source_id
int64 1
4.64M
| question
stringlengths 0
28.4k
| response
stringlengths 0
28.8k
| metadata
dict |
|---|---|---|---|
53,264 | Somewhat predictably, China has blamed their initial problems in responding to Covid-19 to decentralization and poor decisions from regional authorities: The rare admission, from Director of China's National Health Commission Li Bin, comes after sustained criticism abroad of China's early response. [...] Mr Li told journalists the pandemic was a significant challenge for China's governance, and that it exposed "the weak links in how we address major epidemic and the public health system." [...] Li Bin said the commission would fix the problems by centralising its systems and making better use of big data and artificial intelligence , building on many of the leadership's longstanding objectives. [...] Several provincial and local officials from the ruling Communist Party have been sacked but no senior member of the Party has been punished. Beijing has not responded to calls to ease censorship and state control of the media. I suspect this sounds almost like a rhetorical question, but has any country's government said that they should fight this or future pandemics in the opposite way, i.e. by more decentralized decision making? | Arguably, the United States of America has. Sort of. It's confusing. The federal government, or rather the president and some of his cabinet, has largely left the response up to individual states. It's less of a conclusion, and more a result of chaos and denial at the Federal level. It is difficult to write this up in a neutral tone, to find sources with a neutral tone, or to even determine what the official federal response is. Federal response has been chaotic and contradictory and the conduct of the president has been appalling . I live in the US. This is not an abstract answer. An example of this confusion is the president's tendency to make sweeping declarations only to rescind them the next day. For example, the president declared "total authority" over the states re-opening plans, and then the next day he "authorized" the states to come up with their own plans . He has neither power. Another example is confusion about who is in charge. There is an official White House Coronavirus Task Force lead by Vice President Pence and Dr. Brix . Jared Kushner leads a "shadow" task force . They often conflict with each other. Jared Kushner has no experience in disaster managment ; he is the president's son-in-law. The federal government has taken some actions. Jan 31, declared a public health emergency. Feb 2, issued a travel ban on China. March 13, declared a national emergency. March 16, advised against groups of more than 10 people. March 19, advised against international travel. WHO recommends against blanket travel and trade bans as they "may interrupt needed aid and technical support, may disrupt businesses, and may have negative social and economic effects on the affected countries". In other areas they have opted to have the states handle disaster response usually handled by the federal government, often with no warning, and while the states and companies are pleading for help. Jared Kushner, the leader of a coronavirus task force, stated that "the notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile... it's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use" in contrast to the stated goal of the stockpile. The stated goal was then changed to match Kushner's statement . The president has been reluctant to use the Defense Production Act to help medical production , but then using it to force meat packing plants to remain open . The president encouraging protests against state lock-down orders , orders which often agree with federal policy. The president's transactional view of federal disaster response , "It's a two-way street. [The states] have to treat us well, also. They can't say, 'Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.'" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested allowing states to go bankrupt (currently they cannot) rather than giving federal financial support usual for a disaster. The president suddenly cut funding for the World Health Organization accusing it of bias and responding poorly to the pandemic. The CDC has the power to "detain, medically examine, and release persons... traveling between states who are suspected of carrying these communicable diseases" , but so far has declined to use it. Instead, individual states, and even a county, have been setting up a patchwork of checkpoints . There is pattern of reluctance to coordinate procurement and distribution of vital supplies, for issuing clear guidelines for state closures and reopening, and for making these policies national. There is also a pattern of using federal aid as a carrot and stick to pursue agendas against certain states and punishing perceived political enemies . This is based on no evidence, but political ideology. It is in contrast to previous federal disaster responses leaving state and local governments scrambling. And it is in stark contrast to expert advice, both inside and outside the federal government. Dr. Brix , White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, Dr. Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all contradicted many of the president's decisions, including the need for federal coordination. While there was some initial rapid response from Congress , they are quickly falling back into partisan deadlock . Senate Majority Leader McConnell has stated the Senate will focus on confirming lifetime judicial appointments , not coronavirus work. The Republican party is in danger of losing control of both the Senate and the presidency at the end of the year. This has resulted in high profile, public arguments between the president and governors over federal vs state response and responsibility. For example, between President Trump and New York Governor Cuomo . New York is one of the hardest hit states. It has also been a subject of the president's ire prior to the virus. Some state governors have then allowed the response to further devolve to their cities and counties, either explicitly or through inaction, and often at odds. For example, currently the state of South Dakota has largely downplayed the virus, while Native American tribes within its borders have not. They are currently at odds over their policies . In response, many states are recognizing that the virus respects no borders. They're at risk of competing against each other for scarce resources and driving up the price. They must coordinate. With the federal government abdicating leadership, they are banding together into compacts to coordinate their plans, particularly about how and when to ease restrictions. For example, the Western States Pact and the Midwestern Governors Regional Pact and the Eastern states Multi-State Council . The result is a state-by-state, sometimes city-by-city, patchwork of responses . Every state has declared a state of emergency and nearly all have some sort of stay at home order. As of this writing, nationally the number of cases and death toll continues to rise steadily . Four states never issued a stay-at-home order and, as of this writing, 13 states have rescinded their stay-at-home order. With the exception of extremely rural Montana , all are continuing to see a steady rise in cases and deaths. See also: Timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States (Wikipedia) COVID-19 pandemic in the United States (Wikipedia) U.S. state and local government response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Wikipedia) | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53264",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/18373/"
]
} |
53,284 | In the UK, if you haven't paid back student loans within 30 years they are written off. Why would the government institute such a policy? As far as I can see, it results in most people not paying back a large proportion of their loans, but it's not clear to me that this incentive is obvious to most people, which makes me think that wasn't the purpose. I am interested in both the reasons stated by the government who brought the rules in, as well as why these policies exist in the first place. | Writing the debts off after 30 years is a way of linking repayments to earnings, as well as negating the risk of the loan to the student. Loan repayments are usually made automatically as part of tax on your income, and no payments are required unless your income is over a certain level, currently around £26,500 - there is no legal way to avoid paying back the loan if you earn over the income threshold. The current arrangements came into force under the Coalition Government in 2012, as a result of the Browne Report in 2010, an independent review of tuition fees undertaken by Lord Browne. Before this change, the loans were written off after 25 years, and were introduced by the Conservatives in 1990. Browne's report does, however, give us some hint as to why the 25/30 year clause exists: As we will show under the section on paying back the costs of
learning, the loans that students take on for meeting these costs are
risk free. No one has to pay back the loan unless they are earning
above £21,000 per year. Payments are linked to income. Graduates on
low incomes do not pay interest. Any loan amount that is not paid off
after 30 years is written off by Government. The financial risk on the
loans is therefore borne by Government, not by the student. This is
exactly what the principles that we have set out recommend, but the
consequence is that institutions bear no risk either. They could set
unrealistic fees, out of proportion to the employment returns from the
courses they provide, and yet still receive all of the fee income. So part of the rationale is that the Govermnent does not want the fear of a loan to put students off of going to university - they will have the assurance that the loan is 'risk-free', as the cost of the loan is borne by the Government should the student fail to pay it off. In addition, no collateral is needed to secure the loan. This Working Paper from the OBR gives us more insight into this policy decision: The design features of student loans in the UK that differentiate them from conventional loans reflect the fact that students lack the
collateral necessary to take out conventional loans and will know
better than lenders whether they are likely to embark on a higher or
lower earning career. This implies levels of risk for both borrowers
and lenders that would lead to lower take-up of higher education than
successive governments have deemed desirable. To address this market
failure, student loans need to be large enough to allow recipients to
smooth their consumption over their student and graduate years, and
also – for that to be effective – to offer an element of insurance
against low incomes after graduation. As a consequence, student loans involve a significant subsidy element. The loans carry an interest rate in excess of many commercial
loans, but repayments are contingent on the borrowers’ income rather
than how much they borrowed. And it is the policy intention that a
significant proportion of the money lent out and interest charged on
it will be written off rather than repaid. This can be for a number of
reasons, most notably that a student’s earnings may remain below the
earnings threshold for the 30 years after they graduate, or they may
rise above it too infrequently or by too small an amount to repay both
their principal and the interest on it before the loan matures. Other
potential reasons include a borrower dying or becoming permanently
unfit for work and receiving a disability-related benefit. Only 30 per
cent of English Plan 2 full-time higher education entrants in academic
year 2017-18 are expected to repay their loan in full. So according to the OBR, the policy intention from the outset was that a significant amount of loans would not be paid off. Nevertheless, the 25/30 year rule was included, firstly, to ensure that any repayments were linked to earnings - to ensure value for money and to prevent a university education only being economically viable as a pathway into well-paid jobs, secondly, to counterbalance the high interest rates compared to traditional loans, and thirdly, to pass loan risk onto the Government rather than the individual student, allowing individuals with zero collateral which would preclude them from taking out traditional loans to take advantage of the scheme. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53284",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32498/"
]
} |
53,534 | Today, for the first time, Twitter attached a warning label in a tweet from president Trump. As a reaction, he tweeted : ....Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen! In the unlikely scenario that Twitter takes a more drastic action, like banning Trump's account for violating its T&Cs, what kind of (legal) retaliatory measures could Trump — as a president, as he said — take against a business like Twitter? | One legal pathway that has been proposed (ironically, on Twitter) by Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley is some sort of review of Twitter's protections under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act . Subsection (c) of this section states: (c) Protection for ''Good Samaritan'' blocking and screening of
offensive material (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker - No provider
or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the
publisher or speaker of any information provided by another
information content provider. (2) Civil liability - No provider or
user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on
account of - (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to
restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or
user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively
violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such
material is constitutionally protected; or (B) any action taken to
enable or make available to information content providers or others
the technical means to restrict access to material described in
paragraph (1). This section means that Twitter's actions are protected by law. Rubio, however, makes the argument that Twitter's actions confirm their role as a publisher, which he argues means they should no longer receive the protections conferred by this Act: The law still protects social media companies like @Twitter because
they are considered forums not publishers. But if they have now decided to exercise an editorial role like a
publisher then they should no longer be shielded from liability &
treated as publishers under the law. Hawley makes a similar argument, referring to the Act's provisions as a "sweetheart deal". And @Twitter is getting subsidized by the federal government for
that interference in the form of special immunity worth billions. Time
to end #BigTech sweetheart deal w/ government It should be noted that Hawley has made similar arguments before, for example in April, when he called for a third-party audit of the platform's suspension policy. The initial pathway open to Trump, then, at least as proposed by certain Republican Senators, seems to surround either the repeal of this part of the Act, or some sort of argument that due to Twitter's adoption of an 'editorial role' in attaching the warnings to Trump's tweets, that the legal protections detailed above should no longer apply to the website. If Twitter no longer benefitted from the protections it currently enjoys under the provisions of Section 230, the website could itself become legally responsible for any illegal content posted on the site by its users. The EFF has published an infographic with more information on Section 230, including the statement that sites could be sued every time a user posted objectionable material. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53534",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28747/"
]
} |
53,582 | According to the Financial Times , Donald Trump has threatened to quit the World Health Organization (WHO). Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw from the World Health
Organization unless it demonstrates independence from China, in an
escalation of his attack on the body. In a letter to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the
WHO, Mr Trump said he would take one of several dramatic actions
unless the global health body committed to reform within 30 days. “If the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive
improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze
of United States funding to the WHO permanent and reconsider our
membership in the Organisation,” he wrote. I don't see any benefit the USA could gain by doing so. What benefits would there be for the US if this threat was followed through on? | What the US would gain is unclear, besides saving some contribution money. What Trump gains is turning the narrative away from criticism of his leadership with regards to the Covid crisis and reframing it as something for which he doesn't have to take any responsibility because it was all China's and the WHO's fault. Basically, the Covid story is here to stay. Make it about WHO shortcomings rather than Trump shortcomings. Other presidents might have been wary of the reactions of US allies at picking a fight with the WHO, especially when their expertise is much needed. Trump however has frequently indicated he doesn't care much about what the rest of the world thinks and many of his core supporters like that about him. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53582",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/25285/"
]
} |
53,615 | I've done all the research I can, but I can't come up with an answer. Perhaps a professional on the subject can better inform me? | Antifa doesn't have membership Antifa is a political movement not an organization. It's a bit like asking "How many members does the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement have?" It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what antifa is. Antifa doesn't have a central organization or membership . It's a political movement dating back to the 1920 of regular people who choose to act out against fascism (hence the name anti-fascist, shorted to antifa), in whatever way they see fit to do so. Some antifa activists do form small decentralized groups of like-minded individuals, but it's impossible to know how many such groups there are or how many "members" they have in total, and that wouldn't include all the individuals who are also anti-fascist. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53615",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32655/"
]
} |
53,644 | With the current situation in the USA, I had a look at the wording of the Oath of Office the US president takes, and was surprised to see that the oath is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution". Why is the oath worded to the constitution, and not the people of the USA? From Comments and additional Context for future readers:
From @vsz : Just for context, there have been several leaders (Stalin, Hitler) who
based their rule on preserving, protecting, and defending the people
(or claiming to), completely disregarding any constitutions and other
laws their countries had before. The current German oath is worded (taking into account people AND law): I swear that I will dedicate my efforts to the well-being of the
German people, promote their welfare, protect them from harm, uphold
and defend the Basic Law and the laws of the Federation, perform my
duties conscientiously, and do justice to all. So help me God.
(Translation from Wikipedia ) That contrast was what actually lead me by being surprised by the lack of "people" in the US-Oath. Hitler actually had an oath on people AND law as well. There is only so much an oath can actually hold you to! I am not familiar enough with Russian history to know if Stalin found a loophole or just disregarded his oath, too! | The Founding Fathers were concerned, among other things, that the Office of the President might become a staging ground for tyrannical rule, either through a popular uprising around the person of the president, or by the president being suborned by foreign nations to subvert the established government. The Constitution contains the checks, balances, and other safeguards that prevent that kind of usurpation of power, so as long as the Constitution stands, the form of government that the Founders were trying to establish stands. Taking an oath to to 'preserve, protect, and defend' the people of the United States is ambiguous: it lends itself to factions who think they are the only important people — the only people that matter — and could encourage insurrection and a turn towards tyranny. Taking an oath to 'preserve, protect, and defend' the constitution , on the other hand, ostensibly forces the president and other political leaders to preserve and defend the institutions that limit and constrain their own power. 'The People' is a vaguely defined construct. People (as the Founders saw it) are manipulable, fallible, emotionally labile, and — particularly in anonymous groups — given to behaviors that do not suit their best interests or the best interests of the community (see: Federalist #10 ). 'The Constitution' is a document: stable, structured, disinterested, not invested in any particular person or institution. Stability of democratic institutions is the goal, because only through the stability of democratic institutions can we properly guarantee the rights and security of the people. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53644",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/15313/"
]
} |
53,649 | President Donald Trump tweeted "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a
Terrorist Organization." Can he do that? Why or why not? | As mentioned elsewhere, in theory, Trump cannot do this . Among the various obstacles is the fact that antifa is a philosophy. It would be like labeling anti-Semitism or anti-racism or deontology a terrorist group. It almost lacks meaning. Another problem, as also mentioned in other answers, is that there is no definition of domestic terrorist groups in the US: When it comes to ISIS and other international groups designated as
terrorists, U.S. terrorism statutes make it a crime to provide them
with "material support" -- such as money or even one's own person.
That's how so many Americans who fled the United States to join ISIS
in Syria or elsewhere were eventually charged and arrested by the FBI. But no such "material support" statute exists for a U.S.-based group. That said, there are a variety of things that people have claimed are explicitly prohibited by the law, and that have been carried out anyway. For instance, under almost any plain reading of the Constitution, the internment of Japanese-Americans without due process during World War II was illegal, but with presidential authority, and compliant courts, it happened anyway. Many people believed that Trump's ban on immigration from primarily majority-Muslim countries was unconstitutional, and it happened anyway. I doubted that Trump could suspend almost all immigration indefinitely, but it happened. Nor is this limited to the Trump administration. For instance, many Republicans complained that Obama's executive order offering a stay of deportation and a path to a work permit to young immigrants was not provided for by law: it happened anyway. Obama was also able to expand government surveillance programs and conduct drone strikes against American citizens (which Trump has continued) despite many people claiming that the law did not allow this. The fact is that with the expansion of executive power, there is probably some fashion in which Trump can label the "antifa" ideology a terrorist group that will have an actual impact. Legal theory is frequently insufficient to predict actual policy. For instance, although there are not definitions of domestic terrorist groups, there is a definition of domestic terrorism in the US, as established by the Patriot Act : (5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that— (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the
criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or
coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction,
assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United
States; and Trump could potentially order the Department of Justice to consider any criminal case in which adherents of an "antifa" philosophy were involved to be considered terrorism under this law, justifying it by saying that antifa wants to influence the government by coercion, say. Even if it is untrue, it is possible he could get away with it. Or, in a more unlikely scenario, he might simply create a new executive classification of some groups as domestic terrorist groups, going around Congress altogether. Such a policy could be undone relatively easily by a future president of a different ideological persuasion, but it's possible that he could just do it. After all, his primary goal here may be less legal than rhetorical. Trump may desire to appeal to "law and order" elements in his party by promising to crack down on what many of them see as dangerous radicals. To do this, Trump need not actually arrest any believers in antifa philosophies, but rather convince he supporters that he is taking strong action against the aforementioned. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53649",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/7655/"
]
} |
53,663 | Democracy is type of government formed by the people, of the people and for the people . The Lobbyist tries to influence the government, for the policies which are in favour of the interest group. Sometimes, it may happen that the policies favoured by the lobbyist are against the desire of the majority. But, the politicians would still implement them, due to their self-interests. How can such a government claim to be working "for the people" ? And considered democratic? | Let's take a moment to visit how the word "lobbying" came about. In the British Houses of Parliament, there is an area called Central Lobby (between the Commons and the Lords), which is where members of the public could meet their representatives to discuss an issue and persuade them to support it. The term "to lobby" came from the location in Parliament where this was done. To bring this back to your question, everyone who has asked a representative to bring attention to an issue, whether it be an individual member of the public or a large international corporation, has done a form of lobbying. If lobbying were to be banned, it would effectively cut off two-way communication between a representative and his/her constituents. CLARIFICATION: For the purpose of this answer, a representative refers to a person elected to a legislative body. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53663",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32675/"
]
} |
53,706 | Details may be confusing, but I mean to ask whether federal armed forces , including the military (Army, Navy, etc.) and policing/investigative organizations (FBI, Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection and the Defense Department), have ever acted violently against civil movements . | Yes basically, even ignoring the Civil War etc., the Ohio Army National Guard shot and killed some students during the Kent State shootings in 1970. Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others. The Ohio Army National Guard is part of the US Army reserves in a somewhat convoluted way that applies to many state national guards. Ohio Army National Guard
is a part of the Ohio National Guard and the Army National Guard of the United States Army. It is also a component of the organized militia of the state of Ohio [...] Also The Army National Guard (ARNG), in conjunction with the Air National Guard, is an organized militia force and a federal military reserve force of the United States. They are simultaneously part of two different organizations, the Army National Guard of the several states, territories and the District of Columbia (also referred to as the Militia of the United States), and the Army National Guard of the United States, part of the United States National Guard. As for the latter : The United States National Guard is part of the reserve components of the United States Army and the United States Air Force. It is a military reserve force composed of National Guard military members or units of each state and the territories of Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, for a total of 54 separate organizations. All members of the National Guard of the United States are also members of the Organized Militia of the United States as defined by 10 U.S.C. § 246. National Guard units are under the dual control of the state governments and the federal government. So the Ohio Army National Guard basically has this dual status too. (Edit:) However as a comment points out below: That unit of the Ohio National Guard was at the time under the command of Governor Rhodes. Since it was still under the Governor's command, it had not been "called up", and was not at that time acting as a part of the US Army. – T.E.D. Apparently Nixon had not invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807... unlike his predecessor Lyndon B. Johnson who did so on several occasions. And at least in one of those, during the 1967 Detroit riots , there were separate (rather than mass shooting) cases of the Guardsmen killing civilians (but also being shot at and wounded or even killed by them), e.g. The National Guardsmen engaged in what they said were firefights with locals, resulting in the death of one Guardsman. Of the 12 people that troops shot and killed, only one was shot by a federal soldier. A selection from the list of the civilian casualties during this riot, to give an idea of the nature of the incidents: (Clifton Pryor, [race:] White, [age:] 23 July 24, 1967. Mistaken for a sniper while trying to keep sparks from a neighboring fire off the roof of his apartment building; shot by a National Guardsman. (Tanya Blanding, Black, [age:] 4, July 26, 1967) Died as a result of gunfire from a National Guard tank stationed in front of her house. Guardsmen stated that they were responding to sniper fire from the second floor. (Helen Hall, White, 51, July 26, 1967) Hall, a native of Illinois, was visiting Detroit on business and stayed at the Harlan House Motel. Hearing tanks rolling by, she peeked through the drape window to see what was going on. She was shot by National Guardsmen who mistook her as a sniper. (George Tolbert, Black, 20 July 26, 1967) Killed as he ran past a National Guard checkpoint at Dunedin and LaSalle Streets, when a bullet fired by a Guardsman hit him. (Roy Banks, Black, 46 July 27, 1967) Banks was a deaf-mute walking to a bus stop to go to work; he was shot by Guardsmen who mistook him for an escaping looter. (Ernest Roquemore, Black, 19 July 28, 1967) Shot by an Army paratrooper and declared dead on arrival at Detroit General Hospital. The soldier had been aiming at another youth who was unharmed. The last one seems to be the case of the "federal soldier" mentioned in the summary para. In these riots there was concerted state and federal response with armed forces; apparently the Guardsmen were also called in by the state rather than the federal government in this case too, but the paratroopers were called in by the latter: Governor George W. Romney ordered the Michigan Army National Guard into Detroit to help end the disturbance. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the United States Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. (Aside: during the 1968 Baltimore riot the Guardsmen intially involved were eventually put under federal command in Task Force Baltimore. It's not clear however from Wikipedia if any of the 6 deaths reported during that riot involved anyone from Task Force Baltimore, except for one traffic accident in which the fatality was a soldier.) | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53706",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28589/"
]
} |
53,739 | With the George Floyd protests going on I keep seeing news about curfews as early as 6pm, police driving by peaceful gatherings and firing chalk rounds or arresting people for illegal gatherings, I thought back to grade school learning about the constitution and thought I remembered something about the right to peacefully gather in there somewhere. So I looked it up and sure enough: Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But the wording of this suggests the 1st amendment only applies to federal law. Does it not apply to state and local law? Does this mean that states and municipalities have the legal grounds to deny all forms of peaceful gathering / protest? | Brain Z's answer is correct; the 14th Amendment extends the protections offered in the Bill of Rights to the states. This is known as the incorporation clause . So really, at the heart of your question is how can various local police forces arrest people for illegal gatherings in light of states also being bound the 1st Amendment's protest protections? Or, how can peaceful gatherings be illegal at all? The answer is that the 1st Amendment protects the right of the people to peaceably gather. That's the operative word. A protest that violates otherwise constitutionally valid laws is by definition not a peaceable gathering. The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that the government can apply "Content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions" to the first amendment, subject to strict scrutiny (which is another topic beyond the scope of this question): Time Restrictions: The government can impose reasonable time limits on when gatherings can occur. An emergency curfew would fall into this category. Place Restrictions: The government can designate certain public places as off-limits for gatherings. Blocking traffic on an interstate highway would be an example of this. Blocking access to an essential government building (e.g. a police station) would be another. Manner Restrictions: The government can restrict what kinds of activities are allowed to take place during a protest. Distributing bricks and rocks that are likely to be thrown at other people or property for example; even if that's not your intent for that to happen. It's important to remember that curfews -- so long as they are reasonable to the situation, applied equally to all, are not contingent on the content of the speech being engaged in, and do not restrict your rights generally speaking -- are lawful, and therefore the police have the ability to arrest you for violating it. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53739",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/18648/"
]
} |
53,742 | One thing that surprises me about the George Floyd incident is that the police would treat the passing of a counterfeit $20 in a corner shop as some kind of an emergency. If someone called the emergency number (999) in Britain with such a report, I feel sure they would simply be told to try and get the vehicle registration number of the customer, and then to take the number and the note to their nearest police station. Or perhaps to call the non-emergency line. It seems especially over-the-top that a police officer would pull out a firearm to get such an individual out of his car - almost as if someone's life were at stake. Would US police forces normally treat the uttering of a small item of counterfeit currency as an emergency? | The case of George Floyd is that he was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 Floyd allegedly used a counterfeit bill to buy cigarettes at the convenience store last week. The clerk reported it to police, a step that management described as store policy in Facebook posts. In the US, most jurisdictions permit 911 calls for any active crime, regardless of the severity. The police then decide the urgency and severity of the response. While all jurisdictions have a non-emergency number, it's always a normal number. Some areas do not have a corresponding "quick dial" non-emergency number (like 311). That is the case here Operator: How can I help you? Caller: Um someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car. We tell them to give us their phone, put their (inaudible) thing back and everything and he was also drunk and everything and return to give us our cigarettes back and so he can, so he can go home but he doesn't want to do that, and he's sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he's not in control of himself. And at the end of the call Operator: Alright, I've got help on the way. If that vehicle or that person leaves before we get there, just give us a call back, otherwise we'll have squads out there shortly, okay? Caller: No problem. The key line there is "If that vehicle or that person leaves before we get there, just give us a call back, otherwise we'll have squads out there shortly, okay?". Cars were sent, but it was likely a non-priority call (meaning a serious emergency like a shooting would likely have gotten those resources instead). We don't know what escalated this between the time the cars showed up and the time we see the video of him on the ground, pinned beneath an officer's knee (which lead to Floyd's death). Without that escalation, he likely would have been taken to the local precinct or jail, booked and jailed until a pretrial hearing for bail. Counterfeiting is a Federal crime and he likely would have been investigated by the Secret Service afterward. If charged, Federal prosecutors would have tried him in Federal court. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53742",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/6837/"
]
} |
53,762 | Speaking on June 5th 2020, at the end of the fourth round of talks on post-Brexit trade, EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier said : Ladies and Gentlemen, to be clear, our lack of progress in this
negotiation is not due to our method, but to the substance. We must
stick to our commitments if we want to move forward. We engaged in
this negotiation on the basis of a joint political declaration that
clearly sets out the terms of our future partnership. This document is
available in all languages including English. It is not difficult to
read; good weekend reading, if I may say. And this declaration was
negotiated with Prime Minister Johnson himself. It was approved by the
leaders of the 27 member states at the European Council in October
2019, it has the backing of the European Parliament also. It is for
us, and it will remain for us, the only valid reference, the only
relevant precedent in this negotiation. And it was agreed by both
sides. Yet round after round, our British counterparts seek to
distance themselves from this common basis. A few minutes later, British Chief Negotiator David Frost gave a press release , saying: We are now at an important moment for these talks. We are close to
reaching the limits of what we can achieve through the format of
remote formal rounds. If we are to make progress, it is clear that we must intensify and
accelerate our work. We are discussing with the commission how this
can best be done. We need to conclude this negotiation in good time to enable people and
businesses to have certainty about the trading terms that will follow
the end of the transition period at the end of this year, and, if
necessary, to allow ratification of any agreements reached. For our part we are willing to work hard to see whether at least the
outline of a balanced agreement, covering all issues, can be reached
soon. Any such deal must of course accommodate the reality of the UK’s
well-established position on the so-called ‘level playing field’, on
fisheries, and the other difficult issues. It may be that both sides are employing fairly diplomatic language here, but I'm struggling to identify from these comments what the main sticking points within the negotiations are. Barnier seems to be accusing the UK of backtracking on commitments made in the Political Declaration , but I'm still unsure in particular in what way. Frost, for his part, seems to be accusing the EU of being inflexible with regard to the UK's firmly held positions - "the so-called ‘level playing field’, on fisheries, and the other difficult issues", but doesn't really give any more detail. What are the main bones of contention holding up progress in the trade talks? | During the Brexit negotiations, fundamentally unresolvable differences were postponed. There will be a point when they will have to come to the table. Look at the terms regulatory alignment and level playing field . The UK wants a Brexit which means Brexit, the right to make their own policies and trade agreements as they see fit. Speech by Johnson The EU wants to protect the integrity of the Common Market, that is no free trade with nations which make differing policies and trade agreements. Speech by Barnier Both want to retain the strong economic ties. Basically the three bullet points cannot be reconciled. Something has to give. The EU27 are convinced that they have the stronger negotiation position and that the UK must retreat from their red lines while the EU27 red lines will be respected. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53762",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28994/"
]
} |
53,829 | Right now (June 2020), sparked by the murder of George Floyd, there have been a wave of protests against police brutality towards black Americans. In these very protests, there has also been a massive outbreak of police brutality towards protests, often seemingly instigated by police towards peaceful protestors. Given that these protests are receiving international attention, and were sparked by the murder of a helpless man by police officers, why is there not more effort by law-enforcement organizations in the US to prevent excessive force being used right now? I am not asking why police brutality happens in general in the US. Rather, I want to know why the police are putting themselves into optically a very bad position, to the point where many organizations are cutting ties with the police, legislation is being discussed to regulate police action, and one city is actively beginning to dismantle their police department. Politically it seems that police leaders should be incentivized to act with extreme caution towards protests in order to avoid increasing the negative attention they are receiving. On the level of individual officers, while typically in the US it is rare for law enforcement to be charged and convicted for excessive force or brutality, we have seen the officers responsible for George Floyd's death charged with murder, and several officers involved in brutality towards protestors fired, suspended, or even arrested and charged for this conduct. So while an officer might expect that typically acting in this manner carries few consequences, right now it is riskier for a police officer to use excessive force. Here is some speculation on my part about what the answer could be: Police leadership can't effectively curtail excessive force, because it is too baked into the practices/culture of their department, so even if they issue directives designed to minimize it, these directives just aren't working The people using excessive force just don't see the cost-benefit analysis the way I've laid it out, and aren't worried about facing consequences The protests happened too quickly for the public pressure to translate into pressure on police not to use excessive force, but the behavior of police towards these protests may change going forward as the backlash against excessive force becomes more and more well known I have made some major error in my analysis I know that the answer will be complicated, given that I am talking about a large number of distinct law enforcement agencies and departments, and clearly they are all responding in vastly different ways to these events (some police departments are joining protestors and there is no indication of any police brutality at all). Nonetheless, given the intense attention one might naively expect far less excessive force than what has actually occurred, given it seemingly is against the police's interests to act in this way. | One data point seems to be the 75 year old who was seriously injured when he was knocked backwards by police. When the policemen who did this were suspended the entire squad resigned from the Emergency Response Team (but not their day jobs) in protest. John Evans, president of the local police union, told the newspaper: "Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square. This suggests that excessive violence is such an ingrained part of police culture that they simply cannot understand the civilian point of view. To them it is simply a part of their job and therefore not "excessive". (Edit: those wanting to argue that this doesn't count because of provocation should see this question .) | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53829",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32800/"
]
} |
53,882 | There are people in Texas who were ineligible to vote but erroneously voted and therefore were jailed for voter fraud : You’re right, there are really strict punitive criminal measures to try to deter people from registering to vote or voting. You probably read about a woman who was finishing terms of her probation, and erroneously voted though she was not allowed to by those terms of probation, I think ended up with a five-year sentence in jail. Another woman who was brought to this country at a very young age, grew up in the United States but was not a citizen, again erroneously voted, I think had an eight-year term, so the signal is sent to be very afraid about voting in Texas. Let’s assume that it’s correct that no intent was involved. How is that even possible, i.e., how could they erroneously vote?
Is just any person who shows up on a voting station allowed to vote? I would think a person needs some identification to check whether he is allowed to vote, and can only vote then? Is the person first allowed, and somehow checked later and tracked down? I thought public voting is anonymous, so that's not possible! I know the German way of voting: You receive your voting card via post. You show up at the station and present your card. They check whether you are on the voters’ list and possibly check your ID. You get the ballot paper, mark your choice, and put it into the voting box. Is there some tracking who has voted, and later, there is a check after the fact? | The two cases mentioned in the linked podcast are those of Crystal Mason and Rosa Maria Ortega, who were both convicted of voter fraud under different circumstances. I'm going to firstly focus on the case of Crystal Mason, who was convicted after voting in the 2016 presidential election whilst ineligible to vote. She was able to be identified and charged because as she did not appear on the list of registered voters, when she went to vote at her polling place, she filled in a provisional ballot paper . These were introduced by the Help America Vote Act in 2002, and are used to ensure that voters who think they should be able to vote, but do not appear on the list for administrative reasons, can still cast their vote on the day. You can read more about Texas's specific implementation here . Provisional voting is designed to allow a voter whose name does not
appear on the list of registered voters due to an administrative error
to vote. The provisional voting process involves an affidavit that (1)
the voter must complete stating the reasons he or she is qualified to
vote; and (2) is used if the voter’s registration cannot be verified
by the polling place election officials OR if a voter (a) does not
possess one of the acceptable forms of photo identification listed
above, and a voter can reasonably obtain one of these forms of
identification or (b) possesses, but did not bring to the polling
place, one of the seven forms of acceptable photo identification
listed above, or (c) does not possess one of the seven forms of
acceptable photo identification, could otherwise not reasonably obtain
one, but did not bring a supporting form of identification to the
polling place. The provisional voting process requires the voter to visit the voter
registrar’s office within six (6) calendar days of the date of the
election to either present one of the above seven (7) acceptable forms
of photo ID OR if the voter does not possess, and cannot reasonably
obtain an acceptable form of photo identification, execute a
Reasonable Impediment Declaration and present one of the acceptable
forms of supporting ID, OR, if applicable, submit one of the temporary
affidavits (e.g., religious objection or natural disaster) OR, if
applicable, qualify for a permanent disability exemption, in order for
the provisional ballot to count. The voter-marked provisional ballots are kept separately from the
regular ballots, and the voter’s records will be reviewed by the
provisional voting ballot board (the early voting ballot board), to
determine if the ballot is to be counted or rejected. If applicable,
the voter registrar will conduct whatever research is necessary to
determine whether the voter is or should have been registered in the
precinct in which the voter cast the provisional ballot and will pass
this information on to the ballot board to assist it in making the
decision of whether the provisional ballot must be counted.
Provisional voters will receive a notice in the mail by the 10th day
after the local canvass advising them if their provisional ballots
were counted, and if they were not counted, the reason why. Mason was ineligible to vote due to previously having been convicted of a felony; tax fraud, and being on supervised release. Texas prohibits felons from voting until they finish their sentence entirely. As a result, she was charged and convicted of voter fraud, as the provisional ballot with attached affidavit served as evidence that she had attempted to vote. The Guardian reports : She did not read the small print of the form that said that anyone who
has been convicted of a felony – as she had, having previously been
convicted of tax fraud – was prohibited from voting under Texas law. Her sentence was upheld by a Texas appeals court in March 2020. Secondly, the case of Rosa Maria Ortega. Ortega is a Mexican national who registered to vote despite being ineligible, and later confessing to officers while being secretly recorded to having voted previously. According to USA Today : Birdsall characterized Ortega as a poorly educated woman who, as a
lawful permanent resident all of her adult life, was unaware that she
was not permitted to vote. Her indictment in November 2015 followed a
series of actions she revealed to elections officials and law
enforcement investigators. After moving from Dallas to neighboring Tarrant County in late 2014,
she attempted to register to vote but indicated on her application
that she was not an American citizen. When her application was
rejected, she called election administrators and was told that the
reason for the rejection was that she had checked the "no" box for
citizenship. Ortega explained that she had been able to vote in Dallas
County and resubmitted her voter registration, this time indicating
she was a citizen. Several months later, Ortega was visited on her front porch by two
investigators from Paxton's office. They secretly recorded Ortega as
she said she checked the box indicating she was a citizen because she
had previously encountered no trouble voting in Dallas County. It was Ortega's poor luck that she had just confessed to illegal
voting in a state where elected officials made examples of those they
deemed contributors to voter fraud. So in the two cases mentioned, there were specific circumstances which provided the court with enough evidence to convict the individuals of voter fraud. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53882",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/8307/"
]
} |
53,900 | According to latest news from Seattle, protesters now are controlling some parts of the city, preventing police from entering. Can it be treated as insurrection against Federal Government, according to Insurrection act ? | In strictly rational terms, it would be difficult to call this an act of insurrection. There has been no armed conflict, no declarations of independence or sovereignty, no expressed intention of overthrowing even the local government, and police and government officials are not being prevented from entering the area. Instead, Seattle police and officials have voluntarily withdrawn, boarding up their precinct building and allowing protesters to congregate freely. The protesters have 'won' in the sense that they wanted the right to protest freely, but that is all. Of course, the President gets to decide what is and is not 'insurrection', and Trump has a demonstrated tendency to cast things in irrationally exaggerated terms, often referring to even the mildest opposition (for instance) as 'treasonous'. Whether that could translate into an invocation of the insurrection act is an open question, though I suspect it won't; as a matter of practice, Trump has regularly used threats and intimidation tactics, but has rarely followed through with overt applications of force. Further, since Washington state still has a fully functioning government on all levels, and that government is not itself rebelling agains the US, the Insurrection Act would seem to imply that Trump would need an invitation from the State Legislature or Governor to intervene on their behalf. Given the political orientation of Trump's base, Trump would probably not want to be seen sending Federal troops to take over Seattle against the wishes of both its citizens and its government | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53900",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/20263/"
]
} |
53,926 | One of the demands of Black Lives Matter (BLM) is to de-fund the police. At the center of it are the police unions, since the contracts are negotiated through the police unions. My question is as follows: Can the police unions be dissolved permanently? Is it possible to ban police unions in a democratic country? | Technically speaking, any union can be dissolved if the people on the other side of the table are willing to cope with the consequences. A union is merely a collective bargaining structure that negotiates employment contracts as a group. The private sector in the US has a long history of union busting, which generally involves firing all union-affiliated employees — ending their contracts peremptorily — and suffering though months of acrimonious strikes and protests. It becomes a matter of endurance and attrition: the business hopes that loss of income will force striking workers to seek employment elsewhere, thinning and eventually dispersing the protests; the union hopes that strikes will limit production by depriving the business of workers, and impact sales by impugning the business' public reputation, and that the consequent loss of profits will force the company to the bargaining table. In the early days, union fights were far more violent. Businesses would sometimes hire private police to intimidate or rough up individual union members and leaders, or to physically disperse strikes; this was one of the main sources of revenue for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Likewise, union members would sometimes intimidate and rough up 'scabs' — temporary workers hired by the company — or damage equipment (monkey-wrenching) to slow or prevent production. Those tactics (mostly) disappeared in the US with the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, and while many modern corporations still resist union formation (e.g. Amazon, which is aggressively opposing unionization), most companies that already have unions find collective bargaining more palatable than the alternative. There is nothing intrinsically different about a public-sector union: i.e., unions for people working in essential public services like police, firefighters, air traffic controllers, metro workers, or the like. People employed in these areas face the same challenges and risks of exploitation as people in the private sector, and collective bargaining is a useful tool to ensure they receive adequate compensation and decent workplace environments. And yes, states and municipalities could decide to simply break the collectively-agreed upon contract, firing all workers who do not agree to new terms and suffering through the inevitable strikes and protests. However, there are two factors relevant to public-sector unions that are not seen in the private sector: The ostensible 'employers' of public-sector workers are not private individuals but publicly elected officials; this gives public-sector unions a purely political impact that increases their bargaining power. A private-sector union is forced to deal with the management as given of the company they work for; a public-sector union can pour its resources into changing the management to something more sympathetic to its interests, using its political clout to elect people who will be inclined to agree with its demands. The public itself becomes a hostage in union negotiations. Unlike a private-sector union squabble, in which the public might (at worst) be forced to turn to a different supplier for the duration, public-sector union squabbles can become immediate threats to the health and safety of the public at large. The public cannot help but be involved in public-sector union battles, because the public will have to 'do for itself' in the event that union members are fired or walk off the job. And obviously, health and safety are 'unlimited value' items for which almost any demand will be met — this is arguably the same reason that the privatized US health system has such exorbitantly high prices; people will pay what's needed to ensure their health — and this too dramatically increases the bargaining power of a public-sector union. In short, the problem is not that police unions exists or that they could not be dissolved with a certain amount of risk and effort. The problem is that police unions have interests that are (in some cases) directly opposed to the health and safety of the public they ostensibly serve, and they have a strong bargaining position that allows them (in some cases) to enforce demands that are contrary to the public interest. Forcing police unions out of politics — perhaps as a conflict of interest — would be a good start, but until we make some fundamental legal distinctions between public and private-sector unions, the problem will persist. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53926",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/29259/"
]
} |
53,967 | If one pays attention to technology-based news all the big players in facial recognition technology are now refusing to provide this technology to the US government and/or police. When news reports on this the generally imply the new refusals are caused by George Floyd's death and fears of racism associated with the technology, though they never elaborate on the specific fears. I'm aware of the general concerns about the potential for abuse of facial recognition to lead to a 'Big Brother' police state, but I'm curious about the specific unclear claims about facial recognition being associated with racism; I'm not sure I understand that specific concern. I'm aware of examples of early facial recognition technologies worked better on Caucasians than other races, but that seemed to be a failure to utilize a properly representative set of photos to train the technology, fixing this specific issue seems to only require an intent to get a more representative training set, it hardly seems an unfixable issue. Beyond that I would think technology would be less racist than humans; my neural net doesn't have subconscious biases that cause it to make presumptions about an individual based off of the color of their skin, but study after study prove that humans, even those who otherwise do not show any outward sign of racism, are guilty of such biases. So why would facial technology be thought to lead to racist results? | People often have the mistaken belief that computers are inherently objective and unbiased – and while they may not hold prejudices themselves, the results that they produce reflect the biases and assumptions of their programmers. This is particularly clear with machine learning systems, where the predictions they give out are dependent on data set used to train the model. For facial recognition software specifically, fears of racial bias stem in large part from a 2019 test carried out by NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) . This test evaluated 189 software algorithms from 99 developers and showed that facial recognition software has a false-positive rate that is orders of magnitude higher for Asians, African Americans, and Native Americans, compared to White people: For one-to-one matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces relative to images of Caucasians. The differentials often ranged from a factor of 10 to 100 times , depending on the individual algorithm. False positives might present a security concern to the system owner, as they may allow access to impostors. Among U.S.-developed algorithms, there were similar high rates of false positives in one-to-one matching for Asians, African Americans and native groups (which include Native American, American Indian, Alaskan Indian and Pacific Islanders). The American Indian demographic had the highest rates of false positives. ... For one-to-many matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for African American females These higher false positive rates mean that Asians, African Americans, and Native Americans are at significantly higher risk of being arrested and falsely accused of a crime based on a faulty facial recognition match. Because so many people trust computers’ objectivity, false positive matches can have severe consequences, and if they’re applied in a racially biased manner, as the data shows they currently would be, then the effect will be to introduce additional racial bias into the criminal justice system. Another interesting takeaway is that, contrary to rs.29’s claim , this effect doesn’t represent some sort of inherent racial trait for these groups, as algorithms developed in Asian countries showed equivalent accuracy for Whites and Asians: However, a notable exception was for some algorithms developed in Asian countries. There was no such dramatic difference in false positives in one-to-one matching between Asian and Caucasian faces for algorithms developed in Asia. While Grother reiterated that the NIST study does not explore the relationship between cause and effect, one possible connection, and area for research, is the relationship between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53967",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/6105/"
]
} |
53,984 | When the Atlanta police recently discovered that a driver, who was otherwise calm and cooperative was "over the alcohol limit" after a long and largely fruitless conversation (during which he failed a breath test) they suddenly, and without warning, attempted to put him in handcuffs? Why? Presumably they had the suspect's address from his driving licence, the vehicle registration details etc i.e. all the information necessary to charge him with drink driving. (He was not actually driving - he was asleep in the car, albeit inconveniently parked.) It was at the moment when, for reasons best known to them, they attempted to apply handcuffs that the trouble started. Had they simply said: "I'm afraid sir, you are in no state to drive, which means we shall
have to charge you with being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle, and
will also have to impound your car. We shall be affixing a wheel
clamp, which you can sometime tomorrow apply at the police station
(address on this leaflet), to have removed at the cost of £150. Your
failure to do that within 14 days will mean that the car will be sold
by public auction and you will be sent the proceeds, less expenses.
You will be receiving notice of intended prosecution at the address on
the licence within the next 14 days. Your failure to respond to that
will occasion a warrant for your arrest being sought." "Good night sir".* both they and the motorist might have gone on their way living to enjoy another day. Why was it deemed necessary physically to restrain the man? This example is not meant to be a precise indication of what might happen in the UK, as has been assumed by some people. It is simply my suggestion of what would, in my view, have been a more adult way for the police to have handled what appears to have been a less serious case of "drunk in charge". | Why do US police use handcuffs in otherwise calm, non-violent circumstances? Because they have cause to fear escalation and because their training encourages it. Since the question mentions UK currency and US policing, we can compare the two countries: Escalation The US population is five times that of the UK. However deaths of police officers are 50 times as numerous. About 50 police officers killed in 2019 in USA, about one policeman killed a year in UK. A police force in a US city of 1 million might deal with 50 intentional homicides a year. A police force in a UK city of 1 million might deal with 12 intentional homicides a year. This might account for some increased wariness and caution by US police officers Policing principles US police officers always have firearms. 95% of UK police officers do not carry any firearms. Although it might seem that UK police officers are more vulnerable and might therefore be more inclined to use handcuffs or other restraints, it may be that UK police rely on the people they interact with knowing that the policeman in front of them won't shoot them. It is often said that UK policing is more consent oriented: Policing by consent (UK) lists the principles of policing set out in 1829 as: To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect. and so on. Public approval is No 2 on that list. In the USA, public opinion is less important, it comes in around principle 6 in this LAPD list Training UK police policy on use of handcuffs Any intentional application of force to the person of another is an assault. The use of handcuffs amounts to such an assault and is unlawful unless it can be justified. Justification is achieved through establishing not only a legal right to use handcuffs but also good objective grounds for doing so in order to show that what the officer or member of police staff did was reasonable necessary and proportionate use of force. USA (LAPD) Guidance The principle reason for handcuffing an arrestee is to maintain control of the individual
and to minimize the possibility of a situation escalating to a point that would necessitate
using a higher level of force or restraint. The decision to use restraining procedures and
devices depends on common sense and good judgment. While felony arrestees shall
normally be handcuffed, the restraining of misdemeanants is discretionary. There is a clear difference in tone. The UK starts with the presumption that handcuffing is an assault . In the US it is introduced as a restraint . | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/53984",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/6837/"
]
} |
54,001 | Has any government throughout history banned foreign currencies? It happened in Zimbabwe in 2019 for example. How about other countries? I'm also interested in broader answers, like governments banning alternative forms of currencies (for example, banning ownership of gold as happened in the US in 1933). Has any country forbidden by law its citizens to use anything else than their country's currency? | This has happened a few times before, and is usually a rather extreme measure used to promote the use of, and trust in, local currency, as opposed to transactions being conducted using a more stable foreign currency, most often USD. Indonesia In 2011, Indonesia banned foreign currencies being used in domestic cash transactions: On 28 June 2011, the Indonesian president signed law Nr. 7/2011 on
currencies, requiring cash transactions within Indonesia to be
conducted only in the local currency (art. 21(1) of the law). The ban
shall not hold for the following exceptions listed in the law: a. certain transactions within the framework of the implementation of
budget revenues and expenditures; b. accepting or awarding grant
abroad; c. international trade transactions; d. bank deposits in
foreign currencies; or e. international financing transactions." The regulation came into force
on the day of its issuance but entities had one year to comply with
the new provisions. Later, in 2015, the Bank of Indonesia pushed through a regulation which banned foreign currencies being used in all domestic transactions: Trust in the rupiah has been fragile ever since the Asian financial
crisis in the late 1990s, when its value went into free fall and
Indonesia went under an International Monetary Fund rehabilitation
program. The rupiah has become one of Asia’s worst-performing
currencies this year, depreciating around 7% against the dollar. Bank Indonesia says the prohibition against foreign currency in
domestic transactions is intended to reduce reliance on the dollar and
other foreign currencies and mitigate against capital outflows.
According to Bank Indonesia, transactions within the country in
currencies other than rupiah amount to $73 billion a year. These laws are still in force. Nigeria In a similar vein, in 2015 the Bank of Nigeria banned commercial banks from accepting deposits of foreign currencies. On 5 August 2015, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) prohibited
commercial banks to accept deposits of foreign currency cash. The
policy was published in a circular by the CBN's Director of the Trade
and Exchange Department, Olakanmi I. Gbadamosi. Account holders which
made a foreign currency deposit prior to the announcement by the CBN,
are advised to withdraw their amount in the foreign currency or naira
equivalent. The CBN stated that the measure is supposed to counter
illicit financial flows in the Nigerian banking system. The Nigerian
government is impeding access to USD since mid-2015. The goal of its
strict monitoring of cash flows is to avoid foreign currency reserves
to deplete as oil prices are falling. Crude oil exports represent
Nigeria's main source of US Dollars. The policy is also connected to
the government's national development plan which emphasizes import
substitution, i.e., the protection of local businesses from
international competitors. This measure, however, seems to have been relaxed recently. California Section 107 of California's Corporation Code banned individuals or entities from "[issuing] or [putting] in circulation, as money, anything but the lawful money of the United States.", however this was repealed in 2014. Other assets In addition, some governments have previously sought to ban alternative assets used in place of currency. You've mentioned the 1933 US ban on 'hoarding' gold. India, as well, has enacted several regulations on gold over the years, most prominently the (now repealed) Gold (Control) Act, 1968 , which prohibited citizens from owning gold bars and coins. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seem like another obvious example, and although many countries have not yet adapted their laws to explicitly legalize or criminalize this type of asset, many have. There is a fairly comprehensive list here , which I won't reproduce in this answer, but regulations range from an outright ban (e.g. Algeria, Bolivia, Nepal), to a ban on use as a payment method (Vietnam, Indonesia), to a ban on banks facilitating Bitcoin transactions (e.g. Canada, Colombia, Jordan). | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54001",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32906/"
]
} |
54,013 | In 2016, during the nomination of Justice Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court many Republicans cited the "Biden rule" to justify denying him a hearing. What is the truth behind this so-called "Biden rule"? I know after doing some research that the then senator Joe Biden on the Senate judiciary committee talked about not holding a nomination in a presidential election year. Is there more to this? | A short piece on PolitiFact published at the time in 2016 put Biden's 1992 speech in its political context: Biden's floor speech was on June 25, 1992, more than three months later in the election cycle than it is now. There was no Supreme Court vacancy to fill. There was no nominee to consider. The Senate never took a vote to adopt a rule to delay consideration of a nominee until after the election. Nonetheless, Biden took to the floor in a speech addressing the Senate president to urge delay if a vacancy did appear. But he didn't argue for a delay until the next president began his term, as McConnell is doing. He said the nomination process should be put off until after the election , which was on Nov. 3, 1992. The piece includes an extensive quote of Biden's own words, and links to a video of the speech on YouTube . EDIT: He repeatedly states the same thing multiple times, and it could not be more clear that he means to delay through the election season only, not through the nomination of the next president. Perhaps the most direct concise example is where he says, " the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over. " | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54013",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28683/"
]
} |
54,035 | I read in two sources that the 2016 popular vote was Democratic by 2.09 percentage points (48.18% Clinton, 46.09% Trump). I also read it was by 2.22 percentage points (51.11% Clinton, 48.89% Trump). I assume the second one is the two-party vote. Is that correct? | Yes - the official totals according to the FEC were: Trump - 62,984,828 (46.09% of all 136,669,276 votes)
Clinton - 65,853,514 (48.18% of all 136,669,276 votes) So in terms of difference in popular vote percentage, this gives us your first figure, 2.09 points. However, in terms of the percentage of the votes given to either of the two main parties, this gives us: Trump - 62,984,828 out of 128,838,342 = 48.89%
Clinton - 65,853,514 out of 128,838,342 = 51.11% Calculating the difference between these percentages gives us your second figure of 2.22 points. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54035",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/29035/"
]
} |
54,058 | I read a tweet earlier asking the hypothetical question of "what could Trump do between November and January if he lost the election?" In the UK, the election is lost and the winners enter 10 Downing Street. What power does the US President have after he has lost the election? | The 20th Amendment to the US Constitution states: The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on
the 20th day of January , and the terms of Senators and Representatives
at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms
would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms
of their successors shall then begin. The incumbent President, therefore, legally retains all powers he had during most of his term in the 72-78 day period between Election Day (2nd-8th November) and the inauguration of the new President. According to the Congressional Research Service's publication, Presidential Transitions: Issues Involving Outgoing and Incoming Administrations : The President’s authority to exercise power begins immediately upon
being sworn into office and continues until he is no longer the
officeholder. By the same token, while congressional oversight of the
executive branch is continuous, some activities may take on special
significance at the end or beginning of an Administration. The
disposition of government records (including presidential records and
vice presidential records), protections against “burrowing in” (which
involves the conversion of political appointees to career status in
the civil service), the granting of pardons, and the issuance of
“midnight rules” are four activities associated largely with the
outgoing President’s Administration. The incumbent President may also
submit a budget to Congress, or he may defer to his successor on this
matter. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54058",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32572/"
]
} |
54,074 | This article deals with Germany’s Armed Forces status in the context of Trump's decision to reduce US troops stationed in Germany. Besides the main topic, the article also mentions that Germany spends less than the targeted goal of 2% of GDP. This 2% goal by 2024 was agreed during the 2014 Wales Summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) : By 2019, however, only seven of the alliance’s 29 members (now 30,
with the entry of North Macedonia this year), had either met or
exceeded the two-percent target. Greece, at 2.24 percent, was furthest
along. Germany came in at 1.36 percent . I am wondering why Germany has not increased it's defense spending, despite having a budget surplus . Question: Why does Germany have such a rather small defense budget? (significantly below the target value of 2% of GDP)? | The 2% goal for defense spending of all NATO countries originates from the Wales Summit of 2014 . However, the people who made that commitment are heads of governments, many of which don't actually have the authority to make budgeting decisions. This includes the German Chancellor. The Bundestag (German parliament) which actually has that authority never committed to that goal. So the decision whether to increase military spending or not is a decision to be made by the parliament and the parties in it. A survey from 2018 shows an interesting picture. A plurality of the German population has a slight preference for increasing military spending (43%: increase, 40%: keep as is, 14%: decrease). But if you look at the results by party preference ("nach Parteiwählerschaft"), then you see that there are only two parties where the majority of voters actually support more military spending: the FDP and the AFD, and neither is part of the current government coalition. The followers of the governing parties CDU and SPD lean towards keeping the status quo. So if you assume that the parties try their best to reflect the opinions of the voters they represent, then that explains their behavior on this issue. Further, national defense does not play a very important role in German political discourse. I looked up surveys about which political issues are currently relevant for German voters, and I could not find a single one which even lists defense. So politicians have a lot of other issues to spend money on, one of them being a reduction of the government debt, which actually is a relevant point according to some surveys. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54074",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/11278/"
]
} |
54,091 | I hope this doesn't get labeled as a bad faith question. I'm genuinely curious what the rationale is for supporting the mass gatherings and protesting following the death of George Floyd, despite previously having supported the social distancing during the pandemic. While I understand these people feel strongly about racism and police brutality, they also felt strongly about the pandemic. The same pandemic, mind you, which is still on-going, and the number of daily cases has started growing in the US again, after a long period of decline. This may or may not be due to the protests, but either way, the point is that social distancing seems to still be relevant. What are the reasons cited for this change in stance? I am primarily interested in reasons offered by US-based politicians and institutions. Any person who fits this description and who went from supporting social distancing to supporting the protests, fits my criteria and their cited response will be a valid answer to my question. I however had not had much luck in finding such an explanation. | I don't know of any politician or institutions that has made an explicit justification, and I'm not certain any have seen a need to. One would only need to offer an explicit justification if one were trying to organize a protest: trying to convince people they should break quarantine and take to the streets. But these protests have largely been organic, spontaneous actions, meaning they were not preplanned over weeks or months, as some protests are. They arose as a group reaction, self-organizing through private and personal communication channels, growing out of a strong, in-common conviction that there is pervasive injustice in the system. No one needed to convince people to come out and protest Floyd's death; people were primed and ready to go. There was a more pressing need to convince them to be peaceful, civil, and to take proper precautions for their health, and politicians/institutions have mostly focussed on the latter issue. That being said, almost every discussion of the protests and the COVID-19 restrictions carries a broadly understood and implicit justification. Social distancing is meant to curtail non-essential interactions, in order to slow the transmission of the disease to manageable levels. But political actors (with a few notable exceptions, such as our current president) know that protests are an essential part of the US political system. We tolerate protests for the same reasons we tolerate people gathering in hospitals, grocery stores, and polling places: people need to do those activities or things begin to fall apart. Even those who speak out against the protests are (again with exceptions) careful to do so in ways that do not question the fundamental right to assemble politically. A few people have raised the issue that the protests following George Floyd's death (BLM) were received far better by political leaders than the anti-social-distancing (ASD) protests that had previously occurred around the nation. This is arguably true, but seems beside the point, for two reasons: No one tried to stop the ASD protests, except through disapproving words and counter-protests: no mayor deployed riot police with military hardware against them, no governor called out the national guard, the president did not threaten to send in military troops to 'dominate' them. Those protests went off peaceably and smoothly in large part because they met no opposition whatsoever . In that sense, the BLM protests were received far worse than the ASD protests. The moral justifications for the ASD protests were far weaker. The complaints that lay behind these protests were self-centered and scientifically illiterate, arguing that the coronavirus threat isn't 'real' and that social distancing is an unnecessary and intrusive inconvenience. This isn't to suggest it is invalid to voice these complaints, but such complaints are never going to generate sympathetic moral consensus, not on the same level as the complaint that an entire group is subject to systematic oppression by police. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54091",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32947/"
]
} |
54,093 | I just came across an article by Putin in The National Interest and got quite impressed by his English writing proficiency. As an undergraduate student learning English, I know how much time and effort are needed to master English to such an admirable degree, especially if you do not live in an English-speaking country. What's particularly amazing is that Putin started learning English around 2000, when he was about 50 years old, and has since been learning English while holding a full-time Russian-speaking job. Amazed, I carefully checked whether the article mentions any co-author, contributor, translator, or an original Russian text. It doesn't. But before I start telling my friends and fellow students about this truly inspiring example, I'd like to ask here whether I'm not being too naive. Sure, I find it unthinkable that the president of a developed country will usurp the authorship of an article written by someone else or fail to acknowledge a translator. And I'm aware that there have already been a few talented writers among Russian leaders, with Lenin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev having written books as solo authors. But the skeptic in me is whispering that it's a bit of a stretch to believe that Putin could achieve excellence of a whole new level, emerging as a writer in a foreign language he learned while serving as Russia's president. My question: Are there any facts, statements, or pieces of evidence that confirm or refute that Putin wrote the article on his own? I am curious, for instance, whether his spokesman or close associates said anything about that, whether magazines like The National Interest require that all authors sign an authorship statement like in research journals, and whether Putin's English is good enough to write such articles. | There are a few possibilities. Here they are, in descending order of probability: First, he might have asked someone else to write the article. The Russian government certainly does have advisors who can do that. The president tells them what they want to say, perhaps supplies a few notes and sketches, and the advisor writes it, then submits it to the president. This is not an usurpation of authorship; the ideas are those of the president, not (necessarily) those of the advisor. Second, he might have written the text in Russian, and have an advisor to translate it. There is no real reason why the advisor shouldn't remain anonymous in this case either. They are paid do perform such jobs, after all. Third, Putin might have written the whole thing in English. It wouldn't be published before being very carefully revised by advisors, who would suppress mistakes and Russianisms. Or, fourth, Putin may be a very proficient English writer. After all, he can have a couple advisors to teach him and improve his English at any time, and certainly a considerable library at hand that he can read from. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54093",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28847/"
]
} |
54,125 | I read recently that Colorado will have a version of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact on their ballot in November. Considering that this bill functionally eliminates the Electoral College, and thus changes the system of elections laid out in the Constitution, what is it's constitutionality? Is there a legal argument against it? Additionally, assumed that it is challenged after the election, could the results of the election potentially be overturned? | The Interstate State Compact, if it ever was implemented by states representing 270 or more electors would almost certainly be tested in court. Until it is tested in the Supreme Court, nobody can authoritatively say if it is constitutional or not, The arguments would centre around whether the constitution should be read on the "plain meaning of the Constitution" (this would be a "textualist approach"), or whether we should consider the implied intention of the Constitution (an originalist approach). The textualist looks to the words written and argues that the Constitution allows states' legislatures to appoint electors in any manner, without restriction. The plain meaning of the Constitution allows for the interstate compact. The originalist would say "If we look at the structure of the union, it is clear that the intent was that the President would not be elected by the national popular vote. This idea was considered and rejected." So this would indeed be a "subversion" of the intent of the Constitution. The notion here is that the Constitution delegates power to the states to choose electors, but as with other delegated rights (such as the right to free speech) that right is not unlimited (there is no right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre) but defined by norms and historical precedent. By this analysis, the interpretation of the phrase "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct" implicitly has a parenthesis "provided you don't fundamentally change the role of elector". An originalist view would not follow the plain text if they felt that my making the selection of electors dependent on the results of elections in other states would be a fundamental change and not sanctioned by the intent of the authors of the Constitution. Ultimately this change can have political consequences, and so how you interpret the constitution is likely to be coloured by your political viewpoint.
