The path for backbencher Republican candidates running for president in 2024 just got even harder.
Four Republican backbencher candidates who failed to qualify for the first 2024 GOP presidential debate this week slammed the Republican National Committee over its rules, with multiple contenders calling them “rigged.”
Political parties exist for the sole purpose of rigging politics by disenfranchising the public. Their entire existence is a kind of corrupt, elitist caste system.
These organizations need to be treated the same way as corporations that get too big: they should forcibly split up. Force parties to form coalitions to get anything done, like in other parliamentary systems. Take away their corrupt levers - like FPTP voting (force RCV instead) and dark money, and return power to the people instead tolerating it in the hands of a couple private, invite-only cabals.
Political parties should be outlawed, not just split up. It should be a crime to include a party affiliation next to a candidate's name on a ballot. (Or an indication of which is the incumbent, for that matter.)
We also need to change the voting system too. Approval voting is ideal for a no-party system. All candidates getting approved by some min number of people get elected.
Elder ... said he intended to file an emergency lawsuit to halt the debate from taking place. Businessman Perry Johnson, another GOP candidate, also said he intends to take legal action against the RNC.
I am wholly unclear on how there's any grounds to litigate about the RNC running a debate. Political parties and their internal operations around how they run their own debates isn't covered by any law, is it?
A couple years ago the DNC had a court case about bias in primaries.
Their legal defense boiled down to:
We're a private organization beholden to no one, if we wanted to we could ignore every primary vote and nominate anyone, so it literally doesn't matter if we have a bias.
And the courts agreed, because it's true.
Our nation is run by two groups of private citizens who can essentially do anything they want.
There are public, state-sanctioned votes to select candidates for private political groups? That's wild. That gives the impression to the populace that these private organizations are part of the state apparatus itself. It provides an impenetrable legitimacy to those that are already dominant, and makes it so, so much harder for new ones to crop up, because they lack that mantle of legitimacy.
I was curious and it turns out that the FEC does have regulation regarding public debates.
The part that would be relevant doesn't seem to apply, though:
c. Criteria for candidate selection.
For all debates, staging organization(s) must use pre-established objective criteria to determine which candidates may participate in a debate. For general election debates, staging organizations(s) shall not use nomination by a particular political party as the sole objective criterion to determine whether to include a candidate in a debate. For debates held prior to a primary election, caucus or convention, staging organizations may restrict candidate participation to candidates seeking the nomination of one party, and need not stage a debate for candidates seeking the nomination of any other political party or independent candidates.
So, I guess there is a law that could be potentionally sued over, but I don't see how the RNC doesn't fall within the guidelines. I'm not a lawyer.
I don't know why it bothers me so much given that every GOP candidate is scum. But it especially irks me that Doug Burgum can get a spot in the debates by giving away $20 gift cards to those who donated $1.
Exactly why I posted this article. It's clear other GOP politicians are taking pages from Turmp's playbook and we will likley have to deal with his form of politics for long after he is removed from the political arena.
While Trump is skipping the debate ― and has said he’ll also sit out all future GOP debates ― eight of his Republican rivals will be vying for runner-up at the event in Milwaukee.
Unnecessarily brutal paragraph. Polling shifts quickly this far away from the actual election, and people are still starting to tune in. Trump is obviously a heavy favorite but the downside is obviously possible too with the indictments. He's a heavy favorite but not the prohibitive favorite.