Well no. Somebody tried that exact argument to defend Bush over all those death warrants he signed. It was pointed out that other governors had simply refused to sign them and then the people couldn’t be executed.
Anyway, the analogy doesn’t hold up. Obama wasn’t being asked to go along with an existing law. The law had been declared unconstitutional. It’s as if somebody’s death sentence had been overturned and you were saying the Governor is obligated to execute him anyway.
Uh-uh.
Maybe. I think it would be very hard to de-integrate the military once you had gays openly in there for several years, and again, executive worked quite well in a very similar instance when Truman did it, so I don’t buy it. Political expediancy before an election passes the shit test.
As people simply assert. And when I argue back that it’s not true… nobody responds with a cite saying that the President is obligated to try and put back laws declared unconstitutional.
I’m no longer, but I bet a time or two when a law was declared unconstitutional and the president accepted it.
Why does he have to do this? Why do you guys keep saying he does without saying why or providing a cite?
Well, ok, if the Republicans deserve credit for this, how come they ain’t bragging about it? Unless, of course, they don’t want credit for it. Wonder why. Does it rhyme with “probe”?
Well, if you want me to reply that way you need to not mischaracterize my arguments. Next, if you want reasonable arguments back, you need to offer them yourself.
I replied as I thought appropriate to your post based on its content, and upon rereading it, I’m comfortable. Sorry you feel you’ve been given short shrift.
True. If you’re interested, here’s more: "Politics aside, there are at least two good legal reasons for the government to appeal. First, Judge Phillips’s decision, based heavily on trial testimony, reads very much like a ruling in an as-applied case rather than on a facial challenge. The government took the position in the case that on a facial challenge the only relevant evidence is the statute, legislative findings, and legislative history. (The government therefore called no witnesses.) Judge Phillips rejected this argument and issued a ruling based on a wide range of evidentiary materials. The government has an interest in pushing back on what defending a facial challenge requires.
Second, the government has an interest in asserting deference to the military particularly in times of war. In rejecting the interests the government asserted in cohesion and readiness, Judge Phillips deemed President Obama’s public statements against DADT as an “admission” by the government that DADT serves no government interest. Judge Phillips also relied upon the military’s practices of discharge under DADT, in particular the smaller number of discharged gay and lesbian service members during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as evidence that DADT serves no purpose. It is odd for a court to accept as evidence a statement by the Commander in Chief that an existing military policy is unwise and through a carefully coordinated process should be altered and at the same time dismiss as serving no interest the actual policies of the military that is overseen by the Commander in Chief. It is also odd that in a time of war and when military resources are stretched thin, the military’s decision not to implement fully a policy becomes proof that the policy has no point."
Why do you feel to mischaracterize almost every argument people make? I’ve given credit to the LCR for this. Repeatedly. Yet you insist on making up something I never said. It’s incredibly frustrating. I never said LCR don’t deserve credit, just that giving credit to JUST LCR is inane. And expanding that credit to the entire Republican party is, likewise, inane.
You seriously believe the ACLU (which by the way won the Witt case in the 9th circuit, which was a huge part of the reason the LCR won in their case), the Serviceman’s Legal Defense Fund, the Human Rights Council, and the myriad of other “liberal” organizations that have fought DADT since it’s inception all wanted to lose? Damn, after winning that Witt case, the case in Washington, the case involving DOMA, same sex marriage cases, and the Prop 8 case, they really, really suck at losing on purpose.
The idea that the LCR won because they wanted to win, and the other groups lost because they wanted to lose takes a ocean of stupid to believe. While you’ve made some seriously flawed points in this thread, the sheer amount of stupid required to believe that dwarfs them all.
One of my favorite moments in the movie “A Few Good Men,” occurs during a re-direct examination of a Marine. As you might remember, in the story two Marines are being tried for administering a “Code Red,” an unofficial beating, to a fellow Marine who dies as a result. After another Marine testifies that Code Reds were authorized, the prosecutor hands the Marine a copy of the General Orders for the base and asks him where Code Reds are listed. When the witness says they’re not there, the prosecutor feigns surprise and hands him the Marine Guidebook and says, “Surely they’ll be listed here, then.” Again the witness admits that Code Reds aren’t documented in that book either. The prosecutor desists, confident he’s shown that Code Reds don’t exist.
The defense lawyer stands and hands the witness the same books. “Please show me where in those books the mess hall is,” he asks. The witness replies that the mess hall’s location isn’t in them either. “How could you eat, then,” asks defense counsel, “without knowing where the mess hall was?”
“I guess,” said the witness, “when chow time came I just followed everyone else.”
The President’s duty is to faithfully execute the laws. (Art II Sec 3) An Act of Congress is presumed constitutional. When a law is challenged, it’s his job, through the Justice Department, to defend it, even through the appeals process. If this were not so, then the will of a unanimous Congress could be flouted by a single judge. There is no law requiring the President to defend laws, I grant you, but the general division of roles in our tripartite system of government demands it, and even though there’s no explicit law requiring him to act, his duty exists because of our system, just like the guy who finds the mess hall by the system, not the entry in the Marine Guidebook.
