Timex
4439
Yeah, i don’t see why Biden would be a better matchup against Trump. Your just ceding a potential advantage of you don’t run someone who’s less than a million years old.
It’s a horrible self fulfilling prophecy.
Yup. In return for a cheap “gotcha” (not like Trump is within a light year of being competitive in California, anyway), you establish the idea that states can reasonably tailor a requirement to exclude a candidate that the people in power in that state have it in for.
I’m not even sure that the GOP will wait until '24 to run with that.
magnet
4442
This was already addressed by the Supreme Court. States cannot change who is eligible to run for president. So for instance they could not keep someone off the ballot because they never paid income tax.
But they can require candidates to provide information, and according to California this means that if someone did pay income tax then they can require them to submit their tax forms along with all the other necessary forms.
Isn’t it just a formalization of something that has been true for several decades anyway? It’s only Trump that requires some sort of exception.
As to your first paragraph, this is true, although I am not going to guess what the Supreme Court will decide in terms of states’ rights going forward.
But your second paragraph gets at our practical problem. Do you seriously doubt the ability of Republican strategists to come up with effective parallels to what California is doing? Now, if California’s electoral votes were in question, it might be worth the cost. However, since California’s electoral votes are already ours, why provide motivation and cover for the GOP to come up with something similar in a state like Wisconsin?
It might well be just me. I often react to these things differently than most. But to my ear, this is one of the very weak, even self-defeating, side issues directed at Dump. For time out of mind, presidential candidates have traveled around the country. They have had campaign managers. They have advertised on television. They give press conferences and release white papers/policy outlines. However, those traditions have not become legal requirements. And that, if they refuse, we have no legal recourse.
It is certainly a potential campaign issue that this one candidate refuses to release his tax returns. And we are free to suggest likely motivations, tailored to what might fire up key constituencies. And within the realm of criminal inquiries, there may be cause for prosecutors to access those returns. But as to using the law to require compliance as part of a presidential election… Liberals ought to be the first to realize that tradition does not equal law.
Perhaps, but it’s not the first time that a tradition has become law.
Take for example the 2 term president. Up until the 1940’s, no president has served more then 2 terms, a trend started by George Washington. FDR broke this tradition, but soon after, we passed the 22nd amendment to formalize into law, what had only been a tradition, but for the sake of the democracy, we made a significant, formalizing, what until that point had only been a tradition.
This is no different. It’s been a tradition upheld for several decades to give the public more information about the candidate. A way to keep them a little honest.
Now, not all traditions should become law. Heck, most probably shouldn’t and should be broken, but with this presidency, we see the impact of what happens when important traditions are broken. You might not think it’s all that important, but I do.
Well, there is a serious distinction between “I think that this is a tradition that we ought to make into a law or constitutional amendment” and “This president isn’t following a tradition I believe in, so we ought to pursue it legally as though it were already law.”
I’m okay with the former, but believe we come across as weak with the latter.
It all started the same way. Someone thought that 2 terms was a tradition that needed to be enforced for the sake of democracy. This is no different.
SlyFrog
4448
What you are saying is that these things seem to rarely go well, when someone uses some ridiculous precedent or tool to target a particular candidate, because it then opens the flood gate to Jim Crow-like shit (oh, no, you need to be able to prove this before you go vote/run).
Haven’t we had enough shenanigans around things like Supreme Court nominees just being pocketed because procedure allows it? Can’t we just govern and elect people based on the peoples’ will? Do we really need more gerrymandering type bullshit? Do we really need more “release the birth certificate” type junk codified into law?
I agree with you.
Well then, but that logic, let’s strike down the 22nd amendment. If people want a 3 term Obama, then that should be our choice.
SlyFrog
4450
I don’t really equate something that required a constitutional amendment to something that is essentially an individual state procedural election law.
Why is there a difference? A state gets to make the choices that impact it’s citizens, doesn’t it? I mean, those are elected representatives of the people of California.
If a state wants candidates to provide a reasonable amount of information before putting them on the ballot, I am fine with that.
I agree that it doesn’t take much imagination to foresee the problems if it becomes normal to exclude candidates from the ballot on a state-by-state partisan basis. Tax returns may not seem an arbitrary exclusion, but it is; and the coming ones will be much much worse. Republicans have made it clear that they will abuse any norm to win, and we probably shouldn’t dare them to abuse this one, especially when it serves no practical purpose.
wavey
4453
It’s not like they haven’t already tried this kind of thing before.
2011 seems so long ago now.
[Obama] said the country should move on from the “silliness” of the birther controversy and cease paying attention to “carnival barkers” like Donald Trump.
…and now that dude is our President! Hilarious!
*weeps quiet tears of desperation*
I also think Trump will win the lawsuit. I get that there may not be any clear language in the Constitution requiring California to put him on the ballot, but the Court will find an an argument for it anyway. They will embrace the idea that the Constitution is more than, larger than the text, because it suits them to do so.
Like they wouldn’t do something like that anyway if they could?
At the risk of doing the ‘appeal to authority thing’, op-ed by Erwin Chemerinsky
Opponents of SB 27 contend that it is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decision in United States Term Limits vs. Thornton (1995). In that case, Arkansas law prevented a candidate for Congress from being listed on the ballot if he or she had already served three terms in the United States House of Representatives or two terms in the United States Senate. The Supreme Court said that a state cannot impose qualifications for being in Congress other than those specified in the Constitution.
But a critical difference is that, in Thornton, the state completely barred a candidate from being on the ballot if he or she had exceeded the term limits specified by Arkansas law. SB 27 allows candidates to be on the ballot so long as they meet an additional simple requirement that almost all presidential candidates already do: disclosing tax returns.
Matt_W
4457
I actually heartily agree with this. Term limits are undemocratic. If Obama could have run for a 3rd term, he would have won handily and we’d be a whole lot better off.
And I also agree that any arbitrary requirements for getting onto the ballot are undemocratic, including tax return release. How about let the voters decide? But I’m kind of an extremist on these issues: I think the age, nationality, and naturalization requirements for officeseekers are also arbitrary and undemocratic. Let the voters decide.
JoshL
4458
If the Republicans pass a law in, say, Ohio, that only Republicans can appear on the ballot, who’s going to stop them? They’ll just do it. Sure, someone will take it to the Supreme Court, but we know what the outcome of that will be. They’ll just do their “Bush v Gore” thing and say it would be unfair to Republicans to overturn the law, or they’ll just refuse to hear the case based on “standing” or some other bullshit.
Forcing candidates to release truthful information that helps people know who they are and what their history is is a good thing. Worrying about how Republicans will abuse it is folly because Republicans are already doing things like closing all the polling places in minority districts, and just removing people from voter registration databases because they have foreign sounding names, or have the same birthday as a felon. There’s no low they won’t sink to regardless of legality or tradition. We shouldn’t let them freeze us into inaction.
