Conservative Ideology: A Big Lie

[Seacoaster(1)]

Same topic:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2 ... ?_amp=true

"The Supreme Court’s extremist justices are aiming their next dagger at the heart of the entire democratic enterprise: voters’ right to pick leaders of their choice.

On Thursday, the court announced that it will hear Moore vs. Harper, a North Carolina case involving gerrymandered congressional district maps drawn by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Those maps would probably give Republicans control of 11 of 14 congressional districts in the state.

North Carolina’s Supreme Court rejected the maps because they violated the state Constitution in illegally favoring Republicans. While the Moore case involves legislative districts, how we choose presidents is in the court’s sights. More on that in a moment.

In Moore, Republican state legislators petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, advancing a debunked right-wing doctrine innocuously labeled the “independent state legislature” theory. It maintains that state courts can play no role in overseeing their legislatures in federal election matters.

Hence, according to this baseless notion, state legislatures can do whatever they want in manipulating elections no matter how extreme the results — principles of voter equality and fairness be damned, along with the state’s constitution, its governor and its courts.

Four justices — Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh — had previously signaled support for this idea. One more justice would provide a majority to give state legislatures absolute control of electoral votes in presidential elections.

One of the two constitutional provisions the independent legislature theory purports to rely on is directly at issue in the Moore case. The Constitution’s elections clause provides: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

Yet in North Carolina, the Legislature itself expressly specified that the “manner” of holding elections would include the state courts’ final authority to overturn improper districting decisions. The state’s General Assembly has even detailed the findings courts must make, how and where such challenges must proceed, and the courts’ authority to impose an alternative map. Using the independent legislature idea to throw aside North Carolina’s election law would, therefore, violate the elections clause itself.

And even in states whose legislatures haven’t specifically assigned their courts a role in elections, any ruling granting legislators alone unfettered election authority would contradict our whole constitutional scheme. It would rip all 50 state legislatures from their moorings in the state constitutions that create those legislatures and limit their authority within three branches of state government. Such a holding would commandeer states’ constitutions, the ultimate repository of the power the 10th Amendment “reserves to the States respectively, or to the people.”

No less fundamental, the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV guarantees each state “a republican form of government.” In a republic, the people elect their representatives to make the law. That fundamental principle would lose all meaning if the Supreme Court decided to shred state constitutional provisions governing state election laws.

Going into this November’s elections, 30 state legislatures are firmly in Republican hands, including in most of the battleground states that determine presidential election outcomes. Adopting the independent state legislature theory would amount to right-wing justices making up law to create an outcome of one-party rule.

Take Arizona. In 2015, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision upheld the state’s nonpartisan redistricting system, which voters adopted by initiative, empowering an independent body to draw electoral districts. Now, under the independent legislature theory, the court could strike down Arizona’s nonpartisan scheme because the state’s Constitution allowed voters to make election law.

Next look at Pennsylvania, a key battleground state. In March, the Supreme Court declined to block a Pennsylvania state court decision striking down Republican-drawn gerrymandered congressional maps. If the conservative justices adopt the independent legislature idea, such long-standing oversight would be stripped from the state’s courts.

Constitutional textualists such as former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, the preeminent conservative jurist, already see what lies ahead.

Luttig recently wrote that the pushers of this debunked theory would also seek to apply it to presidential elections to “‘steal’ from Democrats the presidential election in 2024.” Those pressing the idea claim that state legislators may ignore the people’s vote — not to mention the state judiciary and state election procedures that the legislators have themselves enacted into law — because the Constitution’s electors clause directs each state to “appoint” electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.”

Our freedom to govern ourselves is at stake if the conservative justices embrace this theory.

One possible defense is for Congress to enact the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Act, which could be invoked to defeat the way the independent legislature theory disenfranchises the state’s people. Arizonans and West Virginians must prevail on Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to end their resistance to eliminating the filibuster on that bill. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set elections rules nationally for federal elections, no matter what any renegade state legislature might try to do.

Voters can also elect state legislators committed to respecting the will of their constituents, regardless of the gimmicks dangled in front of them by autocrats posing as lawyers.

Keeping our power as citizens to choose our leaders and keeping our republic are one and the same. We need to recognize the great peril we now face and speak out fiercely against what we can foresee unfolding in state legislatures and on the Supreme Court."

[Peter Brown]

What inane idiocy.

Tribe has become a clown in real time.

