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Why Did The Left Fail to Employ Federalism Against Trump?

AmNat said:
The Left used all available means to oppose Trump, with regard to any principles (either moral or procedural), because the Left does not have any principles save for what expands their own power. They did not seek to disempower the executive branch because the executive branch is overwhelmingly leftist.

The Left did not invoke "federalism" as a talking point, because that would not have provided any ideological benefit to them. It was much more convenient, for the purposes of energizing their own side, to invoke the specter of fascism.

As for the constitutional order, Trump was not capable of damaging it since it has been dead for our entire lifetimes.
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You're beating you head against a wall. The OP is a Never-Trumper authoritarian and is primarily responsible (along with progressives) for discouraging compromise and ruining our gov't.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
Watch as Biden easily exceeds Trump’s law/rule making by EO and EA. Step one as POTUS is to declare an emergency (or four) and then take multiple emergency executive actions to address it (or them).
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Watch as the authoritarian Biden blames the Trump administration for having the audacity to allow each state's executive to decide the schedule of Covid vaccinations.:rolleyes:...As if Biden cared about innoculating the US against Covid seeing as he just signed another EO to open our borders to all sorts of Covid foreigners.

One thing different between the Biden EO and the Trump EO is Trump allowed the legislative branch to confer (and not agree on anything (But what else would you expect from authoritarian representatives of the American people?)) while Biden signs his barrage of EOs w/o the legislative branch conferring.

Heck, Trump even negotiated with the legislative branch to get them to act on things like border security. Biden, the authoritarian??...No...More than 40 EOs in the first 3 weeks (I think).
 
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cabse5 said:
You're beating you head against a wall. The OP is a Never-Trumper authoritarian and is primarily responsible (along with progressives) for discouraging compromise and ruining our gov't.
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I'm aware of the OP's ideology. But my general MO is to assume that anyone who isn't a committed leftist is potentially capable of being reasoned with.
 
aociswundumho said:
Because the left wants political power to be centralized as much as possible, and they value that even more than they hated Trump.
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Only the federal government has the requisite power to borrow and/or print enough to implement socialism or communism (or whatever “fair” redistribution system the left has in mind). The state and local governments must use taxation to fund the operation of their departments, agencies and programs - not so at the federal level.

Raising sufficient funds for “proper” leftist redistribution (via taxation) would cause “the rich” to flee that state/local area and those seeking to enjoy more of free ride to move into it.
 
cpwill said:
Sure, but switching to the argument (for example) that the Executive branch didn't have the right to set Legislative Policy would have strengthened their position, by requiring the ascent of the Democratic-controlled House. They weren't willing to give up the Imperial Presidency to oppose Trump.
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The Senate was not under their control, otherwise that would have been possible.
 
AmNat said:
I'm aware of the OP's ideology. But my general MO is to assume that anyone who isn't a committed leftist is potentially capable of being reasoned with.
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There are righties like the OP who are incapable of reasoning if it diverts from their authoritarian inclinations. The neo-conservative (they have the audacity to insert conservative in their designation:ROFLMAO:), for example...The G.W. Bush types, the Liz Chaney types and types like the OP.
 
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rocket88 said:
Cp is a long standing actual conservative member here. Not a cultist. Someday you may recognize the difference.
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It is amusing that whenever someone who has identified as a conservative breaks ranks, he's cool with the left. You know, people like McCain, Romney, Flake.
 
rocket88 said:
Cp is a long standing actual conservative member here. Not a cultist. Someday you may recognize the difference.
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cpwill is an authoritarian Never-Trumping neo-conservative out of the mold of G.W. Bush and Liz Chaney, for examples. cpwill is far from conservative since he relies heavily on big government to get things done....Neo-conservativism is the new black, er, conservativism.:rolleyes:

Meh. You wouldn't know what conservativism means (neither does cpwill, BTW) since you're progressive, are the opposite of conservativism and oppose conservative ideals.
 
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ttwtt78640 said:
Only the federal government has the requisite power to borrow and/or print enough to implement socialism or communism (or whatever “fair” redistribution system the left has in mind). The state and local governments must use taxation to fund the operation of their departments, agencies and programs - not so at the federal level.

Raising sufficient funds for “proper” leftist redistribution (via taxation) would cause “the rich” to flee that state/local area and those seeking to enjoy more of free ride to move into it.
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You're right, but if the left controls fedgov, then they will just bail out progressive states, hence rewarding their profligate spending. wasting of taxpayer dollars. This will create a perverse incentive to the fiscally responsible state legislatures to ramp up spending and forget about balanced budgets.
 
Paradoxical said:
It is amusing that whenever someone who has identified as a conservative breaks ranks, he's cool with the left. You know, people like McCain, Romney, Flake.
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I've disagreed with him many, many times. He's an actual conservative who believes in small government (too small, imo, but ok). What he doesn't believe in is a cult of personality - he railed against it under Obama (in retrospect, he was right), and still didn't like it under Trump.
 
rocket88 said:
I've disagreed with him many, many times. He's an actual conservative who believes in small government (too small, imo, but ok). What he doesn't believe in is a cult of personality - he railed against it under Obama (in retrospect, he was right), and still didn't like it under Trump.
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Who is he?
 
aociswundumho said:
You're right, but if the left controls fedgov, then they will just bail out progressive states, hence rewarding their profligate spending. wasting of taxpayer dollars. This will create a perverse incentive to the fiscally responsible state legislatures to ramp up spending and forget about balanced budgets.
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Yep, but that practice is not limited to “the left”. Loads of federal “financial aid” (pure pork?) flows to state/local governments (rather than directly to people within those state/local boundaries). Whether they are call block grants or some other kind of incentive program (opportunity/enterprise zones?) the affect is the same - the states get a bribe in exchange for allowing some new (aka additional) federal spending which, once started, is likely to not only remain forever but to increase every new FY via what now passes for federal “budgeting”.

