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Christ, there's so many problems here I don't know why I bother.On December 16 2018 08:18 xDaunt wrote:
ChristianS doesn't care about the nuance so much as the ultimate result: the effective repeal of Obamacare.
Try to have a conversation without resorting to backhanded condescension some time, huh? There's nothing undemocratic about what happened.
It's a democratically enacted law being invalidated by a politically motivated judge using judicial power to get around the lack of any political will to democratically enact a repeal. That's definitionally undemocratic. At least have the balls to embrace it - technically judicial review is basically always undemocratic (e.g. throwing out a democratically enacted religious ban, or any other violation of Constitutional rights). It's just not usually used as a Plan B when Congress tries and fails to pass something.
Obamacare was a terrible law when it was passed. The Supreme Court had to bend itself into a pretzel to save it.
But that's not what the decision says. It embraces the logic of the 2012 decision, and argues the same logic implies a different conclusion now. Not to mention, whether Obamacare was a terrible law is completely irrelevant to constitutionality. If you're gonna use the lawyer thing for cred, then act like one.
Congress inadvertently knocked out the underpinnings of how the law was saved. And now Obamacare is gone, and Congress is free to create something new and better to replace it.
Again, if setting the penalty to zero knocks out the Constitutional basis, why is the conclusion not that they aren't allowed to set it to zero? If I pass a law setting the legal penalty for killing Catholics to 0 days in prison, and it's thrown out as a 1st Amendment violation, do we just invalidate my revision or do we throw out the law making murder illegal?
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On December 16 2018 09:46 ChristianS wrote:Christ, there's so many problems here I don't know why I bother. Show nested quote +On December 16 2018 08:18 xDaunt wrote:
ChristianS doesn't care about the nuance so much as the ultimate result: the effective repeal of Obamacare. Try to have a conversation without resorting to backhanded condescension some time, huh?
There's nothing backhanded about the comment. You obviously care far more about the result than the process. If that were not the case, you wouldn't be up in arms over what the judge did here.
It's a democratically enacted law being invalidated by a politically motivated judge using judicial power to get around the lack of any political will to democratically enact a repeal. That's definitionally undemocratic. At least have the balls to embrace it - technically judicial review is basically always undemocratic (e.g. throwing out a democratically enacted religious ban, or any other violation of Constitutional rights). It's just not usually used as a Plan B when Congress tries and fails to pass something.
Go read the opinion. There's nothing politically motivated about the judge's decision, despite the best efforts of the media to spin it that way. The judge very accurately recites the law, the history of the law, and applies it impartially. What makes his opinion so solid is that he directly uses and applies the reasoning adopted by the liberal majority in the first Obamacare case.
And you're giving Republicans way too much credit if you think that this result was intentional.
Show nested quote + Obamacare was a terrible law when it was passed. The Supreme Court had to bend itself into a pretzel to save it. But that's not what the decision says. It embraces the logic of the 2012 decision, and argues the same logic implies a different conclusion now. Not to mention, whether Obamacare was a terrible law is completely irrelevant to constitutionality. If you're gonna use the lawyer thing for cred, then act like one.
No, the decision does not cast aspersions upon the reasoning of the five justices who concluded that Obamacare was a tax in 2012. That's not the place of the district court judge. His job is to take the rule and the reasoning of those five justices and then apply it to the matter at hand. This is precisely what he did. He used the same logic and applied it to the new factual circumstances of the case. Like I said before, the 2012 decision hinged upon the revenue component of the mandate. Without that component, the 2012 reasoning clearly dictates a different result.
Show nested quote +Congress inadvertently knocked out the underpinnings of how the law was saved. And now Obamacare is gone, and Congress is free to create something new and better to replace it. Again, if setting the penalty to zero knocks out the Constitutional basis, why is the conclusion not that they aren't allowed to set it to zero? If I pass a law setting the legal penalty for killing Catholics to 0 days in prison, and it's thrown out as a 1st Amendment violation, do we just invalidate my revision or do we throw out the law making murder illegal?
Like I said, courts don't have plenary authority to pick and choose what they're going to save from a statutory scheme. Their power is quite limited. The judge addressed this issue in footnote 34 of his opinion. Here's the most important part of the footnote:
Because of how Texas structured its challenge, the district court is presented with a narrower menu of options with respect to severability. No one — not the Plaintiffs, not the Intervenors — has challenged the constitutionality of the TCJA. Federal courts lack a roving license to flip through the U.S. Code with a red pencil to void one statute in order to save another. Invalidating the 2017 tax cut is simply not an option in the Texas litigation because it has not been challenged.” (citations omitted)). To the extent Frost is relevant here, it stands only for the proposition that a court should hold unconstitutional acts invalid and constitutional ones valid. The unconstitutional act in this case is the Individual Mandate, not the TCJA.
