RIP Ruth

[ctuser1]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.

Summary:
If you are unarmed, being black increases your chances of being killed by the police manifold.
(14.8% vs 9.4%, while a big difference, is still VERY misleading if blindly used. you have to convert % to absolute and apportion that per capita to get apples to apples).

[darkadams00]

Am saying "don't limit examples to minority deaths."

OK.

Which other examples would you like included?

Why doesn’t a non-minority example come to mind immediately? It doesn’t happen? It rarely happens? It isn’t reported by every news outlet across every channel for the better part of a week? With the number of non-minority citizens, the number of available guns, the number of likely late-hour citizen/police interactions (my assumption), and the nature of humans to react similarly in similar situations regardless of race (my assumption), it would seem this would happen with non-minorities enough to warrant similar outrage/news coverage. Statistically this might happen disproportionately to minorities (I haven’t read the research well enough to assert that), but similar situations would be expected to happen more often to the majority population given the racial percentages in the US.

It does.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-clear-white-people-are-not-more-likely-than-black-people-to-be-killed-by-police/

(Headline is a little odd)

Which is my point—In the case at hand, there are two factors at hand that have been discussed here. Police/prosecutorial procedures and racial influences/biases. In the discussion of the first, inclusion of both minority and non-minority examples make a more robust case for reform and remove the tendency to mix that discussion with the latter one of race. However, the average citizen playing at home can’t readily think of examples because those examples are not getting airtime. That keeps the focus solely on the second discussion about race. However, the focus could be wrongfully applied in this case because the issue was likely the procurement of the warrant rather than its application. But the general public points fingers at the cops at the door rather than the folks in the office.

[robartsd]

Within the last few days 3 members of the House have started crafting legislation that would limit Supreme Court justices to a term of 18 years.

The legislators  also propose adding 2 more justices to the high Court.

RBG opposed packing the Court.

She thought nine justices were sufficient.

I certainly agree that nine justices is sufficient, but I'd like to see retirement or death of a justice decoupled from the privilege of the President to appoint permanent justices. I also don't want to see an explicit term limit on justices. Historically average service was 16 years, but justices appointed since 1970 have tended to serve longer. I'm not sure if the trend towardss increasing partisan politics in appointments might be a factor in justices choosing to stay longer. Appointing a permanent justice every two years and capping the size of the court at 11 justices would provide an expected maximum tenure of at least 22 years if all later appointed justices remain active.

A tie-breaker isn't needed: if the Supreme Court is unable to have a majority opinion then the judgement of the Appeal Court stands.

Good point. Though a tie breaker could beneficial to allow the Supreme Court to provides a unifying precedent when the different appeals court districts rule counter to each other on very similar cases, it might just be better to wait until the Supreme Court can make a more decisive ruling.

[John Galt incarnate!]

Within the last few days 3 members of the House have started crafting legislation that would limit Supreme Court justices to a term of 18 years.

The legislators  also propose adding 2 more justices to the high Court.

RBG opposed packing the Court.

She thought nine justices were sufficient.

I certainly agree that nine justices is sufficient, but I'd like to see retirement or death of a justice decoupled from the privilege of the President to appoint permanent justices. I also don't want to see an explicit term limit on justices. Historically average service was 16 years, but justices appointed since 1970 have tended to serve longer.

Here's my tenure-limiting  proposal for the Supreme Court.

1. No justice may sit on the Court more than 25 years.

2. All justices must retire at the age of 80.

[redbirdfan]

Am saying "don't limit examples to minority deaths."

I would hazard a guess that socioeconomic status plays a big role.  Poor white people are likely also disproportionately victims of bad prosecutorial and police procedure. 

But the general public points fingers at the cops at the door rather than the folks in the office.

They aren't completely unrelated.  Yes, the warrant itself was problematic.  The execution of the warrant is also an issue.  In what universe was knocking down the door at 1:00 a.m. reasonable for the potential crime in this case?  How was that not designed to create panic and chaos?  Why couldn't officers in uniform knock and announce their presence at noon, 2 p.m, during daylight?  The cop who was charged fired shots into residences with no ability to see his target.  I doubt that would occur in a suburban neighborhood. 

Within the last few days 3 members of the House (all Democrats)  started crafting legislation that would limit Supreme Court justices to a term of 18 years.

The legislators  also propose adding 2 more justices to the high Court.

Gavin Newsom just signed an executive order banning the gas powered cars by 2035.  It's political malpractice even if you think it's reasonable.  Do this AFTER the election.  I will never underestimate the ability of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

[MDM]

Am saying "don't limit examples to minority deaths."

I would hazard a guess that socioeconomic status plays a big role.  Poor white people are likely also disproportionately victims of bad prosecutorial and police procedure. 

I think you are exactly correct about socioeconomics playing a big role - perhaps to the point of being the primary driver.  It is unfortunately highly correlated (not perfectly, but highly) with race.

[GuitarStv]

The execution of the warrant is also an issue.  In what universe was knocking down the door at 1:00 a.m. reasonable for the potential crime in this case?  How was that not designed to create panic and chaos?  Why couldn't officers in uniform knock and announce their presence at noon, 2 p.m, during daylight?  The cop who was charged fired shots into residences with no ability to see his target.  I doubt that would occur in a suburban neighborhood.

My wife and I were talking about it last night.  The execution of the warrant makes no sense at all.

They were searching for drugs in an apartment right?  OK.  So maybe they felt they needed to perform the raid with plain clothes on so that people wouldn't see uniformed officers coming up the stairs and warn the (theoretical) drug dealers.  That logic kinda makes sense to me.  But there's still no reason they couldn't just knock on the door in the day in plain clothes and then flash a badge to tell 'em to open up.  Banging the door down in the middle of the night is an extremely aggressive action that feels designed to increase the chance of violence.

If you're being fired at as a police officer, my understanding is that you are taught to fire back at your target.  Especially if you're in a situation where there are likely to be innocent bystanders in the line of fire.  In what world is firing blindly through walls acceptable use of force?

I really hope that the execution of this flawed search warrant was poorly done.  If this is normal procedure, it's a wonder that bodies aren't piled up all over the place.

[ctuser1]

Am saying "don't limit examples to minority deaths."

I would hazard a guess that socioeconomic status plays a big role.  Poor white people are likely also disproportionately victims of bad prosecutorial and police procedure. 

I think you are exactly correct about socioeconomics playing a big role - perhaps to the point of being the primary driver.  It is unfortunately highly correlated (not perfectly, but highly) with race.

The bolded statement is true for whites, False for Blacks.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PoliceKillings.pdf

Within all three racial/ethnic groups, rates of police killings were higher with increasing census tract poverty (Figure 3). The relationship between poverty quintile and police killings was strongest for whites, for whom
the rate was nearly 4-fold higher in the highest-poverty quintile (where it 7.9 per million) relative to the lowest poverty quintile (where it was 2.0 per million). For the black population, the police killing rate was 1.8-fold higher in the highest-poverty quintile relative to the lowest-poverty quintile (12.3 versus 6.7 per million). The relationship was weakest for Latinos, whose rate in the highest-poverty category was 1.5-times that of the lowest-poverty quintile (4.7 versus 2.8 per million).

Further, on relative importance on the factors:

Under a counterfactual scenario in which the distribution of poverty quintiles among black people is equal to that of whites, police killings would decrease from the observed rate of 7.9 per million to 6.6 per million (Figure 4). This is equivalent to a 28% reduction in the black-white gap in police killing rates on the additive scale (the rate difference for black versus white populations is 4.6 per million under the observed poverty distribution versus 3.3 per million under the counterfactual distribution).

Higher poverty among the black population accounts for a meaningful, but relatively modest, portion of the black-white gap in police killing rates. In contrast, higher census tract poverty fully explained the Latino-white gap, and the police killing rate among Latinos was lower than expected given their relatively high rates of census tract poverty.

[Samuel]

The execution of the warrant is also an issue.  In what universe was knocking down the door at 1:00 a.m. reasonable for the potential crime in this case?  How was that not designed to create panic and chaos?  Why couldn't officers in uniform knock and announce their presence at noon, 2 p.m, during daylight?  The cop who was charged fired shots into residences with no ability to see his target.  I doubt that would occur in a suburban neighborhood.

My wife and I were talking about it last night.  The execution of the warrant makes no sense at all.

They were searching for drugs in an apartment right?  OK.  So maybe they felt they needed to perform the raid with plain clothes on so that people wouldn't see uniformed officers coming up the stairs and warn the (theoretical) drug dealers.  That logic kinda makes sense to me.  But there's still no reason they couldn't just knock on the door in the day in plain clothes and then flash a badge to tell 'em to open up.  Banging the door down in the middle of the night is an extremely aggressive action that feels designed to increase the chance of violence.

