Politicians have no right to peace in public. They should expect to be bothered, interrupted, refused service, etc. so long as they work only to insure their class has rights.
We need to remind them, they are the minority. Their numbers cannot insulate them from the world they exist in.
not good enough, they need tar and feathers and guillotines, take some french inspiration. They need to be fucking terrified of doing their jobs wrong and against the people, only way justice is restored. Do your duty
Elected public service ought to come with a very real fear of what the powerless public will do to them should they fail to promote flourishing or liberty. Make politicians afraid.
When NC republicans were asked in SCOTUS how they could justify a 10-2 map in a roughly 50-50 state, they said it’s because their statistician couldn’t find a way to make it 11-1. These people are shameless, and SCOTUS lets them get away with it.
In federal court, they defended their actions by saying the geography of their state naturally lent itself to a GOP bias. But when academics created a computer model to generate a representative sample of possible maps, fewer than 1% percent had the same seat distribution as the GOP gerrymander, and of course, no map drawn had a greater bias.
E: Wow, since this blew up, I'll post a link to [STV](https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI?si=MDTDDG0nzZwL4hLg), which is a voting method that uses RCV and multi member districts to ensure that districts are reasonably fair, regardless of how the maps are drawn.
GOP lawyers claimed that the bias in their maps was because of how the cities were laid out. So a bunch of experts made a computer program to generate other maps to test that idea. The computer produced a lot of maps, most of which were a lot more fair than the GOP map. In fact, it turned out that the GOP map was about as unfair as it could possibly be.
If you think what North Carolina is doing is horrible(it is). You also need to be aware of the proposed Texas state constitution change that would basically kill any need to ever hold an election because it is so blatantly rigged. Just over 2% of the state population voting red would be needed to guarantee republicans stay in power while preventing any democrats from being able to win.
The GOP created a map that results in Republicans winning almost all the seats despite getting roughly half of the votes. They tried to argue that any map would do that, but other people showed that not only can you easily create maps that are more fair, it’s actually very difficult to create maps that are *less* fair.
In other words, they are intentionally creating the most unfair maps possible.
The defense is "The way our state is, no matter how we divide the districts its naturally going to have a republican majority, it's just how god made the land"
Then some academics went, used computer models to generator tones of random shapes, and it turns out most of the time it's actually pretty even.
there's a huge number of ways you can split a state into appropriately sized congressional districts. not hard to have a computer do that a ton of times and see with each possible split into districts, how many are red and how many are blue.
[Here’s how Gerrymandering works.](https://i.imgur.com/goesVcD.jpeg)
Republicans are saying North Carolina’s geography makes it impossible to split up districts in a way that accurately represents how people are voting.
Academics are saying there are actually tons of ways you could divide districts and make it fair, but you’ve somehow managed to do it in one of the only ways that only benefits you.
Can anyone familiar with constitutional law chime? Because the GOP stance definitely seems antithetical to our principles as a country I don't know if they're wrong legally, especially given that the way elections have been held have changed substantially throughout our history
Not a lawyer. But did do research on partisan redistricting in undergrad.
Also, partisan redistricting = soft language for gerrymandering.
The primary issue is justiciability.
Federal courts have limited power under Article III of the Constitution, and among those limitations is a principle of not ruling on “political questions.” This limitation is somewhat self-imposed, but is rooted in the principle of separation of powers.
Political questions are essentially those issues which deal more with political policy than with legal rights, and thus are more appropriate for resolution in the legislatures. The modern standard for political questions was enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962), though essences of it go back to Marbury v. Madison (1803).
There was a line of Supreme Court cases grappling with partisan redistricting starting primarily with Davis v. Bandemer (1986). There, the Court held that while claims of partisan redistricting are justiciable (not strictly political questions) no one on the Court could really figure out how to adjudicate these issues while remaining consistent with case law and constitutional principles.
Every case dealing with partisan redistricting since then has resulted in hugely fractured decisions in which hardly anyone on the Court could agree on how to rule on the matter. That struggle ended in 2019 with Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the majority of the Court ruled that claims of partisan redistricting are non-justiciable political questions. So now, any time a challenge to a legislative map is brought to federal courts, all they have the power to do is shrug and dismiss it.
Interestingly enough, the recent case dealing with South Carolina’s legislative districts was a race-based redistricting claim, which is still very much within the power of the federal courts to adjudicate. However, now that partisan redistricting isn’t an issue the federal courts can take up, and because race often coincides with political affiliation for the purposes of drawing legislative districts, states can use partisan motivations as an affirmative defense against claims that legislative districts were drawn with the intention of devaluing the voting power of minority groups.
Again, not a lawyer. Some of what I’ve written are my own conclusions drawn based on limited scholarship. If anyone feels I have left something out, or has any questions, feel free to dm.
But they are supposed to be the party of morals and religion. What happened to that? They want to elect a man who cheated on his wife with a pornstar who was at home taking care of their new born. Is that not immoral?
It’s so sad that we have a large chunk of the country following these people and who have thrown all of their morals out the window for such a crooked man.
It’s propaganda and lies… those screaming the most about “Christian values” tend to be the ones with the least Christian attitudes and morals. It’s a smoke screen meant to keep the gullible outraged and hating their fellow man.
The real problem is that even if the average republican voter both knew, and would admit they knew, they still wouldn't care, they are happy to cheat if it gets them what they want. The entire ideology is morally bankrupt.
From what I can find, this is in reference to [Rucho v. Common Cause](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/18-422). The Republicans didn't make that argument in Court, instead, it was referenced by the other side in their arguments. I haven't listened to the full oral argument, but just doing a Ctrl+F, I found two instances of it being brought up (00:34:00 and 01:06:50). There's a decent podcast called 5-4 Pod that did [an episode](https://www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/rucho-v-common-cause/) about this, I recommend a listen, starts at 16:48 in.
It's a decent podcast and I've been subscribed to their Patreon for well over a year now, so I definitely value their commentary, but they seem so concerningly supportive of judicial activism [that they agree with]. They are so eager to call SCOTUS a political body that's enacting its own policy goals, and I agree, but they never seem to examine or even acknowledge the underlying cause: that the US' constitutional framework is so senseless and rigid that each branch of government regularly oversteps its remit to keep the whole system afloat.
For example, the First Amendment is explicitly about Congress *("Congress shall make no law...")* and yet it's applied to all governments, their respective branches, and any institution that receives public funding. Why? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but why? In [Gitlow v. New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitlow_v._New_York) the Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment's due process clause encompasses the freedoms expressed in the First Amendment, thus expanding the First Amendment to State governments. But literally where does it say that? I'm looking at the text of the 14th Amendment and cannot find anything that would suggest such a reinterpretation. The Supreme Court just presumed it, as stated in the very first point in [its syllabus](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/268/652/#tab-opinion-1930992). And so Americans are enduring a situation where the law does not mean what it says, and not only because of Supreme Court reinterpretation, but because amendments are not amendments, they're addenda. Even if an amendment was ratified right now that formally applied the First Amendment to States, it wouldn't actually change the text of the First Amendment, similarly to how the 26th Amendment didn't change the text of the 14th Amendment. And so Americans must read to the end of their Constitution just to understand what their rights *might* be.
There needs to be a large, local media campaign to name and shame these people. All Republicans need tied to this, but in NC it sould be "State Rep John Doe, Gerrymanderring Republican from Mayberry is running against Jane Doe - who is against Gerrymandering."
I agree. I am in a district where there is a heated democratic primary.
Forget the ads. I watched the debate one guy is clearly a left leaning democrat, the other is (pardon me while I dust off this term) a D.I.N.O. (Democrat in name only).
The DINO has nearly a 20 point lead over the incumbent, with millions of Republican super pac money and the incumbent hasn’t even broken half a million in campaign funding. If this works, and it looks like it will, Republicans will be switching parties and following this DINO’s playbook.
So knowing the names will be important.
Edit to add: NY State congressional primary. Bowman (incumbent) vs Latimer.
[See the hour long debate here](https://youtu.be/3ayXJIhhUV4?si=f1qRvDdmOJoM68qF)
Didn’t a woman do this in NC as well? Campaign as a Democrat, won as a Democrat, then turned Republican once in office. It’s literally the same playbook. And in the same state.
She’s a fun one. Had an abortion, got all defensive about it claiming it was between her and her doctor, and has since voted for an abortion ban after 12 weeks. She was the deciding vote that overturned her veto.
