Both snark *and *gibberish. That’ll show you. 
In other words your entire contribution to the debate was to assist those unable to Google “definition:legislature.” You really have descended to emacknight’s level. He’s too amusing to Ignore, and with you I find
Oh. It would be fine if your messages disappeared completely, but even on Ignore you leave a little turd behind.
I’ll Unignore you. In three years I’ve seen you descend from
Hypocritical Lawyer with a 105 IQ
to
Pretentious Moron who’s wasted 35,000 posts telling us his opinions, only to finally confess they’re irrelevant and none of our business
I’ll check your threads now and then just to watch you descend further to
Embittered Imbecile who dimly recalls once being sentient
Admirable, I suppose, refraining from speculation. Not strictly true. Actually, not true at all, speculation is one of the foundation blocks of the argument you were/were not making. Massive blocks of carefully carved fog.
You have no doubt whatever when it comes to the motives of the Massachusetts Democrats. You are crystal clear about their motives, to the point that you can offer declarations of liberal hypocrisy for those who fail to condemn them.
But on “your side”? Even when a Republican leader flat out says that the purpose of voter suppression is to hand victory to Romney! No, no, that’s speculation, and not to be admitted under your strict standards. Well, strict in a flexible sort of way.
And your valid neutral justification? Challenged on that, you go straight into speculation. You accept that a broad based voter fraud effort is impractical, and any such voter fraud is minimal at most. But speculation comes to your rescue! What if?, you say. What if the race is very, very close, and voter fraud is the determining factor, even if it is only a handful of votes?
And in rebutal, I offer you the testimony of an acknowledged expert, Mr. Nate Silver, who speculates that somewhere between one and two percent of the electorate vote is likely to be suppressed. You confront that fact with the forthright honesty that has become your trademark. That is to say, you ignore it.
Or the efforts of the aforementioned Mr Husted, who continues to seek ways to thwart and circumvent the very voter rights you hold so sacred. Again, you rebut the assertion in a direct and unvarnished fasion. “No comment”, I believe it was, yes?
Brave, brave, brave, Sir Bricker!
And now you want to tell us that none of this ever mattered, it was all just due to your wild enthusiasm for typing. That all along, the only case you were actually making was that they were authorized to pass laws, and they did, and therefore it is legal, and that’s that. Advancing boldly to the rear, and charging headlong into the hidey-hole.
it is by these methods you have established your reputation for honest debate and forthright advocacy. Such as it is. And it ain’t much.
(Bolding mine, I’m assuming you meant to say “unreasonable” or else it seems to make no sense.)
No, you as a private individual have the right of free speech. That has bugger-all to do with what the state does with respect to voting.
You seem to be saying that any amount (which you assert to be small) of voter suppression is better than any amount of voter fraud (which you have cited to be, in fact, a tiny amount).
Why?
In both cases, probably the outcomes are not swayed except in very rare cases.
I think I know the answer (although I have not seen you say this). A person who votes fraudulently is doing an illegal act. A person who is intimidated from voting due to actions by the state is just weak. So the principle is that it is better to suppress the weak from voting than to allow illegal acts.
I can see this as a point of view, especially from you. I don’t agree with it, because I think the state’s power is more likely to be misused and to greater negative effect than any individual’s illegal act of voting.
It is the duty of the jurisdiction to validate voting records so that illegal voting doesn’t occur. That they would prefer to put the onus on individual voters to additionally prove their eligibility to vote is not a model I willingly support.
I do agree with you on the point that you seem to be making over and over again - where it is the law, and where that law was passed legitimately, it must be enforced and obeyed. Where we differ is that you think it is a good law, and I think it is a bad law.
Roddy
So is it reasonable for people to pit scuzzy behavior from elected officials? Because that’s pretty much what this thread is about. (Or do you see a distinction between “scuzzy behavior” and “non-scuzzy behavior with scuzzy motivations”?)
Also, part of the problem, at least from my perspective, is that while there are many types of scuzzy behavior that are, in fact, illegal (accepting bribes, passing laws forcing black people to sit in the back of the bus), this category of scuzzy behavior (which I would argue includes gerrymandering, voter ID type stuff, whatever presumably-not-accidental reason it is that the lines to vote in left-leaning areas always seem to be longer than in right-leaning areas) is frequently legal. Suppose I proposed some very clever solution which would make this kind of scuzzy shenanigan illegal, but would do so in a way which clearly did not overreach and intrude on other freedoms, which was clearly nonpartisan and objectively fair, etc. (I don’t have such a brilliant solution, I’m asking that you imagine I did). And suppose I, instead of being a lazy SDMB poster, was a go-get-em grassroots organizer type and got a ballot initiative proposing this solution on the ballot either nationally (yeah, I know there are no national ballot initiatives, pretend there were) or in your state. Would you vote for it? Even if the party currently in power, and thus most likely to be able to use these scuzzy behaviors and benefit from them, was Republican?
Oh yes, democracy, the one ideal to strive for. Unless we’re talking tax policy.
Or if the people elect a communist government, in which case the US supporting a fascist coup is preferable.
Sure, it’s reasonable to Pit scuzzy behavior.
Where the criticism crosses the line is when rhetoric like, “They cannot do this,” gets used. There’s. a huge difference between saying they SHOULD NOT do this and claiming they CAN NOT do this.
