Yes, that was the wording then, it was the qualification to vote (male, citizen, over 21). Since the adoption of the 19th Amendment (which happened after, and supercedes this text) that standard has included women and today you just need to be a citizen and over 18. The proportionality of loss of EC votes and congressional seating (these are apportioned on the same basis, after all) was about states like South Carolina and Mississippi, whose population of enslaved people exceeded that of white citizens- if these states didn’t respect the new citizenship and voting rights of most of their citizens, they’d lose more than half of their federal representation, and that in turn would cost them and their confederates influence in the resulting federal government.

My prior comment, made in the context of a Kansas court declaring that voting is not a right according to the Kansas constitution, was intended to point out that if nobody has that right in Kansas, that may be well and fine in Kansas politics, but if Kansas conducts itself in that way it will cost them influence federally, and that sets the stage for another round of Voting Rights Acts that can be used to guarantee voting rights federally even if states don’t want to do it themselves.

The US Constitution, on the other hand, does not oblige the federal government to recognize the electoral votes or congressional delegates of a state that does not enfranchise its citizens and submit to their will in the form of their votes.

The Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution requires that state governments take the form of a republic, versus that of a theocracy or monarchy or dictatorship. (All republics involve some degree of democracy). Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says that if states deny citizens the right to vote, those states shall lose their representation at the federal level- that is, if you’re not a democracy that submits to the will of its voters, you can do that but in the process your electoral college votes and ability to send congressmen to DC goes away- and your state will lose its ability to influence federal law and to elect federal officials.

Of course, the current SCOTUS is likely to find some way to assert that anything giving the GOP political advantage must be what the framers would have wanted no matter how many ways they told us unambiguously they fucking wanted government derived from the consent of the governed.

For your consideration, here is the text of section 2 of the 14th amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

A literal reading of this text, apart from the anachronism by which voters must be male and 21 (which should be overridden by the 19th amendment, which enfranchises women’s vote, and the fact that voting age today is 18) says that if your state doesn’t let its citizens vote and abide by the result, its electoral college votes won’t count either, and neither will its congressional delegation be seated.

Isn’t the requirement only that the government be “republican”? A republican government doesn’t necessarily have to be representative. It only needs to not be a monarchy.

That’s the requirement of the Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution- in its time, it was about barring non-democracy states from statehood, it was a guarantee of protection of any state from foreign invasion, and protection of any state from internal coup or rebellion.

But, if you look at section 2 of the 14th Amendment, it’s a banger: if the right to vote is denied to citizens qualified to vote, the state doing it will lose its federal representation (as in, it will not just lose its electoral college votes in federal elections, its congressmen will not be seated). The purpose for this section of this amendment was to prevent confederate states from denying the formerly-enslaved the right to vote, and it should certainly apply today if Red-State legislators try to use their power to strip their citizens of their ability to meaningfully vote

I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as the next guy, but there is a frame in which this kind of confusion does actually make sense.

It’s the frame in which you acknowledge that our system of justice isn’t about holding everyone equally accountable to the law, it’s instead been an institution to keep the poor and marginal in their places- that is, it’s about enforcing an unspoken social, class, gender, and racial hierarchy that a lot of the MAGA folks take for granted and really want to defend and uphold.

That is the order they’re talking about when they say ‘Law and Order’. The order is a social, racial, gender, and class hierarchy, and the law is the means by which the hoi polloi are kept in whatever the powerful in it regard to be their ‘rightful places’.

For these people, the idea that the law might actually apply to everyone is an attack on the basis of order as they understand it. Of course they’re mad.

At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

Wow. Conflicting feels. On the one hand, it’s a pretty good look

On the other hand, that looks like a lot of work

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

Its consistently worse than home cooking. But not everyone has the luxury of a functional kitchen or a stocked fridge or the time to prepare the meal.

You’re not wrong here. It’s not good food, but it’s easy and touches the makes-me-crave-it neurons, it’s often available in food deserts (where it’s legitimately difficult to really stock a kitchen) and sometimes it’s only cheap in the context of whether or not you have that home infra and time to use it or not.

I just use my privilege (I have a pretty functional kitchen and the ability to stock it mightily) to not fund a business model that looks to me like it’s hostile to labor (yeah you, McDonalds and most of the rest), tends to give money to politics I can’t abide (looking at you, chick-fil-a), and I really prefer to patronize businesses whose employees don’t have the energy of beaten animals. I get that it’s my privilege to do that, but being someone with that to work with, using it appropriately seems the right thing to do.

