BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I’ve been thinking a lot since Thursday of Luttig’s clear-eyed view of the dangers we face in this country today, and of his willingness to cast aside old political loyalties to call them out in order to protect our democracy. They remind me of nothing so much as Abraham Lincoln’s description of the way northerners reacted to the 1854 passage of a law permitting the spread of enslavement into western lands from which it had previously been excluded. The passage of that law woke up Americans who had not been paying attention, and convinced them to work across old political lines to stop oligarchs from destroying democracy. Northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver” to push back against the oligarchic enslavers, Lincoln later said. Regardless of where they started politically, they stood up for democracy together. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Could you please give us a count of the mass shooters....Harris, Klebold, Lanza, Ramos, etc.....who were NRA members? Thank you in advance.

Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath? (2012)

I didn't know psychopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population. Seems like getting people in positions of responsibility in government, the health care industry and the gun industry to recognize that and say that is a huge part of rationally discussing and addressing the mass shooting problem and other problems that the criminal justice system has to contend with.

The neuroscientists say that within their study of 120 individuals, they examined 12 females and observed, for the first time, that psychopathy was linked to enlarged striatum in females, just as in males. In human development, the striatum typically becomes smaller as a child matures, suggesting that psychopathy could be related to differences in how the brain develops.

Asst Prof Choy suggested “A better understanding of the striatum’s development is still needed. Many factors are likely involved in why one individual is more likely to have psychopathic traits than another individual. Psychopathy can be linked to a structural abnormality in the brain that may be developmental in nature. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the environment can also have effects on the structure of the striatum.”

Prof Raine added “We have always known that psychopaths go to extreme lengths to seek out rewards, including criminal activities that involve property, sex, and drugs. We are now finding out a neurobiological underpinning of this impulsive and stimulating behavior in the form of enlargement to the striatum, a key brain area involved in rewards.

The scientists hope to carry out further research to find out the causes of the enlargement of the striatum in individuals with psychopathic traits.

https://www.theatlan...porters/661324/

Many sophisticated observers of the January 6 committee will judge its success by two key metrics: whether the panel refers former President Donald Trump for criminal investigation and, if so, whether Attorney General Merrick Garland actually proceeds. But committee members are doing another job at least as important as advising the Justice Department: They are giving an off-ramp to those who accepted Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him—and who might excuse or even support violence done in his name.

Democracies do not fail in a single moment; they gradually break down from within. The same can be said of violent movements. Since the Capitol riot, the United States has been waging what is essentially a counter-extremism effort against Trump and the forces that nearly toppled our democracy. Such movements grow by portraying themselves as successful and their leadership as exceptional. The committee hearings have shown Trump to be not only an insurrectionist and an inciter of violence, but also a desperate sore loser. Almost everyone around Trump was telling him that his public claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” as former Attorney General William Barr put it. The people who continue spreading that myth need to know that Trump is making a fool of them. The savviest of his advisers long ago headed for the exits, and the ones who haven’t are not to be believed.

Notably, most of the committee’s witnesses against the former president are or were members of Team Trump or the GOP. Look at them, the committee is saying—there is a way out. Trump, according to Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s Republican vice chair, was advised by an “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani. This description, based on the accounts of Trump-campaign figures, isn’t idle gossip, but is meant to humiliate Trump, make him seem like a puppet of the unhinged and reckless. Run away from that guy! Trump is also betrayed by his daughter Ivanka, who in videotaped testimony looks deflated and pale as she sides with the forces telling Trump to stop his madness. The implication is clear: If his own daughter isn’t with him, why should you be?

The former president’s critics may rightly ask why neither she nor Barr spoke up in the moment. But longtime Trump skeptics aren’t the committee’s target audience. The message to his remaining supporters is: Trump has peaked. His best days are behind him. You won’t be the first to take the off-ramp, but you don’t want to be the last.

Instead of subscribing to Trump’s stolen-election fantasies, Republicans can join Team Normal, the term used by the former campaign manager Bill Stepien to describe those who were not instigating violence. If these former Trump loyalists can reject the lies, the committee is effectively telling his current followers, then so can you. And by the way, there was no honor among Trump’s abettors; the committee has evidence, one of its two Republican members has said, that GOP politicians who may have been involved with coordinating the January 6 effort had sought pardons, leaving everybody else exposed to prosecution.

According to evidence aired Thursday, John Eastman—a Trump legal adviser who kept insisting that then–Vice President Mike Pence had the power to alter the Electoral College vote—presumptuously declared in an email after the riot, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.” One of Trump’s White House lawyers testified that he’d told Eastman, “Get a great effing criminal-defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.”

From the above:"Many sophisticated observers of the January 6 committee will judge its success by two key metrics: whether the panel refers former President Donald Trump for criminal investigation and, if so, whether Attorney General Merrick Garland actually proceeds. But committee members are doing another job at least as important as advising the Justice Department: They are giving an off-ramp to those who accepted Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him—and who might excuse or even support violence done in his name."


