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Over at Salon, Amanda Marcotte expresses enthusiasm for secret ballots because of concerns that husbands are forcing wives to vote for Trump:
She also thinks it would be good if wives used emotional blackmail to control men's votes:
Oddly enough, there is no mention of the issue posed by absentee ballots. These are the tools by which abusive spouses can use anything from cajoling to emotional abuse to outright violence to dictate the votes of those that reside with them. The only way to make sure this isn't an option is returning to the canonical secret ballot, which is in a voting booth where this is no option to show others who you voted for. Notably, this is a protection against other forms of coercion, such as from employers or caregivers.
Marcotte comes as close as I've seen anyone on the progressive side of things has gotten to acknowledging this problem, but somehow elides the solution to this fundamentally solved problem. Kind of interesting dynamic.
Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.
In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"? What would stop them?
If you believe that the republicans all want to enact Handmaid's Tale then it's pretty rational to not expect the procedure to stop them.
No.
A whole shitload of precedent and existing laws.
To somehow morph the constitution enough that individual lights could be altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions, you'd have to, at the very least, pass a bunch of amendments. Not laws, amendments. This requires ratification by 2/3rds of the states. I don't think there's anything, right now or in the foreseeable future, that 2/3rds of the states could agree on fast enough to accomplish this within a 4 - 8 year presidency and also assume zero turnover in congress. Along the way, I also assume there would be dozens of court challenges.
Remember that, for a few years, the Republicans really mad an effort to overturn The Affordable Care Act. They got close but failed. The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.
Altering the constitution (in the opposite direction of its original intent) would require an amazing level of sustained, focused, hyper coordinated action. Without any room for even mild electoral losses or turnover. While also assuming something like court packing happening in parallel. And ... in a single 4 year Trump admin?
It's a goofy catastrophy-porn scenario. Congress is fucking up its basic budgetary requirements. The Republican majority kicked out their own speaker. But, we're supposedly to believe that if Orange Man gets a sequel (which will almost certainly be decided by less than 300k votes) all of a sudden 2/3rds of the states and 3/4ths of their population will get out their well concealed ChristoFascist playbooks and get to work.
In fairness, look at what some of our doomposters here believe: that the Democrats literally ignore laws with impunity because they are in control, so the Constitution is fake and gay and any claims that they can't do X or Y or Z are just cope.
It's not hard to believe that rabid partisans on the other side like Marcotte believe that Republicans can and will just ignore laws and everyone will go along with it because.
It's maybe a nitpick, maybe not - but there is a difference between ignorning laws and actually changing them in what would be plainly against the individual freedom concepts embedded in the constitution.
Ignoring or selectively enforcing laws (or, on another level, choosing to interpret laws in a certain way) is commonplace no matter who holds power in the executive branch. Congress and The President get to fight it out. The backstop to that has always been individual liberties - specifically those laid out in the constitution and, otherwise, those with deep precedent.
There is room for legitimate doomerism on both sides, but there is also, in my opinion, a difference between unlikely and fanciful. To take a Red Tribe issue of note; the idea that the Federal government could ever confiscate already owned guns is fantasy. The idea that they could make everyone register their guns or be subject to search is far fetched but plausible.
Marcotte and her ilk start with the fanciful and ridiculous as "legitimate concern" territory and then use a logical structure full of gaps and deeply nested assumptions to get there. It's a bad in product and process.
Can I be skeptical that this is so far fetched? Unlikely, sure, but all it would take is a 5-4 SCOTUS decision to claim the 2A does not confer an individual right to own guns. Right now, with the current SCOTUS lineup that won't happen, but give it a generation or two, some unlucky deaths/retirements, or court packing and we could quickly be there.
It may be bias on my end, but I also feel the more conservative members of SCOTUS who are textualists (and to a lesser extent originalists) are less partisan and more consistent with their rulings on the whole than the more liberal side whose motivating principle seems to be more about how they think society should be.
No, they can't. The federal government might be able to declare that they have the right to do such a thing but actually going and doing it is another matter, like deporting twenty million illegals. It's just not doable.
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