site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27672 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Biden wants a constitutional crisis, apparently.

Well, that's editorializing, but like, seriously--WTF?

Biden says Equal Rights Amendment is ratified, kicking off expected legal battle as he pushes through final executive actions

He's got chutzpah, I guess (or, realistically, one of his staffers does). Never have I seen such a nakedly partisan attempt to create mass confusion concerning American constitutional law, nor such an inducement for left wing justices to defect from the rule of law. It is perhaps the single least professional, most embarrassing thing a sitting President has done in, like, six or seven weeks.

Just to get this out up front: no. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been ratified, and is not the law of the land. When asked for comment by CNN, the U.S. archives referred the station to previous statements from the U.S. archivist that

the amendment “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions,” pointing to a pair of conclusions in 2020 and 2022 from the Office of Legal Counsel at the US Department of Justice that affirmed that ratification deadlines were enforceable.

The President has no particular role in the ratification process anyway, so his opinion is legally meaningless. Certainly his appeal to the "American Bar Association" (an especially left wing advocacy group) is meaningless. But it's a signal, and the message is clear: time to ignore the law, precedent, history, and any possible position of compromise and coexistence. Watching the outgoing administration slap the "defect" button as rapidly as possible does not bode well for the next four years. At best, it's an inducement for the Trump administration to play tit-for-tat. At worst, I don't know--civil war?

The fact that the CNN article is still pushing this wild "pre-emptive pardons" stuff is also concerning, but illegitimately announcing an Amendment to the Constitution has surely got to be the most brazen lame duck move in American history. This is banana republic levels of absurdity.

I believe the ERA, which would apply strict scrutiny for sex-based discrimination, same as the level for race, instead of intermediate scrutiny which is used now, is very much a "careful what you wish" situation for its cheerleaders on the left generally. As strict scrutiny is an almost impossibly high bar, meaning common female-centric societal advantages advantages build into the law or policies become illegal: the draft, sex-based crime initiatives, female-focused jobs and skills initiatives, affirmative-action (theoretically already dead), etc.

But I could be wrong.

As a metaphor, from Ames v. Ohio:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars employment discrimination against "any individual"—itself a phrase that is entirely clear—"because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin[.]" 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). Thus, to state the obvious, the statute bars discrimination against "any individual" on the grounds specified therein. Yet our court and some others have construed this same provision to impose different burdens on different plaintiffs based on their membership in different demographic groups. Specifically—to establish a prima-facie case when (as in most cases) the plaintiff relies upon indirect evidence of discrimination—members of "majority" groups must make a showing that other plaintiffs need not make: namely, they must show "background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority." Zambetti v. Cuyahoga Cmty. Coll., 314 F.3d 249, 255 (6th Cir. 2002) (cleaned up) (quoting Murray v. Thistledown Racing Club, Inc., 770 F.2d 63, 67 (6th Cir. 1985)).

To be fair, SCOTUS is hearing this matter on appeal in February.. To be less naive, I included those very long citations because Murray v Thisledown dates back to 1985, aka over forty years of Some People Are More Equal before SCOTUS might slap their wrists.

But I could be wrong.

In this thread the phrase "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" came up. And this is one of those cases where it applies. Were the ERA to pass, all sexes would be equal, but some sexes would be more equal than others. Through a combination of procedural trickery and sophistry, measures which favor women would remain legal, while measures which favor men would become Constitutionally illegal. Since neither conservatives nor leftists want to draft women, court cases requiring that would face impossible barriers.

Yeah, one only needs to look at the National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality to see how this would play out.

Jesus. In a 42 page document, beginning on page 7, men aren't mentioned till page 9:

We also combat discrimination and harmful gender norms that affect people of all genders: women and girls— including transgender women and girls—gender nonbinary and gender nonconforming people, as well as men and boys. (Emphasis mine)

In total, men are mentioned a grand total of 11 times in 42 pages, and with only two exceptions those instances reference men purely to illustrate the comparative plight of women.

