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SCOTUS decisions

ImTheCaptain said:
no i don't think it's sensible in an era where communication is instantaneous and global and physical travel between continents is counted in hours to have a mish-mash of legal standards and rights across a so-called unified nation
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Very well. You are, of course, entitled to your opinion....though I'm not exactly sure how what you are saying applies to Federalism. Is it your position that all laws should be made at the federal level and individual states should have no rights?
 
I think viability is a rational standard - but it should be natural viability. A 20 week premie hooked up in the NICU should not set the standard for viability.

If a baby can’t live on its own after it’s born, it shouldn’t be considered viable.
 
I think he's saying he finds it bizarre to have different laws in different states in 2018 given how frequently people are now able to travel from state to state, communicate and transact business in different states, and it's considerably easier to get around the country than it was in 1789.

That directly applies to federalism.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
I think he's saying he finds it bizarre to have different laws in different states in 2018 given how frequently people are now able to travel from state to state, communicate and transact business in different states, and it's considerably easier to get around the country than it was in 1789.

That directly applies to federalism.
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OK….but what is he proposing we should do about changing laws and/or the Constitution? I don't think anyone disagrees with the bolded part of your post.
 
Can't speak for him but it seems pretty clear based on his recent posts that he would prefer laws to be consistent across the states so they'd be made at the federal level.
 
The vast majority of Americans have struck a balance on abortion between abortion should be legal in he case of rape or incest and abortion should allowed through the second trimester.
 
PhDeac said:
The vast majority of Americans have struck a balance on abortion between abortion should be legal in he case of rape or incest and abortion should allowed through the second trimester.
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Right. I think Roe strikes a great balance.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Can't speak for him but it seems pretty clear based on his recent posts that he would prefer laws to be consistent across the states so they'd be made at the federal level.
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That seems to be a reasonable assumption.

Going back to LG's post which started this series of posts, I assumed that his comment that "America is being ruled by a minority" was a direct slam against the Electoral College....which is, of course, a basic tenet of the Federalism in our Constitution. My original reply to him was with that thought in mind more than in reference to, say, laws regarding such issues as abortion.

I agree with you that it would probably be beneficial to have more states with similar laws in many areas where possible.....but eliminating states' rights completely would be radical & dangerous....and that should never be done. The EC is a prime example. Hillary won California by 4.3M votes, but lost the other 49 states by 1.3M votes. I certainly don't want a system where one state can elect the president.

ETA: And, anyway, the Electoral College is never going to be eliminated so there is really no point in even talking about that possibility. You may be able to get enough votes in congress to tweak it in some ways....like splitting each state's votes like Nebraska & Maine already do....but you are never going to get the smaller states to go along with going to a full-out popular vote. Nor should they.
 
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You prefer a system where someone wins with fewer votes?

I think the EC is shit and have for the last decade plus. If the results are the same as popular vote why do you need it and if it’s different why do you want it?

You have people in states like Wyoming whose vote is worth four times as much as someone in California. That’s wildly disproportionate.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
You prefer a system where someone wins with fewer votes?

I think the EC is shit and have for the last decade plus. If the results are the same as popular vote why do you need it and if it’s different why do you want it?

You have people in states like Wyoming whose vote is worth four times as much as someone in California. That’s wildly disproportionate.
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Your argument is with the U.S. Constitution, not with me.
 
SwissChaletDeac said:
That seems to be a reasonable assumption.

Going back to LG's post which started this series of posts, I assumed that his comment that "America is being ruled by a minority" was a direct slam against the Electoral College....which is, of course, a basic tenet of the Federalism in our Constitution. My original reply to him was with that thought in mind more than in reference to, say, laws regarding such issues as abortion.

I agree with you that it would probably be beneficial to have more states with similar laws in many areas where possible.....but eliminating states' rights completely would be radical & dangerous....and that should never be done. The EC is a prime example. Hillary won California by 4.3M votes, but lost the other 49 states by 1.3M votes. I certainly don't want a system where one state can elect the president.
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The highlighted statement is total BULLSHIT.

CA has 38.3 million people. If you add the populations of AL, AR, ID, IN, KS, KY, LA, MO, NE, OK, WV total about 37.9M people. Trump won those states by 4.42M votes. We should take those away from him.

No matter how many times you post that inane BS, it won't make it relevant or sensible.
 
Shooshmoo said:
It would actually be more productive and make more sense to argue with an old piece of paper than you, Bud.
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Not to mention that the Constitution can be amended, a fact which Republicans today seem to have completely forgotten. The Framers added that ability because they realized that times change, and what sounded good in 1789 may not work as well as, say, in 2018. But, to listen to Republicans, the Constitution, like the Bible, is set in stone and should only be taken literally, never interpreted, and almost never amended. I've seen arguments in some conservative journals that Amendments such as the 14th (ensuring equal rights for black males, and which has been used by the courts since to expand rights for other minority groups), and the 17th (providing for the popular election of US Senators, instead of having state legislatures do it) should never have been ratified, because the Constitution wasn't meant to be used in such a way.
 
