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Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

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Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#291

Post by johnnyanmac »

bombcar wrote: post #254
whimsicalism wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of democracy is to have some say (or the illusion of it) in how the government acts. People from small states will have a say. They will oftentimes be crucial votes. The point of democracy is not that some people get 10x voting power than others. The point of democracy is not that you are entitled to the swinging vote or disproportionate voting power. I am from a place smaller than Wyoming that never got…

The big takeaway is that you are a location where you could increase your political power infinitely by moving to Wyoming, and let you remain. Very few people move based on where they would have voting influence.

>Very few people move based on where they would have voting influence.

Yeah, just the millionaires. Now billionaires. But with internet and private jets they don't even need to move anymore to exert power.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#292

Post by robryan »

dangus wrote: post #87
adamors wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.

Those 8 people still needed to agree to change their vote and the responsibility is ultimately on them. And this is yet another political trope: Democrats are always blamed for everything by everyone including their own voters. Republicans have majorities in the entire federal government, but the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault because they wanted a bill with healthcare preserved. The majority party isn’t blamed for…

Was it actually a cut or was it not renewing something that was expiring? A bill to fund the government seems like the wrong place to be debating new spending.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#293

Post by bigstrat2003 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system.

The real biggest problem in the US is the steady power grabs by the federal government (most notably by FDR but he wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last). The federal government has far too much power, completely illegally under the Constitution, and it causes most of the acrimony in US politics. You simply cannot have one central body adequately meet the needs of both NYC and rural Wyoming, but we are determined as a society to keep jamming that square peg into the round hole. We desperately need to dismantle power from the federal government and return it to the states, who should've held it all along.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#294

Post by alistairSH »

cthalupa wrote: post #215
giantg2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair," Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation? "This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones." The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to repre…

The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact…

This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#295

Post by tmnvix »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #213

It's absolutely insane how unrelated provisions can be inserted into a CR instead of being debated and passed on their own merits (or bundled with related laws). Regardless of what the measure is, or what party it's coming from, it's a significant flaw in the process.

One man's flaw is another man's feature.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#296

Post by astroflection »

mmoustafa wrote: post #233
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress). I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the spee…

Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#297

Post by wing-_-nuts »

giantg2 wrote: post #102
whimsicalism wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well aware of the reasoning for the design -- although I will point out that the notion of an extremely constrained federal government was controversial then, hardly consensus among the founding fathers. But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity, and it simply does not make sense t…

If you are from a smaller state, you would think it would still make sense. Otherwise the rural concerns just get steamrolled by the urban concerns. The point still stands about trying to level out concerns between smaller and larger states, which is why it was created with years of debate and a majority even if it wasn't consensus.

I've yet to understand why 'land' should have a stronger vote than 'people'

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#298

Post by mrguyorama »

dfxm12 wrote: post #150
bakies wrote: post #31

Cannabis needs to be reclassified. I think this is the right thing to do, actually, but only if it came at the same time as reclassifying. This is a drug market that should be regulated, but not class 1.

People upthread are arguing about the senate as a system, but how much does that really matter when wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress? A majority of Americans are in favor of this, and have been for over a decade .

> wildly popular things, like legalizing marijuana, are not even considered by anyone in congress?

Because it's not "not considered by anyone".

Democrats have been demonstrably decriminalizing and legalizing weed all over the country, and the Democrats in the federal government have been pushing and submitting and trying to make it happen.

It's republicans. They are the ones that continually stonewall a measure the vast majority of their constituents support, and they are the ones that somehow still get elected despite that.

Show me the democrats preventing legalization of weed federally.

Show me the democrats who invite cop associations to talk at their meetings about how dangerous weed is. Show me the democrats who are taking money from cop associations or prison lobbying organizations who very explicitly want to keep weed illegal.

Stop overgeneralizing! It's literally how things are this bad! Blame who is actually at fault!

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#299

Post by whimsicalism »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #293
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

The Senate is one of the only things keeping the country from becoming a tyranny of the top N biggest cities over everyone else. We need it, or something like it. People in coastal cities openly hate the rest of the country, derisively referring to it as "flyover country"; there is zero chance that people in such states would have their needs met in the slightest under your system. The real biggest problem in the US…

I don't hate the rest of the country and it is actually the primary target of where I would support redistributing resources from richer more productive states.

Smaller and more rural states are a massive beneficiaries of the centralized system, especially the income taxation system.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#300

Post by cthalupa »

petcat wrote: post #283
cthalupa wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.

So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.

I think there is very little our founding fathers would recognize about today's american government, in a wide variety of ways.

Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle to have any concept of what the future holds.

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