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On December 16 2018 03:37 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2018 03:02 GreenHorizons wrote:On December 16 2018 02:58 xDaunt wrote:
All of these foreign collusion narratives as they pertain to Trump and his team are patently retarded. That much has been obvious for a very long time. The best explanation that I have heard for why Mueller and the DOJ have pushed it so hard is that they are trying to create a post hoc rationalization for having abused NSA surveillance on Trump and his team for political reasons. This is the essence of what Nunez was highlighting during his press conference last year. If the worst thing that happens after our intelligence agencies illegally spy on a presidential candidate (let alone a president if that's the case) is that they lose their jobs (they probably would have lost anyway) enough for you to want to take away their ability to do it, or are you still willing to sacrifice that liberty for the security you think it provides? No, I'm no longer willing to trust the government with that kind of power. And I'm not alone in that assessment. Democrats are largely oblivious to the real scandal here because the mainstream media has been intentionally ignoring it (in large part because they don't want to admit how badly they were manipulated and played by the bad actors), but conservatives are very much engaged and paying attention. And they are angry. We are at an inflection point as it pertains to the relationship of the government to the people. People are beginning to lose faith in the government because they can see the rampant abuse of all of these unaccountable bureaucrats. We've had a very good look at the swamp, and we do not like what we see.
I think my favorite part of this entire paragraph is that you can make a few word replacements sort of like so and it's a pretty good fit for how liberals feel about the dumpster fire that has been the last two years of Republicans governance.
No, I'm no longer willing to trust the government with that kind of power. And I'm not alone in that assessment. Democrats Republicans are largely oblivious to the real scandal here because the mainstream conservative media has been intentionally ignoring it (in large part because they don't want to admit how badly they were manipulated and played by the bad actors), but conservatives liberals are very much engaged and paying attention. And they are angry. We are at an inflection point as it pertains to the relationship of the government to the people. People are beginning to lose faith in the government because they can see the rampant abuse of all of these unaccountable bureaucrats Republicans from safe districts. We've had a very good look at the swamp, and we do not like what we see.
Also, on the subject of this ACA ruling, could at some point in the future Democrats set the penalty to a non-zero number via budget reconciliation and have the whole thing turned on again because now it qualifies as a tax again and is no longer unconstitutional?
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On December 16 2018 17:07 Kyadytim wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2018 03:37 xDaunt wrote:On December 16 2018 03:02 GreenHorizons wrote:On December 16 2018 02:58 xDaunt wrote:
All of these foreign collusion narratives as they pertain to Trump and his team are patently retarded. That much has been obvious for a very long time. The best explanation that I have heard for why Mueller and the DOJ have pushed it so hard is that they are trying to create a post hoc rationalization for having abused NSA surveillance on Trump and his team for political reasons. This is the essence of what Nunez was highlighting during his press conference last year. If the worst thing that happens after our intelligence agencies illegally spy on a presidential candidate (let alone a president if that's the case) is that they lose their jobs (they probably would have lost anyway) enough for you to want to take away their ability to do it, or are you still willing to sacrifice that liberty for the security you think it provides? No, I'm no longer willing to trust the government with that kind of power. And I'm not alone in that assessment. Democrats are largely oblivious to the real scandal here because the mainstream media has been intentionally ignoring it (in large part because they don't want to admit how badly they were manipulated and played by the bad actors), but conservatives are very much engaged and paying attention. And they are angry. We are at an inflection point as it pertains to the relationship of the government to the people. People are beginning to lose faith in the government because they can see the rampant abuse of all of these unaccountable bureaucrats. We've had a very good look at the swamp, and we do not like what we see. I think my favorite part of this entire paragraph is that you can make a few word replacements sort of like so and it's a pretty good fit for how liberals feel about the dumpster fire that has been the last two years of Republicans governance. Show nested quote +No, I'm no longer willing to trust the government with that kind of power. And I'm not alone in that assessment. Democrats Republicans are largely oblivious to the real scandal here because the mainstream conservative media has been intentionally ignoring it (in large part because they don't want to admit how badly they were manipulated and played by the bad actors), but conservatives liberals are very much engaged and paying attention. And they are angry. We are at an inflection point as it pertains to the relationship of the government to the people. People are beginning to lose faith in the government because they can see the rampant abuse of all of these unaccountable bureaucrats Republicans from safe districts. We've had a very good look at the swamp, and we do not like what we see. Also, on the subject of this ACA ruling, could at some point in the future Democrats set the penalty to a non-zero number via budget reconciliation and have the whole thing turned on again because now it qualifies as a tax again and is no longer unconstitutional?