They, and we, should think carefully about this. So far, they are doing an excellent job of making it unmistakable clear what happened. That is a fine thing for an investigating committee to do. After it is absolutely clear what happened, I think the Attorney General will decide whether or not to bring criminal charges. It would be a mistake to have it become whether or not the Attorney General does what the committee recommends. The decision should be based on the Attorney General's assessment, after seeing what has been presented, of the legal case. If the planning that went into the insurrection, and the egging on of a violence-prone mob in a manner that clearly implied that Mark Pence had to be forcefully prevented from certifying the election is not seen as grounds for a fair number of indictments, then Congress needs to pass some important laws. I would be very surprised if no indictments followed from the hearings. Clearly there should be indictments.


What I am getting at: This should not become "Will the Attorney general do what the committee tells him to do or won't he?", it should be "The committee has done its job, now will the Attorney General do what clearly needs to be done, and if not why not?" It's a subtle difference, but I think it is important for it to go down the second path. Among other things, in matters like this, there are (so I understand it) strategic matters of just who gets indicted first and for what. Let the AG plan this out.

Oddly enough. what these Jan 6 hearings may be doing is resurrecting the Republican Party by divorcing itself from Trump in favor of democracy.

Former President Donald Trump has made the “stolen” 2020 election the centerpiece of his post-White House political life. Virtually every statement he sends out invokes the false theme.

The polling shows it has been effective, not just with the crowd that stormed the Capitol on his behalf on Jan. 6, 2021, but with members of the Republican Party almost a year and a half later.

The multiple recounts and audits that confirmed Joe Biden’s win have changed little. With remarkable consistency, a scant one-quarter of Republican voters tell pollsters that Biden won legitimately. That was the view they shared in the spring of 2021, and the fraction remains about the same today.

In poll after poll, about 70% of Republicans say they don’t think Joe Biden is the legitimate e winner of the 2020 election.

https://www.bloomber...author_18529680

What explained the devastating weight of Tuesday’s hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee? The testimony barely mentioned the attack on the Capitol or other events of that day.

Instead we heard, in new and terrifying detail, about Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Republican officials in state after state to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. By expanding the scope of the events covered, the panel heard from witnesses who recounted just how massive and systematic the efforts by Trump and his allies really were — and how violence and threats of violence played a central role in it.

We still do not have firm evidence tying Trump specifically to organized violent outbreaks, including the Capitol attack. But we’ve now seen enough that it’s clear Trump either knew his words would put people in danger or he should have known. And the same goes for those around him.

Those of us who have followed this story closely already knew the broad outlines and even many details in the stories of Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers; Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office, and Georgia election worker Shaye Moss.

But Tuesday’s airing of their accounts, one after another, was just brutal. Bowers endured Saturday protests outside his house, with armed Trump fans calling him (among other things) a pedophile. Sterling described how he was moved to give his forceful public statement denouncing efforts to overturn the election after seeing a staffer in his office overwhelmed by vicious, personal attacks on social media. Moss and her mother were so intimidated by the president’s attacks and those of his followers that they basically shut down their lives.

In other words, the committee artfully made the case that the violence of Jan. 6 was only a continuation of violent efforts to bully everyone who stood in the way of the president and his desire to stay in office, regardless of the facts and the law.

We already knew that the fraud accusations that Trump and his allies made were investigated and found to be false or frivolous, based on obvious fictions or misunderstandings of normal procedures. And that, despite this, Trump ramped up pressure on Republican officeholders in states that Joe Biden had won.

We knew about the scheme, probably criminal and certainly outside of the law and the Constitution, to submit slates of false electors in states that Trump had lost. And about his call to Raffensperger, in which the then president of the United States begged, cajoled and threatened him to “find” the votes needed to reverse the Georgia outcome — this figured prominently in Trump’s second impeachment and Senate trial.

There was some new detail. For example, Rudy Giuliani told Bowers that “we've got lots of theories — we just don't have any evidence.” I don’t think that was previously reported, and it helped make the committee’s point that the conspirators were well aware that Trump had lost the election.

And we knew that violence and threats of violence had been present throughout the post-election period and were a regular feature of Trump’s rallies from the start of his 2016 run for president.

In contrast to Trump and his allies, Tuesday’s witnesses stood out as patriots. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson in his opening remarks thanked the various elected officials, bureaucrats and election workers who have testified “for their service”: The US is defended, after all, by its democratic institutions — defined by the men and women who do their jobs faithfully or not — even more than by its military might, and has been since 1776. It was inspiring to watching Bowers, Raffensperger, Sterling and Moss stand up for democracy, despite the costs that they have had to endure — especially when you consider how few Republicans have been willing to rally to their side.

It’s not yet clear how strong the legal case against Trump will be. But I agree with the political scientist Alex Garlick, who said that “the more we learn from the January 6 committee, the more it becomes obvious that the Senate's inability to convict Trump in February 2021 was a failure of historical proportions.”

What does that have to do with it? This is like asking whether drunk drivers work for the liquor industry. You don't have to be a member to be highly influenced by the NRA's rhetoric or take advantage of the gun "freedoms" that they advocate.