US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6704

On January 31 2017 05:18 sharkie wrote:
There is no valid excuse to not go vote. I have no respect for people who dont go use their right.

On January 31 2017 05:12 LegalLord wrote:

I don't think that's what happened to Hillary, if only because turnout was quite standard this time. The problem was simply that her support was concentrated in the wrong places (safe state megacities) while Trump's appeal was in the most contested areas, which happened to have a large rural or working class population.

On January 31 2017 05:33 kwizach wrote:

Actually, a 538 analysis points to registered Democratic voters staying home in sufficient numbers to have probably cost Clinton the election: click here.

US travel ban puts 20,000 refugees in 'precarious circumstances', UN says

The United Nations refugee chief has expressed alarm at the scale of Donald Trump’s order barring the arrival of refugees, saying it placed 20,000 people who were expecting resettlement in the US in “precarious circumstances”.

“Refugees … are fleeing war, persecution, oppression and terrorism,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees. “The individuals and families UNHCR refers to governments for resettlement are the most vulnerable – such as people needing urgent medical assistance, survivors of torture, and women and girls at risk. The new homes provided by resettlement countries are lifesaving for people who have no other options.”

Late on Friday, the Trump administration issued a temporary ban on the entry of Syrian, Sudanese, Somali, Iraqi, Yemeni, Iranian and Libyan nationals to the United States in an executive order that he said was prompted by security concerns.


'Totally wrong': Houston's Iraqis and Syrians react to Trump's travel ban
Read more
The move also suspended arrivals by all refugees for 120 days and stopped the resettlement of Syrian refugees indefinitely, even though those who were expected to arrive in the US having already undergone an arduous vetting process that could take up to two years.

“This week alone, over 800 refugees were set to make America their new home, but instead find themselves barred from travelling to the US,” Grandi said. “UNHCR estimates that 20,000 refugees in precarious circumstances might have been resettled to the United States during the 120 days covered by the suspension announced Friday, based on average monthly figures for the last 15 years. Refugees are anxious, confused and heartbroken at this suspension in what is already a lengthy process.”

On January 31 2017 05:55 LegalLord wrote:
When she picked Tim Kaine as her VP I could see she had no intent whatsoever of compromising her platform for some annoying leftists.

I didn't choose not to vote / vote Trump / vote third party but anyone who did is justified in believing that she failed to do enough to get their vote. They didn't owe her their votes and she didn't really earn them.

On January 31 2017 05:25 parkufarku wrote:


I get your point about how the inevitability of it may turn off some people from voting for their candidate - and it's a perfectly valid argument. But these people know what they're doing, and they announce that stuff not 3 hours before election booths open up but during the middle of it when most people are in line. So what you said may be true if they announced it way earlier, they do this when, by their statistics, most people should already be in line (those who were gonna vote anyway), and if you physically went to the location to vote, you're not gonna just leave the line and go home just because you heard some news claim their candidate was gonna win, you're gonna want to join in on the victory since you already made an effort to go out there.

WIth the tracker, yes, it's out there way before the actual election time to vote comes, but they still give a slight worry and uncertainty by not making it look like it's overwhelmingly a given. For example, they could say "Clinton has 80% chance to win" and put the commentary: you still need to help her incase something unexpected happens. This way it would still work with human psychology but it would still entice you to vote

Scores of American diplomats stationed across the globe have drafted a formal “dissent memo” to register their objections to President Donald Trump’s ban on Syrian refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The draft memo, obtained by ABC News, represents the most significant opposition thus far from within the Trump administration to the president’s controversial executive order.

“This ban ... will not achieve its stated aim of to protect [sic] the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States,” wrote the diplomats. “It will immediately sour relations with these six countries, as well as much of the Muslim world, which sees the ban as religiously motivated.”

The draft memo does not contain any signatures, and its contents are categorized as “Sensitive But Unclassified.” The use of “dissent memos” at the State Department dates back to the Vietnam War, when they were considered necessary to ensure that diplomats on the ground had a means to express opinions that differed with formal U.S. policy.

To say that the writers of Monday’s dissent memo expressed opinions that differed with the Trump administration may be an understatement. “This ban stands in opposition to the core American values that we, as federal employees, took an oath to uphold,” they wrote.

“The end result of this ban will not be a drop in terror attacks against the United States; it will be a drop in international goodwill towards Americans and a threat towards our economy,” the memo read.

If the memo is formally submitted to secretary of state designee Rex Tillerson, who is currently awaiting Senate confirmation, the rules of dissent memos would grant Tillerson 30 to 60 working days to respond.

On Monday, a State Department spokesman said the agency is aware of the dissent memo. “The Dissent Channel is a longstanding official vehicle for State Department employees to convey alternative views and perspectives on policy issues,” spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement. “This is an important process that the Acting Secretary, and the Department as a whole, value and respect. It allows State employees to express divergent policy views candidly and privately to senior leadership.”

White House spokesman Sean Spicer was much less forgiving of the diplomats who are choosing to air their concerns. “They should either get with the program, or they can go,” Spicer said Monday at a press briefing.

On January 31 2017 06:13 LegalLord wrote:

After looking into their methodology, as I described a fair bit back, I myself concluded that they weren't really rigging - their models just sucked, and the "less likely event" happened.

If Hillary had won their models would still have sucked because they were bad, not because they made the wrong call.

On January 31 2017 06:18 Logo wrote:


Yeah, it certainly seems like there were a bunch of bad models going awry.

But at the same time, I don't see what people expect? Accurately polling an election with a wide popular/electoral split seems like it's always going to be relatively difficult. I still think some of the more conservative estimates (like 538) were as accurate as they could reasonably be outside of maybe a lot more state polls being conducted near the vote.

Is Trump’s Immigration Ban Legal? We Survey The Smartest Legal Experts

Since President Donald Trump signed his ‘extreme vetting’ executive order on Friday, there has been a flurry of legal action, including at least a half a dozen lawsuits filed against Trump and his administration across the country. So far, several judges have ordered stays, putting a temporary stop to very limited portions of the law to prevent approved visa holders and green card holders from being deported from the United States. As of this writing, however, no federal judge has weighed in on the actual constitutionality of the executive order. In other words, is it legal? Can President Trump just do something like this? Will the courts ultimately be on his side when it comes down to the heart of Trump’s executive action?

Oh, if only the answer was easy. This is a very complicated issue, and we found that immigration experts, all of whom have spent their careers studying this field, are deeply divided as well. Without oversimplifying, there are some who contend that federal law simply forbids what Trump is doing. Others believe Trump is in the clear legally because the “plenary power doctrine” allows the legislative and executive branches to have sole power to regulate all aspects of immigration. Still, there are other experts who believe that even despite the plenary power doctrine, the Constitution does not allow discrimination on the basis of religion or race/ethnicity/national origin even for immigration policy. We will be updating this article with more responses from experts as we get them.

What does the Executive Order say?

The order suspends the Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days
Indefinitely blocks all refugees from Syria
The order bans people from mostly Muslim countries, with suspected terrorism links, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days.
The order specifically carves out an exception and directs the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to prioritize refugee claims made by persecuted members of religious minorities.
Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric, the immigration order was very careful not to single out Muslims in particular

Illegal/Unconstitutional
David Cole, National Legal Director of the ACLU and professor at Georgetown University, said that the Executive Order violates the “clearest command of the Establishment Clause” of the U.S. Constitution. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Cole believes one of the critical questions on whether this EO is legal under the Establishment Clause is its intent and effect. In other words, if Trump’s order intended to disfavor a particular religion, then there is no doubt that he violated the Establishment Clause. Cole then goes on to list examples which he says prove that the order was intended to do just that. And in fact, one of Trump’s campaign advisors, Rudy Guiliani even said on a Sunday talk show that Trump had previously asked him about how to do a Muslim ban “legally.”

Adam Cox, the Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at NYU, and immigration expert, believes that the law is unconstitutional. He believes that even though the Supreme Court has traditionally given Congress and the President broad authority over immigration policy, this doesn’t given Trump the license to discriminate. Cox writes:

In short: the Supreme Court has never upheld an immigration policy that openly discriminated on the basis of race or religion during a period of constitutional history when such a policy would have been clearly unconstitutional in the domestic context.

The upshot is that there is a very good chance that the Supreme Court–and even more certainly many lower court judges–would strike down an immigration policy (even an admissions policy for people who have never entered the United States) if they see it as amounting to open discrimination on the basis of race or religion. And such a holding would not mean that courts were “abandoning” or walking back the plenary power.

David J. Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity recently wrote for The New York Times that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin, and therefore Trump’s order is illegal. Bier writes:

Even if courts do find wiggle room here, discretion can be taken too far. If Mr. Trump can legally ban an entire region of the world, he would render Congress’s vision of unbiased legal immigration a dead letter. An appeals court stopped President Barack Obama’s executive actions to spare millions of undocumented immigrants from deportations for the similar reason that he was circumventing Congress. Some discretion? Sure. Discretion to rewrite the law? Not in America’s constitutional system.

Quasi- Constitutional
Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, writes that normally the policy laid out in the Executive Order would survive judicial review. “That is, I believe the executive branch may decide to identify specific countries from which immigrants and others seeking entry into the country must receive “extreme vetting” and that the President may order a suspension of refugees from particular places (as Obama did with Iraq in 2011). Despite some of the President’s comments during the campaign about wanting a ‘Muslim ban,’ this EO does not come anywhere close to effectuating such a ban, as it largely focuses on countries that were previously identified as sources of potential terror threats,” Adler wrote in The Washington Post‘s Volokh Conspiracy. However, he believes that the EO could give judges pause because of the “the cavalier and reckless manner in which this specific EO was developed and implemented will likely give judges pause — and with good reason.”

Legal/ Constitutional
Nolan Rappaport served on House Judiciary Committee as an Executive Branch Immigration Law Expert for three years. He contends that while the executive order was clumsily written, it is still perfectly legal. He wrote for The Hill that the President has authority to suspend immigration which can be found in section 212(f) of the INA:

“(f) Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

Peter Spiro, professor of immigration and constitutional law at Temple University says the executive order is constitutional (even though he says it is awful) and points to the doctrine known as plenary power which gives the political branches an effective blank check to regulate immigration policy. In a New York Times piece he wrote:

The court has given the political branches the judicial equivalent of a blank check to regulate immigration as they see fit. This posture of extreme deference is known as the “plenary power” doctrine. It dates back to the 1889 decision in the Chinese Exclusion case, in which the court upheld the exclusion of Chinese laborers based on their nationality.

Unlike other bygone constitutional curiosities that offend our contemporary sensibilities, the Chinese Exclusion case has never been overturned. More recent decisions have upheld discrimination against immigrants based on gender and illegitimacy that would never have survived equal protection scrutiny in the domestic context. Likewise, courts have rejected the assertion of First Amendment free speech protections by noncitizens.

“I don’t think you have to look any farther than the families of the Boston Marathon, in Atlanta, in San Bernardino, to ask if we can go further,” Spicer said.

None of the perpetrators of those terror attacks would have been affected by the executive order Trump signed on Friday.