I really hoped this was going to be about holding one's own side to account. That's something I can agree on with anyone, whatever side they come from, and no matter who did what to whom.
Instead, it's about feeling uncomfortable when someone not on your side calls your side to account, and you aren't sure whether they are lying, and if so, how much. You also present that as a uniquely right wing problem, and from my viewpoint far to the left of you, I can assure you that lies are told about everyone and anyone. And while the media *may* do a better job of fact checking if the target is on the left, it's sure not going to be a perfect job.
At any rate, you have my sympathy. I'm heartily sick of sifting through lies, and wondering whether the latest "someone on your side did something bad" soundbite has any truth to it.
Also, for the record, if you are a habitual liar, you are not on my side, whatever policies you may claim to favor, or actually work in support of - for precisely the same reason that someone who favors political assassination is not on my side - the harm they do to society as a whole is almost certainly worse than any benefit to whatever side they favor, except in circumstances more extreme than we have in the US.
And I'd love to see you address the problem of holding wrong-doing political allies to account.
Agree with you here - "if you are a habitual liar, you are not on my side." We can't get started on solving a problem, any problem, unless we're all clear on what exactly that problem is made of.
>This story popped onto my radar because one of my Discord room’s inhabitants brought it up: Isn’t this a clear sign that DeSantis is bad, and should be dumped? And I end up in a weird place, because yeah, it probably does. The most likely version of this story is that DeSantis did a shitty thing to some poor people; I will not be shocked if that ends up being the pretty confirmed version of this story.
If doing "shitty things" disqualifies somebody as presidential material then nobody is suited to become president. DeSantis' shitty thing is a hell of a lot less shitty than nearly all alternatives, so dumping him would be a massive mistake.
A few poor people who are in the country uninvited getting screwed around a bit is much less of an issue than facilitating mass illegal immigration in the first place.
Agree with your main point, and I feel similar and am getting increasingly tired and apathetic about the integrity of political news. But also, I don't understand how busing new immigrants to a different (nice) place is so bad. From my understanding, the transportation of newly arrived undocumented immigrants is extremely common in many states.
I think it's pretty bad if you trick someone into doing something they wouldn't do if they knew the truth.
If DeSantis or proxies said "listen, there's this island, mostly blue, and they are unprepared for you to show up, and they don't actually want you there that much - you won't stay there, at least. But it's not here; wanna go anyway?" I'm cool.
If they said "Listen, lets get you to Boston where there's guaranteed work and a place to stay" and then dropped them off at Martha's Vineyard, that's pretty bad even if things turn out well, because it's trickery/lying.
Basically you can sometimes get good outcomes from shitty behavior, but that doesn't justify shitty behavior.
I am kind of curious about that too. The earlier bussing of immigrants to Chicago and NYC, yea, that was probably easy to do. Big, famous cities probably sounded awesome. Martha's Vineyard probably would be a harder sell, just because who even knows what or where that is? Then again, as you say, it isn't like staying put was going to go well, either, and "Everyone there is super rich, and it isn't like they mow their own lawns, or repair their own roofs, so who knows?" is both true and appealing.
I don't know, in a way I find I don't care, if only because the whole situation says to me "See, this is why you can't have a large nation state rules from the center; people make rules about immigration that they never have to live with, and so they get to virtue signal without paying any sort of price for the virtue." Or maybe a more accurate description of how I feel is "Those politicians are all assholes, so to hell with all of them," and hoping they aren't screwing up the immigrants more than they would be otherwise. I hope things work out well for them, at least.
As an update, it appears the immigrants signed consent forms (of course this is now being portrayed as yet more evidence of malfeasance). It appears to have been nothing more than a very effective political stunt, which I think is where much of the rub is.
I think it's a little more complex than that. If I tell you to come over to my house because I broke my leg, and you come based on that to find that I was tricking you into coming so you'd drive me to Wendy's, that would be pretty shitty of me.
As Randy pointed out, an undercover cop getting you to do something you otherwise wouldn't do is actually a workable defense most places - it's entrapment, and even if it's imperfectly enforced we think it's bad.
