To the broader point, there has to be _representative_ democracy for decentralized decision making to be fair
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/nov/...
Could it be that a majority of the population in those states are against abortion? Wouldn't Why should this be regulated at the federal level?
I'm pro-choice but I can understand that some people believe life begins at conception and therefore abortion is murder. If a majority of people in a state believe that, isn't it democratic to let them make laws accordingly?
This has both benefits and drawback. The decision of more than half of US states will impact less than half the us states citizens.
There’s a million nuances in it, rape, incest, medical reasons, and the time of abortion.
The abortion debate doesn’t exist in Europe because almost all sides managed to agree on a 12 week limit and it’s left alone.
I would guess in 10-20 years the US would arrive at the same conclusion, with small differences between red and blue states.
Stop making this a yes or no issue. And that’s not what the Supreme Court did. They didn’t ban abortion. If 60% want abortion legal they can vote for whoever gives them that.
> I would guess in 10-20 years the US would arrive at the same conclusion, with small differences between red and blue states.
This data visualisation [0] highlights the problem with this approach.
This isn't an issue where you can sit back and contemplate it as some abstract exercise of democracy. So many women will die, or be persecuted during that 10-20 year span you mention and it is completely needless. No one should be adopting a "it'll all work out in the end" mindset.
[0] https://twitter.com/monachalabi/status/999562371461992448?la...
That's simply not true.
In Germany's last election, a major issue was about removing a clause disallowing "advertising" abortions. It remains controversial that people seeking abortions have to get extensive psychological counseling from an extremely limited number of therapists before getting an abortion.
In Poland abortion is banned entirely and they are about to start keeping a pregnancy register.
Ireland and Spain also have ongoing debates about the particulars of their laws, with Ireland having just legalized it all in 2018!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/abortion-...
So fix the actual problem instead of trying to kludge your way around it.
Believing that these ruling will make things more democratic requires ignoring what Republican lawmakers both say and do.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/mike-pence-celebrates-end-roe-1529376...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annakaplan/2021/11/15/republica...
A group of Republican lawmakers introduced a bill Monday to federally decriminalize and tax marijuana, adding an alternative to sweeping Democratic proposals for major marijuana reform and narrow GOP-backed efforts to deschedule the drug in the U.S.
> The States Reform Act has garnered attention as the first prominent bill sponsored by a House Republican to end the federal prohibition of marijuana, which could help give the proposal some political advantage in its efforts to secure bipartisan support. Congressional Democrats have previously introduced various marijuana legalization proposals, including the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, and currently have draft language for the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity (CAO) Act. At this time, however, many observers believe neither of the proposals being led by congressional Democrats will be able to secure the necessary Republican votes for passage in the Senate. Any marijuana legalization proposal would need to secure the support of at least 10 Senate Republicans in order to overcome a potential filibuster.
"A small group of Republicans has finally seen the light at a time they've no power to pass legislation, and it'll fail because of Republican opposition in the Senate" is not quite "The Republicans sponsored a bill".
I think the current crop is largely apathetic about it. The Party rejected legalization in the 2020 platform. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/democratic-party-delegates-r...
There's a fairly clear red/blue state divide on the issue. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Map_of_U...
Polling backs this up, too: https://iop.harvard.edu/survey/details/political-issue-marij...
> Democrats support legalization 49 percent to 28 percent (oppose), Republicans oppose, 32 (support) percent to 50 percent;
The US is certainly more democratic than it was at its founding, when neither the president nor the Senate were entirely directly elected at all, but it's not even close to as democratic as most Americans appear to believe it is.
I think many Americans have been calling it a democracy for shorthand and people forget that it's an adjective for "republic".
For the most part, everyone in the world means approximately the same thing an American does when they say democracy ("a representative constitutional democracy, probably with some degree of regional federalism and bicameralism"). The US neither resembles a pure democracy or the republic the founders created at this point anyways, so it doesn't really matter. These terms are pretty fluid.
