Discussion of the Republican Party, page 1

Originally posted by Conspiracy Theorist06
You mentioned ealier on another post that the Democrats want to take away the second amendment.

Now the Demorcrats or Republicans will never take away an amendment, both of them will shrink different ones down to almost nothing.

That's exactly right. I didn't say they were trying to take it away. I said "They attack the second amendment and have waged all out war on the tenth". They don't have to take it away because they make laws and appoint judges that simply ignore it as if it wasn't there.

But the part that Democrats attack (2nd amendment) is a little bit for the general safety.

I have no problem admitting that a large portion of the Democrat agenda as far as guncontrol is concerned is public safety. I'm not upset with them for advocating public safety. I am upset that they haven't advocated public safety in the appropriate way. I am mad at the Republicans for the same reason, because they haven't done it either.

The correct way to address gun control is to target illegal guns. The second amendment, disregarding for a moment the controversy over the "well regulated militia" clause, says that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. It does not, however, forbid measures which do not infringe on those two rights. For example, registration does not infringe, nor do laws restricting illegal use of weapons. I happen to walk a rather fine line in this regard, because I believe that bearing a weapon with the intent to commit a crime can be restricted, not on the grounds that you are breaing a weapon, but on the grounds that you are preparing to commit a violent crime.

This means that what they ought to be doing, which they refuse to do because of the obvious claims of racism that would result, is that they need to stop trying to restrict the guns and start catching the people who carry them. They need to appropriate the funds to equip police with metal detecting devices, train them in how to establish reasonable suspicion and conduct a legal frisk, etc. Then they need to have the police make a concerted effort in dangerous neighborhoods, especially targeting known gang members, to catch these people carrying stolen or unregistered weapons with the intent to commit a violent crime (the language of our gun laws must be carefully crafted so that it is not the bearing of an arm itself which is being punished but the bearing of an arm in such a way as that legal uses such as practice, sport, peaceful protest, etc are clearly out of the question and there is little doubt that violent use is the intent).

If we start catching and arresting the gang members before they shoot people, require weapons to be stored responsibly in the home by legal owners (ie: locked in an immobile stand or case), and intercept the weapons coming into this country, and prosecute an aggressive campaign against the criminal organizations which are bringing them in, we won't have a problem.
People seem to have this crazy notion that the mob is gone just because there isn't an Al Capone in the paper all the time, and no Elliot Ness screaming about it at the top of his lungs. AK-47s are coming into this country- I could have one in just a couple days for a few hundred bucks. All you've gotta do is talk to a couple of drug users and find out where the stuff is coming from in your town, go to him, do some business, and if you can get his trust he'll be able to get you a weapon too. How do I know? Let's just say I knew more than my fair share of drug addicts when I lived in a certain slum outside of Palm Springs. Now do you really think that some two bit speed cook or teenager selling dime bags is bringing E and AK's into this country, or does it make more since that we have an organized crime problem which is facilitating the gang violence in this country?

These parties need to attack the problem at its root and leave my rifle alone. Do you think that the friendly neighborhood crackhead is really going to be disarmed by this law? Or is it just going to be the good people whose homes said crackhead breaks into for drug money that will be disarmed?

"But Vagabond, the AKs are only a small part of the problem. Handguns stolen from legal owners are a bigger problem, or even legally bought handguns".
Not a bad response, but that doesn't mean handguns can't be illegal imported, it just means they aren't currently because they are more economical to get domestically. If you outlaw guns in this country, the criminals will buy imported handguns and things are going to get worse, because they'll have an assurance that none of their victims are equipped to defend themselves.

How many people go hunting with an automatic pistol? I know absolutely none. People do NOT need automatic pistols or automatic weapons for hunting. I think that they should keep shotguns and rifles, but you do not need an AK-47 to go hunting or to protect yourself.

