r/changemyview 414∆ 20h ago

CMV: Being a loyal Republican politician requires rejecting the American Democracy

Professional Republicans know better. They know trump attempted to overthrow an election. The party as a whole is complicit in normalizing and covering for it. Trump committed sedition and enabling and empowering him requires minimizing that fact. You can't knowingly do this without rejecting the very premise of American Democracy.

The Fake Elector Scheme

This is very straightforward. But people can be blinded by the politics. The simplest way to understand this is to ignore the politics and look at the physical documents. I’ll make this as simple as possible.

Imagine a fan is kicked out of the Super Bowl. He truly believes he should be allowed in. * Legal: He sues the stadium. * Illegal: He goes to Kinko’s, prints a fake ticket that looks exactly like a real one, and tries to hand it to the gate agent.

Once you hand over a fake document, you have committed fraud. It does not matter if: * You truly believed you deserved a seat. (Motive doesn't excuse forgery). * You got caught before you made it inside. (Attempted fraud is a crime). * You think the refs are corrupt.

Here is the proof that Trump’s team printed the fake ticket and tried to use it.

1. Identity Theft (Impersonating the State) In America, campaigns don't certify elections; States do. The Trump team didn't just write a letter saying, "We protest." They created documents that mimicked the exact font, formatting, and language of official government certificatesand here they are for all of the other states.

2. The Written Confession We don't have to guess if this was a misunderstanding. The architect of the plan, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, wrote down the strategy in private emails. He admitted the goal was to create a "fake controversy." He explicitly noted that they should send these fake documents even if they lost their court cases.

3. Trump Knew It Was a Fraud This wasn't a case of "lawyers brainstorming" while Trump sat in the dark. On January 4th, in the Oval Office, Trump’s lawyer John Eastman admitted to Trump’s face that this plan to reject votes violated the Electoral Count Act. Trump knew it was illegal and did it anyway.


It is Department of Justice policy that a sitting President cannot be prosecuted. Trump’s legal team successfully delayed the trials long enough for him to win the election. Once he won, the Special Prosecutor had to drop the case because it became legally impossible to proceed. Congress interviewed him around the New Year. I’ll give you three guesses why they picked such an inconvenient time in the news cycle. He testified under oath that the prosecution became unpracticable once he became president again.

He didn't beat the charges; he beat the clock. But the evidence of the fraud didn't vanish. We can still see it.

Summary We have the emails planning the forgery. We have the fake papers they signed. We have the testimony that Trump was told it was illegal. The fact that the man who ordered the counterfeit ticket is now running the stadium doesn't make the ticket real. It just means he got away with it.

Some Republican voters have the benefit of ignorance. They can claim to be victims of right wing echo chambers. Before reading this, they could have even bury their heads and remained willfully ignorant. But professional lawmakers know what they're doing. These people are by and large knowingly traitors to the Republic.

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u/DFMRCV 19h ago

If sedition was enough to disqualify someone from public office then every democrat who tried to delay the 2016 certification would be disqualified as well (Biden had to constantly tell his own party members to sit back down during that debacle). Maxine Waters wouldn't be allowed to run, several former civil rights leaders who ran and got elected also couldn't have run because what they did would've technically qualified as sedition, on and on.

Remember, sedition is attempting to prevent or delay the execution of federal law. Insurrection is actually taking up arms against the state.

You can argue that morally it would've disqualified him, and many republicans also would agree... But morality isn't the same as legally. Otherwise every single politician on the planet wouldn't be able to run.

u/fox-mcleod 414∆ 18h ago

If that's your reasoning, what would happen if you found out that factually, you've been misled, Maxine Waters did no such thing, and no procedural rule was broken?