There's a version of this where we go "Well, these are illegal immigrants or something like that where we have the power to do whatever we want with them anyway", but I'd expect that in situations where that was actually true we wouldn't have to lie to them, we'd just load them up in shackles or whatever.
The lie is only necessary if you think you are doing something you *can't otherwise do*, which at least superficially seems to be the case here. It's a way to get people to voluntarily give you something they wouldn't give you if the truth were known.
It would be pretty shitty if they were tricked. But I'd like to compare it to busing them to wherever immigrants in similar situations are otherwise bused; if such immigrants generally have a say in the matter... Of course, it would be nice for the maybe never day the news is broke that this was or was not a trick, but we probably shouldn't hold our breath.
By every account I've read, these people were walking the streets legally. But for argument's sake, let's say their status is the equivalent of "out on bail". Would it be acceptable for the governor of Connecticut to pay to trick a bunch of people out on bail in Chicago with promises of jobs and no legal repercussions so that you could haul them to Tallahassee? This is really messed up.
I'm guessing most of the people here are very much against the government (whether that be federal or Florida) or other parties tricking us into doing things that may end up working out.
If I were a criminal alien, I would WANT to be flown to an area where democrats were in the majority. I can only think of the positives of this happening and none of the negatives. Did I think I would be given the red carpet to the White House and greeted with open arms for being sneaky, sneaky?
I'm not in a southern border state but I can understand how conservatives in them feel exasperated about the invasion of illegal immigrants.
A more recent example is the Duke/BYU volleyball case, where supposedly someone was yelling racial slurs, but further investigation has shown absolutely no corroborating evidence.
You're right. As a moral standard, doing shitty things like this makes that person unelectable.
Living in a fallen world means taking what we have and making the best of it. Some people choose to fall further, and take themselves out of the running for leadership.
Don't let 'em get to you, RC - taking time to know what's true and what is not about any given story doesn't make you wrong or a bad person. It means you're a reasonable, rational person. That you, me, or anyone else can be made to feel less human b/c we don't immediately jump on the 'latest thing' bandwagon as directed is a sign of how rotten our times have become.
Agreed. But at the same time I'm also not perfect on this even once my defense is factored in - like, I do *like* the part where someone revealed that dumping a bunch of migrants on a place that loves migrants and wishes to gather them under their wings like chicks results in an immediate bulk order for busses. I do *like* my political enemies getting "own libs"ed, as it were.
It's actually a bit hard for me to disambiguate the two. Like I'd like to think I'm this perfect tower of principles, but at the same time I really, really like to win. It muddies things.
I...kind of agree, in that I understand why you feel that way. I blame left-leaning "mainstream" media for most of the awful things that have happened recently, in the same way I blame the boy who cried wolf for his sheep getting eaten. Naturally I also blame the wolf. But there'd be no point in talking to the wolf. The wolf can't understand what you're saying. The boy might learn something.
I do feel like I need to point out that so-called "mainstream" media isn't. Sources like Fox and Brietbart are much more viewed sources of news. It might be true that the left ignores them, but the left *shouldn't be doing that.* They're the main source of information for most of the country. The left is choosing not to engage with the counter-narrative to their narrative in a way that is costing them election after election.
I find all this incredibly annoying because I understand why other conservative folks feel how they do. There's no good way to know if any given negative story about a Republican is true. It would be much easier, and frankly more rational for people who don't neurotically follow politics like I do, to have some blanket rule like "Probably you can discount anything NYT says."
In addition, if you actually internalize the truth of what's happening - that the GOP is restricting voting rights, reluctantly endorsing candidates who undermine democratic norms, and generally acting in ways that do long-term damage to our nation - you're left with only a single viable party that believes mostly things you strongly disagree with. Basically you're being asked to stamp your approval on appointed candidates you hate.
Much much easier to be the reasonable conservative(TM) who is deeply skeptical of that narrative. To say, "I don't like Trump and DeSantis, but isn't the left doing the same thing? Where's the accountability on their side?" without considering degree, proportionality, or impact.
I'd encourage continued skepticism, but also skepticism of one's own motives to come to different conclusions. Try hard not to think, "Well the left-leaning media is out of control, so probably everything bad that gets said about conservatives is a lie or exaggeration, and probably the left candidates are just as bad."
