Politics

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DColeKC
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Re: Politics

Post by DColeKC »

grovester wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 7:56 pm So I assume you're good with filibuster and gerrymandering reform, so we actually get a good democratic representation of what people want?
I am but until the special interest money and entire system of fund raising is changed, it’s hard to be optimistic. How music time politicians spend raising money is ridiculous.
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Re: Politics

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DColeKC wrote: Sat Jul 16, 2022 5:41 pm
grovester wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 7:56 pm So I assume you're good with filibuster and gerrymandering reform, so we actually get a good democratic representation of what people want?
I am but until the special interest money and entire system of fund raising is changed, it’s hard to be optimistic. How music time politicians spend raising money is ridiculous.
Yeah, a shame campaign finance can't pass.
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Re: Politics

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Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 4:47 pm
Highlander wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 2:07 pm The idea that the constitution is not a living document and that any specific item not covered in the constitution is open to interpretation by the states is not what our forefathers had in mind.
Isn’t that specifically what the 9th and 10th amendments outline though? Like, to a T?
There have been a myriad of judges and supreme court justices that have endorsed the concept of the constitution as a living document. Thurgood Marshall among others.
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Re: Politics

Post by mean »

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe the bible is the actual literal word of god and is infallible and inerrant, would have a quasi-religious relationship with our country's founding documents. I further suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe in a big strong man in the sky who is the only one who can forgive them for anything and is the only one who can fix not only all their problems but indeed all the world's problems, would be attracted to a doofus like Trump who, although largely incompetent and incoherent, somehow projects to them the illusory appearance of truth and competence and being the only one who can fix everything, mostly it seems by saying those things over and over and over and over and over again, and also being a huge dickhead.
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Anthony_Hugo98
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Re: Politics

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mean wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:17 pm I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe the bible is the actual literal word of god and is infallible and inerrant, would have a quasi-religious relationship with our country's founding documents. I further suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe in a big strong man in the sky who is the only one who can forgive them for anything and is the only one who can fix not only all their problems but indeed all the world's problems, would be attracted to a doofus like Trump who, although largely incompetent and incoherent, somehow projects to them the illusory appearance of truth and competence and being the only one who can fix everything, mostly it seems by saying those things over and over and over and over and over again, and also being a huge dickhead.
I don’t know who you’re trying to call out exactly, but I’m atheist and didn’t even vote for trump, so if it’s me you’re 0-2
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Re: Politics

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Highlander wrote: Sun Jul 17, 2022 4:49 pm
Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 4:47 pm
Highlander wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 2:07 pm The idea that the constitution is not a living document and that any specific item not covered in the constitution is open to interpretation by the states is not what our forefathers had in mind.
Isn’t that specifically what the 9th and 10th amendments outline though? Like, to a T?
There have been a myriad of judges and supreme court justices that have endorsed the concept of the constitution as a living document. Thurgood Marshall among others.
Should obviously be flexible, but the amendments are also pretty plainly straightforward. The flexibility in the constitution is it’s ability to be amended.
mean
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Re: Politics

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I wasn't meaning to call anyone specific out at all, least of all anyone here, I'm not sure how you read that into what I wrote. Just randomly opining about the state of things in the country and the broader psychology of Trumpistan generally.
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Re: Politics

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mean wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:56 pm I'm wasn't meaning to call anyone specific out at all, least of all anyone here, I'm not sure how you read that into what I wrote. Just randomly opining about the state of things in the country and the broader psychology of Trumpistan generally.
My b, had thought it was due to my previous statement about 9th and 10th amendment. Agreed though, the societal hypocrisy from people like that is baffling. The amount of people who are wildly not self aware is insane
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Re: Politics

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responded to wrong post
Last edited by Highlander on Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Politics

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mean wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:17 pm I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe the bible is the actual literal word of god and is infallible and inerrant, would have a quasi-religious relationship with our country's founding documents. I further suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe in a big strong man in the sky who is the only one who can forgive them for anything and is the only one who can fix not only all their problems but indeed all the world's problems, would be attracted to a doofus like Trump who, although largely incompetent and incoherent, somehow projects to them the illusory appearance of truth and competence and being the only one who can fix everything, mostly it seems by saying those things over and over and over and over and over again, and also being a huge dickhead.
You want a real life experiment in Trump voters, spend some time at the lake of the Ozarks! I will say while most people I encounter when there are conservative white folks they’re mostly not anything like the above description. I think those very religious and hypocritical Trump fanatics exist no question but you’d be surprised with how many normal, nice and intelligent people I hang out with or encounter at the lake who voted for Trump. We have some very democratic members of our core group too and shockingly major spats don’t happen.