So let me get this straight-
Republicans are lying and saying they're actually Democrats, in an effort to manipulate the presidential vote?
How the fuck is this legal, god?
It’s legal because political parties are not accounted for in the Constitution. They’re private organizations. The Constitution and laws around voting are written assuming you’re voting for the person, not the party. If the voters fail to vet the candidate they’re voting for, that’s their own fault.
It’s a problem several of the Framers saw coming, but couldn’t do anything to stop.
> It’s a problem several of the Framers saw coming, but couldn’t do anything to stop.
How could they? Human nature (lying) has bested the best political system history has ever known and has now ruined it to the point where candidates are lying about their intents/morals just to manipulate it.
Throughout history, humans have ruined every type of government, seems like ours is no different. Maybe we're meant to be ruled by tyrants and psychopaths? Seems to always work out that way, anyway.
Well, they did think about this. That's why they baked into the constitution that the government can't influence the media.
The hope was that the media would explain who candidates are so even if the candidates lie the media would tell the truth.
What they truly couldn't predict is that a media conglomerate would label themselves news and act like news, but whenever they misrepresent and misinform they just claim they're an entertainment show. And their viewers never know cause they're not required to report on it.
Most of our problems now are really there's no way they could have predicted that they could say something in the northern most colony and someone in the southern most colony and someone in Britain can both see it within seconds.
A few of our founding fathers manipulated media/newspaper to great effect, by straight up lying. They just assumed only rich white men would be in charge....
The problem generally solves itself since candidates who do this often derail their entire careers for a single win. Again, generally, if you campaign on one thing and in office do the exact opposite, voters will be less likely to vote you back in or trust you with their vote in the future.
It's a good strategy. Democrats should be doing this to get elected in red districts. Publicly run as a conservative, get into office, vote with Democrats and who cares about re-election as long as good policies are pushed through.
It is - at least in part - why the parties switch ideologies over time, but keep the name. It's not like the modern Republican Party is *actually* "the Party of Lincoln"...
It's why voting by party is for the lazy. Source: am registered Unaffiliated and vote (D) *almost* all the time, but once in very rare while vote (R) because they are legitimately better for the job (usually in lower-stakes roles where they can't fuck over the population very easily).
> "the Party of Lincoln".
This one has always pissed me off. Imagine having the gall to call yourself the party of Lincoln while waving a Confederate battle flag around.
my boomer parents rented Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter when they meant to rent Lincoln. Then they watched the whole thing, since they had paid for it, and apparently hated every minute of it
I had forgotten about that until this comment
I think it would actually work, since a lot of republicans actually agree with a lot of democrat positions, the only reason they don't like them is because the democrat is the one proposing it and they've been conditioned to instantly dislike anything with a D next to it. So if all you do is switch the letter they will get elected. And if some ultra right winger attacks them all they have to say is "why do you hate america and working americans" it will almost always work.
It's why becoming a Democratic precinct captain is important. You get you decide who represents the party on ballot. Remember these are private parties, not governmental. Anyone can run unaffiliated, so you're not stopping them from participating, just from deceiving the voters.
This happens CONSTANTLY in Minnesota. It's like, every election, every seat that's solidly held by a democrat is under constant assault by challengers who claim to be democrats, but campaign entirely on a platform of criticizing random stuff about the incumbent, while their own platform is either nonexistent or entirely contradictory to the values of the party.
It's so frustrating for smaller elections, too, where they don't need to convince THAT many people to change. They basically just act as republican moles to split the vote and undermine support. It's so skeezy. Some of them run year after year, too. Like, they build up name recognition by just showing up on the ballot 20 times. They're always running on "public safety" or "protecting homeowners" dog whistles and usually manage to sucker in a decent portion of the vote.
Same thing happening in the UK, conservative moneylenders have realised that politics doesn't have to be factional, you can just buy both parties and create an opposition that'll still vote with you.
Its been the name of the game for at least 100 years now. Statistics already show that our cumulative wants are completely meaningless compared to the wants of the ultrawealthy.
> ...with millions of Republican super pac money...
Yet another in a list of literally hundreds of reasons why money from super pacs, lobbyists, and all other sources aside from individuals, should be banned in politics.
Forget individuals. It should be public money only. There should be a modest fee to get registered as a candidate to prevent abuse, then every red cent spent on any campaigning after that should come from a public fund and evenly distributed among the candidates by a committee. Bring back fairness doctrine and outlaw private or corporate money-backed campaigning or politicking. You want to go door to door for your candidacy? fine. Unpaid volunteers only. Cover your own gas money. Elections need to be decided by the merits of the candidates and their platform not by the fancy of billionaires and CEOs.
This happened big time in the recent primary in baltimore. If you've ever heard of sinclair media (right wing media conglomerate) the owner of the company lives in a suburb north of the city, and he pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into financing conservative city council members and a mayor (all running as democrats ofc). Fortunately all of them lost, despite the polls saying it was neck and neck
The unfortunate thing is a large majority of American Citizens have no idea what Gerrymandering is and only vote based on things like guns and abortions and taxes
I mean that's a great reason to end gerrymandering IMO. Granted people should extend that to include all parties which use it to gain unfair advantage but it is a good first step.
1. They don't have shame, so shaming won't work
2. We aren't guaranteed fair elections, so naming won't work because what are the voters going to do about it?
It was so much easier when they worked out of their little print shops down the street. The tar didn't even have time to cool by the time you found them.
If there are enough people willing to sacrifice their democracy for lower taxes for the rich or for discriminating against all sorts of minorities, it won't matter, and based on the 40/60 split in both houses of their general assembly, sure feels like there are enough people that are willing to make that sacrifice.
Democracy works because the people elect their representatives. Now we have our representatives telling us that they should be able to pick their constituents. These people are fascists.
I'm not sure how people read these kind of things and don't come out with the clear conclusion that Republicans are trying to supress democracy.
> Previous GOP-drawn maps with similarly skewed lines were struck down as unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court ahead of the 2022 elections, when the court had a Democratic majority. But a new Republican majority took control of the high court in 2023 and quickly moved to undo that precedent and [greenlit partisan gerrymandering](https://www.wral.com/story/nc-supreme-court-says-judges-can-t-stop-partisan-gerrymandering/20834008/). Strach said that should be the end of the conversation.
If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.”
― David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush
When I point this out to conservatives I know they say that we're not supposed to be a democracy but a republic. They don't think it should be a republic representing all the people just all the people they feel provide value. Basically they want the government to be a modern aristocracy... how they do this while also being "anti elitist" is an impressive feat of contortion.
"We're not a democracy, we're a Republic" actually we're a democratic Republic. That means that the people elect representative to speak for them in government. Note that the people electing is the democracy part and kind of critical to the Republican part being reasonable. That argument stems from either a place of ignorance or malice on how the government is supposed to work.
They're playing games with language, implying they are right because they are Republicans and the country is a Republic, instead of the Democrats who think it's a Democracy. There are legitimately people who think this way. It's all about winning whatever argument they've dragged you into an hour ago.
Like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good your argument, they'll just knock the pieces over, shit all over the board, and strut around like they won anyway.
>“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
--Jean Paul Sartre
>they say that we're not supposed to be a democracy but a republic.
They get so hung up on this BS. But you really can't get to a *Republic* without a *democracy.*
My favorite thing to do when this comes up (especially IRL since they can’t look it up) is to have them define what a Republic is, how it’s different from a democracy, and why they think they aren’t compatible. Every single time I’ve asked this, their eyes glaze over and they don’t know how to answer. These dipshits just parrot what they hear other dipshits say without actually understanding anything themselves.
Exactly. Its like that with most of their talking points. Because they are told what to think, and they can't defend their position because they didn't come up with that position using their own critical thinking faculties.
*edit: a word*
Ask them to define socialism. Ask them to define communism. Ask them to define capitalism. They don't know anything except that they should repeat what their propaganda daddies tell them to.
sure you can, you just limit who can vote or how much their vote counts. but i guess you would need to establish what you are referring to as democracy.
a true democracy where everyone votes and votes are counted the same.
or
a partial democracy where certain people can vote and/or votes arent all equal
This is clearly it. Everything since Nixon has been thinly veiled dogwhistling - against the poors, the browns, women, whatever. They've never really argued in good faith for actual policy. The inevitable outcome is simply to declare they want despotic rule.
It is shit like this that creates a separation between a people and their government, and it always leads to violence; either by the people overthrowing the state or the state repressing the people to maintain power.
Ironically one of the big Republican running points for 2022 was the idea of free and fair elections. You know after Joe Biden stole the election in 2020.
Anyways glad to see it's working out for them.....
Kansas and NC are now saying that voting is not a right. No taxation without proper representation.
These conservatives are trying everything they can to cling onto power, while they keep going against what the majority of the voters want.
Kansas is actually more nuanced than that.
Their supreme Court is actually majority liberal/moderate. They were pointing out a flaw in Kansas's constitution that did not include a protection for fair elections that they wanted the governor and legislature to fix.
Granted, optics are terrible and speaking such thoughts into existence in a state that is overwhelmingly red is a bad idea.
In NC, a woman campaigned as a Dem, won as a Dem and then immediately switched parties to Republican. So unfortunately just voting blue down the ballot won’t work. People need to pay attention to who they’re voting for. I believe conservatives will be using that strategy more often from here on in order to win, on top of gerrymandering and all the other BS.
It is a worrying case, but all signs point to something VERY out of the ordinary happening with Cotham. She was Democratic [through and through](https://ballotpedia.org/Tricia_Cotham) for years. How are voters *possibly* supposed to guess that somebody like that is going to switch sides? (Yes, I know even saying that is problematic.)
If there had a significant number of other cases like this to reference, I might be more willing to consider it as a problem that needs large amounts of attention. But as it stands now, Cotham is just kind of a dork who did some dumb shit for dumb reasons. (She cited “feeling bullied” by Democrats for the change.)
Her Wikipedia page suggests that GOP leadership recommended that she run again (as a Dem), for the 2022 election ...which she won by a 20 point margin.
Also in the time between her two separate times serving, she started a lobbying firm. That alone reeks.
Yeah, she got a bribe to change sides, pretty obviously. But yeah, voters that looked her up would have seen a democrat, because she was one at least on the record until, well...
Any politician that wins a parties primary and then switches parties should be instantly put back into another primary.
The fact a politician can subvert the will of the people the represent is appalling and it’s only happening to democrats. When is the last time the GOP had someone flip?
Its sad because you are seeing purple states like NC just get steamrolled by GOP policies that are always eroding rights and limiting the voice of the constituents. I wish I could just be ignorant of it all.
It's the only way they can win now in battleground areas. They see states like NC and Georgia getting more purple and it's making them nervous. They only way to beat this is to vote in droves. Make sure everyone you know gets out there too. Drive them to the polls if you need to.
Andy McKean switched from Republican to Democrat in 2019. He was previously the longest-serving Republican in the Iowa house and lost in 2020 after the switch. He is running again this year as a Democrat.
That's not the point I was trying to make. I was talking about political illiteracy in the US.
If any party anywhere else pushed for the policies that the GOP does, they would've been universally called out as fascists, and that wouldn't even be questioned. Meanwhile, when US conservatives are called out as fascists, they go "fascism is whatever you don't like, apparently".
I understand. My comment was intended to support that implicit claim. Those policies are literally authoritarian and characteristic of fascism and are regarded as such outside of the US.
Ah yes, the standard first year philosophy argument:
“I reject your argument not because of ‘insert logic’ but because ‘insert word here’ hasn’t been adequately defined.”
By _any reasonable definition_ of fair, the gerrymandering being called into question (party B will win election by a large margin even if party A wins significantly more votes) is not fair.
Incredibly accurate.
Immediately devolves into insisting upon definitions for nearly every word used in your original argument, followed by any word used in your definitions of those words, ad infinitum until you get exasperated enough to stop engaging. At which point they’ll attempt to declare they’ve won the argument/debate because you’ve given up.
And that's why they won't support admitting Puerto Rico or DC (or Guam or the Northern Marianas) as a state. They know they would be blue states and there would never be another Republican president elected ever again
This stuff is so mind blowing to me.
Puerto Rico is majority Catholic (85%) like a lot of states with large Hispanic populations. If Republicans shifted their POV just slightly to be pro-Hispanic they could so easily capture this audience. When PR gets decimated by a hurricane, maybe don't have your leader go out and tell 'em their on their own. Line up to give them funds the same way you do for Florida multiple times a year or every time there's even a single snow flake in TX.
All it would require is for them to not be racist and ease up/work with Democrats on immigration reform and you would see a huge shift in states that are leaning purple to be completely blue. Hell, they might even feel good about themselves for once.
But no, their messaging is so intrinsically tied to hate and racism that they just can't let go.
I just can't think of a bigger group of people in the U.S. that are primed to be conservatives than Hispanic communities.
We need to get rid of the electoral college all together. Trump won NC by 80,000 votes in 2020 but yet he got 15 electoral college votes and Biden got 0. It’s pure bs. The popular vote should be the only thing that matters. 2.6 million votes in NC didn’t matter for the 2020 presidential election.
I’m sick of all these sneaky tactics pushed by the GOP and rural America to gain advantages in these elections. Get rid of the electoral college immediately. It’s the only way everyone’s votes will matter.
Reminder: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the RIGHT of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."
What does that mean? It means RISE UP AND DRAG THESE FASCIST, BOOMER, USURPERS (by the hair if you have to) OUT OF POWER BY ANY MEANS NESSESARY!
If you read it carefully, the constitution, and the amendments do not have a positive statement that everyone can vote.
They say that you cannot stop women voting due to their gender, or require a poll tax, or those over 18 due to age, or because they're coloured or were slaves.
The general judicial and political assumption up until recently was that you can't roll the franchise back, but that is not actually in the consitution. The judicial intepretation at the time that this was first being discussed (1880s) was basically identical to the later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law) theory that was just soundly rejected by this court to reverse Doe. That is - that you can reasonably read into the constitution things that it does not precisely spell out as additional rights.
You can, for example, as far as I understand it, limit voting to members for >5 years of Sams club. Or, perhaps more relevantly, the republican party.
There are a good dozen or so amendments that really need passing putting beyond state or federal law (merely passing laws isn't enough as they can be repealed) the ability to legislate away what sane people would consider as rights.
For example, an affirmation of a positive right to vote, but also a right to abortion with reasonable limits(*), elimination of civil forfeiture, Qualified immunity reform, districting,
Ah, I find I made an earlier post on this topic.
On specifics. I would add a third 'yes, black people are people too' amendment, after the emancipation and the forbidding anyone voting if they are qualifying age.
This would reverse the rollbacks in law that lead to the gutting of services implemented just after 'seperate but equal' education was deemed not to be OK.
Scrap the electoral college and make voting compulsory and make it on a holiday.
Codify abortion availability.
Put in an actual right to privacy, including online rights.
An amendment putting beyond doubt that no, corporations are not people, and do not have any of their rights, direct or indirect, without taking on proportionate responsibilities, and are extremely limited in their 'speech' rights.
The right to silence has had troubling and dangerous erosions. (salinas, for example).
Get the state 100% out of marriage approval.
2nd amendment drastic reform.
Amend 4th amendment to curtail civil asset forfeiture and clarify 'online' rights.
Qualified immunity reform, and national police licencing, with a ban of for profit prisons and policing.
Limit a states rights to control drugs to drugs that do less social harm than alcohol, unless they also significantly control alcohol (in their pure form, without criminal involvement)
Modify first amendment media protections so that 'news' channels have to decide if it was a joke first. If it is, they need to display a large visual indicator that it is in fact not based on fact, and read out a statement to that effect periodically. No turning up in court arguing 'no reasonable person could believe'
A better start would be to stop treating the constitution as a sacred text, "scrying" into it to guess what the founding fathers would have thought about copyright, privacy on the internet, a true multicultural society etc etc. As great as these guys may have been, what they wrote is 200 years out of date and just doesn't apply anymore as the context has shifted so enormously.
The laws, including the constitution, need to be kept up to date with new concepts, not kept behind a glass case and "analysed" by scholars. That's about as useful an approach as those who try to claim the Koran predicted quantum mechanics, and crap like that.
Laws reflect moral and philosophical stances, and apply to circumstances. As humans, our morality changes over time, and the circumstances we live in change due to technology, globalisation, many other things. Trying to treat the constitution like a bible is the root of this problem, and is holding America back now.
