True.
Absolutely. Reasonable suspicion. “We think he might be guilty.”
Because all the crap you’ve tossed up doesn’t tie together as one big crime. Why don’t you lay out, just like you did for the shooting victim, the facts that you think establish that Delay is scum.
But if “scum” simply means “a political position I don’t like,” then we can stop right here.
Well, now that you mention it, I did ask you that question, but you have decided to render my post down to the one point you think you can win.
Did these things happen, I asked you? Did Tom DeLay know, or have reason to know, that these things were happening? Have you any evidence to offer that he made any effort, any effort at all, to change that?
But, as to your effort to send me off into the thickets of legalese…
The gist here is that the bill “normalized” the status of workers in the Mariannas, which rendered them subject to the same sorts of laws and protections. Hence the conditions described below…
If the bill had been passed, their immigration status would have been normalized and they would have been afforded the protections offered to such persons. It did not need to state every effect of normalizing their status, as such protections are already a part of that status. (The article actually centers around the success of such efforts, since Tom DeLay was spending more time with his family at the time of its writing.)
Granted, this is a viewpoint from the AFL-CIO. But since you have not placed an Affidavit of Liberal Hypocrisy on them, their arguments and opinions have not been rendered null and void.
Am I free to assume that since you did not adress any of the other points in that post, that you stipulate them to be fact? I have not yet recieved an Affidavit of Liberal Hypocrisy, so I assume my points are still admissable?
Advise.
Collapses like a house of cards?
I am willing to bet Saipan already had laws making rape illegal. The Senate passing a law saying rape is illegal would be redundant.
Do you know what effort would produce the desired results? Did you study the problem? Maybe they found that immigrants were denied access to the system. They were stuck and the corporation essentially owned them and the immigrants had no effective recourse. Granting better immigrant rights would presumably open access to the legal system for the immigrants to get justice they were previously denied.
Personally I do not know either (just speculating above) but you seem to suppose that the Senate undertook a bill to aid immigrants on Saipan and then passed a bill that did nothing to achieve their goals so therefore Delay was correct. The 100 (or whatever counted as unanimous that day) people in the Senate who voted for it all got it wrong. May have passed a resolution that “kittens are cute” that would achieve as much as the immigration law would. Lucky for the Senate they had Delay to sort things out for them or they’d be lost. :rolleyes:
We’ve been through this before. Deem-and-pass is not one person thwarting the will of the legislature. Everyone gets to vote on the bill. If they do not like some aspect of the bill they can choose to vote it down. If the bill is different than what the Senate sent then it goes back to the Senate to be voted on again.
The bill is not dead. The bill is not buried. One person is not passing it or killing it. The WHOLE Congress gets to vote on it!
Did Delay let that happen?
Guess who has the burden of proof here?
(Hint: it’s the guy claiming a bill that doesn’t say a thing about rape was intended to stop rape).
You do.
You are saying a bill passed did not achieve the goals it was meant to address. So show that is so rather than asserting it.
For my part I think it is reasonable to assume the Senate studied the problem (Murkowski report for starters) and endeavored to ameliorate the situation. They chose to implement some immigration reform in pursuit of that goal. I believe it is proper to defer to the Senate on this without evidence to suggest otherwise.
It is your job to find the evidence that suggests otherwise.
Bricker:
Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
If a bill were to pass making them all citizens of the Untied States, would that bill have to specify each and every obligation of a citizen? If it failed to mention income tax, would that mean that the newly minted citizen was exempt from such an obligation, because it was not specifically mentioned?
By the same token, would such a bill have to stipulate each and every protection afforded a US citizen?
Apparently, Sen Murkowski (who was, by no stretch of the imagination, “pro-labor”) was so shocked the he produced a bill he thought would correct the situation. Were he and his highly paid staff so utterly stupid that they produced a bill that had no effect on the situation?
Is that your position?
And if such were the case, why did DeLay block it? Why didn’t he just snicker and let it be?
Not making a lot of sense here, counselor.
Um… what??
Are you seriously suggesting that the Senate passes a law that mentions immigration a bazillion times, rape not once, and it’s on ME to prove that the law doesn’t address rape?
Yeah, here’s my proof. You got something better than public-relations bullshit spouted by a senator, bring it. The law says what the law says. You want to claim it says (or does) something else, YOU are the one that needs to show it.
Because he didn’t agree with the goal of extending easy residency and citizenship to those immigrants.
You know – the thing the bill’s language actually says?
You cling tot hat CNN reporter’s description of the bill like it was your hope of salvation. How about: Senator Murkowski spouted a load of horseshit and the media lapped it up and reported it? You have no trouble believing that happens when the issue is, say, death panels. You happily point to the text of the law and demand, “Show me death panels! Where, where are they?!?”
And I agree. No death panels in the health care law. I know, because I READ THE FUCKING BILL.
Why don’t you do the same thing here?
This is where I begin to lose my mind.
If anyone else is still reading this, I’d love to hear a bit of feedback. Please, put aside your generalized hatred of Republicans in general and Delay in particular, and focus on this bill thing for a moment. Does anyone else, AFTER READING IT, actually believe this bill was intended to address rape, forced abortions, or squalid living conditions?
Does anyone else believe the burden of proof on that issue still rests with me?
Yes, you bet.
You are saying DeLay did not block legislation that might help alleviate egregious conditions workers suffered on Saipan because the law did not mention “rape”. You have in fact made no showing that the bill would not have the effect of alleviating that and other problems faced by the immigrant workers there.
It is hugely disingenuous to suppose the only way to help minimize rape and forced abortions and other bad things from happening is a bill that explicitly mentions them. There is more than one way to approach a problem. For instance giving women the right to vote in the US certainly helped them on a number of fronts all without specifically mentioning the various issues women faced.
