2016 Presidential Election Thread

would have to be someone who didn't run. This is a fairly good list - which I think I posted before:

Paul Ryan - works for the Romney establishment and cool with Kasich
Mike Lee - a more palatable version of Cruz
Nikki Haley - if they go for the "young face that looks good" gambit
Mike Pence - thought about running but there was no more room in the clown car, governors tend to win
Pat McCory - a dark horse but N.C. is "in play" so they might surprise us.

My guess, they'll talk a lot about Ryan and the conservatives will push back and it'll be Pence.

If it ever came to that sort of wide open deal making. Kasich could support either, the Cruz folks would settle for him, and that combined would outvote the Trump loyalists.

They don't have to just outvote the Trump loyalists, they have to retain them, and nominating Peter B Higgenbottom III out of the blue isn't going to do that.

Would it have to be someone who didn't run?

• Pro for someone who didn't run: Nobody had a chance to vote for them, so maybe we can convince ourselves that they would have won if they'd been in the race.
• Con for someone who didn't run: Nobody voted for them.

Conversely:

• Pro for somebody who ran: At least some people voted for them.
• Con for somebody who ran: They lost; even with a chance to vote for them, most people didn't.

I have no way to judge which rationale will seem more appealing...

There's too much risk in running someone who didn't run in the primaries because they will likely suck as badly as Rick Perry or Jeb Bush did on the stump.

The key to the 2016 elections is that the party elites and consultants have failed abysmally at predicting who will be popular. They've spent close of a half billion dollars backing abject losers, so why should their next idiotic choice be any different?

Yeah, unless Trump stops winning primaries between now and the convention, if he walks into the convention with the most delegates and doesn't get the nomination, there's going to be trouble. As there should be. Trump absolutely has no business being in charge of the country, but if that's who the voters in the primaries have picked, then he should be the nominee. Nor do I think that the nomination of Trump as the GOP candidate for President automatically hands the election to the Democrats. Regardless if its Trump v. Clinton or Trump v. Sanders, I think its going to be a hard fight.

the bolded is the compelling argument. Someone who didn't run also didn't get rejected.

Then let's run Scott Baio.

WNYC story

Jim Sleeper, author and lecturer in political science at Yale University, argues that party elites have created Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and Trump's popularity exposes a "vacuum" in American political discourse.

Sleeper said there's a need to "rattle the cage of the establishment," especially in the Democratic party.

But that shouldn't mean that anything goes.

Sleeper also made a point about the so-called elites who look down their noses at Trump supporters: "We’ve used our classism to condemn their racism…without understanding that we were contributing to the sense of alienation and dispossession with our own disdain."​

You think some highly paid consultants would have understood this, but being a highly paid consultant means you move among the elites and only talk to normal people when you tell them to carry your bags up to your room.

The Republicans are apparently going to attempt to an end run around Trump AND Cruz with a convention floor fight which is why Kasich will not get out of the race. We have to face reality and it's that the GOP hates both men because both will not be controllable by the GOP. If it was just Trump the GOP was worried about they would have shoved Kasich and even Rubio out of the race a long time ago. Rubio wised up and realized that he fucked up. Kasich is 100% old school Republican establishment. He's taking one for the team.

If Cruz is close enough in delegate votes to Trump and wins the convention because delegates from the other candidates such as Rubio/Kasich/Bush go over to him there may not be so many problems. Trump can't complain as long as the rules were followed as they are now.

But there will be problems if someone other then Cruz or Trump gets the nomination. No one in either camp will accept such a nominee. And why should they? I sure as hell won't. I want Cruz to win but I also want Trump to win if it's clear he should be the winner.

Republicans trying to pick someone who hasn't run a primary campaign? That will be an instant disaster.

I would hope in such a situation that Trump goes 3rd party. I would hope Cruz also goes 3rd party. Hell if Trump and Cruz teamed up to shaft the GOP I'd support such a ticket!

Well, the problem is that they're trying to stop Trump but can't actually nominate Cruz because he'll get knocked off the ballot because he's foreign born. Their chickens have come home to bite them in the ass.