The 2nd Amendment doesn't say "A well regulated hunting season..." it says "A well regulated MILITIA...". There is ample room for dispute over whether or not the citizen must belong to a militia, or whether he is allowed to have a gun in the event that he should wish to join one. I contend that since our founding fathers had just fought a war against unjust government using their privately owned weapons, and not all of them had belonged to militias at the time of owning them, that the original intent is clearly that any citizen should be able to own a weapon so that militias may be raised in times of crisis.
I believe that this includes military grade weapons. I believe that the storage and intent of use can be regulated, but not the keeping and bearing of them. I believe that I should be allowed to get a howitzer and shells for it if I can afford it. I believe the government has the right to require that it be registered and stored in a secure armory, even perhaps one not directly under my control, but if I have a valid reason for taking it out of the armory and using it, they can't stop me. Of course that valid reason would basically be limited to practice, which means that unless I owned a properly secured artillery range that I could never get it out unless we were invaded.
Like I said, they can't restrict the keeping and bearing of arms, they restrict use and enforce those laws before the fact based upon likely intent, and they can require registration and safe storage.
What about nukes- good question right? Gun control advocates love to ask that question. If the nuke was just a really big explosive, I'd have a right to it, although i probably wouldn't have a right to access the firing controls unless we were under threat and my target had been cleared (special considerations are granted to anything on the scale of a nuke obviously because the militia may not interfere with regular military operations and certainly can not do something like that which will hit federal troops too).
The catch is that a nuke creates a public safety hazard by its very use, so I'd have to obtain certain permits, which would be very unlikely to be granted. Furthermore the US acknowledges treaties which restrict legitimate ownership of nuclear weapons to Security Council permanent members. This means that my weapon would have to remain under federal control, even though since it was privately funded and maintained it would technically be a militia weapon.

Well Bush doesn't violate the 1st amendment he talks about it. (what I'm reffering to is the freedom of worship) He almost violates the 4th amendment because he makes some of these big buisnesses 'unsueable'.

I don't dispute that Republicans have operated a government which exceeds its constitutional authority just as the Democrats do, nor that they have interfered with citizen's access to the judicial system, and god knows what else. My goal is not to defend so much as to rebuff anything that is purely slander and of course to point out the opposite side as a matter of fairness.

Also why would I want to pay taxes to support big buisnesses I mean at least when a Democrat is in office, you know where its going. Where does your money actually go? Big buisness? Govt base? Osama?

Do you claim that the government does not award contracts to major businesses, often sweetheart deals to old friends, except when Republicans are in office? I think I have one off the top of my head, but I hate it when I get things wrong so i'll look it up this evening and post a couple of specific examples.

On top of the handouts to business, which exist either way, I don't feel any better about being stolen from to give to people who refuse to work. I don't want my money spend on teaching inner city single mothers yoga- I want it spent on my own college tuition, car insurance, gasoline, meals, textbooks, and the various other vital expenses which I have to contend with that would be almost no challenge to me if the government wasn't taking between 22 and 35% of my income depending on my wages (that's everything that California and the Feds combined have taken out at various wage rates I have worked for)

Originally posted by Two Steps Forward
What isn't true is that the D-Rs supported small government generally (only w/r/t the feds),

Fair point, I have been primarily focused on federal politics here, but you're right. Obviously in rural states the D-Rs had to get a bit liberal to keep the vote of the common dirt-farmer. The stay acts on forclosures are a good example.

or that the D-Rs represented the typical working man. It's more accurate to say that the D-Rs/Democrats represented rural interests (including the big slaveowning planters -- far from "working people"), while the Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans represented the urban elites.

Again this is fair. I would probably rephrase more liberally, something along the lines of "were identified with by the common man". You are again correct that parties always tend to go where the money is and let the common man closest to their position come along on his own. Still it is a fact that early on the American working man in the prevailing part of the nation was a simple farmer, and his vote is one of the major factors that kept the rural-favoring D-Rs in power.

In the early days of our nation, working people in the sense of hired industrial workers weren't much of a political force;

Agreed, my point is that the working man was more commonly a dirt farmer than an industrial laborer in an urbanized area, up until revolutions in transportation, communcation, and industry in the 19th century began to diversify the "working class" in the North (while the South remained primarily a rural agricultural economy for quite a while, hence the "Solid South", where the working class was not diverse enough to make elections too close)

No American political party except the Libertarians has ever truly represented "small government."

In consideration of state levels as well as federal you are mostly correct, unless I'm forgetting one of the transient third parties.

A nation generally has the amount of government that it needs given its diversity, population, and complexity of culture.

I would agree in terms of actual government (which has to be elected) although parties will sometimes advocate a level of government which is either above or below the need-point, which probably is a significant factor in the formation of ages of dominance.
In addition to divergence from the needed amount of instrusion, the type of intrusion is obviously a factor, and at present this is probably where most of the difference between our parties exists. This can create obvious point-of-view biases. People who are geographically or demographically positioned in such a way as to not recieve as much of the benefit of intrusion, while still carrying part of the burden, will have a different perspective of what the level of intrusion is. This is where I think some of the minor errors or generalizations in my first post come from.