I don't think it's so much that I assume that everything bad about my side is a lie, but I do assume that everything is an exaggeration. This is at least true to me in the sense that every take that, say, CNN puts out on anything clearly from the right will be the worst-possible-without-being-silly interpretation.
Clearly Republicans have to do wrong things sometimes, and we are talking about politicians, so add an order of a magnitude to that expectation. Ditto Democrats. My difficulty is not in believing my own side might be misbehaving (it certainly is), but knowing how and how much.
To pull something at random out of your list, take "undermine democratic norms". A few months ago, the DNC made a very clear threat (that they didn't follow through on, for reasons) to use taxation as a blugeon against a religious organization for doing something they didn't like (Disciplining Pelosi). If religious freedom is an element of Democratic norms, this was a massive sledgehammer blow being threatened - literally "Do what we want, or we will insert you into a coercive system we control and force you to that way".
Or over the last couple years, there have been very serious pokes and action towards making non-government-view-adhering speech was less legal (see: misinformation as a term).
I think you could think up right-aligned hypothetical actions/movements that would roughly correspond to each (say, the right partnering with ISPs or financial institutions to destroy forums they didn't much like). And if they did this, it would set the world on fire; you'd know about it, everyone would be concerned about it, it would be a big big deal and French would wear out his fainting couch.
It's not that those issues get completely buried when it's the left, but they are *ignorable* in a way that other things aren't. So where you'd expect balancing "attacked the Capitol" with "spent a summer attacking police stations and burning shit down" to be difficult, you might not expect one to be weighted at 100 and the other to be weighted at .0001. But that's what we got, more or less; the narrative was pretty well controlled on each.
This is all sort of rambling, but it makes it hard and complex for me to deal with. Say with the Capitol attacks: I'm supposed to, in a general sense, take this very very seriously; realistically, it's very very bad. But at the same time I know that if a similar amount of people broke into the capitol but were *wearing pink hats*, I wouldn't be supposed to take it seriously anymore; it would be an annoying but ultimately futile attempt at protest that we'd all forget about in a week.
That bleeds into every interpretation I'm making, because the ask is that I hurt my interests (as you mentioned) in favor of people who will actively work against me. What-about-ism is a powerful meme, but it actually does matter what the balance-of-badness is across sides in this context, because the eventual demand is that I pick one side over the other.
And, without getting into a massive and off-topic argument, I think there's clear evidence that Democrats are doing vaguely dirty politics as usual while Republicans have gone off the deep-end insane, to the point where they might re-elect someone who attempted to overthrow a presidential election (the storming of the Capitol worries me much less than a sitting president actively calling election officials and telling them to change the vote totals).
But I don't know how I'd ever convince anyone of that in a universe where those actions are given the same treatment by "respected" media as Romney endorsing a slightly less aggressive version of Obama's healthcare plan. If everything is an existential threat to democracy, nothing is.
I get it. It just also makes me crazy. I both love this country and have vaguely conservative/libertarian leanings, and it's sad to watch an authoritarian movement take over half the nation while regular people go "haven't y'all said an authoritarian movement is taking over our party for like 40 years now? Do you think we're stupid?" Fair enough.
I *constantly* hear that the GOP is "restricting voter rights". When I dig down to the proposals, they're common-sense proposals that are used all across Canada and Europe. Are Canada and Europe "restricting voter rights"?
There's a current case before the Supreme Court to set a precedent that would allow legislatures to overturn popular votes and send their chosen electors to vote in presidential elections.
A GOP legislature directly challenging the power of state courts and constitutions to rule on their election actions is just about as clear a challenge to the concept of voter rights as I can imagine.
Let's accept Cato's argument (Which involves rejecting an argument, made directly by President Trump and much of the GOP, that ISL theory should allow state governments to overturn a state's popular vote and substitute their own electors). This would still make it illegal to establish anti-gerrymandering procedures, independent state agency and court reviews of districting and election procedures, and, following the gutting of the election portion of the civil rights act by conservative justices, allow legislators to "pack" non-white voters into single, inconsequential districts.
