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Oh, yeah. None of this will be accomplished until we get to the other side of this. I’m basically just taking notes to remind myself what we need to do when we get there.
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#1 and #2 on my wish list would be expanding the size of the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives, but I don’t think there’s much support for either of those. But those could help keep the fascists from coming back for awhile.
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I definitely agree with #1. I would make voting rights, including expanding automatic voter registration and vote-by-mail to the whole country #2 only because I think the current court would rule against voting rights unless SCOTUS is rebalanced to reflect the country.
I do think criminalizing the violation of individuals’ constitutional rights by government officials has to be in the top 10. We don’t really have those rights if officials from local police up to POTUS can violate them as much as they want without consequences.
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Not sure what the penalties should be, but I like it. I recently suggested to a friend we need better requirements for candidates running for higher office, too. IMO if they can’t pass a US citizenship test, their names shouldn’t be on a ballot.
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I’m pretty nervous about instituting tests like that, mainly because of this country’s history with creating and administering such tests is not great. I don’t want rules that depend on having people acting in good faith enforcing them, because we will always have some people acting in bad faith.
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I do like the idea that any such rules ought to be applied to people they’d want to make them easy for as well as people they’d like to make them difficult for. Like imagine if how much you could pay a CEO was linked to the minimum wage in the company! It would probably turn into paying them mostly through other means, but still.
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Sure, but a rule like that doesn’t really allow for selective enforcement. Requiring tests often does result in selective enforcement. All you have to do is have ambiguously worded questions, or confusingly phrased questions, and now it’s entirely up to the grader to determine if you passed.
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See: Literacy tests for voting. Yeah, unfortunately, if there are not clear, enforceable guidelines, that are actually enforced, any system will be gamed by those in power to stay in power.
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Elie Mystal has been arguing at least for the expansion of the house, probably SCOTUS, too…
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Oh, this I disagree with.
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When the first Congress met in 1789, each Representative had a constituency of a little over 30,000 people. Today, it’s about 800,000. Now, I’m not suggesting we should have 9,000 Representatives today, which would be pretty close to the 1789 ratio, but having only 435 is nuts.
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Agreed. Maybe something could be included in the confirmation process where the Senate asks questions and the confirmation committee members each get a veto of a nominee, and can exercise that veto after confirmation if the nominee violates what they promised during their confirmation hearing or perjures themself.
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agreed… Mystal makes a similar argument. It was rather recently that we stopped expanding the House, maybe in the 1920s? I’ll have to dig up some of his recent interviews where he’s making this argument…
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It was 1929. The Reapportionment Act that year fixed the number at 435.
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while i know that my county is small at 75,000 permanent residents, i wish for a more representative member of congress. our current representation includes southern miami-dade. that area does not have the same needs as our delicate archipelago. we need representation by people who understand the needs of our special environment.
why can’t we have that?
why do we have Carlos Gimenez, who does not live here, does not even visit the keys, lives in highly urban miami-dade county, as our representative in congress?
not asking you, @danimagoo , to answer that. I’m just asking to maybe vent my own frustration, and perhaps to agree that we all need better representation in OUR government.
YES! expand the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.
ETA: i do know that the gerrymandering that has occurred under desantis merged (cracked-and-packed?) congressional districts to minimize the impact of the small electorate down here. FACT: MoRon DeSantis hates the keys, especially Key West.
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Yes, your situation is exactly why the size of the House needs to be expanded.
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Your state has ballot initiatives, has one been attempted to end Gerrymandering?
We did it in Michigan, in spite of state Republican’s doing everything they could to prevent implementation. Better representation prevailed (probably get full Democratic control again next year).
It’s an available roadmap, is all I’m getting at.
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appreciate that.
florida has made it more and more difficult to place ballot initiatives before the public.
currently, the threshold is some 60% to move an initiative forward, and the signature drives are subject to very strict scrutiny.
couple that woth the blatant corruption of desantis, himself, moving monies from federal covid funds to his own wife’s dubious “charity”, in order to surreptitiously oppose two ballot initiatives on the '24 election (opposing the abortion initiative and the recreational cannabis initiative) and you can clearly see why the ballot initiative avenue to address these issues may be moot.
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