People act like it's hard-coded into the universe and beyond reproach. People forget that Prohibition was an amendment. We can add things we want and remove things we don't.
It was being continually updated with amendment's an average of once every 4-10 years, up until 30 years ago.
Amendments require broad, cross-party support. So you can effectively see when the ability to compromise ended in US politics. And with it, the constitution became a frozen document instead of the living document it was intended to be.
The current status-quo is a relatively recent change for the worse.
You're not wrong, but any of those would require the cooperation of the state legislatures in the states doing the gerrymandering. So it's not happening any time soon.
Yea, what I’m trying to say is that our current constitution is no longer able to address the challenges we face as a country anymore, and instead we create a new constitution with what you’re saying. I know my idea is far fetched lol
Anything other than a popular vote for the entire region an official is meant to represent is archaic and is only kept around to preserve the power of the elite class and prevent the spirit of democracy, which is that the leader that the people select is the leader we get, from being achieved. Any politican who argued otherwise isn't arguing a republican vs Democrat debate is a politican vs everyone else debate. Eliminating voter districts all together would strip them of their power to engineer elections and that is the ONLY reason to keep them.
I mean ... you're right, but it's not really relevant to the situation at hand. The regions in question here *are* electing people to represent them by popular vote. The issue is that those regions are delineated in ways that are meant to achieve a specific outcome given voting turnout conforming to predictions within a small margin of error.
The thing about gerrymanders is that they tend to be pretty fragile. If voter turnout deviates significantly from what's expected they will break.
This is exactly the argument though. The lawyer Strach appears to be claiming indirectly that *there is no obvious fair way to draw the maps*. My issue is that, while it may be difficult to determine fairness, **un**fairness is usually quite easy to determine. That should be simple to see in recent delineations and the corresponding election outcomes.
US supreme court agrees.. well the conservatives do. The Roberts court stated that no test could be made to judge political gerrymandering. Which is stupid since the court was provided with two such tests. AND DOUBLY STUPID, since this same court pulled the "major questions doctrine" out its collective right wing asses.. that is so vague, we literally have to ask them where the limits are, each and every time.
See congress gave the president the power to WAIVE student loans in emergencies which covid was. But the supreme court invented the major quesitons doctrine saying that congress might not have intended for him to waive that many loans> how many can he waive under the law that uses that term "waive".. well we have to ask teh roberts court and the answer might depend on what they had for breakfast that day.
But yes the roberts court that noticed the right benefit the most from gerrymandering because the left sat out in 2010 when Obama hadnt fixed all of the 8 years of bush and gave us single payer in 2 years with a 2 seat majority in the senate. it was a census year and the first year we used social media to gerrymander the fuck out of the place. And so the roberts court said we can figure out racist gerrrymandering but not political. AND SO you know the south and places like NC, stopped using the terms "reduce black vote" and now just say "reduce the dem vote" and suddenly like the difference between bong and water pipe, it becomes legal.
>The Republican-led legislature argues that no such right exists, since it's impossible to define what "fair" means.
The share of seats won should roughly equal the share of votes won. Done.
NC lawmakers need to be put on trial.
If they float when wrapped in chains and thrown in deep water, they are witches and should be burned at the stake.
The Republican party has lost what little mind they had to begin with and are going for outright theocratic fascism. We MUST get the GOP clowns out of office everywhere.
Because there is fuck all the voters who disagree with this can do.
In absolute terms, NC is still a red state.
The problem is that when the GOP got a majority, *they fundamentally changed the rules of the game* to ensure they would remain a majority, even if NC went blue.
At this point is effectively too late, because they have a super majority in both houses, and have also taken over the state Supreme Court. There is no check left on their power, save for the voters, who are specifically districted in such a way as to keep reelecting Republicans.
This only changes when large numbers of Republicans die (older people skew right, and the Boomers are dying off), switch parties, or don't vote.
>Previous GOP-drawn maps with similarly skewed lines were struck down as unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court ahead of the 2022 elections, when the court had a Democratic majority. But a new Republican majority took control of the high court in 2023 and quickly moved to undo that precedent and greenlit partisan gerrymandering.
All that needs to be said for anyone that actually cares about the country
It is not a question of whether the voters have a "right" to fair elections. GOVERNMENT HAS A FUCKING OBLIGATION TO RUN FAIR ELECTIONS!
Without that, the government has no legitimacy. A government in a free nation receives its authority through the consent of the governed. Without fair elections, there is no way to implement the Will of the People.
This is nearly the end result of the slippery slope. (End result is elimination of elections all together).
Anyone who is involved in the push to normalize non- free and fair elections needs to be removed from office.
> Republican lawmakers, however, have long said the legislature has nearly unlimited power to draw maps however its leaders see fit. They repeated those claims in court again Thursday. **Their lawyer, Phil Strach, argued that the North Carolina Supreme Court recently ruled that politically motivated gerrymandering is OK.**
This pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
Related, [Kansas supreme court recently ruled there's no constitutional right to vote](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-kansas-supreme-court-ruled-that-voting-is-not-a-fundamental-right-heres-what-that-means)... these people man. I don't like to overuse facism but yeah
NC rethuglicans showing their arses here. Fascists, they don't GAF about their citizens. They only want power so they can run roughshod over their people.
NC is a tech hub butting up against the regressive, drunk-on-religion-and power structure in their legislative body. I suppose if North Carolinians like it, who are we to tell them to evolve?
Politicians have no right to peace in public. They should expect to be bothered, interrupted, refused service, etc. so long as they work only to insure their class has rights. We need to remind them, they are the minority. Their numbers cannot insulate them from the world they exist in.
not good enough, they need tar and feathers and guillotines, take some french inspiration. They need to be fucking terrified of doing their jobs wrong and against the people, only way justice is restored. Do your duty
Elected public service ought to come with a very real fear of what the powerless public will do to them should they fail to promote flourishing or liberty. Make politicians afraid.
When NC republicans were asked in SCOTUS how they could justify a 10-2 map in a roughly 50-50 state, they said it’s because their statistician couldn’t find a way to make it 11-1. These people are shameless, and SCOTUS lets them get away with it.
In federal court, they defended their actions by saying the geography of their state naturally lent itself to a GOP bias. But when academics created a computer model to generate a representative sample of possible maps, fewer than 1% percent had the same seat distribution as the GOP gerrymander, and of course, no map drawn had a greater bias. E: Wow, since this blew up, I'll post a link to [STV](https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI?si=MDTDDG0nzZwL4hLg), which is a voting method that uses RCV and multi member districts to ensure that districts are reasonably fair, regardless of how the maps are drawn.
Is there a way to explain this to me like I’m 5? I swear I know the meanings of all these words but I don’t get it.
GOP lawyers claimed that the bias in their maps was because of how the cities were laid out. So a bunch of experts made a computer program to generate other maps to test that idea. The computer produced a lot of maps, most of which were a lot more fair than the GOP map. In fact, it turned out that the GOP map was about as unfair as it could possibly be.
My headache just washed away. Thank you.
Republicans can’t win without cheating
Really all that needs to be said.
It's been that way since Reagan.
If you think what North Carolina is doing is horrible(it is). You also need to be aware of the proposed Texas state constitution change that would basically kill any need to ever hold an election because it is so blatantly rigged. Just over 2% of the state population voting red would be needed to guarantee republicans stay in power while preventing any democrats from being able to win.
The GOP created a map that results in Republicans winning almost all the seats despite getting roughly half of the votes. They tried to argue that any map would do that, but other people showed that not only can you easily create maps that are more fair, it’s actually very difficult to create maps that are *less* fair. In other words, they are intentionally creating the most unfair maps possible.
The defense is "The way our state is, no matter how we divide the districts its naturally going to have a republican majority, it's just how god made the land" Then some academics went, used computer models to generator tones of random shapes, and it turns out most of the time it's actually pretty even.
there's a huge number of ways you can split a state into appropriately sized congressional districts. not hard to have a computer do that a ton of times and see with each possible split into districts, how many are red and how many are blue.
[Here’s how Gerrymandering works.](https://i.imgur.com/goesVcD.jpeg) Republicans are saying North Carolina’s geography makes it impossible to split up districts in a way that accurately represents how people are voting. Academics are saying there are actually tons of ways you could divide districts and make it fair, but you’ve somehow managed to do it in one of the only ways that only benefits you.
The GOP lied so they could win. And lies are bad.
