This is an excellent point.
I think we’re starting to disagree more.
The Republicans can be evil, but – in the main – aren’t stupid. They are organized, funded, and very data-driven. When they drill for oil, it’s based on an endless series of surveys, core samples, and geologist’s assessments.
Rove wasn’t shooting blindly. Neither are goons like DeSantis.
They know exactly what buttons to push in order to rile up and mobilize their base.
As I said, I don’t know the polling on this, and it would have to be done now (or soon), rather than relying on what past polling looked like, but – IMHO – this one is either the winner to ride all the way home on, or … it isn’t.
I don’t know what’s most likely to animate the Dem base these days, and turnout – like always – will be everything.
But I think the machinery that does exist on the left had better sharpen their pencils and wring every drop of it out of their pollsters before they decide exactly where to place their “all-in” bets.
I understand your sentiment, though.
Many/most of my friends have long maintained that we “have to do something” about the gun issue, but I maintained that a losing strategy – doing the wrong thing – can have deleterious consequences that last for years.
Following my own analogy a step further … after nearly every mass shooting, we’re sure that the ground will be soft enough to pass stringent gun restrictions.
And. Yet.
[I know that’s more about the intransigence of the right than the apathy of the left, but … not totally]
[sigh]
Excellently said.
A big issue with the Republicans is more that they are so captive to their extremes that guys like DeSantis and other Republicans in that vein are often promoting policies that aren’t actually that popular among the GOP base. But the “rhetoric of Trumpism” is popular, and the non-Trumper Republicans don’t seem to care when the Trumpers push Trumpist stuff, so there is no “downside” for a DeSantis to push a Trumper position that sometimes may not even be a majority position among GOP voters. It certainly of course depends on the issue–on some issues DeSantis as an example, is promoting policies that have majority support among all voters in Florida. But it’s been a consistent thing in the era of Trumpism that Republicans have grown very comfortable pushing ideas that even a significant amount of Republicans don’t support. It appears because the logic is “I can support an extremist position, and get the support of the extremists, and the moderate Republicans won’t jump ship because they are so committed to team ball I won’t be punished.”
That development essentially means the GOP has no self-moderating capacity any longer, which is an unusual circumstance in our system of two big tent parties.
As i say, in today’s world, a GOP voter would as soon switch parties and vote DEM as they would switch genders. Party affiliation is such a fundamental part of their identity.
I would agree but, more expressly, say that this argument isn’t difficult to adjudicate, it is simply illogical. If we’re saying that fetal life is human then privacy just has no bearing. It’s like saying that so long as you can murder a woman quietly, in the privacy of your home then it’s none of the governments’ business. That’s plainly insane.
We have to assume that the judges who decided Roe were not insane so there must be more to the decision than privacy - and specifically about what constitutes a human life. But that can’t reasonably be gotten into without, effectively, saying that a secular, scientific answer to the question is the only answer that the US government is allowed to give and that arguments like “a second soul enters the mother’s body during contraception” are nonsense.
A full Roe decision would have required an affirmation of the government’s requirement to ignore religious teachings. The justices were, I expect, afraid to write a decision on the definition of life that opposed popular Christian teaching and so they simply hopped past addressing the question and wrote the whole decision with the implicit understanding that a fetal life is not a human being - and thereby a matter that can fall under the privacy rule - without explaining how they came to that conclusion.
A real and complete pro-life decision can’t just be a decision on medical privacy, it also needs to create a standard for human life and - per that - it must abide by the 1st Amendment and use a secular definition. That would be an even bigger kettle of fish to deal with and almost certainly cause an even larger amount of chaos since - I assume - almost all Americans have no idea that their government is intended and required to be secular, and rubbing that in their faces would almost certainly turn them against the whole institution.
Ultimately, the purpose of the Constitution and the 10th Amendment was to alleviate discord between the states by giving each state the freedom to act as its own nation and the expectation that everyone else would afford them that right. If Pennsylvania wants to be a nation of Dutch speakers, that’s fine; if Maryland wanted to be Catholic while the other states were Protestant, then that would be fine; and so on.
Fundamentally, if the people of Kentucky think that human life begins at conception then, whether that has a secular basis or not, it’s their state and their right to make that rule - just as they could decide that you’re in your rights to shoot a man for walking on your lawn without permission, while New York requires that he attacks you with a weapon in the privacy of your home, and the shot be fully in self-defense. So long as the rule is public and well-known, the people who live there have the freedom to complain about it, vote, or up and leave, as they see fit.
The states are supposed to be different. If one state wants to be Muslim and practice Sharia then - to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with the Bill of Rights - that should be allowed. One standard for all goes against the planned setup of the nation by the framers. It was their answer for keeping peace between nations with different religions, beliefs, and languages.