42 pages. 11 mentions. 1 positive mention.

That 'positive' mention is the one I give above, where it's suggested that men need help to liberate them from their masculinity. The other mention is neutral, stating that the commission will work with men to, of course, help women.

I'd be less critical of it if it merely ignored men. Instead it often takes blatant evidence of discrimination against men and views it as discrimination against women. Eg, consider the section on education, which says of higher education:

While women have made substantial progress in rates of enrollment in postsecondary education and represent a majority of college students, they hold two-thirds of the nation’s student debt

"Women represent a majority of college students" here is hiding a large and growing gender gap in college education going back over 40 years at this point. Worse, pointing out women hold two-third's of the nation's student debt and implying it is discriminatory against women completely hides both that women are very nearly two-thirds of college students (so it is nearly proportionate) and hides the structural issues that disproportionately prevent men from accessing student loans, most prominently being men having to sign up for selective service in order to be eligible for (note this changed very recently, with men being automatically enrolled since so many weren't doing so voluntarily...) the government subsidized loans which make up over 90% of student loan debt. This is like claiming whites were being discriminated against because they held a disproportionate amount of outstanding mortgage debt at the height of redlining.

Page 4:

The single father who depends on paid leave to care for his family.

Well done! I used Ctrl+F for ‘men’, I should have tried some more synonyms.

How many times are transgender women mentioned?

Trans people (generally) twice, and trans women (specifically) three times. I could've missed some because it was a simple ctrl+F.

Clearly Biden is doing a bunch of fuckery intended to tie up Trump during his first few months in office. Biden's reputation is already garbage, there's no loss.

But I think it's unlikely to work. Trump's team is highly motivated right now. The bandwidth of Biden's demoralized staffers is just not that high compared to what Trump will be able to muster.

I think it's likely* (not guaranteed) that the Doge comes in with hundreds or thousands of high IQ workaholics that will have the bandwidth to undo all Biden's bullshit before making sweeping changes of their own. If Elon's standards at SpaceX are any indication, we're about to see an explosion of competence in the executive branch that hasn't existed in decades, maybe ever.

I know the cool take right now is that the Doge will fizzle. The "nothing ever happens" crowd is usually right. But I'll take the over. Something will happen this time. I think they will do a Milei on the U.S. government and the results will be amazing.

I think it's likely* (not guaranteed) that the Doge comes in with hundreds or thousands of high IQ workaholics that will have the bandwidth to undo all Biden's bullshit before making sweeping changes of their own.

I disagree strongly. DOGE is almost certainly going to be less effective than the Church Commission:

In 1981, America was still a serious country. Compared to now, anyway. It is a fallacy to assume that we can pump more joules into the same target. We have less to pump. When we print out the final report of DOGE and put it on a shelf next to the 47-volume work product of Reagan’s Grace Commission, which will look more serious?

47 volumes! Think about all the people who put all that work into all those reports. Some of them must still be alive today. They must know that if none of this work had ever been done, the world 40 years later would not be even slightly different. Sad!

I hope that I'm wrong, but my hunch about DOGE is that they will cut a million here, a million there, but will not be able to get rid of any major inefficiencies, and that they will avoid touching the $1 trillion / year military-intelligence budget, since that is a sacred cow for both Democrats and especially Republicans, and is also a massive and very sensitive jobs program.

What would go wrong if you just deleted the department of education?

In my opinion, less than what would go right if we deleted it. But it would probably be hard to find a national-level majority that agrees with me about that. The Department of Education is also a sacred cow because people understandably are very attached to children, and a huge fraction of people are still stuck in the mindset that mass education is actually effective at making people more educated beyond the reading/writing/arithmetic basics.

Community college would become much more expensive.

Good. I frankly don't trust or expect people like Elon to be able to meaningfully be able to separate wheat from chaff within the federal government.

The alternative is default or hyperflation.

We're already spending > $1 trillion per year on interest on the debt. The government spends more than 140% of what it brings in each year.

This is a fiscal doom loop unless something stops it.

