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Is Nullification on the Horizon?
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-condemns-president-bidens-illegal-rewrite-of-title-ix
Recently the Biden admin rewrote some regulations to encode gender identity in title IX. While this is stupid, it's not something that in itself seems likely to be a productive motte top level post. Ken Paxton sued the white house over it, but this is just the default assumption about federal administrative rules on culture war topics. No, what I'm getting at is the letter from Greg Abbott:
https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/O-BidenJoseph1.pdf
I guess telling the federal government to kick rocks back in January and getting away with it set a precedent- and, obviously, Joe Biden is not going to send the troops in to escort male athletes into the high school girl's locker room in an election year.
This obviously raises the question- are we on the cusp of an era where big state governors feel free to resist the federal government? Obviously, being combative with the Biden admin is a political winner for Greg Abbott. It's unclear what he'll use as a replacement for it in the likely event that Trump sits there next year; I don't think he thinks he can get away with bullying New or old Mexico but the strongman image requires something. And, of course, are Ron Desantis and Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul watching closely and learning? Will they resist Trump policies as brazenly(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance) as Abbott does Biden's, given that he's emboldened by a base which may not be pro-secession but is absolutely confident Texas would be fine if it did happen?
And, of course, we could see the same thing on the left as well. We've at least seen resistance to listening to SCOTUS, and things like marijuana "legalization" seem not all that different.
The difference is that in those cases, it's the Left doing it, with the backing of all the institutions they control. The Right, being mostly powerless, will not be able to get away with it the way the other side can.
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DeSantis is on the same bandwagon:
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Be nice, until you can coordinate meanness. Abbott appears to be coordinating meanness.
From a Red Tribe perspective, there is no rational reason beyond naked fear to respect or maintain federal authority. Nullification is indeed on the horizon, it's just the one behind us, given that we're certainly two and perhaps as many as five generations past the point where Federal authority could plausibly be claimed to operate according to well-defined and well-respected rules. We Reds already know that laws we pass at the Federal level aren't real laws, that our Supreme Court victories don't count, that it isn't actual democracy when we win elections, that we do not enjoy meaningful rule of law. We know the existing system has no intention of cooperating with us at any level. Our situation is a conflict, not a mistake.
We won on immigration law, and our laws were ignored. Blue Tribe spent decades actively facilitated the illegal immigration of dozens of millions of people from the poorest regions of the world, and they did it while explicitly celebrating the thesis that this would give them an insurmountable and irreversible advantage politically. It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic. Blues look at this as a fiat accompli, but why respect a system that doesn't respect you? @TracingWoodgrains points out that all the establishment institutions are solidly against Red Tribe. Given that reality, why continue to support and maintain those institutions? Because we need them to keep society running? Have you seen society?
The correct move is to withdraw the consent of the governed, and make them fight for every step. Impose costs anywhere and everywhere. Impose friction. Deny them freedom of action at every possible point. Contest every issue under every theory imaginable, and when those run out, think up new ones. Never concede their legitimacy, never grant them authority, never cooperate. When they push back, escalate, and when they push back on that, escalate again. Attack their institutions and organizations. Locate, isolate and persecute their partisans. Engage in economic and legislative warfare. All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play. The Progressive Coalition is not a stable entity, and it is already suffering severe policy starvation. It does not appear to have unlimited state capacity to spare. It is entirely possible that we can grind them down to the point that the social structures they're leaning on simply collapse, and their project of cultural imperialism dies of exhaustion, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. Formal secession is not necessary, much less the severing of economic ties or serious breach of the peace, only a destruction of the mechanisms of centralized power.
And if we are not so fortunate as to get the happy end, all the efforts put into this strategy pay dividends at the subsequent levels of escalation.
Progressivism is currently winning against conservatism/reaction because it won over the elite, not because of illegal immigrants. Fewer hispanics would move the median voter slightly to the right, and thus R and D policies slightly to the right, and that'd still be way to the left of what you want.
Anyway, I don't think any such decentralization will happen, economic systems are deeply intertwined with regulation and the law and that'll make a true decoupling too painful to countenance. And if it was attempted anyway, it'd just be a "man corners dog, dog bites man, man shoots dog" scenario, the state would lose hard.
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Why isn't that fear enough?
What matters is not respect, but obedience. Blues don't need or want Reds' respect, only their submission.
Because you will be punished if you don't?
So, poking the (metaphorical, Federal) bear?
This implies we have any meaningful ability to do so.
Legitimacy is overrated. Don Corleone doesn't need "legitimacy" to get people to pay him for "protection," does he?
What does this look like, and how does it end in anything other than getting arrested, shot, etc.?
Try that with the IRS, or the FBI, and see what happens.
What makes you think this can possibly end well? How does this not end in the Feds and Blues crushing Red utterly. What does getting you (yes, you) and your entire family gunned down by SWAT accomplish, exactly?
Attack with what, exactly? As the old meme goes, you and what army?
Same question as above. They have most the big corporations and economic weight on their side, and only their legislation has "teeth," not ours.
Except we lack the means to do unto them as they have done unto us. It's like telling a man taking cover from gunfire to "just shoot back; tit-for-tat," when he's unarmed.
It doesn't need literally "unlimited" state capacity, merely enough to crush us. And as I see it, it has that in spades. What evidence do you have to the contrary?
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! It is not, in fact, "entirely possible" for us to do this. They are too powerful, and we are but ants beneath their boots.
How can you possibly believe that "the subsequent levels of escalation" are anything other than Red Tribe getting crushed harder and harder, until we're eventually eradicated?
Because, in my assessment, it's not rational. It appears that others agree with me, Abbott and DeSantis among them, among a number of other leaders and their supporters. Defiance of Federal authority is observably being coordinated, right out in the open where you can watch it happen.