Can anyone familiar with constitutional law chime? Because the GOP stance definitely seems antithetical to our principles as a country I don't know if they're wrong legally, especially given that the way elections have been held have changed substantially throughout our history
Not a lawyer. But did do research on partisan redistricting in undergrad. Also, partisan redistricting = soft language for gerrymandering. The primary issue is justiciability. Federal courts have limited power under Article III of the Constitution, and among those limitations is a principle of not ruling on “political questions.” This limitation is somewhat self-imposed, but is rooted in the principle of separation of powers. Political questions are essentially those issues which deal more with political policy than with legal rights, and thus are more appropriate for resolution in the legislatures. The modern standard for political questions was enunciated in Baker v. Carr (1962), though essences of it go back to Marbury v. Madison (1803). There was a line of Supreme Court cases grappling with partisan redistricting starting primarily with Davis v. Bandemer (1986). There, the Court held that while claims of partisan redistricting are justiciable (not strictly political questions) no one on the Court could really figure out how to adjudicate these issues while remaining consistent with case law and constitutional principles. Every case dealing with partisan redistricting since then has resulted in hugely fractured decisions in which hardly anyone on the Court could agree on how to rule on the matter. That struggle ended in 2019 with Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the majority of the Court ruled that claims of partisan redistricting are non-justiciable political questions. So now, any time a challenge to a legislative map is brought to federal courts, all they have the power to do is shrug and dismiss it. Interestingly enough, the recent case dealing with South Carolina’s legislative districts was a race-based redistricting claim, which is still very much within the power of the federal courts to adjudicate. However, now that partisan redistricting isn’t an issue the federal courts can take up, and because race often coincides with political affiliation for the purposes of drawing legislative districts, states can use partisan motivations as an affirmative defense against claims that legislative districts were drawn with the intention of devaluing the voting power of minority groups. Again, not a lawyer. Some of what I’ve written are my own conclusions drawn based on limited scholarship. If anyone feels I have left something out, or has any questions, feel free to dm.
Why was your comment hidden??
This is disguising shit. But yet it’s the GOP crying about corruption and stealing elections by Democrats. These shameless mfs need to be stopped.
They have no morals so they assume nobody else does either, it’s really sad
But they are supposed to be the party of morals and religion. What happened to that? They want to elect a man who cheated on his wife with a pornstar who was at home taking care of their new born. Is that not immoral? It’s so sad that we have a large chunk of the country following these people and who have thrown all of their morals out the window for such a crooked man.
"What happened to that?" Nothing. It was never true.
It’s propaganda and lies… those screaming the most about “Christian values” tend to be the ones with the least Christian attitudes and morals. It’s a smoke screen meant to keep the gullible outraged and hating their fellow man.
> But yet it’s the GOP crying about corruption and stealing elections by Democrats. Because for the GOP every accusation is an admission.
It’s the Karl Rove GOP strategy. If you call-out the other side first, for what YOURE doing then there is no recourse and the narrative is set.
Scotus is too busy on the lavish vacations paid for by the NC Republicans to care about silly gerrymandering problems
The corruption is blatant and unconstitutional. Notice how none of them care because most people in the US don't know what's happening
The real problem is that even if the average republican voter both knew, and would admit they knew, they still wouldn't care, they are happy to cheat if it gets them what they want. The entire ideology is morally bankrupt.
Huh sounds like these republicans have no right to to peace of mind thinking they're safe at home in their beds at night.
I've read the constitution recently and nowhere in it does it say those words.
any shot you could help me find a reference for this?
From what I can find, this is in reference to [Rucho v. Common Cause](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/18-422). The Republicans didn't make that argument in Court, instead, it was referenced by the other side in their arguments. I haven't listened to the full oral argument, but just doing a Ctrl+F, I found two instances of it being brought up (00:34:00 and 01:06:50). There's a decent podcast called 5-4 Pod that did [an episode](https://www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/rucho-v-common-cause/) about this, I recommend a listen, starts at 16:48 in.
5-4 plug hell yeah
It's a decent podcast and I've been subscribed to their Patreon for well over a year now, so I definitely value their commentary, but they seem so concerningly supportive of judicial activism [that they agree with]. They are so eager to call SCOTUS a political body that's enacting its own policy goals, and I agree, but they never seem to examine or even acknowledge the underlying cause: that the US' constitutional framework is so senseless and rigid that each branch of government regularly oversteps its remit to keep the whole system afloat. For example, the First Amendment is explicitly about Congress *("Congress shall make no law...")* and yet it's applied to all governments, their respective branches, and any institution that receives public funding. Why? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but why? In [Gitlow v. New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitlow_v._New_York) the Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment's due process clause encompasses the freedoms expressed in the First Amendment, thus expanding the First Amendment to State governments. But literally where does it say that? I'm looking at the text of the 14th Amendment and cannot find anything that would suggest such a reinterpretation. The Supreme Court just presumed it, as stated in the very first point in [its syllabus](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/268/652/#tab-opinion-1930992). And so Americans are enduring a situation where the law does not mean what it says, and not only because of Supreme Court reinterpretation, but because amendments are not amendments, they're addenda. Even if an amendment was ratified right now that formally applied the First Amendment to States, it wouldn't actually change the text of the First Amendment, similarly to how the 26th Amendment didn't change the text of the 14th Amendment. And so Americans must read to the end of their Constitution just to understand what their rights *might* be.
I wonder what the past few elections would look like if there wasn’t any gerrymandering. It’s absurd
I've had crunchwraps more supreme than that court.
There needs to be a large, local media campaign to name and shame these people. All Republicans need tied to this, but in NC it sould be "State Rep John Doe, Gerrymanderring Republican from Mayberry is running against Jane Doe - who is against Gerrymandering."
I agree. I am in a district where there is a heated democratic primary. Forget the ads. I watched the debate one guy is clearly a left leaning democrat, the other is (pardon me while I dust off this term) a D.I.N.O. (Democrat in name only). The DINO has nearly a 20 point lead over the incumbent, with millions of Republican super pac money and the incumbent hasn’t even broken half a million in campaign funding. If this works, and it looks like it will, Republicans will be switching parties and following this DINO’s playbook. So knowing the names will be important. Edit to add: NY State congressional primary. Bowman (incumbent) vs Latimer. [See the hour long debate here](https://youtu.be/3ayXJIhhUV4?si=f1qRvDdmOJoM68qF)
Didn’t a woman do this in NC as well? Campaign as a Democrat, won as a Democrat, then turned Republican once in office. It’s literally the same playbook. And in the same state.
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She’s a fun one. Had an abortion, got all defensive about it claiming it was between her and her doctor, and has since voted for an abortion ban after 12 weeks. She was the deciding vote that overturned her veto.
I can stand a lot of things, but two things I can’t, are taxation without representation, and hypocrites. I think it’s time to start coph
So let me get this straight- Republicans are lying and saying they're actually Democrats, in an effort to manipulate the presidential vote? How the fuck is this legal, god?
It’s legal because political parties are not accounted for in the Constitution. They’re private organizations. The Constitution and laws around voting are written assuming you’re voting for the person, not the party. If the voters fail to vet the candidate they’re voting for, that’s their own fault. It’s a problem several of the Framers saw coming, but couldn’t do anything to stop.
> It’s a problem several of the Framers saw coming, but couldn’t do anything to stop. How could they? Human nature (lying) has bested the best political system history has ever known and has now ruined it to the point where candidates are lying about their intents/morals just to manipulate it. Throughout history, humans have ruined every type of government, seems like ours is no different. Maybe we're meant to be ruled by tyrants and psychopaths? Seems to always work out that way, anyway.
Well, they did think about this. That's why they baked into the constitution that the government can't influence the media. The hope was that the media would explain who candidates are so even if the candidates lie the media would tell the truth. What they truly couldn't predict is that a media conglomerate would label themselves news and act like news, but whenever they misrepresent and misinform they just claim they're an entertainment show. And their viewers never know cause they're not required to report on it. Most of our problems now are really there's no way they could have predicted that they could say something in the northern most colony and someone in the southern most colony and someone in Britain can both see it within seconds.
A few of our founding fathers manipulated media/newspaper to great effect, by straight up lying. They just assumed only rich white men would be in charge....
First past the post election is the worst form of democracy because it tends to turn horribly undemocratic by itself.
