Ronald Brownstein: How a GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms

November 7, 2022 Hunter Wallace Uncategorized 21

This is important.

Generally speaking, I am not as angry with Republicans as I have been in the past largely because Alabama Republicans really haven’t been doing a bad job. They ended a woman’s right to choose in Alabama. They passed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. They have already banned “gender-affirming care” for “trans youth.” Also, we didn’t lose our minds during COVID or the Fentanyl Floyd riots.

The Atlantic:

“If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.

Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation. …

This first act has played out largely within the framework of restoring states’ rights and local prerogatives. As I’ve written, the red-state moves on social issues amount to a systematic effort to reverse the “rights revolution” of the past six decades. Over that long period, the Supreme Court, Congress, and a succession of presidents nationalized more rights and reduced states’ leeway to abridge those rights, on issues including civil rights, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

Now the red states have moved to reverse that long trajectory toward a stronger national floor of rights by setting their own rules on abortion, voting, LGBTQ issues, classroom censorship, and book bans, among other issues. In that cause, they have been crucially abetted by the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, which has struck down or weakened previously nationally guaranteed rights (including abortion and voting access).

But the proliferation of these congressional-Republican proposals to write the red-state rules into federal law suggests that this reassertion of states’ rights was just a way station toward restoring common national standards of civil rights and liberties—only in a much more restrictive and conservative direction. “All of these things have been building for years,” Alvin Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s just that Mr. Trump gave them the idea they can succeed being more [aggressive] in the advocacy of these policies.”

Just the other day, Florida followed our lead and banned “gender-affirming care” for “trans youth” although it didn’t go through the state legislature.

New York Times:

“Florida has effectively banned medications and surgery for new adolescent patients seeking gender transitions after an unprecedented vote by the state’s medical board.

The move makes Florida one of several states to restrict what’s known as gender-affirming care for adolescents, but the first to do so through the actions of its Board of Medicine, whose 14 members were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The strategy circumvented the Republican-controlled State Legislature, which had twice declined to take up a bill aiming to restrict such treatment.

The board voted 6-3 (with five others not present) on Friday to adopt a new standard of care that forbids doctors to prescribe puberty blockers and hormones, or perform surgeries, until transgender patients are 18. Exceptions will be allowed for children who are already receiving the treatments. …”

At the state level, Republican governors and state legislatures have long passed a bunch of good bills only to watch those bills later get shot down in federal court, which is why it seems like nothing ever happens. Arizona’s SB 1070, for example, went all the way to the Supreme Court where it was shot down by John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy in Arizona v. United States. Alabama’s HB 56 was another tough anti-illegal immigration law that was gutted in federal court by the SPLC.

Note: The death of Roe v. Wade and the impending death of affirmative action have illustrated that a combination of electing Trump as president, controlling state legislatures and winning key Senate races has gradually removed some of these legal obstacles that have vexed us in the past.

21 Comments

  1. How a GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms”

    ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

    Oh, you mean …

    A rolling back of unconstitutional, immoral, and illegal tweaks that were made to our nation by activist Leftist judges who, since Brown vs. The Board of Education in the early 1950s, seemed able to read anything they wanted to in The Constitution.

    Y’all scream about ‘Democracy’.

    Well, we voted 66-34 against ‘gay marriage’ in North Carolina, and we still got it anyway.

    Not for long…

    • “GOP Congress Could Roll Back Nationwide Freedoms”

      Yes ivan, your freedom to be carjacked, your freedom to be stabbed on public transport, your freedom to be a fourth class citizden.

      Listen to the all knowing Brownstein, as a goy you just can’t think, he’ll do it for you.

  2. Regarding Federal courts overturning laws put in place by elected legislatures at the state level, this has to stop.

    State sovereignty means states choose what their policies are, and whether or if they defer any authority to any Federal body to override that.

    It is well past time states began to ignore the Federal courts on the grounds they have no standing to overrule elected state officials.

    • “…It is well past time states began to ignore the Federal courts on the grounds they have no standing to overrule elected state officials….”