You can believe that such defiance is inevitably doomed to fail, but I disagree, and it appears others disagree as well. Very well: we've made our predictions, and the outcomes will be as they will be.
It doesn't seem to me that they're getting it, and the trend seems to be that they're getting less of it over time.
It seems to me that their capacity for punishment is declining, and that well-chosen actions can force it further into decline.
Trump is certainly being punished. He has survived so far, and is plausibly going to win the election. If he does, they will stonewall him and continue their efforts to destroy him, and the result that matters is that the system will continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. If he does not win the election, or if they succeed in destroying him, the system will likewise continue to bleed credibility and thus capacity. I do not see a route by which the establishment arm of the GOP regain authority over and support from their base, which has been in open rebellion for some years now. Abbott has not yet been punished, and neither has DeSantis. Even if Trump is destroyed, and Abbott is destroyed, and DeSantis is destroyed, someone else will step up to take their respective places, and the process will continue.
Abbott has done so before, and Biden backed down. Abbott is doing so again, and Biden is very likely to back down this time too.
There is more defiance to Federal authority now than there was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. It does not seem to me that the trend supports your interpretations or predictions.
...As for the rest, I maintain that the ultima ration is preferable to an uncontested blue tribe win, and that it favors Red Tribe. I also maintain that it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale, think it should be our last resort, and do not believe that discussing it in detail is a good idea, especially in this forum. I continue to decline discussion of the ultima ratio beyond these points, and continue to be comfortable with your assumption and assertion that this means there is no substance to my argument. I invite you to dispense with the questions and simply proceed to state that I offer no explanation and thus should not be listened to. Others are free to draw their own conclusions.
If violence is your last resort, you're not prepared to use it at all. Von Neumann knew there was only one way to get it done: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today?”
You don't need to be frothing at the mouth and shooting every minute of every day, but it needs to be the goal you base all your other plans around reaching or it will never happen, just like writing a novel.
And that's why the only possible response to someone cursing you out is a mag-dump.
Salami slicing is an actual problem. Coordination is an actual problem, a very serious one.
Let's say a man with a pencil mustache and a dapper black suit hands you a button. You press this button, and a randomly-selected two to five percent of the US population is abruptly mulched, the trains stop running and the power and water goes out for the indefinite future. There's also a 75% chance that the American Blue Tribe ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force, and a 25% chance that the Red Tribe ceases to exist.
Do you pressing that button right now is a good idea?
I would slam the button even if the odds were a coin flip: it's still a far better outcome than what will actually happen thanks to decades of zero resistance from "constitutional conservatives."
I am going to die when leftist looters burn my family alive FC. Any opportunity to win and then mulch them first is worth taking, no matter how bad the odds are (I'm assuming "ceases to exist as a sociopolitical force" means no effective resistance to mop-up mulching after victory, since a random 5% is far too low to include that part)
I have come across pictures like this, and contemplate that some day in the not-to-distant future, they could very well be my wife and children. But you are claiming certainty. Okay. What are the intermediate steps? What happens, specifically, between here and there? Make your predictions, and we can see how it goes step by step. If it doesn't go the way you're thinking, you can hopefully recognize that you are being irrational. And if it doesn't go the way I'm thinking, I can recognize that I've underestimated the threat. Either would be a positive result, no?
In the meantime... Do you live in a Blue area? If so, you should move. Do you own guns? If not, you should get them, not because they're particularly useful in a fighting-the-blues sense, but because you should have the means to protect your family. More than that you should be building skills and cultivating social networks. I worry about my family being burned alive, but not by looters, because I don't live near potential looter populations, the local authorities look favorably on armed self-defense, I have a strong social network, and my wife and I have plans to improve our position over the next few years.
Why? I hate Blues so much it often keeps me awake at night. But you are claiming you think they're going to kill a significant portion of the US population, and so you need to do it to them "first". Okay, how are they going to do that? What's the sequence of steps? Because we're talking about the power and water going out and the trains stopping, and also incidentally dozens of millions of your friends and neighbors dead. That means you get real poor real fast. that means crime goes through the roof and probably stays there. That means everyone's life gets fucked for the foreseeable future. If you're certain something bad enough to be worth all that is coming, you should necessarily be certain about how we get from here to there. So, how?
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And yet, you don't seem to think that the Red tribe's deep hostility to coordination of any kind is an issue with respect to their odds of success. How do you solve the coordination problem with the regular in Sarah Hoyt's comment section who declared that, even in a SHTF situation, everyone will do their own thing, fort up their own homestead themselves, and if you come around to his place talking about "organizing" or "joining up" or "coming together," it won't matter how long he's known you or how close a friend you are, you are The Enemy and he will shoot you dead on the spot?
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Exactly. Particularly if you are also fundamentally opposed to preparing for its use, and particularly to organizing in any fashion ("We are the people who, when someone orders us to breathe, suffocate to death. It's our superpower."). They mumble about "2nd amendment remedies" coming someday, eventually, when the gubment finally "goes too far"… and when their past idea of "goes too far" finally comes to pass, well, it's not that bad, but next time…
These are family and friends I'm talking about, and they have such terrible understandings of how successful rebellions and insurgencies are fought. Ridiculously wrong understandings of how the American Revolution worked, how the Taliban worked, how "fourth-generation warfare" works; it's all 80s action movie fantasies about how "lone wolf" fighters with naught but their rifle and the clothes on their back will Chuck Norris their way through hordes of faceless mooks to inevitable victory.