You're both right but still stuck in partisan habits. The next realization is what that paragraph and it's versatility says about both parties, the people that support them and why they do.
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Setting the tax to zero and having it still be considered a tax simply doesn’t pass muster. Think about the ramifications. Literally anything could be passed under the tax power just by putting in a zero tax. It would be a way to backdoor every constitutional limit of the government. No court will allow that.
And the fact that this act of Congress was done via budget reconciliation is irrelevant. Acts of congress signed into law are still the law regardless of whether reconciliation is used. The only significance of reconciliation is that it is a process that allows certain acts of legislation to get through Congress more easily. Once that happens, the use of reconciliation becomes irrelevant. The judiciary won’t care.
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Why is the individual mandate not severable from the rest of the law legally speaking? From a practical perspective the law seems to be limping along without it.
Edit: I.e, I don’t see any reason why the Medicaid expansion needs to be struck down even if the IM is unconstitutional. They don’t have anything to do with each other.
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New 2020 polls are out and you should ignore the trash you're going to hear in the media about "experience vs a new face". It's completely garbage reporting not meant to analyze the substantive policy differences but shift the discussion as much as possible about the packaging and rhetoric. "A Black woman?, maybe a "Young fresh face, perhaps a Latino?, etc..." A little about generic "progressive left or centrist" leanings but these will be largely pulled from recent rhetoric rather than their political history.
I fully expect the media to do the most bias casting reporting possible on the race going forward so for those looking for some decent (albeit Bernie favored) analysis I'll try to comment regularly as things change throughout the race.
Biden is looking a bit better than I expected with ~39% but that's a lot of nostalgia for, the luxury of no one shining a critical eye on him, name recognition and being a white guy.
Bernie's ~20% is solid. Virtually no one who has Bernie as their first choice is even considering anyone outside of maybe Warren so that's pretty much his floor in those states (save a couple percent).
Beto is third with ~11% and that's largely national headline hype and recency bias from his headlines combined with some major donors "leaking" that they were going to back him as their first choice.
Warren is next at ~8% with the most enduring and progressive policy of the remaining candidates. Her being a national figure beyond the recent theatrics from other candidates in the various hearings means this is unlikely to go down much either.
The last candidate with a chance to make it past super Tuesday (Warren is a stretch at this point) is Harris with 5%. This is pretty much to be expected with little name recognition even in her home state. Her stunts at the hearings helped lift her above the rest of the midwest stragglers but probably didn't play especially well and will have a hard time making up much ground against Biden and Beto (should those trying to stop him fail) in those states and will likely be banking on an all-in strategy in SC and trying to break 15% before that. Then she has to win CA and at least a couple others and hope that someone has beaten Bernie and Biden in some states too (those two will have a delegate lead going into Tuesday).
For people wondering about wildcard candidates they simply don't have the type of active grassroots support it will take to be competitive in the primary as it's set up. Any potential wild card candidate outside the 5 mentioned is going to take a ground breaking national narrative and/or already be famous (like Oprah or Kanye).
EDIT: Forgot link and to mention specifically that everyone will be fighting for Joe Biden voters (we saw this when he polled well early in 2016) and they are most predisposed to go to Bernie, Beto or maybe Klobachar (if she campaigns).
www.realclearpolitics.com
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On December 16 2018 22:15 Mercy13 wrote:
Why is the individual mandate not severable from the rest of the law legally speaking? From a practical perspective the law seems to be limping along without it.
Edit: I.e, I don’t see any reason why the Medicaid expansion needs to be struck down even if the IM is unconstitutional. They don’t have anything to do with each other.
The short answer is that all nine justices on the Supreme Court in 2012 said it wasn’t. The longer answer (ie why they decided as such) is that the whole financial basis for Obamacare was to force healthy people to buy health coverage so as to subsidize the coverage of people with preexisting conditions. Without that mechanic, the cost of health care spirals out of control. Of course, this is happening anyway because Obamacare is a terrible system.
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Poor guy thought that if he chose a lawyer to be his fixer, he'd be shielded. Too bad huh.
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I really don’t think that Cohen was able to deliver anything, but we will see what comes out.