Further, you dodged the fact that this is what the Senate, unanimously, agreed to in order to help the workers of Saipan (a Senate that was conservative at the time). Are you suggesting it did nothing to address the problems Murkowski (which as noted was pretty damn conservative) identified? That a unanimous Senate all missed the boat and only DeLay saw through the bullshit and saved us?
Finally, the bottom line is DeLay single-handedly put the kibosh on this. Love the bill or hate the bill (any bill) I am not ok with one person playing King and unilaterally deciding what should or should not get passed. We have 538 elected representatives in Congress for a reason and not just there as window dressing.
OH, OK. So, since Tom DeLay is not “scum”, he certainly supported any effort to alleviate the conditions suffered. He just didn’t support such an easy path to citizenship as this bill would have offered.
When did Sen Murkowski become such an advocate of open immigration and citizenship? Or did they throw some slipshod thing together, without realizing the consequences of their actions, but Tom DeLay did, and acted accordingly?
Is that your position?
Well, OK, if thats so, then what efforts did Mr DeLay make otherwise? If you’re saying he felt that this was the wrong remedy, what remedy did he offer to replace it?
Oh, heck, I didn’t see this text correctly…
I have been delivered an Affidavit of Liberal Hypocrisy. Hence, my arguments are rendered moot. Darn. Thought maybe you’d overlook that.
There is another possibility here. That Marse Tom let it be quietly known that he would do his act, so that Senators could vote for the bill and watch it die, without having any of their fingerprints upon it. They could nobly vote and suffer no consequences.
Might have been different if they had known it would actually be acted upon.
If all you do is hand someone that bill and ask them that question they will, of course, have to answer it does not address rape and so on.
That is only if you strip it of all context though.
As I said before I am willing to bet Saipan already had laws against rape. It is entirely possible, when looking at the problem, Senator Murkowski realized the real issue was the immigrants were disenfranchised and so utterly beholden to the corporation they could not exercise even basic rights. So, perhaps, a woman who was raped would be “discouraged” from reporting it and upsetting the company with police running around. If she did she could get fired in retribution, kicked out of her hovel which, shitty as it was, is probably better than living under a bridge in winter.
So too with forced abortion. A pregnant woman would be unable to work at some point. So the company “encourages” her to get an abortion. If she doesn’t she can go have her baby under a bridge somewhere and feed it garbage she can scrounge. Since she has no rights she cannot access government help and so on.
So, if we want to address these and other problems it could reasonably be figured that granting them greater rights as immigrants would give them the ability to not be subject to these indignities.
Another law saying, “Rape is bad, don’t do it” would actually not solve the problem. Granting more rights to the immigrants would.
Then it could have granted rights to the immigrants without making them residents or citizens.
If that was truly the goal.
After a simple-minded reading of it, with my limited understanding of the issue and considering no other sources? No, my understanding wasn’t deep enough to allow me to make a connection between the bill’s contents and the worker abuse. But it seems that there was substantial and largely undisputed agreement at the time that it would. We could let it rest on the historical record, but maybe we can slog through it. Can we consider more than just the text of the bill, and look to contemporaneous sources?
Here’s the Clinton administration’s statement:
The CBO’s Cost Estimate:
I’ll just give a link to Senate testimony regarding the bill, since it’s lengthy and best read completely. Granted, the Senate testimony is largely from Murkowski again, a source of information which has already been questioned, but it does offer a direct explanation of why he and others thought that this bill would reduce worker abuse in the Marianas.
Basically, the reasoning is this: Alien workers are easily manipulated and often subject to abuse. If we make some of them no longer be alien, and tighten immigration enforcement, there will be fewer alien workers. The CBO’s estimate agreed that it would have this effect. Fewer alien workers, fewer workers to be abused, thus less abuse. Oh, and some aliens are being abused by criminals, many of whom are coming to the Marianas from other countries. If we tighten immigration policy, we’ll also keep more of them out, further reducing abuse.
So, yeah, now after reading it and bunch of other stuff as well, I believe it.
No. But which position is the right one? I’m not pointing out the hypocrisy as an ad hominem, elucidator. I’m saying you’re right to demand that we look at the law, and not some PR populist bullshit ABOUT the law.
You were right to demand that for the health care bill, and you SHOULD demand it here as well, because it;s the correct way to debate what the law means.
OK, very fair. At least you accepted that the burden was on you to offer up some other evidence, and you did. That’s how debate is supposed to work.
Now let me rebut in turn: if that was in fact the goal, do you have an opinion on whether or not this was the best way of reaching the goal?
And do you believe it would be possible for someone else to think this wasn’t a good method of addressing the problem?
(Without being “scum”?)
It’s not about individual bills. It’s about motivation. DeLay opposed the bill not because he thought it was a bad way to correct the labor abuses going on there. He opposed the bill because he was in the pocket of Abramoff, who was employed by the islands and the garment manufacturers there to prevent any correction any of those labor abuses.
Well, you read the bill, certainly well enough to insist that everyone else’s understanding of it is shallow and feeble.
So, what’s yours? What does this bill do? Did it accomplish the ends to which it was crafted by Sen Murkowski? Or do you deny that he ever had such ends in mind?
And, most importantly, would you agree that a man who would thwart such relief to the oppressed and downtrodden for political and/or personal gain, such a man would qualify as “scum”? Or would you prefer a finding of “not very nice”?
(With some people, an argument is like fencing, or maybe boxing. With you, its like a game of dodgeball, but we got to use bowling balls at a range of forty yards, blindfolded. We have to throw overhand and if you say you weren’t hit, you weren’t, even if you’re being carried out on a stretcher…)
Is this a tacit admission that Tom DeLay was aware that there was a “problem”?