racism, active flaunting of corruption and open contempt for democracy. As Continetti writes, many on the right are now in the grip of “antagonism toward American culture and society” and even outright “opposition to the constitutional order.”

Which brings us to the GOP’s continuing embrace of Trump.

Continetti warns that conservatism cannot remain a viable ideological alternative to liberalism if it doesn’t decisively repudiate this turn away from liberal democracy and constitutionalism.

But one has to ask: Why are many Republican lawmakers so disinclined to take this same view?

One possible answer might be that, just as conservative elites have historically been reluctant to police extremism in order to hitch conservatism to mass political movements, something similar is happening again.

You can discern many signs that Republican lawmakers think the party’s future depends, at least partly, on sustaining the engagement of the voters that Trump brought into the GOP coalition, and that a full-throated repudiation of Trump’s contempt for democracy might imperil this project.

You see this in Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explicitly declaring that the party “can’t grow” without Trump. You see it in Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory for weeks to keep GOP voters engaged for the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia.

You see it in the GOP’s official censure of the only two House Republicans who want a full reckoning with Trump’s effort to destroy our political order. You see it in Pennsylvania Republicans telegraphing their belief that keeping the base engaged requires undying fealty to Trump’s 2020 lies.

There is a spectrum of motives in all this. Some Republicans really do think future elections should be subject to nullification by any means necessary, justified by wildly inflated depictions of the leftist enemy. Somewhat less menacingly, others feed these tendencies for instrumental purposes, to keep GOP voters on full boil.

But at bottom, why many GOP lawmakers think this is necessary to keep their voters engaged remains an unanswered question. It’s possible that if many GOP primary candidates endorsed by Trump lose, followed by him not running in 2024, then this conviction might fade.

But as long as it remains in place, it’s hard to see Continetti’s warning being heeded anytime soon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/19/conservative-matthew-continetti-warning-trump-2024/

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Wrong thread.  This one is dedicated to Brandon.  Start your own if you want to talk about Trump.

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36 minutes ago, homersapien said:

A conservative insider’s stark warning about Trump and 2024

In the dispiriting saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization against democracy, this week brings good news and bad news.

The good news: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is likely to survive a GOP primary challenge backed by Donald Trump in retaliation for Kemp’s refusal to help overturn his 2020 loss. If a willingness to respect election losses doesn’t turn out to be a dealbreaker in GOP primaries, that will be welcome.

The bad news: Trump’s allies are escalating efforts to get swing-state GOP legislatures to revisit and overturn the 2020 outcome. This is gaining support from some Republicans running for positions of control over future elections, which bodes rather badly.

The stakes are high in this struggle over the GOP’s future posture toward democracy. And a new book by a conservative movement insider helps us make sense of those stakes, why things have come to this, and the prognosis for a good outcome in that struggle.

In “The Right,” author Matthew Continetti warns that Republicans must wean themselves off the personality cult of Trump and fealty to his 2020 lies in order for conservatism to remain a viable ideological project. The 2024 election is a big test.

“Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump won’t be easy,” writes Continetti, who has held various positions inside conservative journalism and think tanks over the years.

But this gives rise to a question: Why are so few Republican lawmakers inclined to undertake this project of disentangling from Trump in the first place? Here’s where Continetti’s history of modern conservatism is illuminating.

In the book, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election through extraordinary procedural corruption and then the incitement of mob violence occupy a more prominent place in the story of conservatism’s evolution than movement thinkers usually ascribe it.

That’s because, in Continetti’s telling, those events partly represented long-festering tendencies inside the movement and the GOP. When racist, white supremacist and alt-right elements sought to violently overturn democracy, he writes, “all of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open.”

To illuminate these tendencies, Continetti tells a story of conservatism that has often been marked by an elite inability or unwillingness to police extremism, and at times an active embrace of it.

For instance: The right’s noninterventionist streak during the lead-up to World War II too easily collapsed into Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism and flirtation with Nazism. The anti-communism of the 1950s too easily shaded into support for Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.

Then in the 1960s, conservative elites were slow to purge John Birch conspiracism. And for too long they humored “states rights” as a smokescreen for opposing the dismantling of legally enforced white supremacy.

More recently, when Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried to edge the GOP in a pro-immigrant, facially aspirational direction, the base lurched the other way. It embraced right-wing populism, the angry anti-immigrant demagoguery of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan and the resentment-soaked “Own the Libs” theater of Sarah Palin.

The through line here is that conservative elites have perpetually kept fuzzy the boundary between elite conservatism and right-wing mass politics, to mobilize large popular constituencies. As John Ganz notes, again and again conservative intellectuals have “fastened themselves like barnacles onto demagogic movements.”

