Nah. Nationalize that shit and fuck the racist shitfucks over. They don’t get to ruin people’s lives just because they’re shitty.
Note: I recognize this probably at some point involves tearing the Constitution up. I’m extremist enough to not mind that. At this point, all I want is to ensure a lifetime of hellish misery for every one of those fuckers.
No dude, that’s not how our country works. It’s never going to happen.
And really, we don’t want that. I don’t want Trump’s government and the GOP at the national level imposing their bullshit on everyone.
If you are in a place, where everyone around you is voting for stuff you don’t like, the answer isn’t for you to impose your will on them.
Move. Go to a better state.
Would there be anything unconstitutional about mandating that, at least for federal elections, certain voting conditions were met?
I mean, what was the Voting Rights Act about, if not that?
Of course, what with that moronic SC decision some years back which basically gave the former Confederate states carte blanche for fuckery, now it’s increasingly a dead letter.
You realize that this just results in the shitty states having control of the Senate forever, right? The Senate is already horribly skewed in its representation of the American people as a whole.
No, no, the opposite. You gotta move more of your rational friends to these states so they become purple again, or stay purple, or eventually turn blue.
And what would those voting conditions be… say forcing people to show up with documents and photo ID and making sure it’s difficult to vote because that’s what the GOP would try to nationalize. They went after Oregon’s mail ballot, multiple times.
If it was nationalized, we probably wouldn’t have that right now. The racist stuff though is nationalized, it’s not legal if you could prove it was actually racist.
Sure, if you want to try doing that, that works even better.
But the answer isn’t to just abandon federalism and have the federal government control everything directly. Our country is too big for that.
Indeed, federalism is probably the country’s saving grace right now.
I wouldn’t be against it if living in certain states didn’t mean diminished say in Federal matters. The fact of the matter is, that people in states like Wyoming or North Dakota or some other miserable place get far greater representation then people in New York or California, and so they have more right over my life than I do. As long as not all states have equal say, moving to a new state because dislike the old impact all our futures.
I agree it’s a double-edged sword. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one edge, and it worked damned well for around 40 years+. But then the usual suspects started agitating to change things back one way or the other, culminating in the SC ruling ( Shelby County v. Holder - Wikipedia ) gutting one of its important provisions (pre-clearance).
This is why, in the absence of norms (like giving an SC nominee prompt hearings and a vote), the country is doomed, and very possibly within the next hundred years.
What do you think the result is going to be for those states if people abandon them? Of, even better, start refusing to do business with them?
Because I can tell you that the answer isn’t “robust economic growth”.
And ultimately if those policies result in economic devastation, then folks living there aren’t going to keep voting for it.
I suspect we’ll see some changes in our government if we can get the whackos in control out of it, but there have been certain times in this country when large groups of individuals woke up and felt the same way, the government doesn’t work for us, it’s unfair to the point of being lethal, and that was years ago; we’re still here today.
Parts of our voting is absolutely regulated at the federal level, but it’s not controlled there. The idea that it’s not nationalized at all is just silly, but it goes back to proving things, legally. If the federal government had complete control today, it would be worse due to which group is in charge right now. It’s the same reason I don’t want the federal government in control of everything like, oh I don’t know, my right to use birth control.
Right now, the only thing you can do is fight hard in the states that have the problem or move. And by fight hard, that means winning can still be losing and will continue to be unfair for a long time until shifts are had. It would take decades, generations to make sure things like literally unconstitutional maps are not actually used for real life votes.
Republicans have been voting to impoverish themselves since time immemorial. They’re not suddenly going to gain the 20 IQ points necessary to stop fucking themselves to death to screw blackie when their state slides from #47 to #48 in every prosperity measure under the sun. At a certain point, we accept that these people just need to be controlled for their own good, because they’re incapable of behaving appropriately.
Everyone wants an analogy of how bad it can become. Well, here’s some history of how bad it was.
(my bolds)
The Supreme Court heard a number of cases involving slavery in the late 1840s and 1850s. With one minor exception, slaveowners won every one of these cases and the Court overwhelmingly supported the power of Congress to assist them in recovering fugitive slaves.