Surely too much debt is a problem, but cashflow issues be solved by either reducing spending or increasing revenue. And when you're talking about a government's budget, increasing revenue can be some combination of increasing tax rates and increasing tax base/GDP. Obviously, much of political disagreement is over exactly which policies will maximize GDP, and Republicans routinely state they believe things like DOGE will increase economic productivity by getting the federal government out of the way. On the other hand, the Democrats believe better regulations, which require funding the federal government, will maximum GDP. And they're in favor of raising taxes.

Additionally, it's unclear the current situation is "too much" debt. The Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product and Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments charts don't look great. On the other hand Federal Outlays: Interest as Percent of Gross Domestic Product looks high, but nowhere near a historical high.

Maybe I have a higher threshold for what "hyperinflation" is, but I think you can print your way out the debt without getting all the way there.

I do wonder about the second order effects: The USD is the reserve currency, central goverments have large stockpiles of it, and, all over the world, entire asset classes (like real estate) are denominated in it.

It's a scary time to be long bonds. Of course, it's a scary time to be long stocks as well.

Gold is the default alternative right now; it’s not hard to imagine a role for bitcoin as well.

Either way, we’ve seen inflation in reserve currencies before. It’s survivable.

There is no difference between default and hyperinflation, at least not as it affects the average citizen.

elon recently tweeted that he thinks social security fraud is likely in the range of 10-20%. that would be a decent pot of money if true. (sounds insane to be fair)

Elon doesn't know what he's talking about. I used to work as an adjudicator for the PA Disability Determination Bureau, and the investigation is so thorough that getting disability through fraudulent means is effectively impossible. The evaluation is mostly based on the claimant's actual medical records and, if those are insufficient, the bureau will schedule an examination. Some information comes from the claimant themself, but most of this is clarification about medical treatment or conditions which are noted on the medical records but that they aren't claiming disability for. The ydo fill out an ADL form, but this is only really taken into consideration in the event that the claim is borderline; in that case it might tip the balance toward an approval but only if the condition is significantly limiting their ADLs in a way that one would expect the condition to limit them. In any event, most ADLs show some limitations but not nearly the kind that would be sufficient to tip the balance in that circumstance. For example, if a guy is claiming disability for a back problem there's probably going to be something about how they don't move around very well and can't lift heavy objects. They probably aren't going to claim that the pain is so bad that they can't get out of bed and have to have someone else do housework for them.

Realistically, the only way you're getting disability on the initial application is if you're over the age of 50, have a job that involves physical labor, and haven't done any other kind of work in the past 20 years. If you're under 50 it's assumed you can adjust to other work, so if you're capable of doing a sedentary job that doesn't require any special qualifications you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have an office job you're denied. If you're over 50 and you have a job that involves physical labor but there's a similar job that uses the same skills but doesn't involve physical labor you're denied. If you're over 50 and you generally work a job that involves physical labor but you you worked the register at your brother's convenience store a decade ago when he was just starting out and needed extra help, you're denied.

Some of the cases I can remember: One approval of the more typical kind involved a 55-year-old black guy who worked as a welder his entire career and had back problems. Claims of back problems are common, but this guy had serious problems documented on x-ray and had undergone at least one surgery. He tried to go back to work after the surgery but had to stop. Another case involved a guy in his 30s with brain cancer who was in such bad shape I couldn't talk to him directly and had to get the information from his sister (cases like this are flagged upon intake so they can be approved quickly). One case involved a 16-year-old girl who had severe psychological and emotional problems to the point that her mother couldn't take care of her and she was put into a group home, but her behavior was so bad that she kept getting kicked out of them. She had been admitted to Western Psych repeatedly over the past few years. I only spoke to her briefly; most of my communication was with her mother, who spent most of the conversation on the brink of tears as she talked about how she didn't know what she was going to do about her daughter and how scared she was about the future. I honestly don't know if this is an approval because I left before the case was resolved. I was pushing hard to get it out the door because it was clear to me that this girl would never be capable of working but my supervisor was skeptical because, if memory serves, while she had frequent hospitalizations it had been close to a year since the last one so maybe things were improving.

