Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
That's your view. It's nonsense to present that as an objective consensus.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
If that politician goes "they counted the votes and the state court is trying anything to overturn the result", shouldn't they have some way of relying on the state court acting within its powers?
The State Court was very much acting within its powers! Their was a known and obvious issue with the nature of the ballots, and the Court proposed a recount at a time when not all votes were counted. Some states have a mandatory recount if the margin is small enough. As I said in my previous post (where you only commented on the first line) this is the definition of reparable harm - it's not like breaking an item or committing libel; if Bush had won, a recount would have affirmed that. Instead, because there were ballots that would have been counted in a recount that could have gone to Gore and "changed the result" (based on the information available at the time) the Bush team did not want that.
Again, you have a pile of votes that give an election to Candidate A, a closed box with some unknown number of legal votes in. Candidate A argues you don't need to count the votes in that closed box. The Florida court says, yeah, you do, SCOTUS says, nah, you don't. Only one of those decisions actually ignores any votes, and it is the actions of SCOTUS noy the Florida court. Even if later on when you open that box and count the votes (something that has not ever actually been done) and it still shows Candidate A won the method that got Candidate A into power was not based on the votes cast but the decision of SCOTUS.
A coup in a western democracy begins to look quite plausible to me
Trump, now Germany? This is a theme
Both failed though as you need the full support of the army for a successful coup. See Egypt where it was the army that toppled President Morsi
Generally I think you are right, particularly in a 3rd world country where more are the Army supplanting a Government than a popular uprising. And there was no way the German thing was ever coming to anything. I'm not so sure of America though. I hope you are right and they would have stopped it, but if Trump could have stopped the certification and had enough people convinced he was cheated and the parliament had refused to certify the result and it all turned into a mess, would the military have intervened. How do they decide who is right if a significant number of the population and members of the parliaments believe Trump was right.
It was scary and still is, although less so.
In terms of all of Leon's fears, I'm surprised this one wasn't up there sooner.
Though the Democrats holding the Senate means zero chance of Congress overturning the EC results in 2024 if Trump runs and loses
They've got the House this time, can't they play silly buggers at that end?
It needs both the House AND Senate to object to EC results to overturn them, so effectively no
A German man referred to as a prince called Heinrich XIII, 71, is alleged to have been central to their plans.
Apparently he was a member of the princely house of Reuss, which has the quaint custom of naming all its male members (so to speak) Heinrich, and numbering them in chronological order of birth.
Whether he is really a prince in any sense I'm not sure. Apparently the main line goes through Heinrich IV (1919-2012), Heinrich XIV (b. 1955) and Heinrich XXIX (b. 1997), so the would-be Kaiser is presumably a cousin of Heinrich XIV in some cadet line.
Numbering of the Heinrichs
All the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. In the elder line the numbering covers all male children of the elder House, and the numbers increase until 100 is reached and then start again at 1. In the younger line the system is similar but the numbers increase until the end of the century before starting again at 1. This odd regulation was formulated as a Family Law in 1688, but the tradition of the uniformity of name was in practice as early as 1200. It was seen as a way of honoring the Hohenstaufen Emperor Heinrich/Henry VI, who raised Heinrich der Reiche/Henry the Rich (+1209) to the office of provost of the Cloister in Quedlinburg.
Real life Gormenghast.
I'll be sorely disappointed if he doesn't have a handlebar moustache and look like Baron Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
The Mail has a picture:
Ah thanks - no handlebar but otherwise excellent. The jacket is close to what I pictured. Pity we can't see his trousers.
Toss up between dark pink and mustard.
And surely a waistcoat with hunting tassels for when the talk gets serious.
Smoking jacket, surely - cigars, brandy in the snooker room after dinner is the socially correct place to plot coups, I believe.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
2008 and 2012 weren't close enough. And next time a POTUS election was won by a narrow margin, it was Democrats - elected and in the media - who spent four years trying to delegitimise that result.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
That was part of my original point - that the Democrats just accepted Bush v Gore is wild to me, and set the stage for the radical SCOTUS we have now.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Not so. Once they have something vaguely constitutional, confirmed by the Supreme Court, then it requires an active choice to stand against that. Effectively a coup to stop a coup.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
The other, perhaps more serious issue, is what percentage of the police and military would have been AOK with Trump doing a coup.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
If that politician goes "they counted the votes and the state court is trying anything to overturn the result", shouldn't they have some way of relying on the state court acting within its powers?
The State Court was very much acting within its powers! Their was a known and obvious issue with the nature of the ballots, and the Court proposed a recount at a time when not all votes were counted. Some states have a mandatory recount if the margin is small enough. As I said in my previous post (where you only commented on the first line) this is the definition of reparable harm - it's not like breaking an item or committing libel; if Bush had won, a recount would have affirmed that. Instead, because there were ballots that would have been counted in a recount that could have gone to Gore and "changed the result" (based on the information available at the time) the Bush team did not want that.
Again, you have a pile of votes that give an election to Candidate A, a closed box with some unknown number of legal votes in. Candidate A argues you don't need to count the votes in that closed box. The Florida court says, yeah, you do, SCOTUS says, nah, you don't. Only one of those decisions actually ignores any votes, and it is the actions of SCOTUS nor the Florida court. Even if later on when you open that box and count the votes (something that has not ever actually been done) and it still shows Candidate A won the method that got Candidate A into power was not based on the votes cast but the decision of SCOTUS.
There were two closed boxes with some unknown number of legal votes in. Gore asked - and the Florida court agreed - to open only one of them.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I thought Stowe was supposed to be pretty upmarket? Was at uni with a chap from there and it did sound quite decent academically.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
Probably it's meant as a sophisticated little joke for wellborn people who appreciate sophisticated little jokes but there's a 'tell' in it - which is that the class system is alive and well and is so anchored around public schools that the subtle differences between them assume a grand significance in the affairs of the nation. If this wasn't the case the comment would have no traction, either seriously or in jest.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
As HYUFD has kindly confirmed, also, re the importance of differentials.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
But one set of votes was an unknown at the time. It was a closed box. The supreme court had the option of saying "we take the votes we have, or we take a recount that we don't know" and they took the votes they had, giving it to their guy. They could have chosen the closed box, and it may have still been their guy who won, but at the time that was unknown. So they chose.
"Their guy"? Give me a break.
You used exactly the same implication when refering to the Democrat controlled court in Florida. I mean why did you need to mention it was Dem controlled?
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
2008 and 2012 weren't close enough. And next time a POTUS election was won by a narrow margin, it was Democrats - elected and in the media - who spent four years trying to delegitimise that result.
No, they didn't. They challenged, quite rightly, the legitimacy of the President. They fully accepted the result of the election.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
But one set of votes was an unknown at the time. It was a closed box. The supreme court had the option of saying "we take the votes we have, or we take a recount that we don't know" and they took the votes they had, giving it to their guy. They could have chosen the closed box, and it may have still been their guy who won, but at the time that was unknown. So they chose.
"Their guy"? Give me a break.
You used exactly the same implication when refering to the Democrat controlled court in Florida. I mean why did you need to mention it was Dem controlled?
I wasn't the person who first noted in this thread that the Florida court was "putting its thumb on the scale for Gore".
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Not so. Once they have something vaguely constitutional, confirmed by the Supreme Court, then it requires an active choice to stand against that. Effectively a coup to stop a coup.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
The other, perhaps more serious issue, is what percentage of the police and military would have been AOK with Trump doing a coup.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
If that politician goes "they counted the votes and the state court is trying anything to overturn the result", shouldn't they have some way of relying on the state court acting within its powers?
The State Court was very much acting within its powers! Their was a known and obvious issue with the nature of the ballots, and the Court proposed a recount at a time when not all votes were counted. Some states have a mandatory recount if the margin is small enough. As I said in my previous post (where you only commented on the first line) this is the definition of reparable harm - it's not like breaking an item or committing libel; if Bush had won, a recount would have affirmed that. Instead, because there were ballots that would have been counted in a recount that could have gone to Gore and "changed the result" (based on the information available at the time) the Bush team did not want that.