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I'm not very good at predicting left-wing minds, but I don't think Biden is a realistic candidate. He seems more like a placeholder for "generic Democrat" than someone like Bernie, who actually has a core base and a message. I don't feel good about Beto, but that's just my instincts, and while my instincts are pretty good for Republican politics, they are a crapshoot for Democrats so who knows. It just seems weird to run a guy who got famous for a loss. I don't really understand any desire for Warren either, other than the fact that she's a woman. Is she significantly different from Bernie in such a way as to carve out a niche of her own? Maybe she can pull the donor class and the populist left together better than he can, but if so, why?
Oprah and Kanye would be fun, but I don't know if I see them actually going the distance. They both have celebrity brands to think about and do they want to expose themselves to the slime of a post-2016 Presidential campaign? I could see Kanye going for it because his brand is already being an oddball but with Oprah I don't really see an upside for her. Unless she has a burning desire to be President, but with her money and influence and approval ratings I couldn't for the life of me think of why she would have such a desire.
I hope it is Trump v Bernie. Give us the race we should have gotten.
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On December 17 2018 19:58 ReditusSum wrote:
I'm not very good at predicting left-wing minds, but I don't think Biden is a realistic candidate. He seems more like a placeholder for "generic Democrat" than someone like Bernie, who actually has a core base and a message. I don't feel good about Beto, but that's just my instincts, and while my instincts are pretty good for Republican politics, they are a crapshoot for Democrats so who knows. It just seems weird to run a guy who got famous for a loss. I don't really understand any desire for Warren either, other than the fact that she's a woman. Is she significantly different from Bernie in such a way as to carve out a niche of her own? Maybe she can pull the donor class and the populist left together better than he can, but if so, why?
Oprah and Kanye would be fun, but I don't know if I see them actually going the distance. They both have celebrity brands to think about and do they want to expose themselves to the slime of a post-2016 Presidential campaign? I could see Kanye going for it because his brand is already being an oddball but with Oprah I don't really see an upside for her. Unless she has a burning desire to be President, but with her money and influence and approval ratings I couldn't for the life of me think of why she would have such a desire.
I hope it is Trump v Bernie. Give us the race we should have gotten.
Beto was a loser but he has infinite charisma and money to campaign; I find him a very scary opponent, the 2nd coming of JFK. I think luckily he did himself a disservice running a lost senate race, not to talk about his pretend mexican; he would get mocked to death, and it's pretty aparent to anyone who actually speaks spanish.
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what’s “pretend mexican?”
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On December 18 2018 02:02 IgnE wrote:
what’s “pretend mexican?”
His real name is Francis and he is of Irish ascent, not "Beto". His spanish is both terrible and speaks EXACTLY in the way that english speaking people speak spanish. All native spanish speakers have a distinct phonetic that allows us to tell where someone is from (I.e. I can tell if someone is from Chile/Argentina/Mexico or Spain just be listening to someone, even if they use the exact same words)
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the man speaks perfectly fine spanish. instead of ‘ignorant americans speak only one language’ he’s just mad a white (presumably the real problem isn’t that he’s white but that he’s a white dem) dude is catering to his constituency by speaking spanish. what an absurd complaint, one not even based in reality (there’s a surprise.)
sorry it’s only on facebook after my ten seconds of looking, but here he is holding a perfectly normal conversation on a spanish broadcast lol.
https://www.facebook.com/betoorourke/videos/1641502012566169
On December 18 2018 02:20 GoTuNk! wrote:His real name is Francis and he is of Irish ascent, not "Beto". His spanish is both terrible and speaks EXACTLY in the way that english speaking people speak spanish. All native spanish speakers have a distinct phonetic that allows us to tell where someone is from (I.e. I can tell if someone is from Chile/Argentina/Mexico or Spain just be listening to someone, even if they use the exact same words)
his name is Robert Francis O’Rourke. people don’t generally go by their middle names round these parts. do you actually not know this?
assuming we now agree his spanish isn’t at all terrible;
this just in, people speak foreign languages with accents indicative of their mother tongue. isn’t english your second language? does this not strike you as hypocritical and, sorry in advance, very stupid on your behalf?
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On December 17 2018 19:58 ReditusSum wrote:
I'm not very good at predicting left-wing minds, but I don't think Biden is a realistic candidate. He seems more like a placeholder for "generic Democrat" than someone like Bernie, who actually has a core base and a message. I don't feel good about Beto, but that's just my instincts, and while my instincts are pretty good for Republican politics, they are a crapshoot for Democrats so who knows. It just seems weird to run a guy who got famous for a loss. I don't really understand any desire for Warren either, other than the fact that she's a woman. Is she significantly different from Bernie in such a way as to carve out a niche of her own? Maybe she can pull the donor class and the populist left together better than he can, but if so, why?
