Yeah, I wish the legal system didn’t have this deference to “the voters will decide” when it reaches the level of actual criminal activity. Like the fact that you are running for or currently hold some office should have no impact at all on whether we are all equal before the law or how the law treats us. Yet every court and law enforcement agency seems terrified of the appearance of influencing the outcome of an election to the point that as long as you are running for something you are essentially legally bulletproof if the election is coming up soon.

I wonder if they understand what they’re encouraging by making the punishment for protests harsher than the punishments for direct action…not that that’s any of my business…

Where I live we get lots of local candidates who are some combination of democrat-green-progressive-working family alliances. Building coalitions from the bottom up like that, and showing that people with “green” in their bio can really be elected, is the way to move things forward. At the national level, the two-party system is far too entrenched to have a third party be anything but a defacto spoiler that turns off their own supporters more that anything else.