emmaubler:nyaanarchist:emmaubler:nyaanarchist:emmaubler:Yes, our federal government was deliberately
emmaubler:nyaanarchist:emmaubler:nyaanarchist:emmaubler:Yes, our federal government was deliberately structured to provide checks and balances and prevent the tyranny of the majority. Some of those checks have already been obliterated, but some still remain. Similarily, in a regular criminal trial it doesn’t matter if the jury is split 7-5 in favor of a guilty verdict–they have to be unanimous. Convictions require a higher threshold than majority rule by design. “Tyranny of the majority” is just what authoritarians call democracy. The alternative to “tyranny of the majority” is “tyranny of the minority” where a small group of people have power over the majority of people, which we call oligarchy.“I think the voices of minority populations shouldn’t be ignored and run roughshod over, and convictions are intentionally designed to be difficult to obtain in the interests of protecting the innocent” = authoritarianism now. Who knew? Our government isn’t set up to “protect the voices of minority populations,” the checks and balances that exist are lkke that to stop progress from happening and stop war criminals from being held accountable. The founding fathers literally admitted this when they set it up lol. Checks and balances exist to stop common people from disrupting things.The US has the largest prison population in the world both per capita and in total so maybe our “justice” system isn’t really protecting the innocent? Why is that the only time it protects people, it’s the rich and powerful?Abandoning the “advocating for minority populations is authoritarian!″ bit is good strategy.Now, it is true that the founding fathers designed the system in order to make laws hard to pass, but federalism played a large part in that. The states were supposed to retain most of the power for laws and decision making, and the federal government was supposed to be very limited in what they could do, hence the checks and balances. Of course, Washington has done nothing but seize power and transfer to to themselves since that time, but it was meant to stop the federal government from becoming the overbearing bureaucratic despots they are today. Alas. As for the stop war criminals from being held accountable intent of the founding fathers, you’re gonna have to cite a source on that.Just think of how many more people would be in prison if you only had to win jury trials by a simple majority, rather than unanimous guilty verdicts, which was the point I was making. If you want to point the finger at the cause of our terrible prison system, I’d certainly point to the quixotic war on drugs first.You’re not “advocating for minority populations” you’re advocating for anti-democratic systems which harm minority populations lmao. The only “minority” that has ever been protected by US legal systems is the ruling class. The US federal government and state governments were set up by the ruling class to defend their wealth and power and stop those below them from threatening that. It’s meaningless to complain about the federal government being “authoritarian” if the state governments are just as oppressive to their citizens regardless of the federal government’s input. Impeachment proceedings (and any other senate vote) don’t function like ordinary criminal trials and they aren’t relevant so I don’t know why you keep bringing them up? Trump isn’t some normal innocent person getting targeted by the unjust criminal justice system, he’s an authoritarian that instigated a violent attempted coup, and got pardoned because his political allies didn’t want him being punished, not because of how they felt about the facts of the case. Also, the need for unanimity from juries is functionally the same as needing a majority because 99% of the time the majority just pressures the minority into conceding, and when most jurors are working class people who aren’t able to miss work, people just want to get out of there as soon as possible. Like, based on literally any facts about our criminal justice system it’s clear that it doesn’t function to protect people in any way, why are you so insistent on going “well if you look at this one bit theoretically it helps people” when in practice it never does? -- source link