SCOTUS and whatnot

[mtutiger]

29 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

and of course while a narrow aspect of the argument like 'how many majority black districts' is relevant to the VRA, it actually has nothing directly to do with which side is favored by which map in practice. As has been seen in MI, dividing the city of Detroit vote actually favors the Dems and there has been much GOP wailing and gnashing of teeth over our new district maps even though one result may be the loss of a minority congresscriter.

Just to expand on this, there are parts of the country (Atlanta, Houston, DFW) where Section 2 helps the GOP more than it hurts them. 

On the whole, i think the decision is more bad than good in terms of minority representation, significantly so even.... but, for instance, if state lawmakers in Texas were, in practice, to eliminate the VRA vote sink district that spans between Fort Worth and Dallas and allot it to other adjacent districts, it would potentially be a net negative and could potentially put a couple of districts that are 15> GOP in play.

A ruling against Section 2 seems like it would be symbolically pretty terrible, but how it would play out in practice would just vary based on the geography. 

Edited February 8, 2022 by mtutiger

[buddha]

2 hours ago, pfife said:

Cool but I don't need stern to tell me that - everything I said was pretty obvious before his tweet was ever sent. 

In fact, what I said is pretty obvious to almost every piece of legislation the Democrats pass for the next couple few decades, your opinions notwithstanding.  

Nice ad-hom though,  did we defund the ad-hom police officer that was here for a week or so?  Or is ad-hom 911 a joke?

i assume this is directed at me.

i wasnt attacking you, i was commenting on stern.  sorry if it came across that way.

[Motown Bombers]

9 hours ago, buddha said:

a couple things:

1) citing mark joseph stern on the supreme court is like citing triple7 about the tigers.  does he know some of the facts and the basics?  yes.  is he occasionally insightful?  as much as a broken clock is right twice a day.  is he hyperbolic, over the top, and seeking attention for himself rather than offering any useful information?

yup.

2) roberts didnt really take the liberals' position, he took a centrist position.  like usual.

3) this ruling doesnt gut the voting right act.  it doesnt say anything about the voting rights act.  here is the deal, the alabama legislature passed a map that would have had one majority black voter district whereas the old map had two.  instead, the new map puts some black voters in other districts.  the district court (with two trump nominees who obviously forgot their marching orders) sided with the naacp and said this is a violation of section ii and they had to redraw the map.  the legislature asked them to stay their ruling (which would have left the old map intact) while they appealed to the supremes.  the district court said no.  it said you have plenty if time to redraw the map now get busy.  if you dont redraw it with a good map, we'll appoint an outside agency to draw one for you.

the supreme court got the appeal and said yes, we will hear this and we will stay the district court's decision until we can rule.  this means the ruling is stayed until the supremes can hear the appeal in the fall which, for all intents and purposes, means this new map is in effect for the next election.

kagan says thats bs and the ruling should go into effect now and the supremes can hear the state's appeal while the state operates under the old map (or the redrawn map ordered by the court).  kavanaugh says thats not fair to the state because it is planning the elections with the new map and that the supremes are not supposed to get involved in state elections so close to election time (technically kinda true).  roberts says the case needs to be heard to clarify section two of the vra (which was changed in shelby county by roberts) and that the old maps should be in effect until the supremes can make that clarification.

4) i think kavanaugh is wrong and kagan/roberts are both kind of right.

5) democracy isnt dying.  nor is it dead.  life will go on in heavily gerrymandered states like illinois and alabama and pennsylvania and maryland and north carolina...

6) despite #5, i think gerrymandering is stupid and should be ended.  post haste.

Here are a couple blue states that gerrymander so see they do it as well. Democracy is dying. States like Georgia are continually making it easier for their legislature to simply overturn the results. Georgia is purging election boards of Democrats. They are intentionally making it harder to vote. It is on the brink. 

[buddha]

2 hours ago, mtutiger said:

Just to expand on this, there are parts of the country (Atlanta, Houston, DFW) where Section 2 helps the GOP more than it hurts them. 

On the whole, i think the decision is more bad than good in terms of minority representation, significantly so even.... but, for instance, if state lawmakers in Texas were, in practice, to eliminate the VRA vote sink district that spans between Fort Worth and Dallas and allot it to other adjacent districts, it would potentially be a net negative and could potentially put a couple of districts that are 15> GOP in play.