Pure democracy is basically never the goal anyways. It's not a bad thing for a system of government to be not entirely democratic, there do have to be checks on pure majoritarianism somehow, but the particulars of the US' democratic lacks seem to be both worse than most Americans imagine them to be, and also far more vestigial if not accidental than they ought to be (many were really there to help uphold slavery and/or prevent reconstruction from fully succeeding).
At this point, the net effect of the US' democratic failings is to create a tyranny of the minority, which can hardly be considered a better failure mode than a tyranny of the majority.
Any source fir it only being tyranny of the minority? I see examples of tyranny of the majority too.
Neither of these things are actually true in practice.
As I said in another branch of this conversation, the use of the filibuster on nearly all bills of any significance (budgets and confirmations aside) in the Senate (and the chilling effect it's had on even bringing other bills to the floor) means that states are not represented equally either. The most obstructionist states have substantially more legislative power than the ones that want to actually pass bills. This is obviously more abstract, but it's pretty clear that in practice states are not equal in the senate.
Yes, there are some outliers and discrepancy in the number a representative represents. It probably should be adjusted.
I hope it's uncontroversial that, say, blocking a bill to ban slavery is not "failing open," for example, and the persistent effort to prevent slavery from being banned led to many failures in liberty?
When your main bulwark is making it hard to pass bills, all you've really done is make it so that the status quo is powerful. The status quo is not, by default, freedom.
I mean, we will never know. Any answer to this question can only be speculation. I could as easily ask "how many expansions of freedom have we prevented?" And in this moment of political time I think there are at least a few. But that's also just speculation.
In theory it's supposed to be the constitution itself that prevents these abuses, not the crude instrument of legislative gridlock that prevents all change good or bad, especially in a moment like now or before the civil war where the two dominant political forces can't even see eye to eye on basic structures of power.
Much like, to bring it back to the original point, the Senate is already an unrepresentative body, it does not need the procedural filibuster (a unique creature among legislatures as it exists in the us Senate afaik) to make it one.
The constitution is supposed to restrict what abuses? There's basically nothing preventing further restrictions in freedoms on many topics. Because the constitution is generally vague and conceptual, the courts have a lot of leeway to allow restrictions, even on well defined rights (rights are not absolute). There's little interest in calling a convention or otherwise amending the constitution it seems.
The senate is a representative body, for the states. The filibuster ensures that controversial bills pass with more than a simple majority. This is a feature which helps ensure that the affected minority is relatively smaller, protects states rights (it's up to the states if the feds dont regulate in moat cases), and help prevents waffling after every election that changes the simple majority.
You can say that you like a system that has this feature for states or it has certain other benefits and so on, but you can't say that it is equal representation because it is not.
If you truly want equal representation, then we have to go the direct democracy route since you will not have equal numbers of people under each representative. You also need to get rid of appointments by the executive (including rule making agencies), closed primaries, and provide universal voting including for felons and non-citizens.
So what is this argument for equal representation across the board? I don't see any benefit other than if you want populist movements to succeed based on the whims of the day and potentially at the expense of the minority rights (even more so than today).
The main point here is that state representation was necessary in order to create the country, and is likely necessary for the country to continue. I don't see any argument that supercedes this so far.
But what is the objective benefit to removing the senate? The argument I'm hearing is just that it could be more democratic, but there are many changes that could make things more democratic. Some things are about fairness, like gerrymandering. But I don't see any benefit to removing the senate.
I thought we already covered that they represent states, not people.
By the way, what bill would they pass that would fix gerrymandering? I thought the states had the authority to draw their districts and it can be contentious as to what a good fix is.
And of course we have the same logic on the other side - that a party in power will do what they can to add to their power. We see that with laws about non-citizens voting (struck down), restoring/giving voring rights to groups that would disproportionately support them, and such.
We did, and that's the point.
> what bill would they pass that would fix gerrymandering? I thought the states had the authority to draw their districts and it can be contentious as to what a good fix is.