Now, I saw plenty of bullshit as well, but it was obvious bullshit that resulted in a denial. The modal case for this was some kid in his early 20s who never worked for any length of time and never had any education beyond high school who was trying to claim disability for psych problems despite having never seen a psychiatrist. He might be taking some kind of antidepressant but it was always prescribed by a PCP and didn't follow any kind of psych workup. That presents a complication, since we can't deny the claim without any psychiatric evidence, so we'd have him evaluated by a psychiatrist who would invariably conclude that the kid had garden-variety anxiety and depression but nothing that would prevent him from working. Psych claims usually require a longitudinal history of progressively worsening problems, or else some kind of huge psychic break that's unavoidable. But most of the cases are people who obviously have problems, just not of sufficient severity to render them disabled. The determination office is basically a denial machine, and most of the claims that are approved at the initial stage are ones so obvious that no one could possibly claim they were fraudulent. There are also a small number of people who have already retired and later have a health problem and figure they'll file just to see if they qualify.

Now, once you get beyond the initial determination stage and into appeals, the success rate is much higher. However, if you're appealing then you have an attorney and the case is heard by an administrative judge who issues an opinion. I think that the reason for this is that few of the bullshit claims get appealed, so the cases the judge sees are of overall higher quality that what are seen at the initial stage, especially since most of the severe cases are sent to a different department for fast-tracking. An adjudicator who spends all day dealing with marginal claims basically turns into a denial machine. I saw a statistic that claims 38% of initial applications that reached the adjudication stage (i.e., not denied for technical reasons, which half of all initial claims are) were approved. This seems way too high. Granted, the numbers are from ten years after I stopped working there and I can't speak to how they do things in other states, but in my office it was like 20%, 25% tops. And that includes expedited cases and cases adjudicated by people who have been there for 20 years and think they can tell an approval from a denial based on gut feeling.

I wasn't there long, but in my time there I evaluated hundreds of claims, and I never once saw anything I thought looked fraudulent. As I said, there were bullshit claims, but these were obviously bullshit, and in any event the claimants weren't lying about anything. It's one of those things that just isn't worth it. The average SSDI benefit is $1,200/month, and the average SSI benefit is $800/month. And if you make more than something like $1,200/month from a regular job your benefits get cut off. So the reward one gets from perpetrating a fraud on the system is a life of bare subsistence living. One thing I can't speak to is fraud at the technical level, for example, people hiding income or assets so they qualify for SSI. Given the high rate of technical rejections, it's clear both that SSA is doing thorough investigations and that people aren't even trying to hide much. I'm not saying that fraud doesn't exist, but the guardrails in place for preventing it are so high and the incentive for committing it are so low that I doubt there's much savings to be had here.

pinging @jeroboam, since I didn't see his comment until after posting this

thanks for taking the time to write this out

I guess I just wonder how much this sort of thing happens.

Most SS fraud is going to be concentrated in SSDI, which is like 15% of its budget. And although I bet there is a shocking amount of fraud in it, it's not going to be 100% fraudulent.

How common is "Grandma died, don't tell anyone and keep cashing her checks"?

The US doesn’t have any big regions with anomalously long life expectancy, so if it is common it’s concentrated by a protected status, not geography- which makes it verboten to crack down on.

Disability prevalence is geographically concentrated, but largely in dying to dead rural areas where the working-age adult population skews old and uneducated and non-physically demanding jobs are scarce, but rents are cheap enough that it's viable to eke out a living on federal benefits, places like Hale County, Alabama, also profiled here by NPR.

It varies by region, per Ig Nobel laureate S. J. Newman.

I know the cool take right now is that the Doge will fizzle. The "nothing ever happens" crowd is usually right. But I'll take the over. Something will happen this time. I think they will do a Milei on the U.S. government and the results will be amazing.

I respect the energy. Which big changes do you think will happen?

And which ones are you looking forward to?