Oprah and Kanye would be fun, but I don't know if I see them actually going the distance. They both have celebrity brands to think about and do they want to expose themselves to the slime of a post-2016 Presidential campaign? I could see Kanye going for it because his brand is already being an oddball but with Oprah I don't really see an upside for her. Unless she has a burning desire to be President, but with her money and influence and approval ratings I couldn't for the life of me think of why she would have such a desire.
I hope it is Trump v Bernie. Give us the race we should have gotten.
Not a Democrat but I do understand the appeal. Biden is reminiscent of the Obama years because he was VP. He's blandly nice, safe, quite popular with donors so can get money together, and a competent politician. So yeah, your 'generic Democrat' line isn't wrong, but he has the Obama connection that makes him seem a bit shinier than most.
Warren's just a longtime further-to-the-left candidate who's looking more appealing with the Republicans going more to the right. But she's establishment more to the left rather than outside more to the left like Bernie.
The Democrats still don't like him in the same way the GOP hated Trump until he won. Bernie's an outsider and they have little to no idea of what he'll do if he gets in power.
So you could say the main appeal of Biden and Warren is they aren't Bernie.
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On December 18 2018 02:25 brian wrote:the man speaks perfectly fine spanish. instead of ‘ignorant americans speak only one language’ he’s just mad a white (presumably the real problem isn’t that he’s white but that he’s a white dem) dude is catering to his constituency by speaking spanish. what an absurd complaint, one not even based in reality (there’s a surprise.) sorry it’s only on facebook after my ten seconds of looking, but here he is holding a perfectly normal conversation on a spanish broadcast lol. https://www.facebook.com/betoorourke/videos/1641502012566169Show nested quote +On December 18 2018 02:20 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 18 2018 02:02 IgnE wrote:
what’s “pretend mexican?” His real name is Francis and he is of Irish ascent, not "Beto". His spanish is both terrible and speaks EXACTLY in the way that english speaking people speak spanish. All native spanish speakers have a distinct phonetic that allows us to tell where someone is from (I.e. I can tell if someone is from Chile/Argentina/Mexico or Spain just be listening to someone, even if they use the exact same words) his name is Robert Francis O’Rourke. people don’t generally go by their middle names round these parts. do you actually not know this? assuming we now agree his spanish isn’t at all terrible; this just in, people speak foreign languages with accents indicative of their mother tongue. isn’t english your second language? does this not strike you as hypocritical and, sorry in advance, very stupid on your behalf?
His spanish is terrible, he conjugates verbs incorrectly all the time; if it suts you, we can call it "bad". You can't tell because it's not your first language; he has broken spanish, it is understandable though.
"pueden ir a un escuela público"
"este noche"
"yo estoy coriendo"
"ahora en la mismas escuelas"
"somos una de los comunidades"
etc, tons of examples 2 mins in the video you linked.
I don't mind people speaking other languages, I think that's great.
I mind pretending ancestry you don't have, wasn't "cultural appropiation" a left thing? why is he doing it?
I speak english, I don't claim to be british or american on job interviews.
I do stand corrected, his name is Robert, not "beto", which isn't even a real spanish name usually.
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So? His spanish isn't perfect but he seems to be capable to have a real conversation in spanish. Maybe he was just called beto since... A long time? Where is your actual issue?
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On December 18 2018 04:28 Velr wrote:
So? His spanish isn't perfect but he seems to be capable to have a real conversation in spanish. Maybe he was just called beto since... A long time? Where is your actual issue?
As I said I have a problem with people claiming to be something they are not, specially if it is to gain votes; his spanish is also bad, as I have stablished. I hate identity politics and dude is very little mexican. According to wiki it was a nickname given by his parent, but he is def exploiting it.
"Robert Francis O'Rourke was born on September 26, 1972, at Hotel Dieu Hospital in El Paso, Texas to Pat Francis O'Rourke and his second wife Melissa Martha O'Rourke née Williams.[1][2][3][4] He is a fourth-generation Irish American.[5][6]"
This bothers me, I'm sure some people are perfectly fine with it. I do believe he would get mocked for being a "fake mexican" if he were to run as president. It is dirty business.
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It's been noted that this is going to be fertile ground for Castro (how about that name lol) to exploit.
The construction of Identity politics among Democrats almost demands it.
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EPT
