“wordy words! words! you cannot deny these wordy words!”
According to the latest info on the Delta variation, vaccinated people can definitely spread it even if they themselves have no symptoms. A conundrum for sure.
Not if they’re spreading potentially fatal diseases, they don’t.
Moderating:
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It’s a diversion and a thread hijack. Please stick with the topic at hand.
Not a warning, only a note.
Those arguing with D’Anconia on this issue, please drop it.
Indeed. The GOP has discovered that they can tell this huge number of voters anything - literally anything and they will believe it and repeat it. There is absolutely nothing too outrageous, illogical or just plain insane that these folks will not believe instantly.
All they need to do is keep these folks continually ramped up with fear and anger, and they will loyally vote for the GOP. I can’t think of anything so unbelievably nutty that they could not use at some point in the future. I foresee a GOP candidate in the future that makes Trump look like a mature statesman.
Unless they want to vote, amirite?
Ann_Hedonia drops mic.
Indeed she does.
As per the modnote above, please drop replying to the hijack.
As expected, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called another special session to begin they day after the current one ends on Friday to debate election “reform.” The Texas House Democrats currently camped out in Washington to keep the Legislature from passing legislation will have so stay out of the state for another 30 days if they wish to continue to block the bill.
I fully expect them to fold. This walkout has been a debacle, with no plan for how they’re going to sustain it or benefit from it. Two of the Dems allegedly fighting for voting rights legislation in DC got busted that they’re actually on vacation to Portugal. Texas Democrats never fail to disappoint.
Long thread, bad memory, etc., but a post from one of our conservatives elsewhere in the forum made me think. To paraphrase, “80% of all Americans favor voter ID of some sort.” I believe this is largely true.
Where the two sides importantly diverge is that liberals would like states to engage in acts that actively assist everyone to acquire a valid voter ID (motor voter rules and a host of other methods). Conservatives seem to think that this cheapens the act of registration somehow, that voting has higher value if you have to jump through more hoops to do so.
I don’t get the conservative position at all and I especially don’t get their opposition to things like universal voting by mail. There’s no fucking widespread fraud; help your fellow citizens to vote.
I think the situation is simpler than that. Republicans want people to have to jump through hoops specifically so they can make the hoops easier to jump through for people who are likely to vote for them, and harder for people who are likely to vote Democrat. Democrats would prefer a working voter ID system, but know that the intention is to create a broken one whose purpose is to be used against them.
The literacy tests of the Jim Crow south also had a sensible-sounding justification – you couldn’t trust the vote of someone who couldn’t even read the ballot after all – but I don’t think anyone seriously believes that the primary purpose of the tests wasn’t disenfranchisement.
Conservatives are typically more hierarchical than progressives, who tend to be more pluralistic and egalitarian. Thus they want, and feel entitled to, more power. In the eyes of conservatives, they founded the country. They see themselves as the true Americans and they should set the standards for others to follow. They want to make it easier for conservatives to vote and harder for ‘others.’
It’s not about fraud. The Republicans know there’s virtually no fraud. It’s this:
Trumpy spoke this truth last year (March 2020), and McConnell had said it before him.
Donald Trump admitted on Monday that making it easier to vote in America would hurt the Republican party.
The president made the comments as he dismissed a Democratic-led push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day registration and early voting as states seek to safely run elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Democrats had proposed the measures as part of the coronavirus stimulus. They ultimately were not included in the $2.2tn final package, which included only $400m to states to help them run elections.
“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox & Friends.
…
My bold.
Q.E.D.
The Texas House of Representatives is within five votes of having a quorum as of yesterday as some Democrats have begun to trickle back to Austin. The Democrats are tearing into each other on Twitter over it. And the Governor has proposed a constitutional amendment to reduce quorum requirements from 2/3 to a majority so that they can never do it again.
I think the Democrats probably felt like they had no choice but to break the quorum, but they had no game plan other than that.
This is probably a good thing in the long run. Supermajority quorum requirements are objectively stupid and there’s a reason why only a few states have them.
The internet tells me those states are:
Wisconsin legislators aren't the first to walk out, leave town - CNN.com (2011)
But in Indiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas, two-thirds of the members make up a quorum, and in Wisconsin, three-fifths of the members are required to act on budget and tax bills, making it easier to thwart a bill.
~Max
Ted Cruz does it again. 
…
During that overnight final session, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-New York, requested unanimous consent from the Senate to immediately consider the For the People Act, a sweeping overhaul of federal elections that would preempt attempts from states to restrict voting access, would overhaul campaign finance laws and would end congressional gerrymandering, among other provisions.Only one senator is needed to block a unanimous consent request — a procedural move typically reserved for items that aren’t controversial — and Cruz jumped at the opportunity.
“This bill would constitute a federal government takeover of elections. … It would strike down virtually every reasonable voter integrity law in the country,” Cruz said.
Schumer proposed unanimous consent for two more proposals that would address redistricting and campaign finance, and Cruz also objected to those as motions.
The great hope among many of the more than 50 Texas Democrats who had decamped to the nation’s capital this summer was that the U.S. Senate would make tangible progress toward a federal voting rights bill before Congress’ annual August recess period.
…
I don’t think this is honest reporting. It has been very much “typical” to block unanimous consent requests to consider major legislation for years*, especially by Mr. McConnell’s caucus.
~Max
* for the record, since 1789.