It's more "I can't predict what a good chess player will do, but I bet he'll do something good". There are very motivated and smart people involved. And, of course, never bet against Elon.

To give a taste of something I think is possible, Elon tweeted recently about fraud in the social security department. How much fraud happens? How much do we pay to dead people? Who is keeping track? The government recently acknowledged that it basically did no checks on PPP loans during the pandemic and "forgave" tens of billions (probably more) of dubious loans, some from obviously fraudulent LLCs such as "2019 Dodge Ram Crewcab".

Even if old age pensions are relatively free of fraud, SSA disability is a swamp. The number of "disabled" workers has just gone up and up and now represents 5% of the labor force (as of 2019, likely much more now). It goes on and on. Medicare fraud is omnipresent. As is fraud in defense procurement.

One criticism of the DOGE is that the biggest areas of the government are immune from being cut. I think that's false. There is waste and fraud everywhere.

If you run with the lower classes good odds you know of someone who is collecting disability but could easily work some non-back-breaking job. I know a few. One guy I know collects veterans disability but could easily do even heavy labor. His claimed disability is PTSD from an event that happened off-base in an allied country and outside the line of duty. The guy just parties all the time.

There are 8.9 million SSDI recipients in the US. The average monthly payment is $1,483.

Say you paid investigators to go out and spy on one person each working day. There are 240 working days in a year.

If you paid the investigator $70,000, they'd need to catch four people to break even on their salary.

If more than 1.7% of people are committing such obvious fraud that you'll catch them with one day of observation, then it's worth it to hire the investigator.

Well, there's also the process for getting them kicked off of disability, there's the necessary evidentiary standards for each claim(which vary from claim to claim), etc. All this changes the calculus.

Remind me, how much additional revenue have those 87,000 IRS agents brought in?

I hope you realise that catching this fraud entails a massive expansion of the state. America likely has plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick here given how undersized the relevant governmental bodies are but it's hardly free and the benefits won't necessarily be quick, while the PR downsides will be.

Catching and preventing this fraud will be a hard long-term project with both up- and downsides.

I doubt there's going to be much of a legal battle. Laurence Tribe believes it's the law of the land, but Laurence Tribe believes a lot of stupid things - the more likely outcome is that the first plaintiffs who try to enforce it inevitably get slapped down by the courts, and this fades away to nothing.

Maybe we'll get a quick case clarifying the legal question of whether states can legally revoke ratification, and whether Congress is legally allowed to impose ratification deadlines. I think it would be sensible for the Supreme Court to rule that states can revoke ratification before an amendment has been passed (but not after), and that Congress can impose deadlines for ratification.

But it's kind of a pointless battle anyways, isn't it? Under current case law the 14th and 19th amendment already do most of what the ERA would do, and despite people like Hananiah pushing for it, I seriously doubt the majority of Federal statutes that prevent discrimination against women are going anywhere. And even if they did disappear, 23 states already have state constitutional provisions protecting the equality of men and women under law.

Technically the Archivist of the United States has the final, non-reviewable, say on validity of amendments, and she came forward last December and said it wasn't valid.

https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2025/nr25-004

This is more an attempt to acclimate the public to a future Archivist declaring it valid. It's interesting because the Archivist traditionally avoids doing anything controversial. There would be a whole lot of legitimacy questions if it happened.

It's the courts that have the final say, and the courts have said it's not valid without further Congressional action, which is why the Archivist said she can't legally publish the amendment. I imagine that if she tried publishing it herself, the ensuing litigation would just end in the courts referring to their prior decisions and striking down her action.

Technically the Archivist of the United States has the final, non-reviewable, say on validity of amendments

Certainly not; if the Supreme Court says one thing and the Archivist says another, the Supreme Court is going to get its way.

I agree that this is the most likely first-order outcome. It is also true that you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. What's the cost of ammunition?

Biden has a history - from well before he was president - of gaffes so out-there that he sounds like he's from an alternate timeline. Maybe this isn't a scheme and it just really was ratified in his home universe.