A ruling against Section 2 seems like it would be symbolically pretty terrible, but how it would play out in practice would just vary based on the geography. 

most of this voting rights act stuff is about symbolism.  not all of it, but most of it.  in general, its very easy to vote in this country.

that said, the voting rights act was put in play for a reason and not all of those reasons are gone.  the roberts court deals with discrimination cases by saying - as roberts did - the best way to end discrimination by race is to stop discriminating by race.  and by the letter of the law, they are right on discrimination cases.  things like affirmative action do discriminate by race.

the other question is why and if it is still necessary to do so because of the long history of discrimination.  and while those acts do say that the government cannot diacriminate on the basis of race, the purpose behind those acts was to deal with a specific type of discrimination foisted upon a certain group of people by the majority group in society.  roberts' view doesnt take that into account enough, imo. 

but by the letter of the law, he is right.  the other issue is whether it is still necessary in today's world.  but that's another debate altogether.

[buddha]

1 minute ago, Motown Bombers said:

Here are a couple blue states that gerrymander so see they do it as well. Democracy is dying. States like Georgia are continually making it easier for their legislature to simply overturn the results. Georgia is purging election boards of Democrats. They are intentionally making it harder to vote. It is on the brink. 

separate issue.  that isnt a voting rights act issue and its not at issue in this case.

that's an electoral act issue.  they need to shore that up before the next election for the very reasons you said.  if im not mistaken, there is bipartisan support for doing that.

[Motown Bombers]

3 minutes ago, buddha said:

separate issue.  that isnt a voting rights act issue and its not at issue in this case.

that's an electoral act issue.  they need to shore that up before the next election for the very reasons you said.  if im not mistaken, there is bipartisan support for doing that.

No, there isn't bipartisan support. There's a voting rights bill in the senate that would address these issues plus gerrymandering but not a single Republican supports it. Not even Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger. 

[pfife]

23 minutes ago, buddha said:

i assume this is directed at me.

i wasnt attacking you, i was commenting on stern.  sorry if it came across that way.

I interpreted it that way because you explicitly called out CITING him, not him.   I figured I cited him b/c I posted his tweet, thus you called out what I did.

 

[pfife]

sorry, I will amend - you called out citing him, and then called out him. 

[buddha]

21 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

No, there isn't bipartisan support. There's a voting rights bill in the senate that would address these issues plus gerrymandering but not a single Republican supports it. Not even Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger. 

there isnt bipartisan support for the voting rights act, but i thought there was some bipartisan support for amending the electoral act?  i could be wrong though, its been a while aince i heard anything about it.

[chasfh]

32 minutes ago, buddha said:

most of this voting rights act stuff is about symbolism.  not all of it, but most of it.  in general, its very easy to vote in this country.

Says the white guy who lives in a mostly white community where elections are run by a bipartisan Board of Election Commissioners mandated by the state to maintain easy access to the polls. 🤠

[buddha]

22 minutes ago, chasfh said:

Says the white guy who lives in a mostly white community where elections are run by a bipartisan Board of Election Commissioners mandated by the state to maintain easy access to the polls. 🤠

albany park is more diverse than your community, white dude.

you can even ride your bike to a polling place, its that easy.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, buddha said:

most of this voting rights act stuff is about symbolism.  not all of it, but most of it.  in general, its very easy to vote in this country.

that said, the voting rights act was put in play for a reason and not all of those reasons are gone.  the roberts court deals with discrimination cases by saying - as roberts did - the best way to end discrimination by race is to stop discriminating by race.  and by the letter of the law, they are right on discrimination cases.  things like affirmative action do discriminate by race.

the other question is why and if it is still necessary to do so because of the long history of discrimination.  and while those acts do say that the government cannot diacriminate on the basis of race, the purpose behind those acts was to deal with a specific type of discrimination foisted upon a certain group of people by the majority group in society.  roberts' view doesnt take that into account enough, imo. 

but by the letter of the law, he is right.  the other issue is whether it is still necessary in today's world.  but that's another debate altogether.

I don't know if Roberts is half right or half wrong. There was a time when discrimination was enforced by law, and the best way to end that is for the law to be colorblind. That is true - as far as it goes. The trick is that in American we have found lots of ways to create discrimination that don't depend on the law - for instance housing patterns that result in segregation, which in turn leads to resource withdrawal from minority populations does not come about because of any active support in law one way or the other. The question for society to face is how does a society based in law, change something without using law without the law itself becoming discriminatory. Roberts is right that that is the fist step down a slippery slope back to legally enforced discrimination - so it's a complex question and I don't think that as a society we have even figured out the correct formulation of the question.

Edited February 8, 2022 by gehringer_2

[Motown Bombers]

18 minutes ago, buddha said:

albany park is more diverse than your community, white dude.

you can even ride your bike to a polling place, its that easy.

And that's Illinois. In Georgia they are closing polling locations and removing dropboxes. Lines are hours long in areas of Atlanta. In Texas, over half the applications for absentee ballots are being rejected. Polling locations have closed. There is no valid reasons these states are doing this other than to attempt to suppress voting. 

