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PoliGAF 2016 |OT| Ask us about our performance with Latinos in Nevada

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Could the SCOTUS do anything to force the hand of the Senate in holding a vote? Or could the Obama admin do some kind of appeal perhaps arguing it's the constitutional duty for the institution to hold a vote?

Apparently, if the nominee languishes in the Senate then Obama can appoint a temporary seat. But it would only be temporary.
 

benjipwns

Banned
I think the Supreme Court, at behest of the President, ordering the Senate to vote on something probably isn't the best way to peal votes off the Republican majority.
 

Diablos

Member
Apparently, if the nominee languishes in the Senate then Obama can appoint a temporary seat. But it would only be temporary.
I'm not talking about a temporary seat. I'm talking about the Supreme Court essentially calling out the GOP and forcing them to adhere to their constitutional duty to hold a fucking vote for Obama's nominee.
 
I'm not talking about a temporary seat. I'm talking about the Supreme Court essentially calling out the GOP and forcing them to adhere to their constitutional duty to hold a fucking vote for Obama's nominee.

As long as the nominee is being "considered" I don't think SCOTUS can force anything. Plus from what I understand the Senate put in a whole bunch of measures in 2014 that greatly reduces the president's ability to appoint without Senate involvement.
 
Did everyone miss that article Benji posted about the one week opening for a recess appointment? Obama's totally going to do it.

But they totally changed the definition of "Recess" in 2014:

Fourth, strongly on the Senate’s side, the decision left it largely up to the Senate to decide when it does take a recess, allowing it to avoid the formality of a recess by taking some legislative action, however minor or inconsequential and however few senators actually take part in some action.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/02/is-a-recess-appointment-to-the-court-an-option/

Basically, someone just has to come in for a few hours and pretend to work and the recess is void.
 
Out of curiosity, given how wretched Chafe's performance (or the perception of his perfomance) was, is his political career most likely over?
 

HylianTom

Banned
I just hope, in the very low-probability scenario where the general election hinges on a court fight, that it happens within one of the districts where the appeals-level is now Democrat-majority. If I were writing this like an absurdist comedy, a 4-4 SCOTUS ruling would be hysterical, and a fitting end to this shitshow of a cycle.

Map-of-US-District-Courts-2000px.png

Districts with majorities of Dem appointees: 1-2-3-4-9-10-11-DC-Federal

(Just avoid the Midwest!)
 

Gotchaye

Member
I'm totally going to sound like a Right Winger for part of this, so fair warning:

One way or the other you're going to be paying people a living wage. Whether its by mandating a livable minimum wage or by making up the difference in welfare payments to those who aren't getting paid enough. That or you let people slowly die through insufficient nutrition / medical care / housing (which I'll admit is a more popular solution than I'd have anticipated).

Setting a minimum wage below living and then making up the difference in welfare is effectively subsidizing company wages out of the public pocket. Why should companies who can't afford to run themselves be living off the public largess ?

I get the appeal of this as political rhetoric, but the economic justification seems pretty obvious to me.

Basically it's just "too high of a minimum wage causes unemployment", right? Plausibly there are people who it does not make sense to employ at a living wage* (this is obviously the case for some disabled people, but plausibly it's true or will soon be true for a significant part of the population). If your minimum wage is set at a living wage, these people don't get employed. They then need to be provided with 100% of the equivalent of a living wage through welfare (or they die in the streets). Meanwhile they're not doing much useful labor. This is inefficient, since their labor is worth something. Better to employ them at less than a living wage so that society only has to make up the difference rather than providing 100% support.

I guess it's the difference between looking at low minimum wage + EITC as a subsidy to companies employing minimum wage labor and looking at the EITC as a jobs program for people who aren't employable at a living wage. The jobs program works less well when a specific employee's employer has to make up the entire gap between market wage and living wage - they have a lot less reason to keep the person employed. Maybe in some cases the balance of bargaining power is such that many minimum wage employees really could be paid much more without that impacting companies' employment calculus, but there's no a priori reason to think that the living wage level is related to the marginal product of low-skill workers. It seems to me that what you want** is to set the minimum wage to their marginal product and then, if that's lower than a living wage, make up the difference with EITC.

*Probably in the real world it's not that specific people either are or are not employable at some wage but rather that there will be some number of jobs at different minimum wages, but I don't think that changes much.

**If what you want is economic efficiency. At some point we should be thinking about whether someone's labor is worth sufficiently little to society that social welfare is maximized by not trying to make them work so hard but by giving them more leisure time.
 

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
I think it's in their best interest to wait until there's a new President (if possible). That way they can pin the new "liberal activist justice" on the new President (if it's a Democrat) which would give them further "reason" to obstruct the new President.

They could theoretically lose the senate.
 
They could theoretically lose the senate.

I think this is likely. Surges in voters benefit Democrats significantly as a result of demographic changes.

I think it will be asinine for them to resist confirming whoever Obama nominates, provided they can even half sell it to their base.
 

Diablos

Member
Half selling to the base is a guarantee. When you have Senators like Ayotte advocating for a delay until '17 then you know it's playing well enough to these voters.
 

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
I don't think there's like early polling or anything that Ayotte is looking at. I think at this point the caucus told her hold the line or you're toast.
 

benjipwns

Banned
Benji, how do you feel about Stefan Molyneux and do you think it's embarassing that he's all but endorsed Donald Trump?
No, he's Canadian, they're all evil slaver scum. And they hide among us attempting to undermine our Republic and restore The Crown.

Also I automatically oppose anyone except Jason Unruhe who posts videos of themselves in front of walls talking to the camera on YouTube.

