I just noticed this story about Ohio. Perhaps one of our legal experts can explain the relationship to other election and voting rights shenanigans in this very important tipping state.
The one thing that’s clear is that the Ohio legislature is firmly opposed to making voting easier in November, and even wanted some complainants to be required to post a bond.
Governor Kasich, while supporting most of the bill, vetoed it due to the cash bond requirement. Perhaps he’s looking forward to a 2020 Presidential run with the slogan ‘No, I’m not completely bat-shit.’
No, that was the other guy, similar username and rhetorical style, but that other guy, for instance, spent many a page trying to prove that voter fraud was a real thing. Kinda like trying to inflate a Japanese condom into a Zeppelin. The real Bricker only talked about voter ID, period. And liberal hypocrisy, which is pretty much the same thing.
I don’t actually know whether my fellow liberals are hypocrites. I don’t have the power to look deep in to their souls.
But I will point out that the situation is more complicated than you are presenting it as. Consider the two following examples:
(1) There’s a law governing taxation on broccoli. But given how the law is written, it can be evaded by just declaring that all your vegetables are “green cauliflower”.
(2) There’s a law forbidding employers from discriminating based on race. But one employer evades it by discriminating based on zip code, knowing that in his city, there’s a very strong correlation between zip code and race. His motivation, however, is purely based on racism.
In both cases, someone is following the letter of the law and evading the spirit of the law. But I find (2) to be contemptible, and not (1).
Sure. But then your objection is not to the act of adhering to the letter of the law while avoiding the spirit of the law, is it? Your objection is to discriminating based on race, and it’s that which you find contemptible. Right?
Wait. You just said, “But I find (2) to be contemptible, and not (1).”
So do you find (1) contemptible, or not?
If you do, why did you say you didn’t?
If you don’t, why did you disagree with me when I said, "Your objection is not to the act of adhering to the letter of the law while avoiding the spirit of the law, is it
Two objects may both be warm, but only one be hot. Two actions may both the objectionable, but only one is contemptible. The element of law evasion makes the action “hotter”, more likely to reach the threshold of “contemptible.”
Not sure I agree, but there is nothing perplexing about it. Looks like you were going for a Perry Mason headlock there.
Yes, that’s what I was getting at. Although I wasn’t actually expressing my personal opinion about anything, not having actively thought about whatever issue it was. I was just pointing out how it’s entirely possible to find one case of letter-but-not-spirit contemptible but another one not contemptible without being guilty of (gasp) hypocrisy.
There’s a test for that! Recall the Great Massachusetts Massacre? Did you shriek with outrage and roll about on the floor, tearing out clumps of your hair? In that case (pics, or it didn’t happen), you might be eligible for a provisional status as a non-hypocrite.
And in reply, I was pointing out that if this is so, then what you find contemptible is not the letter-vs-spirit, but the underlying action, or perhaps it’s the letter-vs-spirit combined with the underlying action.
It’s NOT the letter-vs-spirit standing alone. Contemptibility arises when the letter-vs-spirit is applied to an act that qualifies it for contemptible.
It’s when the difference is picayune, pedantic, finagling, and horse-shit. It’s contemptible of the Governor to split hairs in this way, making a childish and petulant discrimination of people into classes, and quite possibly risking a contempt of court citation (although I suppose if that were to happen, it already would have.)
Also, I wonder at the actual legality of the hair-splitting. The Judge said that the people were entitled to be registered to vote. The Governor said, “Okay, but only for Federal elections.” How exactly does he justify that? He’s denying voting registration to thousands, in contradiction of the Judge’s directive.
I’d love to see the Judge crack down, hard, on this bullshit.
I mean, it’s not some simple equation, where x+y=contemptible and x+w!=contemptible.
I think part of what is so galling about letter-vs-spirit tacked onto something that already seems bad is that it emphasizes that the person is going out of their way to really WORK at how to be odious. There’s no way it was an accident. There was no way it was a side effect. They (in this vague hypothetical) realized that what they wanted to do (a thing which I view as bad) was against the law, and went out of their way to figure out a way to do it anyhow.
But honestly, this is a hijack, even for this thread. I’m willing to stand corrected, but I doubt that anyone in this thread is claiming that the mere act of taking an action that is within the letter of the law but which contradicts the spirit of the law is, in and of itself, no matter what, contemptible. Now, can we please move on?
Heard something to the effect that its a state sovereignty kind of thing, like the Feds can interfere but only so far as Federal elections are concerned, state elections are safe from their statist hands. Could look it up, but reading about that guy makes me want to break something. Poor mental hygiene.
Makes me think of a friend who has a young son. Guy tells kid, “Don’t go outdoors. Don’t set one foot out that door.”
Comes home. Kid is lying across the doorstep, with his feet just inside, the rest of his body outside.
Guy says, “Okay, cute, you got me. Letter of the law. Don’t ever do that again.” And the kid didn’t need ten pages of legalese to know he’d done wrong.
To which I responded by pointing out that he was literally saying that the mere act of taking an action that is within the letter of the law but which contradicts the spirit of the law is, in and of itself, no matter what, contemptible – BUT that this was not actually true. The truth, I said, was that his comfort with conforming to the letter instead of the spirit depended on how he felt about the underlying act.
Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Here was your original quote (bolding added):
And there is probably some truth to that, if we’re talking about emotionally loaded words like “contemptible”. But it’s far more complicated than just “your preferred outcome”. It’s not that I’m totally OK with it when anyone works around the law leading to an outcome I agree with, and hate it when someone works around the law leading to an outcome I disagree with. Rather, it has to do with person’s motivation, the circumstances in which the law was passed, etc.
For instance, to come up with a slightly contrived example that fits into this thread, it’s presumably illegal to manufacture forged driver’s licenses. If someone was doing so and distributing them to illegal immigrants purely with the cynical purpose of trying to get those illegal aliens to fraudulently vote for democratic candidates, I would find that abhorrent, and if they somehow managed to do it while deviously pretending they were actually acting within the law, that would be worse. At the same time, someone else who was doing something superficially similar but whose motivation was to keep children from starving to death by getting their parents fraudulently enrolled in medicaid, I would view very differently.
And I can’t spell out the precise calculus here, but there’s a difference between a private citizen doing this kind of thing and an elected official doing it. Certainly in the above example with fraudulent IDs, if the person doing this was the person actually entrusted by the people with manufacturing and distributing IDs, that would make it even worse.
Final point: I’ve been thinking about bunches of examples in my head, and a lot of them end up feeling kind of like civil disobedience… without the risk of arrest. It’s odd, you would think that not actually breaking the law would make it a more ethical action, kind of by definition. At the same time, though, part of what’s admirable about civil disobedience is risking arrest, putting your principles above yourself. If what you’re doing is not actually illegal you’re not risking arrest. It’s an interesting topic. But, as I said, a tangent in this thread.