Well, the whole idea of a republic is to provide a filter for the whims of the people. So I’m sympathetic to your point of view on curated decision making. I’d also like to see a balanced SCOTUS and would welcome constructive ideas to achieve that goal, Perhaps it means a floating number of justices where they rotate in and out of sessions.
OT: Gabe Kapler
- Thread starter Knightmoves
- Start date
- Status
Well, the whole idea of a republic is to provide a filter for the whims of the people. So I’m sympathetic to your point of view on curated decision making. I’d also like to see a balanced SCOTUS and would welcome constructive ideas to achieve that goal, Perhaps it means a floating number of justices where they rotate in and out of sessions.
Yes, floating justices is what I thought as well. There would need to be some judges on deck, basically. Each president could appoint some number of on-deck justices, so each side keeps some number on deck at all times. Once an on-deck judge is added to the court, they are there for life, but they might be “benched”, no pun intended, with pay obviously, if the White House seats a new president from the same party that appointed them and a rebalance is needed.
Or something like that.
funny what happened to talking about your thoughts about Kaplan and how people feel about it, looking at this thread now.
But a gun reform law has been passed, so Gabe might be able to stand again.
As I am sure you know, the usual suspects are refusing to close the background check loophole.
Also, something like 95% of guns found in crimes committed in NJ were legally purchased in other states, so that is part of the issue.
The numbers are similar or worse in NY and New England...it's why they called I-95 the iron pipeline.
It's the same thing with guns coming to Chicago from Indiana and the west coast from Nevada. It's a pretty unmistakable pattern.
The problem we have in the US is a simple one on paper.
There's a way to fix all 3 branches
- Ban gerrymandering and all lines decided by a computer
- Add PR and DC as states so everyone's votes count
- Abolish the Electoral College
With this you'd never get the appointment of the current Sharia court that we have.
If states like Wyoming with a population less than that of Monmouth County get outsize say, the country is going to collapse on itself.
There's a way to fix all 3 branches
- Ban gerrymandering and all lines decided by a computer
- Add PR and DC as states so everyone's votes count
- Abolish the Electoral College
With this you'd never get the appointment of the current Sharia court that we have.
If states like Wyoming with a population less than that of Monmouth County get outsize say, the country is going to collapse on itself.
So true.
California with 40 million citizens gets two senators while North and South Dakota with a total of 1.5 million get two each. How fair is that ?
I don't speak for the usual suspects - my views are pretty centrist on this issue and I'm okay with imposing the same checks on all gun transfers of ownership regardless of if it's a private sale or an FFL gun dealer. Do everything on my list and it would cut down on a bunch of ordinary gun violence, including cutting down on crime guns that started life as legal purchases.
OTOH, for mass shootings, sadly, nothing we can do is going to have much impact. It's like lone-wolf terrorism. People might not like this reality, but there are plenty of easily obtaining and effective tools with which an individual committed to killing a bunch of innocent helpless people can achieve their psychotic goals. Only way to even come close is for the US to throw away privacy entirely and even then it would keep happening.
very simple, when it comes to separation of church and state, the separation is being eroded by this current SCOTUS.
EDIT: I wonder if Gabe will stand for that
Equating the Supreme Court of the United States as a sharia court is the reason why I don't participate on the CE board. People can't make their point without going over board to the nth degree.. This court has an obvious conservative tilt so now it needs to be changed? The SC goes through cycles. It was very liberal for many years.
When this court comes through with their decisions that allow for gays to be tossed off buildings or for adultery to be punished by stoning then come back and compare them to a sharia court
When this court comes through with their decisions that allow for gays to be tossed off buildings or for adultery to be punished by stoning then come back and compare them to a sharia court
one must understand some over the top insults will be handed out to anyone or everyone involved in controversial decisions.
What one side sees as fair and balanced, the other side might claim abuse of freedom.
For the umpteenth time this is why there are TWO houses in Congress. For this country to exist there needs to be some sort of equality among states. That’s what the Senate is for. Without the Senate there is no United States.
You will often hear an argument about the required compromise in 1787 that provided smaller states the same Senate representation as larger ones. And it’s true, but this presumes that the founders would have made this compromise regardless of magnitude. For example, in 1787, Virginia had 12.7x the population of the smallest state. Today, California has a population of 39.6 million. Applying the same ratio of Virginia to the smallest state in 1787 to California today, the “smallest” state would be about 3.2 million. Think Iowa. There are 17 states with a smaller population than Iowa, which equates to 34 Senate seats, or 34% in total. In 1787, using that same 12.7x ratio, that would be 2 out of 26 seats or 7.7%. Anyone arguing that the founders would view the two scenarios identically must not think much of the founders intellectual prowess.