Again, you have a pile of votes that give an election to Candidate A, a closed box with some unknown number of legal votes in. Candidate A argues you don't need to count the votes in that closed box. The Florida court says, yeah, you do, SCOTUS says, nah, you don't. Only one of those decisions actually ignores any votes, and it is the actions of SCOTUS nor the Florida court. Even if later on when you open that box and count the votes (something that has not ever actually been done) and it still shows Candidate A won the method that got Candidate A into power was not based on the votes cast but the decision of SCOTUS.
There were two closed boxes with some unknown number of legal votes in. Gore asked - and the Florida court agreed - to open only one of them.
What are the two closed boxes? Gore asked for a manual recount in 4 counties, and the Florida court granted that. If you're saying not recounting all the counties makes a second box, that's a bit of a stretch, but then SCOTUS could have ruled that Florida should have another statewide recount. They didn't; they opted to leave the votes uncounted.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I thought Stowe was supposed to be pretty upmarket? Was at uni with a chap from there and it did sound quite decent academically.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
Probably it's meant as a sophisticated little joke for wellborn people who appreciate sophisticated little jokes but there's a 'tell' in it - which is that the class system is alive and well and is so anchored around public schools that the subtle differences between them assume a grand significance in the affairs of the nation. If this wasn't the case the comment would have no traction, either seriously or in jest.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
There is no such thing as an 'egalitarian' alternative.
Even if a Labour government abolished all the public schools private school parents would just send their children to an Outstanding state school, one of the remaining grammars or to an expensive private international school abroad.
They wouldn't touch an average or requires improvement or inadequate state school with a bargepole
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
2008 and 2012 weren't close enough. And next time a POTUS election was won by a narrow margin, it was Democrats - elected and in the media - who spent four years trying to delegitimise that result.
No, they didn't. They challenged, quite rightly, the legitimacy of the President. They fully accepted the result of the election.
Were you even paying attention? "Not my President!" And that was the least of it!
How can the president not be legitimate without challenging the election itself? Preposterous.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Not so. Once they have something vaguely constitutional, confirmed by the Supreme Court, then it requires an active choice to stand against that. Effectively a coup to stop a coup.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
The other, perhaps more serious issue, is what percentage of the police and military would have been AOK with Trump doing a coup.
Some of those that work forces, are (as we know) the same that burn crosses - but I struggle to imagine the military in particular acquiescing to a coup.
Police likely more of a mixed bag depending on jurisdiction, but there were plenty who stood up to the 6th Jan bellends.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Still, it gives affluent Leavers someone to blame, I suppose, for the terrible state the country has slid into thanks to the Great Cameron Folly. 'Not the Brexit I voted for'.
In other news, I've been texted by my doctor's surgery - part of a seemingly ever-expanding partnership that now seems to cover surgeries across a large area - that there are no appointments available to be booked unless you need to be seen on the same day. You can't see a doc, in other words, unless you're very ill indeed, for the foreseeable future. Blaming staff shortages. Hmmm.
This 12-year nightmare has brought the country to its knees.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
If that politician goes "they counted the votes and the state court is trying anything to overturn the result", shouldn't they have some way of relying on the state court acting within its powers?
The State Court was very much acting within its powers! Their was a known and obvious issue with the nature of the ballots, and the Court proposed a recount at a time when not all votes were counted. Some states have a mandatory recount if the margin is small enough. As I said in my previous post (where you only commented on the first line) this is the definition of reparable harm - it's not like breaking an item or committing libel; if Bush had won, a recount would have affirmed that. Instead, because there were ballots that would have been counted in a recount that could have gone to Gore and "changed the result" (based on the information available at the time) the Bush team did not want that.
Again, you have a pile of votes that give an election to Candidate A, a closed box with some unknown number of legal votes in. Candidate A argues you don't need to count the votes in that closed box. The Florida court says, yeah, you do, SCOTUS says, nah, you don't. Only one of those decisions actually ignores any votes, and it is the actions of SCOTUS nor the Florida court. Even if later on when you open that box and count the votes (something that has not ever actually been done) and it still shows Candidate A won the method that got Candidate A into power was not based on the votes cast but the decision of SCOTUS.
There were two closed boxes with some unknown number of legal votes in. Gore asked - and the Florida court agreed - to open only one of them.
What are the two closed boxes? Gore asked for a manual recount in 4 counties, and the Florida court granted that. If you're saying not recounting all the counties makes a second box, that's a bit of a stretch, but then SCOTUS could have ruled that Florida should have another statewide recount. They didn't; they opted to leave the votes uncounted.
I don't think SCOTUS could have ordered a full statewide recount because nobody was asking for it at that stage.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
I give up. If you can't see that a court making a decision to stop a count (even if that is the correct thing to do) doesn't mean they decide, even if the outcome was probably the same, isn't them, well making a decision, what can I say.
I mean if they didn't decide why did anyone go to court in the first place and why did they come to any conclusion. This is nuts. They made a decision. That decision resulted in the election winner, regardless if it would have been the same by other means. There must have been at least some doubt, no matter how small, as otherwise nobody would have been in court.
They decided which set of votes to use. I was objecting to 148grss saying it "wasn't decided by votes" - of course it was. SCOTUS didn't require nonexistent votes to be created and added to the count.
Why on earth would there ever be a case if it was a 100% certainty between Bush winning or Bush winning at that point in time.. Clearly that was not the case. Nobody would have been arguing about it if it was.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
2008 and 2012 weren't close enough. And next time a POTUS election was won by a narrow margin, it was Democrats - elected and in the media - who spent four years trying to delegitimise that result.
No, they didn't. They challenged, quite rightly, the legitimacy of the President. They fully accepted the result of the election.
Were you even paying attention? "Not my President!" And that was the least of it!
How can the president not be legitimate without challenging the election itself? Preposterous.
Quite easily. Had Trump been successfully impeached, his replacement would have been Pence.
That you fail to grasp that point, indeed find the proposition hilarious, speaks volumes.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Still, it gives affluent Leavers someone to blame, I suppose, for the terrible state the country has slid into thanks to the Great Cameron Folly. 'Not the Brexit I voted for'.
In other news, I've been texted by my doctor's surgery - part of a seemingly ever-expanding partnership that now seems to cover surgeries across a large area - that there are no appointments available to be booked unless you need to be seen on the same day. You can't see a doc, in other words, unless you're very ill indeed, for the foreseeable future. Blaming staff shortages. Hmmm.
This 12-year nightmare has brought the country to its knees.
Blaming exactly a 12 year period, covering four very different governments, whilst ignoring that the opposition has supported the two biggest decisions that have led to the current situation and fundamentally agrees with the overall economic strategy, does risk making you look marginally partisan.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
But one set of votes was an unknown at the time. It was a closed box. The supreme court had the option of saying "we take the votes we have, or we take a recount that we don't know" and they took the votes they had, giving it to their guy. They could have chosen the closed box, and it may have still been their guy who won, but at the time that was unknown. So they chose.
"Their guy"? Give me a break.
Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas were (are in Thomas' case) some of the most partisan judges, and the two other votes came from judges nominated by a Republican (they signed it off per curiam so no actual names were attached). Yes, it was "their guy". To claim SCOTUS is nonpartisan, especially in the world we live in now, is purposeful ignorance.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
They always seem to downgrade the most interesting stories of the day, in order to talk about tittle-tattle instead.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
2008 and 2012 weren't close enough. And next time a POTUS election was won by a narrow margin, it was Democrats - elected and in the media - who spent four years trying to delegitimise that result.
No, they didn't. They challenged, quite rightly, the legitimacy of the President. They fully accepted the result of the election.
