Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Of course it happens.

What I was saying was that when Federal money gets used that way coercively ... if you were on board with it because the means fit some end you personally wanted, you really can't complain about it when someone who doesn't have your ends uses the same means to do something you don't like. You endorsed the means. You now own it.

The reason I used Donald Trump as the example was that he showed us how coercive power in the hands of a president might be used in particularly immoral ways.

This is not the type of government any of us should want. But people are fine with it if it suits their ends and then complain when it doesn't suit their ends. I'm not pretending about anything. I'm saying you reap what you sow.

 

Brown vs. Board was not an executive mandate. It was a judicial issue, which had the Supreme Court playing the exact role it is supposed to within the separation of powers of our government.

The court told states that their laws that created segregated schools were in violation of the 14th amendment, which prohibits the states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions.

Now you can perhaps argue that the legal reasoning they used was strained (and I can go ino why if you even care), and what they were really trying to do was mandate their own social goals on the states, the same way a president might. But 1) they did go to the trouble of rooting the end result they wanted in their doing judicial review. ... which is exactly what they are legitimately empowered to do. 2) They weren't doing anything like, "We are going to coerce you to do what we think is right." It was straight, "That is unconstitutional, so we are striking down your laws."

You are comparing two things that just aren't analogous.

Our system wasn't set up to give the president some broad power to try to coerce states to do whatever he wants and if they don't cooperate, try to compel their obedience with coercion using Federal funds. And if our courts were set up to operate that way, they'd have even less credibility than they do.

 

Did your copy omit the 10th amendment?

 

The 10th Amendment says that the Federal government ONLY has the powers specificially spelled out in the Constitution. Anything else? The states (and the people) were supposed to be free to do their thing, provided the Constitution doesn't prohibit it.

@Michael_ Gee There is no "power of the purse" in the Constition. We have evolved into a country with a much stronger Federal aparatus than was originally intended, and our Federal government has evolved into something that can hand out money to special interests in ways that would have been unimagineable when the Constitution was drafted. But you are telling me the Constitution says the opposite of what it actually says. The powers of the Federal government are spelled out explicitly, and there is zero ambiguity in the 10th Amendment.

As for your power of the purse, our Federal government evolved into something where they try to use a version of cooperative federalism to try to get states to do things, and Federal funding is a big part of that, because they can say, "You need to meet this Federal standard" to get money the states might want. But that has zero to do with the Constitution. The states are still free to tell the Feds to fuck off. And the Feds can not act in a coercive manner along the lines of your suggestion that our Federal government trumps the states. Even the Supreme Court, which has served to largely pervert the constitution depending on the social goals of the court at any given time since broadly the Warren Court, has consistently struck down attempts by Congress and the Executive branch to try to use the states as an instrument of the Federal government. For example, the Printz ruling in the 1990s. Or the court ruling that Obamacare couldn't coerce states to expand Medicaid by conditioning the funding for Medicaid on states having to expand the program. And the Constitution itself says the opposite of what you just said. It limits the Federal government's authority to what is spelled out in the Constitution. It doesn't make it supreme over the states.