Technically, the equivalent would be you standing outside a polling place with a sign saying “I will give every adult in the area $500 if Candidate X wins”.
Ostensibly, you could just be lying (just like Trump) - and that would probably be covered under your 1st Amendment rights.
It’s stupid, but there is enough of a disconnect between action and reward that it might skirt past.
No, that’s not how that works.
18 U.S.C. § 597 - U.S. Code - Unannotated Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure § 597.
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and
Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
That seems pretty straightforward. So the law is correct, it’s just useless because the system founded on these laws is broken.
I should look forward to Trump getting charged with that, then?
But more seriously, there would be countless lawyers happy to argue that a general statement such as “$500 to every adult in the county if John Smith wins” does not technically break that particular law because it’s not explicitly targeted at any one individual recipient, nor is it contingent on them participating in an election whatsoever.
Just as I’m also sure there would be more than one sympathetic Trump-appointed judge to side with the defendant too.
US laws mean nothing if they aren’t actively being followed.
People in this thread forget that the Supreme Court already gave Trump immunity from prosecution.
do you have supreme court immunity?
This is most r/nostupidquestions thing that has ever been asked here. It’s just bait.
I mean, There’s also the more direct approach if one wants to give out bribes in return for votes… Remember this? Tell me more about how amazing and just the Western Democracy is.
One theory for the death of Edgar Allen Poe in Baltimore is that he got caught up in a cooping gang. It is all voter fraud no matter how you handle the details.
It’s very different. One is “I will give YOU money if you vote for me” and the other is “I will give EVERYONE money if I win”. The main difference is that one is not discriminating against who people voted for. The first is buying votes, the second is a campaign similar to “I will retroactively lower taxes for this year if I win”, which I don’t think anyone would see as problematic but it’s exactly the same outcome as the one you’re finding problem with, i.e. give people money.
It’s a stupid campaign because anyone with half a brain understand that he’s not going to do it and that that money would have to come from someplace else, but it’s still a campaign promise similar to any other promise politicians make to ask you to vote for them.
Everything is legal when everyone let you write the rules.
Or ignore the rules that someone else wrote to prevent you from doing the thing.
Yes it is illegal for you to do that, as it would be for Trump. But no, Trumps proposed 5k checks to all adult citizens, as I understand it, is legal. I’m pretty disappointed in the other answers. A few relevant points.
- Remember the model for sending checks to folks: CARES. Both Biden and Trump have previously done this.
- Congress can legally amend and pass laws. Note that the law that makes bribing for votes illegal is not in the constitution, so it requires only the usual legal action to amend it.
- I note that the policy Trump proposed isn’t discriminatory on who you vote for; your hypothetical does. (I suspect this is irrelevant for the legality, but certainly helps the optics.)
It’s still illegal; it’s just that nobody will enforce the law against the orange bastard. The motherfucker was literally convicted of 34 felonies and hasn’t paid any fines or faced a minute of jail time, FFS.
Was it illegal for Bernie Sanders to campaign on free medical and college?
Rather than tilt and rave let’s approach this from another angle: Trump promised funds from DOGE and balanced budgets on multiple occasions and you’re never going to see any of it. He is a liar.
What a moronic take. Like genuinely.
The guy is a huge troll, I have tagged them thusly and he had continued to live up to that moniker
Was it illegal for Bernie Sanders to campaign on free medical and college?
No because that would have been done through normal policy change and actually a thing an elected official should try and do. What Trump is doing (even if it is a lie) is bribery. It’s not even remotely the same, and it speaks volumes of your character that you would even try and equate them.
Trump’s and Bernie’s plans would both require congress because the president literally has no access to funds without it.
I worry about people spreading these lies because it is in fact a great policy stance.
Your suposition is that the power of the purse still applies here. Trump has operated the executive as a collective slush fund, many times using horrible arguments that fail in court and then proceeding anyways. Also he’s allocated money from military coup projects like Venezuala to funds not under congressional control illegally.
Bernies plan is to first expand Medicare to all ages. Going off Trump’s logic this would be done by directing CMS by executive order to adjust the rates, the treasury department to allocate the necessary trust fund expenditures, the IRS to apply the necessary taxes, and the justice department to aggressively target every single possible violation in the private health insurance industry. Bernie’s actual plan is to use the bully pulpit as intended to pressure congress to act in accordance with those changes ahead of time, completely different. That’s because Trump moves to erode government into the pockets of the rich and Bernie seeks to build it stronger to benefit everyone. Executive overreach expansion has only been applied to benefit the rich effectively where everywhere else it had failed.
rofl imagine being the fucking clown pretending free medicsl and college would be a bad thing.
Again: Fucking. Clown.
Turns out the president is above the law, and can only be impeached, given the rare condition that the opposition party has a supermajority in Congress, of course!
Presidential immunity only extends to official acts see here. That said, its so poorly defined as to be irrelevant at the moment.
Still, I suspect distributing checks from the federal government that was not appropriated by congress would very much fail to qualify.
When there are no consequences, everything is an official act.
Americans refuse to apply the law to trump for some reason
Conservatism is entirely about the laws applying differently to different people. The king is special. The nobles are a little less special. The peasants are trash. The slaves are worse. That’s the conservative world. Hierarchy. So of course they don’t want to apply rules to their chief.
They are worse than children.
How do you expect that to happen when the fascists own and operate all three branches of government and are hands on with DoJ?
Americans have no choice in the matter, if we’re talking about legal channels.
For real. Like yeah, lemme just waltz my ass on over there and issue a citizens arrest. That will go over splendidly.
All the idiots who say this shit think they would be the one to kill Hitler if they were born in Nazi Germany. There’s a reason it took a foreign military invading to push him to do it himself.
I’ve even heard dipshits say “Well America had a Civil War in the past” as if that war was declared by the people and not their governments and fought by their militaries.
there’s a major error in that the president, according to legal experts, can’t be arrested by anyone but congress and the house, which makes no sense. he should simply be president from a poison at this point.
There will never be a payout of 5 k ,from taco, all lies
But the far right pretending to be socialists and for the workers is a long tradition dating back to at least 1920.
Do you mean lying?
They are two very different things.
In one case you’re handing people real money on the street for their vote.
In the other your making a “campaign promise” that everyone knows isn’t actually real.Question from far away: do even the basic, illiterate, red-capped MAGAts not believe it? Or is the fanbase waiting for its manna?
Believe it’s true literally?
NoIt’s a concept known as Kayfabe. A special kind of pretending, where both performer and audience act as if something is real, when both know it isn’t. It started with American professional wrestling. Wrestlers would do interviews, even greet fans after the show and sign autographs as their characters, not as themselves.
So no, even his MAGA supporters don’t literally believe he’ll give them $5k. They just accept is as a promise that he and the Republicans will do good things for them generally. They like the sound of it, even though they know it’s not “real”.
I think they know Trump is full of shit, they just don’t care so long as he’s ‘hurting the right people’.
They’d let Trump shit in their mouth if it meant a ‘librul’ would have to smell it.
It’s not a campaign promise. He’s already elected!
He’s campaigning for the Republicans generally during this midterm Republican “convention”.
Campaigning for ones-self isn’t the only time or way to campaign.
This is what tips me over the edge, all in on maga now. I’m surely gonna collect the 5k from the dude famous for stiffing contractors and bankrupting casinos