Were you even paying attention? "Not my President!" And that was the least of it!
How can the president not be legitimate without challenging the election itself? Preposterous.
Quite easily. Had Trump been successfully impeached, his replacement would have been Pence.
That you fail to grasp that point, indeed find the proposition hilarious, speaks volumes.
Right. But you can't successfully impeach a president for "being Donald Trump and beating Hillary Clinton", like the Democrats tried the first time, nor can you successfully impeach a president for "being Donald Trump and losing to Joe Biden", like they tried the second time.
"Not my president" started from the moment he won.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
So what? It still makes your statement inaccurate. I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of the case or who would have won. But saying the SCOTUS didn't decide is not true even if it was highly probable it made no difference.
It was decided by votes, SCOTUS just had to choose between sets of votes to use. And both options would have resulted in Bush winning.
But one set of votes was an unknown at the time. It was a closed box. The supreme court had the option of saying "we take the votes we have, or we take a recount that we don't know" and they took the votes they had, giving it to their guy. They could have chosen the closed box, and it may have still been their guy who won, but at the time that was unknown. So they chose.
"Their guy"? Give me a break.
You used exactly the same implication when refering to the Democrat controlled court in Florida. I mean why did you need to mention it was Dem controlled?
I wasn't the person who first noted in this thread that the Florida court was "putting its thumb on the scale for Gore".
Again never said you were. Doesn't matter who was first, you did it as well so it is hypocritical to criticize others for doing the same.
You might note I have repeatedly not argued the rights and wrongs of the court cases nor the result. Just that your argument is not logical.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
And if the recount had gone the other way? So there is a probability that SCOTUS did decide the result as they could have let it go on.
I'm not arguing the rights and wrongs of this, but your statement is possibly inaccurate even if that is improbable (I have no idea of the probability)
The recount that the Dem-controlled Florida supreme court ordered would have resulted in Bush winning if completed.
Fine, if that was the case; I disagree with your insistence that it would have been the outcome
It's not my insistence, it's the academics who analysed it after the event.
If a politician goes "I know I won the vote, we don't need to count them all, and the courts back me" you don't see that as a non democratic means to "winning" an election? Even if post hoc the votes did tally up to mean that politician did get the most votes, was the method of them gaining power democratically legitimate?
If that politician goes "they counted the votes and the state court is trying anything to overturn the result", shouldn't they have some way of relying on the state court acting within its powers?
The State Court was very much acting within its powers! Their was a known and obvious issue with the nature of the ballots, and the Court proposed a recount at a time when not all votes were counted. Some states have a mandatory recount if the margin is small enough. As I said in my previous post (where you only commented on the first line) this is the definition of reparable harm - it's not like breaking an item or committing libel; if Bush had won, a recount would have affirmed that. Instead, because there were ballots that would have been counted in a recount that could have gone to Gore and "changed the result" (based on the information available at the time) the Bush team did not want that.
Again, you have a pile of votes that give an election to Candidate A, a closed box with some unknown number of legal votes in. Candidate A argues you don't need to count the votes in that closed box. The Florida court says, yeah, you do, SCOTUS says, nah, you don't. Only one of those decisions actually ignores any votes, and it is the actions of SCOTUS nor the Florida court. Even if later on when you open that box and count the votes (something that has not ever actually been done) and it still shows Candidate A won the method that got Candidate A into power was not based on the votes cast but the decision of SCOTUS.
There were two closed boxes with some unknown number of legal votes in. Gore asked - and the Florida court agreed - to open only one of them.
What are the two closed boxes? Gore asked for a manual recount in 4 counties, and the Florida court granted that. If you're saying not recounting all the counties makes a second box, that's a bit of a stretch, but then SCOTUS could have ruled that Florida should have another statewide recount. They didn't; they opted to leave the votes uncounted.
I don't think SCOTUS could have ordered a full statewide recount because nobody was asking for it at that stage.
SCOTUS can do what they want, they are the last court in the land. They could have taken on points from both arguments and gone - "Bush team is wrong to say there is irreparable harm to having a recount, but we disagree with the Gore and lower courts decision to only recount certain counties. Therefore, a recount in all counties is the only fair way to solve this issue." They literally commented in the decision why they didn't do this - "It is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of Equal Protection and due process without substantial additional work." So they just said it would be too much work to do a statewide recount, not a legal argument at all.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Not so. Once they have something vaguely constitutional, confirmed by the Supreme Court, then it requires an active choice to stand against that. Effectively a coup to stop a coup.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
The other, perhaps more serious issue, is what percentage of the police and military would have been AOK with Trump doing a coup.
More police than military, almost certainly.
There have been some quite serious concerns about the extreme-right in portions of the American military.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I thought Stowe was supposed to be pretty upmarket? Was at uni with a chap from there and it did sound quite decent academically.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
Probably it's meant as a sophisticated little joke for wellborn people who appreciate sophisticated little jokes but there's a 'tell' in it - which is that the class system is alive and well and is so anchored around public schools that the subtle differences between them assume a grand significance in the affairs of the nation. If this wasn't the case the comment would have no traction, either seriously or in jest.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
There is no such thing as an 'egalitarian' alternative.
Even if a Labour government abolished all the public schools private school parents would just send their children to an Outstanding state school, one of the remaining grammars or to an expensive private international school abroad.
They wouldn't touch an average or requires improvement or inadequate state school with a bargepole
Most state schools are rated "good" which means, er, good. Which is good enough for me. And I value education probably more than most private school parents do and have the money to go private but don't want to.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
That's your view. It's nonsense to present that as an objective consensus.
Funnily enough, I checked that page before posting to check my memory was correct.
Funnily enough, you selectively quote it. ... Florida State University professor of public policy Lance deHaven-Smith observed that, even considering only undervotes, "under any of the five most reasonable interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court ruling, Gore does, in fact, more than make up the deficit".[4] Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's analysis of the NORC study and media coverage of it supported these interpretations and criticized the coverage of the study by media outlets such as The New York Times and the other media consortium members for focusing on how events might have played out rather than on the statewide vote count..
Note three of Bush's then legal team now sit in the Supreme Court. And have shown no sign of abandoning their then partisanship.
As I said, there's plenty of material to argue either side of Bush v Gore ad infinitum, and I've no interest in doing so.
The issue is rather the road the Republican Party has taken since.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
Too blasé.
You really need to speak to more Old School Republicans to get a better feeling about just how remarkable the attempts to prevent Trump's VP from ratifying the election results really were.
I'm not asking to suspend partisan leanings - merely to look at the situation objectively.
But it would, ultimately, have been meaningless. Vast sections of the military and the country were not going to support it and, as others have mentioned, 'the buildings' are simply symbols rather than real seats of power.
Not so. Once they have something vaguely constitutional, confirmed by the Supreme Court, then it requires an active choice to stand against that. Effectively a coup to stop a coup.
That's why the role of people like Pence was so crucial, and why the current situation is still so dangerous. If the counting of the electoral college votes had ended without the Senate declaring Biden had received most votes then the whole thing was up in the air. Could happen in the future.
The other, perhaps more serious issue, is what percentage of the police and military would have been AOK with Trump doing a coup.
Some of those that work forces, are (as we know) the same that burn crosses - but I struggle to imagine the military in particular acquiescing to a coup.
Police likely more of a mixed bag depending on jurisdiction, but there were plenty who stood up to the 6th Jan bellends.
Lots of those that work forces are ex-military. They "will do what you tell me".
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
I'm not aware that me or anyone I know has a greater influence in anything that's important -or anything at all for that matter-but I know that it's made life one hell of a lot more difficult and considerably less pleasant.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Still, it gives affluent Leavers someone to blame, I suppose, for the terrible state the country has slid into thanks to the Great Cameron Folly. 'Not the Brexit I voted for'.
