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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Yeah, I dislike a Biden candidacy more or less for the same reason that I dislike a Sanders candidacy.
Regardless of their pro's or con's as candidates or people, they're just old and the Democratic Party should be able to do better.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangNo argument there; Biden and Sanders are both old and the Democratic party seems to be gathering far more younger voters than older ones.
Two long articles here; one about why Democrats aren't focusing on Governor races
around the country, despite all of the swing-states with close elections right now.
It’s a story the Democratic National Committee has, until recently, utterly failed to tell. Until recently, the DNC was focused almost exclusively on the battle for Congress. I’m glad it has finally taken notice of the fact that 36 states are holding gubernatorial contests this year and that Democrats are likely to flip many of the most important state houses from red to blue. But from a strategic standpoint, it’s been very late to the game—although it’s better to be late than sorry.
Nowhere is it written that the president’s party is guaranteed to lose big in a midterm election. In fact, when the economy is good, the party controlling the White House has a huge advantage. Democrats picked up five congressional seats in 1998, when President Bill Clinton was in office and the middle class was thriving. Good policy drives good politics.
But we know the flip side as well. When the American people think the economy’s headed in the wrong direction, they’re liable to punish the president’s allies across the country. That’s what happened in 1982, 1994, and 2006. And that’s why it’s so remarkable that Republicans are struggling one week out from this year’s midterm.
If a political pundit arrived on the scene today not knowing anything about the past two years in politics, she’d likely look at the economic indicators and presume that the GOP was flying high. But President Trump’s divisive social agenda and pugnacious personality are so unpopular that he’s dragging his entire party down with him. Republicans are hemorrhaging mea culpa voters who regret having voted for Trump in the first place. And that will cost the GOP not just in House races, but also in state houses across the country.
What’s a wave election? It’s a force within the electorate that proves more powerful than the structural impediments it overwhelms. The barriers to Democratic success are formidable, including voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a 3.7 percent unemployment rate. But Democrats are seeing their support swell high enough that it’s likely to overtop those barriers, not because of the economy but in spite of it.
No Democrat needs to be reminded why statewide elections in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin matter in presidential campaigns. But until now, the DNC has seemed intent on letting everyone ignore the GOP’s biggest vulnerability, namely the fact that those three states—not to mention swing states like Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota—are electing governors next week. If Democrats end up flipping state houses in places Trump won in 2016, they will have proved themselves capable of winning in the places coastal elites derisively refer to as “flyover America.” You can’t overstate how big a deal that will be.
It’s not that power in Congress isn’t important—it is. But over the long haul, the gubernatorial contests are likely to have a much bigger impact for three reasons. First, swing-state Democratic governors will have road-tested the messages best equipped to sway voters in the most important swing states. Nothing could be more valuable for our 2020 nominee.
Second, across most of the country, state officials will soon be tasked with redrawing the nation’s congressional districts. A decade ago, Republican governors helped the GOP gerrymander itself a decade’s worth of political advantage in Washington. If Democrats do well this year and again in 2020, they’ll be poised to flip that advantage back on the GOP through 2030.
Finally, in close presidential elections, a state’s political apparatus can have an outsize impact. Who knows how the 2016 campaign would have turned out if Democratic governors had controlled Michigan and Wisconsin, places where Hillary Clinton lost by three-tenths and seven-tenths of a point, respectively? Our country might be in a very different place today.
Republican operatives and elected officials are quietly working to suppress (mostly minority) voters in battleground states. And the GOP base is unusually energized, meaning that any blue wave will almost certainly be countered on the margins by a red undertow. Many of these races will come down to the wire.
But none of that should obscure the bigger picture. We’re on the verge of watching the American people repudiate a sitting president despite a nominally strong economy. That’s exceedingly rare. Democrats are proving they can win swing voters, and are well on their way to establishing one of the strongest benches they’ve had in decades. Things are looking up for progressives. If Democrats manage to win two of the nation’s three battlegrounds next week, they’ll have had a huge night. Once the results are in, don’t let anybody convince you otherwise.
And second, an article about Trump's attempt to shred the Constitution
via Executive Order, and the outright fabrications from the conservatives to support him in the attempt.
In an interview with Axios on HBO, Trump confirmed what had been suspected since last summer: He is planning an executive order that would try to change the meaning of the Constitution as it has been applied for the past 150 years—and declare open season on millions of native-born Americans.
The order would apparently instruct federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if their parents are not citizens. The Axios report was unclear on whether the order would target only American-born children of undocumented immigrants, children of foreigners visiting the U.S. on nonpermanent visas—or the child of any noncitizen.
No matter which of these options Trump pursues, the news is very somber. A nation that can rid itself of groups it dislikes has journeyed far down the road to authoritarian rule.