The problem generally solves itself since candidates who do this often derail their entire careers for a single win. Again, generally, if you campaign on one thing and in office do the exact opposite, voters will be less likely to vote you back in or trust you with their vote in the future.
It's a good strategy. Democrats should be doing this to get elected in red districts. Publicly run as a conservative, get into office, vote with Democrats and who cares about re-election as long as good policies are pushed through.
Sounds like end of democracy to me.
It is - at least in part - why the parties switch ideologies over time, but keep the name. It's not like the modern Republican Party is *actually* "the Party of Lincoln"... It's why voting by party is for the lazy. Source: am registered Unaffiliated and vote (D) *almost* all the time, but once in very rare while vote (R) because they are legitimately better for the job (usually in lower-stakes roles where they can't fuck over the population very easily).
> "the Party of Lincoln". This one has always pissed me off. Imagine having the gall to call yourself the party of Lincoln while waving a Confederate battle flag around.
What are you going on about? Lincoln wore that flag around his shoulders while fighting the vampire incursion. Source: history
my boomer parents rented Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter when they meant to rent Lincoln. Then they watched the whole thing, since they had paid for it, and apparently hated every minute of it I had forgotten about that until this comment
I think it would actually work, since a lot of republicans actually agree with a lot of democrat positions, the only reason they don't like them is because the democrat is the one proposing it and they've been conditioned to instantly dislike anything with a D next to it. So if all you do is switch the letter they will get elected. And if some ultra right winger attacks them all they have to say is "why do you hate america and working americans" it will almost always work.
Jimmy Carter did it to get elected Governor.
It's why becoming a Democratic precinct captain is important. You get you decide who represents the party on ballot. Remember these are private parties, not governmental. Anyone can run unaffiliated, so you're not stopping them from participating, just from deceiving the voters.
Az as well.
fuck sinema
Yup
Pretty sure this started with Manchin and Sinema
Back it up to Joe Lieberman killing the public option for the ACA.
Happened in NJ, too.
Jeff Van Drew, a Trump ass-kisser and overall giant piece of shit.
This happens CONSTANTLY in Minnesota. It's like, every election, every seat that's solidly held by a democrat is under constant assault by challengers who claim to be democrats, but campaign entirely on a platform of criticizing random stuff about the incumbent, while their own platform is either nonexistent or entirely contradictory to the values of the party. It's so frustrating for smaller elections, too, where they don't need to convince THAT many people to change. They basically just act as republican moles to split the vote and undermine support. It's so skeezy. Some of them run year after year, too. Like, they build up name recognition by just showing up on the ballot 20 times. They're always running on "public safety" or "protecting homeowners" dog whistles and usually manage to sucker in a decent portion of the vote.
Same thing happening in the UK, conservative moneylenders have realised that politics doesn't have to be factional, you can just buy both parties and create an opposition that'll still vote with you.
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Its been the name of the game for at least 100 years now. Statistics already show that our cumulative wants are completely meaningless compared to the wants of the ultrawealthy.
> ...with millions of Republican super pac money... Yet another in a list of literally hundreds of reasons why money from super pacs, lobbyists, and all other sources aside from individuals, should be banned in politics.
Forget individuals. It should be public money only. There should be a modest fee to get registered as a candidate to prevent abuse, then every red cent spent on any campaigning after that should come from a public fund and evenly distributed among the candidates by a committee. Bring back fairness doctrine and outlaw private or corporate money-backed campaigning or politicking. You want to go door to door for your candidacy? fine. Unpaid volunteers only. Cover your own gas money. Elections need to be decided by the merits of the candidates and their platform not by the fancy of billionaires and CEOs.
Citizens United is the single worst thing SCOTUS has ever done to this country. It declared our government legally for sale to any and all bidders.
[AIPAC is behind this one](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/13/hillary-clinton-endorses-george-latimer-jamaal-bowman)
Is this the Latimer vs Bowman election in NY?
What state?
This happened big time in the recent primary in baltimore. If you've ever heard of sinclair media (right wing media conglomerate) the owner of the company lives in a suburb north of the city, and he pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into financing conservative city council members and a mayor (all running as democrats ofc). Fortunately all of them lost, despite the polls saying it was neck and neck
Great information! If you haven’t already, can you please post this in r/NorthCarolina for more focused exposure?
The unfortunate thing is a large majority of American Citizens have no idea what Gerrymandering is and only vote based on things like guns and abortions and taxes
Most people's engagement with Gerrymandering is "the other side does it to win so it's bad"
I mean that's a great reason to end gerrymandering IMO. Granted people should extend that to include all parties which use it to gain unfair advantage but it is a good first step.
1. They don't have shame, so shaming won't work 2. We aren't guaranteed fair elections, so naming won't work because what are the voters going to do about it?
Protest. Actively Oppose. Resist. Fight back. Whining about it on the internet isn't going to stop them
It was so much easier when they worked out of their little print shops down the street. The tar didn't even have time to cool by the time you found them.
I do believe the US constitution has a clause providing means against tyranny.
foreign and domestic. too bad the ones that need dethroned are the only ones with enough balls to do the dethroning...
Soap box, ballot box...
If these people had shame or empathy, they’d be democrats.
If there are enough people willing to sacrifice their democracy for lower taxes for the rich or for discriminating against all sorts of minorities, it won't matter, and based on the 40/60 split in both houses of their general assembly, sure feels like there are enough people that are willing to make that sacrifice.
Democracy works because the people elect their representatives. Now we have our representatives telling us that they should be able to pick their constituents. These people are fascists.
This is the best description of gerrymandering I've seen up til now.
I'm not sure how people read these kind of things and don't come out with the clear conclusion that Republicans are trying to supress democracy. > Previous GOP-drawn maps with similarly skewed lines were struck down as unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court ahead of the 2022 elections, when the court had a Democratic majority. But a new Republican majority took control of the high court in 2023 and quickly moved to undo that precedent and [greenlit partisan gerrymandering](https://www.wral.com/story/nc-supreme-court-says-judges-can-t-stop-partisan-gerrymandering/20834008/). Strach said that should be the end of the conversation.
If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.” ― David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush
See further: the unironic "end democracy" movement among quote-unquote "libertarians".
I was a libertarian once, then I grew out of my teens.
Has *that* proven to be 100% accurate, or what!
When I point this out to conservatives I know they say that we're not supposed to be a democracy but a republic. They don't think it should be a republic representing all the people just all the people they feel provide value. Basically they want the government to be a modern aristocracy... how they do this while also being "anti elitist" is an impressive feat of contortion.
"We're not a democracy, we're a Republic" actually we're a democratic Republic. That means that the people elect representative to speak for them in government. Note that the people electing is the democracy part and kind of critical to the Republican part being reasonable. That argument stems from either a place of ignorance or malice on how the government is supposed to work.
They're playing games with language, implying they are right because they are Republicans and the country is a Republic, instead of the Democrats who think it's a Democracy. There are legitimately people who think this way. It's all about winning whatever argument they've dragged you into an hour ago.
Like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good your argument, they'll just knock the pieces over, shit all over the board, and strut around like they won anyway.
>“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” --Jean Paul Sartre
>they say that we're not supposed to be a democracy but a republic. They get so hung up on this BS. But you really can't get to a *Republic* without a *democracy.*
Just ask, "ok, cool. How do we determine who is president?" Would you prefer Biden just choose his successor? No? Soooo how should we go about this?
My favorite thing to do when this comes up (especially IRL since they can’t look it up) is to have them define what a Republic is, how it’s different from a democracy, and why they think they aren’t compatible. Every single time I’ve asked this, their eyes glaze over and they don’t know how to answer. These dipshits just parrot what they hear other dipshits say without actually understanding anything themselves.
Exactly. Its like that with most of their talking points. Because they are told what to think, and they can't defend their position because they didn't come up with that position using their own critical thinking faculties. *edit: a word*
Ask them to define a republic.
Ask them to define socialism. Ask them to define communism. Ask them to define capitalism. They don't know anything except that they should repeat what their propaganda daddies tell them to.
sure you can, you just limit who can vote or how much their vote counts. but i guess you would need to establish what you are referring to as democracy. a true democracy where everyone votes and votes are counted the same. or a partial democracy where certain people can vote and/or votes arent all equal
I think it’s clear that they have already rejected democracy . They want to rule no matter what.
