2020 US Election (Part Two)

[Birdjaguar]

All true. Court packing would undo a 150 year old consistency though whereas the crying about nominating another justice during the possible tail-end of a presidency is just that, whining.

And how many years of civil tradition and DOJ independence has Trump ended?

 

[Estebonrober]

Idk all of these topics seem reminiscent of the run up to the civil war. Just because it is in the constitution does not make something sacrosanct.

The electoral college or the senate need to die. Choose one of your levers for balance. Both has lead to the tyranny of the minority.

The minority has managed to rig the game so badly that there is no balance nor has there been any balance in quite some time. This is why the government is not responsive at all to the will of the people it’s supposed to represent. There are consequences to continuing this situation and they are starting to show themselves.

 

[Ajidica]

What were the actual grounds on which the court made its decision?

Knock yourself out
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-ruling/313921/
https://www.theatlantic.com/nationa...as-lamentable-as-plessy-or-dred-scott/276455/

he opinion itself is as accessible as any you are likely to read. Writing for the Court, the Chief Justice declared that Congress simply failed to update the "coverage formula" of Section 4 to address the very successes that the Voting Rights Act has brought to minority voting rights over the past 50 years. If Congress is to divide the states between "covered" and uncovered jurisdictions, the Chief Justice wrote, it bears a heavy burden under the Tenth Amendment and "must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. It simply cannot rely on the past."

The Fifteenth Amendment, which decrees "that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or color," the Chief Justice wrote in a remarkable passage, "is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future." Yet the Court's ruling today directly contradicts that lofty premise. A black voter in Shelby County today, as a result of this ruling, has a much grimmer "future" when it comes to voting rights than she did yesterday. Without Section 4's formula, Section 5 is neutered, and without Section 5 that black voter in Shelby County will have to litigate for her rights herself after the discriminatory law has come into effect.

In a passionate dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg immediately homed in on the extraordinarily aggressive nature of what the Court has just done. "The question this case presents," she wrote, "is who decides whether, as currently operative, Section 5 remains justifiable, this Court, or a Congress charged with the obligation to enforce the post-Civil War amendments 'by appropriate legislation.'" Until today, Justice Ginsburg wrote, the Court "had accorded Congress the full measure of respect its judgments should garner" in implementing that anti-discriminatory intent of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Until today.

"The Court," Justice Ginsburg wrote, "makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story." And then she proceeded to outline the countless ways in which racial discrimination in voting practices is alive and well in Alabama and other jurisdictions covered by the law. "The sad irony of today's decision," she wrote, "lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." It has been effective, of course, because it has made it harder for vote suppressors to suppress the votes of minority citizens. No more and no less.

It is worth pointing out that when declaring Section 4b unconstitutional, the Supreme Court's conservative majority went against overwhelming support for the law - in 2006 it was reauthorized with 98% support in the House and in the Senate.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/109-2006/h374
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/...ote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00212
In other words, the Supreme Court decided they knew better than our elected congresscritters and ruled that Section 4b was unconstitutional because there was no evidence of voter supression - which was exactly the behavior Section 4b (and accompanying clauses that relied on 4b) put a stop to. Or, as Ginsburg noted succintly in her dissent, it is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are no longer getting wet.

A minority to dominate? Of course not, the system is meant to be a compromise to keep both more equal than otherwise.

I'm honestly not sure what you are trying to get at here.

Sorry, new to the board, idk how to reply in different places of your post.

Easiest way to do it is to put quote tags around each section of text, so you would type:
[quote**] text you are quoting [/quote**], without the ** obviously.

 

[Lexicus]

Haha no, only a recognition of something actually working consistently in government for once, and a cautiousness to change that, possibly for the worse.

So let me get this straight.
Republicans can trample on all the "consistencies" they want, and you'll say it's fine as long as it's following the rules in the Constitution, and implicitly accuse others of "whining" about it, but the second the Democrats start talking about responding in kind it's suddenly time to be really cautious?

 

[Estebonrober]

So let me get this straight.
Republicans can trample on all the "consistencies" they want, and you'll say it's fine as long as it's following the rules in the Constitution, and implicitly accuse others of "whining" about it, but the second the Democrats start talking about responding in kind it's suddenly time to be really cautious?