The Constitution actually authorizes a level of intrusive government that no American would want, but doesn't require that this be done.

True, but it limits the ends for which such means might be pursued. This could hypothetically set upper and lower limits on intrusion at a given time, although those limits will shift with circumstances.

Being old enough to have lived through the 1960s and half of the 1950s, I can definitely attest that this is not the first time that national security has been on the front burner.

My statement that we are in the midst of a shift to focus on national security refers at the very least to the beginning of the Reagan administration, with obvious precursors to that shift in the late 40s and 50s, although I would argue that national security had close competition with social and economic issues through the 60s and 70s, again in the 90s, and possibly yet again in 2006 or 2008.
I think it's fair to say, though I'd be interested in your opinion on the matter, that National Security really didn't break through as the dominant issue until the Reagan and Bush 41 Administrations, and wasn't really observed to slip again (when you consider the Perot factor) until the 1994 and 1996 elections.

In fact, by comparison to the Cold War at its height, today's obsession with security is tame and halfway.

In terms of social attitudes or actual policy. However worried we may have been about the Soviet Union, I'm primarily interested in what actually got people elected and what they did with their office.

From Korea to the Bay of Pigs, perhaps, but my understanding (which may not be extensive enough) is that social and economic agendas dominated at the very least through the Johnson and and Nixon administrations, unless of course we characterize Vietnam as security concern that won elections and enjoyed top priority with policy makers, which I obviously doubt. I could give Kennedy and Ford the benefit of the doubt, even though many of their "national security" moments, were thrust upon them either by previous administrations or foreign action (Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Koh Tang). Nor would I call Carter a foreign policy president by any stretch of the imagination, despite Iran and the occasional kissing of Communist feet.

I definitely don't agree that this is a permanent shift, although we do have an issue since the end of World War II regarding the degree and type of U.S. international intervention.

I would certainly not contend that any shift is permanent, and I actually believe that the dominance of foreign policy is prepared to meet an early death, if it hasn't begun to already. I expect foreign adventures and meddling for economic purposes over the course of the next 20 years, particularly with respect to East Africa, South America, and India, but my expectations have less to do with national security and more to do with resource prices, particularly cement, metals, uranium, etc if and when the continued increase in natural gas and oil prices creates a need for new development of energy infrastructure and a switch to concrete for most paving.

Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, the more usual trend where money influences politics to the degree it does in America, is that everybody represents big business and nobody represents the people.

Again I am bitten by the same generalization as I was with respect to D-Rs. It has generally been my position that neither party first and foremost represents the interests of the people, but generally one of the parties will be considered more friendly to the people while it goes on following the money. I believe that while many democratic voters would identify their party as that of the people, a lesser percent of republican voters would do so, and voters on each side would characterize the other as the representitive of an aloof elite. If I am correct in this, which I have gathered from my observation both online and in the news media as well as in personal conversations, then the sum of a poll would indicate that while most Americans identify the political parties as serving financial interests first and foremost, there would be one party which was heavily considered to accidentally be the closest thing to a "party of the people" at the same time.

The Democratic Leadership Council, which took control of the Democratic Party with Clinton's election (although they may be losing it now), made the Democrats a party just as corporatist as the Republicans, and defined the differences between the parties purely in terms of social issues.

In light of that I'd be very interested in your views on the thread I linked to several posts above, titled "Fear and Partisanship: Stealing your Liberty to make you vote"
I think it bears mentioning though that even though the Democrats found a new place to sell out (as if they hadn't already when they took us to Vietnam for the Military Industrial Complex) that the Clinton years have been sold by the media as a golden age of prosperity for the common man. I believe this illustrates my contention that even while doing what politicians do, one party or the other can generally be accepted, despite whatever the truth may be, as the party of the common man by virtue of advocating government intrusion in the areas which the majority of the population is willing to stomach.

This is what corporate America would call a "politically safe" situation -- no matter who wins, they win.

Double-safe in the age of electronic voting. They get to choose the greater of two evils.

A quibble: the equation of "liberal" with "big government" and "conservative" with "small government" is an invention of self-serving conservatives, and is false.