Back in my junior year of high school (98-99), we had an exchange student from the former Yugoslavia, briefly escaping the wars. And (until lefty classmates stopped asking because they didn't like the answers) she had interesting things to say about the conflict. My later readings have mostly matched what she said: that people and families who tried to hunker down on their lonesome — particularly those who "headed for the hills" and tried to make a go of it in the woods — got picked off by those who grouped up. It was the organized, the militias and such, who survived.
As I've seen it put, a rebellion is not going from one government to zero to one, but from one government to two to one. A successful rebellion is a parallel state — as is a successful mafia; the difference between the two is mostly down to political ambitions (as in the case when the Ming restorationism of the "Three Harmonies Society" degenerated into the modern "Triads" who draw their name from it).
In reply to Isaac Asimov's dictum that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent," fellow sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle replied, "you're right; the competent use it before it's the last resort."
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I agree with this. Which is why my scenario is that the Republican party will be suppressed; we'll have at the very least Democratic dominance, as in the early 20th century, maybe more. I wouldn't rule out the GOP getting banned.
I'd like to believe that last point, but I don't see sufficient evidence, particularly given my first-hand experience with other Red Tribers — I don't see my parents or brother winning in any civil war, regardless of the veritable arsenal of guns and ammo they've accumulated. You certainly aren't providing any evidence of that. Comparisons to the Taliban are facile and misunderstand how the latter won. Sheer numbers of people and (merely-civilian) guns are not nearly as relevant to victory as command and coordination. A small, disciplined force almost always overcomes an uncoordinated rabble of individual, independent actors.
And since you're not going to provide such, for no other reason than because you don't have any (and when you claim other reasons for not sharing, you are lying), yes, I suppose I am simply stating that you offer no explanation, are a liar and thus should not be listened to.
@FCfromSSC was too nice to mod you (and to be clear, did not ask anyone else to either). But calling people liars is about as directly antagonistic as it gets. Even if you think someone is lying (and you may be right, people do sometimes lie about what they actually believe or what their intentions are or even about stated facts), you need to stop at "I don't believe you, for such-and-such reason." Emphatically and repeatedly calling someone a lying liar because you see the world through different lenses (and fwiw, if I were forced to adjudicate who's factually correct here, I'd be more inclined to side with you than FC) is not okay.
You have 4 AAQCs and no prior warnings. But I'm still giving you a 1-day ban to emphasize this point. For someone who spams reports on every other poster in the Motte who ever expresses an arch sentiment like you were watering your lawn, you really should know better, or at least act like you do.
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If i might be a bit crass, paraphrasing the same objection over and over doesn't win an argument.
The reason why cannabis legalization worked is that there are only 10.1k DEA employees and they entirely rely on state and local government to be their enforcers, so states could withdraw that support and they'd not be able to fill the void.
The FBI only has 35k employees, not just special agents, and is in a similar situation with a wider breadth of requirements.
It is why nullification has always worked in the US.
This "they can't catch everybody" argument is tiresome, because it's true of every police force ever. According to the 2022 figures on this page, the case clearance rate for murder is only 52.3%, and this doesn't count the portion where the courts fail to convict. Thus, in the majority of murderers in America, the killer gets away with it. Does this mean laws against murder are pointless, and we shouldn't bother enforcing them? For auto theft, the closure rate is only 9.3%. Does that mean that the laws against carjacking have been "nullified"? Their aren't enough traffic cops to catch even a tiny fraction of speeders or red-light-runners; does this mean enforcing traffic laws has no effect at all, and is a waste of money?
This is a fully-general argument against law and government in general. No society in human history has ever been able to catch all criminals… but they don't have to. You just need to catch enough, and punish them harshly enough, to have a significant deterrent effect on the general population.
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…is because the Left supported it and the Right opposed it. It doesn't work the other way around. Cthulhu always swims left.
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It's mostly the so-called captains of industry, who tend to lean right, that imported millions as cheap labor.
You should probably take a closer look at some of your fellow "red tribers".
California is red tribe? Migrant workers aren't picking field corn in the midwest, they are only needed for certain crops.
This whole "red-blue tribe" obsession and talk is utterly useless, imo. It's long turned into an excuse to vigorously engage in naked tribalist politics while hypocritically professing to speak about and above such.
Getting that off my chest, of course the heads of industry "lean right." They "lean right" everywhere. What pro-union socialist heads of industry can you name? Honestly, trying to do away with simplistic political memology, what do you think California is? Some Communist monolith? The is the state of Nixon and Reagan, "right to work" laws, and prop 13. There's millions of people of every political stripe.
What does that have to do with anything? Coal unions aren't blue tribe and unions are only becoming more decoupled from the Democratic party.
Illegal Migrants certainly don't have union cards either. So I don't get why those structures have to do with the conversation.
California is one of the most leftist states in the union. It is the example of a leftist state, with a triple branch control for the left party.
If you don't mind the indulgence: Was Stalin a fascist or a communist?
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Oh give me a break. You could be a literal Stalinist, if you're against MeToo / BLM / TransWomenAreWomen / the lastest Current Thing, approximately no one on the left is going to accept you as a leftwinger. There was a time when economic issues were what defined the left, but that time is long over.
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Who's working in the meatpacking plants there?
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[Citation needed], as they say. Because from what I've read, these days "industry" leans ever-leftward — see DEI, ESG, etc.
The chamber of commerce & friends represent the right. The actual, traditional right, not MAGA-style socio-populism. They back the GOP for low taxes and low regulations.
I'm trad and generally supportive of MAGA-Style socio-populism. What am I, Left?
I believe the term is socialist, presumably of the ethno/nationalistic variety.
Why not just go with "fascist"?
That would allow you to pretend you're not just another variety of socialist.
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No. Ag lobby are not captains of industry.