But you can also stop at Wal-Mart in Clinton for a snapshot of the holy shit WTF Trump voters who worship him.
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Re: Politics

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Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:32 pm
Highlander wrote: Sun Jul 17, 2022 4:49 pm
Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 4:47 pm
Isn’t that specifically what the 9th and 10th amendments outline though? Like, to a T?
There have been a myriad of judges and supreme court justices that have endorsed the concept of the constitution as a living document. Thurgood Marshall among others.
Should obviously be flexible, but the amendments are also pretty plainly straightforward. The flexibility in the constitution is it’s ability to be amended.
The constitution's flexibility goes beyond just being amendable. There have been a plethora of decisions handed down that apply the constitution to issues just like abortion. Obviously, Roe vs Wade was one of those decisions. It was the correct decision.
Last edited by Highlander on Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Politics

Post by mean »

DColeKC wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:14 pm
mean wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:17 pm I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe the bible is the actual literal word of god and is infallible and inerrant, would have a quasi-religious relationship with our country's founding documents. I further suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe in a big strong man in the sky who is the only one who can forgive them for anything and is the only one who can fix not only all their problems but indeed all the world's problems, would be attracted to a doofus like Trump who, although largely incompetent and incoherent, somehow projects to them the illusory appearance of truth and competence and being the only one who can fix everything, mostly it seems by saying those things over and over and over and over and over again, and also being a huge dickhead.
You want a real life experiment in Trump voters, spend some time at the lake of the Ozarks! I will say while most people I encounter when there are conservative white folks they’re mostly not anything like the above description. I think those very religious and hypocritical Trump fanatics exist no question but you’d be surprised with how many normal, nice and intelligent people I hang out with or encounter at the lake who voted for Trump. We have some very democratic members of our core group too and shockingly major spats don’t happen.

But you can also stop at Wal-Mart in Clinton for a snapshot of the holy shit WTF Trump voters who worship him.
Oh believe me, I know. My former boss, who I worked with long enough and closely enough to become good friends with, whom I always respected and thought of as a sane, normal, intelligent, regular person and am still friends with / go to lunch with on a regular basis / attended his wedding at his house years after we no longer worked together, fell into what I personally perceive as the Trump Con, but not the Trump Cult. We have always remained able to discuss it without it getting heated, and generally we tend to agree on vastly more things than we disagree on; it's typically just when we get pretty deep down into the weeds where we find what are generally fairly minor disagreement about policy minutia or whatever. And he's an athiest, so it's not coming from the same place as I think it is coming from for some other people. For him it seems to be that he vibes with people that I perceive as being bloviating, word-vomiting con-men, because we also had a very talkative, borderline narcissistic coworker with a continuous stream of grandiose but seemingly impractical business venture ideas, and he's put tens of thousands of dollars into them. He can afford it, it's not like a huge risk for him, I just was shocked (at first) that he took this guy seriously until I kinda put two and two together that he was just in sync with a vibe that I personally found very off-putting. So for sure, it comes from different places for different people. I have no beef with my former boss or the many people like him beyond disagreeing with the choice of who they voted for, it's the holy shit WTF Trump cult people that freak me the hell out.

