The General US Politics Thread

What speech was that?

the RNC speech. Probably the high water mark thus far for "Holy fascism batman" in the Trump campaign.

edited 24th Sep '16 1:29:27 PM by CaptainCapsase

I heard that Pence once tried to criminalize miscarriages? Is this true? Also, how much of a fucking monster do you have to be to think that's legislation that needs to be passed?

Either someone very deluded or very, very cynical and opportunistic.

@beary: after a bit of internetting I haven't found anything like that. Utah tried to pass a law that made reckless behavior leading to miscarriages illegal back in 2010 but I didn't find anything linking it to pence. Pence did try to release a horribly terrible no good very bad bill that would make it so, for example, you couldn't seek an abortion if you your fetus was disabled but a judge blocked it from taking effect. The man is an enemy of women's rights but he's been a horribly ineffective one.

Say what you will about the zodiac killer but when he went after abortion clinics he managed to shut them down and drown the rest in paperwork. Depending on how this election goes the supreme court might even rule that all that obviously anti-abortion BS was legal to.

Thanks. That makes me feel a little better, though I still don't like Pence.

Could Trump bankrupt the GOP? If he does, what will they do then?

edited 24th Sep '16 1:57:58 PM by BearyScary

Form a New Republican Party, I guess? Otherwise the Democrats will run unopposed until a Third Party rises or a new party forms from ashes of the Republicans to take the old party's place.

Retire ?

Pence didn't make miscarriages illegal. He made it so you had to hold a funeral for the fetus.

I'm not sure the Republican Party is dead, but it has fundementally changed. It seems like the base doesn't care as much about limited government anymore. It seems to be more about religion (Trumps obviously atbest a non-practicing Christian, but he is an Islamaphobe), nationalism and protectionism. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the Party whether he wins or loses, but this brand of politics has had bad results in the past.

It's not dead, but it is a dead end in the long term, and the leadership knows it. The most alarming prospect is that, rather than meet democrats half way, the GOP will opt to make the same mistake that the Italian and German conservatives made in the early 20th century and try to exploit trumpism's authoritarian streak to remain in power in spite of popular opposition.

But how will it end? The German and Italian right wingers only gave this brand of conservatism up after World War 2 and Trump has a solid block of support.

There have been a number of articles posted in the last few months about how all Trump is really doing is tapping into the identity politics that have surrounded the republican party for decades; while there are conservative thinkers who genuinely care about small government ideology and the other supposed tenets of the republican party, their main issue was that they chose to live in willful ignorance regarding the fact that way too many people were not with them because of those ideas, but because of racism.

This poses a two-fold problem for the Republican party's future because America is becoming increasingly non-white. The first part goes without saying, obviously the implicit racism and xenophobia of the republican party drives away minority voters. But the second part is that for many people in those demographics, the ideological tenets of the Republican party, even separated from white nationalism, are not that appealing.

Because of that, Avik Roy, the intellectual consulted in the above article, has diagnosed that the Replubican party doesn't really have a future anymore.

edited 24th Sep '16 3:58:47 PM by Draghinazzo

Certainly not a future in a free and open democracy, and, realizing that, they might very well turn to a man they don't fully understand. Or more properly, to an ideology they don't fully understand.

edited 24th Sep '16 3:57:03 PM by CaptainCapsase

It remains to be seen just how large that block of support actually is. If the results of the general election reveal it to be a marginalized minority, Trump and his ilk will (hopefully) diminish into one of those lunatic fringe groups that everybody else dismisses and ignores.

edited 25th Sep '16 6:22:01 AM by pwiegle

Well he's taken most of the Republican base. The Republicans appeal to racism on purpose. It was part of the Southern Strategy run by Nixon to pick up Democratic racists who were upset about integration. They've been doing tish for decades now. Trumps just not as subtle about it. I'm sure David Duke and his ilk love Trump because he says he wants to deport the illegal immigrants and deporting them would make the country more white. Even if he does win and he's serious, I doubt he'd be allowed to do it.

If he tries to do it anyway, in violation of the constitution and doesn't back down, what happens then?

Impeachment.

And what if he then refuses to step down and declares the process an illegitimate coup on national television?

When people come to remove him by force (if they even do), what if he appeals to his supporters to come out into the streets in his favor ala Erdogan during the coup?

edited 24th Sep '16 4:15:47 PM by CaptainCapsase

American Civil War 2.

The chances of Trump staging a coup are nil. You can't do that without loyal support from some body of authority — whether that's the legislature, the government bureaucracy, the police, the army, etc.

Trump has supporters in all of those, but he doesn't have the support of any of them as a whole. If he declared himself Glorious Leader, he couldn't rely on any of them to make it stick. If he tried, he'd be removed from office. Some of his more diehard supporters would undoubtedly kick up a fuss, and he might end up with a Nixon-style "pardoned by his vice-president-turned-president" situation, but there's no way in hell he'd actually be able to carry off any sort of series coup that amounted to more than a temper tantrum.

Deporting illegal immigrants is against the American constitution?

Speaking of Nixon's pardon, a thought just occurred to me - does anyone know what Ford's working relationship with Nixon was like? He was a fairly late addition, only becoming Vice President after Spiro Agnew resigned, and I'm wondering if it was a relationship similar to Roosevelt and Truman, who was only FDR's VP for his 4th term (only a few months), and among other things, didn't know about the atomic bomb.

edited 24th Sep '16 5:37:17 PM by KarkatTheDalek

Deporting them without due legal process is.

edited 24th Sep '16 5:48:38 PM by tricksterson

The New York Times has endorsed Hillary.