Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

Well, to have a collusion with Russia, you actually have to collude with Russia. Russian crown prosecutor doesn't really cover that :D.

I'm not certain any laws were broken here. Kind of like talking about snatching someone's purse and not doing it. This is something you pay political consequences for, not legal.





I'll take your word for it, as my understanding of common law is much worse than my knowledge of continental law, which is pretty limited
itself.

It's just that it doesn't make sense logically. Anything can be "of value", it's such a subjective criterion. Let's say Trump got some information from a foreign national - how do you decide if it was of value, meaning how do you decide if it had influence in Trump winning the election?

Sorry Samaritan, the phone are my post, so I'm just going to refer you to the application of the "golden rule" against absurdity in statutory interpretation.

Example to consider on common law, recently the New Hampshire legislature passed law to allow killing a fetus to be criminally prosecutable. To exempt abortion, they used language exempting pregnant women's "any act" from consideration as murder, manslaughter, etc. they quickly corrected the language, but if it had been used in trial the golden rule would not actually be seen to grant pregnant women immunity in crimes.

Sorry about that

[Kralizec]

Trump's healthcare overhaul is essentially dead.

I read that his next idea is to simply repeal the ACA with a two year delay, giving congress time to work on a replacement which would take effect after the 2018 midterms elections. I don't think that idea is going to fly, because there's no reason to believe that moderate Republicans, who opposed the bill because it would lead to millions of uninsured, will have any confidence there will ever be a GOP-only effort that they can get behind.

If we look broader than the GOP, it's doubtful that even a single Democrat lawmaker will cooperate because:
1. Nobody asked for their input before
2. The whole enterprise is an en excercise in Damnatio Memoriae. They will not cooperate with anything that is sold as a replacement, rather than an improvement of Obamacare.
3. Health care is a continuing embarassment for the GOP. The Republicans passed multiple repeal bills during Obama's presidency, knowing that he'd veto it anyway. Trump promised that a seamless repeal & replace would take place in the first month of his term. He also promised it would deliver better healthcare, for more people and at lower prices- a promise that flatly contradicts basic Republican ideas and was which was never going to happen by relying 100% on the GOP members of congress.

[Montmorency]

Meanwhile, some research on the fundamental supra-partisanship of democratic legislating:

To what extent has centralization of power in Congress enabled majority party leaders to shepherd their programmatic platforms into law? To address this question,
we examine congressional votes on all enacted laws from 1973-2014, as well on the subset of landmark laws identified by Mayhew (2005). In addition, we analyze the efforts
of congressional majority parties to enact their legislative agendas between 1993 and 2017. We find that legislating in recent congresses is nearly as bipartisan as it was
in the 1970s. Most laws, including landmark enactments, continue to garner substantial bipartisan support, and laws are rarely enacted over the opposition of a majority
of the minority party. Furthermore, there is no evidence that majority parties have gotten better at enacting their legislative programs. In fact, contemporary
congressional majorities fail in enacting their agenda items at rates that are equivalent to (and often inferior to) benchmarks set in less party-polarized congresses.
When majority parties succeed in legislating on their agenda priorities, they usually do so with support from a majority of the opposing party in at least one chamber
of Congress and with the endorsement of one or more of the opposing party’s top leaders.

The majority is not enough, people.

[Husar]

It makes perfect sense given that both parties are in the pockets of big business.

http://www.businessinsider.com/major...hy-2014-4?IR=T

The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

So it's really nice to know that stomping poor people and the middle class further into the ground gets bipartisan support in the US.

[Montmorency]

It makes perfect sense given that both parties are in the pockets of big business.

http://www.businessinsider.com/major...hy-2014-4?IR=T



So it's really nice to know that stomping poor people and the middle class further into the ground gets bipartisan support in the US.

We discussed this very paper in 2014, so I'm more interested in hearing how the findings have been expanded and corroborated since then.

But we're talking about slightly different things, how agendas are constructed (and the 2014 study points out it's lobbying groups in general, not just big business) and how agendas are legislated in the chambers of Congress between parties.

[Husar]

We discussed this very paper in 2014, so I'm more interested in hearing how the findings have been expanded and corroborated since then.

Yes we did, that's how I knew about it. And that was exactly my point, that the findings of your linked research don't do us much good if they are not cross-checked with the findings of the old paper to see which kind of legislation exactly gets the bipartisan support. Bipartisan support is not inherently a good thing after all. If killing five million people got bipartisan support you surely wouldn't celebrate that as a victory of democracy or whatever exactly you were insinuating.

But we're talking about slightly different things, how agendas are constructed (and the 2014 study points out it's lobbying groups in general, not just big business) and how agendas are legislated in the chambers of Congress between parties.

Eh, no, not according to this direct quote:

"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."

Of course you have to factor in that people who work 3 factory jobs to feed their family have a much harder time organizing politically than those who call their wealth manager twice a day to hear how their money multiplies itself. Of course the latter will also tell you how they work 80 hours a week....in lobbying groups to get more legislation that makes their money multiply faster...

The point that we are talking about slightly different things seems a bit desperate since I was obviously aware of that. I wasn't saying your research is wrong, I was saying it is pointless in terms of achieving the goal of a better democracy if you ignore the other factors and parts of the legislative process. Which brings us right back to the point that your study should have done the corroboration work you asked for and checked what kind of legislation gets the bipartisan support and who benefits from it.

[Montmorency]

Yes we did, that's how I knew about it. And that was exactly my point, that the findings of your linked research don't do us much good if they are not cross-checked with the findings of the old paper to see which kind of legislation exactly gets the bipartisan support. Bipartisan support is not inherently a good thing after all. If killing five million people got bipartisan support you surely wouldn't celebrate that as a victory of democracy or whatever exactly you were insinuating.



Eh, no, not according to this direct quote:


Of course you have to factor in that people who work 3 factory jobs to feed their family have a much harder time organizing politically than those who call their wealth manager twice a day to hear how their money multiplies itself. Of course the latter will also tell you how they work 80 hours a week....in lobbying groups to get more legislation that makes their money multiply faster...

The point that we are talking about slightly different things seems a bit desperate since I was obviously aware of that. I wasn't saying your research is wrong, I was saying it is pointless in terms of achieving the goal of a better democracy if you ignore the other factors and parts of the legislative process. Which brings us right back to the point that your study should have done the corroboration work you asked for and checked what kind of legislation gets the bipartisan support and who benefits from it.

You have to recognize the different scope? Research doesn't have to be about what's good or bad in life or the dialectic of What Is and What Should Be, it can just dig up patterns on how things work in practice, and about different aspects of the whole.

The specific study I posted is relevant now as applied in the context of Republican struggles to get much done while controlling the government, and isn't designed to consider why parties do the things they do or how representative of their constituents they are. Those are different subjects that need separate research.