That's not theoretical, that's literally the purpose of existing GOP arguments for ISL theory - doing away with state constitution, agency, and ballot initiative checks on gerrymandering and racial districting.
And, again, it may not be (probably isn't) true that the Supreme Court would find that state legislatures can simply overturn the results of elections they don't like. But that argument is being actively pursued by many powerful people in the GOP, including their most recent president and the frontrunner for their 2024 nomination.
"Allowing the legislature of a state to overturn the popular vote in that state" is kind of a violation of a voter's right to, uh, have their vote matter *at all*. It's one thing to argue about relative values of two different votes as expressed through the Electoral College, and another thing to say, "We're just going to ignore these votes and do our own thing."
After some quick web searches, I can't find anything before the Supreme Court that does that.
I *did* see an NPR article whose first paragraphs are:
The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a case that could dramatically change how federal elections are conducted. At issue is a legal theory that would give state legislatures unfettered authority to set the rules for federal elections, free of supervision by state courts and state constitutions.
But, ah, that doesn't get anywhere NEAR "overturning popular votes".
I don't agree. Trumpistas care about pwning the libs, not actual results. Sending the asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard was an epic pwn; even Trump is jealous. It was, to be clear, a heinous and evil act: but it was nevertheless an epic pwn, and that's what DeSantis needs to challenge Trump on Trump's turf (Republican primaries).
I really hoped this was going to be about holding one's own side to account. That's something I can agree on with anyone, whatever side they come from, and no matter who did what to whom.
Instead, it's about feeling uncomfortable when someone not on your side calls your side to account, and you aren't sure whether they are lying, and if so, how much. You also present that as a uniquely right wing problem, and from my viewpoint far to the left of you, I can assure you that lies are told about everyone and anyone. And while the media *may* do a better job of fact checking if the target is on the left, it's sure not going to be a perfect job.
At any rate, you have my sympathy. I'm heartily sick of sifting through lies, and wondering whether the latest "someone on your side did something bad" soundbite has any truth to it.
Also, for the record, if you are a habitual liar, you are not on my side, whatever policies you may claim to favor, or actually work in support of - for precisely the same reason that someone who favors political assassination is not on my side - the harm they do to society as a whole is almost certainly worse than any benefit to whatever side they favor, except in circumstances more extreme than we have in the US.
And I'd love to see you address the problem of holding wrong-doing political allies to account.
Agree with you here - "if you are a habitual liar, you are not on my side." We can't get started on solving a problem, any problem, unless we're all clear on what exactly that problem is made of.
>This story popped onto my radar because one of my Discord room’s inhabitants brought it up: Isn’t this a clear sign that DeSantis is bad, and should be dumped? And I end up in a weird place, because yeah, it probably does. The most likely version of this story is that DeSantis did a shitty thing to some poor people; I will not be shocked if that ends up being the pretty confirmed version of this story.
If doing "shitty things" disqualifies somebody as presidential material then nobody is suited to become president. DeSantis' shitty thing is a hell of a lot less shitty than nearly all alternatives, so dumping him would be a massive mistake.
A few poor people who are in the country uninvited getting screwed around a bit is much less of an issue than facilitating mass illegal immigration in the first place.
Agree with your main point, and I feel similar and am getting increasingly tired and apathetic about the integrity of political news. But also, I don't understand how busing new immigrants to a different (nice) place is so bad. From my understanding, the transportation of newly arrived undocumented immigrants is extremely common in many states.
I think it's pretty bad if you trick someone into doing something they wouldn't do if they knew the truth.
If DeSantis or proxies said "listen, there's this island, mostly blue, and they are unprepared for you to show up, and they don't actually want you there that much - you won't stay there, at least. But it's not here; wanna go anyway?" I'm cool.
If they said "Listen, lets get you to Boston where there's guaranteed work and a place to stay" and then dropped them off at Martha's Vineyard, that's pretty bad even if things turn out well, because it's trickery/lying.
Basically you can sometimes get good outcomes from shitty behavior, but that doesn't justify shitty behavior.
