STATES RIGHTS!! BAARRRFF

Gonna harp on states rights a little bit here as I can't think of anything else to talk about.

A friend posted this story today, discussing a Fourth Circuit Court ruling striking down North Carolina's incredibly restrictive, and racist, package of voting restrictions. This story follows a couple of others from other states where similar laws have been knocked down.

This shouldn't be something that happens today, a single ruling at the federal level should have sufficed to guarantee voting rights to anyone, but because our constitution seems to enshrine the rights of individual states to be complete dicks about any and all issues, we have to go through this process repeatedly and for any social issue. Sure, like with gay marriage, it happens eventually, but for those who have their lives and rights in limbo until their own backwater section of the country decides to join the 21st century I suspect that isn't good enough.

It is a fact that voter fraud is not a thing that happens on any scale worth caring about, it is also a fact that the vast majority of the states with restrictive voting laws are also those with large minority populations and many of them were until recently specifically prevented from creating such laws under the Equal Rights Act, because they have a history of being racist shitholes who would be happier with slavery still on the books than having to treat black people as if they were human.

But minorities tend to vote Democrat, and so if the Republicans who control the states want to keep doing so, they have to keep those uppity thugs from voting in any way they can.

This is only a problem because they have the right to create those laws and there is basically no reason for it anymore, once upon a time the country was too unconnected for a central government to work very well, so the states needed the power to govern themselves and make decisions that couldn't wait for a response from DC, additionally we were all scared of monarchists or some shit and didn't want to set up a system like that, but lets be honest here, the danger of that is long past. And the arguments against centralizing power have been waning ever since the telephone was invented.

You can talk all you want about different cultures having different values, and to an extent that is true, the USA is friggin' gigantic and many states certainly feel like different countries, however someone once wrote something about certain truths being self-evident. Pretty sure it was in an important document somewhere, and interestingly they didn't add "Unless the state in question doesn't think so", or even "Except for black people" to the thing.

It's always interesting that constitutional literalists skip that part when arguing about taking rights away from a section of the population. I mean, it came first, it must be kind of important. If we are gonna talk priorities here then wouldn't that be the first one for those types? No it's usually a different document entirely they care about, and that only when some asshole shoots a couple dozen people or a government employee decides they don't want to do their job and give gay people the rights they deserve for being here in the first place.

What I am saying is, fuck states rights, the only thing the states care about is the states, and by that I mean the only thing the elected representatives of the state care about is getting reelected in the state, if that means pandering to the inbred hillbillies that put them into office then I guess they will just have to ignore the KKK signature on the donation checks.
The federal government, for all its corruption, and graft, and special interest influence, isn't beholden to that level of persuasion, the President doesn't, and rightly shouldn't, give a shit what the ignorant rednecks of Bumfuck, Nebrahoma think about letting black people have the vote, and most offices at the federal level have a similar interest in their opinions.

National trends are what they care about, and nationally the country doesn't want, need, or even care about rules preventing voter fraud, it isn't a fucking issue and shouldn't be treated seriously in any forum.

The Libertarians and Tea Party types would have us believe that the federal government, or indeed anyone, should have that power, and it should be left to either the free market or god to provide rights, these people are idiots and madmen who will probably form the warring bands that populate our nation after the Trump presidency, but otherwise should not be listened to under any circumstances. Remember the Libertarians literally believe that child slavery is perfectly acceptable until the child seizes responsibility for itself, or some such bullshit, because as the parents are caring for it uncompensated, they own the rights to anything it produces.

Libertarians are horrible people and basically indistinguishable from the far right, they certainly mostly vote straight R in elections.

Anyway, I got off track. So basically, just as the police and American citizens in general have proven they cannot be trusted with firearms, so too have state level governments proven they cannot be trusted with protecting the rights of their populace. The states don't care about the majority of their populace and I think that has been pretty conclusively proven by the last entire history of the country, sweeping protections and reform have always happened at the federal level and states have only accepted them grudgingly, or in one case at gunpoint after the deaths of tens of thousands. Speaking of which, does it surprise anyone that mostly the South is responsible for this shit? There were major mistakes after the Civil War ended, mostly those of allowing the Southern states any degree of autonomy after the war, hell if it wasn't for the massive, you know, slavery, I'd say we'd have been better off to let them go, cesspits that they were and still are today.