If you're being fired at as a police officer, my understanding is that you are taught to fire back at your target.  Especially if you're in a situation where there are likely to be innocent bystanders in the line of fire.  In what world is firing blindly through walls acceptable use of force?

I really hope that the execution of this flawed search warrant was poorly done.  If this is normal procedure, it's a wonder that bodies aren't piled up all over the place.

It's because it was part of the larger case against the ex-boyfriend. They executed search warrants in several other locations that night where they arrested the ex-boyfriend along with 5 others and seized guns and drugs. The warrant for Breonna's apartment was executed shortly after so if there was any drugs, money, or other evidence present she wouldn't have had time to learn about the arrests and dispose of it. It makes sense as part of the larger operation.

I get the distinct impression the officers expected this last raid to be no big deal and their complacency played a significant role in the shit show that resulted. They expected Breonna to be home alone and judged the operation low risk so they went with a small team and had no ambulance staged (like that had at the other raids that night). They had a no knock warrant but due to the low risk determination decided not to execute it as such, instead taking a middle road approach of knocking on the door for 45-60 seconds and announcing themselves at least once* before knocking the door down. The officers testified they felt that was enough time for an occupant of the small apartment to have come to the door, but it turns out it was just enough time to startle Breonna and boyfriend awake, for them to put some clothes on, for the boyfriend to grab his gun, and for the two of them to walk into the hallway facing the front door. When the door flew open the boyfriend immediately fired once, striking one officer, then the two officers fired a volley back down the hallway at where the shooter was standing. The boyfriend dove out of the way but Breonna was hit multiple times by the return fire. A third officer lost his head and fired blindly through curtained windows but miraculously didn't hit any one. He was quickly fired and is now criminally charged for that display of recklessness. So yeah, firing blindly is not an acceptable use of force but shooting back at someone shooting at you still is.

I understand the process for how the warrant was granted is also being looked at in a separate investigation. If inaccuracies (or even lies) were used as justification we may see additional charges but that doesn't factor into decisions to charge or not charge different officers tasked with executing the warrant.


*The "one neighbor heard them announce themselves one time" account comes from reporters later knocking on neighbors doors and asking about it, not from any official report that I'm aware of. That is one of the things I would really like to see the official report on.

[LWYRUP]

WSJ and CNN both reporting it's going to be Amy Coney Barrett. 

[John Galt incarnate!]

WSJ and CNN both reporting it's going to be Amy Coney Barrett.

Circuit Judge ACB is a female Scalia.

 She is a stalwart federalist and  foe of Roe cut from much different judicial cloth than RBG was.

I think ACB will be confirmed which needless to say will alarm and infuriate   liberals throughout the nation.

"Fasten your seat belts."

[LWYRUP]

WSJ and CNN both reporting it's going to be Amy Coney Barrett.

Judge ACB is a female Scalia.

 She a stalwart federalist and  foe of Roe cut from much different judicial cloth than RBG was.

I think ACB will be confirmed which needless to say will alarm and infuriate   liberals throughout the nation.

"Fasten your seat belts."

Yes, I expect so. 

ACB is both more conservative than me and more religious, but to tip my hand, I am also a practicing Catholic and so I was very frustrated when Feinstein appeared to be pushing for a religious test in her confirmation hearing to the Circuit Court.  As well as the general strategy of "character assassination" rather than "reasoned objection" that seems to be part of the gameplan with these things.  I was actually a former Democrat and deregistered to independent a few years ago over stuff life this.  I usually avoid politics threads here but joined this one against my better judgement because I felt I needed to go on record on this particular issue. 

ACB is by all accounts a brilliant scholar, a principled jurist, a dedicated mother and a good person.  She's not Trump or McConnell.  If folks want to criticize her substantive work or judicial philosophy, that's fair game.  Attacking people's character (despite all objective evidence to the contrary), or their faith, or distorting their record is not the purpose of the "advice and consent" role of the Senate, and it has the potential to alienate a whole lot of swing voters that might not otherwise be aligned with Republicans on other issues. 

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Still, I can hear the knives sharpening already...

[redbirdfan]

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

I don't disagree, but the line can be blurred when people have a stated policy position in part because of their religious beliefs.  I like Barrett.  She was my pick for Kav's seat.  I'm personally not religious and am personally pro-life, but she will be making decisions that affect millions of people and is expected to overturn a 40 year precedent. 

Hopefully Democrats can avoid personally attacking Barrett and focus on what her vote represents.  I think the smart strategy would be to let her be confirmed...but I'm coming from a place of privilege where her decisions will not drastically impact my life. 

[John Galt incarnate!]

WSJ and CNN both reporting it's going to be Amy Coney Barrett.

Judge ACB is a female Scalia.

 She is a stalwart federalist and  foe of Roe cut from much different judicial cloth than RBG was.

I think ACB will be confirmed which needless to say will alarm and infuriate   liberals throughout the nation.

"Fasten your seat belts."

Yes, I expect so. 

ACB is both more conservative than me and more religious, but to tip my hand, I am also a practicing Catholic and so I was very frustrated when Feinstein appeared to be pushing for a religious test in her confirmation hearing to the Circuit Court.  As well as the general strategy of "character assassination" rather than "reasoned objection" that seems to be part of the gameplan with these things.  I was actually a former Democrat and deregistered to independent a few years ago over stuff life this.  I usually avoid politics threads here but joined this one against my better judgement because I felt I needed to go on record on this particular issue. 

ACB is by all accounts a brilliant scholar, a principled jurist, a dedicated mother and a good person.  She's not Trump or McConnell.  If folks want to criticize her substantive work or judicial philosophy, that's fair game.  Attacking people's character (despite all objective evidence to the contrary), or their faith, or distorting their record is not the purpose of the "advice and consent" role of the Senate, and it has the potential to alienate a whole lot of swing voters that might not otherwise be aligned with Republicans on other issues. 

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Still, I can hear the knives sharpening already...

I was talking with my mother (she devout Catholic me atheist) a few hours ago about  DF's  barb aimed at ACB during her confirmation hearing for a seat on 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

IIRC, DF said "the dogma runs deep in you" a reference to ACB's faith that  doubtless is central to her personal opposition to abortion.

To mother I read  what you quoted, the last clause of ARTICLE VI.

[LWYRUP]

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

I don't disagree, but the line can be blurred...

Yeah, I get it.  It's not the "she's going to overturn Roe" stuff I mind, because maybe she will, and if someone is alarmed about it, I understand.  It's more the "and she's part of a FREAKY PRAYER CULT, and she HATES WOMEN and she's a BIGOT" sort of stuff. 

It's dumb as a matter of strategy, because I'm pretty sure there's a ton of little old ladies in similar prayer groups in Florida, a healthy fraction of whom are otherwise part of the Democratic base.  There's a certain segment of leftist activist though that can't help themselves when they talk about religion though and they shoot themselves in the foot.  "You know, we aren't all gun-toting evangelicals from the heartland, and some of us actually voted for you, and we can hear you when you tell us you hate us..."

[maizefolk]

To me the solution to get around an escalating race to stack the court would be to simply change the laws so that the president may appoint a new Supreme Court justice every two years (with the advice and consent of the senate) every two years. Use it or lose it, if the senate won't confirm any presidential nominee, the seat goes away, it doesn't roll over to the next president. This would be entirely constitutional, would guarantee each president the predicable opportunity to appoint two justices per term, the senate the opportunity to confirm or reject one justice between each congressional election, and would let justices die without their funeral being turned into a political circus.

Ideally this would be paired with changing the Supreme Court from a lifetime appointment to a 18 year term (maintaining a 9 justice court), but it is more questionable if we could put term limits on the court without a constitutional amendement. If we cannot do term limits, just let the court's size fluctuate as new justices are appointed With one justice being added every two years, and an average age at appointment of 53 (what we see right now), the court would likely stabilize around 13-15 justices, which would be a perfectly workable size and might be somewhat less if congressional terms with split parties between the president and the senate couldn't agree on a nominee.

Having a consistent and predicable number of Supreme Court appointment opportunities per presidential term would do a lot to bring the court more in line with the wishes of the voters. Clinton, Bush, and Obama each appointed an average of one Super Court Justice every 48 months across their presidencies. Trump will have appointed one Supreme Court Justice every 16 months.