We started like the EU. Our current state where everyone thinks of us as a centrally managed nation with a uniform set of laws, and a primary focus on the Federal government, is contrary to the Constitution. In general, the Federal government isn’t even allowed to make domestic law - it has to offer money to the states in return for their acceptance of a national standard, or use other workarounds like that.
It might be. But if I had to bet, my guess is that it won’t make a difference.
I am a man so I may be talking out of my ass here but in addition to the above the lack of abortion as a possible choice forces a woman to go through 9 months of pregnancy which naturally include all the physical and emotional turmoil that possibly creates.
Again, I may be off base here but the abortion debate seems to consistently ignore the actual pregnancy that a woman who cannot have a desired abortion has to go through, as well as any subsequent medical, physical, or psychological effects that pregnancy can have for years to come.
Except that certain rights are fundamental and cannot be denied by any state.
There is no right to be safe against euthenasia by non-governmental operatives.
We were only remotely like the EU under the Articles of the Confederation, we were far more of a unified State than the EU the moment the current constitution was ratified in 1788.
We have also become a more unified country since the days of George Washington–the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, a proper change to our constitution, explicitly empowers the Federal government to protect the civil rights of citizens from injurious actions by the individual States.
So I struggle to really understand your point–yes, we started as a loose confederation and by the late 1780s already realized it was not working, so we formed a true unitary nation, that has gotten more unified by changes to the constitution and our laws ever since. No one living today can genuinely say they think we live in a loose confederation of States, or that important national issues ought be handled that way.
The rights of the Federal government are explicitly enumerated in the Constitution.
They may raise a tax, they must manage the post office, they may raise an army, and they must handle our foreign debts and obligations. The 10th amendment makes clear that if a power is not enumerated in the Constitution then it’s implicitly up to the state government. Regardless that the current Constitution is more beefed up than the Articles of Confederation, it’s still paper thin by any honest reading. It has implicitly gained power through taking over “interstate” matters - where jurisdiction would otherwise be unclear - it has power over Federal lands (military bases, military ships, etc.), and it manages immigration, but that’s still not far past what’s written in the Constitution. Your state, today, manages nearly all laws and institutions that affect your life.
I do not believe that the EU government has as strict a limitation on its ability to create laws affecting all nations in its collective.
It’s this phenomenon that has me convinced that the moderate Republican was always a myth. They were probably mostly far rightists to begin with and just too afraid to admit it until Trump came along and told them that yes, it’s ok to be an asshole.
Sorry but this isn’t a correct reading of constitutional law and I am not interested in debating with someone who thinks it’s 1785 legally speaking, it is not a serious topic for legal discussion. It’s fine if you want it to be that way, but I’m not going to argue with you and spend hours citing 150 years of constitutional law that you can research for yourself.
I might have missed it, but besides Justice Alito who drafted (the draft/leaked) majority opinion, is there anything that concretely indicates who the other justices siding with the majority are?
I’m not asking for the obvious, just curious if there is anything concrete on the Justices that comprised the majority.
(Emphasis mine)
Regarding contraception, I’ve read that Griswold v. Connecticut would be a likely target once Roe is gone. And we’ve already seen rulings like the Hobby Lobby case which have eroded access to contraception, but in a way that is limited to certain groups of people specific to the cases in question, like Hobby Lobby employees and their families.
By contrast, Griswold addressed, and voided, a state law prohibiting the use contraception by anyone, even married couples.
If Griswold is overturned, that would allow states to enact similar laws. But is there really any likelihood of that happening? I can’t imagine that such a law would have enough support in any of the fifty states. “Utah”, you might be tempted to suggest, because of the LDS presence, but even there I wouldn’t expect it. After all, the LDS Church disapproves of alcohol, but Utah doesn’t prohibit that, and it would be free to do so since state laws prohibiting alcohol were constitutional, when there were still dry states.
“They want to give contraception to your kids! Don’t let them!” That will get them moving on it.
In my version, Obamacare would get shot down and the basis for laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and No Child Left Behind would be that they’re optional standards that the States can accept in return for Federal grants (or to prevent the revocation of Federal grants, as may be).
To my knowledge, I live in that universe.
Well you’re living in a reality where Obamacare was shut down I guess back when the Supreme Court reviewed it, and that was like 8 years ago now, and I appear to be in a different reality where that has not occurred. So despite the physical improbability of it, it would in fact appear that you are communicating to me from a different reality. It is an interesting feat, but means we don’t have a good shared reality on the topic of the law on which to discuss such matters. Also those topics aren’t relevant to this discussion about the impending overturning of Roe v Wade, and thus outside any interest I have in this thread.
Without a constitutional right to privacy, there’s nothing supporting Griswold, and any plaintiff who wants to opt out of contraception distribution (like Hobby Lobby) would find a friendly court. But I can’t see any party demanding that contraception be banned for everyone. It’s too firmly ingrained in our society now. And without such a case, the SCOTUS has nothing to rule on to overturn Griswold.