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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
I've always been a big fan of federalism as a starting point for any government but even I can see that the founding fathers made the country with the ideal of a Rome style republic and not a greek style democracy. Thats the first mistep that I see fellow conservatives get with the federalism papers. It wasn't ment for everyones vote to be equal. If thats what you want then you can't really stay with the founders all the time. I can be a dick and blame democrats for runing the checks and balances on this country because of Andrew Jackson but the history of the republic turning into an empire had already happened in Italy. The founders had to either know things were going to go this way if everyone got to vote or they were incompetent. And I don't think they were incompetent.
The founding fathers knew the states needed to be put under a barrel by the federal government and made the government so that it would one day be able to.
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On November 18 2017 04:26 TheTenthDoc wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2017 04:21 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 04:18 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 04:07 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 04:00 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 03:50 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 03:45 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 03:35 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 03:27 TheTenthDoc wrote:
It's hard for me to take people arguing the founding fathers didn't want any coercion from the federal government seriously when the necessary consequence of that is that the federal government cannot provide money to the states in any way without immortalizing those grants in perpetuity, since any removal of funds could then be coercive to states. There is at the very least a bare minimum of coercion potential implicit in having a semi-autonomous federal government that regulates interstate commerce. The question is removal of other funding agreements to compel acceptance of other programs authorized by the Spending Clause. Also, to use that in a backwards way to force states to regulate as you would have them do. Their volition and comprehension is at issue. The problem is that a state could argue any removal of federal funds was in fact a federal attempt to coerce them, even independent of formal use of other funding agreements. The process could simply be encoded in two separate laws; e.g. "we delete Medicaid in law 1, then create SuperCaid with all the riders we want in law 2 and allow states to opt in." Is that coercion? There's no funding agreements involved, it's merely dissembling of a federal program and creation of another one. So you have to allow for separate laws and potential temporal discontinuity when saying there's no coercion, at which point all removal of federal programs could potentially be coercion we just don't know about yet. The federal government may vote to end medicaid entirely. That's legal. They can bargain that states will sign on to SuperCaid because they have no more medicaid funding and they want funding. That's still a negotiation with the understanding of the States, but they can refuse that second bit just fine. Good luck getting representatives in Congress to end Medicaid because they're using it to get around coercion prohibitions in the Constitution. Citizen representatives, you know. They're part of the process. Somehow I don't think the founding fathers were so stupid as to set up a process in which two processes that work identically with a similar potential for coercion and result in an identical outcome have different constitutionality, but maybe I just have a higher opinion of them than you. Especially when the second option (delete Medicaid, create SuperCaid) is if anything more coercive in some scenarios. The citizen representatives have much say in passing two separate laws that some individual or group wants to go together. They do not work identically. You must first repeal Medicaid with the knowledge that if the second law does not pass, you are responsible for ending the entitlement program. The representatives should object to that scheme as coercion. But they are lawfully entitled to repeal any program and set up any subsequent program if there are no other constitutional objections to the terms. You act like someone could just repeal things willy nilly free of consequence. The ACA idiots could have tried to preserve a majority for repealing Medicare 1.0 and instituting Medicare 2.0 ... but that would have required state compliance and two votes. Good fucking luck staying in office after that first vote. If that's a problem then they just reinstate Medicare 1.0. Moreover, it isn't as though these votes can't be contemporaneous. In fact, they could even hold it in reconciliation until both laws go to the executive's desk at once and reject both if one fails, so they're never at risk. This would have been even more common with far fewer barriers than exist today in the founding father's time, since nobody actually knew what was happening in the capitol and the "representative" part was mostly trusting them to know what they were doing. Yeah, good luck going home to your constituents and arguing "See, I took away your entitlement as part of my scheme to make it better. I bet big on coercing my fellow delegates to sign on to the later one after I convinced them to repeal the first." These things survive by subterfuge. Once the coercion is exposed to the light of day, support usually vanishes. An honest medicaid expansion as a separate bill requiring the assent of states might have survived. So your argument is that the founding fathers believed that grants to states should be paralytic, unless the government executed efficient subterfuge and pulled the wool over people's eyes to create an identical result by sending two bills to Washington's desk on the same day instead of 1? Which would of course be hilariously easy in the 1800s.
