Roe's overturn is tech's privacy apocalypse

Population distribution.

There are 50 states in the US. Each state gets 2 senators. States with low populations (think, Wyoming) tend to lean republican while the few states with high populations tend to lean democrat. The end result is these rural states end up with a disproportionate level of voting power in the senate where the fillibuster exists.

Were the US population evenly distributed then this wouldn't be as much as a problem.

There's also been a massive shift in political attitude with the republicans. Back in the Clinton presidency, democrats and republicans often worked together on bills and compromises to keep the government functioning. This changed with the tea party and Newt Gingrich at the end of Clinton's presidency.

After Clinton, Obama was the next democrat president. He had a filibuster proof majority briefly but lost it + the house for the rest of the presidency after the first half of his first term. He was still working on compromises with the republican party (unsuccessfully) and in his second term when he lost the senate it was simply too late to get anything done. Mitch McConnell launched the "we won't approve anything you want to do" policy.

Now, with Biden as president, the senate is 50/50 R and D. 2 democrat senators have said "we will not eliminate or change the filibuster under any circumstance" and that's where we currently sit. Democrats do not have the votes to move anything.

It's not really hopeless. Assuming democrats turn out in the midterm to vote for democrat senators (we just need 2 more) then a lot of positive changes can happen. However, if instead they take the "nothing we do matters" approach then we are boned probably for the next 2 years and maybe even longer still.

What's really distressing is republicans are now deciding that "any election that doesn't result in us winning was stolen" and they are putting into place laws to allow them to decide that "We don't think the people voted right or the democrats cheated" so they can effectively steal elections. We are heading head first into tyranny.

I can't stress enough how important it is to vote for democrats in the upcoming elections. I get that people don't like them in many issues, but america is currently facing a take over by a party that has turned fascist.

> This was overturned no? So is this now also more ironclad?

Roe v. Wade was basically a backdoor constitutional amendment where seven judges bypassed the actual process for amending the constitution (and also ran ahead of the legislatures in all but a handful of states). The recent Dobbs opinion just nullifies that amendment.

A lot of people seem to think that, since the constitution is so hard to amend through the prescribed process, they should be able to use the courts to get the amendments they want. The problem with that is that it explicitly politicized the court, burning up its legitimacy in the process. We're seeing the later stages of that (the next step is something to undermine the court's independence, like court packing or mass impeachment). It also foolishly relied on a fantasy that only one side could abuse the court in this way, and the other side would forever remain helpless.

It is very clear that the Quebec legislative assembly knew that both Bill 21 and Bill 96 were undemocratic and wrong-headed from the beginning, since they preemptively invoked the notwithstanding clause to override charter rights (which they knew that both bills would walk all over).

Not all of 96 is bad. I sympathize with the need to protect the French language and am not against legislative measures to do so. (The decision against Villeneuve’s restaurant "New Town" years ago was just silly, though.)

However, there are clear negative messages being passed by other parts of 96 which make it extremely xenophobic (just like 21), such as ending services for new immigrants in any language other than French after six months.

With respect to history…Toronto was not the preeminent city in Canada. That was Montréal, until the first referendum. Tens of thousands of anglophones left their homes in Quebec as they no longer felt welcome, and numerous businesses shifted their base of operations from Montréal to Toronto, and Toronto has benefited ever since.

In recent years, Montréal has attracted a number of companies back to the point where I have worked with (as a vendor) a couple of companies that closed secondary headquarters in majority English Canada and forced their employees to move to Quebec in order to remain employed. I am hearing that some of those employees are now feeling (once again) unwelcome in Quebec, and those companies may be reconsidering their headquarters in Quebec because of the lack of consideration for charter rights by the current government.

I love Quebec. I think that much should be done to protect the French language there. But I don’t think that preemptively violating charter rights is the right way to do it.

One thing the RvW ruling had that a law wouldn't is a reluctance for most supreme courts to overturn it, since an interpretation exists and now helps form the basis for laws in the US. There's a specific name for this codified reluctance that I don't know at the moment. This is one of the things that the 4 "no" votes openly criticize the majority opinion for. "We're overturning it because we want to," is a short version of the majority's opinion on that.

Ironically, it's court-based interpretations of the constitution that have been performed over the years also help provide the very case law that the SC uses to do the overturning. As one Tiktok creator pointed out, the constitution can fit in a pretty small booklet. The interpretations and the case law built off those interpretations fill thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pages.