You folks were saying they CAN NOT.
Stick with SHOULD NOT and you have little beef with me.
See guys, it was all our fault!
Thanks Mr. Bricker. You sure are swell!
Oh, wait, this is a semantic thing?
You do realize that “You cannot do this” can in common speech, even in formal speech, mean “You should not do this.”
I can’t believe that this is what all this is about. It’s ludicrous. This has got to be some new kind of strawman argument.
I bet when you were a little kid, and a friend asked “can I have a cookie?”
You replied “I don’t know if you CAN have a cookie. I believe you mean “may I have a cookie”.”
And then he kicked you in the nuts.
And you’ve been trying to prove your anal retentive point ever since.
ETA: Fuck me, 61 pages and it boils down to a pathetic semantic nit-pick.
Dudes, he’s backpeddling.
No, dudes, I am not.
I’m saying the same thing I have said from the beginning.
MaxTheVool is back pedaling on behalf of the thread, if anything, now saying that of COURSE everyone acknowledges that such laws are legitimate. Voter ID laws are just opposed by everyone here as unwise. But no one would dream of saying that legislatures can’t make such laws, only that they shouldn’t.
Which is, of course, not remotely what was being said.
No. No, I don’t realize that. Because such confusion is easily remedied. You say, “They can’t.”
I respond, “Of course they can. That’s how we make laws. If you say they can’t, what process to make laws are you proposing?” (as I did about a zillion times in this thread.)
If your theory were true, the next post should be someone saying, “Of course they literally can; I mean they should not.”
Where’s that post?
So you are sticking to the position that the bulk of the people in this thread were actually arguing that a legislature is literally unable to pass such a law? Really? If you thought so, why would you even bother arguing for so long? What a waste of your time.
No. The bulk of people were, however, literally arguing that such a law was illegitimate, that although it was passed it did not carry the same weight of authority that other laws do; the law itself was void or voidable.
This is why I kept returning to my question: what process shall we use to pass laws, if not this one?
Actually, I don’t think that’s the case. The bulk of the people are arguing that the law is a bad idea, that it has been enacted with bad motives, and that the arguments in favor of it are mere pretexts.
For the purposes of this topic, I don’t have the slightest interest in expending any energy in debating this question. And by now I am pretty sure that a person of your intelligence should be fairly sure that very few people in this thread find that question little more than a distraction.
Pretty much covered in the title of the thread, isn’t it?
Bricker claims that he has focused strictly on the legality of vote suppression because his debate opponents focus on its illegality. The 2nd claim is manifestly false, but I thought I’d check the first claim.
Here are Bricker’s first posts in this thread:
[ul]
[li] Bah. You lost. It’s legal, it has widespread support, and it’s happening. It’s not anti-democracy. It’s an obvious and prudent move, and there’s zero, zip, nada, and also zilch you can do to change this trend.[/li]
– except for the unsubstantiated “obvious and prudent” claim, this may be what passes in Bricker’s mind for sober and objective legal opinion. I wonder if he can understand that to some it might look like partisan gloating?
[li] Except all the studies show that even when you spend $900,000 to subsidize fresh fruits and veggies, they don’t buy it anyway. So should we extend that analogy to voting?[/li]
– Here, Bricker argues that the lower classes can’t be bothered to eat fresh fruit, so won’t be bothered to get voter ID. Many would view this as an argument against voter suppression efforts; in any event it’s hard to see it as sober analysis of voter ID’s legality.
[li] there was no fraud, yell the Democrats! You can’t prove the dog voted! And limiting his registration would disenfranchise all the lawfully voting dogs! Yes, genius. Voter ID requirements are legal.[/li]
– Here Bricker pretends that a “Democrat” tried to enfranchise his dog.
[li] Thanks for linking to a page about voter registration purges to question whether Voter ID laws are legal. Perhaps we can discuss capital gains tax next and you can chime in with a page about crochet.[/li]
– OP pits “GOP vote suppressors” who among other things pass voter ID laws. A Doper links to a lawsuit where the U.S. Dept of Justice successfully turns back a GOP voter suppression law but, since the law didn’t involve voter ID specifically, Bricker compares it to “crochet.”
[li] My point is very simple: with no ID requirement, anyone can show up, give the dog’s name, and vote. With. Photo ID requirement, the task is more complicated, and gives an excellent chance of being able to successfully convict the person that tried.[/li]
– this seems less concerned about voter ID legality than about whether voter ID is a good idea. I must be misinterpreting it, since Bricker insists he has no opinion he’s willing to share on voter ID, beyond its legality.
Since dogs age more quickly than people, the photo ID for canines issue gets complicated. But might not this apply to humans as well? “Sir, you look much more haggard than you do on your driver’s license.” … “Yes. It’s from wasting time arguing with idiots on Internet message boards.”
[/ul]
(This also seems to argue beyond mere legality.) And it does suggest a follow-on question: Sir Bricker, Sir, pardon if you’ve addressed this already(*), but if 20,000 voters are denied registration or vote by a suppression program, allegedly to prevent about 3 cases of voter impersonation, could that possibly effect(sic) the election?
(* - SDMB software apparently shows me just a poster’s most recent 500 posts in a given thread, but Bricker has 600+ posts in this one!)
This.
Soooo . . . after all this . . . did it work? For any value of “work”?