And with the US Supreme Court being a political body, with appointees made as much on their political leanings as on their legal expertise, the decision in the supreme court could depend on political factors and not merely a plain reading of the text. The US Constitution has no procedure for the election of a president to be overturned. The electors send their votes to the President of the Senate, and the senate count and declare the winner. That person becomes President. If the senate consider the votes to be invalid then we are in deep constitutional doodoo. If however the Supreme Court decides that notwithstanding the lack of any procedure in the Constitution, the Constitution requires that the election should be overturned, then that would be their judgement. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54125",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32986/"
]
} |
54,222 | In the wake of current events the U.S. police have once again come under immense public scrutiny, putting the focus on various aspects such as police brutality, racial discrimination, qualified immunity, police unions and others. There is however one aspect that I would consider to be a HUGE elephant in the room, which is the amount of training that police officers in the United States receive: I am from Germany. Over here we have significantly less crime than the U.S., less gun violence, less organized crime, less gang violence, or, to get to the point: The job of a police officer in Germany is significantly easier than the job of a police officer in the U.S., who has to deal with far more dangerous and complex situations and issues on an average basis. Yet over here we consider the bare minimum amount of training a police officer requires to be two years (in my home state even three years), which seems to be the norm in developed countries, whereas in the U.S. the average seems to be between 20 and 30 weeks, or roughly 600 hours. I cannot emphasize enough how insane this fact alone appears from my perspective let alone the fact that this isn't the primary issue of the current debate. It seems perfectly obvious to me that this state of affairs is a recipe for disaster, considering that it means that U.S. police officers are sent into complex situations while having only between one quarter or one eighth of the training that other developed countries are providing their respective officers. My primary question therefore is: Why is the amount of police training so much lower in the U.S. than in other developed countries? Furthermore, if you want to go into detail, I would also be interested in why this doesn't seem to be even closely as big of an issue in public discourse as one would expect it to be. Edit: A comprehensive comparison between a great amount of countries is surprisingly hard to find, or rather was impossible to find for me. Therefore I looked at the specific information with regard to various north-western european countries (U.K., Germany, Scandinavia...), because they are the most comparable to the U.S. in terms of national development level. Examples for this would be Germany , Sweden and U.K. . Overall in the north-western European region the predominant model seems to be at least 2 years of training, more likely 3 and usually modeled after a bachelor-master-system. | A large part of the reason that training in the US is so short compared to other developed countries appears to be that the training in the US seems to focus more on the practical aspects of the job, rather than the social or ethical aspects. This Axios article contains comments from a Professor of Sociology: Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution and the University of
Maryland, who leads implicit bias training for police departments and
the military, notes that "police departments do a lot of tactical
training. They don’t do a lot of training that is focused on social
interaction. ... But nine out of 10 times, or even more, their job is
simply having a conversation." In other developed countries, this seems to be the focus of a large proportion of training. If we look, for example, at the Norwegian police academy, Politihøgskolen, there is a breakdown of the three-year basic training course . If we look just at the first year of study, we see modules including "Preventive police work", "Police, society and ethics", "Criminal law and criminal procedure". This training, however, does not neglect practical skills - a large proportion of the training is "Operational police work", but in the first year, this is limited to first aid, arrest technique, and the use of pepper spray & batons. It is not until the final year of study that this includes the use of one-handed and two-handed weapons. One explanation for this is the lack of federal standards on police training - according to the Department of Justice , there are 'more than 18,000 local police departments in the U.S." but there's no "universal standard for the structure, size, or governance of police departments". A second explanation is that although the classroom training in the US is relatively short, a large proportion of police training is carried out 'on the job'. This is not true across the board, for the reason stated in the previous paragraph, but if we take the example of California, police officers first have to undergo a Regular Basic Course with a minimum requirement of 664 hours. The next stage is then a Field Training Program , where new officers are assigned to an experienced officer on the job, the aim being to introduce the new officer to "personnel, procedures, policies, and purposes of
the individual law enforcement department" and to provide "the initial formal and informal training specific to
the department and the day-to-day duties of its officers". This lasts a minimum of 10 weeks, but usually 12-16 weeks. The final stage is then a probationary period of 12-24 months before being considered a fully qualified police officer. In total, then, the stages of training sum to a level which is roughly similar to the training criteria undertaken in comparable countries. The main reasons for the disparity, then, seem to be a focus on in-field training, compared to classroom learning, which skews the figures, as well as a lack of national regulatory standards, allowing individual states and departments to lower standards when faced with recruitment pressures. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54222",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/30576/"
]
} |
54,251 | The House just voted for Washington DC to become a state, almost exclusively along party lines. While the arguments for statehood aren't new, equality for ethnic minorities is a greater concern following the death of George Floyd. But the bill isn't expected to pass the Senate, and the POTUS has said he'd veto it anyway, citing the extra Democrats it would add to both chambers in Congress. So presumably, the Democrats did this for optics: as with many bills, it shows the voters how the parties differ. But this particular one doesn't have obvious national appeal, which leads to my question: what do they hope to gain from this? Is the hope purely that voters across the US will be impressed with the signalled pro-democracy, anti-racism priorities? Edit: to clarify, since a comment & answer have each been posted that proved I need to: I know if it passed the Democrats would have more seats (I made that point myself), and I know that's why they won't get it, and my question is what other motive they could have given that they know that too . | One of the core issues, beyond claims it's all about increasing Senatorial power for a party, is that of representation and enfranchisement of US citizens; tax-paying ones, in this case (raising some ironic "no taxation without representation" connections). The district has about 705,000 people residing in it, absolutely none of whom is represented in the Senate, and who only have a single non-voting representative in the House. By comparison, the 4 smallest states in the US by population are : Wyoming: 578,759 Vermont: 623,989 Alaska: 731,545 North Dakota: 762,062 Two of them have fewer people than DC does (as of the 2010 census), and the other two are only slightly more populous. All of them have voting members representing their interests in both chambers.* So the simple argument is why do we tolerate some 700,000 citizens having zero Congressional representation, when there are entire states with fewer people and full representation? In the early days of the country DC simply wasn't populous enough for this to present much of an issue, but in modern times it's becoming an increasingly large issue. This also ties into issues of local self determination. The district currently has an elected government of its own , but it is ultimately subordinate to Congress itself. Congress has total, constitutionally granted, authority over the District (and it is not clear to me if statehood could do anything to resolve this short of an amendment). Congress can override and replace any of the laws of the district at any time. To put that into perspective, how much would you like it if Senators and Representatives from states completely different from yours could overturn and rewrite your own state's laws? How happy would Texans be if the other states just up and decided to change their gun laws (or lack thereof) against their will? It's even worse than that for DC, as not only do other states get to exercise total authority over them, but DC itself has no voting power at all in this decision. The particularly high concentration of African Americans in the district further compounds things with racial issues, in particular a long running (and seemingly still ongoing) tendency in the country to disenfranchise blacks and other non-white populations, and put them under the total control and mercy of whites. *And let's not forget that Puerto Rico, if made a state, would be the 31st most populous in the country: 20 states currently existing have less people in them than Puerto Rico does (at over 3m citizens). Yet Puerto Rico still has no representation. Note that while Puerto Ricans by default do not have to pay Federal Income tax, they do pay most all other forms of Federal taxes , providing several billion a year in tax revenues to the US; about the same that Wyoming and Vermont provide (including their Federal income tax). | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54251",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/13576/"
]
} |
54,309 | On July 1st, the UK Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, & Home Secretary, Priti Patel, announced that a 'path to full British citizenship' would be opened to Hong Kong British National (Overseas) passport holders, which could affect over three million people, according to the Evening Standard . Following the announcement by the Chinese Government that it will
impose a national security law on Hong Kong, the UK has confirmed that
new arrangements will be put in place for British Nationals
(Overseas). The UK Government made a commitment to change the rules for BN(O)s
should China implement the new national security law first proposed in
early June. This new bespoke immigration route will allow BN(O)s to come to the UK
without the current 6 month limit, granting them five years limited
leave to remain, with the ability to live and work in the UK. After these five years, they will be able to apply for settled status
and, after a further 12 months with that status, apply for
citizenship. The new bespoke route for BN(O)s will be implemented in the coming
months, with exact date and further details to be announced in due
course. In the meantime, we will ensure British National (Overseas)
citizens who wish to come to the UK will be able to do so, subject to
standard immigration checks. This follows an article published on June 3rd by Boris Johnson in the South China Morning Post which warned of this decision: If China imposes its national security law, the British government
will change our immigration rules and allow any holder of these
passports from Hong Kong to come to the UK for a renewable period of
12 months and be given further immigration rights, including the right
to work, which could place them on a route to citizenship. Immigration was a big issue in the debate surrounding the Brexit referendum in 2016, as well as the subsequent two General Elections. I'm interested in what the view of Brexit supporters is on this decision. I would have expected Brexit supporters to not support this measure, however, anecdotally, I've been surprised at the support for this proposal among those I know personally. Have any polls been conducted surveying the support for this proposal or decision that splits out responses by 2016 Brexit referendum vote? I'm aware that there are unlikely to be polls on the actual decision this soon after the announcement, but seeing as the issue has been talked about for about a month, I hope that some research has taken place. | A YouGov poll just published today shows significant support across the political spectrum : The full results show that the level of support among Leavers (62%) is nearly as high as that among Stayers (70%) . If that seems surprising it may be relevant that a study published last year found the following: Those who subscribe strongly to the Leave identity , measured by their aversion to the EU and antipathy towards immigration, are also more likely to hold negative perceptions of Chinese global leadership and be more suspicious of China as a military threat. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54309",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28994/"
]
} |
54,391 | When reading statements of Donald Trump, e.g. this Tweet , there is a better employment rate than ever in the USA right now. But many news sources in Europe report, that there is mass unemployment. What is the actual state? Are there numbers that can be interpreted in the one or the other way? | Trump has indeed claimed something along the lines of "there is a better employment rate than ever in the USA right now". Now before the Covid-19 crisis, unemployment rate was at a low level. According to official sources, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , it was about 3.5% since September 2019, which was the lowest level in the 21st century. Looking at this website the last period with such a low unemployment rate was around 1970. Only when the pandemic hit America, in March 2020, did the unemployment increase. And it's safe to say that there is a (for United States unprecedentedly) high unemployment rate right now: Now, specifically about the Tweet you mention in the comments: Greatest Top Five Monthly Jobs Gains in HISTORY. We are #1! The Bureau of Labor Statistics is mentioned as source, so the graph is as credible as the one about unemployment rates. I would say that this is a clever way to frame the decrease in unemployment rate from 13.3% in May 2020 to 11.1% in June 2020. That is a lot less unemployment / more jobs than the month before, but the president doesn't claim the employment rate is better than ever. He's just showing some figures that cause him to make a good impression, as many politicians (and CEOs, and who not?) are wont to do. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54391",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33100/"
]
} |
54,399 | I've been told that the laws had received widespread support amongst the Democrats of the time. This seems at odds with the current posture of the Democrat Party; is this true? | Yes. Following the American Civil War, the Democratic party was the primary haven for America's most machiavellian racists, (some of which set also included active criminals and terrorists), who labored tirelessly to subvert, frustrate, and stymie many of the postwar reforms, in a too often successful effort to continue a de facto slavery by other means and under other names. Around the mid-20th century the Democrats grew to be somewhat less racist, leaving the more racist southern "Dixiecrats" without a party, which was when the Republican party resorted to what's been called the Southern Strategy to assimilate the Dixiecrats. Having done so, the Republican party has never been quite the same... See also my answer to Are there cases of Democrats engaging in voter suppression? . | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54399",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/16903/"
]
} |
54,407 | This question is inspired by this New York Times article . The crux of the article is that some Russians think if the GRU are paying the Taliban bounties to kill US soldiers (something denied by both the Taliban & Russia), then the US deserved it, because they also gave the mujahideen weapons in 1979-1989 to kill Soviet soldiers as part of Operation Cyclone . Superficially it seems to me that the ultimate aim of both these activities is the same - kill as many of the rival power's soldiers as possible without directly getting involved. But the US political response to the alleged bounty program has been unanimously negative, implying they are not drawing the same parallel that the Russians are doing, presumably because they reject the comparison as invalid. The question is: what is the difference between the two activities that makes the comparison invalid? What justifies providing weapons, but not providing a bounty? Have any US leader directly compared the two, and if so, what was the justification they offered? | When a nation provides arms to another nation, there is at least the pretense that the recipient will use those weapons in accordance with international law (i.e. defensively in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter ). When a nation directs another nation to attack, that pretense crumbles. Of course that's between nations. There used to be principles in international law where damages might be owed for arms sales to belligerents, e.g. after the UK sold warships to the Confederates during the American Civil War . But that happened one and a half centuries ago, and the Afghanistan example you cite was during the Cold War. Back then there were measures like CoCom , so it wasn't exactly "business as usual." So arguably the Russians went back to what they and the Americans did in the Cold War, yet the current US Administration wants to re-invite the Russians to the G7/G8 ... | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54407",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/22967/"
]
} |
54,516 | Capitalism does a pretty good job of incentivizing people to work on what's economically profitable, e.g., finance, law, tech, and what gives them power over others, e.g., becoming CEOs. Now let's assume for a moment that we lived in some kind of socialist utopia with a substantial UBI, an effective wealth tax, the land being owned by the people, and companies being run as worker cooperatives with a maximum pay gap and colleagues electing their bosses. With the financial and power incentives largely disabled, which alternative mechanisms might nudge people to work on the problems most pressing to society? * My personal take is that what people really strive for is social recognition . Money and power in capitalism are a good proxy for both, which is why they work so well as incentives. So what one would need is an alternative mechanism to make people feel socially recognized if they work on important tasks. *Note that "most pressing to society" does not mean "economically profitable". Nurses, teachers, garbage men and small-scale farmers are a few examples that would arguably fall into the former but not the latter category. | The trouble with plain "social recognition" is that it doesn't scale. Dunbar's Number is the number of people you can "know" in the sense of having stable social relationships with them; its about the number in the average Christmas card list, for example. Its generally thought to be around 150, although there is no doubt that some people can "know" many more. (Aside: that link is about face recognition, but face recognition is thought to be merely stage 1 in a processing pipeline that links the face to memories about the person). In a community smaller than Dunbar's Number everyone knows everyone else, what they need, what they are doing etc, and so social esteem works well. In Socialist theory this is known as Primitive Communism . Social esteem translates into a "gift economy" where people readily share resources in the knowledge that everyone else is keeping a mental account and will be willing to do likewise in the future. Having a reputation for stinginess in such a community means you will find yourself excluded from future resources. Once you get above Dunbar's Number this system breaks down; a member of such a society is going to encounter people they don't know and therefore cannot be sure how much the community owes them; likewise being generous with an unknown person may not lead to communal reciprocity because not everyone will know about your good behaviour. So at that point the social esteem relationship breaks down and the community has to find another way of tracking who has done what to benefit others. The immediate response is barter, followed almost immediately by the adoption of some handy commodity as a general medium of exchange, which then evolves into money. This is of course an oversimplified " just so story " version. The reality was slower, messier, and frequently more bloody. But it seems to have been the route followed when stone age tribes (smaller than Dunbar's Number) evolved into Bronze Age kingdoms and empires. Money can be seen as a special case of a wider class of schemes to track communal benefit and award people accordingly. The problem is to come up with something that accurately tracks communal benefit without being subject "gaming the system". This is a hard problem. The most robust and flexible decentralised system found so far seems to be money. You are welcome to try to invent something better, but I'm not holding my breath. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54516",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33051/"
]
} |
54,550 | Russia is said to be involved in the manipulation of the elections and politics of various countries in the West. Did the West ever manipulate Russian politics? Is the West able to manipulate Russian politics nowadays? | Your question is problematic because of the stated and unstated assumptions in it. Russia certainly complains about foreign meddling in their affairs. Various Western governments and government-affilated organizations are supporting civil society in Russia. Democracy activists, civil rights activists, independent journalists, people like that. They complain about Russian countermeasures like foreign agent registration acts, yet the US had such laws since 1938 ... They are sheltering dissidents from Russia and refusing extradition. That makes the headlines when one is murdered , usually the news takes no notice. There are sanctions against Russia with the clear implication that it will take regime change to make them go away completely. The West claims to be convinced that their actions are legitimate in international relations, and nothing like the "underhanded meddling" of the Russians. The Russian government appears genuinely concerned that the West is formenting yet another color revolution in Russia. One might ask why the West doesn't do things like botnets in VKontakte , but it would be limiting to retaliate exactly 1-to-1. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54550",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32479/"
]
} |
54,581 | I am wondering about the idea of a senator running for the House of Represenatives because their senate seat is endangered. There are different reasons someone might want to do this. One could be unpopularity like Susan Collins. Another possible reason could be getting elected under unusual circumstances like Doug Jones. Could an endangered senator run in a safe district in the House of Representatives after dropping their Senate reelection? If they could, they might have more of a chance because the party that is weaker in the state recognizes them. | As far as I know, there is no restriction. The question was raised when Joe Lieberman ran simultaneously for Senate and Vice President in 2000 (had he won both, he would have resigned his senate seat and his replacement been picked by the governor). Given that state term limits on House/Senate seats were ruled unconstitutional in the 1990s, I would imagine that any attempt by states to limit candidates from running simultaneously for House and Senate would be also prohibited. That said, it would be a challenging feat since the candidate would need to run two simultaneous campaigns in both a primary and general election. Lieberman was able to do this because he had such overwhelming support in his home state and didn't really need to do more than a pro forma campaign for the Senate. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54581",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/29035/"
]
} |
54,598 | Suppose someone is drinking and driving, or speeding; then he is obviously a threat to other road drivers and pedestrians. But someone, who isn't wearing a helmet or seat belt, is neither harming anyone directly nor is a threat to someone, specifically because of him not wearing a helmet or seat belt. If an accident happens, the damage to other people would be independent of his wearing or not wearing of the above mentioned things. What I understand by "freedom" is that "I should be able to do anything and everything, if it DOES NOT AT ALL hurt anything or anyone, be it financially, physically, mentally etc." Then why it is compulsory to wear a helmet or seat belt by law? | why it is compulsory to wear a helmet/seatbelt by law? Because there are many ways the consequences of not wearing them are very likely to harm others. In other words, the assumption you formulate is inaccurate. First, every accident requiring emergency services subjects paramedics and police officers to a risk of they themselves having an accident while rushing to the scene. Drivers of ambulances or police cars are well trained and they exercise great care in rushing to the scene or hospital, but that does not preempt other risks which are beyond their control. Second, injuries are a burden to hospitals and tend to divert resources that could be assigned to other types of medical treatment. Similarly, the ensuing handicap tends to strain public resources that are allocated to accommodate others' unfortunate needs. Third, it is wrong to presume that a serious injury will not hurt those who love and/or financially depend on the injured person who did not wear a seatbelt. Fourth, serious injuries are likelier to psychologically traumatize the injured person. The person's choice not to wear helmet/seatbelt at the time of the accident will not preempt lower those traumas (or traumatic diseases) at all. Fifth, many fields of law require a duty to mitigate damages. A generalized obligation to wear helmet/seatbelt makes it easier to establish fault, and to discern between one's own hazard and others' liability. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54598",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33215/"
]
} |
54,613 | Republicans have been touting to "repeal and replace Obamacare " ever since Obamacare was first passed under the Obama administration. In 2017 the republicans put out their healthcare bill on the Senate floor which was rejected due to the votes of Arizona's John McCain , Alaska's Lisa Murkowski , and Maine's Susan Collins . Now that Mr.McCain has passed away and has been replaced with Martha McSally to serve the remainder of his term and who would support such legislation, why don't Republicans just reintroduce their healthcare legislation? | To pass, a bill needs to pass in the House and Senate and be signed by the President. Since the last election, Democrats took control of the House, so while the Obamacare repeal bills that failed in the Senate in 2017 might pass the Senate today, there's no way they would make it through the Democrat controlled House. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54613",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28683/"
]
} |
54,662 | In recent years, Chinese re-education camps have become widely known in the Western press. According to Wikipedia: As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps". Why are Uyghurs the primary minority targeted by Chinese authorities? | The question you added in comments I think is more specifically interesting; We mostly know why the CCP does what it does in Xinjiang (GC Campbell comment), but following that logic, it would do the same in Tibet. The answer is they did! And the same Party member that was in charge of developing the surveilllance state and re-education camps in Tibet ( Chen Quanguo ), was transfered to Xinjiang's camp in 2017. Tibet seems to have been a pre-cursor, where either it wasn't as extensive, or not talked as much by medias. Tibet now seems to be in next phase; Flood with investment and people from Mainland, to dilute the other culture, which is also slowly happening in Xinjiang. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54662",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/7434/"
]
} |
54,682 | According to some articles , China is carrying out genocide against the Uyghur people. Others claim it is cultural genocide as its the Uyghur culture that is being eliminated, rather than Uyghurs as a nation. So which one is correct? Is it "genocide", "cultural genocide", neither, or both? | Genocide Defined The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the international law defining the crime of genocide) says that genocide is: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. China has imposed measure to prevent Uyghur births China has implemented policies designed to prevent Uyghurs from having children, a definition which satisfies item (d) of the definition of genocide. Adrian Zenz, an academic specializing in Chinese politics, authored this document which argues that China's use of forced sterilizations and IUDs for Uyghurs satisfies the legal criterion for genocide. Breaking these birth control laws is punishable by being sent to internment camps. There are also many news outlets online which describe these sterilizations and IUDs, such as this one . This policy differs from China's more general " one child" policy.