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That’s not a nullification. I’d say the correct remedy for opposing a law is challenging it in court, and Abbott’s doing that. But since this isn’t a law passed by Congress, it’s hard to fault him for instructing his administration on how to implement their administrative change.
Now, there’s a little problem. The USED already implements other Title IX athletics rules. Seeing as those aren’t being challenged, I assume Congress explicitly delegated the power at some point. Either that, or it was assumed through the ever-popular federal funding mechanism.
So what makes this different? If it were an Executive Order, I’d understand the case for a Constitutional violation. But this is a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.” See here. It sure sounds like business as usual. If so, the federal government has its obvious recourse: cut federal funding. No Constitutional wrangling necessary.
That’d probably be a big win for Texas Republicans. The rule is being spun as “destroying women’s sports” already. Actually reducing any federal funds? Free leverage for Abbott. As much as I resent the guy, he’s set up a decent gambit. Hard to blame him, when Biden’s agencies are being such partisan hardliners—
Oh.
Well, no one was going to look at the actual rule, anyway. And if they did, they’d surely see that it’s a trap; no restriction could ever survive the captured, liberal media blitz. And if it did, the deep state would bury it. And if they didn’t, those partisan judges would have to legislate from the bench to stop it. And if they didn’t, well, Biden would obviously send the 101st Airborne to escort a minimally-sympathetic trans woman into your daughter’s locker room. Or worse, do it himself. And you don’t want Sleepy Joe near your daughter, do you?
Far better to make political hay now, before all that unpleasantness can get started.
None of that is the actual rule. This is the actual rule:
ETA: The Supreme Court (and lower courts) should look at this, look at Title IX, note there's nothing in Title IX about gender identity, and throw out this regulation as lacking statutory basis. But they won't; they'll save it with deference if nothing else.
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I certainly wasn't going to, because I assumed this is what it would look like, and it appears I was correct. Mandatory gender identity affirmation for elementary kids. Denial of gender identity affirmation technically possible at older ages, provided that one class of Blue partisans wants to deny it, and a second class of Blue partisans seconds their motion.
Given that it's a federal rule and is going to be immediately complied with in all Blue areas, how often do you expect those Blue areas to conclude that "sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students" will actually be implemented, much less approved of by federal authorities?
Why do you think this is a reasonable rule? Why do you think using it to coordinate Red Tribe defiance is a bad idea?
Presumably, because "Red Tribe defiance" is itself a bad idea? Either because one is Blue Tribe, or because one sees "Red Tribe defiance" as leading only to Blue power cracking down even harder?
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That’s fair. I shouldn’t have gotten worked up with that last chunk, because I understand how the even the narrow rule serves as an attack. Blue locations will adopt it as soon as someone makes a stink about existing policy, a heckler’s veto binding any school or league.
There’s a counterfactual world where this is a reasonable rule. Up until high school, sports are glorified team-building exercises. Who cares when the little monster who hit puberty six months before his team can outrun any of them? Who cares if a kid wants to join the other team and hang out with her friends? If you set up two middle-school leagues, with absolutely zero enforcement of sex segregation, I guarantee they’d sort into boys’ and girls’ teams. The categories were made for man.
I know we don’t live in that world. Some combination of ideologues, tiger parents, and bad actors will push any boundary you set. Why give an inch when they’ll take a mile?
That’s exactly what frustrates me. In case it wasn’t obvious, I don’t give a damn about children’s’ sports. Pretending that they’re a Constitutional crisis, a basic human dignity, or the last gasp of traditional values? That’s absurd. And yes, I apply that judgment to whatever progressive fringe is crowing about this victory. Great job, guys, you’ve ensured that 1% of your school district can get bullied even harder.
Imagine this situation in a vacuum. If your only goal was to give trans people more opportunities for sports, what kind of compromise would you propose? I think it’d look a lot like this one. Expand the options where stakes are low. Acknowledge that they can’t be expanded everywhere without sacrificing other values.
Obviously, this isn’t a vacuum, and the people who wrote this rule care about lots of other issues. They have every reason to rally around this particular opportunity for point-scoring. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But they’re doing a better job of converging on the vacuum solution.
I dunno, man. There's still the question of the government imposing philosophical (if not quasi-religious) beliefs on people. If you want to have a rule that says "sports should be co-ed" you can have that, but saying "it's ok for you to have sports sex-segregated, but barring someone of the opposite sex is an act of discrimination, if they have a 'gender-identity' corresponding to that category", is an imposition of belief.
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Abortion was made a constitutional right by first finding a roght to privacy, and then discovering abortion being made illegal violates this right (but only in the first trimester). Or how interstate commerce was taken to mean intrastate, as any change in latter could by substitution effect, affect the former.
Here the courts wouldn't need to be so imaginative to make the most extreme trans activists demands, allowing any female-idenfying person to participate in women's sport, law. "Proposed regulation's other requirements" could be made arbitrarily more difficult to satisfy, as ban on IQ tests in employment shows. @The_Nybbler has on several occasions succesfully shown that if reqs are stringent enough, and organizations risk averse enough, a chilling effect occurs.
Not only was it taken to mean intrastate, it was also taken to mean lack of commerce.
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It's worth noting that doctor-patient privacy somehow also only extended to abortion, and not, say, to Kevorkian or medical marijuana.
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I think stuff like this is good, and I think red state governors should be encouraged to do more of it.
However, most of the big issues the country faces can’t be solved by red states. Immigration in particular is a federal issue. If the US government issues visas for a hundred million inhabitants of the third world to come to the US, Texas can’t do anything about it other than secede.
