If you have multiple parties in a constitutional democracy with a president, the president can come to power with 33% of the vote— or less if the vote is split multiple ways.
Do you really want that?
A majority requires a big tent, which means compromising.
The drafters of our Constitution deliberately avoided a parliamentary system.
If one party jumps on the crazy train, that's when you need all other people to come together to outnumber the crazy party.
10 parties mean each person gets to find the party that fully embraces that person's views (Purity!)
But then the crazy party seizes power.
Under our Constitution, if a president doesn't earn a majority of delegates in the electoral college, the House of Representatives selects the president.
Multiple parties mean that a presidential candidate with 33% support can win a majority in the electoral college.
A president with 33% of the popular vote can win enough states to reach 270 electoral votes and become president.
I've had many Europeans jump into my mentions and tell Americans stupidly don't see the problem is with our Constitution and we should have multiple parties, like in Europe.
One consideration is the probability that the defendant will be convicted and face jail time because otherwise, you run the risk of ruining an innocent person's life.
(A jailed person probably loses his or her job. What if there are kids to support, etc.)
The goal of the GOP is to dismantle the federal government and return to that time (before 1920; for others, before 1860) when white men could basically do what they wanted.
On the frontier, they could grab land!
Before modern rape laws, they could grab women!
2/
Before the alphabet-soup regulatory agencies (the "deep state") they could cheat!
🔹They could fix prices and manipulate markets!
🔹They could sell rotten goods and it was the buyer's fault for not inspecting better!
🔹They could pollute rivers!
Mr. Gideon was a poor man accused of theft. He represented himself because he couldn't afford a lawyer. He was convicted. He appealed to the Supreme Court on a handwritten letter from prison. The Court heard his case and held that poor people get court-appointed lawyers . . .
. . . he had a new trial with a local lawyer who understood how the false accusation happened. The lawyer did some investigating, presented facts that Gideon has been unable to obtain, and Gideon was acquitted.
Our current criminal justice system took form after the Civil War, when the reactionaries and White Supremacists found a way around the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery except in the case of punishment for crimes after conviction. 1/
The solution: Convict lots of Black men, put them in jail, and put them in chain gangs. At the time, there were no limits on what police could do.
So they often beat confessions out of innocent Black men.
Along came Charles Hamilton and his protégé Thurgood Marshall.
2/
As a result of literally decades of work (and one of the few times we had a liberal Supreme Court under Earl Warren), we got rulings that the Fourth Amendment outlaws things like beating confessions out of people.