Or perhaps a matter of point-of-view bias, to put it more gently.
I have conservative leanings because conservatives, sellouts as they may be, have generally given away less of my money for causes that I do not share in, have not said as many bad things about my firearm, etc.
On the opposite side fo the same coin, perhaps the overall level of conservative intrusion has not changed, but only the areas in which they intrude, which would explain my perception of a shift as they begin to spend my money on wars that aren't making me safer, among other things.

Cynical young person.

I have very little beef with that description of my view on political stances on education, except to say that just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get me.

Regarding Amendment 10: You might consider this amendment in light of the process that led to the Bill of Rights in the first place. It's common in our political discourse to attribute these amendments to the framers of the Constitution, but that's incorrect. They were framed by, and demanded by, the anti-federalists, and the Constitution advocates agreed to them under protest and as a condition of ratification.

I am aware. My first semester in college pretty well turned my view of America's founding fathers on its head and raised questions that at times I'm still almost afraid to address. Emotionally I side with Jefferson almost across the board, but if views like his had reigned throughout American history I believe that I would probably not enjoy the life that I do today, if America had maintained independence at all.

A close examination of Article I, Section 8 shows some very vague empowering language that allows the federal government to do almost anything it wants. It can levy taxes in any amount, and by implication spend the money it levies on anything, as long as the taxes are uniform by state and it can justify the taxing and spending as intended to "pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States."

It is precisely the requirement of "for the general Welfare" which should in large part safeguard us against excessive government intrusion, although in practice this has not worked very well, since our Constitution has a high level of malleability thanks to the SCOTUS.

In 1936, in US v Butler the Supreme Court ruled that the General Welfare Clause could not be used to justify taxes affecting local as opposed to national interests. (Specifically the case dealt with part of the New Deal- the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act- which taxed processors of agricultural products in order to provide subsidies for farmers as a price support for crops.)
This precedent has not been far-reaching though; the Commerce Clause has picked up a lot of the slack, and social programs which I do not view as fundementally different from that stuck down in Butler have been protected by the General Welfare Clause by virtue of their geographic distribution.

But the 10th amendment contains no such affirmative restrictions. It merely says that whatever powers are not granted to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people. The problem being that the language of the Constitution grants, in potential, ALL powers to the federal government, leaving NOTHING reserved to the states or to the people!

Only under the most absurd of Supreme Courts (far in excess of anything even the 9th Circuit would likely tollerate, IMHO) could this be true. Such absurdity could fo course arise. I believe the inevitable conclusion of the social contract theory is that the individual is ultimately sovreign and that laws are essentially treaties. It is axiomatic that treaties only endure while they are mutually beneficial, and at some point one party or another is bound to renneg on its obligations, at which point war often results where the ramifications are severe enough.

Shy of such an astounding hijacking of the conglomeration of documents (the constitution itself and the several amendments) which despite their separate origins enjoy equal an equal status as components of a single body of law, the 10th Amendment clearly protects state and individual rights in many respects which could only be related to national concerns by the most obtuse sophistry. Most personal actions such as marriage, sexual conduct, abortion, and virtually every individual right promised in the Bill of Rights (which does not establish federal authority over those rights, even in the event that those amendments were repealed) etc cannot be compellingly argued as proper objects of federal control.
Even your 100% tax is highly questionable, though not explicitly ruled out, as the federal government has only the authority to regulate interstate commerce, but not to organize or mandate it. Therefore the federal government is of highly questionable authority to prevent the establishment of localized economies in circumvention of such a tax, except by a ludicrous extension of the precedent that domestic production influences interstate demand and therefore may be prohibited.

Clearly any such drastic interpretation of the Constitution, possible as it may be through ambiguity, is tantamount to any international instance in which a nation takes aggressive action by intentional misrepresentation of its treaty obligations, and would be legitimately subject to corrective action. In simpler terms, I believe you and I both know there'd be a war over such a thing and that the government would likely either fail to accomplish its objective or fall completely.

I appreciate your input, it's nice to have someone so bright bring this thread back to life. In large part I agree with you as far as semantics are concerned, but in practice I believe that their are obvious limits which keep our constitution serviceable, though not perfect, as a guide American government. On the same note, our parties, while generally disagreeable, are what we have to work with and can be worked with to at least marginal effect- to generalize them as polar opposites as I have risked is a bit of a stretch, but there are differences. I consider them a pair of bodies orbiting an imperfect but workable line, each taking its turn on the better side here and there and now and then.

And now, if Big 5 isn't already closed, I think I'll go price a .357 before the Democrats retake congress.