Although it uses a case study focusing on Koreans in China, this academic article explains that ethnic minorities were allowed more children. It seems that in many cases the limit was not enforced at all. Unexpectedly, when the State increased the limit to 2 children per couple nation-wide in 2015, the birth rate for Uyghurs decreased by 84% (Zenz, ibid). Why did it decrease? Zenz ( and others ) report that enforcement is different. While any ethnicity is theoretically able to be forced to have an IUD, sterilization, or fined, the this punishment is largely saved for ethnic minorities like the Uyghur. Internment camps also appear to be unique for ethnic minorities, which also indicates unequal enforcement in a pretty dramatic way. Internment camps are also used to house family and acquaintances of Uyghurs who do not follow these laws. An additional tactic reported by Business Insider: when a man is taken to an internment camp, the Chinese government may assign Chinese men to sleep with his wife and live in his house with his family. Although not related to IUD or sterilization, this is another unique policing tactic that is applied unequally to Uyghurs and the ethnic majority. Other Stories Outside of the legal argument, there are extant claims that China is systematically killing Uyghurs. I'm presenting this anecdotal evidence because I believe that often first hand accounts are important and under utilized on this site, but also because Uyghurs are an ethnic group that are not commonly encountered in the United States (and I suspect, other western countries). While at the University of Kansas, I studied Uyghur language where I came to know several Uyghurs from Xinjiang, as well as an extended network of scholars interested in the politics of Xinjiang. Several of the indigenous Uyghur acquaintances I made have never been heard from since. My instructor, as well as their family and friends, shared their own personal stories of "missing" loved ones, some of which have been missing for a decade or more. In particular, I knew Abduweli Ayup , who was a linguistics student at the time. Though I can't vouch for the scale of deaths caused by these policies, but this information and my experience with these people supports definition (C). These disappearances are intended to destroy Uyghur people "in whole or in part". | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54682",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/7434/"
]
} |
54,703 | I was surprised to learn that Puerto Ricans, despite living in a US territory, were not entitled to vote in the presidential elections. I was even more surprised to learn that US citizens are allowed to vote for president from anywhere in the world - EXCEPT if they happen to live in Puerto Rico. What is the legal/political rationale behind this? What is it about Puerto Rico that magically removes one's right to vote? Has anyone ever challenged this? | This is a peculiarity as a result of the federal nature of the USA and the exceptional position of Puerto Rico as a territory but not a state. Within the States and Territories of the USA, your voting rights depend on residence. If you leave the States and Territories your voting rights depend on former residence or inheritance. In general most citizens of the USA are also citizens of a state of the USA. Since states don't issue their own passports, your citizenship of a state is determined by residence. If a New Yorker moves to Florida, they become Floridians, and so can vote in state elections in Florida, but can't now vote in elections in New York. Now if our New Yorker moves to Timbuktu, this is treated slightly differently. They remain a US citizen and a citizen of New York, and so retain the right to vote in New York elections. Their children could also claim New York citizenship. But Puerto Rico is both part of the USA but not a State or part of a State of the USA. When our New Yorker moves to Puerto Rico, they can vote in Puerto Rican elections but not elections in New York. Now the nature of elections in the US is that there are no national elections There are statewide elections of Senators, Governors and Presidential electors. There are district elections of Representatives and there are local elections of many kinds. Our New Yorker has lost the right to vote in New York elections (just as they would have done if they had moved to Florida) but not gained the right to vote in Puerto Rican elections for Presidential electors (because there are none). This is odd, but something similar is true if the New Yorker moves to DC. They cease to have the right to vote in elections to the Senate. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54703",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/18356/"
]
} |
54,751 | I was doing a little research regarding elections and I notice that the GOP hasn't made an attempt for mayor positions in some cities, like in Portland or Atlanta. Why is that? According to Wikipedia and other sources, it looks as they haven't even tried to in several decades. Instead the Democrats run against each other (labelled as "Nonpartisan") So what's the deal? | Portland and Atlanta are a little different in this case Portland has a non-partisan primary election: All candidates from all parties enter a single primary election, this includes Republicans (if they wish to stand) Bruce Broussard stood for the Republican party in 2020. The top two candidates the progress to the second round of voting. Current mayor Ted Wheeler (Democrat) and urban policy activist Sarah Iannarone (Socialist) advanced to the runoff. Atlanta has a longer tradition of non-partisan mayoral races, with no party affiliation on the ballot. Officially, all the candidates are independent. There is a two-stage process in which the top two candidates progress to a second round if no single candidate achieves a majority in the first round. Now although all candidates are "independent", Atlanta is a deeply Democrat city, and all the independent candidates who stood are from the left wing of American politics. There are ballot access arrangments: $5600 or 2000 signatures. Apparently none of the city's Republicans were willing or able to achieve this. Mary Norwood is seen as the most Republican of the independent candidates, and certainly the Atlanta Democratic party try to portray her as such. She identifies as a "progressive independent" | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54751",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33284/"
]
} |
54,798 | Historically India had been a non-aligned country. It had been convenient for India. For instance, India managed to purchase weapons from major weapons suppliers while distancing itself from American or Soviet proxy-wars . In recent years, India decided to shed its non-aligned posture and decided to move toward the American pole. From 2002 to 2018, India signed GSOMIA, LEMOA, COMCASA. BECA is under process as of March-2020. So, as we can see even though moving to the American pole started in 2002, it was expedited during the present BJP rule. Why has India suddenly decided to change its non-aligned posture? | The term "non-aligned" (as opposed to simply "neutral") is an historical product of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which in turn was a response to the Cold War. Although the NAM still exists formally and India is still a major member, it is considered much less relevant now that the Cold War has ended. More generally, the end of the Cold War has radically changed the geopolitical landscape and so it is not surprising that India has been gradually (I would not say "suddenly") been closer to the United States. India's increasing conflicts with China further reinforces this. Domestically of course there is also the fact that BJP is in power . Modi and Trump in particular have a strong and close relationship. To the extent that the change actually is "sudden", this is the key reason for it. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54798",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32479/"
]
} |
54,804 | The general definition “Grand Old Party” appears to have been originally used for both the Republicans and the Democrats, but it was finally used to specifically refer to the Republican Party: GOP also G.O.P., "U.S. Republican Party," 1884, an abbreviation of Grand Old Party. The Republicans were so called from 1876; the Democratic Party also was referred to occasionally as grand old party, with lower-case letters, in 1870s-80s when the Republicans (formed in 1854) still were considered new and radical. The designation grand old ______ is from about 1850; in Great Britain, Lord Palmerston was known as the Grand Old Man by 1880, and it was abbreviated to G.O.M. by 1882. (Etymonline) How did the acronym come to be used to refer to the Republican Party and not to the Democratic Party, which was actually founded earlier? | Although, according to this article by Christopher Klein, the term 'grand old party' was used to refer to the Democratic party in 1859 by Democratic Governor Beriah Magoffin, and later, in 1860, by a Democratic newspaper, the 'GOP' acronym only appears to have been applied on a large scale to the Republican party. The original term which associated 'GOP' with the Republican Party appears to have actually been ' gallant old party'. An example of this use was on the Senate floor in 1876 by John A. Logan, a Union general in the American Civil War, and later Republican Senator for Illinois. According to a biography of Logan entitled Life and services of Gen. John A. Logan, as soldier and statesman , during a clash with former Confederate generals in the Senate, Logan used the phrase 'gallant' to characterise the actions of his party during the Civil War. Sir, we have been told that this old craft is rapidly going to pieces;
that the angry waves of dissension in the land are lashing against her
sides. We are told that she is sinking, sinking, sinking to the bottom
of the political ocean. Is that true? Is it true that this gallant old
party, that this gallant old ship that has sailed through troubled
seas before, is going to be stranded now upon the rock of fury that
has been set up by a clamor in this Chamber and a few newspapers in
the country? This appears to then have been conflated with the 'Grand Old Party' moniker - papers from around the time use the term to refer to the party in the same context - referring to the party's work to preserve the Union in the Civil War. This terminology was then used significantly in the press, and in debate, while the Civil War was still in the recent past - helping to cement it as specific to the Republican Party. It seems, therefore, that rather than referring to the age of the party, it was originally a reference to the party's actions. As to why the acronym stuck - Klein's article suggests that it was due to a typesetting issue: “Safire’s Political Dictionary” reports that the Republican’s GOP
acronym began to appear in print in 1884. Newspapers in 1936 credited
T.B. Dowden, a Cincinnati Gazette typesetter, with coining the
initials after receiving a story about 1884 Republican presidential
nominee James Blaine shortly before press time that ran too long. “My
copy ends with ‘Grand Old Party,’ and I have two words left over after
I’ve set the 10 lines. What shall I do?” Dowden asked his foreman.
“Abbreviate ’em, use initials, do anything, but hurry up!” came the
reply. In a rush, Dowden shortened the name of Blaine’s planned speech
from “Achievements of the Grand Old Party” to “Achievements of the
GOP.” | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54804",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/22350/"
]
} |
54,821 | According to Politico : The head of the Chinese Consulate in Houston won’t commit to closing the office — a direct threat of defiance to the State Department’s demand that it be shut down by Friday. In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, Cai Wei, the Chinese Consul General in Houston, said China is protesting the closure order and his office will remain open “until further notice.” “Today we are still operating normally, so we will see what will happen tomorrow,” he said, declining to elaborate further. (Other source: NYPost ) I have many questions about this; please answer what you can, thanks: Doesn't China have to comply with this closure order? Why wouldn't they? What can the U.S. do about it, if they insist? Is there any likelihood of the U.S. changing its mind? How do the laws and politics surrounding this work? How exactly would the shut down work, in terms of transportation etc.? Is it any different with a consulate vs. an embassy? | Doesn't China have to comply with this closure order? I'd say so. Per Vienna Convention on Consular Relations , of which China is a signatory : TERMINATION OF THE FUNCTIONS OF A MEMBER OF A CONSULAR POST The functions of a member of a consular post shall come to an end inter alia: (a) on notification by the sending State to the receiving State that his
functions have come to an end; (b) on withdrawal of the exequatur; (c) on notification by the receiving State to the sending State that the receiving State has ceased to consider him as a member of the consular staff. If the United States has formally notified China of any of these conditions, China no longer has any right to run a consulate in Houston. Consulates, in general, exist at the forbearance of the host country. Per Wikipedia : Contrary to popular belief, many of the staff of consulates may be career diplomats, but they do not generally have diplomatic immunity unless they are also accredited as such. Immunities and privileges for consuls and accredited staff of consulates (consular immunity) are generally limited to actions undertaken in their official capacity and, with respect to the consulate itself, to those required for official duties. If the host country has withdrawn permission for the consulate to exist, there are no longer any "official duties" for anyone working there to perform. If China were to try to continue running the consulate, the US would have multiple options, likely up to and including physically detaining any Chinese officials performing such acts and summarily putting them on a plane to China. Or perhaps even revoking diplomatic immunity (as they would be operating outside defined bounds) and arresting them. Houston is literally over 10,000 km from China. If the United States wants the Chinese consulate in Houston closed, there really isn't anything China can practically do to stop it. What can China do? This: China Orders U.S. to Close Chengdu Consulate as Payback for Houston Move Now, the United States can't really do anything about keeping its Chengdu consulate open. All the things the US can do to force the Chinese consulate in Houston to close, the Chinese can also do to the US with respect to the US Chengdu consulate. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54821",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/27423/"
]
} |
54,830 | Since China's order to close down the Chengdu consulate of the USA is a retaliation of the USA's order of closing down of Houston consulate of China, I have a feeling that there must be a rationale for China choosing Chengdu. CNN : US consulate in Chengdu officially shuts in retaliation for Houston closure FoxNews: China retaliates , closes Chengdu consulate Reuters: China seizes U.S. consulate in Chengdu, retaliating for Houston SCMP: China takes over US consulate at Chengdu in tit-for-tat retaliation for Houston There have been other US consulates in China. Why has China chosen the Chengdu consulate to be closed down? | The US had five(now four) consulates in China: Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenyang, Wuhan. The United States also has an embassy in Beijing. They all have their own consular/embassy district, just like this picture quoted from Wikipedia: You can see: Xinjiang is included in the Beijing consular district. Tibet is in Chengdu consular district. If Chengdu closed, the people in Chengdu consular district can go to Wuhan or Beijing. Why has the Chinese government chosen Chengdu? The Chengdu consulate is the newest American consulate in China, opening in 1985 . The Chengdu consulate is similar in size to the Houston consulate. Chengdu serves four provinces and autonomous regions while Houston governs eight states and one administrative region. According to the Chinese, this is diplomatically equal . | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54830",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32479/"
]
} |
54,842 | Background: During a conversation about politics, I mentioned that one party in the US might try to amend the Constitution so that, should a bill pass the House of Representatives but be voted down in the Senate, the House would have an option similar to the one that allows a two-thirds majority of the Senate to pass a law which has been vetoed by the President - in effect, a two-thirds to four-fifths majority in the House would be able to overrule the Senate vote and send the bill to the Executive branch for ratification. My friend swears that the House is already given this ability in the Constitution. I clarified that I was talking about the House utilizing such a vote, and not the Senate overruling a Presidential veto. My friend replied to the effect of "It's in the Constitution, you just have to read it carefully." Well, I've done that several times now, but I also realize I'm no constitutional law scholar - maybe my friend is correct that the House already has this ability, but it just isn't explicitly stated in the Constitution? Could two or more clauses in the Constitution interact to grant this ability to the House? Is there a Supreme Court ruling that I don't know about that gives the House the right to do this? Or is my friend just genuinely confused between the House and the Senate? | No, the House of Representatives does not have the power to overrule a Senate veto. Article I, Section 7 is quite clear that a bill needs to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate in order to become law. The two-chamber Congress was designed as a compromise between those founders who wanted every person to have an equal say in American politics, and those who wanted every state to have an equal say. Allowing the Senate to, in effect, be ignored in this way undermines this compromise. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54842",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33332/"
]
} |
54,859 | States like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, have in the range of 30% African Americans, who, from what I can tell, vote about 90% Democrat. Yet these states vote reliably Republican. What is the explanation? That non-African Americans skew as far to the Republicans as African Americans do to Democrats, so that overall votes are ~60% Republican -- a number considered "lop-sided"? That a smaller percentage of African Americans turn out to vote? Or is something wrong in the analysis above? | Using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study 2018 , we can test your hypothesis that non-African Americans skew as far to the Republicans as African Americans do to Democrats. Let's limit ourselves firstly to voters in the deep south, which I'll define as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, & South Carolina. This gives us a survey population of 4,920. We can then stratify the survey population by race, and look at how they identify politically. Looking at the 1,155 of these respondents who self-identified as 'Black', we can construct the following breakdown - clearly black respondents skew heavily towards the Democratic Party. Looking now at the remaining respondents, we can obtain a very different graph - we see a large number of 'Strong Republican' respondents, as well as a general skew towards the Republican end of the scale. However, there isn't quite such a well-defined skew as the first graph. Despite the skew not being quite so dramatic, it is dramatic enough to ensure that the states as a whole generally vote Republican. Firstly, the 40% figure in your question isn't quite accurate - according to the American Community Survey 2018 figures, Black or African American Alone makes up between 26.6% (South Carolina), and 38.0% (Mississippi) of the population, for a total proportion of around 30.6% of the population of the above five states. This factor, exacerbated by a small turnout gap, allows the vast Democratic lean amongst the Black population to be outweighed by the relatively smaller, but still large, Republican lean within the non-Black population. However, on a more local level, the African American demographic does have a significant effect. As the population tends to be centred around the ' Black Belt ', this allows the Democratic lean of the demographic to be more obviously represented. For example, the county-level map of the 2016 election provides an interesting depiction of this phenomenon. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54859",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/30819/"
]
} |
54,872 | In The Guardian, 'Cycling ambitions for England move up a gear with No 10 plans', : Johnson is, famously, a keen city cyclist himself, even if high office means he now has to be ferried about by car. I wasn't aware of any restrictions on who could cycle, nor do I know of any other reasons why Johnson "has to be ferried about by car". I would otherwise think this relates to security, but "has to be" is a very strong formulation if it's only security that's the issue. | No, it's not forbidden per se, but as Joe C mentioned , the security concerns of the Prime Minister cycling in London probably make it more trouble than it's worth. On the other hand, Johnson has often been walking & jogging in St James' Park since becoming PM. This theory is, however, backed up by the Guardian, which reported in December: He was forced to give up cycling around London when he became foreign
secretary and then prime minister because of security precautions. Forbes also mentions that this has precedent: Like David Cameron, the previous bicycling prime minister, Johnson has
had his wings clipped by security officials, and he is ferried around
in armored cars rather than be allowed to cycle on London’s streets. I would think that a large reason is that the optics of cycling while followed by an entourage of pool photographers, security, and advisors are not ideal, and the PM is probably trying to avoid a similar mishap as befell Sadiq Khan, the current Mayor of London, in May. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been spotted out cycling in the capital
today, closely followed by his security team in a £300,000 armoured
car - after commuters were last week told to ditch public transport. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54872",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/15044/"
]
} |
54,876 | US television news outlets sometimes: interview people who speak a language other than English, then record a translation over their words. And most people seem to trust that the translations are accurate. I don't recall ever seeing websites providing the original, unedited recordings of interviews, so there is often no direct means to verify that the translation is accurate; perhaps they sensationalize or bias the translation to suit their narrative. In the USA, I expect there is some regulatory body (likely the FCC ) that checks the accuracy of translations of interviews. I didn't find anything searching for translation at the FCC website, though. Question : Are there checks and regulations to ensure interview translations on US TV news are accurate? | No, it's not forbidden per se, but as Joe C mentioned , the security concerns of the Prime Minister cycling in London probably make it more trouble than it's worth. On the other hand, Johnson has often been walking & jogging in St James' Park since becoming PM. This theory is, however, backed up by the Guardian, which reported in December: He was forced to give up cycling around London when he became foreign
secretary and then prime minister because of security precautions. Forbes also mentions that this has precedent: Like David Cameron, the previous bicycling prime minister, Johnson has
had his wings clipped by security officials, and he is ferried around
in armored cars rather than be allowed to cycle on London’s streets. I would think that a large reason is that the optics of cycling while followed by an entourage of pool photographers, security, and advisors are not ideal, and the PM is probably trying to avoid a similar mishap as befell Sadiq Khan, the current Mayor of London, in May. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has been spotted out cycling in the capital
today, closely followed by his security team in a £300,000 armoured
car - after commuters were last week told to ditch public transport. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54876",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/16767/"
]
} |
54,893 | Pandemics are not a new phenomenon and people like Bill Gates have been talking about preparing for the next one for many years now. Did the US government have an official plan in place for what they're going to do in case a new dangerous virus starts spreading around? Specifically, did such a plan envision shutting down borders, enforcing a lockdown, distributing apps for contact tracing, closing schools and restaurants, etc? How did the US government plan to deal with the next respiratory virus prior to COVID? | What was the US government's official plan for dealing with future pandemics prior to 2020? National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan , May 2006. Did the US government have an official plan in place for what they're going to do in case a new dangerous virus starts spreading around? Yes. Specifically, did such a plan envision shutting down borders, enforcing a lockdown, distributing apps for contact tracing, closing schools and restaurants, etc? Yes, with the exception of "apps", it was all envisioned. See, Pandemic Influenza - Challenges and Preparation . Social Disruption May Be Widespread Plan for the possibility that usual services may be disrupted. These could include services provided by hospitals and other health care facilities, banks, stores, restaurants, government offices, and post offices. Prepare backup plans in case public gatherings, such as volunteer meetings and worship services, are canceled. Being Able to Work May Be Difficult or Impossible Find out if you can work from home. Schools May Be Closed for an Extended Period of Time ... For borders, see Chapter 5 — Transportation and Borders ; shown, in part, below. Also see Does the US President have the power to quarantine a state or other locality? . For intrastate actions, the plan calls for providing information to local authorities. The choice to impose a lockdown or closures is a state function, with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). For contact tracing, see Reducing Disease Transmission and Rates of Illness . In the initial stages of a domestic outbreak, it might be feasible to perform case tracking and contact tracing, with isolation of individuals with known pandemic influenza and voluntary quarantine of their close contacts. Antiviral post-exposure prophylaxis targeted at contacts of the first cases identified in the United States may slow the spread of the pandemic. Quarantine of case contacts has played an important role in the management of outbreaks of other diseases transmitted by large-particle droplets, but its role in containing influenza has not been fully defined. For schools see Guidance for Schools (K-12) . How did the US government plan to deal with the next respiratory virus prior to COVID? I think this is provided by the full text of the of the above referenced plan. This Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza further clarifies the roles and responsibilities of governmental and non-governmental entities, including Federal, State, local, and tribal authorities and regional, national, and international stakeholders, and provides preparedness guidance for all segments of society. ( Preface ) Chapter 5 — Transportation and Borders The containment of an influenza virus with pandemic potential at its origin, whether the outbreak occurs abroad or within the United States, is a critical element of pandemic response efforts. Containment is most effective when approached globally, with all countries striving to achieve common goals. While complete containment might not be successful, a series of containment efforts could slow the spread of a virus to and within the United States, thereby providing valuable time to activate the domestic response. Our Nation’s ports of entry and transportation network are critical elements in our preparation for and response to a potential influenza pandemic. Measures at our borders may provide an opportunity to slow the spread of a pandemic to and within the United States, but are unlikely to prevent it. Moreover, the sheer volume of traffic and the difficulty of developing screening protocols to detect an influenza-like illness pose significant challenges. While we will consider all options to limit the spread of a pandemic virus, we recognize complete border closure would be difficult to enforce, present foreign affairs complications, and have significant negative social and economic consequences. Measures to limit domestic travel may delay the spread of disease. These restrictions could include a range of options, such as reductions in non-essential travel and, as a last resort, mandatory restrictions. While delaying the spread of the epidemic may provide time for communities to prepare and possibly allow the production and administration of pre-pandemic vaccine and antiviral medications, travel restrictions, per se, are unlikely to reduce the total number of people who become ill or the impact the pandemic will have on any one community. Individual regions would still experience sharp surges in the demand for medical services and the need to meet such demand with local and regional personnel, resources, and capacity. Communities, States, the private sector, and the Federal Government will need to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of transportation measures when developing their response plans, including the effectiveness of an action in slowing the spread of a pandemic, its social and economic consequences, and its operational feasibility. Border and transportation measures will be most effective in slowing the spread of a pandemic if they are part of a larger comprehensive strategy that incorporates other interventions, such as the adherence to infection control measures (hand hygiene and cough etiquette), social distancing, isolation, vaccination, and treatment with antiviral medications. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/54893",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/7434/"
]
} |
55,981 | According to Amnesty International , the new Hong Kong security law "applies to everyone on the planet". I quote: The wording of the Hong Kong national security law asserts jurisdiction over people who are not residents of Hong Kong and have never even set foot there. This means anyone on Earth, regardless of nationality or location, can technically be deemed to have violated this law and face arrest and prosecution if they are in a Chinese jurisdiction, even for transit. Accused foreign nationals who don’t permanently reside in Hong Kong can be deported even before any trial or verdict. Social media companies, for example, can be asked to remove content deemed unacceptable by the Chinese government, even if these were posted outside of Hong Kong or if the companies’ offices and servers are located in other countries. That seems so surreal. Are countries allowed to do this? Can country X legislate stuff like "anyone who tells a joke that denigrates citizens of country X will be prosecuted"? | How far applicable the law of a country is is decided by the law of that country. If other countries disagree, they can obviously decline to assist in the enforcement of those laws, and disallow the agents of the first country to act on their territory. There even is precedent that a country outlaws behaviour not related to it at all. For example, German law forbids stuff like genocide and human trafficing regardless of where it happens, who perpetrates it and who it is done to. France and the UK both make torture punishable, again regardless of who and where. There are more examples: Universal Jurisdiction on Wikipedia | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/55981",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/9362/"
]
} |