Ok, then let me translate your unreasonable post into a reasonable one, and then respond to it.
If a chief executive decides to only defend the laws he likes from district court decisions, then he eviscerates our whole system of courts which rely on an appellate process up to the Supreme Court. In other words, laws he likes would get the full due process, but laws he doesn’t would not. That kind of political bias in the enforcement of constitutional law is a bad thing.
That said, I think a good middle ground would have been to appeal but not seek a stay. Which is why I wasn’t really pressing the point.
Well, you’re half-right. LCR got their injunction first, but the ACLU had actually won a district court case finding the application of DADT unconstitutional before that happened. Which is neither here nor there, since the larger point is that LCR didn’t do anything substantially different from any of the “liberal” advocacy groups.
The constitutional argument isn’t complicated. If you really don’t believe me, I can download the pdf versions of the briefs from PACER and compare them side-by-side for you, but that would be a lot of work unless you seriously doubt the point that the ACLU was making substantially the same arguments in the WA case and others.
I wasn’t really saying he did. My point was that LCR didn’t do anything differently from what the liberal groups you so deride did. What changed is the country, for the most part. And it matters to district judges that the top brass was recognizing the injustice of DADT.
Also, the Judge was a Clinton appointee and Berkeley law grad.
Because they must meet their institutional obligations, and nothing more. Their obligation is to defend the statute on its terms, not to find additional evidence to support it, or do anything more than offer the arguments of its legislative supporters.
That wasn’t my point. Obviously some individual Republicans won a great victory in CA, and Obama’s DOJ stayed the decision. I’m not arguing otherwise. What I was trying to correct was your misapprehension that ACLU, GLAD, etc. were just sitting on their thumbs and that LCR came along and got shit done.
Well. Maybe. You could be right. What I think though is something like this is going on: There’s been some study about racial bias based on political affiliation. It turns out that Republicans tend to identify or admit or claim racial bias a lot more than Democrats, who tend not to.
In testing, this hold up… a little bit. When they actually test the biases of Republicans versus Democrats what they find is that the Republicans are every bit as biased as they say, and that the Democrats are nearly as biased as the Republicans. The claimed difference is great. The observed difference is small.
I find the interesting. I think it applies also to the issue of homosexuality. There is not a big difference in the observed bias of Republicans compared to their claimed bias. They, on average, are about as bad as they say they are.
The Democrats seem to be almost as bad as the Republicans, though they claim they are much better. In fact, it seems that much of their political capitol with minorities is based on this claim that there is a vast difference in their behavior versus the Republicans. Observationally, it doesn’t seem to be true. Most of the really shitty things that have been done to homosexuals over the last two decades have enjoyed bipartisan support. There was not a Presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat who did not say they were against gay marriage in the last campaign. DOMA enjoyed bipartisan support. Clinton did DADT. Obama put it back after it was declared unconstitutional. The Democrats seem to let the Republicans take the lead when it comes to discriminating against gay. They seem to hemm and haw enough at first to show some deniability. But when push comes to shove they seem to jump right into the gay bashing party readily enough. It kind of reminds me of “In Cold Blood.” The one killer always needed to pretend he was being the reasonable one to assuage his conscience before he committed murder.
I don’t find that particularly admirable.
I don’t agree with discrimination or gay-bashing, but I do respect integrity. There’s a line in Shakespeare “Much ado about nothing” Don John says " “I cannot be said to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain.”
There’s something to that that rings true. Flattery makes others call you honest. I think a lot of the high reputation that the Democrats currently hold is based on their flattery of minorities.
Well, I’m glad I can take credit for energizing your desire to rock the vote. Your about the fifth person though who has used the “Democrats being worse is absurd” assertion against my argument. I find that interesting. Sincerely interesting. Dismissing an argument as absurd is a fallacy.
In my job, I spend a lot of time searching for those things that everybody is absolutely sure are true, and then betting against them. I’ve made a lot of money over the years that way.
You know why? The answer is different than you’d guess.
It’s not that the things everybody believes in aren’t true. They usually are. The fact that everybody believes in something makes people rely on it, and not question it, and they push it to extremes, and because they have believed something is a certain way they ignore the signs that it is changing and that what they believe may soon no longer be so.
For example, if I build you a deck and tell you to be careful with ho much weight you put on it, chances are you’ll be careful. You’ll check the deck and monitor it, and watch for signs of failure. Usually, this caution will prevent disaster.
However, if I build you a deck and tell you that this is the strongest deck ever and can hold anything you care to put on it, and you believe it… than you might end up with a problem. You might never check it for signs of failure. You might not care if tons of people and equipment sit on it. You might not might maintain it properly because you think it is so strong.
