volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@AGT I emphasize that Trump may be pressuring Ukraine, but that's not the same as America pressuring.

In the US system the president only represents a single Branch of a single government, not the entire government, and not the entire country. Presidents say dumb things all the time that are absolutely rejected by America. It is no different here.

To represent America would require an act of Congress. And that is absolutely not what Trump is going for.

@solicitor @petergleick

You're both missing it. Trump's major value proposition is that he has a personality disorder wherein he has zero shame. He wouldn't resign because that would require shame. It would require him to care about doing right things. He doesn't.

But he does stand for consequences in our system, because our system doesn't require people to have shame or to decide for themselves whether they care. We impose that on them.

And that's why Trump is now a convicted felon, and it's why he has lost so many court cases and has screwed up so many negotiating sessions, and at any point the people that we elect to Congress could impeach him with very legitimate grounds for doing it.

He is suffering consequences for his misbehavior, because it's not up to him whether or not he does. But we should probably stop reelecting representatives who don't care to really unload on him as he deserves.

That's up to us though, not him.

@HamonWry Right, because they're using him to promote their own priorities.

That's been the game all along.

@RonSupportsYou sounds like you're just really not keeping up with the news lately.

@iuculano That's not how the US system of government works, though.

This isn't Trump's attempt to steal five congressional seats. That's not how this works. Instead, folks elected through democratic processes the officials tasked with setting district borders. Trump has nothing to do with that. That is between those representatives and their voters.

There's no stealing, there's just conspiracy theories that rely on lack of information about governmental processes.

@fingolas when the newspapers leave the task of reporting and start acting for their own interests, there will be no paper in any meaningful sense anyway.

Suicide in the face of hysteria isn't exactly better.

No, it is enough for the newspaper to chronicle things, because that's its job.

@RonSupportsYou What? Trump already pulled the trigger on all kinds of substantial things against Russia ranging from attacking the dark fleet through direct tariffs and sanctions.

No, Trump has been emphatically portraying Putin as the intransigent one.

Sounds like you need some better sources of news if you haven't heard about this stuff. It really has been reported widely.

@rpardee It's not up to him.

@DarleneRyan and that's why he fails so often. But again, this isn't about Trump.

He can go be a loser in DC even as we hold our Representatives accountable for their bad votes by refusing to re-elect them.

It's up to us, but too few people realize how that works.

@JaniceOCG I think you're missing the point that they aren't gutting the VRA at all. They are instead moving to implement it on its own terms, saying that the VRA has been misapplied in the past.

No gutting, no vacant shell, here's the VRA, and it's to be applied as our elected lawmakers made the law.

@marcelias

@JaniceOCG

That's not how the US government works. The VRA is still fully in effect, and in fact so many of the arguments right now are about how to properly make sure it stays in effect.

No, nobody is going to repeal the VRA.

If you want to make changes to it, well then elect better representatives to Congress that will do that. But the VRA is settled law.

@marcelias

@ZzyzxProton

You're missing the actual folks that deserve the most blame the representatives that we keep reelecting even as they fail us over and over.

All of this stuff is not supposed to be fixed by the courts, it's supposed to be mainly up to their representatives that we elect to Congress. But it seems like they spend their time pointing fingers at the other branches for things that are really up to them.

Stop reelecting bad people to Congress and a whole lot of stuff would be fixed.

@grrlscientist No, that's not how this works.

If we want federal voting rules to operate differently then we need to stop reelecting crappy representatives that don't fix Federal voting rules.

This has nothing to do with the court, this has to do with us electing crappy representatives.

Hold your representatives accountable. Stop reelecting them when they fail us. Don't let them point fingers at the court when they fail at their jobs.

@TCatInReality

Or maybe he was just a shitty politician that people didn't like?

@Nonilex

@persagen But that's not how any of this works.

Know your enemy? Okay, well trying to hang this all on Roberts is not knowing the enemy. It's buying into a reductionist story that doesn't reflect how the government actually operates.

@BohemianPeasant that gets it exactly backwards, though.

The argument is that this is what the voting rights act actually called for, so it's not undermining it, it's supporting what the act actually says.

@servelan We elected these representatives, and if we want different ones then we bring should elect different Representatives.

It's foolish to act like we didn't choose this. Apparently this is what we want to happen. A whole lot of voters explicitly say they want this to happen.

So it's not voluntarily surrendering power, it's using power exactly as voters want them to use it.

NYTimes seems to be forgetting the core feature that we voters used our votes to get this, and if we want different then we would vote different.

@DarleneRyan What in the world?

This isn't Trump's call. It's not up to him.

We elect our representatives, and they have the job of sorting out congressional districts. If we don't like how they do it, we don't re-elect them.

It has absolutely nothing to do with Trump, and it is absolutely democratic.

We elected these people to do this job. Stop promoting conspiracy theories when they might derail this democratic process.

@Tooden @dalfen there's just no easy solution to it.

They don't have the employees, and they can't make them out of thin air, so they're stuck.

@mhjohnson Well it's not so much that the special census violates the Constitution, it's more that it just doesn't constitutionally or legally count for certain purposes.

If Trump wants to waste his resources doing that, well okay. But he still doesn't get to use a special census as if it was the legal one.