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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[palsch]

ACLU making a renewed marriage equality push after the SCOTUS rulings.

They have three new cases starting with the hopes of getting a ruling on the right to gay marriage itself (the question dodged in Perry). This alongside a continued state level push with the goal of 20 states with marriage equality by the end of 2016.

It's important to note that they see the second of these as important to the first. The Supreme Court (read, Kennedy) don't like to get too far ahead of progress. Showing that the floodgates are open already would be a major advantage in any new decision. It's likely that the new cases will take years to get before the Court (2016 isn't beyond belief), so flipping another couple of states in the meantime would be a huge advantage. Not to mention their specifically working with conservatives and Republicans to reduce the polarisation factor of the issue.

[GlyphGryph]

Which is why it won't happen. National security debates are much easier to have when it's limited to a relative handful of people with a lot of information and a focus on security. When you start involving the uninformed public, the misinformed public, and the deliberate obfuscators with a political agenda....things get ugly.
Note: I'm not saying this as a anti-democratic sentiment by any means. It's a pragmatic one.
It's just that democracy and pragmatism often don't go hand in hand.

Especially since "easy" solutions have a tendency to only be good for the ones making them, it seems.

[misko27]

Easy solutions are the ones that sounded good in theory, and that's the only place they sounded good in.

ACLU making a renewed marriage equality push after the SCOTUS rulings.

They have three new cases starting with the hopes of getting a ruling on the right to gay marriage itself (the question dodged in Perry). This alongside a continued state level push with the goal of 20 states with marriage equality by the end of 2016.

It's important to note that they see the second of these as important to the first. The Supreme Court (read, Kennedy) don't like to get too far ahead of progress. Showing that the floodgates are open already would be a major advantage in any new decision. It's likely that the new cases will take years to get before the Court (2016 isn't beyond belief), so flipping another couple of states in the meantime would be a huge advantage. Not to mention their specifically working with conservatives and Republicans to reduce the popularization factor of the issue.

Mmm. I doubt very much we will won't see at least a few more given the current rate. However the opposite still applies, and a new State ban on gay marriage (pending in Indiana) is actually pending.

It makes sense they wouldn't want to go all Roe vs. Wade on this.

[Bauglir]

Especially since "easy" solutions have a tendency to only be good for the ones making them, it seems.

To be fair, the "hard" solutions are also easy for the people making them.

Wait, that's not a defense at all!

[palsch]

A GTMO prisoner claims the NDAA is an excessive limit on executive power.

Yep.

Obviously details are hard to get here, but it looks like he is claiming the NDAA, in introducing new prisoner transfer restrictions, is treading on the president's war power authority under the Commander in Chief clause (Article 2) of the constitution, combined with AUMF authority.

This is a really fancy bit of legal judo. The courts have been pretty eager to read the president's war powers under the AUMF as broad and reluctant to apply limits. Saying that this state of affairs should remain when the president chooses to release a prisoner and congress says no is a neat trick.

[RedKing]

So....down here in the Holy Carolinian Empire, the state House (oddly enough, the LESS batshit-crazy of the two chambers) recently passed sweeping new restrictions on abortion providers that could effectively trim the number of operating clinics down to (according to estimates I've read elsewhere) one. For the whole state.

They did so with minimal public opposition or outcry until after the vote. How, you ask?
By inserting it as a last-minute rider to a motorcycle safety bill.


On the plus side, this has now created a great new hashtag: #vaginamotorcycle.

Spoiler: Mostly SFW. (click to show/hide)

[Nadaka]

I have no mouth, yet I must scream.

They can't make abortion illegal, but they can make it unavailable.

[EveryZig]

They can't make abortion illegal, but they can make it unavailable.

And the bastards do it while saying how they are protecting the health of women.

I guess that on the positive side at least they need to hide it behind layers of deception rather than just passing it openly like they did with the gay marriage as double illegal amendment.

[XXSockXX]

I've read commentaries basically saying that abortion is going to be the next big thing for republicans, now that they have lost the public opinion battle on gay marriage. Apparently more potential voters have a problem with abortion than oppose gay marriage.

[MonkeyHead]

Its also less of a binary "yes/no" thing, with a sliding scale of moral ambiguity, making it easier to manipulate your position for political gain. Bastards, the lot of them.

[Morrigi]

The whole two party system is essentially irrelevant now. You have two groups who each want to chip away at different parts of your rights, then pretend they're polar opposites. And the majority of the public has been conditioned by the media to believe that voting for anyone except a Democrat or Republican is "throwing away their vote".

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Perhaps the most crazy, racist, unscientific nativist tirade I have ever heard in my life.

[Owlbread]

Found his twitter account.

[FearfulJesuit]

For those of you not in the know, this particular lunatic is not just some bigot picked up off the street- lord knows they're a dime a dozen down there- but the founder and biggest bigwig of the Tea Party of America.

[misko27]

Moment someone starts talking about breeding and humans, I shut it off, swear vigorously in Serbian, and do something else. Fucking Fascist Motherfuckers.

One would think that these people believe Americans were simply spawned from the Founding Fathers doing it onto the dirt of MOTHER AMERICA.