I hope Cruz is nominated so you die of a stroke at the horror of a Canadian becoming President and legislating that you say everything ending with -eh.

He can't be President. At any point, just about anyone would have standing to challenge him in the Supreme Court. There's no way he could win.

The problem is that the longer they've let him continue with his little fantasy, the more chaos it has caused. And the chaos will get much, much worse. Democrats will be filing challenges to get him knocked off the ballot in lots and lots of states. Of course they couldn't and wouldn't do that earlier because they have no say over the Republican primaries and more importantly, they'd love the Republicans to nominate an ineligible candidate. Suppose they only succeed in, say, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. That's 107 free electoral votes for the Democrats.

But suppose he wins and then the court ruling goes against him before the electoral college meets. What happens then? Do all his votes get thrown away, since they were cast for an ineligible candidate, tossing all the states to the Democrats? What is the court rules after his inauguration? Was the whole thing invalid? Do we replace him with a VP pick or with the only valid candidate who ran?

The outcomes just get worse and worse, and potentially bloodier and bloodier, all because the GOP establishment was too chickenshit to note what Article II says about eligibility.

Oh, for fuck's sake. He was a citizen from the moment he was born, just like McCain. At least five challenges have been laughed out of court already. He shouldn't be president, but that's because he's a sanctimonious nutcase, not because he's constitutionally ineligible.

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews....orn-citizen-tossing-eligibility-lawsuit.html/

I just pooped and that makes me a better person than Zombie.

That's not possible since your shit contains everything that would have made you even close to being better in the first place.

Article II doesn't say you have to be a born citizen. Although Alexander Hamilton suggested that phrase, which includes children born abroad to US parents, it was rejected in favor of the tighter restriction that the President has to be a natural-born citizen. Natural-born citizens are those born under the complete protection and sovereignty of a particular country, which excludes the children of foreign ambassadors and those born under foreign military occupation. This was all explained prior to the American Revolution in Blackstone's Commentaries.

James Madison, who wrote the Constitution, remarked that Blackstone's was a book in everyone's hands. In chapter 10 Blackstone says:

The first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it. Allegiance is the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject. The thing itself, or substantial part of it, is founded in reason and the nature of government; the name and the form are derived to us from our Gothic ancestors.

...

Allegiance, both express and implied, is however distinguished by the law into two sorts or species, the one natural, the other local; the former being also perpetual, the latter temporary. Natural allegiance is such as is due from all men born within the king's dominions immediately upon their birth. For, immediately upon their birth, they are under the king's protection; at a time too, when (during their infancy) they are incapable of protecting themselves.

...

When I say, that an alien is one who is born out of the king's dominions, or allegiance, this also must be understood with some restrictions. The common law indeed stood absolutely so; with only a very few exceptions: so that a particular act of parliament became necessary after the restoration, for the naturalization of children of his majesty's English subjects, born in foreign countries during the late troubles. And this maxim of the law proceeded upon a general principle, that every man owes natural allegiance where he is born, and cannot owe two such allegiances, or serve two masters, at once. Yet the children of the king's ambassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England's allegiance, represented by his father, the ambassador. To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. iii. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband's consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king's ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception: unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.​

And part of the key to understanding the last part of what he says, that the foreign-born children of subjects are, to all intents and purposes natural-born. Yet they're not actually natural-born subjects, and these rights are granted them through naturalization acts passed by Parliament.

We first Congress passed a similar naturalization act in 1790, called the Naturalization Act of 1790, which said that such foreign born children of US parents shall be considered as natural-born subjects. But they're not actually natural-born subjects or the act would have no meaning. It would be like passing a law declaring men to be men.

And in George Tucker's commentary on the common law, published in 1803, which is essentially Blackstone's commentaries updated for the United States, he points out that the 1790 and 1795 Naturalization Acts make such foreign born children exactly like natural born children in all ways except one: they can never be President.

And all subsequent Supreme Court usage is completely consistent on the point, even as you encounter unexpected usages such as discussing how Indians are distinct from native Americans. (natural-born citizens are native Americans. Indians are Indians).