Trump hastened the erasure of that boundary with his unabashed nativism, racism, active flaunting of corruption and open contempt for democracy. As Continetti writes, many on the right are now in the grip of “antagonism toward American culture and society” and even outright “opposition to the constitutional order.”

Which brings us to the GOP’s continuing embrace of Trump.

Continetti warns that conservatism cannot remain a viable ideological alternative to liberalism if it doesn’t decisively repudiate this turn away from liberal democracy and constitutionalism.

But one has to ask: Why are many Republican lawmakers so disinclined to take this same view?

One possible answer might be that, just as conservative elites have historically been reluctant to police extremism in order to hitch conservatism to mass political movements, something similar is happening again.

You can discern many signs that Republican lawmakers think the party’s future depends, at least partly, on sustaining the engagement of the voters that Trump brought into the GOP coalition, and that a full-throated repudiation of Trump’s contempt for democracy might imperil this project.

You see this in Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explicitly declaring that the party “can’t grow” without Trump. You see it in Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory for weeks to keep GOP voters engaged for the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia.

You see it in the GOP’s official censure of the only two House Republicans who want a full reckoning with Trump’s effort to destroy our political order. You see it in Pennsylvania Republicans telegraphing their belief that keeping the base engaged requires undying fealty to Trump’s 2020 lies.

There is a spectrum of motives in all this. Some Republicans really do think future elections should be subject to nullification by any means necessary, justified by wildly inflated depictions of the leftist enemy. Somewhat less menacingly, others feed these tendencies for instrumental purposes, to keep GOP voters on full boil.

But at bottom, why many GOP lawmakers think this is necessary to keep their voters engaged remains an unanswered question. It’s possible that if many GOP primary candidates endorsed by Trump lose, followed by him not running in 2024, then this conviction might fade.

But as long as it remains in place, it’s hard to see Continetti’s warning being heeded anytime soon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/19/conservative-matthew-continetti-warning-trump-2024/

What does Neptune look like?

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45 minutes ago, homersapien said:

A conservative insider’s stark warning about Trump and 2024

In the dispiriting saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization against democracy, this week brings good news and bad news.

The good news: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is likely to survive a GOP primary challenge backed by Donald Trump in retaliation for Kemp’s refusal to help overturn his 2020 loss. If a willingness to respect election losses doesn’t turn out to be a dealbreaker in GOP primaries, that will be welcome.

The bad news: Trump’s allies are escalating efforts to get swing-state GOP legislatures to revisit and overturn the 2020 outcome. This is gaining support from some Republicans running for positions of control over future elections, which bodes rather badly.

The stakes are high in this struggle over the GOP’s future posture toward democracy. And a new book by a conservative movement insider helps us make sense of those stakes, why things have come to this, and the prognosis for a good outcome in that struggle.

In “The Right,” author Matthew Continetti warns that Republicans must wean themselves off the personality cult of Trump and fealty to his 2020 lies in order for conservatism to remain a viable ideological project. The 2024 election is a big test.

“Untangling the Republican Party and conservative movement from Donald Trump won’t be easy,” writes Continetti, who has held various positions inside conservative journalism and think tanks over the years.

But this gives rise to a question: Why are so few Republican lawmakers inclined to undertake this project of disentangling from Trump in the first place? Here’s where Continetti’s history of modern conservatism is illuminating.

In the book, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election through extraordinary procedural corruption and then the incitement of mob violence occupy a more prominent place in the story of conservatism’s evolution than movement thinkers usually ascribe it.

That’s because, in Continetti’s telling, those events partly represented long-festering tendencies inside the movement and the GOP. When racist, white supremacist and alt-right elements sought to violently overturn democracy, he writes, “all of the unreason and hatred that had been slowly growing in the body of the Right burst into the open.”

To illuminate these tendencies, Continetti tells a story of conservatism that has often been marked by an elite inability or unwillingness to police extremism, and at times an active embrace of it.

For instance: The right’s noninterventionist streak during the lead-up to World War II too easily collapsed into Charles Lindbergh’s antisemitism and flirtation with Nazism. The anti-communism of the 1950s too easily shaded into support for Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts.

Then in the 1960s, conservative elites were slow to purge John Birch conspiracism. And for too long they humored “states rights” as a smokescreen for opposing the dismantling of legally enforced white supremacy.

More recently, when Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried to edge the GOP in a pro-immigrant, facially aspirational direction, the base lurched the other way. It embraced right-wing populism, the angry anti-immigrant demagoguery of paleoconservative Pat Buchanan and the resentment-soaked “Own the Libs” theater of Sarah Palin.

The through line here is that conservative elites have perpetually kept fuzzy the boundary between elite conservatism and right-wing mass politics, to mobilize large popular constituencies. As John Ganz notes, again and again conservative intellectuals have “fastened themselves like barnacles onto demagogic movements.”