I just look at it as in the beginning the Founders felt basing number on the white property owners ( later general population who qualified) who vote in a state should decide who is in the House Of Representatives for that state they reside in and the States should decide who represents them in the US Senate .
So that's where the population vote came in for the HOR and a set number for the US Senate.
Over the years States gained number of members of the HOR, because of an increase in population but the US Senate numbers never changed even if population increased..
That holds true even after voters started to elect the US Senators .
They also capped the number of House reps in the early 1900s. It was supposed to keep going up and up as the country grew.
It is true that the Senate was intended to dampen the animal spirits of the House. Having Senators chosen by state legislatures was one mechanism to achieve this along with granting Senators 6 year terms, unfortunately, hasn’t worked out that way. Tephey were suspicious of democracy in 1787, and for good reason. The will of the masses should be filtered. Once we released those filters, we had worse outcomes.
So for the countries that have eliminated mass shootings, is it just a happy coincidence and nothing to do with actions they have taken?
Sure. Sharia courts force an interpretation of a religion upon a country that never consented in any kind of way.
Though to be fair, I don't know if Sharia courts are home to people who lie under oath, have their debts mysteriously wiped before joining, sexually harass women, and who consort with coup plotters and rule on their cases. Probably not. That's the kind of thing you'd expect in a craphole country.
John Roberts is a Conservative justice. And he acts accordingly. He did not concur with the 5-4 majority overturning Roe, opting instead for a conservative, and incremental, opinion. He stated that the 5-4 majority was ruling on something they didn’t need to in order to decide the case in front of them. He’s right. The majority opinion was activist. Nothing conservative about it from a judicial standpoint, it disregarded precedent despite no substantive changes to circumstance (other than a change in the personal opinion of the the justices). Historically, to overturn precedent, you need a change in facts or circumstances, None were present here. None were present in the ruling to overturn NY States law banning concealed carry, either.
Those aren’t conservative jurists. They are activists, pushing through personal, beliefs while ignoring or overturning settled precedent. You have Thomas calling for an opportunity it’s to rule on cases in an opinion. That’s activist. Look at the Gorsuch opinion on Kennedy. Had what he written actually be true, I suspect most would agree. To paraphrase, he stated that the coach was engaging in a moment of silent prayer while others were conducting the pleasantries at the conclusion of a high school football game. One photograph included in the dissent shows how preposterous that sentence was. When a justice gets the facts wrong, we can conclude he either was ignorant (hard to believe) or ignoring them to render an opinion he wanted to make. of course it’s overboard to label these justices as Sharia judges, but the hyperbole makes a point. There is an unmistakeable religious, and Christian, overtone to several recent decisions. We should all pause on that point,
Last edited:
Was it "liberal" when it said don't count all the votes in Florida and make a Republican president and oh btw, our decision in this case can never be considered a precedent? Funny how quickly we forgot about that.
The Court was never once its history "liberal." When Roe was decided, more Republicans supported it than Dems. The Court for many years was actually conservative in the real sense, not the take its cues from Rupert Murdoch sense of the current iteration.
The Court was overtaken by unqualified hacks. I didn't always agree with Scalia, Rehnquist, O'Connor or Kennedy but at least they weren't corrupt, weren't liars, and demonstrated intellectual heft. You could find someone at a law school outside of the top 100 selected at random and they'd best the last two gems appointed in each of those categories.
So yeah, when a bunch of unqualified hacks override the will of the American people, and, for the first time in history, take away a right, there's a big problem.
You're responding to an idiot.
He wasn't talking to you. I didn't hear anyone refer to people who used bigoted slurs about players.
So Wyoming needs to be equal to California for what reason?
Since neither were states at the Founding it seems like quite the extrapolation and we know what our dear friends think about things aren't specifically written in the Constitution.
I think Scalia is closer to the current justices than than to Rehnquist, O’Connor and Kennedy. But you were probably extending an olive branch. Or what about this conservative Justice, Warren Burger. Quote from 1991. “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have seen in my lifetime”. Wonder what he would have thought of the Heller decision.
Do we really have to go through the lists of liberal justices that were activists?
Then change the Constitution.
The way the current system is set up no one here seems to recognize that it's structure caters to big states when it comes to choosing the Chief Executive. A candidate only needs to win 11 out of the 50 states (plus DC) to become president.
Frida,
My point being that both sides of the political spectrum have had activists judges on the SC.
That point may or may not be true. However, it has nothing to do with whether the current so-called conservative justices are actually conservative or activist in the judicial sense of the word. That’s the topic.
Last edited:
The evidence, right here at home in the US with it's 50 states and their varying gun laws, shows a clear lack of correlation between gun laws and mass shootings. If strong gun laws are so effective here in the US, why does the state with the strongest gun laws have the most mass shootings? Why does the state with the weakest gun laws have the fewest mass shootings?
