Today we learned that immigration is more important for Americans than even abortion, so much that 3 states didn’t even codify it.
Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks. Amending the constitution requires a 60% supermajority, which I think is appropriate for constitutional questions, but is too high of a threshold for ordinary policy legislation. In this case, repealing the laws against abortion and marijuana have majority public support by a wide margin, so why should we have to pass new constitutional amendments with a 60% supermajority just to repeal bad statutes that were passed via the ordinary legislative process in the first place?
On top of that, because measures passed this way become constitutional provisions, rather than normal legislation, it makes it difficult for the courts to exercise judicial review and reconcile these measures with extant law. It's sort of the worst of both worlds.
Maybe we should try to get an actual ballot initiative process into a draft constitutional amendment for the next election cycle.
The plebiscite/referendum is the ultimate authority.
The point of having a political process is to define a structured way of resolving the conflicts that arise from those divergences of interests and values, not to pretend that the output of specific elections somehow represents the singular will of the entirety of society. Presuming that is a grave error that inevitably results in the strongest faction imposing its will unilaterally onto all others.
Democracy is a great way of deciding political questions, but without safeguards in place to ensure that that it's kept within defined bounds of what qualifies as a political question in the first place, it will degrade into authoritarianism pretty rapidly.
We absolutely need judicial review, and plebiscites in which narrow majorities approve of policies that are unconstitutional, or otherwise violate people's fundamental rights, should unquestionably be struck down, just as equivalent policies enacted by a legislative body would.
you've got to stay hopeful. votes do count, but a 60% threshold means a minority have more sway in this instance.
As far as I can see, their arguments have devolved to weasel wording alone, like saying it's a "reproductive health" or "reproductive rights" issue.
They seem to be carefully avoiding the central issue that, if discussed, could undermine all that weasel wording. I.e. the question of at what point life begins.
Also correct me if I'm wrong, but in the US left, and in some states governed by them, it's the case that a unborn baby of an age which would have been a viable albeit premature birth can be killed under the wording of "aborting a pregnancy"?
I'd just really like to understand the mental and philosophical basis behind this.
I'm not justifying them, but I completely understand why someone would think like that.
A great example is the viral marketing Republicans did where they went house to house in largely blue towns asking when they'd like their shipment of an illegal family to house.
Just wool over everyone's eyes. They are just rationalizing who they want to hate while ignoring how little progress on their issues they are actually making.
That bill was negotiated in secret by three senators, including one Republican senator. When the text of the bill was finally released, the contents were much different than expected. You can listen to Republican senators talking about the bill as soon as the text was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
And you can listen to the Speaker talking about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii0tl8d5G3g
It's not like this bill had wide support, and then Trump said something and everyone pulled back. That's just a fabrication meant to give the Democrats campaign talking points.
Also the House passed a border security bill in 2023, which has been blocked by the Democrat controlled Senate. [1]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/unraveling-misinformation-...
>The bill also would have supplied more funding to interdict fentanyl and human trafficking, and it included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
I think another reading is that abortion was the most important topic. I strongly believe that abortion is wrong and voted accordingly. There have been over 20M abortions in the united states, and is directly responsible for our current population collapse.
Republicans have stymied multiple useful border initiatives since 2008, most recently this year.
That's the problem. The solutions are already on paper, just not enforced. Much like theft in California which appears to have had a drastic shift back with this election too.
People was consistency and enforcement regardless of party.
Since not all American latinos are "illegal immigrants", why would this be a sane argument?
If you total the population of the states which have a ban also I would bet it is less than 50m people, so ~15% of the population live in a state where it is banned and those are heavy rust belt states so they might even be in favor of it being banned.
Smaller states like Texas, the second largest state by population?
The issue isn't immigration, it is massive amounts of illegal immigration. Some form of vetting is necessary to keep gang members, murderers, rapists, and extremist terrorists from entering the country. Nearly everyone in this country either is descended from immigrants or is a first generation immigrant themselves, but they just want a controlled legal process to occur.
Same with abortion. Trump's official position on abortion is that it isn't a federal issue, it is a state issue. This is much more nuanced than for and against. Conservatives have wide ranging beliefs on this issue. There are some that are 100% against it and some that believe it should be banned after X number of weeks. Many also believe that there should be exceptions for medical necessity, rape, and incest. There are complicated ethical, moral, and religious issues that surround these beliefs. At what point does a fetus become a human? No one really has a great answer to that question.
Another issue is gun control. If you believe strongly in the Second Amendment most Democrats are unpalatable on this issue alone. Kamala Harris has in the past stated that she supports a ban and confiscation of AR-15s, as you can imagine this went over poorly for a very significant portion of the electorate.
Bottom line however, I agree with many others here that the economy is the biggest thing that won people over to Trump. Even if it is completely out of Trump, Biden, or Harris's control, most people in this country felt like they were better off financially under the Trump administration and they voted accordingly.
I have a simple and correct answer for that -- at conception. It's not a matter of if abortion kills a human being, it's a matter of if that's ok or not.
Right. This isn't a novel issue. We already have codified, lawful killing in numerous situations.
Nobody has to agree on the morality of it. You can claim and believe that your definition is correct, and someone else can equally claim and believe a different position. But an internally consistent position that all can acknowledge is that there are laws the govern killing. (It's noteworthy that these generally are the purview of individual states.)