Let's hope some of the liberals who oppose the NSA's surveillance can put aside their differences and support this pro-gun, anti-abortion, religious Tea Party republican in his efforts.
Amash is one of the few in Congress that posts his votes and reasoning on his Facebook page. Very transparent. I would say he is also a lot more Libertarian than he is Tea Party. He is for protecting us and (what's left of) the Constitution.
As my representative, I will continue to vote for him and his run for Senate, regardless of his pro-gun, anti-abortion views, religion, or party. We need more Amash's in our government to protect the people and the Constitution.
For the record, he's never actually voted against abortion. He opposes government-funded abortion, but also voted "Present" on a bill to defund the "Planned Parenthood" organization, saying that he will not vote on any bill that names a single private organization instead of a class of organizations in general.
I think that as a practical matter, reform of the NSA has to come from the right. Candidates on the right are less susceptible to charges of being "weak on terrorism" and also can appeal to constituents (pro-gun, anti-abortion, religious) that have historically chaffed at government registration/monitoring type efforts (e.g. opposition to national ID cards has always come mostly from the right). And that means that liberals who want to see reforms to the NSA will have to get on board with any conservatives they can find who are willing to push the issue.
Isn't this tone part of the problem? It is possible that there exists a topic that you agree with someone on even if you find them or their unrelated views repugnant. Refusal to identify where the overlap in views does exist is what has gotten us to the state we are in.
it's the Amash Conyers bill.
I think that the one idea that the [ideologue] liberals and conservatives pretty much agree on, is that the government is full of jack booted thugs who are not to be trusted.
The problem is... ironically... the law and order types in both parties, as well as the majority of the people in the general population. They believe the American Government acts in an essentially "good" fashion. These are the, "Well... if you have nothing to hide, you don't have anything to worry about." -types.
I wish there was more harmony on things like this--if, for example, one wanted to run a back-alley clinic in the Tea Party apocalypse, then presumably you wouldn't want trivial tracking of your movements by phone data mining.
It'd be nice if the liberal party line was more pro-gun; they'd probably find converts a lot more easily.
I posit that the vast majority of gun killings are drug-trade related. Generally in the form of gang conflicts, like turf battles for distribution areas, maybe some for armed robbery for money to buy drugs.
The base of the republican party could never accept that recreational drugs aren't inherently bad. So they can't point out the obvious (obvious to me at least) point that if they ended the war on drugs, the rate of gun violence would plummet.
The base of the democratic party could never accept that guns aren't inherently bad. If they talked about decriminalization as a means to reducing gun violence that would weaken any arguments for the outright banning of guns.
So neither party has incentive to fix the problem because their respective bases have idealogical beliefs that are simply not topics of debate.
Maybe we could convince them that ending the war on drugs would free up more resources for, say, locking up homosexuals that also carry guns?
That'd make everybody happy again, right? :(