But its not so much about punishing the guilty, it is about the towering importance of voter confidence, which can hardly be denied, because Bricker says so. All across our great country, in beauty parlors, truck stops and diners, Americans fret and worry about voter confidence. Everywhere you turn, the subject is on everyone’s mind! Bricker says so, we may rest assured that it is the case.
Our less worthy citizens are not being punished, they are simply being asked to “take one for the team”, to “go the extra ten miles”, as it were. As it is. But do they stand tall and shoulder the burden of their patriotic duty? They do not! They whine and snivel about how all of this is so unfair, or worse, that it is “unConstitutional”! Which is much worse, Bricker says so.
There is evidence submitted here on the effect of these laws on our less worthy citizens. And we are asssured that as soon as Bricker has processed this data, and is satisfied that it is actual evidence, and not some statistical chimera cooked up by liberal academics, he may very well change his mind!
If I didn’t exist, the Voter ID laws still would. You may safely infer that my approval isn’t a necessary or sufficient condition. It"'s not me that says so: it’s your fellow citizens, the ones whose voices you wish to silence so that you and yours can rule by fiat.
Democrats afraid of the GOP elderly vote, institute a law where all polling places must be on the third floor of walk-up buildings. Elderly people can get a “mobility ID” that allows them to vote via a small trailer in front of the building.
The “mobility ID” offices make getting the ID something of a complex chore. Totally okay, to your piggy little eyes?
Without knowing any information at all about where this vote took place and when? You want me to just blindly agree to some pulled-from-your-ass numbers?
THERE’S your denial-twin to the people who say no innocent was ever executed. I was starting to wonder if you were going to bring him back or if I was going to have to check your posts in this thread for his quotes.
Anyway, the number of illegal votes you infer is small - you could actually and easily name the individual illegal voters since their numbers are only in the dozens, if we take you at your word - so let’s assume the worst case and that for every illegal voter we know about, there are three that we don’t, maybe… 200 total? For comparison, we have credible cites of studies where some significant percentage of a state’s population, say 5%, do not have the necessary ID or the easy means to get it. The median population of the 50 states is about 4.5 million, so let’s 4 million potential voters, of which 200,000 are having this difficulty. If we conservatively estimate that for only one of these people in a thousand the difficulty represents a genuine hardship sufficient to discourage voting, that leaves 2000 denied legitimate votes to 200 blocked illegal votes, creating a problem ten times larger than the one supposedly being solved, using estimates most generous to you and least generous to me.
But hardships are okay, according to you and even as you deny that they actually exist, because if voting was easy, some people might obtain it too cheaply and value it in esteem too light, and that could destroy democracy as we know it or at least make the ghost of Thomas Paine cry, or something.
So, sure, I’ll concede to your 3 out of 9000, as soon as you concede to my 30 out of 9000.
You’re still here? I thought you were out silencing citizens and declaring fiats, though why fiats and not higher-quality toyotas remains a mystery to me.
This is where your approach fails. A voter is illegal or legal-- a clear binary choice. The ease of getting the free photo ID is not so … er … easily divided.
I don’t agree that hardships exist sufficient to invalidate the law.
He, and you, are apparently comfortable with substituting your judgement of wise social policy for the results reached by the legislature and judiciary. What’s a better word than “fiat?”
I meant to say only one in a hundred, which would reduce 200,000 voters with difficulties down to 2000 voters with genuine hardships.
Still, even with the more dramatic one in a thousand, we’d estimate 200 voters blocked by hardship to 200 voters generously estimated to be voting illegally, making the situation (under conditions most generous to Bricker and least generous to me) a tie at best.
I can think of a number of better words you could use like “I admit that the rhetorical device of accusing people who criticize laws of wanting dictatorships instead was never an accurate model of their beliefs, even hyperbolically, and for the sake of my own waning credibility, I’ve decided to retire that approach from my vernacular.”
There isn’t even a mechanism by which hardships alone would invalidate the law. It’ll take a judge (or panel of judges) agreeing that the hardships represent an undue burden which outweighs the government’s purpose for the law in the first place, and that’ll depend on how the narrowly the judges feel that the purpose need be tailored, and so forth.
