"Easy Sunday" posts are meant to be short.
So I will ask a simple question:
Are there any readers whose mental alarm bells would not go off if you were asked to sign a government document that asserts a lie?
A Nevada grand jury this week indicted six Republicans who pledged Nevada's electoral votes to Donald Trump. They signed and submitted documents claiming they were "duly elected and qualified" as Nevada electors. They were not. They are charged with offering a "false instrument for filing” and “uttering a forged instrument,” both felonies.
The six people did this openly and proudly. They stood for photographs.
The Trump campaign organized slates of electors to meet on December 20 in all seven of the states with close results that certified the election for Biden. In two states, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the electors balked at signing the document the Trump campaign prepared. They insisted on including language that their votes were valid only if some future court reversed the result. The Trump campaign was adamant in opposing a contingent claim of victory. Say you won, the Trump campaign insisted. The Trump strategy was for there to be two slates presented to Vice President Pence, both claiming validity.
Fear of prosecution and being found guilty is a deterrent. A deterrent is the prospect of spending several years in prison, with the attendant misery and brutalization that takes place there, one's freedom lost, one's family disrupted, one's livelihood lost, and the persistent social stigma of having been an incarcerated felon. Prison sends a message that Americans do not condone claiming to have won an election when you have not.
Trump isn't going to prison on behalf those six in Nevada, if they are found guilty. They are. He is home at Mar-a-Lago. He is golfing. He is out campaigning, flying on his jet, being protected by Secret Service people. He sends out multiple fundraising solicitations every day to people his campaign thinks support him.
I oppose brutal prisons. I favor the being places of detainment, not brutality. But it would be brand appropriate would be MAGA electors, who spent decades delighted that the prisons be overcrowded and dangerous, now getting the karma boomerang.
Those false electors deserve prison time. And prison time for such crimes is a great deterrent to crimes-of-consideration, as opposed to crimes of passion.
Yes to all that, except for the apparent tacit approval of prisons as places of brutalization. Yes, to loss of freedom. Yes to some degree of immiseration attendant to that loss of freedom, livelihood, and social status.
But, please, No! to the brutalization too often attendant to our carceral systems. We don't help anyone become better humans by brutalizing them.
Convict and imprison them, for their own improvement and the improvement of society.