He’s begging Sinema and Manchin to undo the filibuster when both have repeatedly said they will not under any circumstances do so.

So, he gets the birdbrains of the left to think he’s on to something that will make the difference this time.

I’m sure Heather Cox Richardson is soon to clap here.

[dislaxxic]

If Republicans Retake Congress In November, Here’s What Their Agenda Will Look Like

"...you don’t have to wait until after the November midterm elections to know what a huge faction of Republicans have in mind. A little-noticed budget document, the Blueprint to Save America, released in June by the Republican Study Committee, details the group’s priorities. Since nearly 75 percent of Republican House lawmakers are RSC members, these priorities are shared by a majority of the GOP caucus. The 122-page manifesto, containing a laundry list of longstanding conservative desires, calls for significantly reducing the size of America’s social safety net, drastically limiting abortion access nationwide, effectively throwing in the towel on combatting climate change, raising the age requirement to receive full Social Security benefits, cracking down on transgender rights, and making it easier for Americans to carry concealed weapons.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) warns that the document spells out how a future GOP-led House would govern. “The new members [Republicans] get if they unseat our members and take our open seats are going to be even more conservative than the people who put this together,” he says in an interview. “I think this would be exactly the blueprint that they would try to adopt.”

Cause, gosh, all these fly-over Trumpublicans WANT all this done, especially the reduction the the social safety net and the higher age bar to receive Social Security and slashing social welfare programs that benefit low-income Americans, right??

..

[Peter Brown]

If Republicans Retake Congress In November, Here’s What Their Agenda Will Look Like

"...you don’t have to wait until after the November midterm elections to know what a huge faction of Republicans have in mind. A little-noticed budget document, the Blueprint to Save America, released in June by the Republican Study Committee, details the group’s priorities. Since nearly 75 percent of Republican House lawmakers are RSC members, these priorities are shared by a majority of the GOP caucus. The 122-page manifesto, containing a laundry list of longstanding conservative desires, calls for significantly reducing the size of America’s social safety net, drastically limiting abortion access nationwide, effectively throwing in the towel on combatting climate change, raising the age requirement to receive full Social Security benefits, cracking down on transgender rights, and making it easier for Americans to carry concealed weapons.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) warns that the document spells out how a future GOP-led House would govern. “The new members [Republicans] get if they unseat our members and take our open seats are going to be even more conservative than the people who put this together,” he says in an interview. “I think this would be exactly the blueprint that they would try to adopt.”

Cause, gosh, all these fly-over Trumpublicans WANT all this done, especially the reduction the the social safety net and the higher age bar to receive Social Security and slashing social welfare programs that benefit low-income Americans, right??

..

Let me fix that for you.

When (not if) Republicans retake Congress in November, this is what you can expect:

Very little, other than perhaps Biden pivoting back to the center.

They won’t reduce the size of America’s social safety net, they won’t drastically limit abortion access nationwide, no one will effectively throw in the towel on combatting climate change, they won’t raise the age requirement to receive full Social Security benefits, they won’t crack down on transgender rights, and they won’t make it easier for Americans to carry concealed weapons.

You know why? Two reasons: most of that fevered Democratic anti-wishlist is for the states to decide not the feds. And further, a Congress without a similar party President is relatively impotent. Save your lefty hysteria for 2024.

[jhu72]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

[jhu72]

William Faulkner calls out Katie Britt.

[jhu72]

Georgia Guidestone Monument blown up this morning by vandals. Had never heard of this monument until I read the article. Got a pretty good idea who is responsible for the deed. Bet one or more conspiracy loving "Christians" are responsible.

[CU88]

No surprise here, Georgia MAGA r gubernatorial candidate called the tourist attraction "satanic".

"...Kandiss Taylor claimed the guidestones are satanic and made demolishing them part of her platform."

https://www.foxnews.com/us/georgia-guid ... ert-county

Wonder what is next when MAGA makes similar claims on human beings???



r's - "Don't you touch our racist traitorous confederate monuments!"
Also r's - "Hooray someone blew up a monument we don't like!"

[Seacoaster(1)]

Good article on the "Conservative" attack on/use of the "administrative state:"

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/opin ... state.html

"Last week’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency limiting the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate a shift to a less carbon-intensive economy should have surprised no one familiar with conservative complaints about the administrative state. The alphabet soup of federal executive branch agencies — from the F.D.A. to the S.E.C. — that regulate much of American economic life have long been the targets of Republican criticism.