RE: Taylor, it sounds like everyone would agree we need to change the law. If strange people in plain clothes break down the door in the middle of the night, I should be able to protect myself and my family. The obligation should be on the police to clearly identify themselves and be in uniform. And if the law doesn't allow us to charge the police for shooting and killing innocent people when someone is trying to protect themselves from unidentified armed invaders in the middle of the night, the law needs to be changed. I'm pretty sure we could line up 90+% of the American public supporting this idea. ... Or we can argue about whether the police shot her because they were racist or because they were doing a bad job knowing they'd never be held accountable for their actions. And because we'll never get strong super majority consensus on that question, we won't make the important and straightforward changes to the law to try to prevent what happened to Brianna from happening to others in the future.

[ctuser1]

RE: Taylor, it sounds like everyone would agree we need to change the law. If strange people in plain clothes break down the door in the middle of the night, I should be able to protect myself and my family. The obligation should be on the police to clearly identify themselves and be in uniform. And if the law doesn't allow us to charge the police for shooting and killing innocent people when someone is trying to protect themselves from unidentified armed invaders in the middle of the night, the law needs to be changed. I'm pretty sure we could line up 90+% of the American public supporting this idea. ...

A very large majority (maybe not quite 90%) of people was repulsed by George Floyd. Meaningful changes of any kind (e.g. overturn conditional immunity) were deemed "non starter".

I also remember Sandy Hook because it was only a few miles away from me.

I think what you will find is that the police unions hold more power to enact/block laws than 90% of the American population, because it is easy for them to buy a few corn-field senators.

Or we can argue about whether the police shot her because they were racist or because they were doing a bad job knowing they'd never be held accountable for their actions. And because we'll never get strong super majority consensus on that question, we won't make the important and straightforward changes to the law to try to prevent what happened to Brianna from happening to others in the future.

I think you may be trivializing it a bit.

Yes, it is not possible to know in this specific case if racial bias was involved. It is, however, quite certain (from numbers) that racial bias plays an outsized role in the police brutality overall (see my post two above). For blacks, it even seems to be the primary driver (did you know that a white officer is 4 times as likely to use a gun compared to a black officer when in a black neighborhood, even controlling for other variables)!! 

If, in a hypothetical world, "qualified immunity" was to be repealed as long as us "liberals" were to keep our mouth shut about racism on this topic for a finite period of time - you'll likely find most of us will take that bargain. However, I don't think a path forward exists without turning this into a moral outrage. Cold, calculated persuasion will simply not do (see above).
 

[sherr]

WSJ and CNN both reporting it's going to be Amy Coney Barrett.

Judge ACB is a female Scalia.

 She a stalwart federalist and  foe of Roe cut from much different judicial cloth than RBG was.

I think ACB will be confirmed which needless to say will alarm and infuriate   liberals throughout the nation.

"Fasten your seat belts."

Yes, I expect so. 

ACB is both more conservative than me and more religious, but to tip my hand, I am also a practicing Catholic and so I was very frustrated when Feinstein appeared to be pushing for a religious test in her confirmation hearing to the Circuit Court.  As well as the general strategy of "character assassination" rather than "reasoned objection" that seems to be part of the gameplan with these things.  I was actually a former Democrat and deregistered to independent a few years ago over stuff life this.  I usually avoid politics threads here but joined this one against my better judgement because I felt I needed to go on record on this particular issue. 

ACB is by all accounts a brilliant scholar, a principled jurist, a dedicated mother and a good person.  She's not Trump or McConnell.  If folks want to criticize her substantive work or judicial philosophy, that's fair game.  Attacking people's character (despite all objective evidence to the contrary), or their faith, or distorting their record is not the purpose of the "advice and consent" role of the Senate, and it has the potential to alienate a whole lot of swing voters that might not otherwise be aligned with Republicans on other issues. 

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Still, I can hear the knives sharpening already...

No one has ever questioned ACB for being religious. They have questioned whether she will shove her religion down other people's throats.

Which are two completely different things. You can be "as religious" as you want, in whatever religion you want, as long as you're willing to check your religion at the door an apply the law impassively to all.

I'm opposed to Catholics shoving their religion down my throat. And Evangelical Christians shoving their religion down my throat, And Muslims shoving their religion down my throat, etc.

[former player]

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

I don't disagree, but the line can be blurred...

Yeah, I get it.  It's not the "she's going to overturn Roe" stuff I mind, because maybe she will, and if someone is alarmed about it, I understand.  It's more the "and she's part of a FREAKY PRAYER CULT, and she HATES WOMEN and she's a BIGOT" sort of stuff. 

It's dumb as a matter of strategy, because I'm pretty sure there's a ton of little old ladies in similar prayer groups in Florida, a healthy fraction of whom are otherwise part of the Democratic base.  There's a certain segment of leftist activist though that can't help themselves when they talk about religion though and they shoot themselves in the foot.  "You know, we aren't all gun-toting evangelicals from the heartland, and some of us actually voted for you, and we can hear you when you tell us you hate us..."

I don't think the issue is her religious beliefs, it's the extent to which she is able to say "my religious beliefs are personal, my decisions on the bench will be based on my understanding of the law and that in the United States the government does not impose anyone's religious beliefs on anyone else".

So I'm fine with her saying "I believe abortion is wrong".  I'm also fine with her saying "I don't want anyone to have an abortion".

I'd be less fine with her saying "according to my beliefs abortion is wrong and I'm going to overturn Roe v Wade and/or restrict access to abortion because abortion is wrong according to those beliefs".  I'd also be less than fine with her saying "my church tells me abortion is wrong and in order to stay in good standing with the doctrine of my church I will decide Roe v Wade is wrong/restrict access to abortion".     

So, if she says "If I am on the Supreme Court bench I will vote to overturn Roe v Wade/restrict access to abortion" the question becomes: on what legal reasoning?  And are those grounds strong enough to overcome stare decisis/limit the right of the individual to control her own body?  I suspect that the problem is always going to be that her beliefs are so strong that she will build her legal reasoning starting from an "abortion is wrong" position.

[sherr]

I don't think the issue is her religious beliefs, it's the extent to which she is able to say "my religious beliefs are personal, my decisions on the bench will be based on my understanding of the law and that in the United States the government does not impose anyone's religious beliefs on anyone else".

So I'm fine with her saying "I believe abortion is wrong".  I'm also fine with her saying "I don't want anyone to have an abortion".

I'd be less fine with her saying "according to my beliefs abortion is wrong and I'm going to overturn Roe v Wade and/or restrict access to abortion because abortion is wrong according to those beliefs".  I'd also be less than fine with her saying "my church tells me abortion is wrong and in order to stay in good standing with the doctrine of my church I will decide Roe v Wade is wrong/restrict access to abortion".     

So, if she says "If I am on the Supreme Court bench I will vote to overturn Roe v Wade/restrict access to abortion" the question becomes: on what legal reasoning?  And are those grounds strong enough to overcome stare decisis/limit the right of the individual to control her own body?  I suspect that the problem is always going to be that her beliefs are so strong that she will build her legal reasoning starting from an "abortion is wrong" position.

+1, but to say it's not really a question of "what legal reasoning". You can always make a "legal reasoning", see for example the Republicans challenging the ACA in the SC because "we set the tax penalty of not having insurance to $0, therefore it's no longer a tax, therefore the insurance mandate is no longer an enumerated power assigned to the Federal Government, therefore the whole law is unconstitutional and must be thrown out kit-and-caboodle."

It's not a question of IF an incredibly brilliant legal mind can come up with a "legal reasoning" to do what she wants. It's a question of how fair she will be. And it's an extremely valid question for a Supreme Court nominee.

[LWYRUP]

Luckily, ACB has written an article about this.  The long and short of it is that she says that "judges cannot — nor should they try to — align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge" and that if a judge cannot in good conscience take an action that is required under the law, they need to recuse themselves.

So if she felt that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided under the law, she would strike it down.  If she felt it was correctly decided, then she would have to consider if her conscience permitted her to affirm it.  If her conscience prevented her from affirming the decision, she would recuse herself.  She does affirmatively agree that she cannot impose her individual moral views on a civil legal system.  This is all pretty standard fare for Catholic intellectual legal thinkers. 

Every single person, Catholic or Muslim or atheist has their own moral views.  So there is no greater "issue" with her personal morality than with anyone else's.  Any potential SCOTUS candidate could be scrutinized for whether they try to impose their own personal beliefs on the law.  I fundamentally dispute the idea that she needs more scrutiny on this issue than, say, Elena Kagan.  Who decided that Kagan's viewpoints were the "objective" one anyways? 

In any case, with respect to the most hot button case of them all, if I had to guess, ACB got to the "penumbras, formed by emanations" part of the reasoning in Griswold v. Connecticut and realized that it was a non-issue in this particular instance, like many legal thinkers before her. 

[dividendman]

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

This is funny because there is a religious test and that test is the person has to be religious. Americans are more and more non-religious and atheistic yet look at the politicians and judges, they're practically all (at least nominally) religious.