In other news, I've been texted by my doctor's surgery - part of a seemingly ever-expanding partnership that now seems to cover surgeries across a large area - that there are no appointments available to be booked unless you need to be seen on the same day. You can't see a doc, in other words, unless you're very ill indeed, for the foreseeable future. Blaming staff shortages. Hmmm.
This 12-year nightmare has brought the country to its knees.
Blaming exactly a 12 year period, covering four very different governments, whilst ignoring that the opposition has supported the two biggest decisions that have led to the current situation and fundamentally agrees with the overall economic strategy, does risk making you look marginally partisan.
I look marginally partisan?!
The opposition has made a lot of mistakes. In part by buying into the fiction that it was totally the Red Wall that swung Brexit.
'covering four very different governments' - damn right, they've got ever more worse. The rate of eyeball rotation has increased with every iteration. Obvs you're not going to agree - I think you're marginally too partisan for that - but, to me, 12 years is a very convenient timescale. Begun by needless, ideological austerity, followed by needless, ideological Brexit, precipitating us nicely to the mess we find ourselves in now.
Extradordinary story just reported on R4 today - German police just broken up a huge far-terrorist group, first who were planning to raid the bundestag, and in the last analysis including a 70-year old aristocrat they were planning to install as head of state ( ! ).
I was astonished how little attention that seemed to be getting on the Today program this morning. A mature, western democracy central to the EU was facing a serious attempt at a coup? They spent longer wittering on about twins.
It's an estimated 50 people in a country of 84 million with a stable government which for historical reasons is rather fascism-skeptical. The chances of them successfully taking over the government of Germany would be somewhere between zero and none.
Which was also true of the "insurrection" in the US, but that didn't stop it becoming a major news story.
No, that had a very real chance of success. Single-digits, but well above zero. A situation with a sitting president attempting a coup, a fairly hackish Supreme Court and 1/3 popular support for anything he might do (including lots of police and some military) is completely different from a few dozen random outsiders.
Nope. Zero chance of success. You need not just "some military" for a coup to succeed - you need "the military". A coup in support of Trump was never going to have that.
But it was more important to use it to discredit Trump for a future presidential run than to accurately reflect that, so it became a huge news story, to the extent that most people think it was anything more than an impotent howl of rage.
If you have the Supreme Court you don't need the military. The move was to create some kind of procedural ambiguity - for instance get Pence out of the way and have a toady decline to count the Biden votes - then have the tame court make a technical ruling that honoured whatever suited Trump.
We'll never know how hackish SCOTUS would have been to help their guy, because Pence avoided being killed or locked away for his own safety and the Senate managed to reconvene and count the votes. We know they wouldn't sign off on complete nonsense (because Trump tried) but we also know that they can be very hackish (because they have been over other decisions.)
The thing is, if you want to look for the kind of "coup" the GOP would accept, we only need to look at Bush vs Gore - Bush probably didn't win Florida, but the issues with the ballots and the Brooks Brothers Riot allowed for SCOTUS to, hackishly, give the presidency to Bush. This was done with a small threat of violence from people in suits localised in Florida, rather than weird looking mobs attacking the capitol, and a team of competent lawyers rather than the team Trump had, but if your definition of coup includes SCOTUS having handed the presidency to Trump illegitimately, then we have to say the same about Bush. It still baffles my mind looking back that the Dems took that decision lying down, and how it was kind of the first big move towards the radical right wing nature of the court we currently have. Also, we have 3 current SCOTUS judges who worked for Bush's legal team in Bush vs Gore - Roberts, Kavanaugh and Coney Barratt.
I mean, this is nonsense. Analysis by the media after the event showed that even if the Gore-requested recount had been completed he still would have lost.
But it wasn't decided by votes. It was decided by a hackish SCOTUS on really bad legal ground. Which is the exact same situation people are suggesting would count as a "coup" if it happened for Trump.
Of course it was decided by votes. SCOTUS didn't say "Bush is the winner", it said "stop the recount".
Which meant that thousands of votes went uncounted. Meaning that, essentially, SCOTUS said "Bush is the winner" because they stopped the counting of votes before they knew who the actual winner was and at a time when Bush was ahead.
The more important point is that Gore could have pursued the challenge. He chose not to do so in the interests of preserving confidence in the system.
At no time since then have Republicans ever reciprocated. Quite the opposite.
2008 and 2012 weren't close enough. And next time a POTUS election was won by a narrow margin, it was Democrats - elected and in the media - who spent four years trying to delegitimise that result.
No, they didn't. They challenged, quite rightly, the legitimacy of the President. They fully accepted the result of the election.
Were you even paying attention? "Not my President!" And that was the least of it!
How can the president not be legitimate without challenging the election itself? Preposterous.
"Not my President" is fair enough - its an expression that someone didn't vote for, like or respect the President.
"Not the President" is completely different.
Someone saying "Not my President" is no different to saying that something is "not my cup of tea". Its not challenging the election itself.
And Trump was an appalling President for all sorts of political reasons, and he acted illegitimately in all sorts of ways, doesn't mean he wasn't duly elected in 2016 - he was.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
The only book signing I ever went to was for Terry Pratchett and involved a long queue snaking around a nondescript part of London - possibly Croydon?
For the vast majority of the public their experience will be the same - if they go to a book signing it's likely to be one that lots of other people go to. It's only the author's who are at the book signings when nobody turns up.
So the first-time author has an unenviable opportunity to see their biased expectations challenged by a new experience.
In a past life I used to arrange book signings. The fact is, novelists (with a few exceptions, such as Terry Pratchett) tend to attract very few punters compared to celebs and sport stars. I remember dealing with a very grumpy Salman Rushdie when nobody had come to see him to sign his latest (one of his minor novels); novelists on the whole tend to be a bit entitled and miserable - a notable exception being David Mitchell, who probably not coincidentally had been a bookseller in the past.
The best were always the sportsmen and women - nearly always humble, often touchingly surprised by the number of people who wanted a book signing and generally cheerful with the punters.
I went through a phase of buying signed books for gifts. Most often by Iain Banks or Terry Pratchett, not by design but because they happened to be there when I walked past Dillons; possibly the manager was a sci-fi nut (as everyone seems to be nowadays). There was usually a small queue of half a dozen or so. The longest queue was for Tony Benn (who wrote a paragraph of completely illegible dedication, in red ink) and the shortest for celebrity gangster Mad Frankie Fraser.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
I would be astonished if the offered terms were anything other than the standard full membership terms offered to all new prospective members.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
The only book signing I ever went to was for Terry Pratchett and involved a long queue snaking around a nondescript part of London - possibly Croydon?
For the vast majority of the public their experience will be the same - if they go to a book signing it's likely to be one that lots of other people go to. It's only the author's who are at the book signings when nobody turns up.
So the first-time author has an unenviable opportunity to see their biased expectations challenged by a new experience.
In a past life I used to arrange book signings. The fact is, novelists (with a few exceptions, such as Terry Pratchett) tend to attract very few punters compared to celebs and sport stars. I remember dealing with a very grumpy Salman Rushdie when nobody had come to see him to sign his latest (one of his minor novels); novelists on the whole tend to be a bit entitled and miserable - a notable exception being David Mitchell, who probably not coincidentally had been a bookseller in the past.
The best were always the sportsmen and women - nearly always humble, often touchingly surprised by the number of people who wanted a book signing and generally cheerful with the punters.
I went through a phase of buying signed books for gifts. Most often by Iain Banks or Terry Pratchett, not by design but because they happened to be there when I walked past Dillons; possibly the manager was a sci-fi nut (as everyone seems to be nowadays). There was usually a small queue of half a dozen or so. The longest queue was for Tony Benn (who wrote a paragraph of completely illegible dedication, in red ink) and the shortest for celebrity gangster Mad Frankie Fraser.