56,013 | Google collects temporal + location information of Android handsets by default and is only a subpoena away from US authorities. The current administration is concerned that China would be able to use TikTok to track its users in a manner similar to Google. It is my understanding that just about every app has the ability to track users, who are ready to agree to the terms of service. It's unclear to me how any country tracking TikTok users is a national security issue. Is there any line of reasoning that enables one to sort out if the subject matter is a genuine national security issue or political posturing? | An article in Wired took a look at this a few weeks ago. By and large, the experts agree with your assessment that TikTok in particular poses no special security risk and that a ban is not justified. Here's a key paragraph from the Wired piece. TikTok’s fiercest opponents argue that it should be viewed as a dangerous Trojan horse for Chinese Communist Party espionage. On the other side are those who frame that criticism as merely thinly-veiled xenophobia, a result of rising racism toward Chinese people and deteriorating relations between the US and Beijing. In between are plenty of people who aren’t quite sure what to believe. So far, like with Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky a few years before, US officials have provided little evidence for their claims about TikTok aside from pointing to its country of origin. Absent hard proof, what’s left are more extrapolated dangers , like whether the Chinese government, which the US says was responsible for a notorious series of breaches at American institutions, would pilfer user data from TikTok, or censor content on the platform the way it tightly controls the internet within its own borders. Here's a more recent piece from The Atlantic , which goes a little more in-depth and provides some helpful context: In certain respects, TikTok is more of a headache for Washington than any other Chinese company is—even one routinely in the political crosshairs, Huawei. The national-security case against Huawei is much more direct. The firm supplies what is known as critical infrastructure, the nuts and bolts of wireless systems. Any government would, and should, be wary that such vital communications networks could be vulnerable to potential foreign adversaries. But the equipment Huawei makes can readily be supplied by other companies from friendlier nations, such as Sweden’s Ericsson, and its gear can simply be torn out and replaced, as Britain is seeking to do. TikTok presents a very different conundrum. For one, the app is already on millions of American smartphones. Washington’s concerns about data security in regards to China have been heightened by two recent hacks : of the credit-reporting firm Equifax in 2017, and of the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management in 2015. In both cases, security experts blame Beijing. The assumption is that Chinese authorities are compiling dossiers on U.S. citizens for unknown, but probably compromising, purposes. TikTok could be a handy device for stuffing the files with juicy new details. Even more, TikTok is in the business of content. It can just as readily act as a conduit for spreading information as collecting it—and therefore could be a propaganda tool for the Chinese state. But that’s all in theory. There doesn’t seem to be any indisputable evidence that TikTok has shared private data on Americans with China. The platform says it stores its data on Americans in the U.S. and Singapore, and is thus out of the Chinese government’s reach. A lawsuit filed in California last year alleges that TikTok lifted private data and shipped them off to servers in China, though what proof the plaintiff has is unclear. (TikTok wouldn’t comment on an ongoing legal case.) When I pressed Hawley’s office on whether it had any hard evidence against ByteDance or TikTok, its case was based mainly on conjecture : The law in China requires that Chinese companies hand data over to the government, the senator stressed in a comment sent to me. From there, they reach the conclusion that TikTok is, at the very least, a potential threat. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56013",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/11149/"
]
} |
56,014 | The definition of Communism : Communism is a political and economic ideology that positions itself in opposition to liberal democracy and capitalism, advocating instead a classless system in which the means of production are owned communally and private property is nonexistent or severely curtailed. The way I understand classless system is that we won't have any higher level or lower level working people, for example in a office we won't have General Manager, Assistant General Manager, Manager, Assistant Manager, and so on. So, it is very unintuitive that GM will do their job, workers will do their jobs and at the end of month everyone will get the same salary. How is it possible? Even if we disallow modern era class system, in 19th century we had classes in Army, for example, Lieutenants, Majors, and soldiers. And it is natural that Lieutenant was a promoted post, so how come all of them get the same payment (may it be money or just the essentials) when one is higher than the other? It could be the case that I'm misunderstanding the whole idea of Communism, but I have tried and every time I get this same problem. So, please try to explain me the things the way they were and are. | When Marx used the term 'class', he wasn't referring to hierarchical organizational structures. He was referring to more-or-less permanent and impermeable social distinctions. For the sake of the argument, assume it is well accepted that a company of any reasonable size must have (at minimum) a chief executive making global decisions, an assortment of managers implementing those decisions, and an array of workers carrying out the implementation to produce whatever the company produces. The question is this: where do these people come from ? If we have a situation such as the following: Chief executives are always chosen from within a specific group: e.g.: business owners, other chief executives, their children and extended family members. Managers are always chosen from within a second group: e.g., people who have the financial means to attend college and achieve an MBA; distant relations of the first group; entrepreneurs who were able to bankroll their own success. Laborers are always chosen from the rest of the population. These then represent three distinct classes of people. The classes aren't defined by the positions per se , but by the fact that it is extremely rare (if it happens at all) to see someone from the third group rise to the level of the first group, or someone from the first group to fall to the level of the third. This lack of social mobility naturally concentrates wealth and privilege among the highest class, where even the most incompetent member of the highest level lives in luxury and comfort inaccessible to even the most competent and talented member of the lowest level. Marx held that the basis of class structures in all societies was control of the 'means of production': that (whatever it is) which is an essential prerequisite for production to occur. In the Feudal era this was land ownership: land was essential for agricultural production, and land was owned by the aristocratic class, who wielded political authority and took the bulk of the profits. In the Industrial Capitalism era, the means of production was 'the factory' (since no individual can effectively compete against a factory), and so those who owned factories — the industrial capitalist class — held de facto political, social, and economic power. In a classless society there are still hierarchical political and economic positions, but no particular group holds dominance over the highest levels. Every person in the society has the same base chance of becoming a political or economic leader, based solely on his/her skills, talents, and inclinations. The point of nationalizing industry in this model is take control of the means of production, so that the means of production cannot be used by one group to wall off people of other groups. It isn't about bringing everyone to the same level; it is about allowing the natural abilities of everyone to express themselves without being restricted by some artificially imposed conditions based solely on accidental characteristics of social position and birth. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56014",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33314/"
]
} |
56,030 | Suppose an incumbent President loses an election in November and a supreme court vacancy were to emerge right after his loss but before the swearing-in of his successor. Would he be able to fill this vacancy especially seeing that he still is technically the president and his term expires in January according to an amendment to the constitution? | A lame duck President could nominate someone to Supreme Court vacancy, but the Senate may or may not confirm. This happened in 1800 when John Adams lost his re-election. Chief Justice Oliver Elsworth resigned. Adams nominated John Jay (the first Chief Justice who had resigned in 1795 to become Governor of New York.) who was then confirmed by the Senate. Jay refused the appointment. Adams then nominated John Marshall who was confirmed by the Senate. https://blog.oup.com/2016/02/john-marshall-chief-justice/ | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56030",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28683/"
]
} |
56,078 | Given the recent political upheaval and mass protests/riots with scores of people chanting "Black Lives Matter" on the streets, why is it considered white supremacist and racist to say "white lives matter"? Are the two statements not exactly equivalent from an equality standpoint if all races are to be treated the same? | The best statement I've seen of the argument for saying "Black Lives Matter" is in a letter to The Columbus Dispatch from Stanley D. Krider, posted July 25, 2020: I say “Black Lives Matter” because “All” didn’t include Blacks when
whites said “All men are created equal.” I say “Black Lives Matter” because “All” didn’t include Blacks when
whites said “With liberty and justice for all.” I say “Black Lives Matter” because “All” didn’t include Blacks when
whites said “All men have the right to vote.” The point of "Black Lives Matter" is a claim that US policies and practices, especially in policing, do not always treat "All Lives Matter" as fully including Blacks. Saying "Black Lives Matter" is a way of reminding people that the "All" in "All Lives Matter" must include Blacks. Given the history quoted above of "All" not effectively including Blacks, there are grounds for suspecting that those who push "All Lives Matter" are trying to preserve that exclusion, and support a status quo in which Black lives are not treated as mattering as much as the lives of lighter skinned people. "White Lives Matter" goes even further in supporting unequal treatment, in practice, of Blacks in many situations. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56078",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/27206/"
]
} |
56,270 | According to this article, (in Spanish) blood from people recovered from covid-19 is a millionaire's business , laboratories in the US were paying up to thousands of dollars for blood from people who had recovered from Covid-19. According to this other article (also in Spanish) , blood was being sold for 3,000 dollars in Bolivia, but in that country, selling blood is illegal, because it's considering "trafficking". And in Argentina, a proposal to pay people who recovered from Covid-19 for their blood never happened. I have a friend who lost his job due to covid-19 (the business he worked in closed because sales went down), and now he can't pay the rent, if he could sell his own blood to a private clinic or lab or something, that could save him from the bad moment he's going through. What's the logic behind banning the sale of one's own blood in several countries? | Many countries are seeking to move to a system of 100% voluntary (unpaid) blood donations, and many others already have; according to the World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Blood Safety and Availability 2016 , fifty-seven countries reported collecting 100% (or more
than 99%) of their blood supply from voluntary non-remunerated donations. The WHO has long advocated for countries to develop blood donation services on this basis - in 1975, WHA28.72 stated: Noting the extensive and increasing activities of private firms in
trying to establish commercial blood collection and plasmapheresis
projects in developing countries; Expressing serious concern that such
activities may interfere with efforts to establish efficient national
blood transfusion services based on voluntary nonremunerated
donations; Being aware of the higher risk of transmitting diseases
when blood products have been obtained from paid rather than from
voluntary donors, and of the harmful consequences to the health of
donors of too frequent blood donations (one of the causes being
remuneration), [...] URGES Member States: to promote the development of national blood services based on voluntary
nonremunerated donation of blood; There are a variety of arguments employed when advocating for a 100% voluntary blood donation service. Firstly, the issue of coercion. Many organisations, including the WHO, the IFRC, and the Council of Europe argue that the provision of a financial incentive as motivation for donation amounts to coercion of the donor, and is incompatible with individual autonomy. Seemingly small payments can be significant even in developed countries - for example, the German Red Cross has pointed out that "the €25 usually on offer for blood was three times the daily allowance for those on the lowest level of unemployment support in Germany." This leads us to a related argument - under a paid system, donations are more likely to come from those with a poorer background, something which the WHO has labelled 'exploitation': Paid donors are vulnerable to exploitation and commercialization of the
human body as they usually come from the poorer sectors of society and
become paid blood donors due to economic difficulties. Any form of
exploitation of blood donors, including payment for blood, coercion
and the collection of blood from institutionalized or marginalized
communities such as prisoners diminishes the true value of blood
donation. A blood donation is a “gift of life” that cannot be valued
in monetary terms. The commercialization of blood donation is in
breach of the fundamental principle of altruism which voluntary blood
donation enshrines. However, barring payment for blood wouldn't improve the situation of those who may rely on these payments - this is clearly a problem at a deeper level than blood donation. The quote from the WHO above, however, does introduce a more moral-based argument - some believe that putting a price on blood constitutes an objectification of the human being. According to the European Blood Alliance : From a Kantian perspective, the offer and acceptance of payment for
blood could be considered as constituting an instrumentalisation of a
person, in that the paid donor becomes a mere means to the ends of
others. In this view, payment for blood donation would violate the
principle of human dignity. In putting a ‘price’ on a personal ‘good’
– blood – human dignity would be threatened through devaluation of the
person involved. At a more practical level, there are also safety concerns under remunerated donations. The payment incentivises donors to hide factors which would disqualify them from giving blood, for example infections transmitted by blood transfusion or drug abuse. Again, according to the European Blood Alliance: Monetary incentives, as fixed allowances, can encourage undesirable
donor behaviour through concealment of existing risk factors in the
pre-donation interview. This can pose a threat to the quality of
collected blood and ultimately to patient safety. In the South of the
USA, donors from Mexico, some of whom are illegal drug users, travel
across the US border to donate at centres offering even modest
payments, whereas they do not donate in Mexico itself, because payment
for donations there is forbidden. It is noteworthy that similar
practices are presently developing along the eastern borders of
Germany and Austria. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56270",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/12297/"
]
} |
56,292 | There were quite a few allegations that Russia interfered, or at least tried to interfere, with the 2016 US presidential election, and new allegations have started to appear that similar interference in the 2020 election may have started or will soon start. Reams and reams have been published about the evidence for or against these allegations, debates over the fundamental definition of election interference and whether the supposed evidence fits such definition, and what an appropriate penalty for proven electoral interference should be. This question is not about any of that. What would Russia have to gain from interfering with the US election in 2016? Was there an issue of military superiority? Obtaining favorable trade agreements? Coercing a reduction in tariffs? Getting their embassy moved to a better DC neighborhood? Intimidating other countries with their mad leet election interference skills? Again, to be clear, I'm not asking about whether any interference did happen, only what benefits other than "street cred" would be likely obtained by doing so. | Russia would benefit from weakening the United States because that will prevent the US from interfering with Russian actions in the Russian near abroad and from fomenting a color revolution in Russia itself. Personally I do believe in the former but not in the latter. But it does not matter what I believe as long as Russia is afraid, see this RAND study . They could weaken the US by impartially slinging mud in both directions and damaging national cohesion, again referenced by RAND . They could weaken the US by helping to elect a President whom they see as weaker. They could weaken the US by helping to elect a President who is compromised. The idea that Donald Trump is compromised appears unproven to me but it is in the media, like CNN , supported by unusual reluctance to release his tax returns as it is customary. (Mentioning that news story with the qualifier that I consider it unproven is a nasty rhetorical trick, of course, since I did bring it up after all. Would I do that if I saw no fire under the smoke? At least I'm trying to make the reader aware of their reaction.) | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56292",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/9423/"
]
} |
56,333 | I live in Canada, but I follow American politics to some degree, as do most of the people I know. However, I do it as a hobby and realize that American politics really don't have much of an effect on day-to-day life in Canada. Canadian news agencies (CBC, Global, etc) all cover the American Federal elections in great detail. It kind of bugs me that I am constantly bombarded with American politics and political news when I am watching a Canadian news channel. I could just switch to an American channel for that! This trend of presenting American political news as local news, anywhere in the world seems to be common. For example people in Canada, Mexico, Europe, etc seem to know American politics. Also many of the people I know have very heated and deeply-held opinions about American politics, even though they don't even have a say! Often much stronger opinions and interest than they have in Canadian politics. Why does this happen? Why is everyone obsessed with American politics as a story of local interest? | From a European perspective: The U.S. has a great deal of influence in the world, so the presidency of the U.S. is quite likely to affect your own country in some way. For example: In the last 20 years the U.S. invaded Afghanistan & Iraq, wrecked Libya and tried (and is still trying?) to topple Assad in Syria, which at least in part facilitated the refugee crisis that had a great effect on Europe. Furthermore the relationship between the U.S. and Europe is currently as bad as it has ever been at least during my lifetime with Trump raising tariffs, pulling troops out and making explicit economic threats over the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and in general. When you compare that with the rather cordial relationship we had with Obama, it obviously really matters who sits in the White House. From a German perspective: German politics, and this probably holds true for many other countries as well, is quite boring compared to what is taking place in the U.S. American politics is basically a kind of reality-T.V. with great drama, mudslinging, twists & turns and generally enormous amounts of money being spent on it (federal election campaigning in Germany doesn't even cross the 100 million dollar mark in comparison..). American politics is incredibly fake but also very entertaining. Just compare a German election debate to an American one. Or Angela Merkel to whatever presidential candidate for that matter. Excitement looks different... not that I would prefer that kind of excitement in my country, but as said, it is quite entertaining. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56333",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/27213/"
]
} |
56,411 | In 538's Election Forecast , states are highlighted as either having "the closest races" or being "close to the tipping point". What is the difference between these two categories? | To demonstrate the difference, I'm going to use the result of the 2008 election as an example. A close race is a race where the difference between the two candidates is small. In 2008, Missouri was the closest race (in percentage point terms), which McCain won by 0.14%. As we know, though, Obama didn't need Missouri to win that election. The tipping point state is one where, when you sort the states from most Democratic to most Republican, gives the winning candidate their 270th electoral vote . In 2008, this state would have been Colorado; even though Obama won that state by nearly 9%, that's the state that gave him the win in the end. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56411",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/4701/"
]
} |
56,455 | China initiated an anti-dumping investigation against Australian wine. Previously, China had increased tariffs on Australian barley. Why did China do this? Is there merit to this claim? | It's because they previously saw Australia as a weak link in the Western democratic alliance, and are not happy that they are now firmly siding with the U.S. and other Five Eyes. Australia has long been open to Chinese investment and immigration, and until recently had remained, if not neutral, at least moderate in their stance on issues such as sovereignty of the South China Sea. However, over the last couple of years, Australia has carried out a campaign against what they see as undue political and economic influence . For example, they have recently passed a new law to prevent foreign political interference, and launched reviews into foreign interference on university campuses . During the COVID outbreak, Australia called for an investigation into the origins of coronavirus , which China interpreted as a frontal attack. While many in the West may consider Australia's actions quite reasonable, China has correctly noted that it marks a inflection point in relations, with Australia changing from being relatively "compliant" with regard to political matters in return for generous trade privileges , to being firmly within the multi-lateral consensus of the Five Eyes. From their perspective, it is a big change. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56455",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32411/"
]
} |
56,566 | In a recent Economics Explained video "Emergency PSA - The End of YouTube in Australia" at 0:27 and 5:39 , there was a claim that a specific Australian policy may have been timed to be announced while the general population was distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Guardian claims in Take Out the Trash Day – the perfect opportunity to bury bad news that the UK government buries bad news while people are distracted by Christmas. Jo Moore suggested taking advantage of the September 11 attacks to release bad news, but it seems to have been a major blunder . It sounds like a plausible hypothesis, that governments deliberately announce unpopular policies or release bad news when the population is distracted, but I'd like to know whether the hypothesis has been critically examined, and if so, what the conclusions are. | Yes, this has been studied in the case of US presidents, and the commonly held belief seems to be well evidenced. Presidents tend to issue executive orders, and specifically ones that
are likely to generate negative publicity, in coincidence with other
important events that distract the media and the public. CEPR study. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56566",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/270/"
]
} |
56,586 | Suppose Donald Trump was somehow incorrectly presumed dead. Pence takes the oath and becomes President, and sometime after that it is discovered that Trump is actually alive. Does Trump get the Presidency back? If so, does Pence get the Vice Presidency back? | This is a vanishingly unlikely situation. If the President is missing, there has to be a seven-year wait before they can be legally declared dead. At first the VP becomes Acting President, and if the previous president is found then the Acting President returns to being VP. (Unless the Cabinet declare that the President is incapacitated on his/her return and invoke Amendment 25) Then there is an election and whoever wins that election becomes President. If the old President returns after the inauguration then they don't take power again, as their term ended on the 20th January. If the President is not missing, but incorrectly declared dead, then the VP would be sworn in as President. If, somehow, the President recovered, then this assumption of power would be void. As I said both scenarios are vanishingly unlikely, and not discussed in the Constitution, but are well covered in common law handling of missing person probate. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56586",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/30150/"
]
} |
56,607 | I was wondering about how the Republican Party has only won the popular vote once in three decades in a presidential election. Seven out of eight presidential popular votes were won by Democrats. This is a record for either party in winning the popular vote for president. I have added up vote percentages and found that the Democratic Party received a plurality of votes from 1992 to 2016. It won the popular vote average 48.7 to 45.1 percent. This is a 3.6 point win. How have Republicans explained their losses in the national popular vote in most presidential elections since and including 1992? | The predominant explanation, especially since President Trump's victory in 2016, has been that the recent Republican presidential campaign efforts aren't even attempting to win the popular vote, and instead focus on winning the electoral college. For example, Trump himself, a week after winning the election, claimed that he would have campaigned differently if the election was decided by the popular vote: If the election were based on total popular vote I would have
campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and
more easily. The Electoral College is actually genius in that it
brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning
is much different! @realDonaldTrump (1) (2) He repeated these claims more recently in response to Elizabeth Warren calling for the abolition of the electoral college in March 2019: Campaigning for the Popular Vote is much easier & different than
campaigning for the Electoral College. It’s like training for the 100
yard dash vs. a marathon. The brilliance of the Electoral College is
that you must go to many States to win. With the Popular Vote, you go
to just the large States - the Cities would end up running the
Country. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all
power - & we can’t let that happen. I used to like the idea of the
Popular Vote, but now realize the Electoral College is far better for
the U.S.A. @realDonaldTrump (1) (2) This was also alluded to by Pat Rosenstiel, a Republican campaigner and senior consultant to the National Popular Vote. Rosenstiel is a proponent of the organization's attempt to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which attempts to ensure that the presidency would be won by the popular vote winner. Despite acknowledging the Republican party's pretty poor record on the popular vote, he doesn't believe that this change would write the party off: Rosenstiel, who calls himself “a conservative Republican trapped
behind a blue wall in Minnesota,” says it’s wrong to assume
Republicans can’t win the White House on a popular vote. “You change the nature of the system, you change the nature of the
campaign,” he says. Think of it this way: “In NASCAR, I don’t drive to
win every race, I drive to win the points, to win the cup.” In other words, Republicans presidential candidates aren’t even trying
to win the popular vote right now; they’re trying to win the Electoral
College. Presidential campaigns would transform under NPV, Rosenstiel
explains. The candidates might be different. Voters that sit out
elections now might head to the polls, knowing that their individual
vote — and not just the partisan swing of their state — would count. Colorado Springs Independent (Archive.org) This explanation is also presented by Republicans on the other side of the National Popular Vote debate - speaking in opposition to the passage of the bill in Nevada in April 2019, Jim DeGraffenreid, Vice Chairman of the NV Republican Party, voiced the same sentiments: We often hear the argument that National Popular Vote would correct
the so-called failure of the Electoral College which occurs when the
winner of the popular vote does not win the Electoral vote. However,
it's important to note that this is not a failure. Under the
Constitutional system, candidates are not trying to win the popular
vote, so it's actually kind of accidental when they do, at least in a
close race. No hockey game has ever been decided by how many
touchdowns the winning team scored, because hockey players aren't
trying to score touchdowns. I think everyone on both sides of this
issue today can agree that candidates will campaign differently if the
goal is to win the popular vote. There's simply no way to know who
would have won the popular vote in any past election because no
candidate was ever trying to do so. Testimony on AB186 - National Popular Vote | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56607",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33713/"
]
} |
56,657 | Imagine, that elected president is aged/ill in time of elections, so he can hardly perform his duty. But he was nominated for presidency and now is elected. Must a minimum time pass before the US Vice President can replace the US President? Would it be juridically ok if the Vice President replaces the President immediately after the elections? | There are three periods of time at which this question has different answers. Immediately after the elections, you might run into some problems, but immediately after the inauguration, there is no minimum time before the Vice President can take over. After election day, before the electoral college votes As the presidential electors haven't yet voted, there is no official President elect, although they may be given that title unofficially by the media. At this point, a candidate's party could replace the individuals on their ticket at will (subject to their party rules), or instruct their party's presidential electors to vote for a different candidate. Whether they would do so is impossible to predict, and may fall foul of faithless elector laws , which vary from state-to-state. In any case, the candidate which receives over 270 electoral votes, no matter whether that candidate ran for the VP position during the campaign, will become the President elect. This redistribution of electoral votes has only happened to a candidate once - in 1872, Horace Greeley, the Liberal Republican candidate, died before the college could meet. His 66 electoral votes were split between four other candidates , and only 18 went to his running-mate. After the electoral college votes, before inauguration The most relevant legislation would seem to be the 20th Amendment , section 3 of which states: If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the
President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President
elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been
chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the
President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President
elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified;
and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a
President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified,
declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one
who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly
until a President or Vice President shall have qualified. So the Vice President may only become Acting President immediately if the President dies, or has failed to qualify, rather than being incapable. The Vice President elect cannot replace the President elect before the inaugration. After inauguration The relevant legislation, in this case, is section 3-4 of the 25th Amendment , which state: Section 3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the
Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written
declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of
his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to
the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice
President as Acting President. Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal
officers of the executive departments or of such other body as
Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of
the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their
written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the
powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately
assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore
of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his
written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the
powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a
majority of either the principal officers of the executive department
or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within
four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker
of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the
President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.
Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within
forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress,
within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written
declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days
after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote
of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers
and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to
discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall
resume the powers and duties of his office. In both cases, voluntary (section 3), and involuntary (section 4), there is no minimum time which must elapse before the Vice President assumes the role of Acting President. If the act is voluntary, the VP takes over immediately after the President declares themself incapable, and if not, then the VP takes over immediately after declaring the President incapable, supported by a majority of principal officers. So, to sum up, there is no minimum time frame for replacement unless the replacement comes in the period between the electoral college voting, and before the President elect is inaugurated. At this point, the VP only becomes Acting President at the inauguration if the President elect actually dies, or is found to be ineligible for office - as a result, they would have to wait until after the inauguration to replace the President using the 25th Amendment. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56657",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/20263/"
]
} |
56,747 | There is a widespread belief that policing in the USA suffers from systemic racism. Let us suppose that Joe Biden gets elected President and decides that this is a priority. Let us also suppose that he can get legislation passed to support his policies. However, policing in the USA is mostly a local affair. The kind of everyday policing that is at issue here is generally organized at a county or city level. Wikipedia says : There are 17,985 U.S. police agencies in the United States. How much influence can the federal executive and legislature have on the way in which local policing is done in the USA? Edit: In response to comments. The question about "who polices the police" has useful answers; the fact that federal charges can be brought where local oversight fails is important because the executive could easily beef up that aspect of enforcement without any new laws. However I'm also interested in ways in which federal pressure can be bought to bear on systemic problems in recruitment, promotion and general discipline. | How much influence can the federal executive and legislature have on the way in which local policing is done in the USA? The federal government can influence state and local police agencies in the same way that the federal government influences state and local governments in other regards: Threaten to stop supplying the monies the federal government provides to those state and local governments. There are precedents galore for this. One example: Strictly speaking, the federal government did not have the constitutional authority in 1974 to establish a nationwide 55 mile per hour speed limit. That nationwide speed limit nonetheless came to pass when the federal government threatened to remove federal highway funding to those states that did not reduce their top speed limit to 55 miles per hour. The federal government directly provides funds to local and state police agencies through a number of mechanisms. It also provides funds to local and state governments that aren't directly related to policing but that can be tied to policing behaviors should the federal government wish to do so. Federal monies provided to state and and local governments always come with strings attached. In general, state and local governments love those federal funds but hate the strings attached with those funds. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56747",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/13141/"
]
} |
56,757 | Given the recent civil unrest in the United States, where after three months of rioting, protesters and counter-protesters have begun shooting each other on the streets with at least three dead, I started wondering about what the definition of a civil war was. The Wikipedia page on civil wars lists a few criteria that certain academics have used to classify civil wars, ranging from "100 people dead" to "1000 people dead per year of the conflict", along with the definition used by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is a bit more in-depth and doesn't mention a number of casualties at all. This lead to me wondering if there was an official definition of a civil war in either United States law or official policy, or in international law in general. At what point would intrastate violence be considered a civil war? | This is usually left for the historians to sort out. The key point at which something is a "war" is when potentially lethal unprovoked violence is not treated as a criminal matter, but as a military matter. Therefore, in the US civil war, nobody thought of prosecuting the union and confederate soldiers for "murder" even though they purposefully killed enemy soldiers. But before the war, actions like John Brown's raid on the Harper Ferry Armory were certainly treated as criminal. There is also a rhetorical matter in choosing to call an event a "civil war" or a "revolution" or "rioting" or "terrorism". The IRA may have seen the period of the "Troubles" as a civil war, but the British government considered it to be criminal terrorism. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56757",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/17521/"
]
} |
56,762 | The Constitution of the United States of America frequently refers to the President using male pronouns. For instance: He shall hold his Office Not once is the president referred to with a female pronoun, or even with joint pronouns (e.g. "he or she"). Does this indicate that the Constitution does not allow for a female president (since a woman would not be able to fulfill such functions as e.g. "he shall nominate")? Some brief online reading found that most people think it does not, but they could not agree on the reason. One suggestion was that the Nineteenth Amendment grants women the right to be President. This doesn't seem so compelling, as the Nineteenth Amendment only discusses the right to vote. Another suggestion was that the Constitution several times refers to the President as "person" which could be taken to be inclusive of men and women. While "person" certainly does not exclude women, if "he" does exclude women then I'm not sure that "person" would automatically include them, instead of just being a broader term. A third suggestion was that the term "he" was used as a unisex term to refer to any person. Is there a definitive answer to this question? | When the US Constitution was written, "he", "him" and similar were used to refer to all persons regardless of sex. Per Lexico (which claims to use the Oxford English Dictionary as its source): He
Pronunciation: /hē/ /hi:/ pronoun third person singular 1. Used to refer to a man, boy, or male animal previously mentioned or easily identified. ‘everyone liked my father—he was the perfect gentleman’ 1.1 Used to refer to a person or animal of unspecified sex (in modern use, now chiefly replaced by “he or she” or “they”) ‘every child needs to know that he is loved’ 1.2 Any person (in modern use, now chiefly replaced by “anyone” or “the person”) ‘he who is silent consents’ ... Usage Until recently, he was used to refer to a person of unspecified sex ,
as in every child needs to know that he is loved, but this is now
generally regarded as old-fashioned or sexist. ... | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56762",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/24434/"
]
} |
56,822 | Diplomatic immunity says that diplomats cannot be prosecuted in the country they are visiting as a diplomat for. It can be interpreted as saying that diplomats are above the law in the country they are visiting. If there is a concept that no one is above the law, why isn't the concept of diplomatic immunity rejected in countries where nobody is supposed to be above the law? I am asking because this has been abused multiple times. Most of these violations are minor like parking, but others are very serious. | I think one of the best explanations for this comes in the preambulatory clauses of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations which codified diplomatic immunity, and which has been ratified by 192 states. It reads: The States Parties to the present Convention, Recalling that peoples
of all nations from ancient times have recognized the status of
diplomatic agents, Having in mind the purposes and principles of the
Charter of the United Nations concerning the sovereign equality of
States, the maintenance of international peace and security, and the
promotion of friendly relations among nations, Believing that an
international convention on diplomatic intercourse, privileges and
immunities would contribute to the development of friendly relations
among nations, irrespective of their differing constitutional and
social systems, Realizing that the purpose of such privileges and
immunities is not to benefit individuals but to ensure the efficient
performance of the functions of diplomatic missions as representing
States, Affirming that the rules of customary international law should
continue to govern questions not expressly regulated by the provisions
of the present Convention, Have agreed as follows: ... Diplomatic immunity is deemed necessary for the continuation of international diplomacy because it ensures a country's diplomats' safety from persecution by the authorities. You, do, however, raise a good point that this can often be taken advantage of - some examples that spring to mind include the estimated £116m of congestion charges owed to Transport for London by diplomats, and the death of Harry Dunn in a vehicle collision in 2019. However, a blanket ban on the prosecution of diplomats precludes a situation where the diplomat's country might call into question the validity of charges against a diplomat, and also prevents countries manufacturing charges in the first place. In addition, although the Vienna Convention ensures that diplomats are in some ways above the law, it doesn't make them completely immune. Immunity can be waived by the sending country (Article 32), and the host country can always expel diplomats by declaring them persona non grata (Article 9). In addition, there are exceptions to the immunity, for example, diplomats can be prosecuted with relation to any professional or commercial activity they have conducted outside of their official functions. In general, though, diplomatic immunity is respected even in the most egregious cases of clear wrongdoing, as to do otherwise would be to invite other countries to retaliate with relation to one's own diplomats. It would also call into question the independence of the judiciary, potentially leading to an even worse breakdown in law and order than that caused by a few diplomats enjoying immunity from prosecution. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56822",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33713/"
]
} |
56,898 | I recently read about a strange trend: Since the start of the 20th century , the United States has stepped in or started conflicts involving the direct use of military force mainly under presidents from the Democratic Party . Is this trend really present? | Part of the issue with answering this question is defining what counts as a foreign intervention. The Congressional Research Service has published a report entitled Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020 , which is an attempt to "provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad". However, it is questionable whether some of these deployments really count as interventions in foreign conflicts - for example, the list includes entries such as: 1904 - Tangiers, Morocco A squadron demonstrated to force the release of a kidnapped Americans
Ion Hanford Perdicaris and Cromwell Varley. Marines were landed to
protect the consul general. 1922 - Turkey A landing force was sent ashore with consent of both Greek and
Turkish authorities to protect American lives and property when the Turkish Nationalists entered
Smyrna. 1948 - China Marines were dispatched to Nanking to protect the American embassy when the city fell to
Communist troops, and to Shanghai to aid in the protection and evacuation of Americans. It does, however, note the eleven times in its history that the US has formally declared war, as well as the number of informal declarations of war. The instances differ greatly in number of forces, purpose, extent of
hostilities, and legal authorization. Eleven times in its history, the
United States has formally declared war against foreign nations. These
11 U.S. war declarations encompassed five separate wars: the war with
Great Britain declared in 1812; the war with Mexico declared in 1846;
the war with Spain declared in 1898; the First World War, during which
the United States declared war with Germany and with Austria-Hungary
during 1917; and World War II, during which the United States declared
war against Japan, Germany, and Italy in 1941, and against Bulgaria,
Hungary, and Rumania in 1942. Some of the instances were extended
military engagements that might be considered undeclared wars. These
include the Undeclared Naval War with France from 1798 to 1800; the
First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805; the Second Barbary War of 1815;
the Korean War of 1950-1953; the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973; the
Persian Gulf War of 1991; global actions against foreign terrorists
after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; and the
war with Iraq in 2003. With the exception of the Korean War, all of
these conflicts received congressional authorization in some form
short of a formal declaration of war. If we look at these conflicts, all formal declarations of war since 1900 have come under Democratic presidents - those related to WWI & II, while the informal declarations of war are more mixed; the Korean & Vietnam wars began under Democratic presidents, while the Gulf War, the response to the 9/11 attacks, and the Iraq war all came under Republicans; Bush Sr. & Jr. This would seem to be a fairly even split. In an optimistic attempt to view this issue in a more data-focused manner, I've looked at the Militarized Interstate Disputes dataset maintained by the Correlates of War Project, which lists information about 'conflicts in which one or more states threaten, display, or use force against one or more other states'. I've narrowed the dataset down to conflicts which involved the US, began after 1900, and in which the hostility level reached a level of '4' - indicating use of force, rather than just a display of force. Below is a graph of these conflicts, the size of each red or blue dot relating to the fatality level, and the color of each relating to the party of the President. On a purely numerical basis, Republican presidents oversaw 53 of these incidents, while Democratic presidents oversaw 41. However, when we look at the severity of the disputes, those which came under Democratic presidents reached, on average, a higher level of hostility and a higher fatality level. Note - 'Interstate' refers to conflicts between two or more sovereign states, not two or more states within the USA. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56898",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/20263/"
]
} |
56,899 | Recently, the current United States President suggested that people in North Carolina vote twice in the upcoming election: once by postal vote and once in person. Apparently there are measures in place to prevent people from voting twice . Is there any particular significance in picking North Carolina to suggest this to? I suspect there is some motive behind it (though motives aren't something anyone can answer here so that isn't my question, only whether North Carolina is significant in any way). | This is the modern mass-media era. Trump may have been speaking in North Carolina, but he — like any other national level candidate — is aware that he is speaking to the nation as a whole. Note that after he made this statement — as the article points out — he followed it with a tweet on the same subject, explicitly aimed at a national audience. If I were to read Trump generously, I would point out that the idea of verifying that your mail-in ballot has been received is a good idea. Many states have implemented (or are implementing) web portals where voters can check that their ballots have arrived. North Carolina in particular is currently implementing a portal called ' BallotTrax ' (see the notes at the end of the link). In states that have strict deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots, it might be worthwhile checking the portal on election day. If the ballot has not yet been received, you can go to the polling place and ask the workers specifically if you can file a provisional ballot because your mail-in ballot has not been acknowledged. The rules for that will vary from state to state, but poll workers will have been trained for that issue, and if you explicitly ask for a provisional ballot for that reason you can avoid any accusation of fraud. Everyone should check their own state's voting webpage to locate their state's tracking portal. As of this writing, neither the Federal government nor some zealously political Wikipedia editor has amassed a comprehensive list of this voting resource. The former omission is unfortunately typical, but the latter is (frankly) surprising. However, Trump being Trump, I find it unlikely that he meant this statement as a Public Service Announcement to aid worried voters. It seems far more likely that this is yet another effort to troll the democratic institution of voting, generating conflict, doubt, and insecurity which delegitimizes the election process. Now that Trump has made this comment — one that he will undoubtable double-down on, as he doubles-down on all of his more outrageous statements — we can safely assume that a significant portion of his most energized base will follow through, leading to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people attempting to vote twice. There are only three possible outcomes from this, in increasing order of severity: The vast majority of such attempts will be caught and the doubled-ballots discarded. This will have no effect on the election outcome, but undoubtably the large-scale attempt at fraud (or if you prefer, 'testing') will be reported by the news media. Since the duplicates will be discarded without reading or recording their content, there will be no way to correlate the influx with Trump's base, and so Trump (if he loses) will use the news reports to attack the election and accuse the Democrats of massive fraud. It's worth noting in this regard that Trump's statements might also convince his energized opponents to defensively cast doubled ballots — an extremely bad idea, but partisans are not always the most clear-thinking people — which will further confuse the issue. A sufficient number of duplicate votes will pass through the system to affect the outcome. If Trump wins he will declare the election valid and fair and block any effort to investigate; if Trump loses he will again accuse the Democrats of fraud, and use his lame-duck period to try to overturn the election results. Certain districts might independently use the influx of duplicate ballots to create fraud on a massive scale, selectively processing a number of the duplicate ballots on the assumption that no one will look if Trump retakes the oval office. Any of these outcomes will ultimately benefit Trump, assuming he can leverage the resulting confusion and partisan hostility to his advantage. Trolling the institution of voting in this way has no immediate cost for him and several potential long-term benefits, despite the fact that it damages the institution in question. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56899",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/11459/"
]
} |
56,957 | I know the military is supposed to be apolitical to a certain degree. But I have found a Pew poll saying that military veterans lean right. This is more pronounced when comparing younger vets to younger non-veterans. Is the idea of serving in the military a predominantly right-wing concept? Among left-wingers that I know (including myself), none of us could imagine voluntarily serving in the army. Is this a general trend, which results in a US Army which is primarily composed of Conservatives? | The modern US military is self-selecting — a professional army, not a conscripted one — so I doubt this effect would hold true historically. But as a rule, the political Right tends to value military service as a symbol of deep patriotism. As a consequence, those who lean politically Right who want to serve the nation will be more likely to think of the military than those on the Left (who will think of such service more in terms of domestic political action), and those who lean politically Right will be even more likely to consider the military as a career, not a mere tour of duty. Further, all the branches of the military (with the exception of the 'Space Force' which is too new for this to be relevant) are deeply committed to tradition and history, commitments that foster a conservative outlook. For example, few people outside the Marines think about Tripoli and the 19th century Barbary Wars, or understand the point of a Marine Color Guard; but few Marines forget them, and it is unwise to disrespect either to a Marine's face. In short, the modern professional military both attracts people with the kind of national pride that is typical of conservatives, and fosters conservative attitudes through its attention to tradition, history, and honor. In a way, we can see this as the flip side of why academia tends to be liberal, as academia draws in and fosters liberal attitudes. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56957",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
]
} |
56,969 | Take, for example, Alexander Lukashenko. He is in power for the last 26 years. How does he maintain the chain of command? Why do his ministers obey him? Why do bureaucrats obey him? Why does the Army obey him?
Why wasn't he toppled yet? The same question can be asked about Vladimir Putin. What is their common secret about keeping a grip on the top office? | This is a question that the selectorate theory tries to answer. Essentially: As a dictator, you need to identify the people who are essential to you remaining in power. For example: the controllers of the army, the police, etc. Then, you need to establish control of the revenue stream. This can take the form of taxes from the people, or natural resources that can be extracted to generate money. Now, ensure the loyalty of the essential people by paying them using the revenue stream. Pay them enough so that they will remain loyal to you and follow your commands, but not so much that they cease to be dependent upon you. You have now established a working dictatorship. This is how dictatorships rise to power and stay there for many years. All that is needed is the support of a relatively small group of people, and the people can be kept under control by the army/police even if a majority disapproves of the current government. If you don't think this is realistic, picture five people with machine guns in a room with one hundred people. Why do the army/police follow their superiors' orders? Because the dictator's essential supporters don't just take the money they get from the dictator for themselves, they also redistribute it to their followers in order to ensure their loyalty, who do the same to their followers -- all the way down the chain of command. There are some exceptions to this system. The first is protests. If the people are able to gather in a large enough group and organize, they are sometimes able to overwhelm the power of the state. Then, the state is either forced to make reforms, or it is completely overthrown and replaced with another. This does not happen often, however; usually, the government is able to repress the rebellions, unless the leader displeased his essential backers, and they support it. However, sometimes, such as when hundreds of thousands of people gather together in the aftermath of a natural disaster, the protests can succeed and the government is overthrown or forced to institute reforms. Another thing that may cause a dictatorial government to fall or democratize is a failing economy. As less and less money trickles back to the government, the leader becomes unable to pay its essential backers as much as it used to. As a result, they may decline to suppress the population in the face of rebellion, and the government will be overthrown. Alternatively, the regime may decide to increase the citizens' productivity by providing public goods and increasing freedoms. For dictators, this path is risky, however, as this simply increases the ability of the people to protest for more reforms. For more information, you can check out The Dictator's Handbook or watch CGP Grey's video on the subject Rules for Rulers for a simple explanation. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/56969",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/32479/"
]
} |
57,128 | I read an article that said that the most recent COVID-19 relief bill was not passed because Democrats didn't think it was enough. The article is here: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/11/gops-coronavirus-bill-didnt-pass-these-programs-still-provide-relief.html and it said: Congressional Democrats say the bill did not provide enough relief for financially-strapped Americans. They want a continuation of the extra $600 per week in unemployment insurance that the CARES Act provided, as well as money for housing relief and a second round of stimulus checks. Why can't they pass the Republican bill and if turns out not to be enough pass another bill? | What makes you think they could simply "pass another one later"? They've already tried that and failed. They wanted a 4th piece of relief legislation back when both chambers quickly passed three pieces, and have passed more since (and tons of other non-covid bills as well). But the Senate basically acted like it (and all that other stuff) never existed. Why? Because the first three bills already did what the Senate Republicans wanted (or too much). So now they've zero reason to do anything else, and the Democrats and the House have zero bargaining chips and no leverage. Your plan would just make that worse: give Senate Republicans even more of what they want while never getting anything they want. Furthermore, the so-called "skinny" relief was considered unconscionable non-relief to many Democrats: hundreds of millions in bail-outs for the coal industry, billions for the Pentagon, but scraps at best for unemployment, food assistance, healthcare, etc. for the actual people. This bill wasn't "getting at least something done" from their perspective, it was making everything they're fighting against worse and getting nothing in return. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57128",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/34040/"
]
} |
57,149 | It seems that, prior to WWII, lands conquered in war were considered legitimately part of the winning state . After WWII, the international doctrine changed that territories acquired in an aggressive war are not legitimately part of the winning state. However, Israel's 1967 War was by all definitions not an aggressive war but rather a defensive war . So, why are the Golan Heights and the West Bank not recognized as legitimate parts of the State of Israel by some entities? Note that I am not asking about the implications of the decision to not recognize Israeli rule in the areas under discussion. Rather, I am asking why the acquisition of territory in a defensive war is not generally recognized, both in this specific case and perhaps in other cases as examples may be provided. A corollary which may be addressed would be: if territory cannot be legitimately won in an aggressive war, can territory be legitimately lost in an aggressive war? | The general philosophy of post-WWII international order is that the inhabitants of a territory are entitled to self-determination . While there are still many political and historical obstacles to the general application of this principle, it is clear that any kind of military conquest contradicts this principle: it is simply not morally acceptable anymore to grab land by force in any circumstances. This is evidenced by the clear historical trend of the decolonization process : under this self-determination principle, colonizing countries typically have to organize referendums, and they must leave the colonized country if this is what the inhabitants want. One may also note that there hasn't been any successful conquest war accepted by the international community since WWII. For instance nobody would ever consider that the US has any right to keep territories in Afghanistan, even if it can arguably be seen as a defensive war. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57149",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/5736/"
]
} |
57,152 | AP news states flatly that: Mail-in voting isn’t allowed in France. What's the usual reason invoked by French politicians in making this prohibition? | France allowed mail-in voting from 1958 to 1975. It was replaced by proxy voting by law 75-1239 in December 1975. The reasons given at the time to get rid of mail-in voting are the same reasons not to reintroduce it today, namely, that it can and did permit significant fraud. Electoral fraud is difficult to quantify, mostly because all that can be reliably quantified is detected fraud. The political discourse on electoral fraud is often motivated by direct interest more than demonstrated observation. ( Nathalie Dompnier. La mesure des fraudes électorales : difficultés méthodologiques et enjeux politiques . In Histoire & Mesure, XXII – 1 | 2007, p. 123–144. ) (Not that this is surprising when it comes to politics.) So it is difficult to evaluate the precise impact of fraud. However its possibility and its existence are well-established. Mail-in voting offers opportunities for fraud A major difficulty in organizing political voting is that no single person or organization is trusted to tally and report votes sincerely. A trustworthy voting process must make any attempt at tampering evident. This is very difficult with mail-in voting because the chain of custody is long. The voting process in France ensures that every point of the chain of custody of votes and vote tallies is verified by multiple people, and any voter is authorized to observe it. Voting is done with paper ballots which the voter places in a transparent ballot box, which never leaves the polling station. Any voter who is registered in the same municipality can observe both the voting (which takes place over a single day) and the tallying at the polling station. Fraud at this stage requires controlling or intimidating all would-be observers, which is a high threshold. The threshold for polling-station fraud over mail-in votes is a lot lower. It is impractical to verify that the mail received over the course of days or even weeks was kept securely, that none of it was thrown away and that extra votes are not added. It is also more difficult to prevent impersonation with mailed-in votes. At best, casting a mail-in vote on behalf of someone else requires the knowledge of some secret code that was mailed to the voter, and of the voter's signature. Both of these are very easy to do for the entity that organizes the vote. Other would-be fraudsters need to intercept mail, which is a higher threshold, but less high than impersonating someone who is supposed to be physically present. Another difficulty with mail-in voting is that it makes coercion and vote selling easy. Even if it was possible to validate the chain of custody of the ballot after it was filled by the voter, remote voting makes it impossible to verify that the voter could cast their vote confidentially. The reason that usually comes up in political discussions and in the press is fraud through an opaque of chain of custody. Opposition to mail-in voting in France before its suppression in 1975 The newspaper of record Le Monde announced the 1975 bill in an article titled “To reduce electoral fraud, mail-in voting is abandoned” . (Links to Le Monde may be subscribers-only.) The government shall propose a bill amending the electoral code and the legal code of municipal government. It augments the measures against electoral fraud that are already law with a three series of measures regarding the revision of electoral rolls, voting procedures, and the powers of administrative courts over electoral disputes. (…) The bill removes the possibility of mail-in voting. It is replaced by a proxy vote for people who cannot participate in the vote due to a compelling professional reason or a physical inability. (Proxy voting has since been generalized to simply require a self-sworn statement that you will not be able to vote in person.) The subsequent article announcing that the Senate had adopted the law again stated an emphasis on combatting electoral fraud. Even before 1975, there had been concerns about mail-in voting leading to stricter legislation. Citing an article titled “The fight against electoral fraud” in Le Monde dated 1968-04-04 : The process of mail-in voting is maintained, but it is improved with extra guarantees. Introduced by the express wish of General de Gaulle before the 1958 referendum [ context ], mail-in voting has been widely used for fraud. Nevertheless the government estimates that it is a method that is well suited to the conditions of modern life where holidays and travel are increasingly common. Therefore it will be maintained. (The 1968 law added minor extra oversight.) A 2020 article on France TV Infos cites a few examples that were highly publicized in 1975, such as: 200 mail-in votes were fraudulent: 35 of them were permitted by a medical certificate established by a doctor from [a distant town] who had died in 1971… two years earlier. Many other certificates were crudely forged, written by the same hand, and supposedly written by practitioners who had no knowledge of them. ( Le Monde , 1973-03-13 ) (You could only mail in your vote if you were unable to attend the polls in person, which required a written justification such as a medical certificate.) And from a November 1975 article , a statement by a prominent Corsican politician after the announcement of the 1975 bill suppressing mail-in voting: Mail-in voting, which could be excellent in principle, was absolutely detestable in the way it was applied. The government preferred a radical suppression to a modification of mail-in voting. It will replace it by proxy voting, which is not completely safe. We must carefully observe how the law is applied if we wish to sanitize the electoral climate. For context, electoral fraud was and is more prevalent in Corsica than in the rest of the country. The article goes on to mention that in Ajaccio (the largest city in Corsica), one list had obtained 33.5% of the physical votes but 90% of the mail-in votes in the first round, and similar figures in the second round . Official rationale for the 1975 bill Here are some excerpts from the rationale for the bill given by Jacques Limouzy, the member of parliament who was the advocate for the bill. ( Débats parlementaires : Assemblée nationale, compte-rendu intégral des scéances , 1975–1976, n°116 , p. 9366–9368) There are (…) within the electoral process certain preferential areas where fraud is more prevalent because the offered facility creates an easy temptation, an extra propensity, sometimes an almost indecent provocation. Such, ladies and gentlemen, is mail-in voting. (Snipped: remarks about fraud being more common certain regions.) Here also — observers generally agree on this point — mail-in voting is one of the preferred methods for fraud. The idea of removing mail-in voting and replacing it by proxy voting has therefore been generally admitted in the [ parliamentary ] legal commission. Limouzy then argues to restrict the scope of proxy voting, which would be the next easiest fraud target when it replaces mail-in voting. He also discusses the modalities, insisting on making it accessible (you register for proxy voting at the local police station). The interior minister Michel Poniatowski gave similar arguments ( id. , p. 9368–9370). Among the 147 countries of the world, less than 25 are democratic, that is to say, they are countries where the people rules the nation directly or through its elected representatives. (…) There is no democracy when a party maintains a monopoly on candidacy. Neither is there democracy when the voting is not secret. Nor is there true democracy when some people use liberal dispositions of the electoral code in order to taint it through fraud. (…) Since the instauration of [democracy] in France, our electoral legislation has evolved along two axes, which we are today starting to realize do not necessarily coincide. The first axis is the concern to make suffrage ever more open and easier. (…) The second axis (…) has been the quest for an ever more sincere vote. (…) The existence or the possibility of certain abuses drives the Government to propose that you modify the electoral legislation so that instances of fraud, which reflect a shameful degradation of political mores in democracies, shall cease as far as possible. Fraudsters exhibit extreme ingenuity and fertile imagination, and their processes are often hard to prove. I shall therefore not have the pretense to state that the present bill will eliminate all possibility for fraud. It has at least the effect of reducing its main three sources: the manipulation of registration on electoral rolls, mail-in voting, and the perpetuation of elected representatives through fraud. (Snipped: discussion of improvements to the accuracy of electoral rolls.) This bill also carries a remedy to the abuse that is caused by remote voting through mail. The fraud that this votation mode permits are well known. They have scarcely any technical difficulty. (…) Thus the mayor, who has a monopoly on mobilizing voters by mail [ I think this means the mayor oversees the sending of absentee ballots ], has at his disposal a group of voters whose votes he can use to his own interest. In the last days of the campaign, these “stand-in voters” supposedly request a mail-in ballot at the city hall, under the pretense of sickness. The necessary instruments for a mail-in vote are mailed at the last minute to the purported address of the “stand-in voter”. It ( sic. ) is intercepted, or it is returned to the sender with the mention “unknown recipient at the stated address”: the mayor can then destroy it since he knows that the vote has already been posted. This type of fraud is unfortunately common. (…) At the same time, the mayor can neutralize mailed-in ballots cast by voters whom he suspects of being hostile to him or to the candidate that he favors. All he has to do is to send the instruments too late, or to cause the enveloppes that he has received to disappear, or to declare that they were empty. Such abuse is not limited to this or that district. A mere local consensus is enough for it to happen. But one often forgets that it also has a partisan basis. I am especially thinking of certain districts where the elected representatives serve parties that are strongly centralized, structured and organized. The terrain is then highly favorable to fraud. (As far as I know, he's referring to the communist party.) However, I would like to state that such fraud is not limited to certain regions or certain political formations. I will give you a few examples, taken over the past two and a half years. They fill seven pages! I will not name the locations or parties involved: they are honestly spread over the whole horizon. (…) I gave these examples to give you an idea of the extent of this fraud. But one should not exaggerate: the vast majority of mayors are of perfect correction and probity, and I would say that 96 or 97% of our 38,000 mayors would never lend themselves to such operations. Unfortunately, 3 to 4 per cent do. We must therefore eliminate everything that could allow them to lend themselves to such shenanigans. Here are some statistics. For the March 1971 municipal elections, the number of complaints to the State Council [ the electoral commission ] was 463. The State Council cancelled 32 of those elections in full and 216 in part. (…) For the 1973 district elections, 29 affairs have been judged leading to 9 cancellations. But many cases to not result in a complaint to the State Council. These examples and figures show that one must not neglect this fraud situation or believe that it is specific to this or that district. The lists that I have here with me concern municipalities in 60 different districts [ out of 99 ]. The Assembly must therefore grant a great deal of attention to the bill that is submitted to it, especially since fraud through mail-in voting and registration on electoral rolls has been seen to increase rapidly over the last ten years. In these conditions, the Government has no choice, given the abuse that mail-in voting leads to, but to propose its complete suppression. I wish to state that in our democracy, mail-in voting is a subsidiary voting method, initially created to avoid requiring electors to attend polling in person if they were unable to do so, and that it exists in almost no other democracy. It is not logical to link mail-in voting with democracy when the abuse of this voting method casts a discredit on democracy, on voters and on those who are elected. On the other hand, mail-in voting will be replaced by proxy voting, which carries more guarantees, since it requires the voter to appear before a legal authority, and the proxy to vote in person. (Snipped: how proxy voting is organized to reduce the opportunities for fraud.) | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/18373/"