Trump hastened the erasure of that boundary with his unabashed nativism, racism, active flaunting of corruption and open contempt for democracy. As Continetti writes, many on the right are now in the grip of “antagonism toward American culture and society” and even outright “opposition to the constitutional order.”

Which brings us to the GOP’s continuing embrace of Trump.

Continetti warns that conservatism cannot remain a viable ideological alternative to liberalism if it doesn’t decisively repudiate this turn away from liberal democracy and constitutionalism.

But one has to ask: Why are many Republican lawmakers so disinclined to take this same view?

One possible answer might be that, just as conservative elites have historically been reluctant to police extremism in order to hitch conservatism to mass political movements, something similar is happening again.

You can discern many signs that Republican lawmakers think the party’s future depends, at least partly, on sustaining the engagement of the voters that Trump brought into the GOP coalition, and that a full-throated repudiation of Trump’s contempt for democracy might imperil this project.

You see this in Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explicitly declaring that the party “can’t grow” without Trump. You see it in Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory for weeks to keep GOP voters engaged for the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia.

You see it in the GOP’s official censure of the only two House Republicans who want a full reckoning with Trump’s effort to destroy our political order. You see it in Pennsylvania Republicans telegraphing their belief that keeping the base engaged requires undying fealty to Trump’s 2020 lies.

There is a spectrum of motives in all this. Some Republicans really do think future elections should be subject to nullification by any means necessary, justified by wildly inflated depictions of the leftist enemy. Somewhat less menacingly, others feed these tendencies for instrumental purposes, to keep GOP voters on full boil.

But at bottom, why many GOP lawmakers think this is necessary to keep their voters engaged remains an unanswered question. It’s possible that if many GOP primary candidates endorsed by Trump lose, followed by him not running in 2024, then this conviction might fade.

But as long as it remains in place, it’s hard to see Continetti’s warning being heeded anytime soon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/19/conservative-matthew-continetti-warning-trump-2024/

 

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20 hours ago, I_M4_AU said:

Wrong thread.  This one is dedicated to Brandon.  Start your own if you want to talk about Trump.

You create a superficial thread about our current POTUS, I point out the actual threat to our democracy our former POTUS posed.

I don't see the problem here.

:moon:

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17 minutes ago, homersapien said:

You create a superficial thread about our current POTUS, I point out the actual threat to our democracy our former POTUS posed.

I don't see the problem here.

:moon:

Of course you don’t see it.  Trump has broken you.

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Just now, homersapien said:

That makes no sense at all.

Do you want to see him get re-elected?

No, Ive moved on.  How about you?

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Food for thought:

The Cost of Not Indicting Trump Now Is a Presidency Without Guardrails

None of the mechanisms to deter a rogue president would work to restrain a reelected Trump.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is under immense pressure to deliver high-level grand jury indictments around the Jan. 6, 2021, violent insurrection. The Justice Department’s website lists hundreds of “Capitol Breach Cases” and the FBI has an extensive “most wanted list for the U.S. Capitol violence.” But so far, the raft of accuseds glaringly includes zero people who were at the top of the federal payroll that day, including most prominently former President Donald Trump himself.

This is not for lack of evidence. In February, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade did the legal spadework supporting such an indictment in a carefully rendered “model prosecution memo.” In it she details — using only publicly available evidence — how Trump may have violated at least two federal criminal statutes by pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to thwart the election results: conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding. A federal judge effectively agreed with McQuade in a ruling resolving a dispute over documents sought by the House select committee on Jan. 6: Trump “likely committed” multiple federal crimes in office.

To be sure, there are ample policy and pragmatic reasons for Garland to avoid prosecuting Trump. There is a real cultural aversion to the idea of a former president in an orange jumpsuit. The problem is that, without high-level indictments, the Trump presidency stands as a flashing invitation for future presidents of any political stripe to commit federal crimes, with no accountability whatsoever. Indeed, if Trump were reelected in 2024 he would have a four-year window to operate with impunity. No constitutional mechanism, law enforcement agency, legal court or action by voters could deter him.

If we look closely at the so-called guardrails that are supposed to deter malfeasance by presidents, we realize quickly that they are, for all practical purposes, not there at all. Let’s take them one by one.

The 25th Amendment: Confronted with a rogue president, officials within the executive branch might seek to invoke the 25th Amendment to wrest power away from their boss, as former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reportedly considered at some point during the Trump era. But that amendment has never been used as a sort of mutiny provision. Ushered in after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, it was ostensibly meant to kick in if a president is physically incapacitated, not criminally inclined. Moreover, the 25th Amendment is procedurally clunky, requiring the vice president and a majority of the president’s Cabinet to agree that a president is unfit. The president is also allowed to send a counter-declaration to Congress, setting up a political quagmire that would do little to halt crimes in the Oval Office.