I am kind of curious about that too. The earlier bussing of immigrants to Chicago and NYC, yea, that was probably easy to do. Big, famous cities probably sounded awesome. Martha's Vineyard probably would be a harder sell, just because who even knows what or where that is? Then again, as you say, it isn't like staying put was going to go well, either, and "Everyone there is super rich, and it isn't like they mow their own lawns, or repair their own roofs, so who knows?" is both true and appealing.
I don't know, in a way I find I don't care, if only because the whole situation says to me "See, this is why you can't have a large nation state rules from the center; people make rules about immigration that they never have to live with, and so they get to virtue signal without paying any sort of price for the virtue." Or maybe a more accurate description of how I feel is "Those politicians are all assholes, so to hell with all of them," and hoping they aren't screwing up the immigrants more than they would be otherwise. I hope things work out well for them, at least.
As an update, it appears the immigrants signed consent forms (of course this is now being portrayed as yet more evidence of malfeasance). It appears to have been nothing more than a very effective political stunt, which I think is where much of the rub is.
>I think it's pretty bad if you trick someone into doing something they wouldn't do if they knew the truth.
So, undercover policing is bad? Sting operations?
I think it's a little more complex than that. If I tell you to come over to my house because I broke my leg, and you come based on that to find that I was tricking you into coming so you'd drive me to Wendy's, that would be pretty shitty of me.
As Randy pointed out, an undercover cop getting you to do something you otherwise wouldn't do is actually a workable defense most places - it's entrapment, and even if it's imperfectly enforced we think it's bad.
There's a version of this where we go "Well, these are illegal immigrants or something like that where we have the power to do whatever we want with them anyway", but I'd expect that in situations where that was actually true we wouldn't have to lie to them, we'd just load them up in shackles or whatever.
The lie is only necessary if you think you are doing something you *can't otherwise do*, which at least superficially seems to be the case here. It's a way to get people to voluntarily give you something they wouldn't give you if the truth were known.
Those things aren't supposed to trick someone into doing something; that becomes entrapment, and isn't allowed.
It would be pretty shitty if they were tricked. But I'd like to compare it to busing them to wherever immigrants in similar situations are otherwise bused; if such immigrants generally have a say in the matter... Of course, it would be nice for the maybe never day the news is broke that this was or was not a trick, but we probably shouldn't hold our breath.
By every account I've read, these people were walking the streets legally. But for argument's sake, let's say their status is the equivalent of "out on bail". Would it be acceptable for the governor of Connecticut to pay to trick a bunch of people out on bail in Chicago with promises of jobs and no legal repercussions so that you could haul them to Tallahassee? This is really messed up.
I'm guessing most of the people here are very much against the government (whether that be federal or Florida) or other parties tricking us into doing things that may end up working out.
If I were a criminal alien, I would WANT to be flown to an area where democrats were in the majority. I can only think of the positives of this happening and none of the negatives. Did I think I would be given the red carpet to the White House and greeted with open arms for being sneaky, sneaky?
I'm not in a southern border state but I can understand how conservatives in them feel exasperated about the invasion of illegal immigrants.
A more recent example is the Duke/BYU volleyball case, where supposedly someone was yelling racial slurs, but further investigation has shown absolutely no corroborating evidence.
So, DID DeSantis mislead people? I agree that's the critical thing, but this had me read a lot of words and failed to actually answer that.
You're right. As a moral standard, doing shitty things like this makes that person unelectable.
Living in a fallen world means taking what we have and making the best of it. Some people choose to fall further, and take themselves out of the running for leadership.
Maybe DeSantis read this and thought they were serious?
https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2017/04/06/immigration-issue-stirs-heartfelt-response-island
Don't let 'em get to you, RC - taking time to know what's true and what is not about any given story doesn't make you wrong or a bad person. It means you're a reasonable, rational person. That you, me, or anyone else can be made to feel less human b/c we don't immediately jump on the 'latest thing' bandwagon as directed is a sign of how rotten our times have become.
Agreed. But at the same time I'm also not perfect on this even once my defense is factored in - like, I do *like* the part where someone revealed that dumping a bunch of migrants on a place that loves migrants and wishes to gather them under their wings like chicks results in an immediate bulk order for busses. I do *like* my political enemies getting "own libs"ed, as it were.