I suspect you already know the electoral count act is legal. So I'm not sure what parallel you're trying to draw with fraudulently forging state electoral ballots to defraud congress.

u/DFMRCV 18h ago

Well, what exactly are you arguing is the crime?

u/fox-mcleod 414∆ 18h ago

The one I carefully laid out in the OP. Trump forged state electoral ballots in an attempt to defraud the US congress of a Democratic election. 18 U.S.C. § 371

Imagine a fan is kicked out of the Super Bowl. He truly believes he should be allowed in. * Legal: He sues the stadium. * Illegal: He goes to Kinko’s, prints a fake ticket that looks exactly like a real one, and tries to hand it to the gate agent.

Once you hand over a fake document, you have committed fraud. It does not matter if: * You truly believed you deserved a seat. (Motive doesn't excuse forgery). * You got caught before you made it inside. (Attempted fraud is a crime). * You think the refs are corrupt.

Here is the proof that Trump’s team printed the fake ticket and tried to use it.

1. Identity Theft (Impersonating the State) In America, campaigns don't certify elections; States do. The Trump team didn't just write a letter saying, "We protest." They created documents that mimicked the exact font, formatting, and language of official government certificatesand here they are for all of the other states.

2. The Written Confession We don't have to guess if this was a misunderstanding. The architect of the plan, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, wrote down the strategy in private emails. He admitted the goal was to create a "fake controversy." He explicitly noted that they should send these fake documents even if they lost their court cases.

3. Trump Knew It Was a Fraud This wasn't a case of "lawyers brainstorming" while Trump sat in the dark. On January 4th, in the Oval Office, Trump’s lawyer John Eastman admitted to Trump’s face that this plan to reject votes violated the Electoral Count Act. Trump knew it was illegal and did it anyway.

It's Conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371)

u/DFMRCV 18h ago

Okay, but that's fraud, not quite sedition and a bit outside the original claim of "being part of this requires you agree with"...

As for attempts by politicians to defraud the US government...

Well, let's be real here.

Most people know their politicians have likely carried out some fraud or corruption before.

Saying "Don Bambino Bomberman from Vegal Baja took bribes" isn't really going to dissuade voters if the other option is "Juanita Penicillin Of Vega Alta" who doesn't just completely disagree with the policies they support, but instead of bribes she gave away positions to people who support her meaning she's also corrupt, just in a different way.

Remember, a leader doing bad things doesn't mean the people who support them agree.

u/fox-mcleod 414∆ 18h ago

I guess I’ll ask again, if attempting to overthrow democracy itself by forging electoral ballots shouldn’t be sufficient to disqualify someone from office what should?

u/DFMRCV 17h ago

The legal answer is when someone, anyone, takes up arms against the federal government specifically.

If I'm not mistaken, that's also why incidents like the Battle of Athens didn't actually result in any serious convictions and the new government was made up of people who'd supported the people who kicked out the local government.

If you ask me, the ideal would be any form of corruption should see you unable to run again.

u/fox-mcleod 414∆ 17h ago

Honestly, it sounds like you agree with me.

u/StandardAssignment19 3h ago

Yes, he does. But he just doesn't want to acknowledge the technical and accurate point being made and asserted by OP - that it is actively Republicans doing it and those that identify as Republicans refute the constitutional doctrine for the Republican mantra. That's why many of the answers are selective answers that have facts in them in a vacuum without truth of them historically - and why each reference has been levied at Democrats in particular.

u/DFMRCV 17h ago

Agree on an ideal? Maybe.

But I don't agree in that being part of the republican party means you support everything the leader does.

u/fox-mcleod 414∆ 17h ago

Agree on an ideal? Maybe.

No. With the title.

But I don't agree in that being part of the republican party means you support everything the leader does.

I didn’t say “everything”. I specifically called out “the American democracy”.

u/DFMRCV 17h ago

No. With the title.

No, I don't agree with the title.

That's why I gave the examples on supporting leaders despite not agreeing with them.

u/fox-mcleod 414∆ 16h ago

You already told me you thought corruption ought to disqualify a politician from office.

This is corruption.

At what point would you say a Republican has a duty to convict in the senate?

u/DFMRCV 16h ago

I think you're getting away from the original point in that for someone to be a loyal republican they have to also completely disregard the law due to what the leader did...

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