If Republicans retake Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024, the country may see an even more dramatic showdown over the administrative state. But that showdown might well pit Republicans against themselves.

There are actually two Republican critiques of the administrative state — and they are fundamentally in contradiction with each other. One seeks to restrain its power, the other to wield it against new targets.

The former has advanced for decades through the courts. Its roots lie in what is known legally as the non-delegation doctrine, a largely Depression-era theory that sought to deny or curtail Congress’s power to delegate its authority to administrative agencies. Its more recent incarnation has sought to limit the discretion of administrative agencies even when that discretion has been delegated to them by Congress.

The second critique comes from the populist right. It aims not to check powerful executive branch bureaucracies but to wrestle control of them away from liberal technocrats and put them to work for “the people” as they understand it, unhampered by interference from the courts.

The judicial critique is more familiar, but the courts have grown bolder of late in demanding that new rule-making follow explicit legislative mandates. For example, in April a federal judge struck down the C.D.C.’s extension of the mask mandate for airlines by narrowly reading the agency’s authority to regulate personal behavior. And in May, in Jarkesy v. S.E.C., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rebuked the S.E.C. for deciding a question of fraud before an administrative law judge rather than before a jury, even though it was operating under a broad grant of authority under the Dodd-Frank law.

West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is the latest case in this sequence. It didn’t give conservative critics everything they wanted, but it ruled that even if the text of a statute granted broad authority to an agency, the court would read that grant narrowly and stop the agency from making rules on “major questions” without explicit instruction from Congress.

Democrats tend to view this crusade as a backdoor effort to deregulate the economy. But in practice, obstructing the regulatory process may come with potentially perverse results. The E.P.A., for example, retains the authority to regulate coal-fired power plants — indeed, it could take a far more severe stance than the Obama administration took. It just can’t facilitate a smoother transition to a cleaner energy mix without explicit instruction from Congress.

Even as this judicial project has advanced, though, a growing part of the Republican Party has been moving away from free market ideology — and embracing the idea of turning the administrative state to its own purposes.

John Marini, the Claremont Institute’s vigorous critic of the administrative state, has called it not merely unconstitutional but anti-constitutional. His preferred solution may be inferred from the fact that he saw the real tragedy of Watergate as having prevented President Richard Nixon from bringing a (reduced) administrative state more fully under his personal control. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard professor and prominent Catholic integralist, has made common cause with some liberals to argue that the administrative state can be “redeemed” by infusing it with the proper moral spirit. In 2017, Steve Bannon declared that to “deconstruct[ … ] the administrative state” was a top priority for a new populist movement. And in April, J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican candidate for the Senate, said that in a prospective second Trump administration, the president should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

This critique is as much cultural as political or economic. It argues that precisely because it is staffed with technocratic professionals, the administrative state derives its legitimacy from the credentials of that class and a pretension to rational analysis. The bureaucracy’s own interests and the ideological orientation of its staff will increasingly bring it into conflict with the people whose lives and livelihoods it regulates. Meanwhile, the administrative state will tend to view democratic accountability itself as an intrusion on its own prerogatives.

To solve this problem, as these critics see it, it isn’t enough to clip the administrative state’s wings or even to overthrow it, because the same phenomenon is manifested in large corporations, the media, academia — any large institution that values educational credentials. So populists like Mr. Bannon and Mr. Vance seek to restaff the administrative state with politically friendly people who can be relied on to turn its regulatory powers on those same organizations. It’s a culture-war twist on the progressive goal of using centralized government power to check concentrated private interests.

Populist governments in Hungary and Poland have transformed their respective governments in just this manner, transformations that have been denounced as corrupt because they are indistinguishable from corruption. But Hungary and Poland have also transformed their judiciaries to bring them into line with regime goals.

By contrast, a move by a second Trump administration (or a DeSantis administration) to seize and transform the American administrative state could put it on a collision course with a conservative judiciary. After all, if an executive branch agency exceeds its power when it makes rules under a broad grant of power from Congress, surely it exceeds them when it ignores explicit instructions from Congress, which a wholesale politicization of the administrative state would certainly do.

This is where the two visions from the right could come into sharp conflict. Would a conservative Supreme Court rebuke a conservative administration if it acts outside the bounds of what the court sees as legitimate? It’s not clear.