It's actually a bit hard for me to disambiguate the two. Like I'd like to think I'm this perfect tower of principles, but at the same time I really, really like to win. It muddies things.
I...kind of agree, in that I understand why you feel that way. I blame left-leaning "mainstream" media for most of the awful things that have happened recently, in the same way I blame the boy who cried wolf for his sheep getting eaten. Naturally I also blame the wolf. But there'd be no point in talking to the wolf. The wolf can't understand what you're saying. The boy might learn something.
I do feel like I need to point out that so-called "mainstream" media isn't. Sources like Fox and Brietbart are much more viewed sources of news. It might be true that the left ignores them, but the left *shouldn't be doing that.* They're the main source of information for most of the country. The left is choosing not to engage with the counter-narrative to their narrative in a way that is costing them election after election.
I find all this incredibly annoying because I understand why other conservative folks feel how they do. There's no good way to know if any given negative story about a Republican is true. It would be much easier, and frankly more rational for people who don't neurotically follow politics like I do, to have some blanket rule like "Probably you can discount anything NYT says."
In addition, if you actually internalize the truth of what's happening - that the GOP is restricting voting rights, reluctantly endorsing candidates who undermine democratic norms, and generally acting in ways that do long-term damage to our nation - you're left with only a single viable party that believes mostly things you strongly disagree with. Basically you're being asked to stamp your approval on appointed candidates you hate.
Much much easier to be the reasonable conservative(TM) who is deeply skeptical of that narrative. To say, "I don't like Trump and DeSantis, but isn't the left doing the same thing? Where's the accountability on their side?" without considering degree, proportionality, or impact.
I'd encourage continued skepticism, but also skepticism of one's own motives to come to different conclusions. Try hard not to think, "Well the left-leaning media is out of control, so probably everything bad that gets said about conservatives is a lie or exaggeration, and probably the left candidates are just as bad."
I don't think it's so much that I assume that everything bad about my side is a lie, but I do assume that everything is an exaggeration. This is at least true to me in the sense that every take that, say, CNN puts out on anything clearly from the right will be the worst-possible-without-being-silly interpretation.
Clearly Republicans have to do wrong things sometimes, and we are talking about politicians, so add an order of a magnitude to that expectation. Ditto Democrats. My difficulty is not in believing my own side might be misbehaving (it certainly is), but knowing how and how much.
To pull something at random out of your list, take "undermine democratic norms". A few months ago, the DNC made a very clear threat (that they didn't follow through on, for reasons) to use taxation as a blugeon against a religious organization for doing something they didn't like (Disciplining Pelosi). If religious freedom is an element of Democratic norms, this was a massive sledgehammer blow being threatened - literally "Do what we want, or we will insert you into a coercive system we control and force you to that way".
Or over the last couple years, there have been very serious pokes and action towards making non-government-view-adhering speech was less legal (see: misinformation as a term).
I think you could think up right-aligned hypothetical actions/movements that would roughly correspond to each (say, the right partnering with ISPs or financial institutions to destroy forums they didn't much like). And if they did this, it would set the world on fire; you'd know about it, everyone would be concerned about it, it would be a big big deal and French would wear out his fainting couch.
It's not that those issues get completely buried when it's the left, but they are *ignorable* in a way that other things aren't. So where you'd expect balancing "attacked the Capitol" with "spent a summer attacking police stations and burning shit down" to be difficult, you might not expect one to be weighted at 100 and the other to be weighted at .0001. But that's what we got, more or less; the narrative was pretty well controlled on each.
This is all sort of rambling, but it makes it hard and complex for me to deal with. Say with the Capitol attacks: I'm supposed to, in a general sense, take this very very seriously; realistically, it's very very bad. But at the same time I know that if a similar amount of people broke into the capitol but were *wearing pink hats*, I wouldn't be supposed to take it seriously anymore; it would be an annoying but ultimately futile attempt at protest that we'd all forget about in a week.
That bleeds into every interpretation I'm making, because the ask is that I hurt my interests (as you mentioned) in favor of people who will actively work against me. What-about-ism is a powerful meme, but it actually does matter what the balance-of-badness is across sides in this context, because the eventual demand is that I pick one side over the other.