Democrats going along with that playbook is kind of how we got here from the Gingrich congress. Imo anyways.

 

[Lexicus]

I'll do you one better. Eventually, humanity is going to have to get off this planet and become a spacefaring civilization, along with as many forms of life as we can bring with us, because even if we can manage to reverse the environmental damage (we can't... without... well... maybe dying en masse) and avoid a nuclear holocaust (eh... maybe?) and avoid an external extinction level event (we can't... Armageddon and Deep Impact notwithstanding)... eventually the star will explode, implode, or otherwise die, taking the whole solar system with it.

So yes in the "short" cosmically speaking, term... we do need to get off fossil fuels for the love of god and everything that is sacred... in the long term, we also need to be establishing a long term, global initiative to start colonizing/terraforming other planets in this solar system with an ultimate goal of launching multi-generational expeditions to reach other solar systems.

But... to bring this tirade back down to Earth... both figuratively and literally... we need to get a majority of our government, particularly, the leadership, in a consistent position that fossil fuel use is bad for the planet and needs to be reduced. We aren't there yet... but maybe(?) we are close.

As an aside... I've tried the "Impossible Whopper" at Burger King. I think "impossible" is apropos, because as I understand it... the sodium content basically neutralizes any potential health benefits of it being vegan. But I think that the fact that "impossible meat" even exists is a non-negligible sign that we are making progress, are capable of progress... and that 10,000 years from now, our descendants may yet be arriving at distant stars, learning about the primitive days when humans were so stupid that they elected leaders because they were TV show personalities.

I hope...

Here are some words of wisdom from Gandalf.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

 

[aelf]

Nah. I considered myself a "moderate" in the last election. I was tolerant of Trump, knowing he would likely be catastrophic, in the hopes that one of two scenarios would play out: either he would expose the darkness of the Democratic party, or he would expose the darkness of the Republican party. (I did not vote for either party, and lost a great deal of friends on both sides via my defenses of both of them.)

I ultimately got scenario two, with the bonus of the Democrats being effectively exonerated by Trump's inability to even lock up a single Clinton (never mind Obama or Biden). But I made a grievous miscalculation. I had hoped that this corruption, when laid bare, would actually impact the people responsible; unfortunately, it turns out that the people who speak loudest about truth, order, and integrity have no interest in any of these things unless such an interest can be militarized against their political enemies. This is obvious in retrospect, but I wanted desperately to believe in my country's right to exist in modern society.

I have thoroughly earned my lesson. The United States has no future, and will never have a future, for as long as Republicans continue to exist. We will continue falling behind virtually every developed country for the sake of recapturing the glory of the gilded age. Even if Biden wins, the fact that he isn't winning every state in the country proves a very important fact: Republicans do not care even remotely about truth, they do not care even remotely about morality, they do not care even remotely about justice, they do not care even remotely about integrity, and the only things they do care about are power and spite -- and they will do literally anything for them. Those who continue to stand with Trump cannot and will not be reasoned with under any circumstances, and there is no place for them in any society founded after 1945. They deserve only as much respect as they give to others, as they complain about "partisan media" while watching news that cannot go five minutes without attacking a political opponent.

The ACB nomination is the absolute final chance for Republicans to prove that they are anything other than a cult. If (when) she goes through, I will actively support any possible means of re-consolidating power toward Democrats. Pack the courts, pursue statehood for DC and territories, destroy gerrymandering and the filibuster, I don't care what it takes; the Republicans would have no right whatsoever to complain when they would stoop just as low. Biden won't do these because he has nowhere near the balls Trump claims he has, but he should.

Oh boy. Let me introduce you to Mr. Patine.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx was already writing. A century ago, Eugene V. Debs was campaigning. Socialists have been fighting for workers' rights for generations now. People in the US have been fighting for the rights of those who aren't white for ages. And what does the left have to show for it?

