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It is certainly strange that whichever elections the right wins, and whichever court battles they win.... those aren't the ones which result in any change.
Is your claim that there haven't been substantial changes since Trump took office?
That seems about right to me. What has substantially changed?
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There's been tariffs, since the Democrats don't want to interrupt their opponent when he's shooting himself in the face. Also deportations, though the Supreme Court has put the kibosh on those for now. But mostly nothing that won't just be #resist'ed until he's out of office.
In 3 months the Trump admin has
What were your actual expectations for the first 3 months of Trump II?
Are you willing to put a bet with cash to a charity of your choice on disparate impact? Because that's not one of the ones I'm certain is going to get TRO'd and reversed the second a Dem President is in office, but I'd probably put north of 70% on the former and north of 90% on the latter.
I would want to have some concreteness on exactly what we're betting on here (e.g. obviously the EO didn't make Griggs completely irrelevant forever, obviously the strong form of affirmative action in college admissions was already on its way out).
But yeah if we can operationalize this and still disagree on expected outcomes vs just disagreeing on what it concretely means for disparate impact policies to be neutered I am up for a charity bet.
Dollar amount of disparate impact settlements in the first 4 years of next dem admin, inflation adjusted to 2018 dollars? Though that is a super noisy signal.
It's noisy, but more critically, it's also a signal that's very sensitive to other stuff. I'm not very optimistic about Ames, for example, but despite not being a disparate impact suit itself, I'm hard-pressed to think of any conclusion but a punt on the underlying circuit split that leaves the rate of disparate impact suits unchanged. There's some cy pres stuff that could have an even bigger impact on settlements in general.
Beyond that, a lot of my position is about the policy, itself. The paper matters, both as something that discourages behaviors well before a court case happens, and in acting as cover for a wide variety of other behaviors that would be legally questionable. Maybe that's not something that we can bet on -- a Dem admin blanket-reversing every Trump EO is possible and wouldn't necessarily mean a reversion to 2024 disparate impact rules -- but it seems more relevant.
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I'm sorry, but do you not understand that the elections for governor and the elections for local school board are different elections for different positions? Of course winning a governorship has little immediate impact on the decisions of any individual school because state governors are not meant to be elected kings. They have specifically given powers and limits.
Those particular limits can change as states have pretty broad freedom, but even that still requires more than the governor. It requires a state legislature (something else people vote for).
And if you think it's particularly biased, I recommend looking at North Carolina which has a Dem governor and yet the legislature leans heavily Republican to the point they normally have a supermajority and constantly overturn vetos. In fact just recently they overturned a veto on a law that limited the power of the positions the Democrats won. As supermajority winners of the state legislature, that was their legal right to do and no amount of Dem voting for governor can change that because the governorship is not a king position that assumes full and direct control of everything in the state.
I share in The_Nybbler's frustration because it seems like the only way the right gets what it wants is if it has control of absolutely every branch and level of government, including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own). If even ONE of them remains in the hands of the right, then sorry, not only the fucking machines remain, but some local judge is going to rule that the whole country has to hire more fucking machines.
Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?
If your goal is to radically change the legal status quo, US governing systems are generally arranged in such a way where you have to win everything by large margins. The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.
Given the strong propensity of American conservatives to treat these groups as hated enemies regardless of their behavior, the long-run trend will always be that these groups end up aligned against them. Until such a time as the right can overcome both its ideological hatred of civil servants and its human capital problem, it's not going to produce any solution more sophisticated than either serial arson or bringing back the spoilers system.
But it does not get its way in this regard.
It certainly does! Most complaints about how the left always gets its way and the right never does are simply selective perception or "not-winning-hard-enough"/"everything-I-want-is-the-bare-mininum" style complaints. The US political system is incredibly status quo biased. Sometimes this helps the right, sometimes it helps the left.
I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago on the old place:
Nah. We all know the issues where the right can make gains and where not, its extremely predictable, and the fact that the typical categorisation of left and right also includes issues where they do have a chance is not actually relevant.
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Imagine a country that is perfectly 50% party A and 50% party B. The representative split in power will be 50% both ways, but for individual topics this might not appear the case because many individual topics can't be split. The divide between "Wants a road here" and "doesn't want a road here" isn't easily mitigated by just having a smaller road since having one at all inherently violates the desires of the second side.
But it might mean some places do have roads and some don't. And with negativity bias, each side looks "Ugh those jerks, they built a road here" and "Ugh those jerks denied us a road". This is the type of thinking that led to Scott's caution on bias arguments piece where both sides of a conversation shown the same video viewed it as biased against them.
Now imagine this in real life where the sides aren't exact, they're not set in stone because people change their views, they're not easy to measure perfectly (one side might turn out while another doesn't), they might be distributed in different ways like a rural republican city vs an urban dem city is the common way those go, there's a wide distribution of power among various positions and there might be established rules intentionally designed to prevent fleeting minor majorities from making major changes like the difficulty in making new amendments for the constitution and lots of times there's not even just two sides.
Which is to say that are you sure there's "more fucking machines" than there should be given the constituency they represent?
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