There is no bill, also my point. Also, it's only contentious to those who are deliberately attempting to gerrymander.
> that a party in power will do what they can to add to their power.
I agree with this part, its also my point; that is, undemocratic processes are self-perpetuating and self-strengthening.
> We see that with laws about non-citizens voting (struck down), restoring/giving voting rights to groups that would disproportionately support them, and such.
Interesting that that all your counter examples here are about giving people rights to vote. People having the right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Seems your view on democracy is of the 'only the right sort of people should be allowed to vote' variety, pun intended.
Then why are you misrepresenting it to mean something that it doesn't? Only one house is meant to represent people.
"Also, it's only contentious to those who are deliberately attempting to gerrymander."
Maybe for the general idea. But I can see implementation ideas being contentious. That's my point - the solutions are likely to contain biases, and there's going to be opposition to that.
"Interesting that that all your counter examples here are about giving people rights to vote. People having the right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Seems your view on democracy is of the 'only the right sort of people should be allowed to vote' variety, pun intended."
Please name a democracy that has unlimited voting rights. All democracies have some limits. Requiring that someone is a citizen is a damn low bar. Losing rights for felonies can be debated, but that's not too uncommon either. The purpose of those most basic restrictions is do that society does not become influenced by the criminal elements (you're banned from office too) or from outside influence. And guess what, those restrictions were democratically implemented. So please stop with the attacks and more righteous than thou attitude. Please state some argument beyond "fundamental".
I didn't mispresent anything, I've been consistent and clear about my view of the senate.
>Please name a democracy that has unlimited voting rights.
It's not my position that voting rights should be unlimited. I was only pointing out that your own list of bad things were all about giving people who don't have a say about the government whose rules they must live by, a say in that government by vote.
>The purpose of those most basic restrictions is do that society does not become influenced by the criminal elements
This is historical laughable, the purpose of most restrictions is to limit the vote of marginalized groups, usually by race. For just one example, Step 1: Pass laws making weed a felony. Step 2: Focus all law enforcement efforts on marginalized groups smoking weed but let the kids in suburbs and college dorms smoke all they want. Step 3: Harshly punish marginalized groups by making them felons. Step 4: Strip them of the right to vote.
It’s sad how the flimsiest well-actuallys carry so much weight around here. Anyone making arguments around recent decisions being democratic has their head buried in the sand about how blatantly undemocratic the US has been since its inception.
Creating laws out of thin air and not through the proper processes is the opposite of democratic.
This ruling is the right one.
If you don’t like the EPA just say so, but please stop pretending like the Supreme Court is some real arbiter of logic and constitutionality. It has always been (even during liberal courts) an unelected political institution that justifies huge legislative changes with high-minded philosophical hand waving. Occasionally they throw in civil rights decisions for good PR with their aligned base, but even that’s on the chopping block with the current court.
Majority of square feet of land or majority of people?
So there is a democratic debate to be had about where in the middle the non extreme two sides could meet. (In Europe there is no debate about abortion and most countries allow it to 12 weeks).
Better to have a debate and both sides compromise than some court deciding on one of the most extreme views. The Supreme Court didn’t ban abortion, they did however allow it to 36 weeks for decades.
What they did do last week is say: hey guys, it’s a federal democracy, why don’t you fucking debate it and legislate it somehow where both sides can agree, as is normal with divisive issues in a democracy
Even RBG said that Roe v Wade was on shaky ground as a legal precedent.
And what people don’t realize is that if Roe v Wade wasn’t overturn the next ruling discussed was allowing further restrictions by states, further eroding the precedent.
The alternative was just kicking the can down the road until the next challenge.
This just ripped the bandaid off.
I think the metaphor of comparing internet bandwidth to pipes/tubes carrying water is perfectly apt. It seems like a very simple, direct and effective way to describe issues of bandwidth, connectivity, congestion and overall infrastructure.
I've never quite understood why we all pretended like that was a bad analogy. I guess just because it came out of the mouth of an old, white Republican.