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.”

22 points
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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.

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8 points
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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.)

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6 points

The issue I always find in the proposal to ban political parties is: how do you stop people from just reinventing them under a different name?

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2 points

It absolutely would happen. Even if we somehow wiped the idea from everyone’s mind, people would start to group up again because it’s simply more effective than going it alone. We learned that as a species a long time ago.

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1 point

Obviously, you can’t stop people from freely associating (see the First Amendment).

But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that the current two major political parties have been given a whole bunch of special privileges that make them quasi-official parts of the government, and all those need to be permanently stripped away.

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1 point

Yes, like Seattle Seahawks, or Chicago Bears…

Politics really would become a contest between sports teams.

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4 points
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I fully agree. This vote by tribe sh*t HAS to stop. Humanity SHOULD be better than f*cking tribal yawping.

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2 points

As much as I am against the two-party system I am not in favor of sacrificing our right to assembly, especially in the context of assembling over shared politics, on the altar of “hopefully that’ll make elections go better.”

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0 points

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.

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21 points

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?

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44 points

Nope.

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.

And we should change that

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15 points

The primary system in the US still blows my mind.

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.

It’s all show, no go.

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12 points
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So here’s a part of the history you (and many others) are actually missing that will help contextualize this. Make no mistake, I have issues with the primaries too. But this is interesting and may even reshape your opinion.

For over a century we couldn’t vote at all on the candidates. They were completely selected by the parties. People actually protested that system saying they had no say in the candidates, and thus the first presidential primary happened in 1912 I believe (forgot the state). It rolled out over the 20th century because people felt it was unfair the party got to select without their input.

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2 points
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Deleted by creator
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6 points

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.

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1 point

Americans have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of frivolous lawsuits.

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15 points

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.

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13 points

The party of calling elections rigged is facing complaints that their election process is rigged

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3 points

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.

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10 points

Slam

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5 points

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