The idea behind the attack on birthright citizenship is often obscured by a wall of dubious originalist rhetoric and legalese. At its base, the claim is that children born in the U.S. are not citizens if they are born to noncitizen parents. The idea contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause; it flies in the face of more than a century of practice; and it would at a stroke create a shadow population of American-born people who have no state, no legal protection, and no real rights that the government is bound to respect.
It would set the stage for an internal witch hunt worse than almost anything since the anti-immigrant rage of the 1920s.
Birthright citizenship is a term that many Americans had not heard until recently. But it is a key to the egalitarian, democratic Constitution that emerged from the slaughter of the Civil War. In 1857, the pro-slavery majority of the Supreme Court held that citizenship was racial; in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that people of African descent were not American citizens—and never could become citizens, even through an act of Congress. At the time the Constitution was written, he wrote, black people were “regarded [by whites] as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The decision spurred a wave of revulsion throughout the free states and probably hastened the start of the Civil War. In fact, almost since the founding of the republic in 1789, opponents of slavery insisted that American citizenship had always been the birthright of all people born in the U.S. After Appomattox, the 39th Congress met with the urgent purpose of undoing the constitutional damage wrought by Taney and what they called the “Slave Power.” The result was the Fourteenth Amendment. Here is the wording of section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is a fairly intricate piece of legal machinery, set in place after months of deliberation by some very acute legal minds. Its centerpiece is the idea that citizenship in the United States is universal—that we are one nation, with one class of citizens, and that citizenship extends to everyone born here. Citizens have rights that neither the federal government nor any state can revoke at will; even undocumented immigrants—“persons,” in the language of the amendment—have rights to due process and equal protection of the law.
The citizenship-denial lobby has focused on the words “subject to the jurisdiction.” Its members argue that citizens of foreign countries, even if they live in the U.S., are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus their children are not covered by the clause. To test this idea, ask yourself: If a foreign citizen rear-ends your car on your drive home today, will you, or the police, allow him to drive away on the grounds that a foreign citizen cannot be arrested, ticketed, or sued?
For those scoring at home, the answer is no.
Foreign citizens are “subject to the jurisdiction” of our police and courts when they are in the U.S., whether as tourists, legal residents, or undocumented immigrants. Only one group is not “subject to the jurisdiction”—accredited foreign diplomats and their families, who can be expelled by the federal government but not arrested or tried.
That’s who the framers of the clause were discussing in section 1—along with one other group. In 1866, when the amendment was framed, Indians living under tribal rule were not U.S. citizens. Under the law as it was then, American police could not arrest them, and American citizens could not sue them. Relations with Indian tribes were handled government to government, like relations with foreign nations: If Native people left the reservation and harmed American citizens, those citizens had to apply to the U.S. government, which would officially protest and seek compensation from the tribal government. In that respect, Indians living under tribal government were as protected as foreign diplomats are today.
But over and over in the Fourteenth Amendment debates, the framers of the amendment made clear that there would be no other exclusions from the clause. Children of immigrants? They were citizens. Even children of Chinese immigrants, who themselves weren’t eligible to naturalize? Yes, them too. Mysterious foreign “Gypsies,” who supposedly spoke an unknown language and worshiped strange gods and observed no American laws? Yes, the sponsors explained, it covered them too.
The framers of the clause understood about immigration. The issue had been a divisive one throughout the 1850s, spawning the Know-Nothing movement and state attempts to bar immigrants from citizenship. In fact, the percentage of foreign-born residents of the U.S. in 1866 was just over 13 percent—roughly what it is today.
And in the ranks of the Union Army that saved the nation, roughly 20 percent were foreign born.
Three decades later, the government tried to meddle with the clause by denying citizenship to Wong Kim Ark, the child of Chinese immigrants who were themselves not eligible for citizenship. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that the clause meant what it said. No matter where their parents were born, no matter what their parents’ status, American-born children are Americans. And that’s how it should be.
The assault on birthright citizenship is an onslaught on civic equality for all of us. Nativists have grown more strident over the past decade or so. First, they advocated for a constitutional amendment to strip citizenship from the children of aliens; then they argued that citizenship could be stripped by statute; now, in the Trump era, they claim that it can be done with the stroke of a pen. It is an idea that has crawled slowly from the fever swamps of the far right into the center of our discourse, growing more outlandish with each step.
The executive order idea was floated as a trial balloon in July in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post by former White House official Michael Anton. Anton’s sole book is The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, which details a Florentine Renaissance approach to menswear on the job. In the Post piece, Anton inaccurately reproduced a quote from Senator Jacob Howard, Senate sponsor of the Fourteenth Amendment, in a manner that made it seem to support his position (the Post, under enormous criticism, eventually acknowledged the alteration). And in fact, every bit of the scant scholarship Anton relies on in that piece is as phony as a Confederate $100 bill. (I once debated the scholar who was the source of most of it, and pointed out that almost all his evidence was not just erroneous, but faked.)
