Why would they look like the current batshit crazy, racist GOP? Is it truly impossible to advocate for genuine conservative values on their merits without rejecting science and fomenting hatred?
There is an argument to be made that Redistan would be made up of that portion of the GOP, and sane conservatives would go to Blueistan.
That depends on what conservative values are under discussion. IMHO it very much does seem to. be impossible. My hypothesis is that in the past (before the Gingrich revolution in 1994) the crazies were split between the Democrats and Republicans, which is what kept them from exerting influence. I don’t see how its possible to advocate for positions that deny global warming, being against COVID-19 vaccines, being against small d democracy as demonstrated by 1/6/2021, etc. without going all in on the crazy, and those are the tings that conservatism seem to be about these days.
Would Bluistan really want the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys of the world? ETA: There’s so few of them it might not really matter.
Careful. One might be forgiven for inferring from this that Martin_Hyde thinks that when the rubber meets the road, norms aren’t really important.
Do you believe a radical left or anarchist terrorist organisation is or could be possible in the USA? A group that would not bomb federal buildings, like Oklahoma 1995, but target individuals for murder and/or kidnapping like the RAF did in Germany or the Brigate Rosse in Italy (veeery simplified here, I hope the basic idea is clear) or policemen/army like the ETA did in Spain (they not only did this, of course), or some kind of action directe like the anarchists over 100 years ago?
This is unquestionably the world’s stupidest bothsides argument you’ve ever offered. On the one hand we’re talking about a President effectively throwing out legitimate votes to remain in office, and on the other hand… what, enacting a policy via executive order?
Do you understand that if the courts couldn’t litigate this in 2 weeks, then they couldn’t litigate it at all? Had Republicans illegally stolen the electoral count, and it stood until noon January 20th, there would have been zero recourse.
The “Chicken Little” argument is incredibly intellectual dishonest and lazy. You can keep brushing off near threats as long as they never come to fruition. And when they eventually do, there are more pressing matters than holding deniers accountable for their stupidity. This is obviously why it’s your go-to argument on this topic.
Do you think the courts would have adjudicated this matter by noon on January 20th? Because if they don’t, then it’s a dead letter. There’s no recourse for a stolen presidency.
The nice thing about someone posting that they are thinking about willfully misrepresented your comments is it means you can disregard any further comments they post on the topic.
Litigation wouldn’t even have occurred, though, because Pence would have been removed from the proceedings and Grassley would have finished the certification without him. As I said, a core defect of the Eastman Memo is assuming Pence is actually in possession of power within the Senate via his role as President of the Senate. This is not actually the case, and the last Vice President to try that (John Adams) set the precedent that the Vice President has no real power in the Senate. He or She can break tie votes, that is his one real power in the Senate. So the entire idea that all that separate our democracy from collapse was Pence alone, is not accurate, it was 100 Senators. While some Republicans absolutely would have been in favor of Pence nuking the constitution–and that is cause for concern, it’s quite obvious to anyone who actually observed what did happen, that most Republican Senators seated that day would not have been on board with that activity. It’d have been like 85ish Senators voting to have Grassley handle the proceedings and Pence would be irrelevant.
The Supreme Court can issue emergency orders very rapidly. In the crazy scenario where Pence got a majority of the Senate to let him subvert the electoral counts act and attempt to throw the election to a House Contingent election, I have a strong belief the Supreme Court would issue an emergency injunction saying such an election violates the Electoral Counts Act and should not occur.
Now, the Supreme Court has no physical power to stop Congress from doing what it wants within its chambers. But what would occur next would be a Tilden-Hayes still constitutional crisis, if the House just went forward, it would not have been Trump waltzing into the White House on a technicality–it would have been the actual end of the United States as a country. This is the reason the two parties in Tilden-Hayes came to a negotiated agreement, they knew some brute forced nonsense would implode the country. That is still absolutely true today.
At the end of the day you’re massively overstating the importance of silly memos written by executive branch lawyers. If you had any knowledge of the context of such memos, how frequently they occur, and how little value they have in predicting how the government actually functions or will operate, you would realize those memos are nothing but MSNBC fodder. It’s a way to make conspiracist lefties get hot and bothered because they like getting hot and bothered. It has little to do with reality.
There is no value in hyperbole, end of discussion.
But you’re getting excellent value out of weak accusations of hyperbole. And now I see you’re finding weak excuses to start ignoring posts altogether. “End of discussion” indeed.
This is a Supreme Court that appears to lean very heavily into some bastardized form of literalism. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the judicial branch purview into election certification. I can certainly see Alito and Thomas saying that. Roberts probably not, but no idea where Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett would come down on the concept.
