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- cross-posted to:
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A man is suing three women for wrongful death, alleging they helped his now ex-wife end her pregnancy
At the end of this month, an Idaho labor and delivery unit will shutter its doors. It’s not exactly an anomaly; it’s the third such closure in the state following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which triggered laws in the state that criminalize physicians who provide abortion care and make access to the procedure impossible.
As of April 1, 2024, West Valley Medical Center in Caldwell, Idaho, will no longer deliver infants. According to a statement on the hospital’s website, the closure was an outcome the institution “worked for years to avoid.” While West Valley Medical Center didn’t cite restrictive abortion laws as the reason for the closure, Dr. Kara Cadwallader, who is a family medicine physician in Idaho, told Salon in a phone interview that providers feel as if their “hands are tied” and they can’t do their jobs in a state where abortion is completely banned (with only a narrow exception in which an abortion is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman”) and where physicians face jail time for providing a standard part of care.
The Senate should go back to being elected by the State Government instead of by the people, the change to this brought by the 17th caused this muddling. The balance of powers with the 3 chambers should work, but making the 2nd chamber just a superior version of the 3rd throws everything slightly out of alignment.
The states don’t need or deserve representatives, let the people make the decisions. State governors and senates already have enough power, letting them have a say at the federal level is just asking for more trouble. The US does not need more of a nobility or ruling elite than we already have. It’s bad enough we have the ultra wealthy and corporations running roughshod over people’s rights just with the power of their wealth, no reason to make that job easier for them.
That makes sense if the states were just administrative zones like the Canadian provinces and territories, all fully subsumed and beholden under the Federal Government. We are not. We are a closely connected economic and political union of individual states collected into a Republic, all of which work together and compete with different ideas. All powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government are each State’s to decide and manage. This allows States to try different things and see what works best, from tax strategy, to universal healthcare (Romneycare), to UBI.
The people have their focus on what is best for them personally. This encompasses differing things from worldwide events to their neighborhood, but it is still a narrow scope. City/county leadership is focused on how best to keep their city/county running for maximum benefit of their population. States have the same focus over all the cities and counties therein.
We only have a ruling elite because people tend to vote for the incumbents, and we have no term limits except for the Presidency. It is also relatively stupid to put everything to a mass democratic vote, especially for things that should be decided by experts. Water rights, mineral rights, pollution controls, regulations, revenue allocation, etc.
That is like saying that the division leadership in a company shouldn’t have a voice in decision making alongside the union and board of directors, just let the union make the decisions. You don’t need input from finance and design/engineering and human resources and warehousing and production and quality control, the people in those departments all elected their union representatives so we don’t need input from those department leads.
State leadership would still have control of their state. As you point out powers not given to the federal government belong to the states, but as it stands now if the public wants something they need the blessing of the states to get it which is entirely too much power. It allows tiny states to kill attempts by larger states to enact policies because even though the larger state would have more than enough votes to get something through Congress, the Senate treats all states as the same, despite some states representing a tiny fraction of the population. It literally allows a tiny group of elites to override the will of the people.
This is not even remotely true. They focus on what will first not cause them to lose elections, and second on what will most benefit themselves. Thanks to a finely honed playbook of dirty tricks there’s very little these days that will actually cost politicians elections leaving them free to maximize their personal profit.
That might hold water if experts were deciding those things, but they aren’t. Instead those decisions are being made by the highest bidders. Eliminating the Senate wouldn’t entirely fix that problem but it would help at least a little. A congressional representative is much more concerned with the needs of his constituents than a senator is and its much harder and more expensive to bribe a majority of Congress than it is to buy a majority of the Senate.
The US is no longer a loose republic, states are tightly bound to the federal government. The US was forced into that position because a bunch of assholes threw a hissy fit when other people said they didn’t think they should be allowed to own slaves. They hadn’t even been told they couldn’t, just that it looked like things were headed that way. So because a bunch of the states demonstrated they couldn’t behave like decent human beings and instead acted like bigots (and still seem to be acting like bigots to this day) the federal government had to step in. The US isn’t quite a democracy, but it’s closer to being one than it is to being a republic, and it’s about time people realized that.
The Senate makes no sense because it’s a relic of the pre-civil war government that serves no useful purpose anymore. The current state of dysfunction in the US is ample demonstration of that. The fact that we have a political party whose entire policy for a decade now has amounted to stripping rights from various groups of people and blocking or reversing literally every piece of legislation supported by the other party (even to the extent of blocking their own legislation if the other party supports it), and that they’ve been successful at that despite a significant majority of the public opposing them is even more evidence of why the Senate has to go.