FL had 57% in favor but needed 60 for an amendment to state constitution. Generally speaking it seems that this issue has popular support, which hopefully counts for something.
Florida unfortunately does not have an actual ballot initiative process. People have been misusing the constitutional amendment process as a makeshift ballot initiative process for the past couple of decades.
Unfortunately, this has a lot of drawbacks. Amending the constitution requires a 60% supermajority, which I think is appropriate for constitutional questions, but is too high of a threshold for ordinary policy legislation. In this case, repealing the laws against abortion and marijuana have majority public support by a wide margin, so why should we have to pass new constitutional amendments with a 60% supermajority just to repeal bad statutes that were passed via the ordinary legislative process in the first place?
On top of that, because measures passed this way become constitutional provisions, rather than normal legislation, it makes it difficult for the courts to exercise judicial review and reconcile these measures with extant law. It's sort of the worst of both worlds.
Maybe we should try to get an actual ballot initiative process into a draft constitutional amendment for the next election cycle.
100% agree. No implementation details, just a setup for additional court cases... when we've seen that courts making decisions on reproductive rights doesn't count for too much.
There's no such thing as "the will of the people", though -- "the people" is a loose aggregation of lots of different individuals, communities and factions that are not uniformly aligned in their interests and values.
The point of having a political process is to define a structured way of resolving the conflicts that arise from those divergences of interests and values, not to pretend that the output of specific elections somehow represents the singular will of the entirety of society. Presuming that is a grave error that inevitably results in the strongest faction imposing its will unilaterally onto all others.
Democracy is a great way of deciding political questions, but without safeguards in place to ensure that that it's kept within defined bounds of what qualifies as a political question in the first place, it will degrade into authoritarianism pretty rapidly.
We absolutely need judicial review, and plebiscites in which narrow majorities approve of policies that are unconstitutional, or otherwise violate people's fundamental rights, should unquestionably be struck down, just as equivalent policies enacted by a legislative body would.
my hope is that somehow, someway, somewhere.... there is a politician who will think twice about further stripping reproductive rights because of this. Or maybe even someone who will help expand. It is a popular position with wide support.... and hopefully that does mean something.
you've got to stay hopeful. votes do count, but a 60% threshold means a minority have more sway in this instance.
Can someone explain to me the current rationale in the US left around abortion being a hot topic and a strong vote puller?
As far as I can see, their arguments have devolved to weasel wording alone, like saying it's a "reproductive health" or "reproductive rights" issue.
They seem to be carefully avoiding the central issue that, if discussed, could undermine all that weasel wording. I.e. the question of at what point life begins.
Also correct me if I'm wrong, but in the US left, and in some states governed by them, it's the case that a unborn baby of an age which would have been a viable albeit premature birth can be killed under the wording of "aborting a pregnancy"?
I'd just really like to understand the mental and philosophical basis behind this.
You believe abortion means murder and that illegal immigrants bring in crime. Those are somewhat reasonable things to believe in and both lead to one candidate. I am not as surprised as you are.
I'm not justifying them, but I completely understand why someone would think like that.
By "you" I didn't mean OP, I mean "conservative voter." I wanted to say that they're not opposite choices one made, but very common ideologies that one person may share.
To be fair to Republicans, we definitely didn't learn about this today. They've been consistently pushing this issue over the last eight years (build the wall) and crafted a narrative that the Democratic party did absolutely nothing to get ahead of. And it turns out the minority voters that the Democrats rely on, many who came here legally as immigrants, don't like illegal immigrants "cutting the line", regardless of how true any of it is.
A great example is the viral marketing Republicans did where they went house to house in largely blue towns asking when they'd like their shipment of an illegal family to house.
meanwhile voting against immigration control is a bipartisan issue. Because shocker: it turns out big businesses want cheap labor with hostage of citizenship over their heads to abuse.
Just wool over everyone's eyes. They are just rationalizing who they want to hate while ignoring how little progress on their issues they are actually making.
There was a bipartisan bill that Biden vowed to sign. It was torpedod at the last minute by candidate Trump to deny Biden a win, despite it having many of the things Republicans wanted.
This is not accurate, but it is a commonly pushed narrative by certain biased media.
That bill was negotiated in secret by three senators, including one Republican senator. When the text of the bill was finally released, the contents were much different than expected. You can listen to Republican senators talking about the bill as soon as the text was released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
It's not like this bill had wide support, and then Trump said something and everyone pulled back. That's just a fabrication meant to give the Democrats campaign talking points.
Also the House passed a border security bill in 2023, which has been blocked by the Democrat controlled Senate. [1]
>The bill also would have supplied more funding to interdict fentanyl and human trafficking, and it included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
I think you might be reading into that wrong... They both seemed to have similiar views on imigration...
I think another reading is that abortion was the most important topic. I strongly believe that abortion is wrong and voted accordingly. There have been over 20M abortions in the united states, and is directly responsible for our current population collapse.
Also learned that massive numbers of latinos supported Trump precisely for those issues. Destroys the argument that supporting illegal immigration is a way to win over American latinos for Democrats
I don't think this is accurate when you consider the "addons" that were pushed as part of these initiatives. Further you can look at the past few months drastic decreases due to presidential initiatives to further bolster the rights argument that the didn't even need these initiatives and could have just enforced existing laws.
