If they try this shit in my state, I’d fucking sue.
I had surgery BECAUSE it would let me change my drivers license. I paid $5500 as a broke college student because I was getting turned down for jobs with that stupid “F.”
I don’t understand how any of this is legal. The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
And even if they did, it would take months, if not years, to resolve. Until then people will either be disenfranchised and can’t vote or forced to update their ID’s, which could also take months of paperwork to resolve.
In which case they sue, and the case gets run up to the ultra Maga supreme court who will of course be fair and impartial in their review before returning a verdict that favors conservatives.
The problem is that you respect and believe in words. The people currently in charge could give two fucks. Ultimately, words only have the power that we give them, so when those in charge ignore the Constitution, then the Contitution has no power.
I have severe ADHD. It’s funny in a way because when I was younger, I tried to understand the rules of my employers and follow them. And yet I still lost jobs. In part because of issues related to ADHD specifically, but in part because what companies SAY the rules are is not what the rules are. If you’ve worked in a corporate environment, you know that there’s go-to people for things. And while there’s official processes (or maybe even not), what ACTUALLY happens is that someone goes to the person who can do something and asks them to do it, and generally they do, and that’s like 75% of how business actually runs.
In the same way, there are rules and decorum and traditions in politics and revolve around the Constution and various bodies of legislature, et cetera. And so there’s nothing that ACTUALLY forces anyone to follow any of that except voluntary compliance or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
This is why the rich are free, largely, from most crimes. They aren’t enforced. And this is how our democracy crumbled. The Constitution hasn’t been repealed. It doesn’t have to be. It is simply ignored. Worse, those who claim to follow it shit on it and ignore it and throw it out.
or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
And unfortunately those kinds of organisations are full of people who tend to lean very heavily towards authoritarianism, so once the winds shift enough you’ll suddenly find that the people who are supposed to be enforcing the law, well, don’t.
Europe isn’t immune either, by any means. The monopoly on violence will, unsurprisingly, be full of violent authoritarians, and the same will happen anywhere that authoritarians feel like they now have the upper hand
Feel rare to hear that expressed, but one of the side effects of our fall into fascism is that, like you say - we make for a good case study, and if it woke Europeans up a bit and that fall doesn’t happen over there, so much the better.
It definitely is a reminder that we cannot take democracy for granted. It is a constant struggle. And letting the oligarchs “play” with their Fox News lies and right-wing radio… that experiment shows that fascism and authoritarianism must be stamped out and not allowed to thrive as an “equal voice”.
We already have Slovakia, Hungary and Italy here, with Italy being ruled by literal neofascists – FdI is a direct descendant of Mussolini’s original Fascist Party. Finland is on its way to joining them, in Germany AfD is gaining popularity, RN is very popular in France and so on
I’m currently outside the US but I’m pulling my hair out trying to renew my passport. I don’t even care what’s on it. The Nazi bastards don’t give a fuck, the cruelty is the point
I’ve been trying to revive my childhood passport from my birth country since I fully expect passports to be next
The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
I agree with you generally that this should be illegal, but it probably isn’t.
It definitely isn’t ex post facto; this is not a law that punishes anyone from a legal perspective, it merely changes the requirements for a certain privilege (the ability to drive a vehicle). If it declared these licenses invalid before the date of the law (which could carry punishments for illegally operating vehicles), then it would be ex post facto.
Another way to put it is that it simply makes a certain action illegal which was previously legal, and laws do that sort of thing all the time. Consider that in the US you didn’t need a driver’s license in order to drive at all until 1913. The NJ law requiring drivers licenses also “revoked” someone’s privilege even though they complied with the laws previously, requiring them to get a permit from then on. But, since it didn’t introduce any punishments for not having the permit before it was introduced, it wasn’t ex post facto.
Of course the law is also clearly discriminatory, but US’s extremely limited anti-discrimination laws are likely not broad enough to be applied here.
The current events should awaken many people to the sad fact that US laws and its entire legal system exists primarily to protect the wealthy and the powerful from everyone else; all other functions are secondary. As such, many horrible, immoral, and unjust things are legal under US laws, and many others will be twisted into being legal by the supreme court.
It’s true that this isn’t ex post facto, but in a sane interpretation of the law it would be discrimination against a protected class; a woman who was assigned female at birth grts preferential treatment under the law with respect to a woman who was not.
Part of it comes down to how driving is legally a privilege, but it’s also been made a legal requirement in many instances (such as living on a highway that disallows pedestrians) and a functional requirement in many others (have to walk past 5 miles of parking lots and take a long meandering path to get around the interstate along noisy, busy stroads just to get to any grocery store by foot for the most common example)
Sometimes in some places there’s half-assed policies in place to try to paper over the problem, such as free paratransit for disabled and elderly individuals that requires scheduling the ride days or weeks in advance, special driving permits for those who had their licenses revoked to be able to get to work, school and go shopping but restricts allowed driving hours and places to make it even more of a punishment, bus services that run only hourly on weekdays, stopping only at poorly marked stops located in built places no human would want to stand at for even a few minutes, etc
If they try this shit in my state, I’d fucking sue.
