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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> can’t give such an ideologically homogenous group of people that much power over elections and candidates

Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.

The solution is something more flexible than we have now, but still with a high bar. The check is the courts. America didn’t fall apart when Bob Menendez went to jail.

> People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively

We don’t need them to. Prosecutorial discretion means anyone can charged with anything. The test is whether it sticks. (The FBI already has, and has already abused, the powers you’re concerned about.)

Nobody is suggesting prosecutors be allowed to unilaterally jail politicians. If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.

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> Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.

Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession. That’s a solution worse than the problem.

> If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.

You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.

> Your proposal would replace petty corruption with institutional capture of elections by the legal profession

“Make corruption cases easier to bring” is “institutional capture of elections”? What?

> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction

If your only issue is with the jury pool, don’t give DC special jurisdiction. A Senator from Montana should be tried there.

It also seems like you’ve forgotten about appeals.

> to make such consequential decisions for the whole country

We have an election system that’s corrupted by social media, money and the electoral college. That means smaller groups of unaccountable people already make consequential decisions for the whole country.

The folks on January 6th were idiots. But they believed they were saving their republic. A lot more people, today, believe we’re at a precipice of losing it due to corruption.

So yeah, if not a jury it could be something more extreme. (At a certain point, not today but not la-la land, it needs to be.) A state or district electing corrupt fuckwits endangers us all—the folks pushing for decertifying elections for shits and giggles set the precedent for this anyway.

> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction, where evidence is carefully screened by lawyers and judges, to make such consequential decisions for the whole country.

Then it sounds like you need to amend the Constitution. Because that's how our system works. You are indicted by a grand jury in the jurisdiction in which you are accused of a crime and then you are put in front of a petit jury. Both sides agree on who the jury is.

I'm struggling to understand the alternative system you're imagining.

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