The saddest was maybe Des Lynam, who had literally nobody turn up - this was not long after he'd left his short stint at Countdown. He was on the cusp of National-Treasuredom, but fell away at the last. He took it on the chin though.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
Two-thirds majority in congress?
It is similarly possible, albeit difficult, to change the Lisbon treaty.
These seat predictions are absolutely insane; the hysteria is similar to what we saw prior to Biden's win.
It will be a slim Labour majority at best. If they get more than a 50 seat majority I will be astonished. What is beyond doubt is that Keir Starmer is clearly the best leader Labour has had since Blair - and in many ways there was no reason he had to win. He's a brutal operator.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
The methodology to re-write any part of the Constitution is detailed in the Constitution.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
Two-thirds majority in congress?
It is similarly possible, albeit difficult, to change the Lisbon treaty.
I looked it up in the interim. I had forgotten the states need to ratify it. Is there a formal process in the EU?
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
America is a country, people like Scott claim that Europe isn't one or evolving into one.
Texans can't change the US Constitution, because Texas has given away its sovereignty to be a part of America.
Similarly Britain short of Brexiting had given away its sovereignty and democratic control over these issues to join a nascent, evolving Federal Europe - but without the demos and meaningful democratic elections that Federal America has.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
I hadn't really caught up with this story (courtesy of Tortoisemedia):
Hungary has vetoed an €18 billion EU aid package for Ukraine, threatening plans to get much-needed finance to Kyiv by January. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seems to be leveraging his support to secure Hungary’s share of EU funding worth up to €13.3 billion, which the bloc has held back because of concerns about Hungarian corruption and the rule of law. Orbán is also blocking efforts to introduce a minimum corporate tax rate. What next? Other EU capitals will look for alternative ways to secure the funds, but the process could take longer – and Kyiv can’t wait. Meanwhile, Orbán needs to have his recovery plan approved by the end of the year or he risks losing 70 per cent of €5.8 billion in possible EU grants.
I suspect there will be some last-minute deal, but it's awkward. Getting 27 countries into line on anything is difficult - there's always one holding out for special concessions, a bit like the US Congress. The EU needs more decision-making by majority voting...
Your argument is that regardless of which votes were counted it was obvious Bush had won and this was known before the court case and not dependent upon any un-recounted votes
In which case why did the Democrats go to court and why was there so much argument?
Clearly at the time there was doubt in some people's minds.
Therefore by refusing to carry on with the recount the judges decided (rightly or wrongly) the result.
To claim that it did not make any difference which way the judges decided may be correct, but was unknown, even if the degree of being unknown was minuscule. otherwise why bring a case that you know will result in you losing an election regardless of the court's decision.
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I thought Stowe was supposed to be pretty upmarket? Was at uni with a chap from there and it did sound quite decent academically.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
Probably it's meant as a sophisticated little joke for wellborn people who appreciate sophisticated little jokes but there's a 'tell' in it - which is that the class system is alive and well and is so anchored around public schools that the subtle differences between them assume a grand significance in the affairs of the nation. If this wasn't the case the comment would have no traction, either seriously or in jest.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
There is no such thing as an 'egalitarian' alternative.
Even if a Labour government abolished all the public schools private school parents would just send their children to an Outstanding state school, one of the remaining grammars or to an expensive private international school abroad.
They wouldn't touch an average or requires improvement or inadequate state school with a bargepole
Most state schools are rated "good" which means, er, good. Which is good enough for me. And I value education probably more than most private school parents do and have the money to go private but don't want to.
'Good' for private school parents is average. Most of them are in the top 10% of income earners after all and will want their children to go to a top 10% school too. So if they didn't send their children private only an Outstanding state school would do, merely 'good' not good enough
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Still, it gives affluent Leavers someone to blame, I suppose, for the terrible state the country has slid into thanks to the Great Cameron Folly. 'Not the Brexit I voted for'.
In other news, I've been texted by my doctor's surgery - part of a seemingly ever-expanding partnership that now seems to cover surgeries across a large area - that there are no appointments available to be booked unless you need to be seen on the same day. You can't see a doc, in other words, unless you're very ill indeed, for the foreseeable future. Blaming staff shortages. Hmmm.
This 12-year nightmare has brought the country to its knees.
Blaming exactly a 12 year period, covering four very different governments, whilst ignoring that the opposition has supported the two biggest decisions that have led to the current situation and fundamentally agrees with the overall economic strategy, does risk making you look marginally partisan.
I look marginally partisan?!
The opposition has made a lot of mistakes. In part by buying into the fiction that it was totally the Red Wall that swung Brexit.
'covering four very different governments' - damn right, they've got ever more worse. The rate of eyeball rotation has increased with every iteration. Obvs you're not going to agree - I think you're marginally too partisan for that - but, to me, 12 years is a very convenient timescale. Begun by needless, ideological austerity, followed by needless, ideological Brexit, precipitating us nicely to the mess we find ourselves in now.
But you've left out the two critical decisions - lockdown, where Sir Keir and his party demanded the same kind of mistakes, but bigger and for longer - and support of Ukraine against Putin, where Sir Keir and his party have totally supported the government's actions.
You also mention Brexit - yet for some reason the opposition's actions in the 2017-19 parliament (shadow Brexit minister: Sir Keir Starmer) unquestionably made things worse.
You accuse me of being partiosan - I'm trying to support Labour at the moment. I want to be able to - we need a change of government. They could even have won my unquestioning support with a single sentence earlier this week - but every time they come up with a policy it seems to be one that will at best make no difference.
I hadn't really caught up with this story (courtesy of Tortoisemedia):
Hungary has vetoed an €18 billion EU aid package for Ukraine, threatening plans to get much-needed finance to Kyiv by January. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seems to be leveraging his support to secure Hungary’s share of EU funding worth up to €13.3 billion, which the bloc has held back because of concerns about Hungarian corruption and the rule of law. Orbán is also blocking efforts to introduce a minimum corporate tax rate. What next? Other EU capitals will look for alternative ways to secure the funds, but the process could take longer – and Kyiv can’t wait. Meanwhile, Orbán needs to have his recovery plan approved by the end of the year or he risks losing 70 per cent of €5.8 billion in possible EU grants.
Britain could take a principled stand by cancelling any further divorce payments to the EU so that they don't go to Hungary, and instead offering the money to Ukraine.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
I did. Did you read my comment that "it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing"?
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
Two-thirds majority in congress?
It is similarly possible, albeit difficult, to change the Lisbon treaty.
I looked it up in the interim. I had forgotten the states need to ratify it. Is there a formal process in the EU?
If 2/3 of MEPs and most of the European Commission and Council wanted to change the EU constitution it would happen but a high hurdle
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
Your argument is that regardless of which votes were counted it was obvious Bush had won and this was known before the court case and not dependent upon any un-recounted votes
No, that's not my argument at all, so your logic fails at the first step.
(and there's no need for the tag, I'm reading the thread).
@edwest 'There is no class hatred in Britain more virulent than that of the minor public school boy for the major public school boy. This explains so much of the animus felt towards Cameron & Boris (Eton) by... James O’Brien (Ampleforth) & George Monbiot (Stowe)'
I thought Stowe was supposed to be pretty upmarket? Was at uni with a chap from there and it did sound quite decent academically.
BTW a nice object example of only the 'British' being able to parse 'British' English correctly, unlike any foreigner who would be totally wrong.
Probably it's meant as a sophisticated little joke for wellborn people who appreciate sophisticated little jokes but there's a 'tell' in it - which is that the class system is alive and well and is so anchored around public schools that the subtle differences between them assume a grand significance in the affairs of the nation. If this wasn't the case the comment would have no traction, either seriously or in jest.
We know what the answer is, don't we. End all that and create an egalitarian alternative.
There is no such thing as an 'egalitarian' alternative.
Even if a Labour government abolished all the public schools private school parents would just send their children to an Outstanding state school, one of the remaining grammars or to an expensive private international school abroad.