Sure. And generally, every single state has either passed that gateway, or has not. And when states have had judges agree the law is too burdensome, I’m fine with that.
What you are doing, though, is saying that where the judges agree with you, their result should stand, and where they don’t their result should not stand.
Thus the fiat business. Your result must be the final one, and legislatures, governors, and panels of judges must all yield to your determination of “too burdensome.”
You mean by the judicial process? That’s as much part of the mechanism of democracy as the legislature. Are you suggesting otherwise?
I suppose an alternative “strike down” approach would be to call for civil disobedience, calling for officials to simply refuse to enforce an undesirable law. There have been times when this morally defensible. Of course, there were also times when this led to Kim Davis…
I am? When? Where? I cheerfully admit that if the issue gets to SCOTUS and SCOTUS rules in a way I don’t like, I’ll still feel free to say their decision was wrong and hope for a future SCOTUS that will over-rule, or a saner legislature that will repeal.
At what point, if any, does this lead to me wanting to seize control of the U.S government and abolish SCOTUS?
This is stupid, and I’ve said in earlier threads that this is stupid. If it’s what you honestly believe, then what you honestly believe is stupid and needs no further comment from me.
How about the 3 out of 9000, 30 out of 9000 numbers? Planning to revisit that anytime soon?
It most definitely is “criticism”. I regret the necessity of judicial review, it shouldn’t be needed. If there were more Republicans of the caliber of Mr. Sensenbrenner, previously mentioned here and warmly applauded, perhaps it might not be required. That would be better.
You, on the other hand, in a rare spasm of candor, allowed as how “some” Republicans have partisan motives, and are, in fact, looking to stack the deck. (Deftly evasive, that “some Republicans”…might be three, might be ten thousand. But “some”.)
Where is your criticism of men whose motives you admit are unworthy? When you rail furiously against those who fail to meet your expectations in condemning the Great Massachusetts Massacre? Yet have the raw chutzpah to rail at liberal hypocrisy as if you and yours were but innocent lambs frolicking amongst the daffodils.
Have you offered even one word of disdain for such men? By your own admission, looking to undermine the very foundation of democratic process? Show me such criticism. Astonish me!
Hey, wait a sec, demanding to know why someone isn’t criticizing a person who is on their own side is a Bricker trademark. He could sue you! I’m a witness!
I don’t think you ever responded to post 8978 in this thread, from Elvis1Lives, quoting a study about id-law effects in Wisconsin:
"The lead plaintiff who challenged the voter-ID law, 89-year-old Ruthelle Frank, has been voting since 1948 and has served on the Village Board in her hometown of Brokaw since 1996, but cannot get a photo ID for voting because her maiden name is misspelled on her birth certificate, which would cost $200 to correct. “No one should have to pay a fee to be able to vote,” Frank said.
Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID."
That’s just nonsense. When people say things like “this should not stand” or “this is clearly wrong”, they do not automatically mean “…and what should happen is that my opinion should suddenly be enshrined in law no matter what”. They might conceivably mean that (Donald Trump and Sarah Palin probably do), or they might mean “…and therefore I believe we should start a grass roots effort to change the law through legal processes” or they might mean “…and therefore I propose civil disobedience to protest how outrageously wrong it is” but most likely they just mean “I’m so frustrated that that’s the current state of the law, I think it’s a terrible mistake”, but with no implication that somehow things ought to change just because.
And this has been explained to you over and over and over and over in this thread, and yet you still keep going back to that rhetorical hammer.
And that’s particularly galling given that while some voter ID laws have been found constitutional (so far), other generally similar ones have been found unconstitutional. Meaning that believing that these laws should be found unconstitutional isn’t some crazy fringe insane viewpoint, it’s just a slightly different opinion about how much of a burden is too much of a burden. If you think the speed limit should be 60 and someone else thinks it should be 65, you don’t get to go nuts and accuse them of wanting to rule the roads by fiat.
By the way, the vast majority of innocent people sent to death row were not “railroaded” by the state, but their own unreasonable unwillingness to put up a sufficient defense at trial and subsequent appeals.
is how Bricker’s invocation of the death penalty is in any way analogous to this issue.