And I think people overestimate the will for secession, too. Most Texans are politically inactive and see themselves as Americans. They are not willing to risk any reduction in quality of life as a result of political change. An independent Texas would be a pariah state - the US would force all Western countries not to recognize it, so its passport would be worthless. Most smart and wealthy people would emigrate. The state would be sanctioned and embargoed into poverty.
A committed Democratic President can destroy states that nullify federal instruction without ever sending a single soldier in. They can instruct banks to make minor changes to who they do business with and how that would destroy their economies in months. They can pull funding for key infrastructure. They can stymie interstate commerce by claiming that Texas or whoever isn’t following the rules, which would destroy their economy further.
Red states could challenge this, but SCOTUS (even now with Kavanaugh and Barrett much more leftist than anticipated on every non-Tradcath issue) wouldn’t help them and cases would be tied up in legal wrangling for years, all the while anyone with any money or skills would emigrate.
Texas can coordinate defiance to federal authority without pursuing secession. Federal authority is a norm, not an immutable law of the universe, and norms can go away over time. Here, defiance by Red Tribe provides the other half of the back-and-forth wrenching that will tear this norm out of its cultural foundations. The first half of the wrenching has been amply supplied by Blues for decades to any exercise of Federal authority by Reds. If Trump wins, we're absolutely going to see more broad-spectrum "resistance". If Abbott and DeSantis continue on their current trajectory, then we'll see more Broad spectrum resistance from Reds as well. Keep that up, and it's entirely possible that Federal authority loses all credibility, and the existing system simply dies. That's a better outcome than most we could ask for, and requires no battles or redrawing of borders.
I mean, everything is a norm. The command structure of a military at wartime is a norm. The security of your home is a norm. Adherence to contracts is a norm. That police arrest you for breaking the laws passed by the legislature, as opposed to the laws the police chief makes up, is a norm. Yet, we don't expect any of those norms to fall apart.
Yes, any of those norms could change. But they'd need good reasons to. Corporations are very familiar with what happens when they blatantly break federal regulations - it goes poorly - and they maintain close relationships with regulators. Texas just doesn't have much leverage, as one state of many, and the biggest and most economically productive states are blue anyway. Yes, sufficient disruption could break this norm - if the regulators started demanding war communism, your hypotheticals would stop being hypothetical. But they aren't, and nobody involved has enough dissident energy to do anything.
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Except it's a norm backed by a lot of guns.
And what is left after the norm of Federal authority is "torn out," if not the raw "obey or die" assertion of power through raw force?
Only until Abbott, DeSantis, and their supporters end up in prison or dead.
They don't need credibility, they just need to send armed FBI agents to do pre-dawn no-knock raids on enough of those who oppose them to deter the rest.
...A quote from a recent conversation seems relevant.
The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree. I don't think the Enlightenment revolutions of the 1800s - 1900s are repeatable, and I think the social systems that produce similar regimes are observably dying. That does not mean we are heading for utopia; there is no utopia. It does mean that humans are moving away from centralized control as the default organizational principle of society. Attempting to assert control through the naked exercise of force is less practical now than it was previously, and it grows less practical over time.
For a long time, castles were the defining paradigm of force. When gunpowder arrived, one might argue that it should benefit castles, since it allowed faster mining and quarrying of stone with which to build them. One would be wrong.
Agreed.
Disagree. Where's your evidence of this? The internet and computers are only making centralization of control more effective than ever.
Also wrong. You cite the invention of guns removing the power of castles. Yes, there was a trend, for centuries after the invention of gunpowder, that made "the naked exercise of force less practical," gave power to "the people" and drove the rise of democracies. Such trends of labor-over-capital in military effectiveness peaked over a century ago, and the trend has been back toward high-capital "knightly" military elites, leading "government versus masses" conflict to look less like the French Revolution, and more like the German Peasants' War.
We're seeing in Ukraine the failure of "war of movement" and "hordes of expendable replaceable meat" of the past century, and to elite battlefield drone operators as the new knights:
You've already called me a liar and and stated that I should not be listened to. Why are you still trying to talk to me?
The purpose of debate is not to convince the other side, it's to convince the audience. It is to their benefit that I address the claims you make, rather than allowing those claims to sit un-rebutted.
You're wrong, and I'm not going to stop pointing out when you're wrong.
Do what you need to do, sir.
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The Obama administration's decision to let the states do an end-run around federal drug laws that marked one of the biggest swings in favor of state power away from federal power seems like a very important but under-examined swing from state power to federal power, a huge erosion of the federal power norm.
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Issuing visas would, at the very least, include an enforcement mechanism for finding and deporting people who don't meet their visa conditions. This would put the lie to either "Republicans don't like immigrants, 'illegal' is just a fig leaf for hate" or "Democrats don't want any border security, they just want new voters, either this generation or the next."
Is the only principled position either zero immigrants or infinity immigrants?
No. The principles involved might include numbers, which would require a measurement of some sort to have a min and a max, but there are a few other qualifications which should be considered. For example, is it known that this person was freed from prison in their home country to get a visa to the USA? No visa.
Irrespective of who is receiving them, what's the number of visas that could be issued within the foreseeable future for which shaking your fist at couldn't necessarily be considered evidence of xenophobia? Would a billion do it?
I don’t know as I haven’t done the math, but the current flow rate of migrants, refugees, and immigrants are being cited by economists as being good for the economy by depressing wages. Fewer than that.
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I think a (the?) big elephant in the room with secession is that whichever side successfully cons the other side into jumping first keeps the Presidency for the next 50 years.* Get one of the Big Four states to bail, and suddenly there are 30 - 50 EC votes that your side never needs to worry about again. Now all of a sudden you get a massive leg up in domestic politics and implementing whatever pet domestic agenda you had in mind.
