Alex Martin

Why did I take a 6:50 morning flight to London. I'm already regretting it.

The document in which the Romanian Constitutional Court justifies its decision to bar Georgescu, who already won the first round of the presidential election in December and was running ahead of everyone else in recent polls by a wide margin, from running for president is one of the most insane things I have ever read. The text is very confused, the translation probably doesn't help, but the argument the Court seems to make is that, in deciding whether someone can run for president, it has to check whether that person would threaten the country's constitutional framework if he were elected and it claims that Georgescu will not defend democracy. The only argument it gives to justify that claim is that the very same Court previously annulled the first round of the presidential election that Georgescu had won, which means that he didn't respect the electoral procedure and in turn this ipso facto demonstrates that he violates the obligation to defend democracy 🙃 But the December ruling to which it refers, which annulled the first round of the election, mostly didn't talk about Georgescu's alleged violations of electoral legislation to justify the decision, but instead made ridiculous arguments based on what supposedly happened on social media during the campaign, such as the claim that "equality of opportunity" was not ensured on social media due to the "exploitation" of algorithm. (Of course, even putting aside that such a claim is so vague as to be meaningless, this argument is preposterous since, by the same logic, one could justify cancelling literally every election in history because "equality of opportunity" has never existed anywhere in the traditional media either. Do people think, for instance, that the traditional media treat every candidate equally well? There is no principled difference here.) The only accusation made specifically against Georgescu in the December ruling is that he violated the electoral legislation by failing to disclose payments his campaign had allegedly made on social media, but the only evidence the Court cited in support of that claim was a report declassified by the Minister of Internal Affairs after the first round of the election, which claimed that Georgescu had benefited from a social media campaign that wasn't properly marked as electoral advertisement. However, although the document in question did note that Georgescu had not declared any spending on electoral campaigning (which is obviously suspicious), at no point did it claim that his campaign had paid for those social media posts and in fact evidence has since then surfaced that the social media campaign in question was paid for by the liberal party! (Let's put aside, because that's not truly relevant, the fact that even if Georgescu's campaign had in fact been behind that social media campaign, the idea that a $1 million dollar campaign on TikTok can swing millions of votes is nothing short of ridiculous. If this were true, the guys behind Georgescu's online operation should quit their current job, whether it's in the Kremlin or somewhere else, to create their own political advertisement company because they're apparently the most effective people in the field anywhere in the world by a very wide margin.) So the Constitutional Court barred from running for president the candidate who, according to the polls, was bound to win in a landslide, by arguing that its own decision to annul the first round of the election last December, justified by insane arguments about the general context in which the election took place and an accusation against that candidate for which it produced no evidence, showed that he could not be counted on to defend democracy 🤯 I'm sorry but this is nothing short of a legal coup and a denial of democracy. Anyone who defends that decision while claiming to support democracy and the rule of law is a clown. This is the same kind of arguments that dictatorships around the world use to prevent "dangerous" candidates from running and the fact that so many people who constantly pose as defenders of democracy are currently applauding the Court's decision speaks volumes about how deep their commitment to democracy actually runs.

The tax bill is dead. No retroactive 174 fix will happen. Keep lobbying so it whoever controls Congress after the election has it front of mind in the big tax rewrite of 2025.