All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[kidfresh512]

Compulsory voting is like abolishing the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court as pie in the sky ideas. The reality of making any of those happens would be to vote the GOP into utter uselessness. To be able to have the amount of sway in the system to ever get something like that enacted.

Dems would be the only ones that want these things. So you would have to have enough Dems in power to get them done and overrule filibusters etc.

[Tendrin]

YAY! You found a bunch of other people on the interwebs who are either completely ignorant about how government works or are engaging in some deliberate obfuscation.

But 30 assured me he never visits social media.

[CaptainEurope]

Well at least the Democrats are doing something about this.

They gathered by the Capital and sang God Bless America a couple hours ago. Good Grief. The GOP is shredding this country and they are singing songs like the musicians that played on as the Titanic sank.

Is it the only thing they are doing?
If not, don't you have better targets than the Democratic Party at a time like this?

[Tami]

I was on House floor as decision striking Roe was announced. I realized it happened because I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene and others jump up and high five each other. I overheard what they said. One said he always dreamt of this day. Other said something that hit me hard

…....THREAD

One Republican congressperson said something like “let’s keep this going now.” The words reinforced that this has always been their plan. It’s only the beginning. Republican leadership is hell bent on transforming America by rolling back our rights. Rolling back out progress 2/11

Next up it’s marriage equality, birth control, gay rights. It’s not speculation as Clarence Thomas made that clear in his published opinion yesterday. Right out in the open for all to see. 3/11

[CaptainEurope]

They barely got Obamcare passed and that was only with votes from Lieberman and Manchin, who refused to support the Publc Option. What makes you think they could have passed an abortion law?

And yes, it's the voters who forgot what a disaster Bush was two years after he fucked the economy. So again, how could the Dems have done this?

Also, they had that majority even more briefly than they should have, because Republican obstructionism kept Senator Al Franken from being seated for half a year or so.

[Odd Rödney]

I dont think compulsory voting is the answer. First off how would you enforce it and who would decide that? Lets say in some of the more racist states a minority voter cant get off work or find a baby sitter, are they going to be dinged with a fine for not voting? Is the White person registered as a GOP going to get a pass for the same?

Will the party in power make it harder for their opponents supporters to vote like with some of the laws currently being passed and then punish them for not voting? The system is way too easy to abuse. And to be honest I dont have faith in this country to do it fairly.

Well, that's the problem right there. We'd have to overhaul everything.

Also, I'm basing my desire for compulsory voting in the U.S on my experience of living and voting in Australia, where voting is already compulsory. Granted, Australia hasn't experienced as much of an effort to destroy elections and voting like we're currently experiencing in the U.S. It's hard to imagine retrofitting an already broken system with a new compulsory voting law.

The U.S is effed in so many ways, there is just so much to fix.

Compulsory voting is like abolishing the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court as pie in the sky ideas. The reality of making any of those happens would be to vote the GOP into utter uselessness.

Sure, but one can dream.

And let's face it, the GOP belongs in the dustbin of history. They're actively trying to 'Make America The 50's Again' They're aggressive regressives.

[CaptainEurope]

Sadly, there was another fatal mass shooting today. Unusually, it was not in the US, but in the Norwegian capital Oslo. Two dead, almost 2 dozen injured outside a gay nightclub on the eve of Oslo Pride. Suspect is a Norwegian of Iranian ancestry.

[Mister Mets]

Don't forget "But Hillary was a bad candidate too"

But she was.

She managed to lose to Trump.

Some people on the left are saying that this is why they are pissed off at Trump, and what they were warning about. This seems to work if they think Trump succeeded where other Republicans would have failed, either because he's a stronger general election candidate, or because other Republicans would not have fought as hard if they had an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice. These are arguments that end up helping Trump's chances of coming back to the White House.

There is an intellectually consistent argument that this is why people should vote for Democrats in general. The focus on Trump and Hillary is more about things that mattered at the margins, and the way Democrats almost got lucky but didn't.

One persons vote vs several peoples votes isn't a fair trade.

Depends on how confident you guys are that you're right.

Honestly, it would be an unfair trade because many of you are overreacting if you think Brown V. Board of Education and Loving V. Virginia are in danger.

You might want to contemplate what happens if the funding to the program is blocked over this senator's objection.

The program would get shut down for everyone.

That is distinct from creating a program that requires schools to abide by particular policies.