In Jones v. Van Zandt, a unanimous Court held that northerners could be held liable for the fugitive slaves they aided even if they did not have any notice that the person they helped was a fugitive. In this case, Van Zandt, an Ohio farmer, had given a ride to a group of slaves walking along a road in outside of Cincinnati. He was subsequently sued by the owner, Jones, for the cost of recovering them and the value of one who was never recovered. Van Zandt argued there was a presumption of freedom for everyone in Ohio and thus he could not know that the people he gave the ride to were fugitive slaves. The Court rejected this argument, essentially applying the law of the South-that all blacks were presumptively slaves-to the free states. The opinion was written by Justice Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, and even the antislavery John McLean of Ohio accepted the result.
In Strader v. Graham, the Court considered for the first time the thorny problem of slave transit into free states. The Constitution allowed for the recovery of fugitive slaves, but said nothing about the right to voluntarily take a slave to a free state. Strader involved three slave musicians who, with the permission of their master (Graham), had traveled on a number of occasions from Kentucky to Ohio and Indiana to perform. After a number of such trips, they boarded Strader’s steamboat, without Graham’s permission, and escaped. Graham won a judgment in the Kentucky courts because Strader had allowed the slaves on his ship without their master’s written permission, in violation of Kentucky law. On appeal, Strader argued that the slaves had become free under the Northwest Ordinance and the laws of Ohio and Indiana when Graham allowed them to go to those free jurisdictions. This argument was based on a legal theory, first developed in Somerset v. Stewart by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, that a slave became free when taken to a free jurisdiction because there was no positive law creating slavery, and once free, the former slave was always free. By 1850, almost every northern state had adopted this rule, as had a many southern states. But by this time a number of slave state jurists and politicians had begun to question the propriety of following this rule when slaves returned from visits to free states.
In Strader, the Court faced the problem indirectly. The Kentucky courts had ruled that the status of Graham’s slaves was not at issue, and whether they were entitled to their freedom for previous trips to the North could only be determined if they appeared before the state courts. But until they appeared in a Kentucky court, they were presumptively slaves. Therefore, Strader had violated Kentucky law by allowing Graham’s slaves on his ship and he was liable to Graham for their value. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it must defer to the state of Kentucky on this matter, upholding the judgment against Graham. Under this rule, the slave states were free to decide for themselves who was a slave and who was not. In other words, the Court gave the slave states sanction to ignore free state law, and perhaps federal law, in determining who was a slave and who was not. The decision implied that the slave states could ignore the Full Faith and Credit provision of Article IV of the Constitution, just as Kentucky had ignored the constitutions of Indiana and Ohio. The true proslavery implications of this case would become apparent in Dred Scott v. Sandford, six years later.
A year after Strader, the Court clarified an aspect of the jurisprudence of fugitive slaves in Moore v. Illinois. In Prigg, the Court had struck down all state personal liberty laws. In that case, Justice Story had declared that no state could add to the requirements for the return of fugitive slaves, and thus all personal liberty laws providing due process for alleged fugitives were unconstitutional. Despite this huge victory for slavery, in a concurring opinion Chief Justice Taney complained that the decision would also prevent the free states from helping in the return of fugitive slaves. But in Moore, the Court upheld an Illinois statute which punished Illinois citizens for harboring fugitive slaves. This was one more victory for slavery.
Five years later, the Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, the most notoriously proslavery decision in the nation’s jurisprudence. The outcome of the case-that Scott remained a slave-was plausibly correct, based, if nothing else, on Strader v. Graham. Scott claimed his freedom because he had lived in the free state of Illinois and in the Wisconsin Territory (in what later became Minnesota) where slavery was banned by the Compromise of 1820 (also called the Missouri Compromise) and various other federal laws. The Court initially planned to decide the case on the basis of Strader, and had it done so the case would probably be long forgotten. But the southerners on the Court insisted on a more comprehensive result, which led to Taney’s massive and extraordinarily proslavery opinion. Speaking for the Court, Taney held that 1) slavery was a specially protected property under the Constitution; 2) free blacks could never be considered citizens of the United States and essentially had no rights under the Constitution; 3) that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the federal territories; 4) no law in the territories could free slaves because that would be an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment; and 5) that the Missouri Compromise unconstitutionally banned slavery in the federal territories, and by implication the ban on slavery in the Act creating the Oregon Territory was also unconstitutional. This was a sweeping proslavery opinion that settled the issue of slavery in the territories by allowing slavery in all the territories.
