Palpitus1 wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Current state-wide anti-abortion laws? Trans bathroom laws? Clive Owen?
All state matters. Not sure what your question is.
Do you think the Federal Government is subservient to states? Supremacy Clause doesn't exist? Or that trans people are not a protected class, ethically if not to-date legally? No idea why else you'd rail against the Feds having the audacity to protect an historically reviled people. Maybe you could clarify whether you agree or disagree with anti-Trans laws, maybe even morally justify such. No state or federal law forces anyone to have an opinion. So what is yours on this issue?
It's not about subservience, but balance of power and where that power shall lay. The supremacy clause only says that when there are conflicting laws, the federal law has supremacy. You'd have to look at
Section 8 of Article 1 of the Constitution to find a complete list of what the US Congress is able to pass laws on. Could you please tell me where in that list the power to legislate Abortion or who can use which bathroom lies? It doesn't. Ergo, Congress can't pass such laws. Ergo, the supremacy clause is meaningless (well, except to the point of judicial rulings, which I'll talk about later).
Also, The Tenth amendment quite clearly states:
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The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Which is why, in any area of legislation in which the US congress is not granted power, the State legislatures have authority. That's how our government works.
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What if your state made a law to kill all babies? Would you stand by that as a state decision? Or instead be reviled by it and look to the Federal Government for help?
The 5th amendment prohibits the loss of life without due process by the Federal government. The 14th amendment extends that protection to all persons with regard to state actions as well (you get that someone thought of this stuff over the last few hundred years, right?). The specific protection applies to "persons", which quite clearly applies to babies. At a point in the past, blacks were not always considered "persons", and currently, the unborn are not either. Funny how we use linguistic manipulation to justify our actions.
Um... But "babies" are "persons", and thus protected from loss of life without due process. So, I suppose if a state law applied the death penalty to an infant, and that infant somehow managed to break a law for which that was the penalty, and a jury trial upheld that charge and applied that penalty, then that would meet the "due process" requirement (but, um... highly unlikely). Of course, since you said "all babies", you've already chucked due process out the window, so the answer would be that such a law would be in violation of the constitution.
And yes. I'd look to the Federal government to enforce that. Because that's very specifically a required duty. Legislating bathrooms is not. Please tell me you can tell the difference?
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And just from this I suppose you were totally on Texas' side on Lawrence v. Texas. Christ, you are terrible. "State's rights! As long as I agree with the issue in question! Sodomy is against God and should be Illegal!"
Kinda leaped ahead of the facts. No. I was not on Texas' side, and frankly neither was the state of Texas. It was an old law, and sometimes we have to go through the legal process to clearly establish that such laws are unconstitutional. In this case though, it was because the activity was taking place in a private residence, and the court ruled (correctly) that what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is their own business.
Again. Please explain how this has relevance to the use of a public bathroom facility? I have no problem if a trans person wants to declare his/her bathroom to be suitable for whatever gender he/she wants. There's kind of a whole different issue when something is a publicly accessible facility though.
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Enough strawmanning of your likely awful morality and/or dismissing answering what you believe due to "State Law!!!!" though...
Huh? Silly me. I'm actually reading the constitution and applying it. It's quite clear what areas of our law fall under federal legislative jurisdiction, and which do not. It's also quite clear what sorts of laws are *not* allowed, and thus aren't allowed at any level. You're kinda spinning from one concept to another and flailing around wildly while failing to make a coherent point.
What *is* your point? Do you think that the federal government should have the authority to tell a restaurant owner that he must allow people who have peni
ses to use the women's restroom because they feel like women? Isn't that something that maybe the owner of the restaurant can decide?
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Well sure, there were a ton of incredibly stupid liberals and conservatives who supported the Iraq War. Stupid goes across that. If you supported the Iraq War you are stupid, in general, and in addition to the fiscal Conservative standard of small government/small spending. Liberals were stupid and against purported values of less war-mongering, valuing life. Both you and they were morons. All bad dumb ********.
Again. Whether someone supported or opposed the war in Iraq has absolutely zero bearing on the fact that declaring and executing wars falls completely within the purview of the federal government. It's in the list in section 8 that I linked earlier. Deciding who can use which bathroom does not. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
You're trying to inject some kind of moral outrage into this. But the question isn't "was the war in Iraq a good idea?", but "does power to declare war in Iraq rest at the federal level of our government?". And yes, it does.
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Granted, supporting the Iraq War isn't a slam of objectivity. It's more a slam on intelligence. And please don't retrofit a narrative of "but no one knew what was going on!" Millions protested the War; the Bush Administrations' justifications changed monthly due to what was deemed popular/what was quickly mooted as casus belli, etc. Anyone paying attention at the time knew this was cooked, and ********* Atta in Czechoslovakia, protecting Kurds (doubly meta-laughable), Yellow-cake, WMDs, mobile chemtrucks/Powell's UN presentation etc. Didn't only not convince a lot of Americans to go along, but also the UN (US scrapped a final presentation), and a ton of sober countries. The US had to strongarm the coalition into being. Instead of others saying "Yeah, I'm convinced this is a real threat!!" that dozens more countries would've joined. How old are you? Did you only read Judith Miller articles at the time? LOL. You are a dumb as **** conservative if you hood-winked yourself that the Iraq War was necessary. For $2 trillion US dollars and counting. And to next point
Again though. That's utterly irrelevant to the question of whether declaring, executing, and funding a war falls at the federal level of government. It does. Period. End of story. What the heck are you arguing?