The founding fathers wrote federalism into the articles of the constitution. That makes Congressional manipulation of spending within a bill to coerce state action unconstitutional. The courts found rightly this time, they haven't in the past.
The states and the federal government can act maliciously within their power. I disagree with a lot of laws on those grounds. Constitutional but awful. If you can pull one over on the American people, that's law. The people's recourse is in election of representatives that promise to repeal that stupid SuperCaid you brought up in the hypothetical. The state's recourse is through an Article V convention of the states.
Telling states you shall cover individuals meeting this new standard for coverage or it's all gone is stupid coercion. I wonder if you agree, or if there's any limits in your mind to use of power in this way.
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On November 18 2017 04:26 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2017 04:04 IgnE wrote:On November 18 2017 03:50 farvacola wrote:On November 18 2017 03:40 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 03:31 farvacola wrote:On November 18 2017 03:27 TheTenthDoc wrote:
It's hard for me to take people arguing the founding fathers didn't want any coercion from the federal government seriously when the necessary consequence of that is that the federal government cannot provide money to the states in any way without immortalizing those grants in perpetuity, since any removal of funds could then be coercive to states. This argument becomes especially compelling once one accounts for the independent budget decisions of the states made in contemplation of the temporality of federal funds. Many states slashed budgets and state-side funding knowing full well that the federal programs they turned to for funds could be dismantled; many of the states sucking hardest on the federal teet are also those that elect federal politicians that campaign on turning off the federal spigot, to make matters worse. On November 18 2017 03:29 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 03:13 farvacola wrote:On November 18 2017 03:08 Danglars wrote:
If you want a new constitution with broader federal power over the states, amend it or revolt and sign a new one. The only one in existence agreed to by the states is the current one. It respected abuse of power by a centralized authority. Today's operation of Washington DC and federal agencies shows it was right to try and curtail it. It would take novel length kwizach post to show how and why state rights were eroded and the pros and cons resulting from it. That's such a shit argument when huge components of the Constitution have been read out of existence by mere jurisprudence alone. The 9th Amendment can be construed as an incredibly broad grant of Constitutional federal power relative to the defense of rights infringed on by states, and yet, because it's hard to interpret, it basically isn't even acknowledged anymore. Oh yeah, totally ignore the Guarantee Clause too... This is where the lawblogz legal education has its limits; the Constitution is a very poor herald for much outside its contextual, iterative use by judges in service of their holding or as a barebones manual for basic federal processes. You're sneaking quite a bit in here. It's more a desire to achieve good ends through expansive federal power that justifies judicial, congressional, and executive overreach, rather than a "It's hard to interpret, let's just pretend it exists" type rationalizations you provide. A originalist and textualist reading of why it was included and passed in the bill of rights makes it obvious what it was and how it should be interpreted. Hell, Madison himself had to deliver a speech in the House of Representatives to assure Virginia that the ninth amendment would not be used for federal power. If there was no understanding that the text of the ninth amendment curtailed federal power, there would be no ratification by Virginia, no Constitution, no United States under that constitution. Likewise, the Guarantee's Clause (aside from protecting all states under invasion) was debated to protect citizens against ex post facto laws, bill of attainder, and those obvious transgressions. So you apply to Congress for relief if you think your state government is no longer a Republican Form of Government or is engaging in domestic violence (say mob rule). The founders feared kings in states or state monarchies that might affect the stability of the United States in general. Farvacola, do you want a king in your state and no attendant protections from that? + Show Spoiler +