I feel mean for laughing at this but it is pretty hilarious. Of course it could probably also be said of Trump. Lord, have mercy.

Trump and Biden as dueling time-travelers sent back by rival political factions who occasionally slip up and say things from the world as they experienced it?

This is a meaningless statement- the president recognizing a constitutional amendment has nothing to do with anything. The Supreme Court has to recognize it to overrule the archivist. The whole statement is deeply silly. Not dangerous, not unconstitutional- silly.

I view it as burning epistemic commons to get applause from his followers.

If he had said: "I am of the legal opinion that the ERA is in effect, but recognize that I will need to convince SCOTUS of that", that would be one thing.

It would be like Trump saying "The election was stolen from me through fraud, and the SCOTUS will recognize that and award me the presidency".

Instead, what either of these presidents said was basically on the level of "the sky is green".

People should disagree on opinions, but not on facts.

You appear to be operating on the assumption that the rules enforce themselves. They do not, cannot, and never could. Rules can never constrain human Will; all they can do is coordinate the wills of the many to a coherent goal.

This would be silly if it had no chance of securing a significant political outcome, and if employment of the strategy were costly to those utilizing it. As things stand, there is no significant cost and the chance of securing a significant political outcome is non-zero. That outcome almost certainly will not be that the ERA becomes the law of the land; much more likely is some combination of eroded public trust in the courts that decide against the lawsuits, more talking points about right-wing lawlessness and judicial oppression, and perhaps local wins in blue-tribe areas that take years to overturn on appeal. Such outcomes would not be worth it if the attempt came freighted with a significant cost, but since they are effectively free within the decision-horizon of Blue Tribe, there is no reason not to employ them as often as possible.

[EDIT] - Let's try for some additional precision.

I think I'm exaggerating to say that lawsuits based on this are "inevitable." My assessment is that the person who set up and released this announcement percieves lawsuits as a likely-enough outcome to be worth the cost, which is very likely to be minimal to non-existent.

That's where we disagree. Forking the constitution doesn't seem likely to me; more likely than that is that activist judges will continue citing other random bullshit while being activists, and the ERA won't even come up.

Frankly I don't think this is a calculated strategy to fork the constitution. If it's an attempt to do anything coherent, it's an attempt to get another attempt to pass the ERA.

I'd point to the Climate Kids case as an example of how badly some judges do want to jump not just on random bullshit that helps their side, but specifically whatever framework needs legitimization at the time.

I think you're right that a lot of the Tribe-thinkers genuinely think they can just force it through by meme magic and lawschool paper bullshittery, and they're not even wrong in every case, but that looks a lot like forking the constitution in practice.

The smart take is that the Constitution can't really be forked because under the current arrangement the Supreme Court gets to decide what the interpretation is.

The galaxy-brained take is that the Constitution is constantly being forked due to circuit splits!

It's meaningless until some left wing judge acts on it. It's meaningless until some bureaucrat can be pressured to publicize it.

It's literally legal disinformation being promulgated by the President and Vice President of the United States. It is a naked power grab. Presidents have been impeached for less.

He will not be president long enough to be impeached.

In practice, the Supreme Court needs to be convinced that that bureaucrat had grounds to publicize it. They won’t be. This is extremely silly.

He will not be president long enough to be impeached.

Correct. Which is why he's doing this now.

In practice, the Supreme Court needs to be convinced that that bureaucrat had grounds to publicize it. They won’t be. This is extremely silly.

This is an attempt, effectively, to fork the Constitution. This creates and purports to legitimize a blue-tribe consensus that there is a 28th Amendment and that it is the ERA, while the red tribe continues to operate under the view that there isn't such an Amendment.

Will it work? I don't know, but someone clearly thinks it has a chance of working. How many people have to act as if something is the case, before it becomes the case? Might this go nowhere? Sure, it might. But all by itself, Biden's and Harris's willingness to try it is shocking and disturbing.