Highland Deac said:
Not to mention that the Constitution can be amended, a fact which Republicans today seem to have completely forgotten. The Framers added that ability because they realized that times change, and what sounded good in 1789 may not work as well as, say, in 2018. But, to listen to Republicans, the Constitution, like the Bible, is set in stone and should only be taken literally, never interpreted, and almost never amended. I've seen arguments in some conservative journals that Amendments such as the 14th (ensuring equal rights for black males, and which has been used by the courts since to expand rights for other minority groups), and the 17th (providing for the popular election of US Senators, instead of having state legislatures do it) should never have been ratified, because the Constitution wasn't meant to be used in such a way.
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Very true. So have at it. And good luck getting two-thirds of both houses of congress or two-thirds of all state legislatures to vote to forfeit their leverage in electing a president to the state of California.
 
That’s the fucking point, what are the percentage of people that identify as republican? I’ll give you a guess it’s less than a 1/3rd, yet for some reason not only are these the positions that are being enacted, they aren’t even the moderate republican positions. So you have positions representing at best 1/3rd of people at worst 10 percent and they effect the other 70-90% it’s fucking insanity.
 
The problem the Democrats now have with SCOTUS is this: They're now screwed....for a long, long time. Harrison Ford probably said it best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2_YhqLl5-8

President Trump is going to be able to appoint at least 2 and maybe 3 more justices. And the bad thing for Democrats is that the next two in line to go are 2 of the 4 remaining liberals on the bench.

Democrats should have probably thought about this when they let people like DWS & Donna Brazille shove the "It's My Turn" Hillary campaign down the Democratic Party's throat two years ago. It's very possible that Hillary is the only candidate that Trump could have beaten (though I don't know about Bernie). Trump damned sure couldn't have beaten Joe Biden, for example.

In any event, it has worked out well for Republicans and for the country. And the USSC is going to be changed for decades, because Trump isn't going to appoint 60+ year old people to these vacancies.
 
The GOP needs abortion to remain legal to maintain their wedge issue. Without it, they've got dick. Push abortion off the table and their unholy positions on pretty much everything lay exposed. These people have laid in bed with the lowest scum of the earth and have pilfered everything they can from the honest and hard-working. They need it badly, to maintain their charade as the righteous. Go ahead, criminalize abortion. lol
 
The underlying concerns the Founding Fathers had in justifying the Electoral College are hardly relevant and/or simply have not and will not come to fruition:

1. Limit the number of direct elections. The only entity originally with directly elected officials was the House. Senate, Supreme Court, and President were all to be indirectly elected. Ironically, a lot of the Fathers still had faith in a more aristocratic style of government and were concerned about giving too much power to the people. Today, I don't think many would answer affirmatively to the question "do you believe we should limit the number of direct elections?" And those who did would probably be called out as being anti-democratic.

2. Efficiency of conducting national election. At the time of the Constitution, the US spanned a large geographic area and the founders were tasked with conducting an election for the entire nation in an efficient manner. The logistics of establishing one national vote without separating it up into states made this a nightmare at the time and so the thought was to have states run the elections especially since so many citizens were politically engaged at the state level and may have even put their state first over country. Related, the founders naively believed that you could conduct national politics without the rise of factions and political parties - using a national election would likely have increased factions as it's difficult to organize nationally around a limited number of candidates. This turned out to be flat out wrong and there's no turning back now from the political parties as we've seen over the last 200+ years.

Today, we have the technology to not only conduct an election on the same day, but we can conduct it on a national scale. Presidential elections are substantively national elections even though they're run by the states. Efficiency isn't an issue any more and neither is the concern about factionalism since that is now well entrenched.

3. Electors were to be selected by state legislatures who could pick whatever method they wanted. This threw a bone to those in favor of states rights since a state could have electors themselves elected by the people or the legislature could simply pick the electors themselves. Each elector could then pick one president and one vice president and the top five receivers of electoral votes would be sent to the House where each state cast one vote for a candidate until someone received a majority.

I don't know that this is a concern one way or the other, because I doubt many people would advocate for this general system at all.

In actuality the theory of the Electoral College never even played out once because of the passage of the 12th Amendment. Therefore, the whole view of the fathers never came to fruition. Instead we have some sort of odd system subsequently adopted in the 12th Amendment - notably a system that I'm not aware has ever been replicated by any other nation.

TLDR: Hardly any of the concerns the Electoral College professed to address came to fruition and even those that did aren't particular concerns in 2018. The EC is one of the most bizarre institutions in modern politics and hardly makes any sense in 2018. Modern defenses of the system contain almost no similarities to the actual reasons for implementing the EC in the first place.
 
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SwissChaletDeac said:
Very true. So have at it. And good luck getting two-thirds of both houses of congress or two-thirds of all state legislatures to vote to forfeit their leverage in electing a president to the state of California.
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Good luck getting two-thirds of both houses of congress or two-thirds of all state legislatures to agree on anything period in 2018. The chances of the Constitution being amended any time soon on any topic is slim to none. It's a totally different conversation, but amending the Constitution was meant to be a difficult and deliberate task, but not an impossible one. It's essentially an impossibility in 2018.
 
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