And that is how it usually happens. That’s the typical deck failure story. It happens all the time. Decks fail for those who are sure there deck is strong and do not question its integrity.
I think the Democratic platform is not nearly as strong in this regard as you, or others in this thread seem to believe.
Personally, I prefer a deck that I know is dangerous to one that I think is safe. YMMV.
Certified by Jayjay as “not insane.” I may use that as a sig.
I prefer to use a contractor who will actually build me that deck, even if it’s imperfect and comes in over budget and over time, instead of a contractor whose advertisements consistently call decks evil and dirty and against nature and absolutely refuse to build one.
I don’t want to make an argument from ignorance her, but I have no idea why an “as applied case” is inferior to a facial challenge and must therefore be appealed. I have no idea whether you have just made a really great argument or one that a knowledgeable person would laugh at.
You are producing these two arguments as quotes. I genuinely assume you accidentally failed to show the cite you got them from. May I ask for it?
I think you missed the first half of my analogy, which specified that the three horses are not being kept on par with each other: one horse is visibly mistreated by the driver. Does that clear things up at all?
Just to be clear, Scylla: if you could advise homosexual voters who are specifically concerned about maintaining and gaining rights as citizens, would you advise them to vote Republican? Why or why not? Are you arguing in this thread that having Republicans in national power is better for gay rights in general than having Democrats in the same positions? Either way, why?
Also, what do you think the average Republican voter thinks about gay people? The average high-ranking Republican politico? The most well-respected pundits, professional or otherwise? How do you think their attitudes are reflected in their actions?
That makes good sense, and I understand what you said. I do find though in the concept upon which your argument is built, namely that the President has roughly the same degree of autonomy and choice as a Marine Corps Private.
My understanding of the military chain of command is that they higher you go, the more autonomy and responsibility you go.
Or, to follow through on your analogy, Jack Nicholson’s character… The Col, he didn’t eat at the mess hall, did he. He had his own special tent where he wanted it “100 yards away from people who were trying to kill him.” He didn’t need to follow anybody to know where to eat. He decided where to eat.
So, your example, does not hold even within its own context. If the Col. doesn’t need to follow everybody to the mess surely the Commander in chief does not.
Go ahead, don’t let me stop you from providing evidence of the massive homophobia amongst liberals, massively outweighing that of the admitted gay-haters amongst the conservatives.
Except you won’t find any. Because acceptance is a defining characteristic of a liberal. It is almost mathematically certain that liberals are much more tolerant of homosexuality than conservatives.
The only way liberals in general could tend to hate gays is if those that are liberal in other social ways, and financially, tend to be raving homophobes. Because the very fact of LBGT-friendliness is a point in the “liberal” column of a person. They’d have to be pretty liberal in other ways in order to counteract a homophobic tendency and still remain a liberal.
Just like the Log Cabin Republicans would pretty much have to be Gold Bugs or shoot-the-aliens-on-sighters in order for me not to automatically consider them moderate Republicans.
This is a fine and just position to take, and I don’t have any quarrel with it on its own merits. But I have to ask, does Obama share it? If Obama has been vigilant in always challenging rulings that go against the state, if he has been steadfast in enforcing even laws he finds odious, then my criticism of him is misplaced. On the other hand, if he picks and chooses which laws to enforce, and which laws to let slide, if he sometimes looks the other way when a lower court strikes down a federal law, then I think we can deduce something of his character for his decision to act so swiftly when DADT was struck down.
Now, I admit, I don’t have any idea of his history when it comes to challenging legal decisions that go against the state. But I do seem to recall that not too long ago, he stated that he would not be enforcing federal drug laws against medical marijuana users. If he can look the other way when it comes to laws that are currently on the books, I have to wonder what prevented him from doing the same with DADT.
Look, I answered the question you posed. You gave me a false dilemma, and I was dumb enough to roll with your hypothetical. Given an either-or choice between advancing hispanic rights, and advancing gay rights, I picked gay rights. What I find interesting is that, if I had gone the other way, if I had said I would sell out the gays to help the Latinos, you would not be berating me as some sort of quisling to the Republicans. I find that discrepency endlessly fascinating.
And you still continue to fundamentally not understand the crux of the complaints here. The problem is not that we object to compromise. The problem is not that we don’t want to make any deals. The problem is that the people we keep compromising and deal-making with consistently fail to honor their side of the bargain.
I don’t have a plan. Gays are in a no-win situation, politically. Our options are to stick with mealy-mouthed, backstabbing, hypocritical sonsofbitches like yourself. Or switch to the Republicans. And as loathsome as you may be, you’re still a better bet than the GOP. So, my plan right now is to stick with the status quo. I’ll keep voting Democrat, on the offhand chance that sooner or later, I’ll end up pulling the lever for someone who really means what he says. And I’ll keep being utterly unsurprised when they double back on their word, just like all their predecessors.