Let me introduce you to my good friend, Federalism. Some folks like to mock him by calling hime “States’ Rights”, but that’s happening less frequently these days as folks on the Left contemplate President Trump.
That’s always been the argument for checks and balances. That’s the whole point of our form of government is to divide government to keep it from gaining too much power. Yet, the short sighted left wants to erode constraints. Why? Government, like the church of old, is where high potential power resides.
I lean left on most social issues. Where I differ and it’s a serious difference are the tactics. Eroding constraints and balances for short term victories sets dangerous precedent. Not that the left cares since they assume they are destined for eternal power.
If you want to know why we should fear Trump, look no further than Kansas and North Carolina. Kansas republicans didn’t like the fact that judges were ruling their idiotic bills unconstitutional so they simply started impeaching the judges. North Carolina couldn’t accept that their republican governor got defeated in free and fair elections so the outgoing governor and his republican majority stripped him of power.
Where does it all end? What would keep a republican president from simply colluding with loyalists in the military and refusing to leave power after losing an election? He could merely claim the election was rigged and he’d probably have tens of supporters ready to take to the streets in support of him. Democracy isn’t protected or guaranteed by text on paper. It is secured by people - voting citizens and their elected representatives alike - who value democratic principles. Simply put, republicans do NOT value these principles. They value winning and power, by whatever means they achieve it.
Perhaps when the right-wingers are done explaining to us why we shouldn’t be afraid they can explain why we shouldn’t be disgusted.
Government in the wrong hands is dangerous, but so are sporks. I’m not anti-spork just because an insane person can use one to poke my eye out. Government done properly can be a good thing.
The services the federal government provides, if it didn’t provide them, would be provided by some other group. Either another aspect of the public sector or a private industry. I don’t find them to be safer than the federal government. If anything, I’d prefer the public sector because there is some feedback via voting where I have far less influence on a private company,
Checks and balances are what help limit destructiveness of government, not so much the size of government itself.
Having said that, a lot of liberals who looked the other way when Obama expanded executive branch powers are now having buyer’s remorse over that, because it means now Trump has those expanded powers. Various civil liberty groups are now saying ‘I told you so’ about all the warnings they were giving about Obama’s expanded powers.
In my view it isn’t smaller government we need to stop people like Trump, it is the following:
[ul]
[li]An informed electorate[/li][li]Principled politicians who serve the public interest[/li][li]Checks and balances[/li][li]Transparency[/li][/ul]
Except that repealing the ACA has been a central plank of the Republican party for nearly a decade now, and is being held up now as a primary reason Trump won the election. Repealing it is what their base wants. They won’t get punished by them for doing it: they’re going to be more afraid of what their base does if they don’t repeal it.
You’re comparing him to a guy who started two wars, one largely because their president didn’t like his dad, and this is supposed to be reassuring?
Said with all the boundless optimism of an uninvolved third party, I’m sure. But even if you’re right, and Trump only said those things to get elected, it still worked. Trump demonstrated that appeals to naked racism are a viable path to the highest office in this country. His example will be noted by others, and duplicated.
Also, if you’re queer, you’re basically fucked regardless. Trump, to his credit, appears to have no personal animus towards gays that I’ve seen, but he also demonstrably has no interest in putting any sort of check on the most rabidly homophobic parts of his party, and indeed, is quite happy to put them into cabinet positions, on the judicial bench, and in the Vice Presidency.
:rolleyes:
And thank God Texas air and water stop right at the Texas border, right?
The thing about Global Warming is that it happens all over. Kinda implied right there in the name.
I don’t know about the left in general, but personally, I’ve always felt that “States Rights” was a thin veneer over what was, at its heart, simply a desire to see people you don’t like suffer.
I haven’t changed my mind on the basic nature of the concept of State’s Rights, but I’m warming up to the concept regardless.
Nope, I predicted easy Hillary win 
No, there is a perfectly reasonable, albeit complicated, semantic rationale. I could explain it all for you, but I have to go get the dog some more beer.
Government in the wrong hands has been responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions of people in China with Mao, the USSR with Lenin and Stalin, Germany with Hitler, Cambodia with Pol Pot. Exactly how many have died from a spork?
I would agree that for those worried about basic human rights at home and abroad, the military, the CIA, the FBI, and so forth are clearly the parts of government that pose the biggest danger. But they are not the only ones. Conservative and libertarian sources in recent years have reported quite a bit on how many parts of the federal government are being “weaponized”.
National Review, for example,covered how many ordinary-sounding federal agencies now have their own heavily armed law enforcement wings. This includes the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board (!), the Bureau of Land Management, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This is all related to the growth of the federal government. As the number of laws grows exponentially, the amount of law enforcement that’s needed to catch and punish all the law-breakers also grows. The more different federal offices there are running around with machine guns and tanks, the more difficult it is for civil liberties groups to keep track of them all, and the more likely that some abuses will slip by without much notice. I don’t know whether President Trump intends to commit any major civil liberties violations or not, but if he does, he has far more tools at his disposal domestically as well as in the military, compared to previous generations.
