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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
You know, instead of making a decision you know will cause riots, you could always, I dunno, make the opposite decision?
My musician pageHow often do these decisions actually cause riots? That always seem to be a thing - whoever in charge makes a blatantly unjust decision, people are upset but things mostly stay quiet, and then people caw about how surprising it is that black people didn't go crazy.
Edited by LSBK on Sep 21st 2020 at 7:49:45 AM
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Civil and Criminal courts are actually entirely separate systems with different rules. Civil courts are for when private individuals, corporations, etc sue someone for money damages or an injunction (ie: make them stop doing what they're doing). What happened with the family is that they sued the city for wrongful death.
By contrast, only the government (through the prosecutor's office) has to power to bring someone to criminal court, and this is where guilt or innocence is determined, and therefore punishment according to the law. The victim or their family isn't really involved with this procedure at all, except as witnesses. They certainly can't settle it, because they don't have the power to drop the charges even if they wanted to.
Edited by Clarste on Sep 21st 2020 at 6:16:18 AM
Cory Gardner
, Chuck Grassley
and Pat Roberts
support nominating a Supreme Court justice. That's basically everyone who had even the slightest chance of voting no, sans Mitt Romney, and even he would make it 50-50 with Pence being the tiebreaker.
Nope. The Senate is grossly over-endowed with power for being the unrepresentative body of Congress, as it essentially gatekeeps any and all judicial (and other federal) appointments on top of having exactly as much power as the House to prevent the passage of laws.
Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 21st 2020 at 2:55:25 PM
I recently saw an analysis that said assuming no split-ticketing, Democrats would need a 19-point landslide to win a 2/3 majority in the Senate (assuming all seats are up) while Republicans only need a 2-point win. The median state in the Senate is about +7 points redder than the national average; 31 states are redder than the national average while only 19 are bluer.
The Senate is deeply undemocratic and the only reason Democrats have been able to hang on is due to people like Joe Manchin and Jon Tester winning deep red states and doing much much better than expected in purple states like New Hampshire. Basically, as it stands, Republicans enter the Senate with a 24 seat advantage. A bit on this from FiveThirtyEight
. G. Elliott Morris at The Economist has talked about this as well.
If the Supreme Court nominee is confirmed, a Justice will have been nominated by a President who lost the popular vote and be confirmed by Senators who also did not win the votes of a majority of voters.
The Senate imbalance seems to be a particularly difficult issue to solve, since unlike all other challenging problems in America, I haven't seen any major proposals or solutions to fix it besides adding DC and Puerto Rico as states. Anything like reapportionment or depowering it somehow. Or a major protest movement to really point out its rural skew (and hence bias towards older white voters).
It would completely undermine any trust in the court to start outright undoing previous court decisions. Normally, if the court rules against something Congress will go back and write a law specifically to address that.
But what this would do is the exact thing the Republicans, hypocrites as ever, keep whining about: legislating from the bench. Can't get elected? Doesn't matter, just use a puppet court to make sure that your 'religious' opinions are forced on everyone.
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The problem is that fundamentally addressing the Senate requires rewriting the constitution. And in a constitutional convention... every state gets one vote.
Spot the problem.
Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 21st 2020 at 3:25:47 PM
x4 Yes, the laws could be changed again, but the Supreme Court tends to not change the rules they set in place, so the problem becomes if enough Justices are put on that are willing to change the law, the changed laws are stuck for several years. On top of that, it's the laws that these Justices want to change; laws that protect Women's Health choices, Minorities, the Disabled, and the Poor. By changing these laws, that might take several years for the Court with the last word on the Law to change back, real people will die and will die immediately.
Edited by DingoWalley1 on Sep 21st 2020 at 10:28:26 AM
The Democrats really need to liberate the rural states from Republican tyranny.
The fact they've left us to die leaves me with the smallest violin, even if I know I'm part of the ones getting screwed by their apathy to our plight.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I refuse to believe that any Democrats seriously believe we're voting in these assholes.
Surely 4 years of Trump has shown the rest of the country that the GOP cheats and undermines democracy at every turn.
You have to be ignoring reality to think this is voluntary.
I mean, I have more faith in Democrats that they know we're victims here.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 21st 2020 at 7:34:24 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.And how do you do anything that would restore democracy to areas where you aren't being voted in and therefore don't have any power, given that most electoral practices are set at the state level and the Republicans have been destroying the Voting Rights Act for decades?
Stop blaming the people who want to do something for not winning.

Genghis Khan was super egalitarian to his enemies. All of them were worthless and deserved to be crushed utterly. :D