We’ve got to be respectful of regional differences.
What other rights have we treated this way? When we, as a nation, set out to destroy segregation, did we think it was OK to respect regional differences in doing so? No. We did not. Civil rights are rights of all Americans. They don’t change because you cross invisible borders.
No to mention he has no qualms about passing federal legislation that has absolutely no respect for “regional differences” regarding gun rights.
No they want a one size fits all plan to trample the 2nd Amendment.
Y’know, of all the people I thought that would think that discriminating against people’s rights was a regional thing, (just like Jim Crow Laws), it’d wouldn’t be our first black President….
It’s a Democrat Party thing. You wouldn’t understand.
*like*
Remember when you were a small child and you first hear the Hans Christian Anderson story the Emperor’s New Clothes and you couldn’t believe people could be so stupid? Well, that’s how I feel now when I think that 52% of our voters selected this idiot. The very notion that rights vary as you go from one section of the country to another is one that lost any validity with the ratification and subsequent incorporation of the fourteenth amendment. I sure hope that anyone this “constitutional scholar” taught at the University of Chicago Law School can get a tuition refund.
I wouldn’t say that 52% of Americans are stupid; 52% of Americans who took the time to vote are stupid. I’m still amazed that about 3 million Republicans were too stupid or complacent or even just offended for some reason or another, to stay home, instead of get out to vote for Mitt Romney.
Granted, it *was* Mitt Romney we were voting for, and he was like Obama. (Never mind that he’s more Obama ’08 than Obama ’12.)
Having said this, I heard rumors that Obama was better at getting low-info voters out, and that unions were particularly incessed, and were particularly motivated for getting the vote out, as revenge for what Scott Walker did. I don’t know how true these things are, but they probably did have a bit of influence in this election cycle.
Regardless of the reasons, I’m mind-boggled that Obama is still President!
Obama has been very good at tapping into low-information voters and motivating them. It’s part of the secret to his success.
And I don’t think it’s stupidity with respect to Republicans who didn’t show up. A lot of very smart people are of the mindset that they won’t vote for someone they don’t believe in, and Romney isn’t that kind of candidate.
I am generally willing to engage in strategic voting, and advocate for it, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that people who can’t stomach strategic voting are stupid. I also tend to think strategic voting becomes less appealing as you get older, because you’re not likely to believe you’ll live to see the payoff.
What he really means: “We’ll shoot the Constitution full of holes, then wipe our asses with it, in places where we can get away with it. We won’t where the citizens shoot back.”
I would be a lot more sympathetic to the “respect regional differences” argument if the Democrats had shown that respect for abortion laws and sodomy laws. (The Democrats obviously respected segregation laws, until they figured out that it was better to get black votes, now that they couldn’t figure out how to keep blacks from voting.)
For better or for worse, one of the great ironies of “respecting regional differences” is that in striking down laws, as what happened to the sodomy and the abortion, they actually make these issues hotter topics than they really ought to be. If liberals hadn’t taken these cases to courts, states would have continued to gradually relax these laws anyway. Now that these topics can’t be addressed by laws, their proponents become particularly loud, and the Supreme Court becomes particularly politicised.
Of course, if laws are relaxed, and you discover problems with relaxing the laws, you could always make them a little more strict, to address such problems. When you strike down laws by Supreme Court fiat, however, such fine-tuning becomes impossible.
(And now that I think about it, that’s the exact problem we have with the mentally ill, too: by declaring certain commitment and forced-treatment laws unconstitutional, it’s that much more difficult to try to find laws that aren’t as strict as the previous ones, but more strict than the ones we currently have, now that we know that deinstitutionalism doesn’t produced the utopia the advocates thought it would produce…)
Yup. I make that point in My Brother Ron: when you turn everything into a constitutional right — even something as bureaucratic as the number of clerk-typists per patient that the state must employ (I kid you not — this is a case out of Alabama) — then it becomes nearly impossible to make sensible adjustments.
If I recall, even Jimmy Carter used a phrase like that, as a dog-whistle to racists during his 1976 (and 1980?) campaigns.
It was bullshit then, it’s bullshit now, and it always will be bullshit. You either believe a thing is right everywhere, or you believe it’s right nowhere. And beyond that, it’s not a president’s business.
On the plus side, this can be taken as an admission that he thinks Bloomberg and Emmanuel are going to have to suck it up and not see their dystopian policies adopted nationwide.
The Dem-Cong are only interested in control, control of every facet of your life.
I’ll not submit. I aim to misbehave.
“The Dem-Cong are only interested in control, control of every facet of your life.”
Well, they are in government, right?
When the Republicans turned against the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, that was exactly their mantra: respect regional differences. The Jim Crow South knew that meant the GOP was now the party on their side.
One of my law professors once said the same thing about guns. She was trying to sound enlightened–people in rural areas need them for hunting and for protection, since they’re so isolated and the police are so far away. “They” (rural folk) use guns for legitimate purposes, whereas “we” in the cities use them to commit crimes.
I was shocked. I wanted to raise my hand and out myself as an urban gun owner who does not use guns to commit crimes, but I held my tongue.
Tyranny of the majority, that’s what the liberals want.
I wasn’t aware that the Republican Party turned against the Civil Rights Movement, and certainly not in the early 1960s. I understand that more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats.
There were Republicans concerned about the dangers to federalism in nationalizing some of these issues, not because they were hostile to blacks, but because they recognized that there were dangers in putting too much power (even for a good purpose) in the national government’s hands.
Even Stevens, Sumner, and Bingham were far more attached to states rights than most of us want to admit. If these three are to be relied upon for understanding original intent, the first section of the 14th amendment was intended to cover the exact same ground as the earlier civil rights act of 1866, and nothing more.
Clayton, I know you’re not a fan of Raoul Berger’s work on the subject, but you should give “Government by Judiciary” a read. I’d like to hear your take on specific points, because everybody else just declares him “discredited” without actually bothering to discredit him.
That’s just my understanding of the Goldwater campaign, and Nixon, too. But then again, my understanding is based on Perlstein’s books, and he’s a liberal. . .
That “police are too far away in rural areas” line is such BS. Unless they are standing next to you, they are always too far away.
“We’ve got to be respectful of regional differences”
How ’bout our elected representatives read and understand the United States Constitution?
It was passed over 2 centuries ago. You would think that they’d have had time to read it by now.
Unlike Obamacare, it’s not intended to bankrupt anyone.
DSFFN’s
“We’ve got to respect regional differences” is less overtly racist than his earlier version: “What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne”.
(Chicago is 33% African-American, Cheyenne is less than 6% African-American)
BHO will “Respect” Regional Differences as long as there are not Enough Votes (Electoral and Popular) in those Regions to matter. But as long as the so-Called “Progressive Wing” of the Democratic Party can get out enough of the Big Cities and surrounding Suburbs Votes to keep them in Power, they don’t care. For example, about 12 Counties in the State of Ohio had enough Votes for Obama in them to Nullify the rest of the 88. Look at Illinois, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, et.al.
Know thy Enemy.