This sounds like the National Firearms Act of 1934 – in the US. On paper, the newly regulated arms weren’t prohibited, since you could pay a $200 tax to keep your $20 automatic pistol, but back then $200 was a prohibitive price for all but the truly rich.
In 1968, the tax was overturned (Haynes v. United States), but on grounds that it required self-incrimination to admit you had a sort-of-banned weapon, not on any second amendment grounds. If the European Court of Human Rights wanted, I suppose they could make the same kind of ruling on the basis of privacy and anti-self-incrimination provisions in the European Convention on Human Rights.
I can’t really speak to whether constitutions are effective at protecting right. But without a constitution, Obama isn’t the President and Congress has no authority to pass laws.
All constitutions are is law that trumps mere statutes in the same way that statutes trump mere regulations. If you do away with a constitution, then all that happens is that the legislative body is the supreme law. And if you do away with the legislative body then the regulatory agencies are the supreme law.
So your evidence consists of a single guy giving his opinion on why they lost?
Guess what? There are some people who claim Obama won because Romney wasn’t conservative enough. There’s as much backing for that as what you’ve just presented.
Got anything more substantial than one person’s opinion? I mean, I like Bill Clinton. I thought he did a good job as my then governor, and we seemed to do ok in the 90s, but the simple fact is this isn’t backed by much, nor does it prove that voters based their decisions on this single issue.
I remember the 90s. If it came down ONLY to gun control, the midterms wouldn’t have worked out the way they did. So again, do you have anything resembling actual evidence?
Are you being serious?
I’m a gun owner. In fact, I have a CHL. I’m for some forms of gun control, including background checks, no open carry, limited right to bear arms for convicted felons, and some other controls.
You are conflating ANY support for ANY gun control as equivalent to support for banning all guns.
The majority of Texans are against open carry. Guess what? That’s gun control. It’s even a form of gun control that the NRA is against.
Texans are also pretty much for our current system of licensing for concealed carry. Guess what? That’s a form of gun control.
This isn’t even a subtle distinction. There’s a pretty friggin’ unsubtle distinction between some form of gun control (including licensing, background checks, etc) and outright bans. But you seem to want to gloss completely over that and equate any sort of control with outright bans of all firearms.
It never fails to bemuse (and amuse) me that the very constitution that was meant to protect U.S. citizens from such evils as tyranny of government has actually served / been corrupted to serve such tyrannical behaviour. The U.K. or Australia have no “Second Amendment”, yet in those countries it’s not necessary for everyone to carry a firearm to feel safe from their neighbours or, indeed, their government. Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of not being felt up by airport security… all eroded under the gaze of the U.S. Constitution’s glass eye.
And let’s not get started on universal health care and NSA data intercepts… :rolleyes:
What would Bill Clinton know about elections and voting blocks? I consider him one of the leading experts.
What do you, an avowed gun owner, have against hunting? You know, the sport where hunters open carry firearms. When has a majority of Texans or NRA members been against open carry?
The tax/fee is still effect. $200 for you and $200 for each machine gun you own.
The tax/fee didn’t apply to $20 automatic (auto-loading) pistols.
Felons can not be charged for failing to apply for or pay the tax based on their Constitutionally protect right against self-incrimination. Only honest, law-abiding, citizens can be prosecuted.
The majority of votes went to Democratic candidates. Clearly, voting results *aren’t *the only thing that matters. It turns out that redistricting is what matters. You can either admit that the electorate is being foiled or you can claim it doesn’t matter (which would be a perfectly reasonable argument, because the government we have is the one we have). You can’t keep handwaving away the facts, though.
Which U.S. House seat was decided by the total votes of a NATIONAL election? The rules are that each districts vote total decides who will be that districts representative. The claim that more Democrats voted for U.S. House seats in a particular year is an interesting bit of trivia but that bit-O’-trivia doesn’t decide U.S. House elections.
No one gerrymanders like the Chicago Democrats gerrymander. All of the other gerrymanders bow before the Chicago gerrymander.
True, but pissing off lobbyists is more immediate in the sense that while politicians only face the voters in election years they are always raising money. Cutting off a lucrative source has immediate repercussions. It can open the door for better candidates to decide to throw their hat in the ring. Also lobbyists are the ultimate single issue supporters. If a politician gets on the wrong side of constituents on one issue he or she can hope to focus on others before the election rolls around. The lobby only cares about their special interest.
But they are still doing nothing. If they play ball with the monied interests they can become a lobbyist in turn and remain a political insider. As you say, it’s not as if most congresscritters are ever going to worry about feeding their kids but everyone worries about losing status.
Why? Political parties are more reliable in that they are more susceptible to public pressure. They have skin in every election and don’t ever plan on retiring.
I don’t understand why you think this is contradicting my point in any way. I said that both parties are more fiscally conservative than most Americans and you disagreed saying that Americans wanted less government spending than either of the parties. My point was that this desire is based on ignorance of the actual costs of what people wanted from the government and thus not an indication that Americans were more fiscally conservative than the parties. Then you posted this. Why, I don’t know.
My point was that the ACA hadn’t gone into effect so there is no possible way the 2010 election was a referendum on the program itself. I wasn’t denying that Obamacare rhetoric was a factor. But again given how things were stacked against the Democrats in that election it’s no surprise they were beaten so badly.