Also, if someone is religious, doesn't that make them *less* qualified to be a judge? If a judge has such large gaps in basic logical reasoning (i.e. believing in fantastical things), then it should be a strike against the judge, not something to be lauded.

[ministashy]

I think people should give the same amount of consideration to ACB's qualifications as the Republicans did to Merrick Garland's.  That is, none.  Under that premise, her religiosity or non-religiosity is irrelevant.  It's also irrelevant as Republicans have already pledged to confirm Trump's nominee sight unseen, so it's obvious they don't care about her qualifications either.

[former player]

Luckily, ACB has written an article about this.  The long and short of it is that she says that "judges cannot — nor should they try to — align our legal system with the Church’s moral teaching whenever the two diverge" and that if a judge cannot in good conscience take an action that is required under the law, they need to recuse themselves.

So if she felt that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided under the law, she would strike it down.  If she felt it was correctly decided, then she would have to consider if her conscience permitted her to affirm it.  If her conscience prevented her from affirming the decision, she would recuse herself.  She does affirmatively agree that she cannot impose her individual moral views on a civil legal system.  This is all pretty standard fare for Catholic intellectual legal thinkers. 

Every single person, Catholic or Muslim or atheist has their own moral views.  So there is no greater "issue" with her personal morality than with anyone else's.  Any potential SCOTUS candidate could be scrutinized for whether they try to impose their own personal beliefs on the law.  I fundamentally dispute the idea that she needs more scrutiny on this issue than, say, Elena Kagan.  Who decided that Kagan's viewpoints were the "objective" one anyways? 

In any case, with respect to the most hot button case of them all, if I had to guess, ACB got to the "penumbras, formed by emanations" part of the reasoning in Griswold v. Connecticut and realized that it was a non-issue in this particular instance, like many legal thinkers before her.

So my next question would be: does ACB think current court decisions regarding access to abortion go too far or not far enough?  What legal reasoning would ACB use, and in what circumstances, to widen access to abortion or to prevent further restrictions on access to abortion?  Can she think of any cases in which she would rule against any further limitation of such access? Because she is quite clearly going to be appointed on the grounds that she is a known personal opponent of abortion and if she can't reason her way out of distinguishing her personal views and likely rulings then any statement that her rulings will not follow her personal views has to be suspect.

She has already given opinions favouring state intervention in the disposal of foetal remains miscarried or aborted before viability which according to RBG creates an undue interference by the state on the right to privacy established by Roe v Wade, and on the state requiring parental notification for persons under 18 seeking abortions.  If it's all one-way traffic with her then I would treat with extreme scepticism any claim by her that her personal religious views would not be at the root of all her decisions, particularly given that those views are why she is being appointed.

[WhiteTrashCash]

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

This is funny because there is a religious test and that test is the person has to be religious. Americans are more and more non-religious and atheistic yet look at the politicians and judges, they're practically all (at least nominally) religious.

Also, if someone is religious, doesn't that make them *less* qualified to be a judge? If a judge has such large gaps in basic logical reasoning (i.e. believing in fantastical things), then it should be a strike against the judge, not something to be lauded.

Atheism is often equated with atheistic political systems like Communism that devalue human life, which is why most Americans trust religious people more than atheism. Atheists need to do more to convince religious people that they aren't going to guillotine them and they'd be more accepted.

[GuitarStv]

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

This is funny because there is a religious test and that test is the person has to be religious. Americans are more and more non-religious and atheistic yet look at the politicians and judges, they're practically all (at least nominally) religious.

Also, if someone is religious, doesn't that make them *less* qualified to be a judge? If a judge has such large gaps in basic logical reasoning (i.e. believing in fantastical things), then it should be a strike against the judge, not something to be lauded.

Atheism is often equated with atheistic political systems like Communism that devalue human life, which is why most Americans trust religious people more than atheism. Atheists need to do more to convince religious people that they aren't going to guillotine them and they'd be more accepted.

This is poor reasoning on many levels.  While Marxism did consider religion to be a bourgeoise construction used to keep the proletariat in their place, communism isn't inherently anti-religious.  Jesus Christ had a very communistic message in many of his teachings, and there have been many religious communes with shared property throughout history.

Even if we buy the initial flawed assumption, atheism itself of course has nothing at all to do with communism.  Saying that Communists are all Atheists is like saying that Nazis have fingers . . . and therefore fingers are a sign of nazism.  It's a logical fallacy.

That said, I don't entirely agree with dividendman's conclusion either.  Yes, strong belief in something with no evidence whatsoever is certainly an indication of irrationality . . . but it seems that most religious people are able to compartmentalizations this and still use reason in other areas of their lives.  There have been countless great minds and thinkers who were also religious.  Clearly then, religion is not a handicap to intelligence.

[OtherJen]

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

This is funny because there is a religious test and that test is the person has to be religious. Americans are more and more non-religious and atheistic yet look at the politicians and judges, they're practically all (at least nominally) religious.

Also, if someone is religious, doesn't that make them *less* qualified to be a judge? If a judge has such large gaps in basic logical reasoning (i.e. believing in fantastical things), then it should be a strike against the judge, not something to be lauded.

Atheism is often equated with atheistic political systems like Communism that devalue human life, which is why most Americans trust religious people more than atheism. Atheists need to do more to convince religious people that they aren't going to guillotine them and they'd be more accepted.

This is poor reasoning on many levels.  While Marxism did consider religion to be a bourgeoise construction used to keep the proletariat in their place, communism isn't inherently anti-religious.  Jesus Christ had a very communistic message in many of his teachings, and there have been many religious communes with shared property throughout history.

Even if we buy the initial flawed assumption, atheism itself of course has nothing at all to do with communism.  Saying that Communists are all Atheists is like saying that Nazis have fingers . . . and therefore fingers are a sign of nazism.  It's a logical fallacy.

That said, I don't entirely agree with dividendman's conclusion either.  Yes, strong belief in something with no evidence whatsoever is certainly an indication of irrationality . . . but it seems that most religious people are able to compartmentalizations this and still use reason in other areas of their lives.  There have been countless great minds and thinkers who were also religious.  Clearly then, religion is not a handicap to intelligence.

I second this. I live in a community with a very large population of Muslims. Faux News loves to make up lies about how we are governed by Sharia (Muslim law), how English is forbidden in public areas, etc. All of it is bullshit and we are very lucky to have people of all faiths (or none, like myself) who value our community and work together. Many of them base that value in their personal religious beliefs, but none of them write or use the law or legally enshrined public structures to force those beliefs on others.

I sincerely hope that ACB is equally willing to avoid using the law to force her beliefs on others.

[maizefolk]

RE: Taylor, it sounds like everyone would agree we need to change the law. If strange people in plain clothes break down the door in the middle of the night, I should be able to protect myself and my family. The obligation should be on the police to clearly identify themselves and be in uniform. And if the law doesn't allow us to charge the police for shooting and killing innocent people when someone is trying to protect themselves from unidentified armed invaders in the middle of the night, the law needs to be changed. I'm pretty sure we could line up 90+% of the American public supporting this idea. ...

A very large majority (maybe not quite 90%) of people was repulsed by George Floyd. Meaningful changes of any kind (e.g. overturn conditional immunity) were deemed "non starter".

Who deemed it a non-starter? My recollection was that we even had a lot of republican congresspeople lining up with us to stay that the laws needed to change and that what happened to Floyd shouldn't happen to anyone. The consensus only broke down when the conversation started being dominated by arguments over "abolish the police" and what that slogan was supposed to mean, and then later about whether saying people shouldn't burn down buildings during protests meant people also dismissed the reason for the original protests.

I also remember Sandy Hook because it was only a few miles away from me.

That seems a pretty big shift of topic. The difference with Sandy Hook was that, while the whole nation was horrified, right from the beginning there was not a cross party consensus about what to do to prevent another one. From what I recall from people at the time, it didn't shift people from one side to the other of the gun control debate.

There was a nice post up thread about four legal reforms which could be adopted to prevent what happened to Brianna happening again and every one of them was something that I'd guess most republican voters would support.

I think what you will find is that the police unions hold more power to enact/block laws than 90% of the American population, because it is easy for them to buy a few corn-field senators.

I disagree with your conclusion here. Police Unions absolutely have a lot of power. Too much. But it's not unassailable. They will absolutely try to spin the discussion and change people's perceptions. If they can succeed on shifting the discussion from "should the police be held accountable for their actions" to "should we abolish the police" they very well get away without significant reform. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. And I think it was, and remains, less likely they will succeed if we fight their efforts to shift the conversation away from accountability and reform and back to culture war adjacent topics.

