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Ask this question again if Ted Cruz gets his way. Then we can ALL say we'd prefer living in the America the Founders designed, because we won't be living in it anymore.
you want an agency for environmental protection? fine, it should be a federal only deal. you want quality education? keep the feds OUT.
as for smaller state government, yes i believe that state governments should also be much smaller than they are. in fact ALL governments should be much smaller than they are. as any government grows in size, it also grows in corruption and interference. government should fear the people not the other way around.
Nice job missing my point in all that. I didn't address any of that; I simply pointed out that if you want Federal government out of the marriage business because marriage shouldn't need government involvement, then it's nonsensical to hand marriage over to the states. You're applying your own argument unevenly, AFAICS.
because for the most part the constitution tells what the FEDERAL government can or cannot do, not the states. it is at the state and locla level where the people should be going for any government services that are required except those reserved in the constitution for the federal government. for instance it wouldnt do to have 51 different sets of immigration laws, or 51 different nato treaties, etc.
Poor examples, since citizenship and diplomacy are already spelled out in the Constitution as Federal business.
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Originally Posted by rbohm
on the other hand, the federal government should not be in the business of creating a welfare state, or running public schools.
you want an agency for environmental protection? fine, it should be a federal only deal. you want quality education? keep the feds OUT.
We can certainly talk about that, but you keep peeling away from the point I'm trying to make. The Constitution doesn't delegate all non-Federal decisions and powers to the states; it delegates them to the states *or* to the people.
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Originally Posted by rbohm
as for smaller state government, yes i believe that state governments should also be much smaller than they are. in fact ALL governments should be much smaller than they are. as any government grows in size, it also grows in corruption and interference. government should fear the people not the other way around.
So are you saying that you'd be okay with states not getting extensively involved in the matter of marriage as well, or what?
What does the above have to do with fear mongering? So they were mistaken about Romney. It has nothing to do with not dealing in reality.
Deficit spending will catch up with us someday. What about the hopey, chaney thing that Obama and the Democrats were selling their constituents? Did it happen? Well, yeah if you like to think that negative change is a good thing.
The public has turned socialistic and progressive. None of us could have predicted how clueless so many Americans have become. One doesn't have to have their head in the sand to acknowledge that.
Have you conveniently forgotten that Obama has like a 37% approval rating?
I wasn't discussing "fear mongering," which is a distraction. I was discussing which side is tethered in reality and which relies upon what it believes to be facts.
I wasn't discussing "fear mongering," which is a distraction. I was discussing which side is tethered in reality and which relies upon what it believes to be facts.
You jumped into the discussion where two other posters mentioned some so-called fear mongering from the Republicans. Where are you getting that the Republicans aren't dealing in reality? Because they were wrong about Romney? Kinda weak and lame, isn't it? I am sure the Democrats have been wrong about the outcome of an election in the past also.
The answers have been very unsatisfactory so far, but that's par for the course here (along with the gotcha tone of the OP). I'd have thought that some liberals would point to some aspects of some model that they would like implemented here; conservatives do that often enough, even the model in question isn't particularly liked.
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Next up: the OP explains why returning to the Three-Fifths Compromise would be a traditional and good thing, and that's why liberals oppose it.
The three-fifths compromise was a decent idea at the time since it was a formula agreeable to both north and south. Recall that most northern states had banned slavery by 1787, and the Southerners wanted to count their slaves as a whole person to inflate their representation. The three-fifths was the lowest factor the South would accept if they were to join the new union. I don't think it was worth the trouble to bring the South in, but the compromise did make sense. Below is the relevant text:
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Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
The "other persons" referred to slaves. Notice that the distinction is between free and slave, not white and black as is implied by the "Founders believed blacks were three-fifths of a person" meme. Anyway, since there were no more slaves after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, the three-fifths compromise was no longer active after 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment put the final nail in the coffin by explicitly stating:
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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.
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