They wouldn't touch an average or requires improvement or inadequate state school with a bargepole
I'm not suggesting abolishing the public schools and doing nothing else. It's necessary but far from sufficient.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
It's interesting that you're both right. As Driver ironically notes, the pattern that old people die and young people stay left-wing just hasn't happened - when people turn 65, many mysteriously become more Tory. And yet, that doesn't seem to apply to Brexit - the elderly Brexiteers are NOT being replaced by Remainers turning Brexiteer as they get older.
Starmer can't afford to distract from the Tory problems by saying anything exciting about the EU before 2024. But it's hard to imagine a Labour government not easing trade with the EU, and that, by then, is likely to have broad popular consent.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
Two-thirds majority in congress?
It is similarly possible, albeit difficult, to change the Lisbon treaty.
The US inability to change their constitution is a genuine flaw in their system resulting in their ridiculous situation for corporate finance and guns.
But the more relevant comparison is how do voters change the government of the European Commission. Americans regularly vote on their President, and kick them out of power, changing the policy direction of the place as a result.
In the EU, Von Der Leyen is hand picked as Angela Merkel's preferred leader, because she didn't like the Spitzenkandidat that "won" the election. If you remember that was the rationale why the EU couldn't possibly choose someone other than Jean-Claude Juncker, who all four major UK-wide parties opposed. He was the winning Spitzenkandidat and thus the UK had to accept. A rule that didn't apply to Germany. Of course these are all rules that only (some) political nerds know, because the EU is an undemocratic Byzantine mess.
And of course, even if you do change the Commission, there would be no change in policy. Because all the Eurocrats believe the same thing, regardless of the general public. The EPP and the PES divide up jobs beside them as a matter of course, and there has never been a change in direction depending which one as the top job or depending on election results.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
How can Americans overturn the Constitution? Are they not a democracy thereby?
Firstly, no, the USA is not; the democracy bit happens at state level, and the federal republic bit (ie, the electoral college) is deliberately undemocratic for reasons that you may or may not agree with but for which the logic is extremely clear.
Secondly, are you seriously claiming not to know that the Constitution formally consists of the original articles plus the various Amendments made since it was first drafted?
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
When have like minded voters EVER combined to change the policy of the European Union? Could you list three examples?
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
If you want a country called Europe then that would be fair enough, I've said all along a country called Europe could be democratic, given serious reform and the control over the governance being controlled at European elections.
Lets have meaningful European elections which debate and determine these issues, but that wasn't on the cards. "More Europe" is democratic and reasonable, or less, but this bodged halfway house where likeminded voters don't vote on European issues and elect a European Government is not reasonable.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
It's interesting that you're both right. As Driver ironically notes, the pattern that old people die and young people stay left-wing just hasn't happened - when people turn 65, many mysteriously become more Tory. And yet, that doesn't seem to apply to Brexit - the elderly Brexiteers are NOT being replaced by Remainers turning Brexiteer as they get older.
Starmer can't afford to distract from the Tory problems by saying anything exciting about the EU before 2024. But it's hard to imagine a Labour government not easing trade with the EU, and that, by then, is likely to have broad popular consent.
Easing trade is fine. As long as he isn't handing control of laws to foreign bodies.
I hadn't really caught up with this story (courtesy of Tortoisemedia):
Hungary has vetoed an €18 billion EU aid package for Ukraine, threatening plans to get much-needed finance to Kyiv by January. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seems to be leveraging his support to secure Hungary’s share of EU funding worth up to €13.3 billion, which the bloc has held back because of concerns about Hungarian corruption and the rule of law. Orbán is also blocking efforts to introduce a minimum corporate tax rate. What next? Other EU capitals will look for alternative ways to secure the funds, but the process could take longer – and Kyiv can’t wait. Meanwhile, Orbán needs to have his recovery plan approved by the end of the year or he risks losing 70 per cent of €5.8 billion in possible EU grants.
I suspect there will be some last-minute deal, but it's awkward. Getting 27 countries into line on anything is difficult - there's always one holding out for special concessions, a bit like the US Congress. The EU needs more decision-making by majority voting...
If the EU is serious about holding its members to certain minimum standards in terms of the rule of law, media freedom, etc, then they should suspend Hungary's membership. Then Hungary no longer has a veto at all to block action by the other members.
This isn't about the difficulty of reaching consensus. It's not the veto itself that is the problem. The problem is Orban and his disdain for democratic norms.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
Not at all sure that follows - if you vote an EPP-affiliated party you get More Europe. If you vote an S&D-affiliated party you get More Europe.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
India has had very clear changes of policy when they switch from Congress to the BJP at the top, as a result of democratic elections.
When has the EU ever changed policy direction as a result of democratic elections? As I asked, can you name three examples of this happening in the EU's entire history?
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Tosh.
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
Not at all sure that follows - if you vote an EPP-affiliated party you get More Europe. If you vote an S&D-affiliated party you get More Europe.
That's because more EU integration is the publicly stated policy of those parties and people vote for them. There are also parties that stand on a policy of less integration and fewer people vote for them and so they have less influence. That's democracy.
Your argument is that regardless of which votes were counted it was obvious Bush had won and this was known before the court case and not dependent upon any un-recounted votes
No, that's not my argument at all, so your logic fails at the first step.
(and there's no need for the tag, I'm reading the thread).
I tagged out of courtesy as I wasn't replying to one of your posts.
So what the heck is your argument then, cos that is what the rest of us think you are saying?
You actually said it didn't matter which votes were counted Bush had won so the court hadn't decided who won.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Tosh.
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
Once again, "thinking leaving was a mistake" is not the same thing as "wants to rejoin".
Also: new voters today are old enough to remember when we were still in the EU.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
India has had very clear changes of policy when they switch from Congress to the BJP at the top, as a result of democratic elections.
When has the EU ever changed policy direction as a result of democratic elections? As I asked, can you name three examples of this happening in the EU's entire history?
Can you name any EU policy that has been implented despite being opposed by a majority of member states' democratically elected governments and the democratically elected EU Parliament?
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Tosh.
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
Yours is tosh, supporting Brexit or not supporting Brexit is like supporting gravity. It exists, whether you like it or not.
A few headbangers may keep banging on about Brexit but the stark cold reality is its happened and the debate on whether we should leave or not the EU has closed, the answer was we left, its over.
Now could a debate start in a few years that means that joining the EU all over again becomes popular? Its possible. Or its equally possible people will have other priorities and that is what Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have realised, they're better off moving on from Brexit to the issues of the future, not harping on about the issues of the past.
Remain/Leave is an issue of the past. The progress of time means people move on from the past.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
India has had very clear changes of policy when they switch from Congress to the BJP at the top, as a result of democratic elections.
When has the EU ever changed policy direction as a result of democratic elections? As I asked, can you name three examples of this happening in the EU's entire history?
Can you name any EU policy that has been implented despite being opposed by a majority of member states' democratically elected governments and the democratically elected EU Parliament?
The Lisbon Treaty was rejected by referendum in France and the Netherlands, would have been rejected in the UK, but was passed anyway.
Either way though, do you think there should be a democratic country called Europe?
If so, great, then lets ensure that the demos and democracy is healthy.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
India has had very clear changes of policy when they switch from Congress to the BJP at the top, as a result of democratic elections.
When has the EU ever changed policy direction as a result of democratic elections? As I asked, can you name three examples of this happening in the EU's entire history?
Can you name any EU policy that has been implented despite being opposed by a majority of member states' democratically elected governments and the democratically elected EU Parliament?
Your original argument was that the EU was equivalent to the US or India. I gave a very clear and apparent difference and asked you to counter. I assume the fact you are trying to answer a question with a question is that you can't give three examples. Which Indians could clearly give for India and Americans could clearly give for America. You trying to move the goalposts to a different framing is irrelevant.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Tosh.