A prime example is the Medicaid expansion portion of PPACA - for every $1 of state (program?) spending the state gets a federal “bonus” of $9. Why was this was done instead of just making Medicaid expansion a federal (insurance) benefit assigned directly to “qualified” people? Could the reason be that states would no longer be able to use those additional “free” federal funds as they see fit?
 
ttwtt78640 said:
I can think of two answers: 1) State budgets must be balanced and 2) it’s very easy to ‘vote with one’s feet’ - the overtaxed will flee while the undertaxed will rush in to enjoy increased ‘entitlements’.
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While one can always point to anecdotal examples, wealthy people tend to move to areas that have a desirable landscape, climate, and quality of life, taxes don't factor in much. The fact is, California has a ton of rich people in it because it is California. You would be hard pressed to convince someone with a house in Boulder, CO, or San Francisco, to move to central Kansas because of the much lower taxes and less regulation. A family that was building their dream home Martha's Vineyard is not going to decided to build in in Nebraska instead because their property and income taxes would be much lower.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
While one can always point to anecdotal examples, wealthy people tend to move to areas that have a desirable landscape, climate, and quality of life, taxes don't factor in much. The fact is, California has a ton of rich people in it because it is California. You would be hard pressed to convince someone with a house in Boulder, CO, or San Francisco, to move to central Kansas because of the much lower taxes and less regulation. A family that was building their dream home Martha's Vineyard is not going to decided to build in in Nebraska instead because their property and income taxes would be much lower.
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That is true to some extent, but mainly applicable to the mega rich who tend get their income from flat (and lower) rate taxation of investment income.
 
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IS THIS AN EXAMPLE? :rolleyes:
 
Seems a whole lot of red states are attempting to use federalism to overturn elections and to decide that any votes they don't like are invalid.
Yeah sorry, federalism packs a whole lot of volatility into it, much more so than any fictional screeching about pure democracy, which hasn't been tried in 2500 years since its maiden voyage in Athens.
Too bad we lack the common sense to regulate federalism the way we regulate democracy.
In fact, federalism fans are attempting to use federalism to kill representative democracy outright much the way intolerants are attempting to use tolerance to destroy tolerance.
 
Checkerboard Strangler said:
Seems a whole lot of red states are attempting to use federalism to overturn elections and to decide that any votes they don't like are invalid.
Yeah sorry, federalism packs a whole lot of volatility into it, much more so than any fictional screeching about pure democracy, which hasn't been tried in 2500 years since its maiden voyage in Athens.
Too bad we lack the common sense to regulate federalism the way we regulate democracy.
In fact, federalism fans are attempting to use federalism to kill representative democracy outright much the way intolerants are attempting to use tolerance to destroy tolerance.
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States are sovereign and the AG cannot mess with states rights.

Yes remember all those insurrectionists trying to take over the government without one gun and their only weapon a guy wearing a horn hat.
 
cpwill said:
Now that the Trump Administration is over, I'm periodically (It's tough to think for any length of time when you have kids :p) reflecting back on what my expectations had been v what actually occurred. Trump was a bit more destructive to our Constitutional order than I thought, and, long term, has done significant damage to the GOP as I feared. His Judges were far better (from a Conservative point of view) than I had initially feared, and at least he didn't try to hike taxes.

One thing that I had hoped for didn't happen: although the Left was incensed by his rise and bitterly opposed to everything he did, they never leaned on Federalism to stop him. I had hoped that Democrats would use this opportunity to seize power back from the Executive for the Legislature in a major way.... but they seemed (looking back) not to have done so. I had hoped that Democrats would use this opportunity to reinvigorate the power of the States they controlled to set their own policy, seeking to prove (though I would have personally been unlikely to agree) that Democratic policies were superior by enacting what they couldn't get at the Federal Level at the State Level.... but they didn't, really. We never got a Single Payer System in California. New York never experimented with 90% tax rates (and, the one time the Trump administration effectively did raise tax rates on upper income folks, Democrats in New York got very upset about it; repealing that decision is now a priority of Nancy Pelosi's).

Progressives had a tool, written right into the Constitution and immediately available, to reduce the impact of Trump and Republicans on their lives, and, individual states and localities may have made their own decisions, but, I didn't see the appeals to our Federalist structure that I expected once they realized that would have been a far more effective means of #resisting.

Why?
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America will never diminish the role of the Executive, it's too vital to it's mythology. Sadly, this has been a phenomenon common among many fallen empires.
 
OlNate said:
America will never diminish the role of the Executive, it's too vital to it's mythology. Sadly, this has been a phenomenon common among many fallen empires.
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With Obama's third administration taking place now, we are teetering on the brink. When we take back the house in 2022, things will start improving. Take heart.
 
Paradoxical said:
With Obama's third administration taking place now, we are teetering on the brink. When we take back the house in 2022, things will start improving. Take heart.
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Taking cover would probably be the wiser option. But it's nice that you think it matters who's in power, in a quaint kind of way.
 
OlNate said:
Taking cover would probably be the wiser option. But it's nice that you think it matters who's in power, in a quaint kind of way.
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Most definitely Obama’s former hacks are calling the shots. He is getting the Marxist Muslim gubment he yearned for.
 
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