If inflation isn’t based on most prices increasing… What is it based on?

It’s the devaluation of currency that happens when too much of it chases too few goods in the marketplace. It’s purely a monetary thing, you get that when the supply of money grows more quickly than the value of real goods in the economy does.

Ideally, we print money (and take it out of circulation) at a pace that keeps the money supply more or less balanced to the value of available goods and services in the economy. If we were to print too much money, or not take enough out of circulation (note: paying taxes does this; when you pay taxes the money doesn’t go into some account somewhere, it’s used to zero out the bonds issued to create it), the amount of money in circulation would become greater than the amount of real valuable goods in the economy. When that happens, the resulting bidding contest to secure those goods (after all, money doesn’t have intrinsic value, it’s only good for buying things that do) drives up the price of those goods in monetary terms.

…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.

To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.

It’s been maddening to watch people call price-gouging “inflation”, honestly.

That’s not fucking inflation when someone in the supply chain made things more expensive and pocketed the difference as a wider profit margin; it’s the symptom of non-enforcement of antitrust laws.

I mean, most foodstuffs markets (in the supply chain between farm and grocer or farm -> restaurant) are controlled by very few people or corporations; when the farmers get less for their products but the grocer must pay more for them, that’s not inflation. It’s price-gouging, the symptom of the kinds of market failures that follow regulatory failures to prevent corporate mergers that would reduce competition in those markets.

When you look at food, fuel, housing, the enshittification of basically everything, the acquisition of yesterday’s hot-fresh-streaming services and re-packaging them to be just as predatory as the cable was when you cut the cord and went to streaming- it’s all what we get when private equity owns a piece of everything and they’re running it all to squeeze more out of everyone they can, and they also ensure regulators don’t do a damned thing about it.

There was once a time when regulators had the will to block corporate mergers, and they had the will to tax windfall profits at 100%.

Translation: “We can’t have it how I want it because you fucking people don’t want that”

Yeah and it’s also accusing libraries of being drug-infested sex dens

It’s as if Fox News is not a reasonable source for anything but counterfactual nonsense

If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that just means it’s legal for the wealthy/only a crime for the competition that doesn’t have money to burn.

Frankly it’s about damned time criminal corporations had to worry about having their charters yanked

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when accountants and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

There’s a couple of things at play here:

Where the infra (say it’s the road) isn’t adequately engineered to accommodate cycling and driving at the same time, it’s going to give drivers the experience that the road is a scarce resource and when resources are scarce, some folks are going to think in eliminationist terms (e.g. if those people just didn’t exist, everything would be fine) or the part of their brains that descends from people that wiped out competing clans and took their resources rules the moment and they set about violently defending ‘their’ resources.

The folks most-triggered at being made to share the road with cyclists really do some mental gymnastics to frame it in a way that they’re really the victims here and it’s cyclists, not the road engineering, that are the problem. Oh, poor me those cyclists don’t pay taxes and I subsidize their use of my roads bla bla bla and eventually that comes out in the form of vehicular assault to teach cyclists a lesson to stay off their roads. It’s bullshit all the way down of course, but that way they get to feel like the good guys while still bullying and murdering cyclists.

Also, it’s not by accident that the ‘everything is woke’ people are the first to engage in whatever moral panic that’s directing political violence at today’s boogeyman- whether it’s trans people in bathrooms, or gay people generally, or pregnant women that have ideas about bodily autonomy, their targets are always a tiny vulnerable demographic and uniting to put them in their place is an exercise in maintaining or restoring what they think order ought to look like. If they’re not putting people into the bottom rung of whatever hierarchy they think they’re defending, probably they think it’s the end of order or civilization or the like and they’ve failed in their duties to uphold order. Keeping them agitated about (and acting out about) moral panics is an effective way for lobby groups to pit people against scapegoats to keep their ire focused away from themselves or their patrons.

“should we get rid of the cap so the rich pay a fair share or keep it and collectively pay for things by way of inflation?”

The problem with the latter is honestly that inflation hurts the poor a lot more than it does the wealthy and if anything, gives the wealthy a lot more power. Power is really the issue here- when the rich have the ability to override democracy by spending money, that’s a big damned problem

Damn you, I’m in