So when it gets to the Supreme Court, which is where it will end up if he's not stopped earlier, he will get slapped down. On one side you have the Constitutional originalists on the right, who will stick to the text. On the other side you'll have judges who favor a liberal interpretation but who despise Ted Cruz and his plans to turn the US into Jesusland. He doesn't have a prayer.

By the way, I read that decision days ago and Judge Pellegrini screwed up. That's probably because he's a 1970 graduate of the Duquesne School of Law and Cruz's people were waving a paper published in the Harvard Law Review in front of him. The Harvard Law Review article wasn't backed by any actual research. The author's didn't even realize that under common law, extending back into antiquity, the children of diplomats are the native-born children of the country their parents represent, as explained above in the passage from Blackstone.

What Cruz's camp is doing is trying to spread doubt and confusion, and the argument in court is that the Founding Fathers didn't actually understand the meaning of the words and phrases they were using in the Constitution. Would you honestly prepare for case before the United States Supreme Court with that as your essential position?

This is going into the WF quotes thread

Serves them right.

Why did you do it all over Wordforge though?

Judicial Watch on new Clinton documents

Judicial Watch today released 276 pages of internal State Department documents revealing that within two days of the deadly terrorist attack on Benghazi, Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, the president of Libya’s National Congress, asked to participate in a Clinton Global Initiative function and “meet President Clinton.” The meeting between the Libyan president and Bill Clinton had not previously been disclosed. The documents also show Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff coordinated with the Clinton Foundation’s staff to have her thank Clinton Global Initiative project sponsors for their “commitments” during a Foundation speech on September 25, 2009.​

Lot's more at the link, including bits like this:

Caitlin Klevorick, Senior Advisor to the Counselor and Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State who previously worked at the Foundation, notes: “one question is if we want to see if there is a decent mass of fs [funds] related commitments to announce together at closing as a ‘mega’ commitment.”​

Hillary, trying to make millions off terrorist attacks before the bodies are even cold.

Trump should go third party anyway. He isn't a Republican, just as Sanders isn't a Democrat. Their supporters keep bitching and moaning about party elites trying to block the candidacies, but shouldn't that be the case? Doesn't the Republican party have a right to run an actual Republican?

But what constitutes a "Republican" or a "Democrat" changes over time. A number of Republican Presidents couldn't hope to get nominated to the ticket today if they tried to run, and the same is true of many Democratic Presidents as well. Requiring the parties to follow the will of the people also helps prevent things like cronyism.

Of course it changes, but as a result of party conventions ratifying new platforms, the votes and minutes from leadership committees, congressional caucus, what have you. And yes, it can change from a new candidate successfully obtaining the party's nomination. But we're talking about a candidate who consistently fails to get a majority of the vote. If he reaches the convention with less than 50% of the delegates, we can rightly conclude that Trump does not represent majority Republican thinking. I don't see why a brokered convention in such a context would be wrong to pick somebody other than Trump.

But by that logic, the other candidates got even less support from Republicans and should be even less likely than the front runner to get the nomination. So then folks suggest putting for a new name that didn't get any support at all. It's like they're focused on losing.

It would depend upon how the margins worked out. If it was Trump 49%, Cruz 26%, and Kaisch 25%, then dumping Trump for one of the others doesn't seem justified, since politically, Cruz and Kaisch are far apart. If it's Trump 45%, Cruz 45%, and Kaisch with 10%, then a case for picking Cruz instead of Trump could be made. Tossing Trump and Cruz (which has been talked about) for someone like Kaisch, with numbers like those would be suicide for the GOP.

Well it looks like early voting killed Cruz in Arizona because Marco Rubio picked up 17 percent as of this post. Kaisch has 10%.

Fifty-Eight more delegates to Trump.

How early where they voting? You think they could have foreseen Rubio's exit with the Vermont debate where he went the full robot.

Twenty-six days of early voting. And since roughly 250,000 people early voted in Arizona the bulk of that voting took place before anyone knew Rubio would be dropping out.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/arizona-and-florida-expose-early-voting-debacle/article/2586269