Guest post by Your name’s not Bruce? originally a comment on Mandatory prayer.
Aren’t US state legislators required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution rather than subvert it? Aren’t there people who are familiar with how laws work (you know LAWYERS) who can sit these people down and say “No, you’re not allowed to do that. It says so right here. In this document you’ve sworn to uphold, in this document which is one of the foundations upon which all our laws are built and against which all our laws are tested. It says right here that you can’t do that. We won’t even put it into the legislature for a vote. Because it says RIGHT HERE that you MAY NOT DO THIS”?
Do these people live in a vacuum wherein no news of all the other failed attempts to do exactly the same thing ever intrudes? Isn’t one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again in expectation of a different outcome? Maybe they hope to succeed through sheer bloody persistence, that at some point all the courts will just surrender and say “Screw it, go ahead?” These same would-be subverters would be the first to man the barricades if the state was enforcing mandatory prayers that were not Christian.
Good question. I think they are, but I think the oath doesn’t actually mean they can’t propose or pass legislation that would be unconstitutional if signed into law. I don’t think there’s any penalty for proposing or passing unconstitutional legislation, or barrier to doing so.
There is the executive power to veto…and I think it’s possible that failure to veto unconstitutional laws could qualify under one head or another as reason for impeachment (that’s totally a guess). But basically, I think unconstitutionality isn’t a formal barrier unless/until it reaches a court. I think that’s part of the separation of powers idea.
As for why they do it though…futility isn’t necessarily a reason not to do it, from their pov. Far from it. Much legislation is to please the fans back home more than anything else.
Maybe they hope to succeed through sheer bloody persistence, that at some point all the courts will just surrender …
Exactly – it’s called having a reserve of cases in the pipeline for whenever a friendly judge may possibly get appointed.
Part of the problem is the two-party system. Right wing candidates don’t need to worry about offending left-wingers, our argumentative system basically guarantees they won’t be voting for Mr. RWC anyway. Which means politicians spend more time solidifying their base than attempting to reach the dissatisfied on the other side.
Most of the supporters of this bill probably know and do not care that this bill is unconstitutional and won’t last ten minutes before being struck down. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they can go to a big town hall meeting of their constituents and say, “I stood up for JESUS and only was stopped by those damned librul elites from Washington sticking their nose into our business! Now donate more so we can win next time!”
If there were more parties, spread out over the political spectrum a bit more smoothly, then the winning parties would be the ones that can appeal more to mainstream voters than those who can gather their party’s core nutjobs.|
The second part of the problem is how uneducated the average American is. That is, when the guy says, “I stood up for JESUS,” and the audience claps when they should be shouting, “Aren’t you supposed to be standing up for a secular, constitutional government? Get out of here, nutjob!”
It seem the rule is: ‘so long as tax-payers are willing to pay for it’, which seems to be a perfect example of the conservative dogma of ‘fiscal prudence’.
It’s not insanity, it’s maliciousness.
As the saying goes, If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. The religious are applying the same mentality to their attempts at theocracy. They repeatedly try to pass unethical laws in the hope that one will eventually stick. If they got a foothold somewhere, they could then claim a precedent and infect other places with it.
It’s a little like extremist groups in the UK: they can propose any old nonsense in the knowledge they’ll be shot down but they can then claim that they are representing their electorate’a views but their failure is not for the want of trying.
If you want to present yourself as representing Christians being ‘persecuted’ in the US simply make an extreme demand, then fail, then use that failure as further evidence of persecution.
Muslim and other religious groups do the same here.
The ignorance or hypocrisy of the legislators is sort of beside the point.
The ‘thing’ they are doing (successfully) over and over again is reinforcing the blind support of their illiterate, mouth-breathing, terra-cotta necked ‘support base.’ No matter how much time and money they waste on pointless gestures, they WILL receive the votes of these contemptible morons.