The current Congressional districts vary in size from 527,624 to 994,416 people. Districts also vary by the percentage of voters who actually turn out to vote, and whether those voters selected R, D, TP, or I. Having the higher number of national voters doesn’t select a single seat in the U.S. House. The average size of a congressional district based on the 2010 Census apportionment population will be 710,767, more than triple the average district size of 210,328 based on the 1910 Census apportionment, and 63,815 more than the average size based on Census 2000 (646,952). Based on the 2010 Census apportionment, the state with the largest average district size will be Montana (994,416), and the state with the smallest average district size will be Rhode Island (527,624).
What if we “re-run” the 2012 House election, but using the old districts? We have done that simulation, using the 2008 presidential vote in both the old and new districts to capture how the redistricting might have moved partisans around. If we assume that nothing else affects House election outcomes but the partisanship of the districts—in other words, if we allow redistricting to have its maximum possible effect—we find that the 2011 redistricting cost Democrats 7 seats in 2012. This is not nothing, but it’s far less than what the Democrats needed to take back the House and about half what Wang estimated.
The effect is even smaller if we incorporate other important factors. Incumbency is the most important of these: lots of Republicans who were running as challengers or in open seats in 2010—and then won—ran as incumbents for the first time in 2012. We know that incumbency is a powerful factor in House elections, bringing candidates greater visibility, adding to their campaign coffers, and deterring quality challengers from running. On average, an incumbent in 2012 ran five percentage points ahead of a non-incumbent candidate from the same party in a similar seat. Sixty-one seats were decided by less than this margin.
More important, once we took incumbency into account, the apparent effect of gerrymandering vanished. That is, the ability of Republicans to retain the House majority may have been due to incumbency advantage, not new and more favorable districts.*
How are they more susceptible to public pressure? The monolithic parties promote their own agendas and try to drum up support on their hot button issues and don’t, really, listen to the issues that would affect large portions of the populace. They certainly don’t allow much tailoring to the local needs of each representative when requiring them to vote along party lines.
Both parties listen to their dollar sign-ed backers, which are assuredly not the people that vote for them.
Because you stated that people need an understanding of public finance, which is the study of how the government interacts with the economy, both in taxes and expenditure, and how to adjust them in relation to the economy as a whole for an overall benefit. Which is wrong when voting on issues.
People simply need to be able to see both the costs to them (+.5% income tax), and the cost overall of the program ($eleventy billion). If, for instance, we could eliminate all poverty in the US for $25,000 a year, I’d bet you cash money that the craziest anti-government person you could ever find would vote for it. The cost to benefit ratio in that scenario is just incredibly skewed towards “Benefit.”
But what really happens is costs are hard to figure out. Some agenda items (e.g. “welfare”) have so many different programs that it’s hard to get solid figures on as well as making it nebulously annoying to determine who gets what and how much. So, is welfare good? Bad? Depends on what data set you are looking at and who you are talking to’s experiences with it.
So you get politicians who advocate for the poor, but who simply vote more and more money to the situation instead of actually trying to fix the situation. The new programs that get proposed here are there are simply added to the current pool of programs, more often than not, which just contributes to the problem of getting clear information.
This lack of cost:benefit information just divorces the public’s belief from reality on both sides of the issue as a whole. One side thinks all poor people can get fed ham and turkey every sixteen seconds from any church and the other side thinks that all poor are so destitute that they are sucking lichen from the rocks in the public parks.
:dubious: So if I roll up to break your kneecap with a sledgehammer, you can’t object that it will be painful before I swing down and make contact with your leg-benders? While people weren’t being affected by the program, they didn’t want the program as it was laid out and voted into law, and there was a significant backlash in that. And, as I pointed out, as the law has unfolded it hasn’t exactly won people to the cause.
As I’ve said, political parties care about your vote in every single election for the rest of your life. That gives them more incentive to take your opinion into consideration than individuals who only run in some elections and will retire at some point.
Political parties in America are monolithic because our manner of election favors a 2 party system. Parties care more about campaign dollars than actual votes because our elections are amazingly corrupt. Neither of those situations are constitutionally mandated. We can fix them without changing the Constitution so they do not fall within the scope of the discussion here.
You are overthinking this. My point is merely that most people don’t understand what programs cost so a general desire to reduce government expenditures is not an indication that most Americans are fiscally conservative.
Do you have to read 13,000 pages to figure out what a sledgehammer to the knee might do? The ACA is an incredibly complex endeavor involving something vital: people’s very health. That made it incredibly easy to demagogue it. As I’ve said, that rhetoric was a factor in 2010 to some degree but the program itself wasn’t around for people to judge on its merits. This judgement on hypotheticals is a major flaw of the Constitution. Because it so often prevents the enactment of the very policies that parties campaign on voters rarely get to see the actual results of those policies. The ACA is a telling exception. It was unpopular and the rollout was bungled but it’s working and that matters. Because it’s working it will become politically impossible to repeal it before President Obama is no longer in a position to veto any such effort. By then it will be plain to all but the GOP hardliners that it’s a good idea. America could have more such successes if we had a more efficient political system.
You’ll have to be more specific. Currently, voters in individual Congressional districts elect their representative to the U.S. House, as per the U.S. Constitution. The Congressmen were chosen to represent their local/individual districts. I
would be very interested in hearing how you plan to use a national vote total to select the reps of individual districts.
FYI - The U.S. Constitution does not currently provide for a national vote total to somehow decide who will represent individual districts.