You have a point if you refer to civil war constitutionality and jurisprudence. That's a big can of worms.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the Constitution is only to be interpreted in an originalist and textualist way? (by the way, originalism and textualism frequently conflict with one another, as is the case by the very terms of your explanation of the 9th Amendment's jurisprudence of non-existence) Just like written documents and contracts, the only agreement that matters is according to what signee and signer understand it to mean at the time of signing. They specifically included two amendment processes with the understanding that what they had written might have to change in the future. The alternative is deciding to make up what it means as we go along. You're familiar with the breadth of argumentation for and against a living constitution. I don't intend to repeat arguments you've already heard and rejected at length just for your personal pleasure. I bring it up because you thought the ninth amendment and the guarantee clause are some kind of smoking gun, which you haven't addressed, and just try to broaden. EDIT: The original meaning of the words as ratified very frequently goes along with using the actual words of the law to determine what laws mean. That they don't always agree is one reason why we should have limited judicial interpretation of laws to cases. Not this bullshit judicial activism that we have today. It's totally incoherent to on one hand bow to the logic of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that is an inarguable expression of federal legal power while on the other argue that the totality of federal power is circumscribed by the Constitution and its amendment process. The latter is simply untrue and it doesn't help the matter to make overly-simple nods towards basic written contracts as though that explains anything. Like Igne intimated above, the "Social Contract" very clearly functions in a host of ways that render use of the term "contract" largely academic and not of much use in terms of clarifying the extent to which individuals are deigned to have surrendered some number of rights while retaining others at some fictional point in time that supposedly happens as one is born into his or her society. You yourself talk of Madison's speeches as though they have interpretive gravity only to then say things like "the only agreement that matters is according to what signee and signer understanding it to mean at the time of signing." This is the sort of selective invocation of supposedly hard principles that smacks of inconsistency such that any attendant interpretive framework falls apart before it begins. dangles has really gone off the rails here. i love his extratextual analysis of the ninth amendment's true meaning. i would really like to see, though, a full post by someone like danglars where they really attempt to be rigorous. then we could rate it on a scale of 1 to Scalia before busting out some Posner-esque breakdown Good luck finding someone with sufficient thread experience of good faith argumentation to actually ask for a rigorous judicial philosophy from a non-lawyer. You'll arrive at something between mostly originalism and mostly textualism and then who the fuck cares. But nice troll on the social contract, anyways.
i always troll in good faith
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This is what putting party before country looks like. It is repugnant.
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Hatch blew up at all the class warfare going on in his committee.
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Doesn't matter shit what he grew up in 70 years ago. Today is fucking over the poor and mad he got called out for it.
Do tell me, did he at any point refute the notion that this is a tax cut for the rich and an increase for the poor with facts?
And note that the guy is well above average in congress at an estimated worth of nearly 5 million. He's giving kickbacks to his rich donors, not his poor constituents.
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Social mobility in the US is extremely low, in fact among the lowest of the developed world. It's been shown over and over again that social mobility is not the result of upwards mobility (which factually does not exist) but shortening the ladder. And more importantly, pre-tax this holds for all developed countries.
Anecdotes about growing up in wooden shacks and making it to the upper class are precisely that, anecdotes.
+ Show Spoiler +it is only after accounting for Denmark’s high taxes on the rich and large transfers to the poor that its social mobility looks so much better than the U.S.’s. America’s (relatively conservative) economic philosophy is that, with low taxes and little regulation, the market is an open savannah where the most talent will win out. But Denmark’s economic philosophy seems to be that the market is an unfortunate socioeconomic lottery system, and so the country compensates the poor with generous transfers paid by high taxes on the rich.
The second big idea in the paper is that Denmark’s large investment in public education pays off in higher cognitive skills among low-income children, but not in higher-education mobility—i.e., the odds that a child of a non-college grad will go on to finish college.
Overall, Denmark spends much more than the U.S. on all levels of education. In particular, a much higher share of its poor young children is enrolled in daycare and preschool than the United States. This large public investment in kids seems to increase cognitive skills among poor Danish children compared to their American peers. In international math and reading scores, for example, the poorest quartile in Denmark far outperforms their counterparts in the U.S.