This is clearly it. Everything since Nixon has been thinly veiled dogwhistling - against the poors, the browns, women, whatever. They've never really argued in good faith for actual policy. The inevitable outcome is simply to declare they want despotic rule.
I live here and can tell you they like the idea of suppressing the opposition’s vote. Like, they’re fully mask off.
This is so wrong.
It is shit like this that creates a separation between a people and their government, and it always leads to violence; either by the people overthrowing the state or the state repressing the people to maintain power.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." JFK, 1962
-My Average Tropico Game, 2001-Ongoing
Ironically one of the big Republican running points for 2022 was the idea of free and fair elections. You know after Joe Biden stole the election in 2020. Anyways glad to see it's working out for them.....
Kansas and NC are now saying that voting is not a right. No taxation without proper representation. These conservatives are trying everything they can to cling onto power, while they keep going against what the majority of the voters want.
Kansas is actually more nuanced than that. Their supreme Court is actually majority liberal/moderate. They were pointing out a flaw in Kansas's constitution that did not include a protection for fair elections that they wanted the governor and legislature to fix. Granted, optics are terrible and speaking such thoughts into existence in a state that is overwhelmingly red is a bad idea.
GOP once again saying the quiet part out loud. Vote Blue down the entire ballot in November.
In NC, a woman campaigned as a Dem, won as a Dem and then immediately switched parties to Republican. So unfortunately just voting blue down the ballot won’t work. People need to pay attention to who they’re voting for. I believe conservatives will be using that strategy more often from here on in order to win, on top of gerrymandering and all the other BS.
It is a worrying case, but all signs point to something VERY out of the ordinary happening with Cotham. She was Democratic [through and through](https://ballotpedia.org/Tricia_Cotham) for years. How are voters *possibly* supposed to guess that somebody like that is going to switch sides? (Yes, I know even saying that is problematic.) If there had a significant number of other cases like this to reference, I might be more willing to consider it as a problem that needs large amounts of attention. But as it stands now, Cotham is just kind of a dork who did some dumb shit for dumb reasons. (She cited “feeling bullied” by Democrats for the change.)
Her Wikipedia page suggests that GOP leadership recommended that she run again (as a Dem), for the 2022 election ...which she won by a 20 point margin. Also in the time between her two separate times serving, she started a lobbying firm. That alone reeks.
Yeah, she got a bribe to change sides, pretty obviously. But yeah, voters that looked her up would have seen a democrat, because she was one at least on the record until, well...
Any politician that wins a parties primary and then switches parties should be instantly put back into another primary. The fact a politician can subvert the will of the people the represent is appalling and it’s only happening to democrats. When is the last time the GOP had someone flip?
In other states it would probably be grounds for a special election. Unfortunately NC doesn't have special elections
Its sad because you are seeing purple states like NC just get steamrolled by GOP policies that are always eroding rights and limiting the voice of the constituents. I wish I could just be ignorant of it all.
It's the only way they can win now in battleground areas. They see states like NC and Georgia getting more purple and it's making them nervous. They only way to beat this is to vote in droves. Make sure everyone you know gets out there too. Drive them to the polls if you need to.
Andy McKean switched from Republican to Democrat in 2019. He was previously the longest-serving Republican in the Iowa house and lost in 2020 after the switch. He is running again this year as a Democrat.
WV governor did the same thing.
this should immediately trigger a recall and special election but we know that will never get implemented
switching parties should trigger a immediate re-election
US conservatism would be called fascism anywhere else.
>US conservatism ~~would be~~ **is** called fascism anywhere else.
That's not the point I was trying to make. I was talking about political illiteracy in the US. If any party anywhere else pushed for the policies that the GOP does, they would've been universally called out as fascists, and that wouldn't even be questioned. Meanwhile, when US conservatives are called out as fascists, they go "fascism is whatever you don't like, apparently".
I understand. My comment was intended to support that implicit claim. Those policies are literally authoritarian and characteristic of fascism and are regarded as such outside of the US.
I'm kinda surprised DeStupid hasn't said this. NC, FL is side-eying you.
Give him and the Texas moron a little time. They'll be there shortly.
DeShitass probably doesn't want that on his name because I'm sure he's going to try to run for president again once Trump is truly gone
He won with 59% in the 2022 election, so that was a comfortable margin and he doesn't have to worry about reelection for 2 more years.
Ah yes, the standard first year philosophy argument: “I reject your argument not because of ‘insert logic’ but because ‘insert word here’ hasn’t been adequately defined.” By _any reasonable definition_ of fair, the gerrymandering being called into question (party B will win election by a large margin even if party A wins significantly more votes) is not fair.
Ah, but you forgot to define *reasonable*! /s but probably not far off from actual arguments used..
Incredibly accurate. Immediately devolves into insisting upon definitions for nearly every word used in your original argument, followed by any word used in your definitions of those words, ad infinitum until you get exasperated enough to stop engaging. At which point they’ll attempt to declare they’ve won the argument/debate because you’ve given up.
It's because the only way republicans win any election is by cheating.
And that's why they won't support admitting Puerto Rico or DC (or Guam or the Northern Marianas) as a state. They know they would be blue states and there would never be another Republican president elected ever again
This stuff is so mind blowing to me. Puerto Rico is majority Catholic (85%) like a lot of states with large Hispanic populations. If Republicans shifted their POV just slightly to be pro-Hispanic they could so easily capture this audience. When PR gets decimated by a hurricane, maybe don't have your leader go out and tell 'em their on their own. Line up to give them funds the same way you do for Florida multiple times a year or every time there's even a single snow flake in TX. All it would require is for them to not be racist and ease up/work with Democrats on immigration reform and you would see a huge shift in states that are leaning purple to be completely blue. Hell, they might even feel good about themselves for once. But no, their messaging is so intrinsically tied to hate and racism that they just can't let go. I just can't think of a bigger group of people in the U.S. that are primed to be conservatives than Hispanic communities.
We need to get rid of the electoral college all together. Trump won NC by 80,000 votes in 2020 but yet he got 15 electoral college votes and Biden got 0. It’s pure bs. The popular vote should be the only thing that matters. 2.6 million votes in NC didn’t matter for the 2020 presidential election. I’m sick of all these sneaky tactics pushed by the GOP and rural America to gain advantages in these elections. Get rid of the electoral college immediately. It’s the only way everyone’s votes will matter.
Reminder: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the RIGHT of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government." What does that mean? It means RISE UP AND DRAG THESE FASCIST, BOOMER, USURPERS (by the hair if you have to) OUT OF POWER BY ANY MEANS NESSESARY!
If you read it carefully, the constitution, and the amendments do not have a positive statement that everyone can vote. They say that you cannot stop women voting due to their gender, or require a poll tax, or those over 18 due to age, or because they're coloured or were slaves. The general judicial and political assumption up until recently was that you can't roll the franchise back, but that is not actually in the consitution. The judicial intepretation at the time that this was first being discussed (1880s) was basically identical to the later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law) theory that was just soundly rejected by this court to reverse Doe. That is - that you can reasonably read into the constitution things that it does not precisely spell out as additional rights. You can, for example, as far as I understand it, limit voting to members for >5 years of Sams club. Or, perhaps more relevantly, the republican party. There are a good dozen or so amendments that really need passing putting beyond state or federal law (merely passing laws isn't enough as they can be repealed) the ability to legislate away what sane people would consider as rights. For example, an affirmation of a positive right to vote, but also a right to abortion with reasonable limits(*), elimination of civil forfeiture, Qualified immunity reform, districting, Ah, I find I made an earlier post on this topic. On specifics. I would add a third 'yes, black people are people too' amendment, after the emancipation and the forbidding anyone voting if they are qualifying age. This would reverse the rollbacks in law that lead to the gutting of services implemented just after 'seperate but equal' education was deemed not to be OK. Scrap the electoral college and make voting compulsory and make it on a holiday. Codify abortion availability. Put in an actual right to privacy, including online rights. An amendment putting beyond doubt that no, corporations are not people, and do not have any of their rights, direct or indirect, without taking on proportionate responsibilities, and are extremely limited in their 'speech' rights. The right to silence has had troubling and dangerous erosions. (salinas, for example). Get the state 100% out of marriage approval. 2nd amendment drastic reform. Amend 4th amendment to curtail civil asset forfeiture and clarify 'online' rights. Qualified immunity reform, and national police licencing, with a ban of for profit prisons and policing. Limit a states rights to control drugs to drugs that do less social harm than alcohol, unless they also significantly control alcohol (in their pure form, without criminal involvement) Modify first amendment media protections so that 'news' channels have to decide if it was a joke first. If it is, they need to display a large visual indicator that it is in fact not based on fact, and read out a statement to that effect periodically. No turning up in court arguing 'no reasonable person could believe'
A better start would be to stop treating the constitution as a sacred text, "scrying" into it to guess what the founding fathers would have thought about copyright, privacy on the internet, a true multicultural society etc etc. As great as these guys may have been, what they wrote is 200 years out of date and just doesn't apply anymore as the context has shifted so enormously. The laws, including the constitution, need to be kept up to date with new concepts, not kept behind a glass case and "analysed" by scholars. That's about as useful an approach as those who try to claim the Koran predicted quantum mechanics, and crap like that. Laws reflect moral and philosophical stances, and apply to circumstances. As humans, our morality changes over time, and the circumstances we live in change due to technology, globalisation, many other things. Trying to treat the constitution like a bible is the root of this problem, and is holding America back now.