Protest resignations: Alternatively, faithful public servants could resign in protest rather than execute an unlawful directive from a president or turn a blind eye to illegality, on the theory that public scrutiny could pressure a president to comply with the law. This is precisely what happened with President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” — he terminated subordinates until someone agreed to fire the special prosecutor charged with investigating the Watergate break-in, Archibald Cox. Ultimately, his presidency collapsed. But when lead prosecutors resigned over former Attorney General William Barr’s unseemly interference in the Roger Stone sentencing, the administration paid no political price. It didn’t deter Trump from later pardoning Stone, either.

Impeachment: At the time the impeachment procedure was ratified as part of the Constitution, the framers did not have in mind the two-party system in which partisanship now rules. After the failed impeachment of President Bill Clinton and two against Trump, presidential impeachment has become a virtual dead letter. So long as there is no supermajority in Congress from the opposing political party of a sitting president, it will never work. If the Republicans retake the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 elections, the chances that Democrats could muster the votes to impeach Trump in the House, much less convict him in the Senate, are nonexistent.

Congressional hearings: Congressional hearings used to have meaningful political consequences. Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment after hearings laid bare his misdeeds. But if impeachment is an impossibility, then hearings, no matter how revelatory, carry no threat.

 nd poorly reasoned memo from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel advises against prosecuting sitting presidents. So long as OLC’s memo remains in place, only former presidents can be indicted. (For his part, Garland could commission a revised and updated OLC memo, which is merely an internal DOJ policy, not a law, but that would signal that he’s willing to take on Trump.) Of course, Congress could pass a law expressly permitting the prosecution of a sitting president, but for the same reason that impeachment is impossible, such legislation is equally unlikely.

The fact that the president controls the entire executive branch (and therefore all investigations by the DOJ) is why Robert Mueller likely felt constrained in bringing an obstruction charge against Trump despite supporting evidence. And it’s why the Ethics in Government Act was passed after Watergate, enabling an independent prosecutor outside the president’s chain of command. Congress could revive the act but the filibuster makes it almost impossible. It should be noted, as well, that a future president who wins a second term probably would be immunized from prosecution for crimes committed in the first several years of his term because of the general five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes.

The judicial branch: The judicial branch is not available for presidential accountability, either, because Article 3 confines its jurisdiction to cases parties must bring to the courts. Here, that party would be DOJ and the procedure would be the filing of a criminal indictment, which we know can’t happen for a sitting president because of the OLC memo. If Garland doesn’t take that step now, future presidents can mostly rest assured that they don’t have to worry about criminal liability once they’re out of office, either.

The states: Prosecutors at the state or municipal level aren’t technically bound by the OLC memo that currently hamstrings federal prosecutors. We are seeing such power in use, albeit sluggishly, in Manhattan right now. But this option assumes, first, that state and local criminal laws are coextensive with the federal criminal code. They are not. Conspiring to defraud the United States, for example, is a federal crime, prosecutable by DOJ alone. Moreover, state and local crimes require a factual connection to the state or municipality — e.g., Trump paid (or failed to pay) taxes in New York, so that locus has jurisdiction.

Finally, assuming again that a state prosecutor would overcome a president’s inevitable constitutional objection based on the OLC memo to an indictment while in office, the political ramifications for state and local prosecutors — who are often elected — are significant. A sitting president with vindictive motives could use the staggering powers of his office to chill or retaliate against a state or local prosecutor. In short, to dump the problem onto our states and cities is not a satisfactory answer to the very real possibility of a criminally active president.

Elections: During Trump’s first impeachment, while a presidential election was impending, congressional Republicans argued that the November 2020 ballot box — and not impeachment — was the appropriate remedy for perceived presidential wrongdoing. Arguably, their rhetorical gamble failed, as Trump was held “accountable” for his actions by losing the White House. But a reelected Trump would not be constitutionally eligible for a third term and thus would have no reason to fear the wrath of voters.

So where does this leave us? Presumably, most Americans want a president to act with integrity and do the right thing, but the framers understood that such wishful thinking is not enough. It’s human nature to amass, entrench and ultimately abuse power. That’s why we have a system of separated powers — three branches at the federal level, each of which checks the exercise of the others’ power, and a panoply of states with their own checking mechanisms. But as it stands, if Garland refuses to push back on the abuses of the Trump years by engaging in what would be an admittedly risky gamble to save democracy, all that stands in the way of a future presidential crime spree is, by process of elimination, a trust in future voters’ good and informed judgment —and a system of free and fair elections by which to effectuate it.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/21/not-indicting-trump-cost-restrain-guardrails-00026881

 

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