Right now, the echo of Lincoln still rings loudly in our years (the last American Civil War vet died in '56 and the last veteran bride just passed away in 2020). Every single President has been a combination of too much of a true believer in the American project and too much of a realpolitik pragmatist to give away a US state, even if there was internal support for it (there hasn't been.)
Ideologically, I think younger Americans (left and right) are less inclined to have a patriotism or nationalism towards their country as a motherland/fatherland. Some of them might see it merely as a tool to achieve their preferred policy ends (and indeed that's a common attitude towards government these days!) Combine that with an intense focus on maintaining domestic political power, a lack of pragmatic understanding** and a world where there is some native demand for a national divorce and I could see a future where a sitting President goes "besides millions of taxpayers, tens of thousands of servicemen, dozens of vital military installations, four or five different priceless natural resources, and one really nice vacation spot, what have those 40ish Electoral College votes ever done for us?" (Technically this even sort-of happened the first time; the feds did ~zip to stop secession until Lincoln took office.)
I'm not sure such a situation is likely per se, but I think it will be something that will be on the radar in the minds of future politicians in a way that it isn't of most currently serving ones.
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
*In reality I suspect this is a mirage, actually, but a tempting one.
**I'm not actually sure if future governing generations will be worse at pragmatic understanding, to be clear. Certainly many younger people seem less pragmatically-minded, but I'm not sure that's ever been otherwise!
On the other hand, there's the Catalonian independence referendum that got declared illegal by Spain and people arrested for voting, while the rest of the EU gave zero fucks.
There's the ethnic cleansing of Artasakh, 200k people ran away. Russian peacekeepers lost iirc 10+ soldiers. Allegedly a few massacres too.
No one gives a fuck, somehow. Azeris are 'reliable allies'.
People only give a fuck if there's a lobby group.
Armenians have been staunch Russian allies for decades and are close to Iran, they were screwed over by their allies. On /r/europe the attitude is typically ‘it sucks, but that’s what you get for trusting Russia’.
They snubbed Russia in 2010s and tried to cozy up to the West. Also Russia is very much occupied at the moment, which is likely what let Azeris get away with the ethnic cleansing.
I have strong doubts Russians would have just eaten getting their troops killed like this if they weren't engaged in Ukraine.
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Yeah, @hydroacetylene is right. We are so many steps from Texit. That’s precisely why it makes a good fringe position.
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Actual successful secession would result in, more than likely, the collapse of U.S. hegemony because losing a major core province is a pretty big failure and whatever you can say about China’s weaknesses, they’re not about to face that problem.
I agree, but none of that means Germans and British and French are likely to recognize a hard-right independent Texas without the approval of the rUS. The Union was much less powerful internationally and up against a stronger foe in the civil war and even then no other country officially recognized the CSA.
Really the only optimistic case for Texas secession is a full breakup of the US with limited hard feelings and no large and powerful bicoastal blue bloc, which seems unlikely.
You think Texas is gonna care about the alzheimer states of EU?
Lmao. TX is going to care whether they can trade with China.
Yeah, and the United States could close shipping traffic to the Gulf (which in any case requires ships from China to take the long way around) and could block imports from California.
Yeah, and cause a shooting war between Texas & China and the United States in which obsolete weapon systems would encounter new weapon systems.
Chinese would be merely defending freedom of the seas there and preventing an illegitimate blockade.
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You're changing the scenario from "pariah state" to a full-blown war with this.
Like I said, it wouldn’t come to it. Chinese trade isn’t enough to keep Texas alive. It all comes back to the fact that secession without a comprehensive, EEA-style free trade and movement treaty would be suicide. A single sanction prohibiting US-domiciled corporations from doing business in Texas (which would be a day-one emergency bill through congress) would be enough to kill the Texan economy. The US couldn’t survive the loss of 10+ states for long, but Texas? Yeah, it would be weakened, but it probably could.
The question is ‘how much is the average Texan prepared to suffer for independence?’ After all, unlike Russia, Texas is a democracy. The US would gladly welcome back smart refugees. The average Texan is not ethnically or culturally discriminated against by the rest of the United States. They share the majority of their culture, religions and values. How badly do they believe in independence, how much is the average car mechanic in Fort Worth or defense attorney in Dallas prepared to sacrifice to live in broadly the same kind of state they already live in?
The Free State of Texas is going to have MORE gun freedoms, more free speech, no abortions, no homos, no blacks, no woman votes, and no troons. It will be paradise.
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This is far too negative of secession or blue tribe power. It would lead both sides to be poorer and likely the end of the US global empire. Texas and red would also control the blues by the balls with their authority over energy and oil. Sure controlling banks are nice but an energy embargo by red shuts blue down completely. Texas would also have Elon Musks who isn’t leaving and at this points it’s probably fair to say that Elon views blue tribe as a death cult.
Elon retweeted my favorite LDS twitter fundamentalist due to the guy's good speech on fertility.
Incredible event. What the hell?
Honestly incredible if Elon and a few people like him start to support these sorts of initiatives.
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Probably right. Of course, if Texas and the South broke away…not sure there would be sufficient strength by the rest of the US to enforce pariah state status.
That scenario isn’t really in the cards. Even an actual and not just threatened Texas secession probably doesn’t want to bring the south with it- Texas doesn’t want to be Germany and the Netherlands combined for a neocofederate EU. The rest of the south is largely nonproductive before the breakup of the hegemon causes a financial crash.
I don’t think that is right. Georgia and Florida are not unproductive. Florida has a massive economy. The Carolinas are quite productive.
Parts of Alabama are productive.
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Louisiana controls the Mississippi river chokepoint, which is pretty strategic. Just as an exercise in good geopolitics it would be smart to secure it if you could, I think.