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
Once again, "thinking leaving was a mistake" is not the same thing as "wants to rejoin".
Also: new voters today are old enough to remember when we were still in the EU.
The two positions, “leaving was a mistake” and “let’s rejoin” are both headed in the same direction.
Frankly I’m surprised by the strength of “let’s rejoin”, to the extent I now seriously suspect it will happen. Previously I did not think it possible.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Tosh.
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
Yours is tosh, supporting Brexit or not supporting Brexit is like supporting gravity. It exists, whether you like it or not.
A few headbangers may keep banging on about Brexit but the stark cold reality is its happened and the debate on whether we should leave or not the EU has closed, the answer was we left, its over.
Now could a debate start in a few years that means that joining the EU all over again becomes popular? Its possible. Or its equally possible people will have other priorities and that is what Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have realised, they're better off moving on from Brexit to the issues of the future, not harping on about the issues of the past.
Remain/Leave is an issue of the past. The progress of time means people move on from the past.
All the polling suggests that you are one of a dwindling number of headbangers.
Indeed, given your age and education profile, you are becoming as rare as rockinghorse shit.
Unlike the author, I do consider democracy to be a good in itself.
We were a democracy without Brexit
How could I vote to overturn decisions made at a European level then?
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
You could combine with like minded voters in the same way as in local or national elections. Decisions in the EU are made by sovereign governments and the European Parliament which are both democratically elected. If voters across Europe want something then it happens, just as in the UK if voters across the UK want something. A single voter or voters in a single constituency in the UK can't change anything, and in the EU a single voter or voters in a single country can't change anything. It's really exactly the same. Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
But you can't do that in the EU which doesn't have a common language, a common media or any of the other things that are necessary for there to be a demos.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
Neither does India, which is still a democracy. I agree that the lack of a demos is a problem. It is emerging slowly. And the EU still has relatively limited powers as a result, with most important policies decided at a state level. And does it matter that much? If a majority of EU citizens vote for Centre right parties they will get Centre right policies at the EU level. This doesn't require there to be a single centre right party that they all vote for. Of all the arguments against the EU I find the democracy one the least convincing.
India has had very clear changes of policy when they switch from Congress to the BJP at the top, as a result of democratic elections.
When has the EU ever changed policy direction as a result of democratic elections? As I asked, can you name three examples of this happening in the EU's entire history?
Can you name any EU policy that has been implented despite being opposed by a majority of member states' democratically elected governments and the democratically elected EU Parliament?
The Lisbon Treaty was rejected by referendum in France and the Netherlands, would have been rejected in the UK, but was passed anyway.
Either way though, do you think there should be a democratic country called Europe?
If so, great, then lets ensure that the demos and democracy is healthy.
If not, then Brexit was sensible.
I would like to see political power dispersed to multiple layers of government so that people can exercise more power over their lives at a level that matches the issue. So a proper global government to effectively deal with climate issues and prevent tax evasion and resolve conflicts and manage migration. Right down to effective local government to deliver local services that respond to local needs. This will require a multi decade process of evolution. I see the EU as an evolution in that direction but not the end point. I think that too much of the debate on sovereignty rests on the idea of the nation state as the sole authentic repository of power, but it is often both too large and too small to be effective. Personally I have never felt so remote from and forgotten by politicians in Westminster. This has got worse not better since 2016.
“We have sacrificed all these mandates and the economic benefits of EU membership, and what have we got in return? Sadly, the answer is very little. Liberal Brexiteers should admit our mistake, we should concede that Brexit has been and will continue to be an illiberal pursuit.”
Leavers have shot their bolt. Before the referendum I thought in passing that the only way for Remain to win long term was to lose the Referendum as, sadly, the only way to prove Brexiteers wrong was to let them try and fail. Losing in 2016 could well have been to Ukip what losing in 2014 was to the SNP. It was one of the few times my prognostications (albeit quickly discarded as it was because of the damage it would cause/has caused - I voted Remain) have proved right. The only direction now is back towards the EU, even if we end up some way short of rejoining.
Well, that depends what you mean by "Remain winning long term". It seemed obvious to me that full membership of the EU (including the Euro, Schengen and the works) was not likely to ever be acceptable to the British people, and so the existing "half in" situation wasn't sustainable. The only real question was how best to transfer to a "half out" situation.
There was an interesting piece recently looking at how much of the swing to Rejoin was due to opinion change as opposed to Leavers dying and new young voters supporting Remain
It's interesting, but as usual it conflates "wrong to leave" with "Rejoin", which aren't remotely the same thing.
Once you discount cakism, all the momentum is with Rejoin, and accelerating too. Starmer is way behind the curve.
"Momentum" in politics is massively overrated. In this case it will come to a juddering halt the moment that the public cottons on to the fact that the previous membership terms would no longer be available even if the EU would let us back in (which is in itself far from certain).
Demographic change itself is pushing the numbers irrevocably towards leave.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
Ah, yes, demographic change, the thing which has been wiping out the Tories for decades.
Did you read the article posted upthread? Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
The debate is over, we've left.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Tosh.
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
Once again, "thinking leaving was a mistake" is not the same thing as "wants to rejoin".
Also: new voters today are old enough to remember when we were still in the EU.
The two positions, “leaving was a mistake” and “let’s rejoin” are both headed in the same direction.
Frankly I’m surprised by the strength of “let’s rejoin”, to the extent I now seriously suspect it will happen. Previously I did not think it possible.
Pro-EU sentiment is highly supported by minority of the public but elections are won and lost by the middle third. Those people tend to drift towards loosely EU support when the issue is not being covered. When there is a political debate, it moves sharply in the Eurosceptic direction. Even now, with a completely wrecked Conservative Party, a massive war in Ukraine, economic convulsions, the eurosceptic side still has a majority on the immigration topic. And that would immediately come to the fore in a Rejoin referendum. And that is before you get to currency arguments, which of course sank the last attempt at Scottish independence.
Comments
Again, you have a pile of votes that give an election to Candidate A, a closed box with some unknown number of legal votes in. Candidate A argues you don't need to count the votes in that closed box. The Florida court says, yeah, you do, SCOTUS says, nah, you don't. Only one of those decisions actually ignores any votes, and it is the actions of SCOTUS noy the Florida court. Even if later on when you open that box and count the votes (something that has not ever actually been done) and it still shows Candidate A won the method that got Candidate A into power was not based on the votes cast but the decision of SCOTUS.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/will-support-for-brexit-become-extinct/
They challenged, quite rightly, the legitimacy of the President.
They fully accepted the result of the election.
Even if a Labour government abolished all the public schools private school parents would just send their children to an Outstanding state school, one of the remaining grammars or to an expensive private international school abroad.
They wouldn't touch an average or requires improvement or inadequate state school with a bargepole
Were you even paying attention? "Not my President!" And that was the least of it!
How can the president not be legitimate without challenging the election itself? Preposterous.
Police likely more of a mixed bag depending on jurisdiction, but there were plenty who stood up to the 6th Jan bellends.
Leicester in 1964. From the BBC archives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD_KkBl5Qmc
Still, it gives affluent Leavers someone to blame, I suppose, for the terrible state the country has slid into thanks to the Great Cameron Folly. 'Not the Brexit I voted for'.
In other news, I've been texted by my doctor's surgery - part of a seemingly ever-expanding partnership that now seems to cover surgeries across a large area - that there are no appointments available to be booked unless you need to be seen on the same day. You can't see a doc, in other words, unless you're very ill indeed, for the foreseeable future. Blaming staff shortages. Hmmm.
This 12-year nightmare has brought the country to its knees.
Had Trump been successfully impeached, his replacement would have been Pence.
That you fail to grasp that point, indeed find the proposition hilarious, speaks volumes.
@WorldBank. Nobody is more unqualified. I wrote about Kurski here...
https://mobile.twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1600449461385404419
"Not my president" started from the moment he won.
