In a landslide, Kansans voted to preserve their state constitution’s guarantee of abortion rights. Cry about it.

And that's the exact reason why the SCOTUS sent the decision back to the States, where it belongs.
Good for Kansas and its citizens.
The Constitution works!

what about those states that went to automatic bans? Why not let the people vote- it would be shot down just like KS!

They did vote. They elected their State reps and senators, the legislators that write and pass the laws.

No, they did not, and as witnessed by this vote in Kansas, what the people want and what their state goverment wishes to impose on them aren't exactly the same thing.

I wrote: “ They did vote”
You wrote, & I quote:
“No, they did not, and as witnessed by this vote in Kansas”
So, which is it? Either the people voted or they didn’t. Make up your mind.

Goodness, fella, do you really need me to explain YOUR own words to you?
Citizens voting on a referendum and electing legislators with their own lobbyist framed agendas are the same thing?

Buzz off, troll.

Today's word is: Confused

Yes, you are mighty confused

You really should try to relax on hot days like today and drink plenty of water.

One annoying habit of Righties is assuming their policies have more popular support than they actually do. Believing that there's a "silent majority" of Americans that wants to police women's bodies, regardless of what polls and election results might say.

Ironically, in Kansas, the polls *were* wrong - but they were wrong in the other direction. Kansans rejected the anti-choice amendment in a massive-turnout landslide that no one saw coming.

America is a pro-choice electorate. Though "pro-choice" hasn't really become *more* popular since Roe v. Wade, it hasn't become *less* popular, either. It's been a kind of stalemate. But there's certainly nothing that suggests Americans have started rejecting the status quo on abortion in a way that would justify the upheaval across the country that Dobbs has green-lighted.

Other specific Democratic policies - like paid family leave, environmental clean-up, higher minimum wages - are quite popular, and yet the Democratic Party is nevertheless dragged down by a kind of branding problem as a result of the Right's relentless and successful culture war. "Out-of-touch coastal elites who want to shove woke ideology down Americans' throats," yadda yadda. (And, not stated: bring you affordable healthcare, curb billionaires' control of the levers of the economy, and make sure your water is free of lead and the rivers don't burn.)

The Republican Party has just the opposite: a kind of cultural cachet among a lot of the electorate that belies their rather unpopular policies.

This suggests a game-plan forward for Democrats: to put not only abortion rights, but all sorts of other specific popular issues, onto the ballot whenever they can.

What other freedoms belong at the state level? Gay marriage? Contraception? Interracial marriage? Interracial *schools*?

All issues that were decided by the Supreme Court and "taken away from the democratic process."

Beware a world where such fundamental rights are on the ballot every election. Republicans might not like it!

Is marriage addressed in the Constitution? Contraception? Interracial marriage? Interracial schools??
No, they are not. THAT is why the STATES are the ones to decide.
The SCOTUS decides what is Constitutional. THAT IS THEIR PURPOSE. Their purpose is NOT to make laws, it is to decide the laws constitutionality. PERIOD.

Democrats have been perverting the Constitution ever since they got their slaves taken away...

Electorates are fickle. Legislatures are petty. Relying upon them for fundamental freedoms is a recipe for instability at best, disaster at worst.

That’s the point of constitutional rights — to protect the individual and the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Which could be as little as 50.00001%. And actually, in states that are heavily gerrymandered, legislatures can still be dominated by 45% of voters or less.

Did you know that women don’t have a constitutional right to hold a job? Or to do things as mundane as take out credit cards? The only women’s freedom explicitly mentioned in the Constitution is the right to vote. Many other freedoms that we now take for granted aren’t anywhere to be found in the Constitution, or as it’s been amended.

Spin the wheel and discover!

You wanna return them all “to the states”? Okay, but I’m telling ya, that’s not going to be popular…

(Ironically, separation of church and state actually *is* in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has lately been watering that one down substantially — showing that “Constitutional Originalism” is just as malleable when it gets in the way of FOX News priorities)

Oh, just stop, already alright.
Show me where it says "separation of church and state" in the Constitution.
Oh, wait...you can't, because it doesn't.
What it does say is that the US Gov't can't create a STATE RELGION.

Here, this id for you:

US Bill of Rights
1st Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

My apologies for assuming you were an Originalist. You are something worse: a Strict Textualist, meaning that you’re willing to second-guess even the Founders’ intent as long as they didn’t use the exact words that you want.

The Founders, of course, didn’t speak with a unified voice on key questions like slavery — kicking the can down the road instead — to their shame and to our country’s detriment.