This creates and purports to legitimize a blue-tribe consensus that there is a 28th Amendment and that it is the ERA

It helps to legitimize it, but it doesn’t create it. Just last month, 120 Democrats in the House and 46 in the Senate signed letters asking Biden to take this step, since, in their view, the amendment was already validly approved. Other blue tribe groups like the National Council of Negro Women and the New York City Bar Association also published similar letters in December. This move may have blindsided Republicans (myself included), but the Democrats were clearly preparing for it.

Just last month, 120 Democrats in the House and 46 in the Senate signed letters asking Biden to take this step, since, in their view, the amendment was already validly approved.

I have a hard time believing that attitude is anything but kayfabe. If it wasn't an amendment they liked, I don't think they would have the same view on the ratification process.

Almost all views on con law- especially blue coded ones- are keyfabe eventually. The ‘living breathing document’ interpretation seems to be code for viewing the constitution the same way I view municipal zoning requirements- as annoying hurdles that need some ‘campaign contributions’ to get them waived.

Almost all views on con law- especially blue coded ones- are keyfabe eventually.

Right. The progressive-aligned school of constitutional interpretation is living constitutionalism—essentially, if we like it, and we can get away with it, that's what the text means. The conservative-aligned school of constitutional interpretation is originalism, where they attempt to find a justification from the original text, when it's convenient, and find a workaround otherwise, unless you've really got a spine. Originalism is better than living constitutionalism, because they won't drift as far.

My state legislators don't even kayfabe it, they not-my-job it. When they were considering, and eventually passed, bills that clearly violated the stipulations of Bruen, I wrote them cathartic letters expressing as such, not expecting to get more than a form letter response.

I did end up getting a substantial response from a staffer. After some back and forth, I found the position was essentially this: It would be inappropriate for the legislator, not being a constitutional scholar or a member of the Supreme Court herself, to even entertain the question of whether the bills she votes on are constitutional.

Here's one of the responses, obfuscated slightly by ChatGPT to make it difficult to link me to this exact text:

Senator X, who is not an attorney and does not serve within the judicial system, operates in the legislative branch and is unlikely to participate in any cases before state or federal supreme courts. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to expect them to form an opinion on constitutional matters or to provide historical examples for judicial proceedings.

If clarification is needed, I can share a document outlining the separation of powers and the distinct roles of each branch concerning the creation, execution, and interpretation of laws.

More comments

Oh, I agree. My point was that Biden didn’t make this decision out of nowhere. Influential members of his party were pushing him to make this announcement (and actually to go further, but it sounds like Biden isn’t planning to apply pressure to the archivist to certify the ratification).

The thing this is probably attempting to do is get another shot at passing the ERA. It's not to engage in constitutional lawfare- that's already going on, sovereign citizen tier arguments in left wing constitutional law won't help them and the people in the Biden admin know it.

This is banana republic levels of absurdity.

It's bananas, but the last-minute cigarette-with-nicotine ban and the non-condensing gas water heater ban are worse. This is just bloviating.

non-condensing gas water heater ban are worse.

Wow I haven’t heard of it, so happy I got a non-condensing water heater and furnace this year. Condensing version would cost me extra $4000+ for more to need to make completely new exhaust ducting. Going from 80% to 95% would save me something like $200 a year, so it’ll take 30+ years for the investment to beat bonds, even if you assume gas prices going up steadily.

Going from 80% to 95% would save me something like $200 a year, so it’ll take 30+ years for the investment to beat bonds

And water heaters don't last 30 years.

No, this is disinformation coming from the President and Vice President. At least stupid executive orders are president-things that presidents do.

Officially declaring the existence of a fake Constitutional Amendment based on the dubious theorizing of an advocacy group is exactly the kind of oligarchy-style nonsense the President of the United States just warned us about.

I was just telling someone that I'm glad we're leaving the darkest years of American governance in my lifetime behind, but it appears that we're leaving it in the same sense that a dog that just took a big shit in your living room can be taken outside and you're still stuck cleaning up. The final days of this administration have been worse than I would have guessed by a pretty wide margin.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats