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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I actually had written an answer about the effects of the 12th amendment on the politics StackExchange that details how the original elections worked (or failed) under the old system.

    The interesting thing to me about this is that after Washington, there had always been running mates, and the problem wasn’t that the President and Vice President may be political opponents. The problem was the old system was open to gamesmanship that thwarted the will of the voters.

    1796 did not end with an Adams-Jefferson administration because Jefferson came in second. If things went as planned, it would have been Adams-Pinckney instead. But Hamilton preferred Pinckney over Adams and tried to sway the electors for Jefferson-Burr to vote Jefferson-Pinckney instead, which would have led to a Pinckney-Adams administration despite Pinckney campaigning with Adams as his presumptive Vice President. However, his plan didn’t work out, and Jefferson ended up getting the second most number of votes. This led to an Adams-Jefferson administration which was not supposed to happen. This was bad, but the shady dealings happened in the dark, and Adams was at least elected President in accordance to the popular vote. The politicians at the time thought that they could just sweep this under the rug as they now had a better understanding of how to manage their electors.

    But, that turned out to be false. In 1800, they planned to be smarter with allocating the electors’ votes, but the Democratic-Republicans failed and accidentally cast the same number of votes for both Jefferson and Burr. Under the Constitution, a tie is decided in the House, and the makeup of the House meant that Federalists had the advantage. They preferred Burr over Jefferson, so they tried to subvert the election and appoint a Burr-Jefferson administration rather than Jefferson-Burr. Hamilton ultimately convinced the Federalists to relent and give the election to Jefferson. This was now the second time that Hamilton intervened to orchestrate the results of the election, and this time, it was all out in the open on the House floor. Furthermore, in both of these instances, Hamilton’s actions screwed over Burr, leading to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel that left Hamilton dead and Burr disgraced. So not only did the election show that this Constitution was failing in the democratic ideals of the revolution, it also led to the untimely downfall of two of the country’s top political leaders.

    So yes, the 1796 election exposed a pretty major issue, and the 1800 election showed that that issue could not be ignored. However, if you’re suggesting that the 1796 election led to the 12th Amendment because it showed the problems that arise when the President and Vice President are not politically aligned, I’m not so sure. It’s possible, but I don’t think that was a revelation to them. At the very least, the parties at the time were always trying to fill both offices with specific people, even before the 12th Amendment. The biggest problem they were trying to address was the way that the old system could be gamed by political elites.

    Also, sorry for the big wall of text. I just find this to be a very interesting topic.


  • It’s not so much that as that the coalitions and eventual parties wanted to hold both seats, so they ran multiple candidates with the assumption that one would be president and the other vice president. The electors would then structure their votes to ensure that the correct person was elected to each position. However, with the difficulties in long-distance communication at the time, this was prone to error. In 1800, this almost led to the candidate for vice president being elected as president.

    After that, they realized that it didn’t make sense to use one slate if candidates for both positions, so they separated out the ballot into president and vice president. That’s essentially how the elections had been running up to that point (particularly because they always had two votes to cast), but it was to easy to make a mistake. Both before and after the amendment, there was a presidential candidate with a running mate vying for the vice presidency.



  • Yeah, reading the article, it sounds like they’ve decided to park at the space station because the parts that malfunctioned during the journey to the space station were not designed to survive re-entry, meaning that they won’t have the opportunity to understand what went wrong with them after they return to Earth. So they’re delaying the departure in order to collect as much information as possible about what went wrong in the first part of the mission. They’re still confident that a safe return is going to happen.



  • He’s referring to what he said when the Senate acquited Trump after he was impeached by the House.

    Trump’s lawyers are trying to argue that he can’t be prosecuted by the courts for actions he took as president unless he is first impeached and convicted in Congress for those actions. When Trump was impeached and acquitted in 2021, McConnell stated that Congress can’t impeach him as he is no longer in office and that the matter is an issue for the criminal justice system.

    As shit as McConnell is, he is not confused with his dates right now, and his statements from 2021 are very relevant to this case and have been discussed in the news a lot recently.

    I’m also not sure what’s wrong with your quoted text. Nothing about it sounds confused to me.

    US News (Feb 14, 2021): Text of McConnell’s Speech

    President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything he did while in office, didn’t get away with anything yet – yet.

    We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.



  • If you ever use SQL Server Management Studio, you can experience the opposite. Whenever there’s an update, you’ll get a notification in the application, but to actually install it, you need to go to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Chrome, on the other hand, updates itself upon restart without requiring anything special from the user.

    As a software developer, I really like that part. It means that websites I work on only need to consider the features supported in the latest version of major browsers rather than the last several (as was the case with Internet Explorer).

    So, it’s nice and something that I remember really appreciating when Chrome was getting popular. But it’s still a weird thing to brag about.





  • The rationale that they’ve provided (at least on NPR a few weeks ago) is that Republicans insist that abortion should be a states’ rights issue, not a federal issue. Most people are able to choose where they live and ideally are able to move to states that agree with them in regards to abortion rights. However, members of the military have no such freedom, so it’s not fair to them to deny them access to health services due to where they’ve been assigned to live.

    The implied followup argument is that the military is already struggling to recruit new soldiers, and denying people access to essential healthcare is only going to make that task more difficult.


  • He didn’t need them to vote for it. If he was willing to pass a bill that would be supported by the other Republicans and some Democrats, he could have kept his promise. He just didn’t want to upset the FreeDumb Caucus and risk losing his position as Speaker. Ultimately, he acquiesced and brought the promises bill to a vote at the final hour, but it was too late. All he managed to do was enrage the extremists in his party enough for them to bring a vote to oust him, while also showing the Democrats that his promises are worthless. If he brought the good bill up earlier, the Democrats might have voted to keep him as Speaker, but his actions killed the only shred of a hope for that.