(And I still think I'm on the correct side of the con-man vibe, fwiw.)
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Re: Politics

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DColeKC wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 5:14 pm
mean wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:17 pm I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe the bible is the actual literal word of god and is infallible and inerrant, would have a quasi-religious relationship with our country's founding documents. I further suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people who believe in a big strong man in the sky who is the only one who can forgive them for anything and is the only one who can fix not only all their problems but indeed all the world's problems, would be attracted to a doofus like Trump who, although largely incompetent and incoherent, somehow projects to them the illusory appearance of truth and competence and being the only one who can fix everything, mostly it seems by saying those things over and over and over and over and over again, and also being a huge dickhead.
You want a real life experiment in Trump voters, spend some time at the lake of the Ozarks! I will say while most people I encounter when there are conservative white folks they’re mostly not anything like the above description. I think those very religious and hypocritical Trump fanatics exist no question but you’d be surprised with how many normal, nice and intelligent people I hang out with or encounter at the lake who voted for Trump. We have some very democratic members of our core group too and shockingly major spats don’t happen.

But you can also stop at Wal-Mart in Clinton for a snapshot of the holy shit WTF Trump voters who worship him.
The Ozarks & Table Rock are still consistently rated as Top 5 lake in the country
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Re: Politics

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DColeKC wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 12:18 pm The point I'm trying to make is unless something has been codified on the federal level, it should be up to the states to shape and decide these important laws. What people in Alabama want will be far different than California residents. The idea is that states should be able to operate independently and with very little interference from the federal government unless they try to violate the United States Constitution.

What I'm opposed to is judicial activism. I'm not "cool with whatever" rights but we do have a system in place to overrule the states. Let's use it and until that's done, no one should be shocked certain rights are not universally treated the same state to state.

Point about the democrats not codifying this over the last 50 years is simple, they run on it, lie about it just to gather votes and support. You can't tell me there hasn't been ample opportunity to codify abortion rights. I completely disagree with the republicans position on abortion but if we're waiting for them to do something, it's only going to get worse for abortion rights.
This is all a bit of a tangent from how this conversation originally started, which was just me trying to anticipate and address a potential counterargument against my wanting to defang SCOTUS. I acknowledged in that part of the thread already that I don't really know what is the best way to safeguard civil rights, just that I don't see any particular reason to trust the courts to do it (a trust they have generated with landmark rulings like Brown and Obergefell, but which they have also destroyed with other landmark rulings going the other way). So if you want to say the way to safeguard these rights is to codify them instead, then ok, fine, I don't know if I necessarily agree that that's the best way to do it either (for practical reasons including what I already mentioned about how difficult it would be to draft a comprehensive list of rights or the difficulty of actually passing the legislation), but I'm not opposed to codification (with caveats), so I'm not gonna take the anti- side of that conversation.

But I don't really agree that people in Alabama and California should be given what they want if what they want is to deny rights to this or that group of people. I guess I would have to agree with a neutral observation that, in the absence of federal requirements, people in Alabama and California will decide which rights for which populations to recognize or not, but I wouldn't frame this as a states rights issue because I don't believe any state should have the authority to deny anybody their rights. This ultimately leads us back to the question of how best to safeguard rights, and again, I don't know, but if your argument is that it should be open season in the states on anybody whose rights have not been explicitly codified in federal legislation, I, uh, disagree. I don't see any point in recognizing any "state rights" that infringe upon the rights of the people within those states. People matter, artificial political constructs don't. The idea that the vulnerable people actually affected by a state decision to deny their rights can and should be expected to easily move to another state just because a totally different group of mainly privileged people sometimes whine about moving to Canada (and don't follow through anyway) doesn't make a ton of sense to me.