      I don’t agree with this. May surprise you, as I:m constantly jumping up and down about illegal court decisions that have overridden State decisions. I’m fully for the courts curtailing States laws that confine the freedoms of it’s citizens in arbitrary ways that are covered in the Constitution. Like right to jury trials, not having them bust into your house without a warrant. Taking property without public interest. Stuff like this. States can be just as oppressive as the Democrats and should be stopped. We have basic rights and if we are not careful we will lose them.

  3. They passed the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

    Didn’t know that. Defagging the classroom is obviously a good move.

    I mean, it’s pretty sick you’d actually need a law to prevent faggotry being promoted to kids under ten (!), but pretty cool that it happened.

  4. “adolescent patients seeking gender transitions ”

    WTF does a kid know about his life’s future, especially their sexual development. Hell, you’ve got to be past 30 just to have a solid outlook on your own character. Most 20 yr olds are just in a post-teen stage.

  5. “woman’s right to choose ”

    HW, why oh why do you give that term currency by using such an Orwellian phrase?
    ………..it’s killing, pure and simple.

      • There’s nothing wrong the phrase ‘a woman’s right to choose’ — it describes what the Germans would call the Rechtslage, the legal backdrop, to the abortion question (one aspect of it anyway): the claim that somewhere, buried in the Constitution, is the ‘right’ for women to choose to end her pregnancy — it’s just not stated explicitly as e.g. the (real) right to free speech is.

    • There really is so much Orwellian, outright Satanic actions passed as normalcy in the West nowadays. The same people who will go on endlessly about Mengele’s medical experiments and Aktion T-4, and who knows how much of those stories are real in the first place, find it perfectly fine to murder millions upon millions of children in the wombs of their own mothers, mutilate and groom children and prey upon vulnerable and depressed teenagers. And it gets harder and harder to overlook who is pioneering and pushing all of them.

      But the way things are going, the American blue-check bubble and the media-political establishment of the UK and West-Germany will remain as the last true believers in “woke” ideology. Which is why they are panicking, not because orange Hitler is actually going to erect Trumpenreich any time soon.

      • “find it perfectly fine to murder millions upon millions of children in the wombs of their own mothers”

        You make it sound like the mothers are passive victims of something done by someone else. Why do pro-lifers constantly deny the women’s agency and responsibility in this?

        Is it because they’re white knights who pedestalize women and can’t handle the thought of them doing anything bad? Or is it because if they condemned the women people would have the thought “well, maybe it’s a good thing they aren’t passing on their genes?”

  7. Whatever you may think of Trump the usual suspects have been in a constant state of panic and hysteria ever since he won the election 6 years ago.

    • That is true for whatever it’s worth. It’s very odd though since Zion Don never missed an opportunity to fellate them: Lawlessly murdered an Iranian general visiting a Shiite shrine and even tossed his own hapless supporters under Kommisar Garfinkel’s 1/6 Stasi-bus – not the mention the pardons (every Jew swindler Jared could think of plus a couple of violent negro-golem for good measure. Zion Don beez a good goi but massah Schlomo hate him anyway. Poor ol’ Dumpf the Chump.

      • Because Zionism is pretty low on their priorities and hatred of the white christian majority is their number one issue(fear.) Trump rallied those people and acted as their savior and THAT is what terrified our oligarchs a their fellow co ethnics. It also terrified the blacks, any white who can rally rural white people is literally their definition of “klan.” I remember an old black ex con at work who was really freaked out in 2015 with the Trump rallies “they is the same people who used to be hosing down black folks back in the day.” Your typical upper class suburban coastal jew would rather have a rabid anti zionist like Rashid Talib or Ilian Omar as their neighbor than a typical republican white christian.

  9. Froggender, also known as froggigender or phroggigender, is an xenogender identity where one feels a gendered connection to frogs. Some feel that the place their gender should be is replaced with a “frog.” Those who are froggender may find ‘frogs’ are the best way to describe their gender.

  11. Don’t worry though, I’m sure the republicans will blow it by going back to hobby horse “Conservatism INC” issues like getting rid of social security and medicare…

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