But despite this far greater investment in young children and public colleges, Danish children of high-school graduates are still extremely unlikely to go onto college. Put slightly differently, a tiny share of Denmark’s college graduate population comes from homes where neither parent finished high school. The children of college-grads almost always go to college; the children of non-grads often don’t—even in Denmark.
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But think of the struggle of the bottom-of-the-one-percent struggling to hold on to the family jet because of high taxes!
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Not sure what Hatch blew up exactly in that video but his outrage is very reminiscent of Sessions' "how dare you insinuate x about me?"
Hatch growing up poor and how many more legislature he's passed compared to rest of the lawmakers doesn't seem to have much bearing on the actual contents of the tax bill.
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The only class warfare going on is conservatives cutting taxes for people with private jets and paying for them by raising the taxes on people paying state property taxes and people trying to obtain high level degrees from universities. You and the people you support are attacking the middle class.
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On November 18 2017 05:57 NeoIllusions wrote:
Not sure what Hatch blew up exactly in that video but his outrage is very reminiscent of Sessions' "how dare you insinuate x about me?"
Hatch growing up poor and how many more legislature he's passed compared to rest of the lawmakers doesn't seem to have much bearing on the actual contents of the tax bill.
If you watch Last Week Tonight, think back to the episode about the lottery. Specifically the "this system is rigged, which is why it's going to be so sweet when I finally get mine!" part. There's also the "anyone can be rich if they try" facet, wherein helping the rich motivates the poor to get off their worthless butts and become rich (people clearly choose to be poor after all).
You have to remember that Hatch and people like him are aware they have an advantage, but they strongly believe that they have earned it. Confronting them with the idea they haven't is attacking their identity, and nobody reacts well to that.
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On November 18 2017 04:35 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2017 04:26 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 04:21 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 04:18 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 04:07 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 04:00 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 03:50 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 03:45 TheTenthDoc wrote:On November 18 2017 03:35 Danglars wrote:On November 18 2017 03:27 TheTenthDoc wrote:
It's hard for me to take people arguing the founding fathers didn't want any coercion from the federal government seriously when the necessary consequence of that is that the federal government cannot provide money to the states in any way without immortalizing those grants in perpetuity, since any removal of funds could then be coercive to states. There is at the very least a bare minimum of coercion potential implicit in having a semi-autonomous federal government that regulates interstate commerce. The question is removal of other funding agreements to compel acceptance of other programs authorized by the Spending Clause. Also, to use that in a backwards way to force states to regulate as you would have them do. Their volition and comprehension is at issue. The problem is that a state could argue any removal of federal funds was in fact a federal attempt to coerce them, even independent of formal use of other funding agreements. The process could simply be encoded in two separate laws; e.g. "we delete Medicaid in law 1, then create SuperCaid with all the riders we want in law 2 and allow states to opt in." Is that coercion? There's no funding agreements involved, it's merely dissembling of a federal program and creation of another one. So you have to allow for separate laws and potential temporal discontinuity when saying there's no coercion, at which point all removal of federal programs could potentially be coercion we just don't know about yet. The federal government may vote to end medicaid entirely. That's legal. They can bargain that states will sign on to SuperCaid because they have no more medicaid funding and they want funding. That's still a negotiation with the understanding of the States, but they can refuse that second bit just fine. Good luck getting representatives in Congress to end Medicaid because they're using it to get around coercion prohibitions in the Constitution. Citizen representatives, you know. They're part of the process. Somehow I don't think the founding fathers were so stupid as to set up a process in which two processes that work identically with a similar potential for coercion and result in an identical outcome have different constitutionality, but maybe I just have a higher opinion of them than you. Especially when the second option (delete Medicaid, create SuperCaid) is if anything more coercive in some scenarios. The citizen representatives have much say in passing two separate laws that some individual or group wants to go together. They do not work identically. You must first repeal Medicaid with the knowledge that if the second law does not pass, you are responsible for ending the entitlement program. The representatives should object to that scheme as coercion. But they are lawfully entitled to