They’re really going to have to decide between their racism and their sexism: the only religious sub-groups with a majority belief that abortion should not be legal are Latinx Catholics and Protestants. What’s a white supremacist to do? 
What’s a white supremacist to do?
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Cancel elections, pending “needed” “reforms.”
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Limit the franchise to white property-holding men.
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Each county gets one representative and one elector.
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Cities get none.
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California gets none.
… not an endorsement, of course, but these are the implications of a lot of their claims about the 2016 election.
And sloppy sentences inserted into the bill created confusion about what it would do.
This is what years of education cuts get you.
As for the lawmakers “not understanding the bill”… Then they shouldn’t be voting on it.
I know politicians haven’t always been honest, but didn’t they used to actually DO their jobs, as far as writing bills, reading bills, figuring out what the actual costs and impacts would be? Or am I being naive?
From the outside, it looks like a partisan game of voting for any random bullshit that has the right party affiliation, regardless of what is actually in the bills. Is doing the homework somehow beneath them, like some prick disrespecting the nerds? If so, we need to replace every elected official with a nerd who does the work.
It is my understanding that once upon a time, when the earth was green, politicians had assistants who read and often composed the bills, and made sure they were written well and said what they were supposed to say.
Nowadays it’s more like your second paragraph, where I think people often forget what the legislation is actually for, ie: enacting laws.
I imagine we’ll all have need to use this lovely and depressing phrase, many times in the coming years.
A long time ago, when the earth was green,
There were more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen…
The loveliest of all…
The Akallabeth was a warning, not an instruction manual!
One problem is that society and technology are far more complicated than they used to be. Few legislators are smart enough to understand anything any more. And a lot of them are elected because of their simple-minded “solutions” to every problem.
I think it’s also a division of labor issue. Politicians have become perpetual fund raising machines, and to fill that void of writing laws and such, lobbyist have stepped up, especially large scale groups like ALEC, who write bills with a right wing, conservative slant. That might have either contributed to the deepening divide, or been a major cause of the deepening divide, I think.
Sounds like another fantastic reason to get corruption money out of politics. If only…
Exactly so. We can most certainly have a better more responsive system, if we have a fully publicly funded system.
Some good news, at least: