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Barr Sues Over McCain's, Obama's Presence on Texas Ballot
corbettw writes "Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party's nominee for president, has filed a lawsuit in Texas demanding Senators John McCain and Barack Obama be removed from the ballot after they missed the official filing deadline."
An on-line link to the Texas election code: http://tlo2.tlc.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/EL/content/htm/el.011.00.000192.00.htm#192.031.00
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I heard about this a couple weeks ago. Anyhow, the texas filing deadline was before the national conventions, but both parties filed paperwork on time with blank names and amended them afterwards (which is allowed by law). I thought this had already been dismissed, but it's going nowhere.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'm hurt... Don't forget us in PA too! And for that matter KY. :)
- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
But the states elect the president of the union, not the people. If you don't like that, amend the constitution or move.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Electors for each state were originally intended to be chosen by the state legislature, not the citizens of the state. This would have given the state government additional power over the Federal government. Choosing of electors by the people, along with direct election of Senators (the 17th Amendment) represent a lamentable erosion of Federalism, and resulted in things like the blatant abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause, blackmailing states into accepting things like speed limits and Real ID, etc.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There is one set of laws that cover federal presidential elections. That governs the electoral college. All this voting you do in November is not federal, it's to pick your state's representatives to the real voting, done the second week in December. States are free to use whatever method they wish (well, not totally free). It's interesting how many people misunderstand how our elections work. There is not, never has been, a national vote on anything in the United States.
That would require an Amendment to the Constitution. For no good reason.
Not exactly. For presidential elections, yes, because the Electoral College is implicated. But for other federal elections, no. See Art. I, sec. 4, cl. 1: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators (emphasis added).
Congress has the power of preemption of state laws on elections to Congress. But to implement uniform rules for presidential elections, yes, the Constitution would need to be amended.
Nope. If the spelling is close enough that it's obvious who was intended, it counts. Even if it's not entirely flattering.
Forcing all the states to vote the same way would be unconstitutional. The constitution outlines how many electoral votes each state gets, and then leaves it up to each state to determine how to allocate them. The only real influence it has is in stating who can't be in the electoral college, such as the president or I believe anyone in the US house or senate.
Any changes would require a constitutional amendment.
It appears to me the creators of the original constitution felt it was important for the citizens of each state to decide how to cast their electoral votes. We may not like it, but that's the way it is. This was all before the ability to instantly count ballots and transmit results across thousands of miles, so while it may not be relevant any longer, it's still in the constitution.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Few other countries (civilized or otherwise) are as big as to be a Union of states.
Your definition of "civilized" may vary, but:
Russia is a Union of States.
Brasil is a Union of States.
Mexico is a Union of States.
Germany is a Union of States.
Austria is a Union of States.
The concept seems to be quite common.
All voting systems are mathematically flawed. It's a mathematical property and can't be avoided. (check Election Math as a reference).
But you won it, too. That's the thing about civil wars.
States were supposed to govern their own borders and the Constitution was there to limit a few things that states could not govern (like trade between states, or basic rights).
Like the inalienable right to keep and bear slaves.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Actually the Civil War is not the main cause of today's over-reaching Congress. The "Commerce clause" and the U.S. Supreme Court is the main problem. The U.S.S.C. has interpreted the commerce clause in such a way that Congress can now regulate almost anything it wants. That happened during the Depression (1930-40s), and the decision allows Congress to tell you how much wheat you can or cannot grow in your own backyard. Clearly this was not what the Framers intended when they gave the U.S. the power to regulate interstate commerce. What I grow in my backyard is INTRAstate commerce and should not involve Congress at all. It should be the Pennsylvania government that regulates that.
It would be roughly equivalent to the European Parliament telling British citizens how much food they can grow for their own personal consumption. Clearly that's not part of the EU's mandate, and it's not part of the U.S.' constitution either.
Stupid, stupid supreme court justices.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Stupid, stupid supreme court justices.
Eh, FDR basically held a gun to their heads back in the day.
FDR is one of my heroes but I think that's one of the darkest moments of his presidency.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
> That's why you had a civil war. People in the southern states were keeping slaves.
While the issue of slavery was a big issue, and was resolved because of the war, the war did not happen because of slavery. The US civil war was inevitable by the end of the revolution.
Okay, it's true that the "trigger issue" that set the thing off was the secession of South Carolina, and the main excuse for said secession was the slavery issue. But this only *caused* the war in the same sense that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused the Great War. It's what set the thing going, yes, but if it had not done so, something else would have come along and set it going at some point, probably sooner rather than later.
The real major driving issue behind the civil war was the strong correlation between geography, economy, and politics. You could get out a map and pretty much draw a line between the conservative, rural areas with a simple, primary (and to a large extent agrarian) economy, and on the other side of the line the liberal areas, with higher population density and a more complex (and more modern) economy. The south wanted protectionism. The north wanted a more laissez faire, free-market approach to economic issues. The south was mostly anti-federalist, believing strongly in reserving as many powers as possible to the states and the people, limiting the power of the federal government to the absolute minimum. The north mostly was largely federalist. The southern economy relied heavily on slavery; the northern states didn't even allow it. And so on and so forth.