]
} |
57,177 | This surprising New York Times article says many US voters can't tell what political positions their candidate espouse, and in fact appear to simply attach their favored positions onto their candidate. Strikingly, a majority (59%) of Trump voters support requiring masks (only 18% are opposed), and 81% of Trump voters who support mandatory masking think Trump does as well. Similarly, 39% of Trump voters support closing nonessential businesses (37% are opposed), and 75% of Trump supporters who want to close businesses believe that the president does as well. Finally, 34% of Trump voters support WHO membership (39% are opposed), and 70% of Trump supporters who support WHO membership believe Trump supports it. The article calls the phenomenon "projection". This phenomenon is surprising to me, seems it sounds so irrational. I am wondering if it applies to humans as a whole, or if it's unique to the US. I couldn't find anything via Google and there're no (?) relevant results on the Wikipedia disambiguation page for ' projection ' either. | This article is based on conclusions from a survey conducted through a company called Lucid, which does not release any of its data online. Some of the authors may have released more information, I haven't been able to find anything, perhaps it's merely pending publication. So my answer will simply presume that the information is correct and well-controlled for biases, and it was written by academics whose focus is attempting to answer these kinds of questions, so it's a reasonable thing to presume. The question of whether or not people vote based on party affiliation or knowledge and consideration of policy is not limited to the US. In fact one of the authors of this article, Eric Guntermann, has a paper under review titled Policy Preferences Do Influence Vote Choice: Evidence from the 2017 French Presidential Election in which they write Scholars have long debated whether policy preferences motivate vote
choice, as expected in models of policy representation. This debate
has persisted for so long because nearly all analyses of vote choice
are liable to the critique that the policy preferences in question are
endogenous to party preferences. [...] We conclude that policy
preferences clearly do matter to vote choice and that this effect is
most visible when a new party emerges. So in the absence of information, people presume that the views of their political party aligns with their own views. The authors imply that as election day approaches, people will become more and more informed (citation needed, though it seems a reasonable assumption), and that this will likely have an impact on voter choice: Since voters increasingly pay attention to the presidential race as
Election Day approaches, Mr. Trump has reason to worry that voters
will learn more about his stances. Casual reading could infer from this article that US citizens are completely irrational, but I would argue that the idea is instead that when you are faithful to a party, and you do not know its position on a question, you will not pay much attention and assume by default that the party agrees with you. Until the day you realize that it doesn't. This day is much more likely to happen the closer you get to an election. There is nothing uniquely american about this process. There is another component that argues that affiliation with a party influences your policy beliefs, and that you will change your beliefs to conform with the party you adhere to, particularly in certain contexts. You can find more information about that in a previous paper by Eric Guntermann. Study 2, a survey experiment in Galicia, shows that party cue effects
only occur when participants are exposed to competing cues from their
preferred party and from a disliked party. Parties thus influence
opinions when they adopt contrasting positions even on issues that are
rooted in identity. For evidence that the specific cognitive bias of projection, or assuming that the party you support agrees with your values, occurs in other parts of the world, I recommend reading more about assimilation and contrast effects in voter projections . Assimilation is when you presume that a political party you like will agree with you, and constrast is when you presume that a political party you don't like will disagree with you. The study I linked is a bit old (2001) but shows this effect in three countries, and now that you know what it's called (more than just projection), you can easily find more example for other parts of the world. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57177",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/22967/"
]
} |
57,179 | Example: the national costume of Malaysia for men is the Baju Melayu . The current Malaysian Prime Minister is Muhyiddin Yassin. Googling for images of him, we find lots of photos of him in a suit and tie, but comparatively few of him in a Baju Melayu. Why? It seems especially appropriate for him to do so at venues where he is representing the country, e.g. at international meetings, but no - usually every male leader at these meetings wears suits and ties. Female leaders wear more varied clothing, but still nobody wears their country's traditional costume. A first guess is that traditional costumes are usually impractical to wear, but that doesn't seem like the case - e.g. the Tangzhuang , Sarafan and Kilt all look very wearable. | Why should they? What advantage do they gain from wearing some traditional costume? Wearing traditional costumes has some implications: What is an appropriate "traditional costume" for a country? Is the bavarian leather pants representative for Germany? Surely not. Wearing the traditional costume of your region may be considered inappropriate or even offensive in other regions of the same country. A suit is neutral It is often only a cliche. If people do not wear these kind of clothing in everyday life, why wear it on international meetings? Other countries do not do it, especially not the rich western countries. Why single yourself out with clothing? It immediately creates a visual difference between "the rich westerners" and "the others" | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57179",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/22967/"
]
} |
57,202 | Now the USA has a longstanding tradition of negative campaigning, so it is not surprising when the competence of a political opponent is questioned. What is surprising however, is that while Democrats (and others) focus on depicting Donald Trump as dangerous , negligent, authoritarian, unlawful, racist, lying, and incompetent; Republicans such as Trump himself paint Biden as having dementia and even run re-election ads on it. In contrast, Democrats are much more careful in their denunciation; attacking character, policies, and abuse of power. Why is it that Republicans attack Biden's intelligence while Trump's intelligence or mental state is seldom or only cautiously addressed, especially by political opponents or mass media? | Because the Trump campaign crossed a line in 2016. Before this point it was generally accepted, in American politics, that politicians and candidates did not use words such as "stupid" or "insane" when talking about one another. In return, it was fairly uncommon for the "proper" news media to use such terms when talking about politicians, especially the President. You might see a comedian use such terms, and people who disagree with a politician might mutter such things quietly to one another, but it was not something you would see in the newspaper or on a real news channel, most of the time. Overt and serious questioning of a politician's mental competence was even more taboo, and mental health professionals have been prohibited from engaging in such speculation since 1973 . Instead, you might hear about how a politician would be "terrible for business" or how they "don't care about the environment," and similar complaints up and down the political spectrum. Many of these arguments were shallow or even specious, but they were at least couched in the form of a policy argument, most of the time. In cases where they were not, euphemisms such as "heartless" or "inexperienced" were often employed. These were even more often shallow and meaningless, but at least they made for good television . Donald Trump broke this model. His 2016 campaign made heavy use of insults heretofore unheard of in American political discourse. He regularly called people "liars" or "crooked," accused those who disagreed with him of being "stupid," and made a habit of giving his political enemies insulting nicknames, which he would frequently repeat and encourage his followers to use on Twitter. Seeing as this worked so well for him in 2016, Trump has (it would seem) decided to double down on this model in 2020. He is now campaigning, in part, on Biden's alleged mental incompetence. The problem is that the rest of the political sphere is still not sure how to respond. Is the norm dead, now and forever? Will it snap right back into existence the moment Trump leaves office? Nobody really knows. For now, Biden is running a "return to normalcy" campaign, and so it would be contrary to his core messaging to try and use the same tactics as Trump, because he is arguing against that very rhetoric. The media, for its part, has already been repeatedly vilified by the right as biased against them. You might think this would encourage the media to begin attacking Trump in response, but it's not that simple. They still need to sell subscriptions and ads. Further alienating the conservative half of the country is unprofitable, and significant portions of the liberal audience would also be turned off by overtly anti-Trump reporting (many liberals do enjoy reading such content, of course, but they want to see it in the op-ed section). So for the time being, they are going to follow Biden's lead. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57202",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/23097/"
]
} |
57,251 | In light of recent tragedies, many people have been saying "defund the police". I'm a moderate conservative and moderate libertarian and generally think that defunding the police is a bad idea and won't fix any problems that may or may not exist. However, I have had several conversations with a couple of self-proclaimed Marxists/Communists who say that, as a Libertarian, I should sympathize with their cause. My understanding is that Communism is more or less the total opposite of libertarianism. However, those I spoke to appear to believe that defunding the police is compatible with a libertarian mindset. Is it? And if so, how? | To summarize the Defund the police position, it starts with observing that the (US) police is designed and trained to employ violence, and that a majority of situations where currently the police become active do not actually call for violence. It is then suggested to only use the police for the situations where the threat of violence is warranted (e.g., to handle an armed robbery), and to re-purpose some of its funding to other means. This would include a public-health driven drug policy, social workers, a decent infrastructure to cope with mental health issues, etc. The fundamental principle that the use of violence by the state is something that ought to be limited as far as possible seems to be a core tenet of libertarianism. I would suppose that libertarians would be opposed to funding a public health infrastructure, etc., by taxes, but rather want to use the savings from getting rid of unnecessary police to lower taxes, and leave it to the free market to somehow provide this. Hence, I would expect libertarians to be sympathetic to the Defund the police movement, but not agree with all of their demands. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57251",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/34093/"
]
} |
57,262 | I believe I know the Brexit issue pretty well. However, I haven't been closely following it since Boris became PM (but still followed it somewhat). What I don't understand is this: [...] what we can't have is the EU seeking to erect a border down the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Britain. These are the words of the UK's foreign minister reported by BBC. Now, it is my understanding that you either have a border between NI and the mainland UK or a border between NI and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member (because the EU can't allow the UK to make an effective breach in their customs border); the UK voluntarily agreed to the former option as part of an agreement with the EU. How is the EU erecting anything if they agreed to it themselves without having a gun pointed to their head? And what is the UK's alternative proposal other than setting up a hard border on Ireland which many fear could reignite the Troubles ? | From the EU27 viewpoint, the Brexiteers promised a unicorn and now expect the EU27 to deliver this impossible creature. The EU27 always said that it can't be done without breaking something, and that it won't be the EU internal market which breaks. The EU27 want to have an open internal market, notably between the ROI and the mainland EU. The UK want to have an open internal market, notably between NI and England/Scotland/Wales. The ROI and NI should have no hard border, and there should be good economic integration. The UK and the EU27 will have separate internal markets after Brexit unless current and future regulations are the same. From the Brexiteer viewpoint, the problems can be solved with a little bit of technology ( online tracking of freight ) and goodwill on both sides, and it is the EU27 being difficult on purpose to frustrate the Brexiteer goals. UK safety standards would remain high, they say , even if they differ in details, and there would not be smuggling on an industrial scale from England via Ireland to the mainland EU. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57262",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/30327/"
]
} |
57,359 | Why doesn't UK consider Ireland a foreign country for the purpose of British law? What is the philosophy behind it? If we examine the history, it can be pointed out that more than half people in Northern Ireland considered themselves British and wanted to be part of the UK, while the rest wanted to join the Irish Free state to become United Ireland. This dispute was not easy to resolve. It happened that Northern Ireland was deemed UK territory for that time. Violent events followed and then came the Good Friday Agreement (I think everyone knows Irish history, so I am stopping here). Considering this, a Common Travel Area was created wherein citizens of the UK and Ireland were not subject to immigration control and were not treated as aliens for the purpose of Immigration law. But the thing here to note is that if Northern Ireland was the chief reason for allowing Free Movement, then the UK should have allowed free movement from Northern Ireland, not the Republic of Ireland. But it is obviously the case that citizens of the Irish Republic who had absolutely no problem in losing British subject status or being a British citizen, were given free movement rights. And the British, who didn't really bother about all this chaos about NI, were granted the same movement rights. What's more, the citizens of both countries are given rights that no 2 countries on the entire planet give to each others' citizens. (except obviously the European project; I am talking about countries which were not part of the EU (the EU didn't even existed then)). Why were such rights given to the people of the Irish Free State and the UK, when the whole debate was about the people of Northern Ireland? It were the Northern Irish people some of whom wanted to be with the UK and some with the Irish Republic. They could simply have given such rights to people born in or resident in Northern Ireland. In British law, Irish people are not aliens (though they are not British). Similarly in Irish law, British people are not aliens (thought they are not Irish). (1) The question: Why are British and Irish people not viewed as aliens in each others' countries? The whole issue was about Northern Ireland which was nicely solved by the Good Friday Agreement that granted the people of Northern Ireland the choice of claiming British or Irish or both citizenship(s), depending on which country they considered for themselves as "theirs" . The whole issue was resolved by this. Why the extra special status? For your information, Irish and British citizens have working rights, home student status (education rights), healthcare rights, free movement rights (without any condition like job offer or self sufficiency like the EU imposes), Social security rights, etc. in each others' countries. For a common man (and the majority of us are common people, aren't we?), these rights made effectively a common citizenship system if seen virtually. You're Irish? You have all the rights that people who are British have in UK without any conditions. You're British and you want to go and wander in Dublin and claim unemployment benefits? Well, you can and no one is stopping you! (2) A consequent question would also arise : Is this practice of not viewing each other as aliens and giving equal rights in either country and the free movement right (due to CTA), all because of the Northern Ireland issue, or because of historically close connections? If the answer was "historical close connections", then it seems impossible to take away all the rights and end free movement in the event of Irish Unification. But if the answer was "because of Northern Ireland", then it is clear that all rights and special status and the free movement (CTA) will not be needed any more now that Northern Ireland has joined Republic of Ireland. Some important documents that might help: Free Movement between the Ireland and the UK by Elizabeth Meehan, The Policy Institute Joint statement of 8 May 2019 between the UK Government and Government of Ireland on the Common Travel Area The Common Travel Area and the special status of Irish nationals in UK law | Ireland is a foreign country in British Law. But as a result of shared history and a succession of treaties, the two independent countries grant a variety of rights to each others citizens. This is a choice of the two independent governments. It is expedient because of the geographical and historical context. From the middle ages until the 1920s, Ireland was part of the UK (legally since 1801, but since the time of King John, Ireland was a feudal domain of the English King, and in the middle ages, the king held the real power). In 1921 Ireland was partitioned into two self-governing territories (both within the UK) then in 1922 the Southern part became independent (as the Irish Free State) but still a commonwealth Dominion of the Crown with a Governor General (rather like Canada or Australia). Then in 1937, it declared itself a Republic. The Irish government in the South did not recognize the legitimacy of the the 1921 partition, and claimed all the land in the North, thus they claimed all the people in the North were citizens of Ireland de jure. Under the terms of the partition, and independence was rights of movement between the countries. The UK continues to recognise the right of Commonwealth residents to vote in elections, and continues to recognise the right of Irish citizen that are resident in the UK to vote. However British law, and (since the Good Friday agreement) Irish law too, recognizes the countries as independent. In British Law, Ireland is "foreign". The common travel area between Ireland and the UK is a consequence of a closely aligned history, and the agreements made in the 1920, 1930s and 1990s, and the disruption that ending such an arrangement would cause to people living on the border. So to deal with the individual questions in summary Ireland is already a foreign country in UK law. It is special because it is the only European country to have a land border with the UK. The only one that was formerly part of the UK, and one of only two European countries that have commonwealth links to the UK (the other is Malta) The UK could have chosen not to allow free movement in 1922 or any time after that. The UK chose to allow free movement as a result of the historic close connections, and a desire to promote good relations between the two countries, and not deny common rights that people had had since time immemorial. The other commonwealth countries were never part of the UK. They are separated from Great Britain by oceans. People weren't used to walking from New Zealand to the UK and back everyday. People do walk from Ireland to NI everyday. For a humorous example of how partition was done, and to understand why freedom of movement was essential, you could read the novel "Puckoon", about a village that finds itself divided between the Free State and the North. This kind of border arrangement is not so unusual. Except at times of conflict, the border between Belgium and the Netherlands has been functionally open and in Baarle, it has always been possible to move from one country to the other. One could also note that until December 2022, Maltese citizens also have the right to free movement to the UK, the right to healthcare and education, and will continue to have the right to vote in the UK even after the end of the Brexit process. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57359",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/33872/"
]
} |
57,368 | If either party (i.e. Democrats or Republicans) in the US would proceed to "pack the Supreme Court", what would be stopping the next administration (i.e. after power has switched once again to the other party in an election) from just doubling (plus one) the number of judges again, in order to re-gain a majority of judges that are to their own liking? Nothing? | Functionally, nothing except the regular requirements of passing legislation and nominating justices. Altering the number of judges on the Supreme Court is as simple as passing legislation through the normal channels, as the Constitution is silent on the number of judges on the Court. This was last altered in 1869, when the Judiciary Act of that year set the number at nine; the Chief Justice, and eight associate Justices. Assuming a presidential administration has the numbers in the House and the Senate to pass such legislation it follows that they also have the required numbers to confirm a nominee, as the elimination of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in 2017 ensures that a party in control of the Senate may pass a cloture vote by simple majority in order to end attempts to delay a confirmation vote. Attempts to filibuster the legislation to expand the Court could be successful, depending on the partisan composition of Congress, however given the precedent set in 2017, it is perfectly possible that a filibuster could be overridden by another use of the 'nuclear option'. Politically, however, the consequences for the credibility of the Court and the Judiciary as a whole would of course be significant, which could make an administration pause before retaliating. The danger of inviting a tit-for-tat response was, in fact, acknowledged by Joe Biden during the fourth Democratic debate in October 2019: Erin Burnett: Vice President Biden, the Constitution does not specify the number of justices that serve on the Supreme Court. If Roe
v. Wade is overturned on your watch and you can't pass legislation in
Congress, would you seek to add justices to the Supreme Court to
protect women's reproductive rights? Joe Biden: I would not get into court packing. We [add] three justices. Next time around, we lose control, they add three justices.
We begin to lose any credibility the court has at all. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57368",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/23497/"
]
} |
57,402 | There is debate over whether it is right for Donald Trump to try to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the SCOTUS now, because the election is coming up. Republican Senator Mitt Romney said he will still vote for Trump's nominee, explaining The historical precedent of election year nominations is that the Senate generally does not confirm an opposing party's own nominee but does confirm a nominee of its own. Is that what the historical precedent is? | tl;dr: Yes, all vacancies that occurred in an election year while one party controlled both presidency and Senate were filled by that party, regardless of whether the vacancy occurred before or after the election. One vacancy in 1968 did not actually occur due to the way the resignation letter was phrased. A candidate was nominated nonetheless but a Republican filibuster prevented the Democratic Senate majority from confirming the candidate. Wikipedia has an entire article on the Appointment process for judges of the Supreme Court including an entire section concerning nominations in the last year of a presidency . However, it only considers nominations made in the last year of the second term for a president who served two terms; it doesn’t, for example, mention Lincoln’s nomination of Chief Justice Chase in December 1864 which was the last year of Lincoln’s first term. On the other hand, the list of justices of the Supreme Court only mentions those who took office. Thus, I decided to compile the following list of vacancies that occurred in the last 15 months of a president’s term and tried to find out when the replacements were nominated and what happened. I also started this list with the end of J. Adam’s term in 1800 as Washington wished to be nonpartisan and thus it doesn’t make sense to speak of partisanship during his tenure. 15th December 1800: resignation of Chief Justice Ellsworth Vacancy occured after the 1800 election , in which the Federalists lost the White House and Senate to the Democratic-Republicans. Before Jefferson took office, Adams nominated Jay (who declined) and Marshall; both were confirmed by the Senate in the lame duck period (Marshall’s confirmation occurring on 27th January 1801). 26th January 1804: resignation of Justice Moore Justice Johnson was nominated by Jefferson on 22nd March and confirmed by the Senate on 7th May the same year. In November , Jefferson was reelected and the Democratic-Republicans held control of the Senate. 25th August 1828: death of Justice Trimble The presidency of J. Q. Adams was a somewhat turbulent time; arguably, Adams never had a true majority in the Senate. While elected as a Democratic-Republican, the party split into Jacksonians and Anti-Jacksonians during his tenure; the former were a majority but the latter supported Adams. Adams did not attempt to nominate a successor to Justice Trimble until after the election which he lost to Jackson. The Senate voted to not proceed with voting on Adams’ candidate. After Jackson’s inauguration, he nominated Justice McLean who was confirmed by the Jacksonians/Democratics (who held onto the Senate) shortly after. 25th February 1841: death of Justice Barbour The Democratic Party had lost all control in the elections of 1840 (presidency, House and Senate) to the Whig Party. Outgoing president Van Buren nominated Justice Daniel, the successor, on 26th February and the Senate confirmed him on 2nd March just before the new term. 18th December 1843: death of Justice Thompson; and 21st April 1844: death of Justice Baldwin The nominations by president Tyler to fill the vacancies of Justice Thompson and Justice Baldwin is the single largest block in the table of the Wikipedia article. Tyler took office after president Harrison passed away. Although he was elected vice president on the Whig Party ticket in 1840, he was expelled from the party and thus an independent at the end of his tenure. In total he nominated eight people. Four of those nominations were during his lame duck session. Tyler was not on the ballot for re-election but the Whig Party lost Senate control in 1844 (and Democrat Polk won the presidency). Only one of his nominations was confirmed by the Senate, the second seat remaining vacant seat was filled by Justice Baldwin, over a year into the Polk presidency. 19th July 1852: death of Justice McKinley President Fillmore of the Whig Party nominated three people to fill this vacancy but the Democratic-controlled Senate acted on neither. The last two were made during his lame duck session, after his party was defeated by Democrat Pierce in the 1852 election . The Democrats held the Senate and went on to confirm Pierce’s nomination within a month of the new session. 31st May 1860: death of Justice Daniel Democratic president Buchanan nominated J. S. Black in his last month in office. He was not on the ballot in the 1860 election and famously the Republican Lincoln would take the White House. The Democratic Party declined to vote on Buchanan’s nomination; Democrats had held the Senate in 1860. President Lincoln’s nominee would be confirmed by the Senate. 12th October 1864: death of Chief Justice Taney The successor, Chief Justice Chase, was nominated after the election but before the next terms of president and Senate. However, Congress and White House were held by the Republicans. 28th November 1872: retirement of Justice Nelson As above, the successor Justice Hunt was nominated by re-elected Republican president Grant and confirmed by the re-elected Republican Senate majority between the election and the new term. 14th December 1880: retirement of Justice Strong; and 24th January 1881: retirement of Justice Swayne Both vacancies occurred after the 1880 elections in which the Republicans held the White House and gained the Senate. The Democratic majority confirmed outgoing president Hayes’ nomination of Justice Woods but did not act on the second vacancy. After the transition of power to the Republicans, president Garfield’s nomination was confirmed rapidly. 23rd March 1888: death of Chief Justice Waite Despite the Republican party holding the Senate during Democratic president Cleveland’s first term, Chief Justice Fuller was nominated on 30th April 1888 and confirmed on 20th July 1888. In November , Republicans would hold the Senate and gain the Presidency. 22th January 1892: death of Justice Bradley; and 23rd January 1893: death of Justice L. Q. C. Lamar Both vacancies occurred with a Republican-held White House (president Harrison) and a Republican Senate majority. The 1892 vacancy was filled by Justice Shiras Jr before the election, the 1893 vacancy by Justice Jackson in the lame duck period. Democrats gained the presidency and a Senate majority in 1892 . 2nd January 1916: death of Justice J. R. Lamar; and 10th June 1916: resignation of Justice Hughes Both nominations by President Wilson (D) occurred well before the election; both candidates were confirmed by the Democratic senate majority in June/July 1916. The Democrats would hold presidency, House and Senate in the November election . 5th January 1925: retirement of Justice McKenna The successor, then Justice Stone, was nominated by Republican president Coolidge and confirmed by the Republican Senate majority between election and the beginning of the new term. Those two and the Republican House majority were held in the 1924 election . 12th January 1932: retirement of Justice Holmes Jr Republican President Hoover nominated Justice Cardozo and the Republican Senate majority confirmed him on 24th February 1932. In November , the Democrats would take presidency and Senate in a landslide. Inauguration Day moved from 4th March to 20th January 16th November 1939: death of Justice Butler This vacancy barely makes the 15 month-cutoff and it was swiftly filled by Roosevelt’s (D) nomination of Justice Murphy whom the Democratic Senate confirmed on 16th January 1940. Democrats held onto Congress and presidency in the November 1940 election . 15th October 1956: retirement of Justice Minton This is an interesting case, as Republican president Eisenhower nominated a Democratic replacement, Justice Brennan Jr. This was a recess appointment on 16th October, so his tenure on the Supreme Court began immediately but would expire if the Senate had not confirmed it by the end of the next session. The Democratic Senate majority (which had been held in the 1956 election ; Eisenhower was also re-elected) confirmed him on 19th March 1957. 12th November 1975: retirement of Justice Douglas Another event barely making the cut, but partially noteworthy because the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Justice Stevens (nominated by Republican president Ford) unanimously in December 1975. After the 1976 election , Democrats gained the presidency and held the Senate. 13th February 2016: death of Justice Scalia The Republican-controlled Senate declined to act on the nomination put forward by Democratic president Obama. After the 2016 election , the newly elected Republican president Trump appointed a successor who was confirmed by the Republican majority. 18th September 2020: death of Justice Ginsburg Republican President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett who was confirmed by the Republican Senate majority on 27th October of that year. The Wikipedia article also mentions the 1968 case of Chief Justice Warren offering his resignation to Democratic president Johnson, effective once a successor had been appointed. While the Democratic Party had a Senate majority in 1968, the Republican minority filibustered all attempts to vote on the designated succession. The Republican Nixon won the presidency in the 1968 election . Warren declined to withdraw his resignation letter and president Nixon nominated Chief Justice Burger to succeed him in June 1969. Despite the Democratic Party still holding a majority in the Senate, Burger was confirmed 74-3. Classification of these cases Nominations before the election (successful in bold): 16 ( 1804 , 4 times in 1844, 1852, 1888 , 1892 , 2 times in 1916 , 1932 , 1940 , 1956 , 1976 , 2016, 2020 ) plus 1968 of which a split government: 9 (4 times in 1844, 1852, 1888 , 1956 , 1976 , 2016) of which one party in control: 7 ( 1804 DR, 1892 R, 2 times in 1916 D, 1932 R, 1940 D, 2020 R) plus 1968 D Nominations after the election (successful in bold); 16 (1800, 1828, 1840 , 4 times in 1844 ( 1 ), 2 times in 1852, 1860, 1864 , 1872 , 2 times in 1880 ( 1 ), 1892 , 1924 of which a split government: 10 (1828, 4 times in 1844 ( 1 ), 2 times in 1852, 1860, 2 times in 1880 ( 1 )) of which one party controlled both and was re-elected to both: 3, all R ( 1864 , 1872 , 1924 ) of which one party controlled both but knew they would lose both (party that nominated is given): 2 ( 1840 D, 1892 R) Some may want to look deeper into the numbers but I think the only clear conclusions that can be drawn are: a president will always attempt to fill a Supreme Court vacancy; even if it is the last month of their term and they know their party is losing in a landslide; even if they are up against a hostile Senate. the Senate will almost always confirm a candidate coming from a president whose party coincides with the Senate majority; the exception being the Republican filibuster in 1968 preventing the Democratic majority from confirming their candidate. It bears mentioning that a plurality of vacancies could be filled even with a split government. However arguably, there have only been four vacancies since the Second World War (plus the half-vacancy in 1968), so most of the precedents are from before what is commonly known as the party realignment. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57402",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28766/"
]
} |
57,403 | Recently, there has been a lot of talk about "court packing", the process of increasing the size of the Supreme Court, thereby creating openings to be filled with new justices. A common argument is that such a plan would destroy the stability, independence, and credibility of the Court and would lead to constant tit-for-tat packing each time control of Congress changed. However, the size of the Supreme Court has changed multiple times throughout the 19th Century: from 6 in 1789, to 7 in 1807, to 9 in 1837, to 10 in 1863, then down to 7 in 1866 (via attrition, so it never dropped below 8), before returning to 9 in 1869. None of these changes seem to have damaged the Court and they didn't lead to the political chaos that so many people fear. So, what is (or is not) different about today that makes a change in the size of the Supreme Court so dangerous (or not)? | The reason for the first three increases in the size of the Supreme Court was related to the size of the country's boundaries growing. The decrease in 1866 was, reportedly , more an attempt by the Supreme Court to convince Congress to raise the salaries of the justices. When that failed, the number of justices returned to nearly where it was before. In neither of those years did the country have the same level of partisanship as we do today. Any expansion of the Supreme Court would be seen as being for political reasons, despite the fact that the judicial branch is meant to be apolitical. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57403",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/19301/"
]
} |
57,434 | There are a number of questions regarding the motivations and effects of "packing" the supreme court in the United States of America by adding more justices of the appointer's preference. It is well established that there is no constitutional limit to the number of supreme court justices -- Congress need only change the law. What would happen if rather than increasing the number of justices, congress decided to decrease the number. Could sitting justices be removed? If so, how would the justices to be removed be decided? | The size of the Supreme Court can be changed by passing a law The size of the Supreme Court is set by statute: Title 28 § 1 of the United States Code. Under the necessary and proper clause, Congress has the power to pass legislation about how "all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof" are carried into execution. Supreme Court justices are officers of the United States. It doesn't need to involve removal of a sitting justice As you mention, there is precedent that Congress may change the size of the Supreme Court. There is historical precedent for reducing the size of the court—but not for removal of any justices: the changes only affected whether appointments would be made to replace them. That approach (reduction by attrition) avoids the question you raise of "how would the justices to be removed be decided". Impeachment: an established process to remove a federal judge Supreme Court justices are considered civil officers of the United States, which are subject to removal through the process of impeachment per Article II § 4 ( U.S. Constitution Annotated, LII, Cornell Law School ). Eight federal judges (none on the Supreme Court) have been removed after being impeached and convicted. This removal process is not connected to the process of changing the legal size of the Court. Could anything other than impeachment remove a judge? Unclear Article III of the US Constitution precribes the duration for which federal judges hold office: The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office. There is no constitutional distinction here between a justice of the Supreme Court and another federal judge. The phrase “during good Behaviour” is widely interpreted as giving federal judges lifetime tenure. It has been speculated, but not tested, that Congress could pass a statute allowing removal of a federal judge upon a judicial finding of bad behavior However, I found an article, “ How To Remove a Federal Judge ,” Saikrishna Prakash and Steven D. Smith, The Yale Law Journal 2006, that argues that if an appropriate statute were passed by Congress, a judicial finding of misbehavior ought to be legally sufficient grounds for removal. Prakash and Smith suggest removal of a federal judge could occur via something like the following procedure: Our research suggests that under the historically established meaning of "good Behaviour" tenure, Congress could have enacted a statute authorizing the President or perhaps even a private party "' to bring an action in court to determine whether a judge had departed from "good Behaviour." A court so finding could then have ordered the judge's removal-subject of course to appellate review (page 125) This kind of procedure never seems to have been attempted; Prakash and Smith suggest that Congress preferred not to try this approach because it would require politically involving other actors than Congress. In contrast, impeachment is initiated by Congress and is not subject to judicial review, so if the Senate voted to remove an impeached Supreme Court justice, there wouldn’t be any way to appeal the removal. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57434",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/30575/"