repeal any program and set up any subsequent program if there are no other constitutional objections to the terms. You act like someone could just repeal things willy nilly free of consequence. The ACA idiots could have tried to preserve a majority for repealing Medicare 1.0 and instituting Medicare 2.0 ... but that would have required state compliance and two votes. Good fucking luck staying in office after that first vote. If that's a problem then they just reinstate Medicare 1.0. Moreover, it isn't as though these votes can't be contemporaneous. In fact, they could even hold it in reconciliation until both laws go to the executive's desk at once and reject both if one fails, so they're never at risk. This would have been even more common with far fewer barriers than exist today in the founding father's time, since nobody actually knew what was happening in the capitol and the "representative" part was mostly trusting them to know what they were doing. Yeah, good luck going home to your constituents and arguing "See, I took away your entitlement as part of my scheme to make it better. I bet big on coercing my fellow delegates to sign on to the later one after I convinced them to repeal the first." These things survive by subterfuge. Once the coercion is exposed to the light of day, support usually vanishes. An honest medicaid expansion as a separate bill requiring the assent of states might have survived. So your argument is that the founding fathers believed that grants to states should be paralytic, unless the government executed efficient subterfuge and pulled the wool over people's eyes to create an identical result by sending two bills to Washington's desk on the same day instead of 1? Which would of course be hilariously easy in the 1800s. The founding fathers wrote federalism into the articles of the constitution. That makes Congressional manipulation of spending within a bill to coerce state action unconstitutional. The courts found rightly this time, they haven't in the past. The states and the federal government can act maliciously within their power. I disagree with a lot of laws on those grounds. Constitutional but awful. If you can pull one over on the American people, that's law. The people's recourse is in election of representatives that promise to repeal that stupid SuperCaid you brought up in the hypothetical. The state's recourse is through an Article V convention of the states. Telling states you shall cover individuals meeting this new standard for coverage or it's all gone is stupid coercion. I wonder if you agree, or if there's any limits in your mind to use of power in this way.
I believe that there can be undue coercion (e.g. "lower/raise the drinking age or we slash your highway funds in half"), but I don't believe that "any coercion at all" is an effective litmus test for what's constitutional, especially since it makes it so that legislators are unable to update direct portions of federal grants (e.g. "you have to cover children at 300% of the FPL when previously you needed to cover 200%" should not require a constitutional amendment or an absurd legislative circus repealing then recreating the bill).
Edit: Basically I think the coercion becomes far more problematic if the federal government is using it to accomplish things outside the scope of its powers vs. altering how it is already executing within the scope of its powers.
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So the 2018 NDAA is close to finished; this link provides some highlights. Remarkably uncontroversial in that it provides a nice, thorough excess of money to poorly conceived projects to rebuild our "depleted" military that gets hardware it doesn't need or want.
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before all is said and i done i expect a number of jeff session's "i do not recall's" will become "now that you mention it and after i saw it in the news, i now recall's"
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i wish i could have paid for law school by being a janitor
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On November 18 2017 06:32 Plansix wrote:The only class warfare going on is conservatives cutting taxes for people with private jets and paying for them by raising the taxes on people paying state property taxes and people trying to obtain high level degrees from universities. You and the people you support are attacking the middle class.
The important thing to remember is that it's only really a war if both sides are fighting. As long as the poor don't fight back, it's not class warfare, so everything's fine. /s
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On November 18 2017 07:22 IgnE wrote:i wish i could have paid for law school by being a janitor
Back when you could buy the land for a house for about $3000 and build it for about 10-15K in the suburbs of Boston.
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On November 18 2017 07:31 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On November 18 2017 07:22 IgnE wrote:i wish i could have paid for law school by being a janitor Back when you could buy the land for a house for about $3000 and build it for about 10-15K in the suburbs of Boston.
Back when the minimum wage would have been well over 10$/hr today, instead of $7.50
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On November 18 2017 07:22 IgnE wrote:i wish i could have paid for law school by being a janitor
Among the kids I graduated with, those who did not donate hundreds of hours in unpaid internships have shown themselves to be at severe disadvantage. Makes Hatch's statement all the more ridiculous lol
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EPT