A concurring opinion by Justice Nelson of New York also directly telegraphed how the Court would rule on the issue of slave transit. Nelson noted at the very end of his opinion:
A question has been alluded to, on the argument, namely: the right of the master with his slave of transit into or through a free State, on Business or commercial pursuits, or in the exercise of a Federal right, or the discharge of a Federal duty, being a citizen of the United States, which is not before us. This question depends upon different considerations and principles from the one in hand, and turns upon the rights and privileges secured to a common citizen of the republic under the Constitution of the United States. When that question arises, we shall be prepared to decide it.
The implication was clear: as soon as the Court had an opportunity, it would guarantee that masters could travel anywhere in the United States with their slaves. In his House Divided Speech, Abraham Lincoln predicted that the logic of Dred Scott would lead to legalizing slavery in the North through the next Dred Scott decision. Nelson’s opinion certainly made this seem likely.
The final presecession decision on slavery was Ableman v. Booth, arguably the most anti-states’ rights decision since Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, McCulloch v. Maryland, and Cohens v. Virginia. But the difference between the cases is striking. Martin, McCulloch, and Cohens were seen as attacks on the sovereignty of southern states, leading to complaints by some Virginians that the Court had eviscerated the rights of the states. Ableman was directed at northern states and supported the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The case began when Sherman Booth, an antislavery editor in Milwaukee, helped lead a mob that rescued a fugitive slave name Joshua Glover, who had been in federal custody. United States Marshal Stephen Ableman then arrested Booth. At this point, the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervened, freeing Booth with a writ of habeas corpus. There, the Wisconsin Court declared that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was unconstitutional. The Wisconsin Supreme Court then refused to send a record of the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, the U.S. Supreme Court did not decide the case until 1859, when Chief Justice Taney emphatically asserted:
No State judge or court, after they are judicially informed that the party is imprisoned under the authority of the United States, has any right to interfere with him, or to require him to be brought before them. And if the authority of a State, in the form of judicial process or otherwise, should attempt to control the marshal or other authorized officer or agent of the United States, in any respect, in the custody of his prisoner, it would be his duty to resist it, and to call to his aid any force that might be necessary to maintain the authority of law against illegal interference. No judicial process, whatever form it may assume, can have any lawful authority outside of the limits of the jurisdiction of the court or judge by whom it is issued; and an attempt to enforce it beyond these boundaries is nothing less than lawless violence.
Northern states’ rights claims would gain no support from the Supreme Court. Nor was the U.S. Supreme Court troubled by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Speaking for a unanimous Court, Taney unambiguously proclaimed: the act of Congress commonly called the fugitive slave law is, in all of its provisions, fully authorized by the Constitution of the United States. Taney noted that the Wisconsin Supreme Court had asserted its supremacy over the federal courts. This astounded the Chief Justice as he noted:
These propositions are new in the jurisprudence of the United States, as well as of the States; and the supremacy of the State courts over the courts of the United States, in cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States, is now for the first time asserted and acted upon in the Supreme Court of a State.
Ableman was a strongly nationalist opinion-as strong as anything Justice Joseph Story or Chief Justice John Marshall might have written. But it was proslavery nationalism. It upheld the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and emphatically rejected the antislavery jurisprudence of a northern state. It was a decision slaveowners loved.
I wonder what would happen if some WH decided to infer consent instead of asking for affirmative vote. Put forth a nominee and say something like “In the absence of a Senate vote AGAINST the nominee by 120 days from today, we will assume consent and proceed with installation of the new SC justice.” So Senate delay and inaction works against them and they are forced to go through the process if they want to intervene.
That’s what happens when an appointment is made out of session, isn’t it?
A bit like it, but that is a special case which is controlled by the Senate itself, in that it can just choose to never go out of session for more than 3 days by artificially keeping some people in town to do trivial business at all times.
I think every US spangly big box/intraweb entity should pony up $10 gift card too.
Lessons well learned
Bonus Mitchyness
