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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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I thought I made that pretty clear. Vote them the the fuck out. Gerrymandering isn't some be-all end-all, 'now I can never lose' trick. It's more like a 6% advantage. Which we're well above. So make every stupid Trumpist find themselves with influence or employment and therefore without protection. Make them see that the only way they're ever gonna have power again is if they clean up their act.
These are fundamentally selfish people. They'll come running back to the norms the moment it's clear that it's in their best interest to do so.
Edited by Gilphon on Jun 27th 2018 at 11:53:28 AM
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If you think it would be that simple I’d like to invite you to visit Earth some time and check out what’s going on down here, because I assume you it would be nowhere near that neat.
Disenfranchised populations have an alarming tendency to cause trouble. We also have moderates who would doubtlessly vote against this kind of thing, which could lead to the whole situation backfiring and republicans getting a boost, like what’s happening now with midterms. Disenfranchised populations are also terrible for the health of a nation, they drive up economic and political instability which has wide-reaching consequences.
And again, it’s immoral.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jun 27th 2018 at 8:57:26 AM
They should have sent a poet.![]()
One, that's not going to help where it actually matters as gerrymandering for state legislatures is often much, much worse. Like won just over 50% of the vote, but controls 2/3 of the legislature worse. Two, gains are almost universally made against moderates. Should we win back the House in November, the resulting republican party is going to be much, much more the party of Trump because most of the people we beat are going to be either moderates that don't inspire the increasingly radical base, or Trumpists that beat moderates in primaries. Meanwhile many safe republican seats are going to see incumbents replaced with people more fervently in favor of Trump.
Where did the moderate vote against Republican Voter suppression? Please, just give me one example where that occurred.
Edited by BigMadDraco on Jun 27th 2018 at 9:03:25 AM
The US isn't at risk of becoming a dictatorship at present. Sure, Trump didn't get the popular vote, but he did get second place. The fact of the matter is that a very large chunk of common Americans do actually support Trump and he wouldn't have gotten elected otherwise. I know many people who did actually vote for him and actively like him.
Also, I would like to point out that a Democrat-led Dictatorship is a literal contradiction of terms. Look at the name of the party.
Leviticus 19:34In the interest of discussing something more constructive, Roe v. Wade is almost certainly going to be struck down, but that won't outlaw abortion in places where state law permits it. There are about eight states where the nullification will trigger a statewide ban, and twelve more that indicate a ban will be passed. I'm from MA, where it's legal, so I don't know about other states. This might be a good time to start encouraging phone calls to the U.S. Reps and state houses.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."![]()
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Uh, right now? The republicans are facing huge electoral consequences for their behavior. Gerrymandering has been pushed back at almost every level. Their efforts at voter suppression have met consequences pretty plainly.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jun 27th 2018 at 9:10:03 AM
They should have sent a poet.Question: Can the Supreme Court just nullify a past ruling? Doesn't an actual case have to be brought before them? That may be inevitable, but it's not something that will happen right away, and there will be ways to argue the cases that do crop up. Plus there's the possibility, noted earlier, that appeals won't even reach the Supreme Court.
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They need a case brought before them, but lawsuits around abortion laws a fairly common, and the Supreme Court has absolute control over what cases it takes. You're going to see a lot of case that Kennedy convinced people to kick down the road come back fast.
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That has yet to be seen.
Edited by BigMadDraco on Jun 27th 2018 at 9:15:50 AM
John Roberts Will Probably Be The Supreme Court’s Next Swing Justice
Not sure if that's reassuring or not, though...
Good lord this thread moves. Not for nothing, though.
Anyway, look, things are bad right now. Things are very bad. But if you vote at least you're TRYING to fix it. If you vote someone blue in and they get stonewalled, at least they tried. It's better than staying home eating depression-flavored chips and watching the Republican who got the seat because you didn't vote make things even worse.
We're probably not going to live to see the better world. Hell, we're never going to live to see the perfect world. The best we can do is push forward. Inch by inch. If they drag us back 30 years, we dig our fingernails in, and we push forward, because when we die the people who come after us will be starting from atop our corpses and we owe it to them to do as much as we can, even if that's salvaging as much as we can. Sitting down and going 'well, guess the world is fucked' helps no one, and betrays the future in a very literal sense.
It's been fun.Roberts at least has a history of wanting to ensure that the Supreme Court maintains the political high ground. He doesn't want the Court to be dragged down into the political mud slinging you get in Congress. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the 'dismissed on a technicality' decisions came from him looking for an out so as to avoid setting some major precedent.
In other words, don't expect the Court to respond "How high?" when the Republicans ask them to jump. Roberts will still expect a watertight case and given the incompetence of the Trump administration that is far from certain.
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As long as you’re making things even a tiny bit better it’s a victory. Throwing your hands up in the air and saying it’s over helps exactly nobody. And we’re also talking grand plan here, our actions today are going to determine what kind of world our children will live in.
That’s a bit of a non-sequitur.
Of course it's not admitting defeat. It's the exact opposite. We're never going to get to the point where we can just go 'okay, good, fixed the world, no more problems', and that's on a species level. There will always be work left to be done when each of us dies. But it's like people said - MLK Jr died without seeing the first black President, but there was a black President. The work that remains when we go will be picked up by someone else. The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
It's been fun.![]()
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I’m more then aware that the work of creating a more perfect union will never be finished. I’m just saying that we are at a point where simply trying to maintain and appealing the previous democratic norms is not going to be enough to both solve our problems and to get people motivated.
We can’t have a situation where people start getting serious about imposing federal judicial term limits only to have some other people ostensibly on your side decry it as unrealistic, because even if it is it is also a sure fire way to deflate your own side. It’s something that has happened before on our side on issues like healthcare and such, and it’s something that I hope we can avoid going forward on this.

I'm facepalming at the fact that we've spent this much time and pagespace trying to tell someone why responding to authoritarianism with more authoritarianism is a horrible idea.
Disgusted, but not surprised