You might note I have repeatedly not argued the rights and wrongs of the court cases nor the result. Just that your argument is not logical.
... Florida State University professor of public policy Lance deHaven-Smith observed that, even considering only undervotes, "under any of the five most reasonable interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court ruling, Gore does, in fact, more than make up the deficit".[4] Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's analysis of the NORC study and media coverage of it supported these interpretations and criticized the coverage of the study by media outlets such as The New York Times and the other media consortium members for focusing on how events might have played out rather than on the statewide vote count..
Note three of Bush's then legal team now sit in the Supreme Court. And have shown no sign of abandoning their then partisanship.
As I said, there's plenty of material to argue either side of Bush v Gore ad infinitum, and I've no interest in doing so.
The issue is rather the road the Republican Party has taken since.
We don’t know what the membership terms might be. I doubt we would ever join the Euro, for example, but I also doubt the EU would insist upon it if it came to it.
The opposition has made a lot of mistakes. In part by buying into the fiction that it was totally the Red Wall that swung Brexit.
'covering four very different governments' - damn right, they've got ever more worse. The rate of eyeball rotation has increased with every iteration. Obvs you're not going to agree - I think you're marginally too partisan for that - but, to me, 12 years is a very convenient timescale. Begun by needless, ideological austerity, followed by needless, ideological Brexit, precipitating us nicely to the mess we find ourselves in now.
"Not the President" is completely different.
Someone saying "Not my President" is no different to saying that something is "not my cup of tea". Its not challenging the election itself.
And Trump was an appalling President for all sorts of political reasons, and he acted illegitimately in all sorts of ways, doesn't mean he wasn't duly elected in 2016 - he was.
How could I vote to overturn the Lisbon treaty, which the UK Government elected in 2005 had pledged in its manifesto not to implement without a referendum?
It will be a slim Labour majority at best. If they get more than a 50 seat majority I will be astonished. What is beyond doubt is that Keir Starmer is clearly the best leader Labour has had since Blair - and in many ways there was no reason he had to win. He's a brutal operator.
Edit, oh dear, and here comes Stephen Flynn.
Texans can't change the US Constitution, because Texas has given away its sovereignty to be a part of America.
Similarly Britain short of Brexiting had given away its sovereignty and democratic control over these issues to join a nascent, evolving Federal Europe - but without the demos and meaningful democratic elections that Federal America has.
Demographic change explains 1/3 of the shift against Brexit seem since 2016.
Demographic change will mean that more people will grow up never having known Britain as being a part of the EU and find England being in the EU as alien a concept as New Zealand being in Australia, or Ontario being in the United States of America.
Hungary has vetoed an €18 billion EU aid package for Ukraine, threatening plans to get much-needed finance to Kyiv by January. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seems to be leveraging his support to secure Hungary’s share of EU funding worth up to €13.3 billion, which the bloc has held back because of concerns about Hungarian corruption and the rule of law. Orbán is also blocking efforts to introduce a minimum corporate tax rate. What next? Other EU capitals will look for alternative ways to secure the funds, but the process could take longer – and Kyiv can’t wait. Meanwhile, Orbán needs to have his recovery plan approved by the end of the year or he risks losing 70 per cent of €5.8 billion in possible EU grants.
I suspect there will be some last-minute deal, but it's awkward. Getting 27 countries into line on anything is difficult - there's always one holding out for special concessions, a bit like the US Congress. The EU needs more decision-making by majority voting...
Your argument is that regardless of which votes were counted it was obvious Bush had won and this was known before the court case and not dependent upon any un-recounted votes
In which case why did the Democrats go to court and why was there so much argument?
Clearly at the time there was doubt in some people's minds.
Therefore by refusing to carry on with the recount the judges decided (rightly or wrongly) the result.
To claim that it did not make any difference which way the judges decided may be correct, but was unknown, even if the degree of being unknown was minuscule. otherwise why bring a case that you know will result in you losing an election regardless of the court's decision.
You also mention Brexit - yet for some reason the opposition's actions in the 2017-19 parliament (shadow Brexit minister: Sir Keir Starmer) unquestionably made things worse.
You accuse me of being partiosan - I'm trying to support Labour at the moment. I want to be able to - we need a change of government. They could even have won my unquestioning support with a single sentence earlier this week - but every time they come up with a policy it seems to be one that will at best make no difference.
Of course as it's a larger entity power feels more remote. But because it is larger its decisions have more power to change things. That's the trade-off. You can choose to be in a different place on that trade-off, wanting to have more power to change things locally but less ability to influence the big picture, and that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's not democratic to be in a different place on that trade-off.
(and there's no need for the tag, I'm reading the thread).
Starmer can't afford to distract from the Tory problems by saying anything exciting about the EU before 2024. But it's hard to imagine a Labour government not easing trade with the EU, and that, by then, is likely to have broad popular consent.
It's only "really exactly the same" if the EU is a country - something that its supporters rarely admit.
But the more relevant comparison is how do voters change the government of the European Commission. Americans regularly vote on their President, and kick them out of power, changing the policy direction of the place as a result.
In the EU, Von Der Leyen is hand picked as Angela Merkel's preferred leader, because she didn't like the Spitzenkandidat that "won" the election. If you remember that was the rationale why the EU couldn't possibly choose someone other than Jean-Claude Juncker, who all four major UK-wide parties opposed. He was the winning Spitzenkandidat and thus the UK had to accept. A rule that didn't apply to Germany. Of course these are all rules that only (some) political nerds know, because the EU is an undemocratic Byzantine mess.
And of course, even if you do change the Commission, there would be no change in policy. Because all the Eurocrats believe the same thing, regardless of the general public. The EPP and the PES divide up jobs beside them as a matter of course, and there has never been a change in direction depending which one as the top job or depending on election results.
Secondly, are you seriously claiming not to know that the Constitution formally consists of the original articles plus the various Amendments made since it was first drafted?
Lets have meaningful European elections which debate and determine these issues, but that wasn't on the cards. "More Europe" is democratic and reasonable, or less, but this bodged halfway house where likeminded voters don't vote on European issues and elect a European Government is not reasonable.
This isn't about the difficulty of reaching consensus. It's not the veto itself that is the problem. The problem is Orban and his disdain for democratic norms.
When has the EU ever changed policy direction as a result of democratic elections? As I asked, can you name three examples of this happening in the EU's entire history?
There is no sign of new voters supporting Brexit, and that trend to recognising Brexit as a mistake is accelerating.
I expect a further lost decade before we make a serious effort to Rejoin, but it is looking increasingly likely that we will.
So what the heck is your argument then, cos that is what the rest of us think you are saying?
You actually said it didn't matter which votes were counted Bush had won so the court hadn't decided who won.
Also: new voters today are old enough to remember when we were still in the EU.
A few headbangers may keep banging on about Brexit but the stark cold reality is its happened and the debate on whether we should leave or not the EU has closed, the answer was we left, its over.
Now could a debate start in a few years that means that joining the EU all over again becomes popular? Its possible. Or its equally possible people will have other priorities and that is what Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have realised, they're better off moving on from Brexit to the issues of the future, not harping on about the issues of the past.
Remain/Leave is an issue of the past. The progress of time means people move on from the past.
Either way though, do you think there should be a democratic country called Europe?
If so, great, then lets ensure that the demos and democracy is healthy.
If not, then Brexit was sensible.
Frankly I’m surprised by the strength of “let’s rejoin”, to the extent I now seriously suspect it will happen. Previously I did not think it possible.
Indeed, given your age and education profile, you are becoming as rare as rockinghorse shit.
I think that too much of the debate on sovereignty rests on the idea of the nation state as the sole authentic repository of power, but it is often both too large and too small to be effective. Personally I have never felt so remote from and forgotten by politicians in Westminster. This has got worse not better since 2016.