Or consider the Office of Civil Rights in the Dept. of Education, which has been very active during the Obama Administration, and growing rapidly. Founded to protect civil rights, this office has been rapidly expanding its own reach into areas that it didn’t formerly, cover, and much of what it does may be illegal. Officially its job is to investigate complaints of discrimination, harassment, bias and so forth in school districts and universities. In reality, it is infringing on free speech and forcing schools to adopt unfair policies. Is it far-fetched to imagine that in the hands of President Trump, an office with such huge and unchecked powers might do some things that liberals dislike?
Or what about the Obama Administration’s new rule requiring many employers to give the government a massive amount of data about all their employees broken down by gender and race. The Democrats were hoping that with all that data to work with, lawyers could identify employers to sue for discrimination. But it will also be in the hands of the Trump Administration. If, for example, Trump wants a list of employers with lots of high-earning Hispanic employees to be targeted for immigration enforcement raids, he will have that data, thanks to a rule created by the Obama Administration.
Or consider … almost any area where the federal government has lots of power, which is to say nearly anything. Once you create a powerful federal office with the ability to boss people around, that office will still exist and have the ability to boss people around when a President that you don’t like is in office, and that President may find new ways to use that office. There are over 300 federal agencies, most of them focus on domestic issues rather than military. How confident do you feel with Trump appointees in charge of all of them?
This is an area that concerns me, particularly the idea of private industry taking things over. There are services that shouldn’t be handled by a private firm, because the nature of them is such that no private company would be willing to provide them equally, to everyone.
In particular, I’m thinking of the Postal Service. It’s been clear for over a decade that the GOP is trying to dismantle or neuter the USPS, and enable private companies to step in. But, while FedEx or UPS provides great service to most of the country, it’s not really profitable for them to provide service to remote areas, which the USPS must do. Get rid of the USPS, and you further damage the survivability of rural areas.
This thread is giving me some deja vu to back when people warned the right that the Dems would get to play with all the fancy new powers they were giving GWB. It’s like poetry, it rhymes.
Not just conservative and libertarian sources, by the way, and not just in the most recent eight years. This is ultimately a longterm federal legacy, with a sharp spike post-9/11.
[QUOTE=ITR champion]
National Review, for example,covered how many ordinary-sounding federal agencies now have their own heavily armed law enforcement wings. This includes the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board (!), the Bureau of Land Management, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This is all related to the growth of the federal government.
[/quote]
As your own cite notes:
Yup, well, we told you so, back before 2008. As our own jayjay presciently mused nearly ten years ago:
You said it.
The very first thing Trump did was disarm Clinton’s plan to commit acts of war against Russia and her ally. Sure, the second thing he did was ignore China’s demand that everyone ostracise Taiwan, but Trump is not the one whose arrogance and warmongering has already left a trail of corpses across the Middle East.
That’s one way to look at it, and I don’t entirely disagree with you. There has been a bipartisan political and bureaucratic embrace of the neo-imperialist status quo, and it has failed miserably in terms of dealing with ever-increasing instability in the Middle East and also in terms of dealing with Russia. The United States is using a political, economic, and military playbook that no longer works. Our foreign policy with Russia has been incompetently managed since the end of the Cold War and there is, on the surface, an opportunity for Trump to do some good there.
Unfortunately, I think the reality is that Trump is setting himself up to be Putin’s useful idiot. Trump is so eager to claim a foreign policy win with Russia and the risk is that in doing so he allows Putin to create an empire of his own. Putin is also entirely capable of fragmenting the United States with his misinformation campaigns – sounds far fetched but he’s already doing it and republicans who are gleefully cheering the fall of the democratic party are playing right into his hands. California’s already talking of secession. Right now it’s just talk but it might not always be the case and Putin would relish the opportunity to facilitate a divorce among the American federation of states.
If your premiums jumped that much, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you never had health insurance in the first place. A lot of folks who “liked their insurance” before didn’t. See, health insurance, you pay into every month, and then if you have some catastrophe, they pay you. But the plans a lot of folks had, they paid into them every month, and then if they had some catastrophe, the insurance companies found some excuse to not pay them. But if you haven’t had that catastrophe yet, you wouldn’t know.
And your increase in premiums wasn’t due to the ACA itself, it was due to a decision made by the insurance companies. Do you really think that if the ACA were repealed, they’d decide to lower them again? No, they’ll just keep them the same, or increase them again citing increased uncertainty, and go right back to not paying if you end up needing it.
I would also like to know why we should not be worried about Michael Flynn and his team: Scariest Thing About Trump: Michael Flynn’s Team of Nutters
I’d like more information before I give this any credence. What type of insurance did you have before? A lot of people had junk policies that didn’t cover squat, then to be ACA-compliant, quite naturally they had to provide more coverage and of course that would cost more. It’s quite possible that you’re paying more and getting a better deal.