Yup
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I think you’re right re: voting restrictions = bad, but I share your sentiment.
I’ve thought for a while that all of us should need to pass a citizenship exam to be able to vote. Why should it matter where you were born? I know sure as eff my neighbor couldn’t pass that thing. It could be added to our regular slate of stuff senior year in Highschool, and then also available as it is now through community centers. You pass, you’re automatically registered to vote.
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Unfortunately, like other standardized test it would end up having all kinds of racial and cultural biases built into it.
And as with other standardized tests, the solution is not better tests, it’s better education
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Agreed. And the citizenship exam doesn’t include any critical thinking, which is what the post I was responding to was about. Really, we just need to start by properly funding public education and codifying access to healthcare (including reproductive healthcare) as a human right, and enacting living wages, and, and…I wish we could fix our electorate with a simple cognitive test, but I realize that’s unrealistic.
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Trump quote, emphasis mine:
“We believe the American people deserve to have full transparency into all vote counting and election certification, and that this is no longer about any single election. This is about the integrity of our entire election process. From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn. We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government. I will never give up fighting for you and our nation.”
OK, when did any Democrat ever say “illegal ballots should be counted”? Nobody, literally nobody has ever said “yeah, sure, we should count the illegal votes too.”
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Where you’re off base is his definition of illegal… votes for him, legal, votes for anyone else, illegal.
Literally out of the fascist playbook.
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Oh no, I get it, that’s kind of my point.
I don’t know if anyone ever asked him this, but "Mr. President, define an illegal vote for us please-- why should we consider any vote for a Democrat to be potentially illegal, when for the entirely of your term you have never polled higher than 49%? "
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That would require a backbone a large subset of the “mainstream media” seems to have only discovered in the last 48 hours?
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When did Trump say anything that had any measurable correlation with objective reality?
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Doesn’t that assume that people support those policies only because they are smart? It’s not unrealistic, as much as it is advocating for gate keeping via IQ. that’s not better than any other metric of gate keeping with regards to politics. I assure you that plenty of people who do well on tests believe in right wing policies that oppose all that you listed there.
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True, true. Good points, all. I was just woolgathering, mostly. I’m not in favor of hindering access to voting at all. But I did like the thought experiment of what it might look like to vet for cognitive dissonance.
And I don’t think it’s fair that people “from away” need to pass a test to gain citizenship, but those of us just lucky enough to be born here don’t need to do anything to earn it. Getting OT but I’ve long wished for some kind of obligatory civil service (like they do in Germany, if you opt out of the obligatory military service option) to build some kind of national unity, like we’re all in this together, building something.
And speaking of OT: As a side note, on the gifs front, I could see it in the email I got, but here on the thread I just see a blank space. Does that track with your suspicions about uploads vs. links?
More baseless claims being thrown out:
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The President can tell both Houses to go home. It has been very, very rare, but with McConnell shutting down all of Obama’s appointments from 2015 on and his demand to vet all of Biden’s Cabinet picks it might happen.
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I agree. Doing well on tests only proves you do well on tests. It says nothing about critical thinking skills, etc.
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That would be exactly the procedural arcana I had in mind, but that power hinges on not getting the two chambers to agree on a return date for a recess. It would require getting the House to change the date of the recess during the rules adoption before the obstruction occurred and the Senate not to agree with the new date. Trump pushed the idea, but was blocked because the standing rules in both chambers require the minority leader to consent to the change and that wasn’t in the cards and would remain so for Biden.
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Sure, but also, intelligence, critical thinking skills, literacy, etc, should not be metrics for being allowed to participate in democracy. The exact same justification was used to keep Black people from voting during Jim Crow… 
We all deserve representation and a say in how our country is run. The problem isn’t intelligence, it’s propaganda and ideology.
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Dude…you’ll never win at Calvinball.
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CGPGrey talks about the nuclear shenaniganry of forcing a long recess as part of his supreme court vacancy-filling video. It’s possible, but ultimately almost never actually going to happen, if only because nobody is terribly interested in pushing that particular nuclear button regardless of how obstructionist the other side is being.
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