Spoiler :

View attachment 572131

The left has fought and fought and fought for over a century to achieve a world in which people can support themselves and their families through safe, honest, reasonable work and not be held hostage by threats of homelessness and hunger, or be denied rights based on race, or be serfs to an invincible caste of hyper-rich capitalists, or struggle to survive a lifeless, apocalyptic hellscape, and look where we are now. Income inequality through the roof. People being declared "essential workers" too important to be allowed to be safe, but not important enough to pay fairly. Wage-slaves toil at the invincible, all-powerful empire of Amazon. Prices have gone up but wages have stagnated. America is constantly getting poorer and poorer while the ruling class gets richer and richer. In terms of race, Black Americans were promptly re-enslaved under sharecropping and chain gangs after "emancipation," and lost their voting rights to a successful terrorist campaign. Segregation ended - officially - but unofficially, cities remain largely segregated, and most people who aren't white remain disproportionately worse off, and are routinely executed by the tax-funded gangs and lynch squads we call police. In terms of equality, we've made huge strides backwards, with the unions destroyed, taxes on the elite lowered to literally nothing in many cases, more handouts for the rich, and more corporate power in general. Ecologically, none of the warnings of the past four decades have been heeded. Mass extinction is actually accelerating. The goal of keeping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius below previous levels, while still devastating, has proven hopelessly optimistic and is now impossible. The world's capitalists and right-wing nihilists are fighting an overwhelmingly successful delaying action aimed at trapping us in the sinking ship's lower holds while they seize the lifeboats, and nothing meaningful is improving. We're going to have ten billion people all demanding to live like the upper-middle class of a dangerously consumerist society on a world that cannot pay that bill.

The left wanted peace, and it got the world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, and more. The left wanted workers' rights and now we have corporations so huge and powerful that they can stop any threat to their wealth and power, and it won't even matter before long because automation will lead to colossal unemployment. The left wanted racial equality and got shameless, defiant neo-Confederate white supremacy and unyielding racial inequality. The left wanted a healthy, beautiful world and has now been guaranteed a hellish wasteland unsuitable for human habitation within a few decades, if not sooner. The left wanted real change, and is now faced with a centrist versus an actual fascist. All over the world, countries have fallen to right-wing extremism - Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, India, Brazil, Israel, and more. Germany is fighting a losing battle against the same cultists and fascists who have consumed America. Britain has gone haywire. There is virtually no country where the left can be even close to satisfied with the government, and this is worsening by the year. Far-right Internet conspiracy cultism has proven to be an incurable infection that can infect the entire world.

Nothing has worked. Any battles the left "wins" are soon reversed by a ferocious regressive, capitalist backlash. We ran out of time to save ourselves from the threats of climate doom, automation-induced unemployment, and more, and are now bleeding out from fatal wounds.

And frankly I don't think any other result was ever possible.

If you ally with the weak and fight the strong, you'll pretty much always lose if you yourself are also weak. The billionaires can and do easily network and coordinate with each other; they're a small club with strongly shared interests, meet and talk often, and can always hire agents to assist them. The masses of the world are divided by race, religion, and political beliefs, are overwhelmed with work and family and all manner of other demands, and anyway it was never going to be possible to effectively coordinate that many people. The billionaires are thus in the position of a heavy person sitting on the scrawny lower classes, who can never get off the ground unless the billionaires let them. And a huge number of the middle and lower classes actually like being dominated, so long as the natural hierarchy is preserved an the people they hate are kept down.

As far as I'm concerned, all we can do is go down resisting as best we can. That's why I vote, even though it doesn't count in my state or arguably my country. But don't labor under any misapprehensions that the left will ever overcome this rigged game.

Yes, I broadly agree with your narrative. Which is why I believe the insistence on civilised debate and procedural democracy as the cure is silly. Yeah, many of us get to live another day. But it's like playing a long game of poker where some people always get dealt bad cards and obediently fold all the time and slowly lose all their money.

Is this whining I detect? Crying perhaps?

Definitely, and his trying to play it cool after that is 100% lameass Youtube comments stuff.

You can even see the salty rage in the profile pic.

 

[Drakle]

A cartoonish division between "socialism" and "capitalism" leads to bad analysis. Shocker.
I disagree that any billionaires really want to see a more equitable society. Just look at how Bill Gates responded to Elizabeth Warren's very modest wealth tax proposal.

But in any case, all the so-called capitalist countries are demonstrations that socialism can work, because all of them have incorporated socialist policies and institutions without which they would be 19th-century-style social hellscapes. The rich are trying to undo all that if they can.

