Let the games begin!
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Delicious. Nothing more fun to watch than a circular firing squad composed of the enemies of humanity.
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Glad to see you back!
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time for an appropriate commercial break–
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virginia had around half a million people in the late 1700s. pennsylvania, the next largest, had less than half that. georgia maybe fifty thousand.
of those, only white men who owned land were given the vote. and an even smaller wealthy subset were writing the constitution. they wanted a democracy, but they wanted it to be small, limited to the “right” people. ( just like the republican party today? )
but, the us is geographically large – way bigger than any other proto-democracy at the time. you couldn’t just pop into a car and go vote. train? what’s a train.
so you’re off in your far flung state, and you elect some of your close friends and neighbors to go to the capital and hash out who should be president.
it makes sense… given what they had and what they wanted. best we can probably do now to fix it is the popular vote compact
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I’m under the impression that the country’s turn toward autocracy is a cultural phenomenon driven by the internet and changing demographics. You believe it is largely a function of judicial interpretation style, with things like Citizens’ United and the like?
Trump loyalists now pointing to supposed ballot irregularities in Puerto Rico as evidence that the election was stolen from Trump.
Puerto Rico is not a U.S. State and has zero electoral college delegates.
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That was going to be my exact reply to your comment.
Now, PR has voted to become a full state, but as you’ve already noted, THAT HASN’T HAPPENED YET.
PR citizens only get a vote if they currently live stateside, as of right now.
They really are just gonna keep grasping at straws and pulling BS out their asses until they finally reach intestines, aren’t they?
No matter how stupid it shows them to be…
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There’s two big things though, the rise of autocracy in the united states started in the 70s & 80s. That’s not something that can be driven by the internet. The massive political shift the US is currently in (minority rule centered on single-issue voters) goes back to when people like Gingrich worked directly with media figures to make federal elections the only thing people care about and pushing the idea of voting straight ticket - and the Democrats responded by doing the same thing but a worse job of it, which is the model of the modern DNC. That media vehicle and guided political shift in the country came well before the internet and social media, so blaming the internet for Raeganism is looking way to far forward.
Autocracy isn’t a cultural phenomenon, it requires an erosion of democracy that isn’t achieved in the ether. Originalism in the court not only set dangerous precedence with citizen’s united; it also ruled on how to run an election, how the government can allocate funds to the states, reversed desegregation efforts, helped evangelism rise again, etc. All of those rulings had a big impact on culture in the past few decades, and things are spiraling a bit out of control based on an imaginary ideal that federal court rulings are “more accurate” to the constitution when they make things up wholesale (like with the ACA or recent 2A rulings) or use the precedent of someone else that made things up wholesale. And that’s why originalism is a grift - it’s a nonsense term that is considered extremely legitimate by powerful figures seeking to provide legitimacy for their rather extreme political viewpoints.
And since changing court rulings are basically impossible and the court itself cannot change quickly, we are entering into the second full generation of this being the prevailing thought in the court with some of the least qualified, most partisan, and most extreme justices of all time. And the lower federal courts are even worse off with the court packing strategy that is core to the GOP. Back in the Federalist Papers people challenged the constitution as being susceptible to the court system being stacked with partisans and taken advantage of, and the argument back was essentially that the courts didn’t need a check and balance the way the legislature and executive did because we can just ignore what the court says. Obviously centuries later that doesn’t play out very well.
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that fits quite well with the loss of percieved status that has been driving white men to support trump.
( options are: 1. recognize the special status was always wrong and work to improve everyone’s status. or, 2. double down on the racism and hold on for dear life. )
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Cornyn appears to be treating them as a Schroedinger’s State, just a territory when it suits them, a state with actual rights and relevance as soon as it might mean they can make a legal argument.
Sure John, let’s make PR a state and count their votes. Let’s see how well that goes for y’all.
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I’m all for it. Guam too.
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Nailed it. Originalism is a tool of the GOP that came about as part of the toolbox of the Southern Strategy. The inevitable outcome of the success of the Southern Strategy is autocracy. It’s the logical extension of favoring minority rule against the tide of demographic changes.
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Yeah when he finally leaves it’ll be
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Did Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s Kids Get Pushed Out of School Because President Grandpa Keeps Hosting Superspreader Events?
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In a case of no one is surprised:
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