A lot of people think Lincoln wanted to end slavery, and that's why the south seceded. In fact, he had no such intention. He opposed the unchecked *spread* of slavery to more and more states and territories, but he had no plans to suddenly put an immediate end to it in the south. That's the way things played out, but it wasn't what he had in mind before the war. South Carolina opposed Lincoln and seceded when he was elected for complex reasons, and his position on slavery was just one of several things they hated about the man. It was an excuse, and a rallying cry for other states, but the states-rights issue (i.e., antifederalism) was *also* an excuse and a rallying cry.
South Carolina seceded to prove that the state could do that, that the union with the rest of the country was strictly voluntary on the part of the state, and that the majority of the other states could *not* get together and decide things for them at a federal level. Slavery was *one* of the things they didn't want the federal government deciding for them. Tariffs were another. But the main thing is that the state government of South Carolina felt too much of their authority was being usurped. To them, Washington was the next London. The North didn't agree, because as far as they were concerned the south had full representation. South Carolina had as many US Senators as any other state, and Representatives proportional to their population, and so on and so forth, the same as any other state in the union.
As I said, slavery was a major issue, both in contributing to the war and in being resolved by the war. (The protectionism issue, in contrast, was not resolved until much later, if indeed it has been fully resolved, and there's some question about that.) But it was not, by itself, the cause of the war, nor was it the main thing the war was ultimately about.
And actually, the slavery issue might not have been as completely resolved by the war if Lincoln had not been assassinated. His plan for reconstruction did not include immediate abolition. He wanted to bar the major Confederate ringleaders from holding future political office and then let the southern states back into the union almost immediately, with the understanding that the issue of secession had been decided and it was not permitted. But Johnson wasn't able to make it work that way.
Incidentally, the GOP was the liberal party at the time, and the Dems were the conservatives. The history of how that got turned around is interesting in its own right.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> Thanks to our lousy government run education, everyone thinks Lincoln abolished
> slavery with his "Emancipation Proclamation". Read it. It allowed slavery in the north.
Actually, it allowed slavery in the south as well. The only slaves freed were those encountered by Union forces during the actual war. After Appomattox, southern slave owners who had managed to retain their slaves would have been permitted to keep them -- for the time being.
Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He had other priorities. He was willing to let slavery continue in the south for the time being, in exchange for other concessions. Lincoln did disagree in principle with slavery, but he was a liberal, not a radical. He believed in doing things gradually.
Abruptness is harmful. You free all the slaves at once, overnight, and you get exactly what we got: a sudden surplus of unskilled agricultural workers with no education, no property, nowhere to go, and no way to earn a living. Many of them were worse off than they had been before. Almost all of them had to go to work for former slave owners, doing the same kinds of things they'd done before, only now they were responsible for their own debts and bills, providing food and housing and whatnot for themselves and their children. The former slave owners were extremely unhappy with the situation and were not strongly inclined to pay more for the former slaves' wages than they had previously spent on their upkeep, and they were no longer required to provide benefits like free housing... It was a real mess for a long time. The descendants of the slaves *still* have lower average per-capita incomes and education levels than the rest of the population, going on a century and a half later. And we haven't even started talking about the bitterness and social upheaval and resentment...
On the other hand, if you do things more gradually... Say for instance you provide the children of slaves with the same education opportunities as other children, and free two-thirds of them at age 21. That's just *one* way to do things a bit more gradually.
Don't get me wrong: I have some philosophical objections to slavery in general, and numerous *very strong* moral and ethical objections to the way slavery was practiced in the US. It was an extremely egregiously bad system, and it absolutely had to go. I'm very glad we don't have that in this country any more. It's a system I wouldn't wish on anyone, even the gravest of enemies, and it's good that we're rid of it.
I'm just think the *details* of the way in which it was phased out were... suboptimal.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You're both wrong (and I guess both right, but I prefer everyone being wrong). Both sides wanted some things to be strongly protected and others strongly deregulated, and it just so happened that a lot of these things were opposite to the wishes of the other.
The south absolutely did not want to see things deregulated with regard to domestic trade and law, to the point that prior to the Civil War they were willing to override the rights of other states and force them to legalize slavery (see: Missouri, California) in order to maintain a balance which would keep their internationally unpopular status quo; they also didn't want to see the north increase imports of food and raw materials from elsewhere. On the other hand, they wanted better access to European goods and markets so that they could increase exports and decrease expenses.
The north, on the other hand, liked the idea of the south being forced to buy their manufactured goods and didn't want to compete with Europe for goods from the south, but did want to be able to increase imports of food and materials from Europe and elsewhere. As in, everything they wanted the south didn't, and vice versa.
No one side was more in favor of protectionism or free trade, both sides were more in favor their best interests and were more than a little hypocritical about it.
One of the great ironies is that the south only really wanted slavery because it allowed them to be competitive with more modernized farming techniques, but it was actually quite a bit less efficient. After the Civil War and abolition the south actually became much more profitable because they started to use less labor intensive and ultimately less expensive techniques and started to invest in heavy equipment rather than slaves. The north also became more profitable because the Civil War seriously advanced northern industrial facilities and technology, leaving them in perfect position to manufacture the huge amount of product required by the modernizing south and the expanding railroads. The bloodshed and destruction of the Civil War accomplished nothing that could not have been arranged by both sides simply cooperating and thinking it through (with the possible exception of rebuilding Atlanta as a modern southern metropolis).
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." --Abraham Lincoln, 21 Aug. 1858
And: "Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals."
Fun fact of the day: MA is a commonwealth because John Adams decided to call it that when he was writing the MA Constitution, and no one bothered to really discuss it one way or the other.