2022 Midterm Elections (Abandon hope all ye who enter here) butnahhh. or maybe?

There needs to be a Fetterman running for every seat possible.

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Almost - would you settle for dystopian present documentary?

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Well, if anyone is looking for a flippable seat to donate to or help out with, I am now the field director for Joseph Rocha, who is running for CA state senate district 40. Redistricting made this seat go from +6 R to +2 D, and is currently held by a shitbag Republican.

https://www.rochaforsenate.com/about


It’s a weird district that includes parts of super-red east county, but also super blue University city. My job will to be to get out that University City vote, heh.

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https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1541102529483640832?s=20&t=Xl7AZ1FZB-N5wNCf7yzKLQ

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Irony is dead.

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Irony shoulda armed itself.

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What are his specific plans to address the Republican attacks on our democracy?

EDIT: nm thought this was for a House seat. Would be interested to hear his plans on workaround for attacks on California laws abs regulations by the fascist Supreme Court.

Jfc

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The current legislature had it ready to go after the leak in May, so they passed it and signed it on Saturday. It will go on the ballot in November (because CA is weird). The state senate majority has also just put forth a bill for an amendment to the state constitution guaranteeing the right to an abortion in CA…once that passes, that will also go on the ballot in Nov.

Obviously, he supports this, and also Newsom’s further EO that says CA will not comply with law enforcement from other states looking to prosecute abortion tourists.

His opponent, a republican, has declined to comment on the issue at all.

That’s a good start, what is the plan for if/when a national abortion ban passes? More a nice to have than a have to have right now, but I want to know what politicians are willing to do

Does Congress have the jurisdiction to ban abortion nationwide? I legit don’t know the answer to this.

The closest analog I can think of is assisted suicide laws. Physician assisted suicide is murder in some states and legal in others. There are also federal laws prohibiting murder, and let’s say that assisted suicide isn’t legal by federal law? But that doesn’t trump Washington state law in Washington, right?

Or maybe what physicians can do in Washington isn’t actually murder in other states, I don’t know. I think they’re just prescribing lethal doses of a drug, maybe that’s not actually murder in any jurisdiction.

Under this court? 100%.

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Why wouldn’t they?

In practical terms, can’t a Congress pass literally anything they want if they have enough votes? Other than subsequent appeals to the judiciary, is there any other mechanism to stop them?

Whatever federal law that Congress passes making murder a federal crime is irrelevant to a state murder prosecution, right? Same thing for burglary, assault, whatever.

It’s trivially easy to get around that though. You can do it like the drinking age, and just making funding for X dependent on doing Y.

Drugs are illegal on a federal level. You could do it that way easily.

Yadayada commerce clause yadayada

I’m sure you could do it in other ways as well.

Also the court doesn’t care anyways.

You are right that for a federal crime there needs to be some jurisdictional hook. So if you look at your murder example, it’s only a federal crime in certain instances - things like murder of federal official, murder using the mail (interstate commerce), murder during bank robbery (bank robbery is federal crime), etc.

So they’d have to find some jurisdictional hook to make it a federal crime. They could just say abortion affects interstate commerce and SCOTUS probably says ok. If you look at the current federal law against partial-birth abortion, it just says that - " Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion" - 18 U.S. Code § 1531 - Partial-birth abortions prohibited | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute

SCOTUS upheld this law 5-4 in 2007 - so odds now are much worse. You’d need a hail mary that Thomas and another conservative stick to their guns on the limitations of the interstate commerce clause. Thomas indicated in his concurrence that he might have found the law invalid on the interstate commerce issue - but that issue had not been raised.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-380.ZC.html

If for some reason, SCOTUS actually says no, they could just tie things like medicare/medicaid payments to making abortion illegal. I guess perhaps rich blue states could say no.

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Like, ALL medicare payments? Because abortion is already pretty restricted from federal dollars. That’d be pretty crazy, especially if they still collected medicare tax from those states.

Maybe? The most common example is the drinking age, where congress withheld 10% of federal highway funds. Not sure though why if you can withhold 10% you couldn’t withhold all. Might be some legal argument I’m no thinking of, but doubt SCOTUS cares.