]
} |
57,449 | There is a common narrative among progressive political and racial thinkers in the United States that all or almost all police departments are systematically racist in a way that does significant and serious harm to racial minorities, especially to black Americans. The mechanisms behind this seem obvious in areas where black citizens are a minority and unable to control police policy, however many cities in America have majority black or non-white populations and democratic elections for local government that directly oversees the police, controls hiring, and sets police policy. Many of these cities are seen by their citizens to have a serious problem with racial discrimination in policing, for example in 2015 the people of Baltimore protested police discrimination and brutality in their city after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. How do prominent progressive political thinkers on racial injustice explain why demographic majorities in these cities are unable to impact police policy in a way that leads to officers not discriminating against the non-white majority? | Let's start with the understanding that in the USA — at least for the moment — political power is distributed , not centralized . This is a feature of our system of governance, not a bug. The Founders wanted political power distributed over many people, on many different levels, in many different forms, so that it would be difficult for any tyrant to amass power for his own use. It creates an unwieldy, contentious system, but that was seen as preferential to the dictatorial alternative. This, however, is a double-edged sword. Any person who takes public office in the US, particularly at lower levels of governance, is confronted by a wide assortment of power structures which they have no direct control over. A newly-elected city mayor, for instance, has to contend with: State and Federal elected officials — congresspeople, governors, state legislators, even the president — who might find it in their interests to meddle in city governance Other local elected officials — city council members, police or fire chiefs, etc — who may have agendas different from the mayor's Appointed officials — city administrators, judges, etc — who are difficult to remove and may not cooperate with the mayor's efforts Civil service workers — police, firefighters, city employees, and the like — who are heavily unionized and largely immune to political pressure. Independent, overlapping specialty districts — water and power districts, fire districts, etc — that are largely outside the political system but still carry significant influence and weight Private interests — large corporations, prominent businesspeople, society figures, activists, lobbyists — who can create significant political headaches if they are not attended to. Political opportunists looking for any chance to establish or increase their own power A community has some control over who they elect to local office, but little-to-no influence over these other forces. Even if a predominately African-American community elects African-Americans to all the local community offices — and even if all of those elected officials are dedicated to improving the condition of life for their African-American constituents, which is by no means guaranteed — they can still be faced with stubborn resistance: police unions who defend police at the expense of citizens; entrenched judges who will not revise unjust sentencing standards; state and federal agencies which do more or less as they please; businesses that threaten to pull out unless certain conditions are met or maintained; city workers who refuse to change their practices... Control of political offices is ultimately a winning strategy, but that 'ultimately' may only come after a long, exhausting, bitter battle to force these entrenched institutions into compliance. No one in political office wants to use the nuclear option: by which I mean the kind of thing that happened in Minneapolis, where the city council straight-out attempted to dissolve the civil service police force in order to reconstruct it from scratch. That kind of action is fraught with political dangers. But short of that, creating change can be extremely challenging. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57449",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/2951/"
]
} |
57,463 | I'm following the situation around the recent Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As a non-American, what's strange to me is that confirming a new SCOTUS Justice apparently involves a nomination by the executive, followed by a confirmation by the Senate; while I imagine the constitution envisioned more inter-party cooperation and good faith, having just one legislative chamber confirm a SCOTUS judge still seems like a strange corner to cut. Is this a historical artifact, or is there a concrete reason why the House of Representatives was left out of this kind of decision? | The founders had two models in particularly in mind: the Ancient Roman Senate, and the UK parliament of Monarch/Lords/Commons. In the UK, the House of Lords functioned as a Supreme Court. The founders wanted to separate the powers of the court from the Upper house, but they still wanted the upper house to have a role in approving justices. The expectation at the time was the President would be a non-partisan role, probably filled by an ex-general or lawyer. The senate would also be non-partisan (or rather with 13 different parties, one for each state). The House would be a far more actively party political arena. This is how the UK parliament was: The king was mostly non-partisan and the Lords represented themselves and their family, but the commons was actively party political. The expectation was that the Supreme court would be non-partisan, with legal experts giving sober judgements uninfluenced by party allegiance. If the partisan House of Representatives were involved in the appointment, then Judges could be blocked or appointed purely on a partisan basis. By only allowing the senators to "advise and consent" you avoid such partisan appointments. Well it didn't really work out like that, because the senate and President rapidly became partisan positions, and so the Supreme court is a series of partisan appointments. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57463",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/21340/"
]
} |
57,494 | Consider a hypothetical scenario in which there are eight Supreme Court justices at the time election results are being determined (ie, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat has not been filled and there is no possibility for a tie-breaker vote). In the event that election results are contested (not unlike Bush vs Gore in 2000), what happens? Specifically, what happens if there is a 4-4 tie in the Supreme Court? | Most cases never go straight to the Supreme Court; it only has original jurisdiction over a very small subset of cases, as described in the US Constitution. Outside of those areas, they are always heard by at least one other court first before being appealed to the Supreme Court. If there is a tie in the Supreme Court, the ruling of the lower court stands, whatever that ruling was. Source: US Courts | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57494",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
]
} |
57,537 | It's hard to be on the Internet currently without encountering heavy criticism of prominent Republican politicians over Trump nominating a Supreme Court justice so close to the 2020 US election. As per my understanding, criticism primarily highlights inconsistency in the Republican-led blocking of Obama's 2016 Merrick Garland nomination but support for Trump's 2020 Amy Coney Barrett . What I'm not seeing is the same thing for Democrats. I.e., presumably Democrats similarly supported Obama's 2016 nomination and oppose Trump's 2020 nomination, which seems symmetrically inconsistent. To make this concrete, searching for "supreme court hypocrisy" in Google News, we find many articles about Republican hypocrisy ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , etc.), and the only article that mentions the Democrat's symmetric flip-flop is Fox News . Question : Why are Republicans (unlike Democrats) heavily criticized for their flip-flopping regarding the 2016/2020 supreme court justice nominations? | The Democrats were in favour of appointing Garland in 2016, but now that the Republicans have set a precedent that Supreme Court Justices should not be appointed in an election year, the Republicans are being asked to stick to it. The Democrats are simply asking the Republicans to stick to the principles they used four years ago. The Republicans are the ones who changed the normal procedures in the first place, so they are the ones being called out for changing their mind again about how appointments in an election year should be handled. They have done two flip-flops, while the Democrats have just followed a step behind. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57537",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/16767/"
]
} |
57,623 | I've been reading a lot about the birth tourism issue in Canada lately, but this issue applies to any country with birthright citizenship. From a New York Times article describing the issue: Under the principle of jus soli — the right of the soil — being born
in Canada confers automatic citizenship. But as more pregnant women
arrive each month to give birth, some Canadians are protesting that
they are gaming the system, testing the limits of tolerance and
debasing the notion of citizenship. [...] “Birth tourism may be legal, but it is unethical and unscrupulous,”
said Joe Peschisolido, a Liberal member of Parliament in Richmond, who
brought a petition against the practice to Ottawa, where the
immigration minister, Ahmed Hussen, said he would examine the issue. Everything I read about it is either neutral or condemning the issue. This bothers me, as it appears as if everyone is against and yet there's no legislative attempts to combat it. Is there another side to this issue that isn't commonly discussed? The only possibility I see is that it allows wealthy families to establish themselves which could bring more money into the host country. The issue I see with that is that traveling to Canada from China is not that expensive as to be a reliable signal for wealth. There is this question which discusses why it's possible in the first place. I'm looking for explanation about why countries have decided that it is something that they want to preserve. | Birth tourism is a side effect of a policy adopted for other reasons. But a simple rule that everyone is born in a country is a citizen of the country is easy to explain, enforce and defend politically. The main reason to have birthright citizenship is to prevent an underclass of people who are not citizens despite living their entire lives in a country. In the U.S. it was originally enacted in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ameliorate the ill effects of having large numbers of non-citizen slaves but subsequently also became important in assimilating immigrants. (This is an oversimplification , as the U.S. had statutory forms of birthright citizenship prior to the 14th Amendment and Native Americans didn't get it across the board until 1924 , but makes a nice lies to children explanation that conveys the gist of the answer without overmuch technical detail.) The goal is to avoid situations like that of Koreans in Japan , or Turks in Germany (pre-2000), where people can live their entire lives in a country and speak its language and know nothing else, and yet not be full fledged citizens. This is particularly pressing in countries with lots of immigrants, like the U.S. and Canada. The number of birth tourists is generally small and, as you note, mostly rich. And, while this doesn't really advance the primary goals of birthright citizenship, the reality of the matter is that no country is very devoted to keeping rich people out of their country, or to preventing them from investing in it economically. When birth tourism mostly involves the rich, it triggers few of the fears traditionally associated with anti-immigration sentiment. Frequently, the new birth tourism citizens won't even live in the country for the next couple of decades, and for a significant part of the remainder of their lives. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57623",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/34298/"
]
} |
57,624 | I wonder whether the average American has an idea of how the Republican and Democratic party are ordered on the political spectrum in comparison to other major parties in the West. Take e.g. Germany. The three biggest German parties, that is in descending order, the conservative party (CDU), the green party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and the social democrats (SPD) are all far left of the American political two party spectrum. Many policies, which are regarded as left-radicalism or socialism in the US are endorsed by all of these parties for decades. Germany is only one example for a wide range of European parties. Does the American public know, that their perception of left and right is is skewed and right-shifted in comparison to many other Western countries? Or do they assume that European conservative parties refer to policies similar to the Republican parties policies? | Does the American public know, that their perception of left and right
is is skewed and right-shifted in comparison to many other Western
countries? The American public is mostly oblivious to the domestic politics of countries other than their own, although there is some vague familiarity with the leading political parties of Canada, Mexico and the U.K. These topics receive very little U.S. media coverage and are rarely discussed by U.S. politicians. Politically active, college educated, progressives (perhaps 10% of voters, often via support for Bernie Sanders rather than knowledge of European politics directly) tend to be aware of the array of political parties on the left in Europe and to have a favorable opinion of Democratic Socialism and the Green Parties. A narrower swath of educated politically active people on the far right and for whatever reason, quite a few libertarians (perhaps 5% of voters in all), have some meaningful awareness of the parties of the far right in Europe, but less awareness of European Center-Right parties. Or do they assume that European conservative parties refer to policies
similar to the Republican parties policies? I doubt that 5% of Americans have ever had any thoughts on this subject, and would have a hard time even associating famous European national leaders with particular political parties. The very internationally aware without first hand experience mostly might have some dim sense that there might be differences. Maybe 1-3% of Americans might have some generally familiarity with European political parties and what they stand for. Those who do would mostly have either studied it academically in college, or served in the military in Europe, or otherwise lived in Europe (e.g. as an exchange student or expatriate employee). Methods I'm starting with a rough sense from surveys (also here and here ) and exit polls of the breakdown of Americans by politics and education, I'm cross referencing that (intuitively) with categories of people I've experienced knowing about or discussing these things and prevalence of knowledge within categories, after lots of experience in politics at the grass roots level and in media quotations of people and politicians, I'm factoring in (intuitively) data on levels of depth of knowledge to similar degrees, about Europe or foreign affairs generally, It's an informed guesstimate, but order of magnitude close. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57624",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/-1/"
]
} |
57,628 | I was watching the Biden/Trump Presidential debate and it was quite difficult to follow due to candidates speaking out of turn and constantly interrupting each other. Why don't these debates simply disconnect the candidate's microphone when it's not turn to speak, to make it impossible to interject out of turn? Has this been previously considered? | Just a theory: previous Presidential debates were conducted with greater civility, and that civility functioned as a sort of automatic inner software mute switch that was already installed (via education) in the conscience of each candidate. There were occasional interjections now and then, but not enough to impede the general flow of the Presidential debate format. So there was never before a need for a hardware mute switch... until the format met with a candidate without that software mute switch. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57628",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/7434/"
]
} |
57,638 | I have seen people say that the Pakistani government is not strong enough because many governmental decisions are taken by the Pakistani army. Why do the people consider the involvement of the army not good? | Coups by the army - 4 since inception Wars lost by the army - 4 out of 4, all of which it seems to have instigated. Budget used by the army - Accounting for 18.5% of national government expenditure in 2018, after interest payments, Pakistan's military absorbs the largest part of the country's budget. I kinda recall there was an earthquake in which the 18% of budget did not stretch to much earthquake rescue ops. More than almost any other case of runaway military spending, the Pakistani public is ill-served by its use of public funds that really should go more to education and economic development in a very poor country. Not unlike Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's toxic interpretation of Islam (a religion I respect as much as others) is the result of a deliberate choice by the government to back the most intolerant clergy . By Zia ul Haq, a general. Its belated campaign to limit extremism in the tribal areas, mostly by militants initially abetted and funded by ISI - remember that the Taliban originated from Pakistan in 1994 - is rife with abuse . And it is not above political abductions . The Pakistani army, before one gets into possible support by ISI to terrorist groups , is a textbook example of regulatory capture . Legislative in this case. It shapes government policies to its end and screw the people. When the policies are not its liking: coup time! What it's not very good at: fighting wars . p.s. to be clear, I also have little respect for India's involvement in these matters, most notably their martial law in Kashmir. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57638",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/34300/"
]
} |
57,659 | Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted a resolution, H.Res.1155 , committing to the peaceful transfer of power after the election. The Resolution text is fairly short: Resolved, That the House of Representatives— (1) reaffirms its commitment to the orderly and peaceful transfer of power called for in the Constitution of the United States; and (2) intends that there should be no disruptions by the President or any person in power to overturn the will of the people of the United States. In my layman understanding, it only reaffirms provisions stated in the United States Constitution. I understand the circumstances in which this resolution has emerged. However, looking at the big picture, I'm still struggling to understand the political reason for actions like this (not only this particular one). My naive understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the Constitution is already supreme law and nothing can be above it, not even resolutions adopted by Congress. If anyone acts against the Constitution, it must be already unlawful. On the other hand, if someone is able to break the higher law and get away with it, he could also safely ignore common law. What is the political reason to reassure that the Constitution is still valid? Or is it rather a statement than a law? | My naive understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the
Constitution is already the supreme law and nothing can be above it,
nor Congress Resolutions. If anyone acts against the Constitution, it
must be already illegal. On the other hand, if someone is able to
break the higher law and get away with it, he could also safely ignore
common law. In the face of repeated threats by the incumbent President to violate the law and not peacefully transfer power, the mere fact that the law says that someone is supposed to do something is besides the point. Judges simply have pieces of paper that the appropriate officials almost always listen to voluntarily. But once the top official in the government signals he's going to disregard the law and by association the Courts, or implies that his three recent U.S. Supreme Court appointees will back him up if a dispute reaches the courts, out of loyalty to him and partisan sentiment (which even if not true, could sow fear and indecision in the hearts of people who might be afraid that he's right and that they will be pay a price for disagreeing with the President on this issue), reliance on government officials including the President whom government employees are usually required to obey, to obey court orders, isn't enough. One of the ways to get a politician who could conceivably have the power to execute an extra-legal self-coup which is what the resolution is aimed at avoiding, is to get the overwhelming majority of the President's natural allies to commit to not supporting his extra-legal efforts before he starts engaging in them as he has threatened to do. It was a risky move. The Democrats in the U.S. House basically forced the opposition to either disavow democracy which would disrespect the voters members of Congress will themselves be appealing to in a month and a half, or to take a vote that discredits and rebukes their own Presidential nominee in the same election. If Republicans in the U.S. House had backed the President as the five dissenters did, the vote would have set the stage for a likely self-coup attempt if Trump does not win the election. This gambit was successful. Trump's extra-legal rhetoric was publicly rebuffed and rejected by all but about 5 members of his own caucus in the U.S. House. The measure was adopted in a bipartisan 397-5 vote. (A U.S. Senate vote on a substantially similar resolution, held September 24, 2020 was unanimous.) Similarly, someone (probably senior civil servants who aren't politically appointed and senior military officers) has managed to get Trump's own political appointees in the Justice Department and the Department of Defense to publicly disavow his rhetoric about not making a peaceful transition of power, sending a message to rank and file soldiers in the military, and to rank and file career lawyers in the Justice Department, that on this critical issue, the President will not be supported by the people who in ordinary times report to him, if he tries to overstay his term of office. The same individuals, had they not committed to a position pre-dispute and if they had not shared the information with each other authoritatively that no one supports this particular ploy of the President, might feel much more intense partisan pressure and fear to let the incumbent President disobey the law with impunity if first forced to take a position once the incumbent President's self-coup was already in the works. A collective strategy of securing public pre-dispute commitments to not support the actions that the incumbent President has threatened to take gives everyone whose loyalties may be tested when a transition dispute arises confidence about which side will prevail in that dispute, because the worst outcome for any senior official or politician in a constitutional crisis is to appear to be a traitor to the political winner of the dispute. So its critical to influence the perception of who will win the dispute in the face of what amounts to gaslighting by the President over whether basic shared political norms like a peaceful transition of power are still in place. If it is manifestly clear to the incumbent President that he has no support from members of Congress from his own party, the military, or the rank and file in the Justice Department, for his plan, his incentive to never carry out the threat is much stronger. Put another way, somewhat crudely, the purpose of the resolution is to insure that Republicans and other senior government officials don't perceive peer pressure to go along with a Presidential effort to refuse to transfer power peacefully. More technically, it can be considered a "game theory" move, similar to a pact to address the " Prisoner's Dilemma " in which everyone participating comes out ahead if no one betrays anyone else in the pact, by having everyone commit to the pact before it is tested. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57659",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/2984/"
]
} |
57,687 | My question is as much about the proper use of terminology as it is about the use of the phrases. But I'm asking about instances and usage rather than intent, I'm not asking to read minds. Background The English SE question What does “keep their powder dry on where they stand” mean? refers to a recent statement by the US Senate Majority Leader: The last sentence in the Washington Post's Battle over the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg rages as tributes to late justice pour in says: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately told his members in a letter circulated Friday night to keep their powder dry on where they stand on proceeding with a confirmation fight this year. This answer explains that the phrase's origin relates to gun powder: Before the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell famously told his troops to "Trust in God and keep your powder dry" A week and a half later I heard the phrase used again, this time by former US security adviser John Bolton. Here's a recent CNN News video Ex-Trump official: President's Proud Boys threat was real (my transcription): Bolton: ...but he’s getting the benefit out of the ambiguity during the interim and he knows it, and he does this all the time. Blitzer: What did he mean when he said... to this group The Proud Boys what did he mean when he said “Stand back and standby”? Bolton: I took that to mean “Just back off for now, but to put it a different way: keep your powder dry . I've heard the term "dog whistle" used frequently when the current US president's words are analyzed. I think it refers to phrases that can have multiple interpretations; they can arguably be innocuous but simultaneously serve a specific purpose and/or send a specific message to a subgroup whose "ears" are more finely tuned to certain phrases or themes. Another example of the concept might be a certain hand position with index finger and thumb touching, other three fingers extended, which most might call the "OK sign", others might see as innocuous inflection to augment speech, but some might see as looking like the letters "WP" standing for "White Power". Question Can "keep your powder dry" or "Stand back and standby" be said to be examples of "dog whistles" in these political contexts? I'm not asking if they are or are not dog whistles. While that's an interesting question and potentially askable here, for this question I'd just like to focus on my use of the terminology "dog whistle" and if that term can arguably be applied to "keep your powder dry" or "Stand back and standby". | The metaphor of a 'dog whistle' refers to literal dog whistles: whistles that produce tones too high for humans to hear, but which are perfectly audible to dogs and generally excite those dogs to bark and howl. In political usage, it means a public statement that sounds innocuous on the face of it, but which is taken as messaging by certain groups who then 'act out' the ostensible message. Dog whistles work on the principle of deniability : they are statements that encourage or incite a particular kind of behavior or attitude, but do so in an oblique and indirect fashion that protects the speaker from being held responsible for any outcomes. The intended behavior is clear to followers and to targets — e.g., when Trump offered to pay the legal fees of anyone who assaulted a protestor at his rallies, both attendees and protesters recognized it as an incitement to violence — but ambiguous enough that the speaker can reject any accusation of wrongdoing. Trump's debate statement that the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by" was explicitly interpreted by members of that group as a message that they should stand ready for combat. Whether Trump intended to send that message is a matter of debate; Trump will certainly deny it. But there is no doubt that Trump blew on that whistle and elicited that 'barking' response, whether or not he was aware that such would be the consequence. A dog whistle, by its nature, needs to be a public statement — one that can be interpreted by a listening audience as a call to action — so McConnell's private statement would not qualify. Trump's statement, by contrast, was given in an extremely public context, and so clearly has the form of a dog whistle. We can't know whether Trump intended it as such, but as both Bolton and the Proud Boys demonstrate it overtly had that effect. The phrase can be used that way; the rest de-evolves to mind reading. -- Edit -- I should add, just for completeness, that "keep your powder dry" is an explicit (if archaic) military phrase that literally means keep yourself ready for battle. Had Trump used it, it would have been hard for him to deny that that he was directly inciting violence. That wouldn't be a dog whistle so much as an overt call to action. I think that's the essence of Bolton's statement, that the ambiguous 'stand back and stand by' is morally equivalent to the un ambiguous 'keep your powder dry'. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57687",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/16047/"
]
} |
57,802 | I want to know about whether or not many high profile Republicans want fewer eligible Americans to vote because they believe it could help them win more elections. An example that makes me suggest this was the voter ID laws which impact certain types of people disproportionately. It is also commonly believed that higher turnout helps Democrats. Though this is not always the case, the general trend has been backed up by evidence in some studies and by correlations such as the 2014 and 2018 midterms. This is an objective question. I am asking if there are any high ranking officials in government and/or official GOP ranks who have indicated that they would prefer if fewer eligible voters voted , under the assumption that a disproportionate number of lower propensity voters would vote Democrat. | "They had things—levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." Donald Trump on Fox and Friends “Just what America needs, another paid holiday and a bunch of government workers being paid to go out and work ... [on Democratic] campaigns,” he snarked on the Senate floor. “This is the Democrat plan to restore democracy? ... A power grab.” Mitch Mconnell Video here | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57802",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/29035/"
]
} |
57,835 | Specifically with regard to the secrecy of a voter's own ballot, is that a voter's privilege or does a voter have an obligation to keep his ballot secret? The various states have provided mechanisms for a voter to maintain the secrecy of their ballot whether by voting in person or by mail. If a voter chooses to not employ those mechanisms, can the voter be penalized? This issue is central to the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court Ruling that if a voter chooses to not use the security envelope, but instead places their "naked" ballot in the provided mailing (outer) envelope, that voter will forfeit his vote(s). It can only be speculated if the voter intentionally or innocently neglected to use the security envelope, but in 2016 approximately 6% of PA Philadelphia voters submitted ballots in this way. Some election officials have estimated that as many as 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots will be voided on this basis (the naked ballot basis). I can not conceive of how a voter should be sanctioned if they were to show their ballot, for example, to their wife, children, even the next-door-neighbor. That would seem to be that voter's right and privilege. On the other hand, sanctioning a voter for not exercising their privilege, gives the appearance of voter suppression. EDITED TO ADD: As it relates to the obligation of a voter to protect their own voting choices this link addresses Ballot Selfies, wherein the voter not only takes a picture of their own ballot but publishes it! National Conference of Legislatures | At least for those systems inheriting from British tradition and the Ballot Act 1872 the secret ballot was introduced a fraud mitigation exercise to protect against personal bribery & intimidation as the franchise was extended to more people, who were likely to be in debt or positions of weakness to landlords or employers. Note in particular that the British system is still not structurally secret, in that ballots are numbered and (paper) records exist for who they are issued to. To turn your rhetoric around, could you understand why it might be a bad idea to allow people to prove their vote to their boss, or for children to be able to show their parents they voted the "correct" way? | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57835",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/15671/"
]
} |
57,853 | In most countries, there is usually a gap between election day and the time when the elected official assumes office. Example: In the United States, the President is elected in November but does not assume office until January. In Germany, the Bundestag is usually elected around September, but its term does not begin until the newly elected Bundestag assembles for the first time. Question: What is the point of this gap exactly? Can't they just take office as soon as the result is announced? Doesn't this gap create a dangerous situation if the country is hit by a crisis before the newly elected official takes over? (Since the outgoing official no longer has a mandate.) | There are two obvious reasons. I'll refer to the US specifically, but I would imagine other countries are fairly similar. First, the historic. Before modern transport & communications, the election process could take weeks or months. California became a US state in 1850, when it could take more than four weeks to travel from there to Washington (or before the Pony Express & telegraph, even send a message). https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/maps-of-the-day-travel-times-from-nyc-in-1800-1830-1857-and-1930/ Allowing some preparation time, newly elected Senators & Representatives couldn't realistically get to Washington before January following the election. (Indeed, until the 1930s, the new administration didn't take office until March.) The second reason is that it takes time to organize a transition. Among other things, a new administration has to find & vet people to take cabinet posts* and other appointed offices, hire staff, and physically move. (It has taken me a month or more to do a move after buying a new house in the same town.) Newly-elected Senators & Representatives face similar problems: moving to Washington, finding housing, hiring staff, &c. *The British & others seem to handle this by the opposition parties having "shadow cabinets" already in place when they're not in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Cabinet PS: Further to your suggestion that the gap would potentially create a dangerous situation, at least in the US it's historically been the case that outgoing & incoming administrations would work together. (The current situation, with the incumbent openly suggesting that he won't accept the results of the election if he loses, is pretty well unprecedented.) Throwing a new government into the middle of a crisis would seem even more dangerous. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57853",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/28067/"
]
} |
57,867 | I just don't see that there is any possible benefit, in the case of presidential elections anyway. I don't think there are many, if any, registered voters who haven't heard of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, so the goal can't be to raise awareness. There isn't any need to raise awareness of something everyone is already aware of. I also find it extremely hard to believe any undecided voters could be persuaded either way just because they saw a sign with a couple names on it. I believe many are even given away for free, so it can't just be fundraising method. I get some of the appeal for the sign's owner; it's virtue signalling to his or her friends and neighbors, which inherently feels good. I don't understand what the candidate on the sign gets out of it though. Since every candidate ever uses them, I know I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what. | It firms up the base. If you are willing to put up a sign then you have "picked a side" and you are less likely to forget to vote. It helps canvassers. If you have a sign up, then canvassers know what to expect if they knock (This is a supporter, we only need to remind them to vote. This is an opposer, expect a hostile reception) It functions as a reminder to the rest of the base: "we think this is important, if you don't vote you are letting us (your neighbours) down." There is a social aspect to voting and voting decisions. It is expected. It is part of the ritual of elections. It might sway a few undecided voters, it probably can't hurt, and it's cheap. Finally, many people have their own echo chambers, and mostly hear opinions that match their own. This can remind people that there are supporters of "the other candidate" even in their own neighborhood, making it seem possible to change their vote. It might encourage people to look at election literature--watch a debate. It might be the start of a process that leads to a person changing their mind. | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57867",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/29527/"
]
} |
57,892 | We send these people to Washington to do one main job: to vote on bills to make them laws. For example, in the 115th Congress, 33 Representatives and three Senators missed 10% or more of votes, across both parties. Why is it that they do not show up to vote for so many of them?
Why does no one ever say anything about this? | It depends on which votes we're talking about. Votes happen on the House and Senate floor. But they also happen in committees and subcommittees. Most of the actual work of being a legislator happens in committee and subcommittee hearings and conferences where bills are being crafted. If you want to have a meaningful influence on legislation, it's much more useful to refine it in committee away from cameras than to offer amendments on the floor in front of he cameras. At any given time, there are several committees and subcommittees having hearings and conferences. Each legislator serves on multiple committees and there is no practical way to schedule hearing such that everyone can be present every time. So legislators are constantly juggling which meetings to attend and which to skip. Plus there are items that come up for floor votes in the middle of these meetings. Legislators have to prioritize which votes are most important (either because the vote is in doubt or because the subject matter is important to them). That necessarily means that they'll be missing votes on minor procedural issues or on matters whose outcome is certain. Additionally, legislators are supposed to be talking with constituents, with their staff, and with others in government, etc. in order to be able to make informed votes. Some of this can happen in the evenings after regular business is done but there are only so many hours in a day. So, again, legislators need to prioritize. Plus, politicians miss votes in order to do things like campaign. And when they do, they are absolutely called out on it. In 2016 when he was running for President, Rubio missed roughly a third of his votes and that was an issue. In 2008, Hillary Clinton dinged Obama for voting "present" too often . | {
"source": [
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57892",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com",
"https://politics.stackexchange.com/users/34416/"
]
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.