But if you believe that even 90% of Americans cannot change the rule of law, what's your motivation here? If that's true, things absolutely aren't ever going to get better. They're just not.

Or we can argue about whether the police shot her because they were racist or because they were doing a bad job knowing they'd never be held accountable for their actions. And because we'll never get strong super majority consensus on that question, we won't make the important and straightforward changes to the law to try to prevent what happened to Brianna from happening to others in the future.

I think you may be trivializing it a bit.

Yes, it is not possible to know in this specific case if racial bias was involved. It is, however, quite certain (from numbers) that racial bias plays an outsized role in the police brutality overall (see my post two above). For blacks, it even seems to be the primary driver (did you know that a white officer is 4 times as likely to use a gun compared to a black officer when in a black neighborhood, even controlling for other variables)!! 

Primary driver is a tricky word. In Germany, the police kill between 10-14 people a year. Now their population is 1/4 of ours so that's the equivalent of 40-56 people killed by police here in the USA. Instead, about 1,000 people are killed by the police each year in the USA. 26% of those thousand people are black, which is twice as many one would expect given the breakdown of the US population.

If black people were shot by police at at the same rate as white people are shot by police in the USA today, it would save 130 lives a year. Which is a big deal! If police in the USA only killed people as frequently as police in Germany killed people, it would save 950 lives every year, including the lives of 245 black people. Germany is a reasonably good proxy for a best case scenario, but if we could just get down to Canada-like numbers of police killings, it'd save on the order of 670 lives each year, including 175 black lives.

So I think addressing police brutality has to come first, both strategically (it's easier to get 90% of the population lined up behind it) and ethically (we could save a lot more total lives, and a lot more black lives specifically, by reducing police killings overall).

If, in a hypothetical world, "qualified immunity" was to be repealed as long as us "liberals" were to keep our mouth shut about racism on this topic for a finite period of time - you'll likely find most of us will take that bargain. However, I don't think a path forward exists without turning this into a moral outrage. Cold, calculated persuasion will simply not do (see above).

Again I fundamentally disagree with you here. What happened to George Floyd provoked moral outrage. It was on the path to creating real legal change (and may still succeed, although I am less optimistic than I used to me). The momentum generated by the genuine moral outrage any decent human being felt when watching George Floyd's death was lost when the police unions and their allies, with the full cooperation on our own extreme fringe on the left, where able to shift the discussion from police accountability to what is and isn't racism (and frankly it shouldn't matter whether an act is racist or not when it is clearly murder either way), and the ethics of arson and looting as a part of political protest.

But if cold calculation won't do it, and the agreement and moral outrage of 90% of the american population won't do it, how do you propose to effect change?

[LWYRUP]

I think what you will find is that the police unions hold more power to enact/block laws than 90% of the American population, because it is easy for them to buy a few corn-field senators.

I disagree with your conclusion here. Police Unions absolutely have a lot of power. Too much. But it's not unassailable.

I agree with much of what was written in this response generally, but also wanted to point out that the vast majority of regulation of policing happens at the state and local level, so I think "corn field senators" are a red herring.  Nothing is stopping individual jurisdictions from making reforms, and indeed many of them are.  But things like some suburban town strengthening their civilian review board or spending more on de-escalation training and less on former military equipment don't really make the news because right or left "if it bleeds it leads."  Doesn't mean improvements aren't being made.

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.  It becomes harder to sell middle of the road people on the urgent need for reform if, rightly or wrongly, they think those very same police officers are the only reason people aren't trying to burn down their business.  I think an emphatic YES to reforms and NO to violence should have been obvious for all, but it's a sign of the times that we weren't really able to get there. 

[GuitarStv]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

[LWYRUP]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

[GuitarStv]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

[LWYRUP]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

It doesn't seem to me like that gentleman is the type to draft up detailed policy proposals with cross-references and footnotes, I'll give you that. 

[GuitarStv]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

It doesn't seem to me like that gentleman is the type to draft up detailed policy proposals with cross-references and footnotes, I'll give you that.

I'm going to have to assume then (given the inability to actually find someone arguing for it), that you are using the 'abolishing the police' argument merely as a straw man to rail against.

It's entirely possible that some fringe radical anarchists want the abolition of police forces (just as it's entirely possible that some fringe radicals want all Jews in internment camps, all Muslims deported from the US, all black men in jail).  But this is not even remotely close to a mainstream opinion and has no support from any political party.

If we want to play video clips of folks behaving badly, I can find dozens of police officers performing illegal actions and using excessive force against citizens during these protests.  That doesn't mean that all police officers are bad, or that there's widespread support for the police being above the law, does it?

[LWYRUP]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

It doesn't seem to me like that gentleman is the type to draft up detailed policy proposals with cross-references and footnotes, I'll give you that.

I'm going to have to assume then (given the inability to actually find someone arguing for it), that you are using the 'abolishing the police' argument merely as a straw man to rail against.

It's entirely possible that some fringe radical anarchists want the abolition of police forces (just as it's entirely possible that some fringe radicals want all Jews in internment camps, all Muslims deported from the US, all black men in jail).  But this is not even remotely close to a mainstream opinion and has no support from any political party.

If we want to play video clips of folks behaving badly, I can find dozens of police officers performing illegal actions and using excessive force against citizens during these protests.  That doesn't mean that all police officers are bad, or that there's widespread support for the police being above the law, does it?

Honestly, I suspect that you are well aware that there has been widespread violence in the USA for many months now, that there are a violent contingent of radicals that do want to literally abolish the police and that while those people may be small in overall number that there are larger number of people that aren't personally violent and perhaps don't want the police literally abolished but tacitly support their tactics and have thus allowed the violence to continue unabated.  I suspect that you know that I am well informed, just like you, and that we both happen to disagree on the scope of the violence and its overall political implications.  So from my standpoint, you asking me to "prove" violence is basically a way of trying to waste my time, either because you like debating people on the internet (which is fine) or because you are trying to distract away from my point.  The reason I would rather not play has to do with personal decisions re: time allocation. 

Given how much time you spend and political threads and your depth of knowledge on specific issues, it honestly feels like borderline trolling, which is why I tried to cut it off with a joke.  But if you prefer I go the direct route, that's fine too. 

[FIPurpose]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

It doesn't seem to me like that gentleman is the type to draft up detailed policy proposals with cross-references and footnotes, I'll give you that.

I'm going to have to assume then (given the inability to actually find someone arguing for it), that you are using the 'abolishing the police' argument merely as a straw man to rail against.

It's entirely possible that some fringe radical anarchists want the abolition of police forces (just as it's entirely possible that some fringe radicals want all Jews in internment camps, all Muslims deported from the US, all black men in jail).  But this is not even remotely close to a mainstream opinion and has no support from any political party.

If we want to play video clips of folks behaving badly, I can find dozens of police officers performing illegal actions and using excessive force against citizens during these protests.  That doesn't mean that all police officers are bad, or that there's widespread support for the police being above the law, does it?

I have a brother is also somewhat convinced from a handful of twitter accounts that there is this large contingent of people looking to abolish the police or that all police are racist.

It's part of the right-wing media circuit. Tell them a narrative, spin the news to make it sound like a plausible idea, then present a couple of videos of a couple angry protestors. If someone were to reconsider what evidence they really had, they'd come up pretty short, but a good storyteller with just an ounce of evidence can convince a lot of smart people of some rubbish.

[former player]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

It doesn't seem to me like that gentleman is the type to draft up detailed policy proposals with cross-references and footnotes, I'll give you that.

I'm going to have to assume then (given the inability to actually find someone arguing for it), that you are using the 'abolishing the police' argument merely as a straw man to rail against.

It's entirely possible that some fringe radical anarchists want the abolition of police forces (just as it's entirely possible that some fringe radicals want all Jews in internment camps, all Muslims deported from the US, all black men in jail).  But this is not even remotely close to a mainstream opinion and has no support from any political party.

If we want to play video clips of folks behaving badly, I can find dozens of police officers performing illegal actions and using excessive force against citizens during these protests.  That doesn't mean that all police officers are bad, or that there's widespread support for the police being above the law, does it?

Honestly, I suspect that you are well aware that there has been widespread violence in the USA for many months now, that there are a violent contingent of radicals that do want to literally abolish the police and that while those people may be small in overall number that there are larger number of people that aren't personally violent and perhaps don't want the police literally abolished but tacitly support their tactics and have thus allowed the violence to continue unabated.  I suspect that you know that I am well informed, just like you, and that we both happen to disagree on the scope of the violence and its overall political implications.  So from my standpoint, you asking me to "prove" violence is basically a way of trying to waste my time, either because you like debating people on the internet (which is fine) or because you are trying to distract away from my point.  The reason I would rather not play has to do with personal decisions re: time allocation. 