You're saying I have the cartoonish definition of socialism, when you and and others bascially seem to see socialism as when goverments do things, and the more they do, the more socialist they are. Socialism is about owning the means of production. Not the size of government. Saying big government is socialist is the kinda of dumb stuff Republicans get up to.

And we have political donation and voting records. The richest part of society has shifted leftwards, as many of them bascially vote based on social issues, or shared cultural/educational grounds. I mean at that stage, there isn't actually any real economic interest, the difference taxes would make had no impact on their actual quality of life, it is just hoarding otherwise. And this shift is happening in more than just the US, by the way, so you can't just blame Democrats.

It’s a check to the other branches, if the court is packed (which will set the precedent for all presidents to continue to do when they’re elected) it becomes an extension of the legislative and exec instead of a check to preserving fidelity to the constitution as it is meant to be.

Destroying the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is a good thing. The Supreme Court, except for a brief interlude with the Warren court, has always been a reactionary force. Making the court responsive to electoral politics, prevents it from dictating wildly unpopular conservative policy, from a fortress of norms. And conservative legal theories about the constitution are bunk. As is this Supreme Court, which has shredded democratic norms, not protected them.

 

[Birdjaguar]

SCOTUS is a lagging indicator and could be improved by term limits or age limits.

 

[Lexicus]

You're saying I have the cartoonish definition of socialism, when you and and others bascially seem to see socialism as when goverments do things, and the more they do, the more socialist they are. Socialism is about owning the means of production. Not the size of government. Saying big government is socialist is the kinda of dumb stuff Republicans get up to.

"Socialism is about owning the means of production" is a cartoonish definition, but I actually said "cartoonish division between socialism and capitalism". And you're also attacking a strawman definition of socialism here.
So, 0/2.

For the record, my concept of socialism is about the degree of democratic control of the economy. Not who formally owns the MoP or how much of GDP is government spending.

And we have political donation and voting records. The richest part of society has shifted leftwards,

What, you mean they started voting for and donating to center-left parties as those parties have shifted (in some cases, drastically) rightward precisely in order to become acceptable to the super-rich?
Shocking, that.

 

[KaibaCorp]

And how many years of civil tradition and DOJ independence has Trump ended?

Can you be specific?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Trump does not owe $447 million in debt. He owes a billion. Forbes lays it all out here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danale...n-twice-the-amount-he-suggested/#1f483bb43306

 

[KaibaCorp]

It is worth pointing out that when declaring Section 4b unconstitutional, the Supreme Court's conservative majority went against overwhelming support for the law - in 2006 it was reauthorized with 98% support in the House and in the Senate.

In other words, the Supreme Court decided they knew better than our elected congresscritters and ruled that Section 4b was unconstitutional because there was no evidence of voter supression - which was exactly the behavior Section 4b (and accompanying clauses that relied on 4b) put a stop to. Or, as Ginsburg noted succintly in her dissent, it is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are no longer getting wet.

Easiest way to do it is to put quote tags around each section of text, so you would type:
[quote**] text you are quoting [/quote**], without the ** obviously.

It appears to me the decision will be viewed either as a sign of progress made in the south or as a step to returning to race-based voter suppression. I’m not an identity politics bot so my initial conviction is the former, but I do think (in my uninformed, novice opinion) there is legitimate material for disagreement here. Again I’m not well-informed on this though, thanks for the links.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Can you be specific?

• Lying all the time to the public
• Using the DOJ for personal vendettas
• Using the DOJ to block investigations into his corruption
• Refusing to cooperate with congress on its investigations
• Classifying documents to hide his corruption
• Giving security clearances to people not qualified to get them

Oh and one more just in: Trump trying to exclude non citizens from the census; that breaks over 250 years of tradition.

 

[Gorbles]

I’m not an identity politics bot

You don't have to be any kind of bot to believe in something that's existed for most of the US' history.

 

[KaibaCorp]

So let me get this straight.
Republicans can trample on all the "consistencies" they want, and you'll say it's fine as long as it's following the rules in the Constitution, and implicitly accuse others of "whining" about it, but the second the Democrats start talking about responding in kind it's suddenly time to be really cautious?

I assume you mean them not meeting to approve/disapprove Garland’s nomination? Reps were 100% in the wrong imo for not holding a senate meeting and being sketchy politician a-holes about it. They broke decorum when they very well would have most likely had the votes to deny Garland after the blows the dems took during the 2014 midterms. Doing that now has the dems wanting to take this crap further and pack the courts, which is a pretty awful idea, especially in this day and age of extreme division and media echo chambers.