And, without getting into a massive and off-topic argument, I think there's clear evidence that Democrats are doing vaguely dirty politics as usual while Republicans have gone off the deep-end insane, to the point where they might re-elect someone who attempted to overthrow a presidential election (the storming of the Capitol worries me much less than a sitting president actively calling election officials and telling them to change the vote totals).
But I don't know how I'd ever convince anyone of that in a universe where those actions are given the same treatment by "respected" media as Romney endorsing a slightly less aggressive version of Obama's healthcare plan. If everything is an existential threat to democracy, nothing is.
I get it. It just also makes me crazy. I both love this country and have vaguely conservative/libertarian leanings, and it's sad to watch an authoritarian movement take over half the nation while regular people go "haven't y'all said an authoritarian movement is taking over our party for like 40 years now? Do you think we're stupid?" Fair enough.
I *constantly* hear that the GOP is "restricting voter rights". When I dig down to the proposals, they're common-sense proposals that are used all across Canada and Europe. Are Canada and Europe "restricting voter rights"?
There's a current case before the Supreme Court to set a precedent that would allow legislatures to overturn popular votes and send their chosen electors to vote in presidential elections.
I'm not sure what this statement has to do with my statement.
A GOP legislature directly challenging the power of state courts and constitutions to rule on their election actions is just about as clear a challenge to the concept of voter rights as I can imagine.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/30/supreme-court-gop-independent-legislature-theory-reshape-elections-00043471
(See Cato, a highly conservative think-tank, for the counter-narrative): https://www.cato.org/blog/limits-independent-state-legislature-theory
Let's accept Cato's argument (Which involves rejecting an argument, made directly by President Trump and much of the GOP, that ISL theory should allow state governments to overturn a state's popular vote and substitute their own electors). This would still make it illegal to establish anti-gerrymandering procedures, independent state agency and court reviews of districting and election procedures, and, following the gutting of the election portion of the civil rights act by conservative justices, allow legislators to "pack" non-white voters into single, inconsequential districts.
That's not theoretical, that's literally the purpose of existing GOP arguments for ISL theory - doing away with state constitution, agency, and ballot initiative checks on gerrymandering and racial districting.
And, again, it may not be (probably isn't) true that the Supreme Court would find that state legislatures can simply overturn the results of elections they don't like. But that argument is being actively pursued by many powerful people in the GOP, including their most recent president and the frontrunner for their 2024 nomination.
"Allowing the legislature of a state to overturn the popular vote in that state" is kind of a violation of a voter's right to, uh, have their vote matter *at all*. It's one thing to argue about relative values of two different votes as expressed through the Electoral College, and another thing to say, "We're just going to ignore these votes and do our own thing."
Right? I really try to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they're arguing in good faith, but:
"Hey, the GOP is restricting voter's rights."
"Give me one example."
"They're arguing that they shouldn't have to count votes at all."
"What does that have to do with voter rights?"
is really stretching my goodwill.
That's not what NPR claims, and quite frankly, is an example of the hyperbole that permeates the media (both left and right) these days.
Goodbye.
After some quick web searches, I can't find anything before the Supreme Court that does that.
I *did* see an NPR article whose first paragraphs are:
The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a case that could dramatically change how federal elections are conducted. At issue is a legal theory that would give state legislatures unfettered authority to set the rules for federal elections, free of supervision by state courts and state constitutions.
But, ah, that doesn't get anywhere NEAR "overturning popular votes".
what was wrong with "our economy is solid, we shut down the gender bullshit in schools, and I was right about Covid"?
What's wrong with it is that it's not enough to beat Trump in the primaries.
I don't agree. Trumpistas care about pwning the libs, not actual results. Sending the asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard was an epic pwn; even Trump is jealous. It was, to be clear, a heinous and evil act: but it was nevertheless an epic pwn, and that's what DeSantis needs to challenge Trump on Trump's turf (Republican primaries).
You do recall that the media absolutely hated Trump, right? That was a pretty distinctive part of the 2016 election.
Sure, but they hated him all the way to the bank. They gave him wall to wall coverage, hugely benefiting both him and themselves.