That is one of the two takeaways from today’s news: Trump, Anton, and his enablers are relying on phony history and altered documents in an attempt to change the American constitutional order. (The facts are readily available; for my own contributions, see here, here, here, here, and here.) Those who don’t want to take my word for it can consult this essay by James C. Ho, a conservative “originalist” who was recently appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit by Donald Trump. Ho and I agree on little except this—the citizenship clause means what it says.
If the administration attempts to strip citizenship from millions of Americans—millions of people who have never known any other country—the trap door to dictatorship has fallen open. The “executive order” cannot be enforced without a huge apparatus of internal control. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will, of necessity, become the skeleton of a nationwide citizenship police. Each of us must be prepared to prove our membership in the nation at any moment. And the new population of stateless Americans will face persecution, detention, and abuse; Korematsu-style internment camps would be a logical next step.
Our Constitution is a gift to us from the generations that went before, and particularly the millions who died in the Civil War; the Fourteenth Amendment is the centerpiece of that Constitution. If we let Donald Trump destroy it, then history will regard both him and us with equal contempt.
Say what you will about anchor babies ( they're as harmful as illegal immigrants, in other words a net gain for the country), but goddamn if people aren't concerned about the President overwriting the Constitution to declare citizens non-citizens, then... jesus.
My theory is that he's trying to retroactively prove himself right about birther-ism, and he's gradually working his way to "only a citizen if you're born to two American citizens."
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That's a pretty generous reading. I'm far more concerned about ICE picking up American citizens and deciding their citizenship "doesn't count" because, well, according to said order, it doesn't.
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Also likely true. I'm operating on the assumption that they are, because otherwise this is silly to even discuss.
Edited by Larkmarn on Oct 30th 2018 at 1:40:39 PM
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.See, I am fairly sure that "anchor babies" aren't actually a thing outside of right-wing propaganda. Especially since the page on Wikipedia about the concept suggests that parents of such children still get deported in large numbers and for only slight reason.
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Oct 30th 2018 at 6:35:47 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanA Nyways, on Biden? There was this recently:
https://twitter.com/ConstitutionCtr/status/1050011154603540480
Joe Biden. Campaign supergenius giving awards to a Republican President who got over 4,000 Americans killed and wounded I don’t know how many thousands more in a disastrous war fought after lies to Congress and the UN.
I'll let Ta-Nehisi Coates take it from here
I dunno, I think Cory Booker is gonna bring that up. And Gillibrand is likely to have some pointed things to say about how he handled Anita Hill during the Thomas hearings. Coates says Biden's record is very similar to a typical moderate liberal of the time, but that's just the thing: It isn't Biden's time anymore. He's had two disastrous runs for the Presidency in the past, and Obama, who was one of the men in the best position to know, didn't give Biden his support in 2016 behind the scenes despite being the guy in the best position to know if Joe was presidential material.
Projection, thy name is the GOP.
Now, not going to out-of-hand ignore an accuser, but I will not listen to anything this commentator "reveals."
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.Now, I have aphantasia and couldn't picture much of anything if I tried... But, my mental projection attempts to imagine Mueller doing a Kavanaugh can't even manage a vague, tip-of-the-tongue fizz of a ghostly apparition of an idea.
If the guy has ever harassed anybody, the closest I can come to anything sensical is "total misunderstanding".
Dude is just not the kind of man who you inch away from at the buffet table. For that... see Pence (looks like a straight-shooter, but the vibes he gives off when he moves aren't).
Edited by Euodiachloris on Oct 30th 2018 at 6:19:15 PM
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He has changed his stance. But it's something he's neve been called to account for. It's a primary, records matter.
When you are trying to win over the Democratic party base, which is in no small part African-American, stances like this hurt you.
Edited by Lightysnake on Oct 30th 2018 at 11:27:14 AM
Here's some probable good news, in Texas turnout amongst voters under 30
has increased by 508% when compared to 2014.
Now obviously the Youth vote is not a monolith but considering that Youth trend towards the Democratic Party and Beeto seems to be rather popular I think the odds are good that this could be very good for us.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 30th 2018 at 3:20:14 PM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangI mean, the 2020 Senate map is a pretty good one for democrats, it doesn't seem likely the national mood will be doing the Republicans any favours then either, so I think we're good on that particular front.
Though if the Democrats win a full trifecta in 2020, they need to worry about 2022, because trifectas rarely last.
Edited by CookingCat on Oct 30th 2018 at 1:21:36 AM
Yes? I don't think anyone said that we should ignore the long-term.
I'm not actually sure what this is supposed to mean, yes Republicans winning and screwing us over is bad but that hardly means we should ignore upcoming elections. They're how we stop the Republicans from screwing us.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangNot to mention that Trump already has historically low approval ratings in the US and I would not be surprised if his party is butchered in the midterms and he himself is defeated come 2020.
I think that the assumption that followers of Trump would be in any position to write the future history books is not very rational.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang

The democrats need a relatively fresh face. That's Biden ain't.