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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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It's not a plus for Federalism when their rights apply everywhere but yours only apply in your home state.

I think there have been inroads in some areas, ie school choice that are more red-state coded, while still taking your overall point

Their right to abortion now only applies in blue states.

And Blues are actively undermining the court because they find that situation intolerable.

How do you mean?

The current Supreme Court situation looks more functional than it did in Mitch Mcconnell’s day.

  • Open defiance to the Court's edicts from blue areas and blue courts, which now appear to have succeeded in forcing the Court to abandon those edicts. The Second Amendment doesn't exist in Blue Tribe areas, and it's now clear that the Supreme Court doesn't have the juice necessary to change that. This problem generalizes to the idea of Constitutional remedies generally.
  • Court Packing or removal of SC justices squarely back in the Overton Window, driven by high-profile attacks on the integrity of the Justices and the legitimacy of the Court. We're now discussing whether the Court's composition should be modified by methods other than the nomination and approval of replacement justices, which is a fairly novel development. The previous precedent was FDR's attempt at court packing, which is widely believed to have shifted the Court's findings, and until recently was universally agreed to be illegitimate.

To quote some high-effort perspective contrary to mine:

And back to jurisprudence, there wasn't necessarily a strong reason to overturn Roe, Hodges was broadly popular but certainly a major event, and as a Supreme Court you do have a certain amount of political capital and around that point they really should have gotten the memo that they were stretching it to breaking.

The conversation is now converging irreversibly on the Supreme Court's "political capital", and that's the end of the Court as an effective conflict-resolution mechanism.

Maine is a blue tribe area, it is all 2A all the way down, same for Vermont, even more blue, also 2A friendly. There is now a 72 hour waiting period in Maine due to the Lewiston shootings, not that one had anything to do with the other from a factual standpoint. But you can buy a gun and tuck it in your waistband in the bluest city in the state if you want.

Is your argument that Vermont and Maine are more central examples of Blue Tribe areas than New York, California, Washington State, Washington DC and Illinois?

No I am saying that the blanket statement of "The Second Amendment doesn't exist in Blue Tribe areas," is provably wrong.

Would you agree that the second amendment doesn't exist in most Blue Tribe areas? Would it be better to break the areas down by population percentage?

All statements are wrong. Some statements are useful. I think my original statement is accurate enough to be more useful than your correction. My point is that important constitutional rights have been denied in large chunks of the country, and those denials have survived long-term challenges, to the point that they are probably not going to be defeated in the forseeable future under current conditions. Further, I argue that the failure of our established mechanisms for resolving constitutional disputes demonstrates that those mechanisms no longer work. Do you disagree?

More comments

But unlike other “rights” most will never use or use only once the abortion “right.” Given that it is trivially easy to travel to any blue (and even many red) state, there isn’t a big restriction on this so called “right.”

Reds don't treat "small restrictions" on their "so called rights" as lightly, I observe.

Consider: most will never use their right to defend their house with lethal force.

I’m making a different point. The right to arms is a daily right. You use it frequently even if generally one of the reasons for the right never materializes.

In contrast with abortion it is one off; not frequent. Provided there are a number of states they provide abortions and given the relative ease of going from A to B there is a very small drop in access to abortions

Any woman who's frequently having less-than-safe sex while not planning to be a mother is using her right to abortion at those moments, same as a gun carrier/owner even as they're not in the process of shooting.

Yes, that's their singular loss.

Laws around soft drugs are another example, even if widely disregarded.

That's federalism but not a case where something credibly* claimed to be a Federal constitutional right was reduced to only holding in some states. If Mississippi didn't have to recognize gay marriage or Florida could ban flag burning, that would be more like it.

* Yes, I realize conservatives don't believe there's credibly a constitutional right to abortion, but I figure having a long-lived Supreme Court precedent holding so is sufficient credibility.

Hasn’t every recent attempt at enforcing flag burning statutes been over pride flags anyways?