Similar deal with Florida (gives you much more control over the Gulf). I think you'd also (with TX + FL) scoop most of the US' space launch infrastructure (although Vandenberg is in California) and that could pay off considerably down the road.
Security benefits can be a bit hard to quantify at times, so whether or not that would "pay off" or not, I don't know. Given some sort of national breakup, from Texas' POV it seems like the smart thing to do might be to pursue a security/diplomatic alliance with other states that secede without committing to financial support, which would increase mutual safety without dragging Texas down in a negative financial spiral.
I have a theory that if some states broke off from the US of A without a wholesale US collapse, it might cause some very interesting fiscal effects that would bolster the long-run standing of the breakaway states, but I think in the short term even with a mutually amicable separation it would cause a considerable financial shakeup in the best-case scenario.
Oh, paying the bills for southern Louisiana- albeit a not-as-nice as current southern Louisiana- makes strategic sense for an independent Texas, because the mouth of the Mississippi is very important. The place is basically run by engineers from A&M anyways and cutting the local elites down to scale is pretty doable and cuts admin costs drastically by reducing corruption.
But Texas accepting responsibility for the fiscal health of everything in the south that has to be subsidized seems unlikely. And while Florida, Georgia, North Carolina might be able to pay their own way, on a fiscal basis they’re not there to subsidize others.
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The PMC would leave, the media (both domestic and international) would frame it as a racist restoration of Dixie, the demographics of the seceded states would be terrible, the European countries and likely all of Latin America (which is either leftist or allied with Washington, neither of which are sympathetic to a free conservative south) would sanction it to hell, all national and international businesses would leave, unemployment would skyrocket, a lack of federal subsidies would make programs that keep the underclass in these states under control and pliable impossible, what would be left?
A small population of true believer white elites; middle class people of all races who would suffer tremendously; some Hispanics; a vast population of poor black people who would be no fans of the new arrangement. Little viable industry or commerce. The only way states are seceding is a peaceable National Divorce with an explicit and structured economic union between the new countries, a neutral court of arbitration, something like the European Union pre-1994. Even that would be tough for the South.
Sounds just like what was supposed to happen to Russia, yet here we are.
If Texas wasn't sanctioned by China, what problem would they have? Chinese sell everything.
The Panama Channel, possibly? Though I guess if Europe didn't really notice the detour around Africa to avoid the Houthis, it shouldn't really matter.
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I wonder if this is an example of the common criticism of conservatism in that yesterday's radicalism becomes today's normalcy and eventually becomes a new cherished tradition to be defended.
I think I remember seeing a lot of discourse a couple of years ago about how Title IX is this awful leftist thing that's the justification of universities' kangaroo court administrative proceedings against male students accused of sexual assault.
I think that was after a similar reinterpretation by Obama. Title IX itself is from the 70's.
I believe that was zPv’s point. Making a stink about Obama’s latest change was accepting the legitimacy of the past four decades of Title IX.
There was a lot of grumbling about Title IX before that, mostly about how it either hurt men's sports programs (because if they couldn't get enough women in the women's programs, the men's programs had to be cut) or how it resulted in lavishing money on tiny women's sports programs. But I don't think it was considered fundamentally illegitimate (as opposed to wrong-headed) until the Dear Colleague letters.
Yeah, the more I read into this, the more popular Title IX looks to have been. Passed 88-6 in the senate? 275-125 in the house? Politics were different back then.
I get the impression that the same spirit which would lead to A Rape on Campus made a lot of otherwise-supportive people very uncomfortable.
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Not really. I wasn't aware that Title IX was that old and thought it was something created shortly before the whole college sexual assault drama started.
It's possible that it still illustrates the principle, though not as sharply as it would if Title IX was a more newfangled thing, but I don't know how the American political discourse in the 70s looked like.
Oh. My mistake.
Title IX is one of the pillars of American civil rights law, which had previously only covered employment. The 60s were an extremely liberal time for civil rights and social programs, but they’d emphasized racial and economic lines first. Title IX was part of a broader egalitarian push.
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What Abbott is doing is a little different. He and a few other Governors are challenging the rule change in court and telling their states not to make any changes while the lawsuits are on going.
Keep in mind that this is a re-interpretation of existing laws, not any new law. So the Executive Branch is on shakier ground.
The SCOTUS is re-examining Chevron deference and is about to make a ruling. So the Governors are on pretty strong legal ground to delay things until that ruling comes down and they've had their day in court under whatever the new standards are.
So really it's much less brazen than what blue states have been doing, where they've been ignoring specific that have been upheld as valid. Also there was that situation in 2020 where Antifa kept trying to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland and the city / state refused to defend it.
Except, despite this, it'll be treated as an egregious assault on federal authority — unlike the actions of said blue states — and suppressed accordingly. Blue states get to defy Red rules, Red states do not get to defy Blue rules. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy, and Reds are just powerless.
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Do we have any idea when a ruling on Chevron could be expected and how sure are we that it's actually on the chopping block?
Oral argument of Loper-Bright Ent. v. Raimondo, where the question presented is explicitly whether to overturn Chevron, was back in January. Relentless, Inc. v. Dep't. of Commerce, a related case with a similar QP was heard the same day. Decisions for cases heard this term have to be issued by summer.
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I also suspect the rule change runs into due process issues (state action requiring a process to impose punishment that is clearly lacking in fundamental fairness) and State Farm challenge as well. Ironically, the gender stuff is probably on the safest ground thanks to Gorsuch’s terrible opinion (even the greats sometimes muck it up).
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That letter and five bucks won't buy you a cup of coffee, these days.