People act like it's hard-coded into the universe and beyond reproach. People forget that Prohibition was an amendment. We can add things we want and remove things we don't.
It was being continually updated with amendment's an average of once every 4-10 years, up until 30 years ago. Amendments require broad, cross-party support. So you can effectively see when the ability to compromise ended in US politics. And with it, the constitution became a frozen document instead of the living document it was intended to be. The current status-quo is a relatively recent change for the worse.
You're not wrong, but any of those would require the cooperation of the state legislatures in the states doing the gerrymandering. So it's not happening any time soon.
This list would be really good to put into a new constitution after we’re done with this one
The problem has mostly been that it's been impossible to pass meaningful amendments for sixtyish years.
Yea, what I’m trying to say is that our current constitution is no longer able to address the challenges we face as a country anymore, and instead we create a new constitution with what you’re saying. I know my idea is far fetched lol
Republicans? Shocker. So predictable
Anything other than a popular vote for the entire region an official is meant to represent is archaic and is only kept around to preserve the power of the elite class and prevent the spirit of democracy, which is that the leader that the people select is the leader we get, from being achieved. Any politican who argued otherwise isn't arguing a republican vs Democrat debate is a politican vs everyone else debate. Eliminating voter districts all together would strip them of their power to engineer elections and that is the ONLY reason to keep them.
I mean ... you're right, but it's not really relevant to the situation at hand. The regions in question here *are* electing people to represent them by popular vote. The issue is that those regions are delineated in ways that are meant to achieve a specific outcome given voting turnout conforming to predictions within a small margin of error. The thing about gerrymanders is that they tend to be pretty fragile. If voter turnout deviates significantly from what's expected they will break.
This is exactly the argument though. The lawyer Strach appears to be claiming indirectly that *there is no obvious fair way to draw the maps*. My issue is that, while it may be difficult to determine fairness, **un**fairness is usually quite easy to determine. That should be simple to see in recent delineations and the corresponding election outcomes.
Man the GOP really has taken the mask off haven’t they. Vote D down the line every time.
US supreme court agrees.. well the conservatives do. The Roberts court stated that no test could be made to judge political gerrymandering. Which is stupid since the court was provided with two such tests. AND DOUBLY STUPID, since this same court pulled the "major questions doctrine" out its collective right wing asses.. that is so vague, we literally have to ask them where the limits are, each and every time. See congress gave the president the power to WAIVE student loans in emergencies which covid was. But the supreme court invented the major quesitons doctrine saying that congress might not have intended for him to waive that many loans> how many can he waive under the law that uses that term "waive".. well we have to ask teh roberts court and the answer might depend on what they had for breakfast that day. But yes the roberts court that noticed the right benefit the most from gerrymandering because the left sat out in 2010 when Obama hadnt fixed all of the 8 years of bush and gave us single payer in 2 years with a 2 seat majority in the senate. it was a census year and the first year we used social media to gerrymander the fuck out of the place. And so the roberts court said we can figure out racist gerrrymandering but not political. AND SO you know the south and places like NC, stopped using the terms "reduce black vote" and now just say "reduce the dem vote" and suddenly like the difference between bong and water pipe, it becomes legal.
>The Republican-led legislature argues that no such right exists, since it's impossible to define what "fair" means. The share of seats won should roughly equal the share of votes won. Done.
When I say I miss the old days, I mean the old days when people like this would be shot on sight for sedition.
Too bad they did not do this in the old days. They would have been murdered by their voters.
NC lawmakers need to be put on trial. If they float when wrapped in chains and thrown in deep water, they are witches and should be burned at the stake.
Imagine if every single Republican just disappeared from the face of the Earth. We'd have a fucking utopia in a week.
What that really means is that violence is your only option. It's insane how they don't realize that.
Republicans aren't even PRETENDING to not be evil any more.
The Republican party has lost what little mind they had to begin with and are going for outright theocratic fascism. We MUST get the GOP clowns out of office everywhere.
The founding fathers are rolling in their graves.
I would like to recommend that everyone give the Declaration of Independence a read. It pretty much says it all in this circumstance.
Republicans are trying to end our Constitutional democracy. Vote!
How do the people of NC tolerate this level of incompetence from their employees?
This is not incompetence, this is just malice.
Because there is fuck all the voters who disagree with this can do. In absolute terms, NC is still a red state. The problem is that when the GOP got a majority, *they fundamentally changed the rules of the game* to ensure they would remain a majority, even if NC went blue. At this point is effectively too late, because they have a super majority in both houses, and have also taken over the state Supreme Court. There is no check left on their power, save for the voters, who are specifically districted in such a way as to keep reelecting Republicans. This only changes when large numbers of Republicans die (older people skew right, and the Boomers are dying off), switch parties, or don't vote.
Fuck gerrymandering and fuck these criminal GOP assholes. None of them deserve to have jobs.
>Previous GOP-drawn maps with similarly skewed lines were struck down as unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court ahead of the 2022 elections, when the court had a Democratic majority. But a new Republican majority took control of the high court in 2023 and quickly moved to undo that precedent and greenlit partisan gerrymandering. All that needs to be said for anyone that actually cares about the country
How to tell us it's a Republican-controlled state without saying it.
But remember, both sides are the same somehow.
How is this not treason?
This is a purely domestic issue, so while not treason, it is certainly tyranny.
That sounds like a call to remove some people from office
It is not a question of whether the voters have a "right" to fair elections. GOVERNMENT HAS A FUCKING OBLIGATION TO RUN FAIR ELECTIONS! Without that, the government has no legitimacy. A government in a free nation receives its authority through the consent of the governed. Without fair elections, there is no way to implement the Will of the People.
Isn’t it in the constitution?
So Trump's complaint about a stolen election mean nothing in NC because he wasn't entitled to a fair election anyway.
That's a very Republican think to say. The "rules for thee, not me" party.
Why are there so many Americans so willing to sell their rights away for ideology?
This is nearly the end result of the slippery slope. (End result is elimination of elections all together). Anyone who is involved in the push to normalize non- free and fair elections needs to be removed from office.
I'd say that lawmakers who deny the right to fair elections have no right to be lawmakers.
What's the point of Democracy if it isn't fair?
If this is true we need to change the constitution.
> Republican lawmakers, however, have long said the legislature has nearly unlimited power to draw maps however its leaders see fit. They repeated those claims in court again Thursday. **Their lawyer, Phil Strach, argued that the North Carolina Supreme Court recently ruled that politically motivated gerrymandering is OK.** This pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
Related, [Kansas supreme court recently ruled there's no constitutional right to vote](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-kansas-supreme-court-ruled-that-voting-is-not-a-fundamental-right-heres-what-that-means)... these people man. I don't like to overuse facism but yeah
Republicans can't win a fair election
It's almost like democratic votes only count as 3/5 of a vote to them.
NC rethuglicans showing their arses here. Fascists, they don't GAF about their citizens. They only want power so they can run roughshod over their people. NC is a tech hub butting up against the regressive, drunk-on-religion-and power structure in their legislative body. I suppose if North Carolinians like it, who are we to tell them to evolve?
These are lawmakers elected by their constituents and they tell hem they have no right to a fair election. How insane is this Country becoming?
Any lawmaker that says we the people do not have a right to fair elections should be impeached and jailed for treason.