Yeah. One of him vs. a dozen of us. Doesn't seem like a fair wager whatever the stakes are.

So it would be fair for one person to take me up on it?

It's even worse than that. Mets lives in NY, one of the most consistent voting states in the country, and he knows full well that many of the rest of us live in swing states.

He's wagering nothing on his side.

It's mainly about bragging rights to be honest.

I would look pretty dumb if I ended up being wrong on this.

[Odd Rödney]

I wish that this had been something which was written into the Constitution.

Me too.

I don't know how some countries got this enacted without the Party that was pushing for it getting a scarlet letter on them for doing so. Was this a bipartisan effort in Australia?

Compulsory voting goes back a century in Australia, so I wasn't around when it happened and don't know the specifics of how it came to be off the top of my head. It's certainly still in place and our Democracy is in better shape than the U.S because of it.

I don't think Odd Rödney is saying that it would run seamlessly. Every law enacted has some drawbacks and people who are negatively affected. Best ways to assuage some of these are already being enacted in many places in the U.S. Early voting, ensuring that there are enough polling places and machines in place, making registration easier, etc. Having a national Election Day holiday like Kirby101 suggested would also help. As far as some of the other issues that you mentioned, I would look to other countries to see how they handle them. One thing that I don't think that I've ever heard mentioned anywhere is how much people in some countries hate their compulsory voting. I'm sure it has its detractors, though.

Thank you. It might seem liking I'm tapping on this one specific door a whole lot with compulsory voting but I'm for anything that makes voting in the U.S easier.

Ultimately, we know that getting more people out to vote benefits Democrats and Progressives. I think there would definitely be short term consequences for Democrats if they tried to enact such legislation, but if it held up through the successive session of Congress and withstood all of the court challenges, it would be beneficial to do in the long run.

I think it's silly that we see things as Democrat/Republican when there is really much more nuance than that. There are centrist democrats and they are a lot different to progressives. There are the Trump supporters and the centrist right and the libertarians, there might be less nuance in that group, post-Trump but my point is that we kind of simplify a complex thing by making it two polarities when it is much more than that. I think with compulsory voting (and other measures to make voting easier that we've discussed in this thread) you would see that nuance play out a lot more. At first I think the results would lean toward Dems winning more, sure. But over time I think that would change. Not necessarily to Republican, just more nuance.

I hope I'm making some kind of sense here.

[Kirby101]

I don't know that compulsory voting is the best idea, especially in the U.S. I think it'd be worth a try though. We have compulsory voting in Australia, for example.

If you're ok with sharing I'd be super interested to know why you think it isn't a good idea.

I think the backlash would be too great to the Party that passed it. There just isn't an appetite for it in this country. The only poll I found was 15 years old, but there 70% opposed mandatory voting. But making it easier is something we should do. Automatic registration at the least. Like the Voter/Motor Law which registers you with your drivers license.

[Mister Mets]

They've already said they want to go after sodomy laws. They want to make BEING GAY into a crime.

Not quite.

Clarence Thomas is the one who said this should consider this, but this was in his own concurring opinion.

It is also worth noting that the question of whether something is a good law is a different question from whether it is legal. His main comment is that the principles used to determine that something was legal don't apply. He seems to be alone in this. In addition, there would still be room to make a new argument on the constitutionality of these things, and he's open to supporting it.

Any judge should be able to vote against a decision that they think is good policy because it was implemented incorrectly.

Judges should not be unelected super-powerful legislators.

Funny how Mets doesn't want to talk about them ending Roe, Miranda and Church and State separation and gutting most gun regulation. Oh no, we are way too silly about more Rights being stripped away.
And if they don't reverse Brown, we all vote for DeSantis, sure that sounds great.

Mets is glad to talk about all sorts of issues.

Some of these are more complex. And we can take care of the low-hanging fruit first.

And if the position on the board is that Loving V. Virginia or Brown V. Board of Education are likely to disappear in the next few years, that's the goalpost.

For some of you guys, the question is more about whether someone's on the right side, so it doesn't matter if they're exaggerating. This does contradict some arguments on January 6, and the need to focus on facts in political discussions.

This Supreme Court decision teaches us two things. First, that we should take NOTHING for granted. Any right that we've won should not be assumed to be forever. And second, that playing the long game works. They just kept chipping away and chipping away and eventually, they got what they wanted. We have to work the same way.

There are legitimate advantages to thinking about the long game in politics.