On the one hand, the Roberts court has sometimes taken the view that the best way to make the administrative state politically accountable is to treat it as part of the “unitary” executive. On the other hand, the same court rebuked the Trump administration repeatedly for failing to follow administrative law procedures, notably on immigration. It’s hard to imagine it would look kindly on a wholesale dismissal of those procedures, much less the unilateral jettisoning of the Civil Service Reform Act (which sets out rules for the management of the federal bureaucracy).

That’s why Mr. Vance, in calling for Mr. Trump to do just that, went on to say: “And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say: The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

If we take these critiques seriously, one thing really stands out. Absent from this projected clash between the executive and judiciary is the branch that represents the people and is empowered to make laws in their name: Congress. With decisions like West Virginia v. E.P.A., the least-accountable branch — the judiciary — has appointed itself the defender of Congress’s powers against encroachment by the executive, when Congress is perfectly capable of defending them itself.

That’s an odd way to defend democracy. But the populist critique is even stranger when you consider that an aspiring legislator like Mr. Vance is basically calling for the executive to ignore Congress’s laws. Ambitious politicians don’t generally run to weaken the offices they seek to claim, nor do advocates of small-r republicanism yearn for a new Caesar.

So if conservatives are serious about fidelity to the Constitution and about wanting to cure the administrative state’s democratic deficit, Congress is where they should focus their attention.

For Congress to take more responsibility, however, it would first have to defend its own prerogatives even against presidents of the same party and invest in its own policymaking apparatus. Most fundamentally, it would have to be willing to shape public opinion by making policy rather than passing the buck to the administrative state, to lead rather than to demagogue.

If that’s difficult to imagine the Republican Party supporting, then perhaps their critiques really are mere expressions of the will to power. Or perhaps conservatives themselves see the Constitution that they claim to venerate as no longer well designed for the country that actually exists.

In that case, they’ve effectively given a backhanded compliment to the progressives who invented the modern administrative state. They may not have designed an eternally perfect political mechanism any more than the founders did. But in calling for new government structures that respond to new conditions, they may have had a point after all."

[Peter Brown]

Washington DC voted 95-5 for Biden.

Federal agencies clocked in around 98% for Biden.

Republicans have good reason to distrust the administrative state.

[old salt]

Having participated in the acquisition & modification of aircraft, in both private & govt sectors, I'm with JD Vance.

[old salt]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

[Typical Lax Dad]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

We need a new moderator. I wonder if Fanlax is taking applications?

[Seacoaster(1)]

Having participated in the acquisition & modification of aircraft, in both private & govt sectors, I'm with JD Vance.

My guess is that no one here is surprised to find you "with JD Vance."

[old salt]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

We need a new moderator. I wonder if Fanlax is taking applications?

Personal attacks & name calling were moderated. It yielded a more civil, informative discussion from a larger, more wide-ranging group of people. We are now supposed to moderate ourselves, not ignore the rules until someone reports it to the admin.

[Typical Lax Dad]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

We need a new moderator. I wonder if Fanlax is taking applications?

Personal attacks & name calling were moderated. It yielded a more civil, informative discussion from a larger, more wide-ranging group of people. We are now supposed to moderate ourselves, not ignore the rules until someone reports it to the admin.

This is closer to a public square.

[old salt]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

We need a new moderator. I wonder if Fanlax is taking applications?

Personal attacks & name calling were moderated. It yielded a more civil, informative discussion from a larger, more wide-ranging group of people. We are now supposed to moderate ourselves, not ignore the rules until someone reports it to the admin.

This is closer to a public square.

...in Portland.

[old salt]

Having participated in the acquisition & modification of aircraft, in both private & govt sectors, I'm with JD Vance.

My guess is that no one here is surprised to find you "with JD Vance."

...& why should that matter to you ?

[Typical Lax Dad]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

We need a new moderator. I wonder if Fanlax is taking applications?

Personal attacks & name calling were moderated. It yielded a more civil, informative discussion from a larger, more wide-ranging group of people. We are now supposed to moderate ourselves, not ignore the rules until someone reports it to the admin.

This is closer to a public square.

...in Portland.

Forest Park, Baby….

[jhu72]

^^^ not just a liar, stupid as well.

Personal attack in response to a substantive post.

2 sets of rules make this forum a toxic place.

... he proves the truth of the statement everyday as he trolls the forum.