I think your premise itself is wrong. For one thing, it implies that this is something recent and that the country has never been divided before. Which simply isn’t true. From the founding, there have been fundamental differences and divisions. People today think that this is the most contentious and partisan time in our history, but they aren’t even close. Hell, I’ve lived through a more contentious time myself, and I’m not THAT old. The 60’s were MUCH more contentious and divided than today, and we seem to have made it through them. The Civil War period, or even the period of the founding and the decades after that, especially the time leading to the Civil War were more contentious…and we made it through all of that.
All that said, as others have noted, it’s simply not possible to simply divide the country up in neat little red/blue areas. States, all states, are basically purple. Most blue states have large red areas, and vice versa. If you tried to simply divide the country, even if you could do it on current red/blue lines, what you’d get is a few non-contiguous coastal blue states and a bunch of contiguous (mostly) red states. The new ‘blue’ country would be hugely divided, to the point where it would actually make more sense to just divide again, and have a new west coast ‘blue’ country and an east coast ‘blue’ city, with perhaps a few blue enclaves surrounded by red states.
Not sure how anyone thinks this would be better than what we have today. Perhaps, instead of this, we should simply do what we’ve always done…move forward and eventually resolve the issues until we can find new and interesting things to divide us, or go back to unresolved issues and keep chewing on them until we have finally got them to a point where the majority are ok with the new status quo. Seems like a more viable solution, to me at least.
The judicial branch can review if the Electoral Count Act is being followed or not.
I’m suggesting that there is a non-zero probability that the current court would decide the act unconstitutionally restricts the privileges of the Senate and House. Sure, they passed it but that doesn’t mean much to the current court.
Ding ding ding!
Yes, exactly.
And exactly why this attempt was not a “nothingburger.”
A significant number of actual high-level elected representatives plus the then-POTUS, not just a handful of fringe characters, were seriously attempting to break the country.
You wouldn’t even get that, because of all those blue areas in the red states and all those red areas in the blue states.
The problem isn’t that they’re stupid, it’s more that they’ve been convinced over decades that their way of life is being stolen, that they’re the only “true” Americans, that the Democrats are doing the stealing, and so on. It’s an unholy brew of identity politics aimed at white working and middle class people, appeals to patriotism, demonization of the political opposition, and so on.
I mean, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a family and community that was essentially Republican, but that basically held that politics was akin to religion- someone’s personal business that you didn’t pry into, and you didn’t really question, as that was their business and their business alone. In a more public sense, the feeling was that the people on the other side of the aisle (Democrats) were still on the same side, but might have confused or incorrect opinions. There was no sense that they were actively working against the country or the American people. At worst, they were favoring other people, which generally meant minorities or people from “up North”, instead of us.
But that changed at some point during the 1990s, and has been growing like a tumor ever since. Now it’s literally viewed as an existential crisis on their part- all this political garbage is viewed as holding the line vs. the forces of darkness and chaos, and against those who would do away with their way of life (such that it is) in favor of some sort of citified, multicultural lifestyle. They view this stuff as a knock-down, drag-out fight for the soul of the country.
That’s why they’re willing to do this, and forego @Princhester’s magical thinking about the worth of democracy, in favor of undemocratic jerks like Trump; he’s on their side and fighting for them/their worldview, or so they believe. In large part it’s a situation of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”- they’re going to vote Red no matter what, and for that very reason.
Meanwhile, the more cynical on that side are actually amping up the BS with the conspiracy theories, alternative realities, etc… that just serve to pry that segment away from the rest of the country.
Not to hijack here, but references have been made to partisan gerrymandering having been a thing since the dawn of the Republic and, yes that might be true. But it is somewhat disingenuous to toss that out there without it being noted that with the advent of computers it is now less of an art and more of a science than it has ever been. In the old days it was “best guess”, now it’s absolute certainty. You can not out organize gerrymandering because all that accomplishes is that your candidates who were going to win still win, but by bigger margins and your candidates who were going to lose still lose, but by smaller margins.
Agreed. I was saying that even if you COULD just force the current blue state/red state (by, I assume, forcing people who are red to move out of blue states and blue to move out of red states or something equally improbable) you’d get what I’m describing there. The reality would be a complete patchwork of red and blue counties strewn through every state. There is zero way to build new countries out of that mess. Even states we traditionally think of as hard red or hard blue would be in this. California and Texas spring to mind as two examples…trying to divide either by red/blue would result in patchwork states. Trying to force either to be fully red or blue would mean forcing millions to move or…well, do what they do now, live in a state that doesn’t align with their own political leanings. Except if we did what the OP is saying I’m thinking there would be a lot more anger and tension and probably something like ethnic cleansing except politically. It would be a complete dogs breakfast.
Gonna take exception to the characterization of willfully. Also gonna apologize for implying that the importance of “norms” is a binary choice between “they matter” and “they don’t matter.”
That said, your phrasing came off as dismissive, and did nothing to indicate how you personally gauge the importance of norms, leaving it to your readers to decide for themselves exactly how much importance you place on them (“zero to negligible” being a perfectly valid range).