Given how much time you spend and political threads and your depth of knowledge on specific issues, it honestly feels like borderline trolling, which is why I tried to cut it off with a joke.  But if you prefer I go the direct route, that's fine too.

If there are a whole raft of sensible policy proposals which could prevent another George Floyd, then why hasn't Mitch McConnell done something that would bring those proposals forward in the Senate?  Either he doesn't want them, or he thinks he can't get them through the Senate (frankly, I think that the reason that the Senate has done almost nothing for years other than confirm judges is because McConnell doesn't want to make it clear that he is not able to control Senate Republicans any more and that he doesn't have the votes for anything else).

The whole "abolish the police" thing is just being used as a distraction, both on this thread and elsewhere.

[WhiteTrashCash]

"No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

This is funny because there is a religious test and that test is the person has to be religious. Americans are more and more non-religious and atheistic yet look at the politicians and judges, they're practically all (at least nominally) religious.

Also, if someone is religious, doesn't that make them *less* qualified to be a judge? If a judge has such large gaps in basic logical reasoning (i.e. believing in fantastical things), then it should be a strike against the judge, not something to be lauded.

Atheism is often equated with atheistic political systems like Communism that devalue human life, which is why most Americans trust religious people more than atheism. Atheists need to do more to convince religious people that they aren't going to guillotine them and they'd be more accepted.

This is poor reasoning on many levels.  While Marxism did consider religion to be a bourgeoise construction used to keep the proletariat in their place, communism isn't inherently anti-religious.  Jesus Christ had a very communistic message in many of his teachings, and there have been many religious communes with shared property throughout history.

Even if we buy the initial flawed assumption, atheism itself of course has nothing at all to do with communism.  Saying that Communists are all Atheists is like saying that Nazis have fingers . . . and therefore fingers are a sign of nazism.  It's a logical fallacy.

That said, I don't entirely agree with dividendman's conclusion either.  Yes, strong belief in something with no evidence whatsoever is certainly an indication of irrationality . . . but it seems that most religious people are able to compartmentalizations this and still use reason in other areas of their lives.  There have been countless great minds and thinkers who were also religious.  Clearly then, religion is not a handicap to intelligence.

I'm just telling you how it is. If you don't want to accept that, that's okay. Just don't expect to get any results.

[maizefolk]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

These folks in Minneapolis. I'm assuming we can agree NPR is not a right wing news organization?

Now if you dig into it, what they mean by that slogan is very different from what you or I probably think when we hear someone talk about wanting to abolish the police. But because extreme left wing voices are amplified both by left wing media AND right wing media, the folks who say they want to abolish the police (regardless of what they mean by that slogan) crowd out the people talking about reforming the police and changing the law so that they are accountable and do get charged with murder when they kill someone unjustly.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/882001628/these-are-the-minneapolis-activists-leading-the-push-to-abolish-the-police

This creates a perverse incentive. If you want your movement to get press coverage, visibility, and donations from activists (who tend to be farther on the extremes of political thought than the population as a whole), you will be nudged, bit by bit, to adopt slogans than alienate larger proportions of the population as a whole, making it less likely you'll be able to effect real world change.

Same pattern with the "defund the police" slogan. A lot, but not all, of the people who adopt it will tell you that they really want to partially defund the police. But shouting "defund the police" gets them airtime and attention, even as it alienates people who might otherwise be on their side for actually instituting reforms and changes. Here's another NPR story (thankfully this one has a transcript not just the audio) looking at how a wide range of people have adopted the latter slogan to mean different and contradictory things, including an interview with an Minnesota political activist who does use defund the police to mean abolish the police (and put something different in its place):

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/881067204

Now the people who are pushing to either abolish the police or defund the police are generally activists or organizers, not elected political leaders. The two big problems are 1) the incentives the media has to select for and amplify those messages, making it harder to accomplish real political change by turning what should be a broad american consensus back into the culture war and 2) Republicans have figured out that a big swath of the left that doesn't actually use these slogans is also unwilling to condemn these slogans, instead trying to argue that
"Nobody is actually saying that" (Even though people are)
"The people who are saying that are radicals" (Usually yes, but what's the harm in condemning radicals arguing for bad things?)
"Yes people are saying that but it doesn't mean what it sounds like it means." (True in many case, but then let's push people to say what they actually mean, instead of saying one thing and then arguing it means something else. Because if we cannot clearly explain what we want, we're certainly not going to be able to accomplish it.)
"What about the stuff the far right does, isn't that worse?" (In many cases yes, but whataboutism isn't a winning argument with anyone who isn't already firmly on ones own side. It costs nothing to condemn ideas we disagree with on both the far right and far left.)

[Wolfpack Mustachian]

The whole "abolish the police" and tacit justifications of violence really messed up the momentum for making substantive reforms that can actually make a difference.

Who was calling for abolishment of police?

Lol.  Now we're going to go around in circles then. 

I am pretty sure this guy supported that position two days ago:  https://twitter.com/PortlandPolice/status/1309021526986031105

There's nobody on that page who has indicated anything about abolishing the police.

It doesn't seem to me like that gentleman is the type to draft up detailed policy proposals with cross-references and footnotes, I'll give you that.

I'm going to have to assume then (given the inability to actually find someone arguing for it), that you are using the 'abolishing the police' argument merely as a straw man to rail against.

It's entirely possible that some fringe radical anarchists want the abolition of police forces (just as it's entirely possible that some fringe radicals want all Jews in internment camps, all Muslims deported from the US, all black men in jail).  But this is not even remotely close to a mainstream opinion and has no support from any political party.

If we want to play video clips of folks behaving badly, I can find dozens of police officers performing illegal actions and using excessive force against citizens during these protests.  That doesn't mean that all police officers are bad, or that there's widespread support for the police being above the law, does it?

Honestly, I suspect that you are well aware that there has been widespread violence in the USA for many months now, that there are a violent contingent of radicals that do want to literally abolish the police and that while those people may be small in overall number that there are larger number of people that aren't personally violent and perhaps don't want the police literally abolished but tacitly support their tactics and have thus allowed the violence to continue unabated.  I suspect that you know that I am well informed, just like you, and that we both happen to disagree on the scope of the violence and its overall political implications.  So from my standpoint, you asking me to "prove" violence is basically a way of trying to waste my time, either because you like debating people on the internet (which is fine) or because you are trying to distract away from my point.  The reason I would rather not play has to do with personal decisions re: time allocation. 

Given how much time you spend and political threads and your depth of knowledge on specific issues, it honestly feels like borderline trolling, which is why I tried to cut it off with a joke.  But if you prefer I go the direct route, that's fine too.

If there are a whole raft of sensible policy proposals which could prevent another George Floyd, then why hasn't Mitch McConnell done something that would bring those proposals forward in the Senate?  Either he doesn't want them, or he thinks he can't get them through the Senate (frankly, I think that the reason that the Senate has done almost nothing for years other than confirm judges is because McConnell doesn't want to make it clear that he is not able to control Senate Republicans any more and that he doesn't have the votes for anything else).

The whole "abolish the police" thing is just being used as a distraction, both on this thread and elsewhere.

The closest I've seen is Minneapolis, but it hasn't passed. For the more liberal icons of American politics, Bernie has distanced himself from the concept. AOC hasn't really spoken one way or the other that I've seen. I think it's a little disingenous to say that no one is saying it or that there's no political movement towards it at all, but it's certainly being held up as a significant risk when it doesn't seem like one.

[maizefolk]

There's a story on the front page of the nytimes right now about how efforts to reform and hold accountable the Minneapolis Police Department (which has very real and very big problems, starting with the head of its union), fell apart in the face of purity tests and a pledge to defund the police that has alienated many voters in the city while at the same time impairing progress because no one can agree on what it meant to defund the police.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html

...some activists said the pledge was to be taken literally — a commitment to working toward complete police abolition — elected officials said there was widespread disagreement about its meaning. Some believed that “defund the police” meant redirecting some money in the police budget to social programs. Others thought it was a vague endorsement of a police-free future.

“I think the initial announcement created a certain level of confusion from residents at a time when the city really needed that stability,” said Mayor Jacob Frey, who declined to support the pledge. “I also think that the declaration itself meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people — and that included a healthy share of activists that were anticipating abolition.”

The whole story is worth a read. (And again, I hope we can agree the nytimes is not a right wing outlet.)

[John Galt incarnate!]

.

So my next question would be: does ACB think current court decisions regarding access to abortion go too far or not far enough?

What legal reasoning would ACB use, and in what circumstances, to widen access to abortion or to prevent further restrictions on access to abortion?