[chasfh]

23 minutes ago, buddha said:

albany park is more diverse than your community, white dude.

you can even ride your bike to a polling place, its that easy.

It's super easy for me to vote here, too. Then again, we're not a red state that's trying to slash early voting hours or ban mail-in voting or close polling stations in minority areas.

[pfife]

1 minute ago, chasfh said:

It's super easy for me to vote here, too. Then again, we're not a red state that's trying to slash early voting hours or ban mail-in voting or close polling stations in minority areas.

and you didn't argue it was easy for others to vote

[chasfh]

1 minute ago, pfife said:

and you didn't argue it was easy for others to vote

I believe the exact argument was "in general, its very easy to vote in this country" which, I guess technically speaking, is a rhetorically defensible statement. I can accept that, in more than 50% of polling stations in the country, it's very easy to vote.

[pfife]

I'd also wonder what constitutes "easy".   In 2016 I waited for well over an hour to vote in person, is that easy?  Now we have no excuse absentee voting but that's only trustable as long as the republicans aren't running the show.   For 2020 I dropped my vote in a dropbox, that was definitely easy.   I actually plan to go back to voting in person because the republicans aren't trustworthy and our system, as far as I can tell, doesn't show that your ballot was accepted, ie passed "signature certification" or whatever they call it.

[CMRivdogs]

I took advantage of Michigan's senior citizen early voting options for several years when I lived there. Would walk into F-Hills city hall and ask for a ballot. When we moved to Wolverine Lake, same thing at the Commerce Twp offices. In fact they even let me change my vote prior to the 2020 Dem Primary. Good thing I was only working part time and had access to my own transportation at the time.

Virginia Trumpublicans are trying to roll back the early voting they instituted here a couple years ago. We have one location in the county for early voting, it's open about a month before the election. They also do vote by mail (I used it this last go round and checked to website to check on my ballot). 
 

My wife works remotely, lots of days she barely has time to grab a sandwich between meetings. If we go back to the old method as the Trumpkins want she will probably be denied her franchise.

[chasfh]

18 minutes ago, pfife said:

I'd also wonder what constitutes "easy".   In 2016 I waited for well over an hour to vote in person, is that easy?  Now we have no excuse absentee voting but that's only trustable as long as the republicans aren't running the show.   For 2020 I dropped my vote in a dropbox, that was definitely easy.   I actually plan to go back to voting in person because the republicans aren't trustworthy and our system, as far as I can tell, doesn't show that your ballot was accepted, ie passed "signature certification" or whatever they call it.

Good question. Is an hour wait "easy"? Some my say it is, particualrly when contrasted against stories of eight- or more hour waits that make the news every couple of Novembers.

I'm typically in and out of the polling station in 15 or 20 minutes, so it's easy for me. I'm one of the lucky ones.

Fact is, a lot of people don't want it to be easy for eligible voters to vote. They want voting to be difficult for most eligible voters. They want long waits and stringent ID requirements. Some people would even like to require a civics test to vote! Anything to keep that other guy out of the booth. He's ignorant and can't be trusted.

[buddha]

40 minutes ago, chasfh said:

It's super easy for me to vote here, too. Then again, we're not a red state that's trying to slash early voting hours or ban mail-in voting or close polling stations in minority areas.

i think when all is said and done, it wont effect voting at all, and may end up hurting republicans as much as democrats.  but i dont know, we'll find out.

[buddha]

29 minutes ago, pfife said:

I'd also wonder what constitutes "easy".   In 2016 I waited for well over an hour to vote in person, is that easy?  Now we have no excuse absentee voting but that's only trustable as long as the republicans aren't running the show.   For 2020 I dropped my vote in a dropbox, that was definitely easy.   I actually plan to go back to voting in person because the republicans aren't trustworthy and our system, as far as I can tell, doesn't show that your ballot was accepted, ie passed "signature certification" or whatever they call it.

i always vote in person because i dont trust that it was actually received and counted unless i can see it go into the machine.

[CMRivdogs]

I can't find it now, but I found a recent report/survey that showed while there was an increase in voter turnout in 2020 over 2016, it was roughly the same for both parties. 
 

Once again the Trumpublican Boogieman is a pack of lies. Except where it counts. That's in vote tabulation and final official results. That's what they really want to control. 

[chasfh]

5 minutes ago, buddha said:

i think when all is said and done, it wont effect voting at all, and may end up hurting republicans as much as democrats.  but i dont know, we'll find out.

It can hurt Republicans only if the elections are free and fair.

[CMRivdogs]

4 minutes ago, buddha said:

i always vote in person because i dont trust that it was actually received and counted unless i can see it go into the machine.

But you can't see what the machine spits out at the end.....

But then you're in Chicago

[chasfh]

How can you be sure you get your vote counted in Chicago?

Vote Democrat. 😅