I would assume that one's reasons for supporting or opposing a decision to go to war would not be based on whether one is or is not a fiscal conservative. It should be based on other things specific to that choice. If one decides to support the action for war, then he should support funding for it, regardless of whether he is a fiscal conservative or not. You'd certainly not want wasteful spending along the way, but having decided that the war is something that needs to be done, the choice to fund it kinda has to follow right along with that.
The point you're missing is that I might think that public education (for example) is something that should be provided by the government to the people, while *also* opposing funding it at the federal level. Because, as a fiscal conservative, I believe that actions should be taken at the lowest level appropriate, and funding public education isn't on the list of things that I mentioned earlier. So, if we're going to spend money on something, it should be done at the level where "the people" have the most control over it, and the most ability to minimize over spending. That's kind of the root of fiscal conservatism.
Again, you're kinda confusing two different axis of the issue. The decision to do or not do something is one thing. The decision of what level of our government to do that thing, is another.
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For the record, I happen to think that the war in Iraq, while certainly imperfectly executed, was necessary.
Again, that is an utterly ridiculous belief.
Your happening to think that outs you as a ******* moron.
And that's a subjective opinion. Which has nothing at all to do with fiscal conservatism. Get how that works?
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Sure, the action necessary was the Afghanistan War, which was completely justified since the Taliban didn't hand over the perpetrator. The Iraq War had literally nothing to do with 9/11 or the Taliban.
Wrong.
Let's let OBL tell us exactly why 9/11 happened:
OBL wrote:
The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the two Holy Mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in control. These are the reasons behind the singling out of America as a target.
The land of the two Holy Mosques is Saudi Arabia. We had troops stationed there because we were maintaining the southern no-fly zone in Iraq. Bill Clinton sat on this status quo in Iraq for the entire 8 years of his presidency, never moving towards a formal truce, even while radicals like OBL got more and more pissed off that we were basically sitting with troops in their holiest country. This interview was in 1998.
That's how Iraq and 9/11 are connected. The attacks literally happened because of Clinton's failure to resolve the conflict in Iraq in a timely manner. We can debate the decision, post 9/11, to resolve it via invasion and removal of Saddam from power, but to say that one had nothing to do with the other is absurd.
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May as well have invaded Australia for their treatment of Aboriginals. Or gosh, maybe you could imagine invading Rwanda and thus saving millions of Tutsis/Hutus from slaughter. I wonder what you think "necessary" means. Whether you think invasions are necessary for humanitarian purposes, or other... (economic? Hegemonic? Please do tell what your reason for necessary is).
But sure, stupid idiot Conservatives and stupid idiot Liberals can be equally stupid, and equally kill hundreds of thousands in unnecessary wars. Great job, warmonger typical US person, whether liberal or conservative. **** both of you idiots/amoralists. Liberals for liberal reasons, and Conservatives for fiscal reasons. Are you just daft? How many trillions should we now to spend bring the Sudan to order? Rhodesia? Burma? Now Yemen which we ensured was destroyed? Christ, dumb *** warmongers are so ******* stupid. That they pretend to care about anyone is just the final straw. You don't give a **** about humans not yourself--just admit it.
More likely, you are ignorant of the actual reasons for such things, and rail about them rather than spending some effort informing yourself about the subject. It's terrifically easy to label a decision you don't understand at "stupid". But often, you find that when you gain that understanding, it's not nearly as stupid a decision as you first thought.
And btw, there's actually a lot more history to the whole OBL and Iraq thing than you are probably aware of. OBL was tiffed off at the US and SA because when Iraq first invaded Kuwait back in 1990, OBL offered the use of his Mujahadeem warriors to defend Saudi Arabia from possible Iraq attack. The Saudis chose instead to go with a US lead UN coalition to defend the nation. Which is somewhat of a problem for fundamentalist Muslims since by Islamic law, the sovereignty of the ruling state defending Mecca and Medina is determined by that states ability to defend it within the Muslim world. So using outside forces to defend the nation of SA sent a bad message that OBL (and others) were not happy with. So he left SA and went to Afghanistan to basically fume for a while until everything was over. Sadly, after the initial conflict a cease fire was signed and nothing was resolved. Initially an 18 month cease fire agreement existed, with a set of conditions for Iraq to meet for a formal truce to be signed (at which point, all our troops would leave, right?). But this agreement began in summer of 1991, and expired late in 1992. Sadly, Bush lost re-election to Clinton, which meant that nothing was done when the cease fire agreement expired, and the terms were not met. Much like Obama and his continuing resolutions to push budget choices back further and further, Clinton just let the can get kicked down the road further and further, with no end in sight. Worse, Iraq chose to punish the Kurds in the norther region and the Shiites in the Southern region in retaliation, which lead to the establishment and continual use of no-fly zones to prevent air strikes against the people living there. This began 10 years of stalemate in the region which ended only when Bush 43 finally took action over the eternal failure of Iraq to comply with the terms of the cease fire (which btw, had to do with far more then whether there "were WMDs" in the country), and invaded in 2003.
This stalemate was the straw that broke the camel's back, and OBL began a series of increasingly violent and well planned attacks on US targets as a result. The final result was the 9/11 attacks.
So yes, there is a direct and straight line causal relationship between the failure to resolve the initial gulf war in Iraq and the eventual 9/11 attacks. Lots of choices were made along the way, of course, and we can certainly debate them at length. But again, to just deny that one had anything at all to do with the other is to more or less declare your complete ignorance of the subject.
Edited, Jun 1st 2016 2:54pm by gbaji