[/quote]




I  predict that if a direct challenge to Roe comes before the Court ACB will apply stare decisis as will Roberts, Kavanaugh, and the three justices that comprise the Court's liberal bloc.

So that's at least 6-3 to reaffirm Roe.



ACB is a committed,  uncompromising  federalist so she will vote to uphold  extremely restrictive anti-abortion statutes rather than strike them down as impositions of an impermissible, "undue burden" on a woman's fundamental right to choose to terminate her pregnancy (a right that personally, ACB does not recognize).

[ctuser1]

A very large majority (maybe not quite 90%) of people was repulsed by George Floyd. Meaningful changes of any kind (e.g. overturn conditional immunity) were deemed "non starter".

Who deemed it a non-starter? My recollection was that we even had a lot of republican congresspeople lining up with us to stay that the laws needed to change and that what happened to Floyd shouldn't happen to anyone. The consensus only broke down when the conversation started being dominated by arguments over "abolish the police" and what that slogan was supposed to mean, and then later about whether saying people shouldn't burn down buildings during protests meant people also dismissed the reason for the original protests.

Direct from the horse's mouth:
https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/in-the-news/sen-tim-scott-on-race-police-reform-and-why-ending-qualified-immunity-is-a-nonstarter-for-the-gop

There was a nice post up thread about four legal reforms which could be adopted to prevent what happened to Brianna happening again and every one of them was something that I'd guess most republican voters would support.

Maybe initially. But that support will evaporate as soon as the billionaires instruct Fox/Breitbart/Sinclair to spin it differently, just like what happened during George Floyd.
We have a lot of history of that happening. I can pick up many examples if I did some google search. I bet you will find it yourself if you tried.

I think what you will find is that the police unions hold more power to enact/block laws than 90% of the American population, because it is easy for them to buy a few corn-field senators.

I disagree with your conclusion here. Police Unions absolutely have a lot of power. Too much. But it's not unassailable. They will absolutely try to spin the discussion and change people's perceptions. If they can succeed on shifting the discussion from "should the police be held accountable for their actions" to "should we abolish the police" they very well get away without significant reform. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. And I think it was, and remains, less likely they will succeed if we fight their efforts to shift the conversation away from accountability and reform and back to culture war adjacent topics.

Please try to explain what happened to Tim Scott above!!

But if you believe that even 90% of Americans cannot change the rule of law, what's your motivation here? If that's true, things absolutely aren't ever going to get better. They're just not.

But if cold calculation won't do it, and the agreement and moral outrage of 90% of the american population won't do it, how do you propose to effect change?

Political subversion has a history of working. e.g. Obamacare. It was clear to Obama that Democrats will pay a huge political price for enacting Obamacare - not because of substance, but propaganda.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-barack-obama-obamacare-aca-097687

He decided to push forth anyway, and by doing so proved Patrick Moynihan wrong (quoted in this article: "Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”"). There was a heavy cost to be paid for doing so, but then, that is better than doing nothing. You can look up the medical cost increase rate and lives saved due to additional coverage - and I would argue that the political cost was worth it.

Notice how that has turned into a political asset today. That is the fun of doing the right things without putting political considerations on a pedestal. Do what is right whenever there the very first opportunity to do so, worry about politics only as a secondary concern.

Anything positive will likely have to happen that way, until and unless there is a massive culture shift in the cornfields.

Primary driver is a tricky word. In Germany, the police kill between 10-14 people a year. Now their population is 1/4 of ours so that's the equivalent of 40-56 people killed by police here in the USA. Instead, about 1,000 people are killed by the police each year in the USA. 26% of those thousand people are black, which is twice as many one would expect given the breakdown of the US population.

Please see my post above:

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PoliceKillings.pdf

Higher poverty among the black population accounts for a meaningful, but relatively modest, portion of the black-white gap in police killing rates. In contrast, higher census tract poverty fully explained the Latino-white gap, and the police killing rate among Latinos was lower than expected given their relatively high rates of census tract poverty.

[ctuser1]

I agree with much of what was written in this response generally, but also wanted to point out that the vast majority of regulation of policing happens at the state and local level, so I think "corn field senators" are a red herring.

There is lock-step opposition from a national organization - Fraternal Order of Police. Best of luck if you are the mayor of Podunk, Mississippi to try and fight that.

Why do you think your favorite news sources worked so hard to brainwash you right after George Floyd??

[maizefolk]

But if cold calculation won't do it, and the agreement and moral outrage of 90% of the american population won't do it, how do you propose to effect change?

Political subversion has a history of working. e.g. Obamacare. It was clear to Obama that Democrats will pay a huge political price for enacting Obamacare - not because of substance, but propaganda.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-barack-obama-obamacare-aca-097687

He decided to push forth anyway, and by doing so proved Patrick Moynihan wrong (quoted in this article: "Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”"). There was a heavy cost to be paid for doing so, but then, that is better than doing nothing. You can look up the medical cost increase rate and lives saved due to additional coverage - and I would argue that the political cost was worth it.

Notice how that has turned into a political asset today. That is the fun of doing the right things without putting political considerations on a pedestal. Do what is right whenever there the very first opportunity to do so, worry about politics only as a secondary concern.

Anything positive will likely have to happen that way, until and unless there is a massive culture shift in the cornfields.

Could you explain what you mean by "political subversion" here? What specific actions are you arguing should be taken? What right thing do you think I'd be opposed to doing at the first opportunity to do so?

The ACA passed because the Democrats had 60 seats in the senate. More specifically, the ACA passed because Obama crafted a bill that would appeal to even the most conservative democratic in the 111th congress which was elected in 2008 and power from 2009-2011: Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska (e.g. the corn fields).

It passed because it had the votes of Tom Johnson D-SD (corn fields), Kent Conrad D-ND (corn fields), Byron Dorgan D-NE (corn fields), Chuck Grassley D-IA (corn fields), Claire McCaskill D-MO (corn fields), Mark Pryor D-AR (corn fields), and Blanche Lincoln D-AR (corn fields). It passed because it had the votes of Jon Tester D-MT (wheat fields) and Max Baucus D-MT (wheat fields).

Without those senators, the democrats wouldn't have even had a majority, let alone a super-majority. To unite the democrats, Obama had to turn his back on the extreme left which was advocating for single payer even back then. But he was willing to pay the price with his own left wing, and all those democratic senators from cornfield states that you talk about with derision were willing to pay the price with their own political careers (of those ten corn field and wheat field senators, only one, Jon Tester is still in the senate, and none of the others were succeeded by other democrats). The bill passed, and even though it wasn't what the far left wanted, it moved the markers, it saved lives and prevented an unimaginable amount of human suffering and became so popular with those same voters that even when the republicans took back the senate, they couldn't manage to repeal it and today have given up on even trying.

Was it worth it? Yes, I think it was. I just don't see what that story tells me about what you'd like us to do in our present situation.

[LWYRUP]

I agree with much of what was written in this response generally, but also wanted to point out that the vast majority of regulation of policing happens at the state and local level, so I think "corn field senators" are a red herring.

There is lock-step opposition from a national organization - Fraternal Order of Police. Best of luck if you are the mayor of Podunk, Mississippi to try and fight that.

Why do you think your favorite news sources worked so hard to brainwash you right after George Floyd??

LOL.  You have no idea what my favorite news source is or what I think about the George Floyd case. 

These sort of non-sequitur responses make these discussions tedious and unpleasant.  If your goal is just to harass people into going away, it's very effective.

[LWYRUP]

But if cold calculation won't do it, and the agreement and moral outrage of 90% of the american population won't do it, how do you propose to effect change?

Political subversion has a history of working. e.g. Obamacare. It was clear to Obama that Democrats will pay a huge political price for enacting Obamacare - not because of substance, but propaganda.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-barack-obama-obamacare-aca-097687

He decided to push forth anyway, and by doing so proved Patrick Moynihan wrong (quoted in this article: "Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”"). There was a heavy cost to be paid for doing so, but then, that is better than doing nothing. You can look up the medical cost increase rate and lives saved due to additional coverage - and I would argue that the political cost was worth it.

Notice how that has turned into a political asset today. That is the fun of doing the right things without putting political considerations on a pedestal. Do what is right whenever there the very first opportunity to do so, worry about politics only as a secondary concern.

Anything positive will likely have to happen that way, until and unless there is a massive culture shift in the cornfields.

Could you explain what you mean by "political subversion" here? What specific actions are you arguing should be taken? What right thing do you think I'd be opposed to doing at the first opportunity to do so?

