State Issue or Federal Issue

[AstroProdigy]

I'll start off: Abortion should absolutely be a state issue! There's no reason politicians should be able to weasel their way into power in the federal government on this issue. If South Dakotans don't want abortions they shouldn't be forced to give abortions. If New Yorkers want that freedom they should absolutely have that right. The federal government should not be allowed to legislate the same law to different cultures. No matter what stand the federal government takes here the other side will fight to the death for it and since most of the opposition comes regionally sending the issue to the states should lighten the partisanship on capital hill and at the same time pacify the conservative right.

 

If a person in a state where abortions are banned wants to have one then they can simply go to a state where abortions are legal and have their transportation taken care of by the federal government. If people in a state where abortion is banned get sick of it they can fight to legalize it and not waste the time of us "liberal elites" in the northeast to fight for it for them. To make the pro abortion people less angry a law should be enacted saying abortion is legal everywhere, but can be made illegal by a popular referendum for a state and vice versa if it's already been made illegal. That way there won't be a period where people can't have abortions while waiting for a law to be passed making it legal.

[Aileron]

Good topic, but bad example. Abortion is controlled by the federal government because no aspect of the Bill of Rights may be overturned by any state. For a state to say that it wants to limit abortion would be like that state saying that it want to send soldiers searching up the woman's uterus without a warrant - quite literally mind you, because abortion is protected under the "search and seizure" amendment. The Roe vs. Wade decision was a two part decision which stated that a: "no search and seizure" equals "right to privacy" and b: that making a law against abortion would violate that right to privacy.

 

No state government can overturn abortion. Infact, if the entirety of all 50 state legislatures, every local government, all of the governors, 60% of The House of Representatives, 60% of Congress, and Presidency all got together, and at the same time along with 99.9% of the whole national populace was in aggrement with them, and they all wanted to put the slightest limitation upon abortion at all, that would still not be sufficient. To overturn abortion, or even to make it legislatively debatable, either one of two things must occur: a: the Supreme Court must reverse Roe. vs. Wade, or b: the rest of the government must write a new cons!@#$%^&*utional amendment allowing laws banning it to be written.

 

State or Federal is irrelevent on this issue. Heck, democracy is irrelevent on this issue. Five out of Nine lawyers in black robes said that no limitation upon abortion is made, and from that point on abortion cannot be questioned, refuted, debated, or criticised outside of an academic setting.

 

Worse yet is that these guys aren't elected and get to decide when they want to resign. All they need to do before running the whole country with an activist agenda is to trick one overworked executive that they are on the level. We have several of these activists who won't retire while there is a Republican president. Thus, if the entire country was in total agreement about wanting to get rid of a certain radical left wing 65-year old Supreme Court justice who's going to live to 105 due to excellent health care, without the justice being replaced by a younger one who is just as bad, the country would have to elect Republican Presidents 10 times in a row, and hope that all ten of them aren't distracted by something and are good enough judges of character not to appoint a loon in disguise.

 

And Congress criticised Alberto Gonzales. I for one was shocked the day he resigned. Gonzales was exactly the kind of Judge we needed. Yes, its fair to say he had a conservative agenda, but that was a step towards balancing out the four other judges with liberal agendas. Congress will criticise any judge who wants to "overturn Roe vs. Wade". Overturning Roe vs. Wade would not make abortion illegal; it would be abortion debatable. If Roe vs. Wade were overturned, pro choice people could still keep abortion legal, but they would have to actually get a majority vote on the subject. I favor overturning Roe vs. Wade, any person who is pro-life favors overturning Roe vs. Wade, and I say that even if you are pro-choice, but love democracy and the authority to vote for what you believe in more than the right for a woman to smash a screwdriver in the head of her birthing child, you should also favor overturning Roe vs. Wade, because it is a terrible decision which runs counter to democracy.

 

Its this kind of insanity which makes some people pray that some of these judges would drop dead of old age. I must say I'm not in disagreement - it seems to be the most likely scenario of our country remaining a democracy. Lets face it, if Hillary Clinton gets elected president, all of these liberal Supreme Court Justices would retire, and she would replace them with a bunch of loons. In turn, those loons would keep making their "Freedom of Religion" = "Seperation of Church and State", "No Search and Seizure" = "Right to Privacy" kind of decisions. Decisions which taken one at a time seem to be synonyms, but are really links of chains which will twist our Bill of Rights step by step into something that it isn't. Chains which when used properly will bind our elected officials to not having the authority to even debate the real issues. With enough twisting, Five out of Nine lawyers in black robes, who were never elected by anyone, could rule this country without question, for life.