Having said all that, there still is nothing unconstitutional about Trump having these old justices pass during his tenure and filling the vacancies with the majority senate he has backing him.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Having said all that, there still is nothing unconstitutional about Trump having these old justices pass during his tenure and filling the vacancies with the majority senate he has backing him.

And if the Dems hold the house, senate and WH in 2021, would there be anything unconstitutional about them impeaching all 3 of Trumps Judges?

 

[El_Machinae]

Yeah, the court-packing would be payback for Garland. It would not be payback for filling Ginsburg's seat, other than the original hypocrisy deserving the payback

 

[KaibaCorp]

And if the Dems hold the house, senate and WH in 2021, would there be anything unconstitutional about them impeaching all 3 of Trumps Judges?

I guess if there were legitimate grounds for them beyond “we don’t agree with their political beliefs/philosophy”. Only one has ever been impeached.

 

[Ajidica]

It appears to me the decision will be viewed either as a sign of progress made in the south or as a step to returning to race-based voter suppression. I’m not an identity politics bot so my initial conviction is the former, but I do think (in my uninformed, novice opinion) there is legitimate material for disagreement here. Again I’m not well-informed on this though, thanks for the links.

PROTIP: In this day and age, if the GOP is given the opportunity for voter suppression, they will take it. It has bee seven years since Shelby v Holder and there has been an explosion of voter suppression activities, heavily concentrated in areas that had been under VRA pre-clearance.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/georgia-election-recount-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/05/texas-voter-suppression-greg-abbott-absentee/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/how-shelby-county-broke-america/564707/

In June, as the Court closed what would turn out to be the last term of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s career, America suddenly got a glimpse of what Roberts’s mandate in Shelby County will mean for voting rights going forward. First, in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Court essentially gave its seal of approval to Ohio’s system of voter purges, in which the state uses a failure to vote as a trigger to begin the multistep process of taking people off voter rolls. As my colleague Garrett Epps has written, the decision was ostensibly made on a narrow statutory analysis of two laws with texts that might seem to be in conflict in this issue, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. But as Epps also notes, the decision by the Court to essentially allow a loophole creating a legal method of voter-purging challenges both the intent of the NVRA—another pro-voting statute intended to advance access to the ballot among disadvantaged people—and again marks the retreat of the Court from the role Marshall tried to create for it.
...
Despite her warnings, just a few weeks later the Supreme Court doubled down, providing yet another blow against the VRA and the Fourteenth Amendment. Five years to the day after Shelby County v. Holder, the Court for the most part rejected a lower court’s finding that the Texas Republican Party had intentionally diluted black and Latino votes in legislative and state maps that it had redrawn after racial gerrymandering challenges in 2011. In writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that the lower court had erred in requiring the Texas GOP to prove that it had purged its discriminatory intent in its new maps, establishing that the legislature had to be presumed in good faith in its current actions, even if recent history detailed a clear record of discrimination and racism. “The allocation of the burden of proof and the presumption of legislative good faith are not changed by a finding of past discrimination,” Alito wrote.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-w...ights-america-six-years-after-shelby-v-holder

So who was right? Consider the following facts. The day the Shelby decision was handed down, Texas officials announced their intention to implement a strict voter ID law that had previously been denied preclearance – a law that the federal courts eventually found to be discriminatory, following years of litigation. Soon after, Alabama and Mississippi followed suit with their own photo ID laws, and North Carolina passed an omnibus election law that included restrictions such as strict photo ID and cutbacks to early voting. A federal court later struck down the North Carolina law, finding that it had been passed with a discriminatory purpose. So far this year, five states have passed (or are poised to pass) significant laws restricting access to the vote – three of which were previously subject to preclearance. And these laws are just a part of the post-Shelby story, which includes suspect poll closures, a significant uptick in voter purges, and other forms of voter suppression.

This has been a pretty major story for the last seven years, and has become super prominent this year (thanks Covid!) with GOP efforts almost across the entire country to make it hard to vote early, absentee vote, cast doubt on the integrity of absentee voting, and just about every other voting-related topic.