The Federalist Society has created a pipeline of credentialed lawyers with right-wing connections. They've also articulated the conservative legal philosophy pretty well. The left would benefit from more outreach about their judicial philosophy, so that voters would have a sense of when a judge may make the right decision even if the statutes aren't great (as it's the responsibility of the legislature to change the text of the law.)

It would also make sense for Democrats to focus on winning, with a recognition that the median voter in a Senate swing state is to the right of the median voter just due to population distribution (and the median voter is still to the right of engaged left-wingers.)

Im not the thought police.

If people want to have the opinion that abortion is wrong. Fine. If people have the opinion that gay marriage is wrong fine. I dont agree but fine.

But the second that opinion becomes a law that takes away the rights of others?

It is not longer an opinion but oppression. And that is sickening.

Pretty much every law is about tradeoffs.

Many decisions end up taking away some rights, mandating paperwork to demonstrate compliance, or making things that people like to buy illegal (sometimes this is a good thing.)

[Odd Rödney]

I think the backlash would be too great to the Party that passed it. There just isn't an appetite for it in this country. The only poll I found was 15 years old, but there 70% opposed mandatory voting. But making it easier is something we should do. Automatic registration at the least. Like the Voter/Motor Law which registers you with your drivers license.

I can't help but wonder if resistance to the idea is just because Americans simply don't like being told what to do? Perhaps it's viewed by that 70% as an "assault on their liberty" to be forced to do something, even if it benefits them.

[Jack Dracula]

Compulsory voting is like abolishing the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court as pie in the sky ideas. The reality of making any of those happens would be to vote the GOP into utter uselessness. To be able to have the amount of sway in the system to ever get something like that enacted.

Dems would be the only ones that want these things. So you would have to have enough Dems in power to get them done and overrule filibusters etc.

I think a better use of all the time, energy, and money might be an organized, comprehensive nationwide campaign to engage, educate, and energize Democratic voters. Focus and inform voters in every state about the particular procedural and logistical problems they will face and need to overcome in order to circumvent the GOPs machinations.
That's the amount of effort the Republicans are putting into fixing elections nationwide right now and Democrats will have to commit an equal or superior amount to overcome it.
So far, I haven't seen anything like that. I'm not even sure Democratic leadership in Washington communicates with the state parties and has a plan. If anyone can confirm it, I'd be grateful.

[Tami]

Something WBE might be interested in for his project

Senator in 2010 deposition: 13-year-olds can consent to sex

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Before he became a leading voice for conservative causes on Capitol Hill, U.S. Senator James Lankford spent more than a decade as the director of youth programming at the Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center, a sprawling campground about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City that attracts more than 50,000 campers in grades six through 12 each year.

The Republican lawmaker’s tenure at the camp is a prominent feature of his political profile, noted in the first paragraph of his official Senate biography. That experience is also coming under renewed scrutiny as the Southern Baptist Convention, which is affiliated with the group that owns the camp, faces a reckoning over its handling of sexual abuse cases.

In 2009, while Lankford worked at the camp, the family of a 13-year-old girl sued a 15-year-old boy who was alleged to have had sex with her at the camp. Lankford, who was not in Congress at the time, is not alleged to have had any direct knowledge of the alleged assault, has not been accused of any wrongdoing and was not a defendant in the lawsuit, which was settled for an undisclosed amount before it was scheduled to go to trial.

“Yes, I think they can,” Lankford told Kenyatta Bethea, a lawyer for the girl’s family, according a 155-page transcript of the deposition obtained by The Associated Press.

The age of consent in Oklahoma is 16, and although there is an exception in the law for minors between the ages of 14 and 17 who have sexual contact, there is no provision under which a 13-year-old could consent to sex. When Bethea pressed if his answer was still the same “if I ask you that question in terms of your position as a father,” Lankford maintained his stance.

“Yes, they can,” he said.

Under additional questioning about whether he would allow his two daughters to consent to sex at the age of 13, Lankford gave a more expansive answer.

“No, I would not encourage that at all,” he said. “Could she make that choice? I hope she would not, but I would not encourage that in any way with my own daughter.”

[InformationGeek]

GOP lawmaker says she trusts Utah women to control their ‘intake of semen’ as abortion trigger law goes into effect



The challenge when so many women still would give up their own rights. I bet some of these same women giddy at this were arguing a year ago about their right not to get vaccinated or wear masks.

Soooooooo f**king vile these people are