Why does a state like NJ experience relatively few mass shootings and yet NJ allows people to own as many AR-15 style rifles and semiautomatic handguns as they wish? That seems contradictory to the proposed "evidence" from other countries that banned semiautomatic rifles and/or handguns.
Why does Europe suffer a greater terrorism problem than America? Just happy coincidence? Or is the reality that there are a large and complex set of factors, including cultural differences, that impact statistics such as mass shootings and terrorism?
In any event, this is all academic. In terms of gun bans in the US, given the current judicial climate, it will be decades before any gun bans clear the courts. The more likely scenario is that bans against fully automatic weapons will be overturned, which is extreme, but is also in line with the recent SCOTUS ruling.
Edit: And please, before somebody once again posts stats about ordinary gun violence, this post, and the post to which I'm responding, is NOT about that. It's about mass shootings only.
Last edited:
This court has ignored precedent in a number of cases. Alito and Thomas have never thought precedent meant anything if they did not agree with it
Last edited:
The two states are not equal in terms of representation. They are only equal in the Senate.
And the reason for that is built right into our name: United States. Our 50 states were united, and are still united today, at least in part, by the fact that each of the states has equal representation in the Senate.
How long do you think our states would remain united if the relatively few highly populated states get to dictate how everyone in the rest of the nation lives? The founders were thinking very clearly when they gave each state equal representation in the Senate.
I disagree with a number of your points.
1. If you are going to refer to a united group of states in eyes if the founders, the correct number to use is 13, not 50.
2. The Great Compromise was the result of a heated debate and passed only by a slim margin. It was a compromise, and not exactly the product of universal clear thinking on behalf of the members of the Congress or their legislatures.
3. In 1787, states were truly independent states, or better said, nations. We don’t view states in the same manner today as they did in 1787.
4. The gap in population between the largest and smallest state in 1787 was very different than todays gap. See my post above on this topic,, if you’re interested.
suffice to say it’s not clear to me that founding wisdom is absolute on this topic given the substantial changes we’ve had in the last ~250 years.
You're right, and good post.
All that being true, that we wound up being 50 states with wildly varying populations makes the equal representation compromise all the more important than if we had remained only 13 even more independent states with relatively equal population. IMO, it makes that narrowly achieved compromise seem collectively prescient, in hindsight.
That such a good outcome (holding the nation together for so long) was, arguably, the result of a heated debate resolved by a great compromise reinforces my belief that compromise is most often the path to long-lasting good governance.
I think we would have fractured long ago without equal representation in the Senate. We may wind up fractured anyway, in fact we probably will at some point if history truly repeats itself. But I suspect that altering the Senate representation to be unequal based on population would only hasten that outcome.
I agree that it would be near impossible to change Senate representation to reflect population. It would require a Constitutional amendment or convention to develop an entirely new constitution. Neither will ever happen. No one likes having rights taken from them. See the outrage expected from women who just had a 50 year right stripped from them.
But let’s not confuse some divine wisdom led to the Great Compromise, it was the common denominator in negotiations. Madison hated it. And the math today is not the same as then, small population states have disproportionately more power than they did In 1787..
It's not just women who are outraged by the SCOTUS Roe v Wade decision. I'm seeing plenty of outrage by men as well. And also outrage from religious leaders of varying faiths, including some whom one might not expect to be outraged over this decision (e.g. Muslims and certain Christian faiths).
I don't really do outrage per-se. But I'm in strong disagreement with their decision in that case because it robs individuals of one of the most fundamental freedoms anybody can have: the right to determine what happens with their body (along with whatever is inside it).
It seems inconsistent with the decision about carry laws, to me. In one case, the court recognized and upheld a universal individual freedom as being constitutionally provided, despite debatable language for it in the 2nd and 14th amendments. In the other case, the court ignored a universal individual freedom, selectively opting to ignore the exact same aforementioned debatable language in the 14th amendment.
I personally think they made the correct decision in the first case, and the wrong decision in the second.
Well instead we're going to find out what happens when a few lowly populated states get to dictate to the majority of Americans our lives.
How are you liking it thus far?
I would like to end mass shootings and normal gun violence...thus NJ's laws nationally.
I understand there's a bunch of hacks making activist decisions. I am just talking what should happen.
Oh and given their current behavior the chance will come sooner or later that they will be impeached and/or find themselves a lot of new colleagues the minute Dems have 50 votes in favor of continuing American democracy.
The president has to win areas with people?
What a wild idea.
It seems to be working in let's see here...uh...every other presidential system on the face of the planet? Brazil still got a crazy far right President even with majority vote. France has it. It works.
Of course we cannot change the Constitution when that involves states like Wisconsin where a party wins 54% of the vote and gets 36% of the seats in the legislature.
It's like asking why Russians don't vote Putin out.
- Status