I had surgery BECAUSE it would let me change my drivers license. I paid $5500 as a broke college student because I was getting turned down for jobs with that stupid “F.”
I don’t understand how any of this is legal. The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
That’s the thing - It’s not. They don’t give a shit, and the judicial system isn’t doing anything about it
And even if they did, it would take months, if not years, to resolve. Until then people will either be disenfranchised and can’t vote or forced to update their ID’s, which could also take months of paperwork to resolve.
In which case they sue, and the case gets run up to the ultra Maga supreme court who will of course be fair and impartial in their review before returning a verdict that favors conservatives.
The problem is that you respect and believe in words. The people currently in charge could give two fucks. Ultimately, words only have the power that we give them, so when those in charge ignore the Constitution, then the Contitution has no power.
I have severe ADHD. It’s funny in a way because when I was younger, I tried to understand the rules of my employers and follow them. And yet I still lost jobs. In part because of issues related to ADHD specifically, but in part because what companies SAY the rules are is not what the rules are. If you’ve worked in a corporate environment, you know that there’s go-to people for things. And while there’s official processes (or maybe even not), what ACTUALLY happens is that someone goes to the person who can do something and asks them to do it, and generally they do, and that’s like 75% of how business actually runs.
In the same way, there are rules and decorum and traditions in politics and revolve around the Constution and various bodies of legislature, et cetera. And so there’s nothing that ACTUALLY forces anyone to follow any of that except voluntary compliance or physical threat because policing bodies enforce things.
This is why the rich are free, largely, from most crimes. They aren’t enforced. And this is how our democracy crumbled. The Constitution hasn’t been repealed. It doesn’t have to be. It is simply ignored. Worse, those who claim to follow it shit on it and ignore it and throw it out.
And unfortunately those kinds of organisations are full of people who tend to lean very heavily towards authoritarianism, so once the winds shift enough you’ll suddenly find that the people who are supposed to be enforcing the law, well, don’t.
As we have seen in recent months. heh :/
Yeah the US is pretty much a case study.
Europe isn’t immune either, by any means. The monopoly on violence will, unsurprisingly, be full of violent authoritarians, and the same will happen anywhere that authoritarians feel like they now have the upper hand
Feel rare to hear that expressed, but one of the side effects of our fall into fascism is that, like you say - we make for a good case study, and if it woke Europeans up a bit and that fall doesn’t happen over there, so much the better.
It definitely is a reminder that we cannot take democracy for granted. It is a constant struggle. And letting the oligarchs “play” with their Fox News lies and right-wing radio… that experiment shows that fascism and authoritarianism must be stamped out and not allowed to thrive as an “equal voice”.
We already have Slovakia, Hungary and Italy here, with Italy being ruled by literal neofascists – FdI is a direct descendant of Mussolini’s original Fascist Party. Finland is on its way to joining them, in Germany AfD is gaining popularity, RN is very popular in France and so on
I’m currently outside the US but I’m pulling my hair out trying to renew my passport. I don’t even care what’s on it. The Nazi bastards don’t give a fuck, the cruelty is the point
I’ve been trying to revive my childhood passport from my birth country since I fully expect passports to be next
I agree with you generally that this should be illegal, but it probably isn’t.
It definitely isn’t ex post facto; this is not a law that punishes anyone from a legal perspective, it merely changes the requirements for a certain privilege (the ability to drive a vehicle). If it declared these licenses invalid before the date of the law (which could carry punishments for illegally operating vehicles), then it would be ex post facto.
Another way to put it is that it simply makes a certain action illegal which was previously legal, and laws do that sort of thing all the time. Consider that in the US you didn’t need a driver’s license in order to drive at all until 1913. The NJ law requiring drivers licenses also “revoked” someone’s privilege even though they complied with the laws previously, requiring them to get a permit from then on. But, since it didn’t introduce any punishments for not having the permit before it was introduced, it wasn’t ex post facto.
Of course the law is also clearly discriminatory, but US’s extremely limited anti-discrimination laws are likely not broad enough to be applied here.
The current events should awaken many people to the sad fact that US laws and its entire legal system exists primarily to protect the wealthy and the powerful from everyone else; all other functions are secondary. As such, many horrible, immoral, and unjust things are legal under US laws, and many others will be twisted into being legal by the supreme court.
It’s true that this isn’t ex post facto, but in a sane interpretation of the law it would be discrimination against a protected class; a woman who was assigned female at birth grts preferential treatment under the law with respect to a woman who was not.
Unfortunately we live in an age of madness.
Part of it comes down to how driving is legally a privilege, but it’s also been made a legal requirement in many instances (such as living on a highway that disallows pedestrians) and a functional requirement in many others (have to walk past 5 miles of parking lots and take a long meandering path to get around the interstate along noisy, busy stroads just to get to any grocery store by foot for the most common example)
Sometimes in some places there’s half-assed policies in place to try to paper over the problem, such as free paratransit for disabled and elderly individuals that requires scheduling the ride days or weeks in advance, special driving permits for those who had their licenses revoked to be able to get to work, school and go shopping but restricts allowed driving hours and places to make it even more of a punishment, bus services that run only hourly on weekdays, stopping only at poorly marked stops located in built places no human would want to stand at for even a few minutes, etc