Anyway as for the abortion thing, we just went over that like three weeks ago, so I guess I will just reiterate what I previously said about the Dems "running" on abortion instead of repeating myself: viewtopic.php?p=642734#p642734 I don't know how you are defining "ample opportunity to codify abortion rights," but if it means "Dems have previously controlled the government with a pro-choice majority that would pass the legislation if they tried," then no, they haven't. I don't mean that in the sense of "poor Dems," just pointing out that the Dems are terrible in a different way than you think they are.
Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:32 pm
Highlander wrote: Sun Jul 17, 2022 4:49 pm
Anthony_Hugo98 wrote: Fri Jul 15, 2022 4:47 pm
Isn’t that specifically what the 9th and 10th amendments outline though? Like, to a T?
There have been a myriad of judges and supreme court justices that have endorsed the concept of the constitution as a living document. Thurgood Marshall among others.
Should obviously be flexible, but the amendments are also pretty plainly straightforward. The flexibility in the constitution is it’s ability to be amended.
The amendments aren't straightforward at all. If they were, there would be no controversy over what they mean or 230 years of jurisprudence trying to define them, often in ways that directly contradict earlier rulings. The traditional view of both the Ninth and Tenth was that they didn't grant any additional rights or powers, they were basically just instructions on how to read the constitution. In this view, the Ninth just says "we listed some rights here, but that doesn't mean people don't also have other rights we didn't mention." The Tenth reiterates "the constitution lays out what the federal government can do, so if the constitution doesn't say the federal government can do this, then it can't do it." Only in recent decades have right wing lawyers and judges begun to endow the Tenth with actual powers and protections that could be directly violated (there hasn't been any similar trend with the Ninth, presumably because the right is interested in calcifying hierarchical power structures, not protecting individual rights). But whether you accept the classical view that the Ninth and Tenth don't affirmatively add anything to the constitution or the modern reinterpretation of the Tenth as having real teeth, it's still far from straightforward what they mean.

In the case of the Ninth, which rights are retained by the people? How can we tell the difference between a right that is retained vs. one that's not? An originalist would probably dive into the history books to try to figure out which rights people generally understood themselves to have at the time, which neatly lines up with the right wing impulse not to recognize individual rights (both because, in the 1780s, frankly not many rights were recognized, and also because the way society conceives of and understands something can change over time), but does not tell us how society of the 1780s would view the modern question if it could be posed to them (which, when you put it that way, sounds absurd in the first place, but that's originalism for you). And if you're not an originalist, what does that mean for the Ninth? Does it actually grant affirmative protections for "new" rights?

In the case of the Tenth, you get bounced back to the various provisions of the constitution defining federal power, which are themselves pretty broad and vague. It's one thing to say "any power that is not granted to the federal government is reserved to the states or the people," essentially what the Tenth says, and yes, that sounds straightforward, but then, precisely which powers were granted to the federal government? What are the limits of those powers? The answers to those questions are not found in the text of the constitution. They have been the subject of vigorous debate and centuries of court rulings since the constitution itself was drafted. I promise that all of this was not happening while the obvious One True Understanding of the constitution was just sitting there in plain view all along.
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Re: Politics

Post by FangKC »

Look at the movement of Johnson County in past elections. I saw some reportage that indicated that there were a pretty high number of voters who just voted on the abortion amendment and didn't vote in the other races at all.

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Re: Politics

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FangKC wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:20 amI saw some reportage that indicated that there were a pretty high number of voters who just voted on the abortion amendment and didn't vote in the other races at all.
This is why I don’t feel that this vote is a fair bell weather on November voting. I feel there is a big difference between voting on an individual issue versus voting on a Democrat vs Republican candidate.
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Re: Politics

Post by Anthony_Hugo98 »

droopy wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:22 am
FangKC wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:20 amI saw some reportage that indicated that there were a pretty high number of voters who just voted on the abortion amendment and didn't vote in the other races at all.
This is why I don’t feel that this vote is a fair bell weather on November voting. I feel there is a big difference between voting on an individual issue versus voting on a Democrat vs Republican candidate.
That’s what I’ve been saying. One issue voting, especially when it’s only a few weeks after the nullification of Roe V Wade is hardly an indication of what November trends will be.
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Re: Politics

Post by phuqueue »

It would be cool if people's struggles to retain or regain their rights didn't always have to be viewed through the lens of the perpetual horse race
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Re: Politics

Post by DColeKC »

I know men aren't supposed to have a say in women's bodies but I'm glad so many men in Kansas went to the polls yesterday and voted NO. ;)

Hot take: Women talk a big game on women's rights and supporting women, but they don't actually show up and support each other!
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Re: Politics

Post by FlippantCitizen »

Over a 1/3 of Trump's coalition is pro-choice. More are probably are not particularly activated by it as an issue. This ballot measure is not indicative of any broader swing in party preference.
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