I'm very far from sure what Abbott intends for the Texas Education Agency to do/not do, but one important thing to remember is that, for states and federales, the law saying "shall" means absolutely squat without a directly connected enforcement mechanism and someone who can actually press the button on it. This letter might trigger ESEA compliance review stuff, since ESEA state plans have to comply with federal law in general (though it might not trigger until the next review?), but that ends up with a bunch of meetings before the feds can refuse to provide state funding. Title IX proper is supposed to depend on complaints filed regarding specific acts of discrimination (within 180 days of the act, not adjudicated by other bodies, yada), after which the DoE meets with, which (excluding criminal cases not relevant here) if refused can result in "initiate proceedings to suspend, terminate, or refuse to grant or continue Federal financial assistance to the recipient".
I expect Abbott's more relying on unrelated stays slowing any enforcement -- which seems a mediocre bet, since on one hand you've got the Fifth Circuit, but on the other it's this has been the writing on the wall since Bostock -- but barring that he's playing chicken.
The line gets murky: refusing to honor an ICE detainer is probably noncooperation from a non-commandeering sense, but literally sneaking an illegal immigrant out the back door to help evade an ICE officer... well, there's a lot of metaphors where the Little People doing unfavored things would be sitting in jail.
That Little People get arrested for doing unfavored things, while others do not, is what makes them Little People. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy. Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.
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I suspect what’s actually going through Abbot’s mind in the near future is his political future. He’s angling to be seen as a defiant leader something like Desantis is in Florida. I don’t think trans athletes come around often enough that there’s going to be more than one or two in all of Texas. If those few happened to go to private school, there’s no real way for the state to enforce a private school’s policy on trans athletes. If my math is right there are only 12,000 trans people in the entire state, with most being over 18. On that sense the issue would barely even be an issue unless the government were taking very strong sides on it. But it makes great press in the news cycle.
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He's not going to send in troops in any year, because there are already other enforcement mechanisms built into the law. The most obvious consequence would be that Texas loses Federal education funding, which is a hug deal because education funding accounts for about 20% of all Federal money Texas receives, and the state school system — which is already among the lowest-spending in the country — is already facing cuts now that the COVID stimulus is gone and the state legislature can't agree on how to pay for the shortfall. This won't happen immediately, though; my guess is that someone will file a lawsuit and enforcement will be dependent on a favorable court ruling, which won't come until well after the election. The real question is whether Abbott will be willing to enforce his own edict. State schools will be caught between a rock and a hard place if compliance with one law comes down to breaking another. Biden has the luxury of time, but if a school decides to do what they want to do then Abbott has some tough decisions to make.
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Are you sure about this? A huge portion of the dem activist base would cream their pants at the thought of doing this, and the white house is run by that base.
The fact that this administration already pulled out a title IX rewrite that enforces an extremist doctrine no liberal would have endorsed until a few months ago should be a sign that they are not motivated by what wins votes.
The transsexual issue is the ultimate expression of pure power dragging the party by the hair behind it, down to the fleshing table in the basement.
Well, why should they be? Per the past post of mine that @magic9mushroom linked, have you considered that maybe the reason they appear to care so little about elections is because they know elections don't matter? That they'll remain in power no matter how the masses vote?
I mean, I don't see how anyone, having seen both the Trump and Biden presidencies, can believe POTUS is anything more than a figurehead position, as much in charge of the Executive branch of DC as King Charles III is in charge of the UK. Nor how they can have lived through government "shutdowns" where nothing that mattered actually shut down and trillions of dollars continued to be (unconstitutionally) spent, and still think that the House of Representative's "power of the purse" still exists.
The reason the administration enforces extremist doctrines "no liberal would have endorsed until a few months ago" is because they know they won't suffer any meaningful consequences, because they have all the power, and there's nothing and nobody that can stop them.
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I’ll take that bet.
Also, this revision has (apparently) been in the works for more than a few months. This mess has been brewing since Bostock at least.
I would... not be so sure the administration can avoid it if Biden wanted. See the Kincaid v. Williams denial of cert (starts at page 39) from last year as an example of what's going to start coming down the pike in earnest: a very broad law with expansive reads of standing, on a matter extremely sympathetic to progressive-leaning and left-leaning judges, and where individual private actors can bring a private right of action with staggeringly high penalties, and a ton of opportunity to forum shop.
Philosophically, there's a fun question about the difference between sending in the troops and charging 150k for each violation, but there's a point where the practical difference gets pretty small, and it happens pretty quick when the target's main assets will also be the tools necessary to not comply.
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If Biden wants to ensure he loses in 2024 trying to have a Little Rock movement, he can shoot his shot.
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Paging @Capital_Room; I know you have an alternate explanation for this sort of behaviour, and SteveKirkland wasn't around back then (plus the situation has evolved somewhat), so I figure I might learn something from a discussion between you two.
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The operative part of Title IX is
It is possible, though unlikely, that the Supreme Court will find that a large part of the enormous edifice of regulation hung off of this simple statement is a violation of the major questions doctrine. It is more likely that specific regulations will be struck down as having no statutory basis. But if the regulations are upheld, there's no way nullification will be accepted.
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Does he need a replacement? If Trump stays on the same side, at least with respect to the culture war, then there won't be anything he does that Texas would feel the need to nullify. Any overreaches of Presidential authority that Trump makes will probably be in favor of the right and against the left. At which point left-leaning states may try to pull the same stunt using these incidents as inspiration/justification. But as far as Texas is concerned they'll probably just cheer on whatever he does as something they were doing anyway or would like to do.
Nullification itself is what is so good for Abbott politically; telling the federal government to beat it makes him look strong and that makes people rally around the flag. His actual culture war policies are a bit more popular in Texas than nationally, but not my that much.
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