That's the problem. The solutions are already on paper, just not enforced. Much like theft in California which appears to have had a drastic shift back with this election too.
People was consistency and enforcement regardless of party.
Unfortunately it seems the gambit to hold the congress hostage has worked for them. Bad juju for any sort of attempt at building political alliances if you are punished for compromising across the aisle, but rewarded for holding the populace hostage until you get a supermajority to enact 100% of your agenda.
Exit polling yesterday didn't really indicate that, despite it being a big part of Trump's rhetoric. It more-so indicated that the economy and democracy (anti-establishment) were the most important issues.
I mean that makes sense? If you buy into the narrative that illegal-immigration is bad, then anyone could feel it personally. Weigh that against abortion which affects a few people in some smaller states where it is still illegal. Granted it has way more traumatic effects but still it makes sense most people can just ignore it as an issue.
If you total the population of the states which have a ban also I would bet it is less than 50m people, so ~15% of the population live in a state where it is banned and those are heavy rust belt states so they might even be in favor of it being banned.
I don't understand this sentiment. Donald Trump has done nothing nor intends to do nothing that is either pro or anti abortion. His actions pushed abortion legislation back to the state level, which is how it should be. Forcing federal legislation on this topic is ludicrous because of differing opinions, so what Trump did is an absolute win for everyone.
This is one of the biggest issues the Democrats have with messaging. They turn everything into a black or white issue. You're either completely for something 100% or you're against it when most Americans want something in the middle.
The issue isn't immigration, it is massive amounts of illegal immigration. Some form of vetting is necessary to keep gang members, murderers, rapists, and extremist terrorists from entering the country. Nearly everyone in this country either is descended from immigrants or is a first generation immigrant themselves, but they just want a controlled legal process to occur.
Same with abortion. Trump's official position on abortion is that it isn't a federal issue, it is a state issue. This is much more nuanced than for and against. Conservatives have wide ranging beliefs on this issue. There are some that are 100% against it and some that believe it should be banned after X number of weeks. Many also believe that there should be exceptions for medical necessity, rape, and incest. There are complicated ethical, moral, and religious issues that surround these beliefs. At what point does a fetus become a human? No one really has a great answer to that question.
Another issue is gun control. If you believe strongly in the Second Amendment most Democrats are unpalatable on this issue alone. Kamala Harris has in the past stated that she supports a ban and confiscation of AR-15s, as you can imagine this went over poorly for a very significant portion of the electorate.
Bottom line however, I agree with many others here that the economy is the biggest thing that won people over to Trump. Even if it is completely out of Trump, Biden, or Harris's control, most people in this country felt like they were better off financially under the Trump administration and they voted accordingly.
> At what point does a fetus become a human? No one really has a great answer to that question.
I have a simple and correct answer for that -- at conception. It's not a matter of if abortion kills a human being, it's a matter of if that's ok or not.
Right. This isn't a novel issue. We already have codified, lawful killing in numerous situations.
Nobody has to agree on the morality of it. You can claim and believe that your definition is correct, and someone else can equally claim and believe a different position. But an internally consistent position that all can acknowledge is that there are laws the govern killing. (It's noteworthy that these generally are the purview of individual states.)
I've heard this a lot, so I looked for the bill, because these bills usually have things that politicians don't tell you about.
> Next, the bill establishes an expedited process that authorizes asylum officers to adjudicate certain asylum claims. Among other provisions, these provisional noncustodial removal proceedings impose certain target timelines for determining asylum claims and limit review of denied claims. The bill also establishes a stricter threshold for individuals to remain in the United States pending adjudication of an asylum petition.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals, including by (1) making certain individuals admitted or paroled to the United States eligible for conditional permanent resident status, and (2) expanding eligibility for special immigrant visas for certain individuals who were injured while supporting the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
No wonder Republicans never voted for this. This goes against their MO. I can't blame them for not voting against their views and the views of their constituents on a specific part of the policy.
> The bill extends and establishes immigration pathways for Afghan citizens or nationals
Were R's against this part? I thought giving immigration pathways to those Afghans that fought on our side in the war had R support? I'm very fuzzy but seem to recall a Republican veteran being one of the key people advocating for it on a news segment i'd listened to.
The problem with your argument is that this was only 8 months or so ago, and so we all remember how this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans until Trump said “vote against it because I don’t want the Democrats to have a win”.
My statement still stands, I quoted things ADDED to the bill over time, so by the time they added what the left wanted in order to vote for it, nobody wanted it.
If you visit my link, you will notice the asylum bits were all added on the same day they voted on the bill.
The very moment the text of the bill was released, Republican senators held a press conference on how there was zero chance of it being passed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
I didn't say that ALL Republicans supported it in hive-mind lockstep. I said "this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans".
You linked to a video where 6 of the 49 Republican senators hold a mini-conference complaining about how they don't agree with their party's leadership. That doesn't refute the statement that "this bill was championed and lauded by the Republicans" if most Republicans champion and laud the bill.
Once again, I'll repeat: This was only 8 months ago. We remember how the bill was expected to pass before Trump told them not to.
And Trump specifically said that the reason not to was that he wanted to the border to remain weak so that he could nail the Democrats on it.
This argument is so dumb. Yes, they had a chance, ill give you that, but this bill came up 3.5 years after Biden took office, after 8-10M illegals came in. They only started caring about the open border when they saw it could hurt them politically.
