Can you elaborate? My knee-jerk reaction is to be against it, but I haven’t thought about it a whole lot and I’d be interested to know why you have decided on the opposite.
It means if there was an actual politically motivated prosecution, that wouldn’t stop someone from winning. ie. If Trump had managed to make some fake charge against Biden stick in 2020, if the people still wanted Biden to be president, he could be.
I think it’s a powerful statement that - despite all the structural checks & balances and systems of appeal - we consider political charges and kangaroo courts a realistic possibility. It’s not just Alito’s flags - this is a long simmering loss of faith.
Having been a plaintiff in a civil case, with thankfully only money on the line, it was a real eye opener for me of how little the jurors actually get to see, and how much power a single judge has (read: a LOT). It really made me reflect on how absolutely awful and terrifying it must be to have your freedom on the line, and to witness something like I did that felt horrifyingly unfair, and know you could go to jail for it. And I know it happens, a lot, and disproportionately to black and brown folk no less.
In this case it seems easy to be against it because a widely unpopular candidate is the one being prosecuted.
However, allowing felons to run for office precludes the ability for the government to silence political dissidents by making up laws/falsifying evidence that they can be imprisoned for.
The risk of a Trump presidency is still on the table, but the US can avoid situations like what happened to Navalny in Russia as well.
In the 1920 election, Eugene Debs campaigned as the socialist nominee for president from prison, having been imprisoned for advocating draft dodging. That is the sort of candidate I would still support, even from behind bars.
Just because you’re a felon doesn’t mean you’re not a citizen and part of the country. As such, you should be able to partake in democracy in all possible ways as well.
I really dislike this punitive mindset of completely ruining someone’s life for being convicted of a crime. People make mistakes, but we don’t want to exclude them from society, we want to reform them and bring them back in. So yeah, I think, even excluding all this political bs, that no person should have their right to vote or run taken from them.