The ACA passed because the Democrats had 60 seats in the senate. More specifically, the ACA passed because Obama crafted a bill that would appeal to even the most conservative democratic in the 111th congress which was elected in 2008 and power from 2009-2011: Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska (e.g. the corn fields).

It passed because it had the votes of Tom Johnson D-SD (corn fields), Kent Conrad D-ND (corn fields), Byron Dorgan D-NE (corn fields), Chuck Grassley D-IA (corn fields), Claire McCaskill D-MO (corn fields), Mark Pryor D-AR (corn fields), and Blanche Lincoln D-AR (corn fields). It passed because it had the votes of Jon Tester D-MT (wheat fields) and Max Baucus D-MT (wheat fields).

Without those senators, the democrats wouldn't have even had a majority, let alone a super-majority. To unite the democrats, Obama had to turn his back on the extreme left which was advocating for single payer even back then. But he was willing to pay the price with his own left wing, and all those democratic senators from cornfield states that you talk about with derision were willing to pay the price with their own political careers (of those ten corn field and wheat field senators, only one, Jon Tester is still in the senate, and none of the others were succeeded by other democrats). The bill passed, and even though it wasn't what the far left wanted, it moved the markers, it saved lives and prevented an unimaginable amount of human suffering and became so popular with those same voters that even when the republicans took back the senate, they couldn't manage to repeal it and today have given up on even trying.

Was it worth it? Yes, I think it was. I just don't see what that story tells me about what you'd like us to do in our present situation.

You have so much patience.  I really appreciate your contributions to this thread. 

[ctuser1]

But if cold calculation won't do it, and the agreement and moral outrage of 90% of the american population won't do it, how do you propose to effect change?

Political subversion has a history of working. e.g. Obamacare. It was clear to Obama that Democrats will pay a huge political price for enacting Obamacare - not because of substance, but propaganda.
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-barack-obama-obamacare-aca-097687

He decided to push forth anyway, and by doing so proved Patrick Moynihan wrong (quoted in this article: "Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”"). There was a heavy cost to be paid for doing so, but then, that is better than doing nothing. You can look up the medical cost increase rate and lives saved due to additional coverage - and I would argue that the political cost was worth it.

Notice how that has turned into a political asset today. That is the fun of doing the right things without putting political considerations on a pedestal. Do what is right whenever there the very first opportunity to do so, worry about politics only as a secondary concern.

Anything positive will likely have to happen that way, until and unless there is a massive culture shift in the cornfields.

Could you explain what you mean by "political subversion" here? What specific actions are you arguing should be taken? What right thing do you think I'd be opposed to doing at the first opportunity to do so?

The ACA passed because the Democrats had 60 seats in the senate. More specifically, the ACA passed because Obama crafted a bill that would appeal to even the most conservative democratic in the 111th congress which was elected in 2008 and power from 2009-2011: Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska (e.g. the corn fields).

It passed because it had the votes of Tom Johnson D-SD (corn fields), Kent Conrad D-ND (corn fields), Byron Dorgan D-NE (corn fields), Chuck Grassley D-IA (corn fields), Claire McCaskill D-MO (corn fields), Mark Pryor D-AR (corn fields), and Blanche Lincoln D-AR (corn fields). It passed because it had the votes of Jon Tester D-MT (wheat fields) and Max Baucus D-MT (wheat fields).

Without those senators, the democrats wouldn't have even had a majority, let alone a super-majority. To unite the democrats, Obama had to turn his back on the extreme left which was advocating for single payer even back then. But he was willing to pay the price with his own left wing, and all those democratic senators from cornfield states that you talk about with derision were willing to pay the price with their own political careers (of those ten corn field and wheat field senators, only one, Jon Tester is still in the senate, and none of the others were succeeded by other democrats). The bill passed, and even though it wasn't what the far left wanted, it moved the markers, it saved lives and prevented an unimaginable amount of human suffering and became so popular with those same voters that even when the republicans took back the senate, they couldn't manage to repeal it and today have given up on even trying.

Was it worth it? Yes, I think it was. I just don't see what that story tells me about what you'd like us to do in our present situation.

Normal politics = consensus building.

It was understood some time ago that anything transformative should only be done to a society after consensus has been built. This is how things operated for a very long time. FDR legislated the new deal first. And while ideologically opposed to it, Eisenhower worked to implement many of these proposals in good faith. What is little known after the watergate kerfuffle and the whole "southern strategy to racist hell" - is that Nixon, in his Dr. Jekyll form, was also a consensus politician implementing New Deal policies when his Dr. Hyde did not take him over.

Doing transformational things only because you have the political power to do so and without any consensus is a subversion of the intent of the political process. Obama tried to reach out in all the ways that you detail above so well, and yet no consensus was to be had across the political isle.

Forging ahead with Obamacare even with stiff opposition and no consensus was a subversion of political norms - and a necessary one at that point of time. Obama did what was pragmatically the right thing for the American people, the population of corn fields included, and agreed to pay the political price for that!!

However, pushing ahead with such a transformative plan without political consensus would be considered breaking political norms - hence the term "political subversion".

Even FDR was a supreme norm breaker in his own day. Imagine such transformative changes as the new deal legislated within 100 days. He had the mandate, but folks like the Federalist Society still gets their knickers in a bundle over that.

Going forward, it is clear that no consensus is ever to be had on any issues. If so, Democrats now need a different north star to guide them on what to do and what not to do. I posit that the north star should be something like "a pragmatic approach to benefit the American people", and be ready to break whichever political norm stands in the way of doing that.

What right thing do you think I'd be opposed to doing at the first opportunity to do so?

I suspect a lot of moderate democrats will continue opposing the concept of "political subversion" = "norm breaking".
If you have no such undue love for norms when they have clearly broken down, then I think we may agree on a lot.

e.g.1 Should Democrats pack courts? I'd say yes if it makes the courts more representative (having 4 or 5 justices appointed by a minority president confirmed by minority senators is not good for democracy). I expect many moderate democrats to oppose.
e.g.2. Should democrats gerrymander states? I'd again say - yes, if it improves democratic representation, all the while I am very opposed to the idea of local gerrymandering.
e.g.3. Should democrats legislate to overturn qualified immunity in the face of what will be fierce misinformaton campaigns? Probably yes again - assuming it is carefully crafted to benefit the American people.

I expect stiff opposition from the moderate democrats and I don't expect this will be settled the first time Democrats have the power to act on these - whether that be this election, or the one after, or the one after that....

[ctuser1]

I agree with much of what was written in this response generally, but also wanted to point out that the vast majority of regulation of policing happens at the state and local level, so I think "corn field senators" are a red herring.

There is lock-step opposition from a national organization - Fraternal Order of Police. Best of luck if you are the mayor of Podunk, Mississippi to try and fight that.

Why do you think your favorite news sources worked so hard to brainwash you right after George Floyd??

LOL.  You have no idea what my favorite news source is or what I think about the George Floyd case. 

These sort of non-sequitur responses make these discussions tedious and unpleasant.  If your goal is just to harass people into going away, it's very effective.

And claiming my point was a "red herring" without any justification [= "A diversionary tactic; a false or deliberately misleading trail" (https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+red-herring#:~:text=HarperCollins%20Publishers%202012-,a%20red%20herring,result%20of%20the%20curing%20process).)] was intended to be anything other than the same "harass people"?

Let's just say I have "more" justification in guessing what news sources you may be consuming or what may be thinking about the whole George Floyd issue than you have in guessing whether I was trying to distract with my point on "corn field senators" or not!!

[LetItGrow]

I agree with much of what was written in this response generally, but also wanted to point out that the vast majority of regulation of policing happens at the state and local level, so I think "corn field senators" are a red herring.

There is lock-step opposition from a national organization - Fraternal Order of Police. Best of luck if you are the mayor of Podunk, Mississippi to try and fight that.

Why do you think your favorite news sources worked so hard to brainwash you right after George Floyd??

LOL.  You have no idea what my favorite news source is or what I think about the George Floyd case. 

These sort of non-sequitur responses make these discussions tedious and unpleasant.  If your goal is just to harass people into going away, it's very effective.

And claiming my point was a "red herring" without any justification [= "A diversionary tactic; a false or deliberately misleading trail" (https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+red-herring#:~:text=HarperCollins%20Publishers%202012-,a%20red%20herring,result%20of%20the%20curing%20process).)] was intended to be anything other than the same "harass people"?

Let's just say I have "more" justification in guessing what news sources you may be consuming or what may be thinking about the whole George Floyd issue than you have in guessing whether I was trying to distract with my point on "corn field senators" or not!!

In reading, it seems like you, well, live in a very interesting world.

You said they would buy senators. The counterpoint was senators don’t have much to do with what was being discussed.

Then you did another quick draw on your dictionary.