However, on the topic of separation of church and state, they were 1000% unambiguously clear. The Founders had fresh memories of what happens when states proclaim religions and then go to war with each other, or with themselves, over who has the right God.

If you reject separation of church and state, then you reject a founding principle of America completely. You may as well move to Iran.

Wait, what?
Where in the Constitution does it say that?

I showed copious evidence of the Founders’ intent to separate church and state that would satisfy any Originalist.

If you’re not an Originalist, own it!

I am a Constitutional conservative.
Now, where in the Constitution does it say anything about what we are talking about?

Either all these folks are wrong about the Constitution, or you are.

Taking bets!

Hey, silly...you just supported my position.
Those are the reasons why the Framers wrote the 1st Amendment the way they did.
You are just upset. Take a breath.

Actually what the Amendment clearly states is that Congress does not have the power to impose a religion on the federal level. The intent was to protect individual states and their religions and reserve the option of declaring an official for themselves, which some did.

Here's some additional info, more detailed that I can pretend to do:

https://religionandpolitics.org/2013/04/09/north-carolinas-official-religion-the-convoluted-history-of-american-states-and-established-religions/

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/801/established-churches-in-early-america

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel05.html

Bear in mind, the opinions you posted came from some of the same Founding Fathers who absolutely abhorred slavery yet owned them as well, with the much esteemed Jefferson owning over 600, and Washington over 100, with over 300 at Mount Vernon, including Martha's family from her first husband and 40 rented because, hey, at least he was disgusted by it, so it's the thought that counts.

That's the same George Washington the Founders wanted to crown king, they who appointed our first 14 presidents (8 under the Articles of Confederation), and who only reluctantly granted the right to vote - and that only to rich land owning WASPs (which, incidentally, tended to translate into slave owners as well to rub some salt into that bucket of irony) - instead of reserving the right to appoint for themselves - the neu aristocracy - as they saw the common man as too stupid and lowly of class to warrant the right to vote. Frig, it's amazing that the glorious sainted founding fathers didn't simply declare themselves overlords over the peasant masses.

So, yeah, they tended to not think highly of religion just as they didn't of the lower classes who adhered to it. But at the same time, Jefferson & Co saw its value as a tool to help provide them a common culture, something to unite them around, supply them a morality. People are bad enough WITH religious beliefs, can you imagine how the dunderheads would act WITHOUT it to keep them in line?

The Founding Fathers saw how easily British subjects were willing to revolt against their king, last thing they wanted was for them to be turned on next, with no Atlantic as a moat should their new charges go French style on their lovely wigged heads.
So concessions were made: voting, and yes, religion. Let people think you've granted them some control over their lives and they will do anything for you,,,

It's true the Founders gave short shrift to the country bumpkin pretenders who tried to "continue the American Revolution" by protesting federal taxation of whiskey and that kind of thing. The Founders had no time for that nonsense. Washington crushed it in short order.

I have to chuckle whenever Alex Jones growls into his bullhorn: "wE'rE bRiNgInG bAcK 1776! 1776!!" He was there on Jan. 6! And he said that! Really!

They flatter themselves. Of course they're bringing back nothing so much as the incipient treason that has percolated among America's malcontents for almost as long as our nation has been a thing.

It is hilarious to think of the Founders as the detestable overeducated big-government godless coastal globalist elite, but that is basically what they were to a lot of folks.

Slavery is kind of like the fossil fuel addiction of the early Republic. Obviously malign yet integral to the agrarian economy. Some spoke out about it, even as they hypocritically profited from it. They knew it was an existential problem, but they had no solution, so they kicked the can down the road.

It's not as sharp a dividing line as free vs. slave states, but "fossil fuel states" (those with a significant petrochemical industry) are almost exclusively run by Republicans. Hence the dilemma Joe Manchin found himself in - one which he ultimately resolved in the politically sensible way, by giving the mainstream of the Democratic Party a lot of what it wants on climate, while also claiming significant carve-outs for continued fossil fuel extraction, and lots and lots of pork for West Virginia. It could even be enough to save Manchin's Senate seat in this incurably red state.

It appears Jefferson was what we would today call a "white supremacist," but in his favor it's also clear he really thought about the problem of slavery, wrestled with it, and denounced it if only in a philosophical sense. He wasn't like those Confederate Bible-thumpers who viewed slavery as divinely ordained and an unmitigated good.

He's wrong that free whites and blacks could never live together, but not wrong in intuiting the extreme difficulty that American society would have in bringing full equality to a formerly enslaved population, which we arguably still haven't done.