Also I don't trust anyone named Molyneux.
 

thefro

Member
I just hope, in the very low-probability scenario where the general election hinges on a court fight, that it happens within one of the districts where the appeals-level is now Democrat-majority. If I were writing this like an absurdist comedy, a 4-4 SCOTUS ruling would be hysterical, and a fitting end to this shitshow of a cycle.

Map-of-US-District-Courts-2000px.png

Districts with majorities of Dem appointees: 1-2-3-4-9-10-11-DC-Federal

(Just avoid the Midwest!)

A 4-4 tie probably would result in the election going to Congress to decide.
 

FiggyCal

Banned
I can't find the right Jason Unruhe meme, so here's a picture of what he actually looks like:

Edit: Fuck. Banned site. :(

Edit 2: Most Marxists hate him and he's also not the #1 Marxist on youtube, like he says. That would probably be Richard Wolff.
 
I can't believe Donald Trump of all people is the one to flat-out say that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch.

So sick of the "Bush kept us safe" narrative. I don't blame him for 9/11, but you can't credit him for keeping us safe while ignoring what happened.
 
What happens if after Super Tuesday, Hillary has a mathematically undefeatedly number of delegate and pledged super delegate? If sanders concedes, will they still hold the rest of the scheduled primaries and caucuses?
 

HylianTom

Banned
A 4-4 tie probably would result in the election going to Congress to decide.
I'm guessing it'd depend on the nature of the case..

---

Meanwhile, Blanche is making waves:

Sen. Lindsey Graham to 'Re-Evaluate' Supporting Donald Trump If Nominated

A prominent U.S. senator from South Carolina said this morning he needs to "re-evaluate" whether he would support Donald Trump as the GOP presidential nominee after comments the real estate mogul made about George W. Bush's actions in connection to the 9/11 terror attacks.

"I've got to really re-evaluate that after what he said about George W. Bush," he said. "There's just the kooky people in the world; the mainstream Democratic party opposition to Bush did not go where Donald Trump went," Sen. Lindsey Graham told “Good Morning America” today.

Wowza!
 

Yoda

Member
I'm guessing it'd depend on the nature of the case..

---

Meanwhile, Blanche is making waves:



Wowza!

I think most endorsements are meaningless at this point. Also this is the 283912th time pundits have called the death of the Trump candidacy off one of his asinine remarks.
 
No positive Hillary news

god
The news so far in the Clintonverse this morning is that they're hoping on the culinary endorsement. She visited several strip casino cafeterias yesterday (and there's several strip caucus sites).

She also scoffed at her staff underplaying Nevada (because they said it's 80% white).
 

benjipwns

Banned
What happens if after Super Tuesday, Hillary has a mathematically undefeatedly number of delegate and pledged super delegate?
She would have to win 400% of available delegates. Not unexpected with the Democrats history of vote fraud.

Surprised you didn't mention his cut in the Noam Chomsky vid...
The weird thing is that he progressively shaves the sides more it seems like. Either that or he uploaded the videos in a different order than he filmed them.
 
I get the appeal of this as political rhetoric, but the economic justification seems pretty obvious to me.

Basically it's just "too high of a minimum wage causes unemployment", right? Plausibly there are people who it does not make sense to employ at a living wage* (this is obviously the case for some disabled people, but plausibly it's true or will soon be true for a significant part of the population). If your minimum wage is set at a living wage, these people don't get employed. They then need to be provided with 100% of the equivalent of a living wage through welfare (or they die in the streets). Meanwhile they're not doing much useful labor. This is inefficient, since their labor is worth something. Better to employ them at less than a living wage so that society only has to make up the difference rather than providing 100% support.

I guess it's the difference between looking at low minimum wage + EITC as a subsidy to companies employing minimum wage labor and looking at the EITC as a jobs program for people who aren't employable at a living wage. The jobs program works less well when a specific employee's employer has to make up the entire gap between market wage and living wage - they have a lot less reason to keep the person employed. Maybe in some cases the balance of bargaining power is such that many minimum wage employees really could be paid much more without that impacting companies' employment calculus, but there's no a priori reason to think that the living wage level is related to the marginal product of low-skill workers. It seems to me that what you want** is to set the minimum wage to their marginal product and then, if that's lower than a living wage, make up the difference with EITC.

*Probably in the real world it's not that specific people either are or are not employable at some wage but rather that there will be some number of jobs at different minimum wages, but I don't think that changes much.

**If what you want is economic efficiency. At some point we should be thinking about whether someone's labor is worth sufficiently little to society that social welfare is maximized by not trying to make them work so hard but by giving them more leisure time.

Yes. That's the flaw in my argument. I still think its a questionable proposal that a lot of companies that are paying their employees below a living wage are doing so because their marginal utility is such (for one thing their profits suggest the marginal utility of their employees is reasonably high).

Admittedly this is hard to value because lots of utility values are multi-variable (movie stars would be worth a lot less without global audiences made available by the medium (which has very little to do with their acting talent) , the worlds most talented CEO's utilitily is likely 0 if they're the only employee (i.e some part of the value assigned to the CEO actually comes from the other employees)) and we tend to assign such value to whoever's most likely to complain about not getting it.
 

HylianTom

Banned
I think most endorsements are meaningless at this point. Also this is the 283912th time pundits have called the death of the Trump candidacy off one of his asinine remarks.
Agree, he seems to have a Teflon coating as far as primary voters are concerned. And Lindsey isnt revered enough in the party for this to sound like a huge (schoolyard effect:) "oooooooohhh" threat.

If anything, I'm laughing at his (and others') throw-shit-at-the-wall approach to tackling Trump.
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I'm guessing it'd depend on the nature of the case..

---

Meanwhile, Blanche is making waves:



Wowza!

LOL at Lindsey Graham thinking anybody cares about his support.
 
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