 

I mean, how many of the Founding Fathers, when they were thinking up the reasoning behind making it illegal for soldiers to barge into people's homes, after several years of living under British rule where doing just that was a tactic to squash dissagreement, do you think had "We're going to make it a right for a woman to have an abortion" on their minds? The wording of the amendment in my humble eyes doesn't seem to have anything to do with abortion. And to me, the government sending soldiers without a warrant into the home of someone they dissagre with is an entirely seperate action than a group of people reminding a pregnant woman that the "fetus" inside her will soon enough be a living breathing human being.

 

In the time around the founding fathers, if a woman was convicted of a crime and sentenced to execution, but she was found to be pregnant, should would be granted a stay of execution until she could bring the baby to term. Why? Because the "fetus" was considered a seperate en!@#$%^&*y who was innocent of the crimes the mother committed. That's called a legal precident. Any decent judge would have used that factor when making their decision on abortion.

 

 

 

But I've digressed enough. Do I think abortion should be a state issue? Absolutely, though not because I think it should be a state issue as much as that I have more faith in the state governments' ability to represent the will of their cons!@#$%^&*uents than I do the Federal Supreme Court.

[Bak]

yeah the supreme court system is a bit !@#$%^&*ed up, although bush did get to appoint his fair share of judges. It's sort of strange in that we need these judges to be able to make unpopular decisions or else we'd have mobocracy, and we need their terms to be more long term than that of a single president. At the same time, however, the president gets to choose judges that will interpret laws for possibly 40 years into the future, and we don't want judges on either side to have an agenda interpreting laws for that long. Maybe there should be a mandatory retirement age, after all as you get old you experience cognitive decline.

 

are there any first world countries where abortion is illegal?

[Aileron]

There's probably a few. But the point being is that Europe is left wing currently. That still isn't a valid arguement though...all it means is that Europe is left wing. I could argue that Europe got to where it is by being more conservative than they are now, and have been holding off a steady decline. I will agree that political moderation is an aspect of what makes a society great, but I wouldn't quite consider it a strong enough statement to use it here.

 

I'd say that "If a society has moderate politics, then that political stability will produce economic growth". Logic still doesn't say that if you have economic growth it is due to moderate politics though.

[AstroProdigy]

Alright Aileron you really seem to have completely digressed from the original point by the end of that first post. The point I was making is that this should be a states issue as it would decrease partisan bickering and better reflect the regional differences in beliefs in America. Of course the federal government would have to start out by turning abortion rights into a states issue. The problem with the federal government representing the majority of it's people is that if 51% of people believe in something then 49% of 300 million which is 147 million people are dissatisfied and if you delegate this issue to the states you will have a much larger majority of satisfied people. It will also mean that politicians who get many of their votes solely on certain issues like abortion rights can be kept out of the federal government with their corrupt agendas.

 

However I disagree with you about the Supreme Court being liberal. It now is conservative as the 5-4 majority will almost always fall on the conservative end and if a Republican gets elected to the presidency it's likely to turn into an ultra conservative court with the retiring of liberal judges and appointing of more conservative judges. Remember the argument that Alito and Roberts would respect precedent? I think we can now safely say that's out the window and the Supreme Court is going to largely be the type of partisan battle that it was never meant to be. What's the solution? Well to start take some of the most divisive issues that don't need to be federal issues out of their hands and return them to the state.

 

If you want to mention other issues and state your opinion of whether they should be state or federal issues and why then feel free as that is the topic.

Edited November 5, 2007 by AstroProdigy

[JDS]

ailerion tends to do that.. starts out strong, but at the end of his long post you know no more (perhaps less) then you did before reading it

[Aileron]

And JDS's posts consist of a single sentence that took three seconds to write and with far less thought than that put into them.

 

(Where's Veg when you need him? If JDS continues along this line of stupidy and gets that warn meter all the way to the right, the RPG would start getting a lot easier )

 

 

Conservative and liberal are relative. If Roe vs. Wade was moderate than we would indeed have a conservative court. However, I'd say its a radical left-wing decision given how many people's throughts it got rammed down.

 

 

I mean sorry, for digressing, but the question you asked was boring. I think that states should be able to decide almost any issue, and that the federal government should be limited to foreign relations, inalienable rights, and the basic domestic policies needed to keep the union together. That being said, I'd actually say that abortion is either way an inalienable rights issue, and I will admit that is the Supreme Court's juristiction, as majority rule should not be enough to overcome an inalienable right. I am however frustrated that those idiots put 'privacy' before 'life'. Thus, abortion should be a federal issue.

 

Besides a statewide ban on abortion would do little good - they'd just fly to another state to have it done.