But the bill prohibiting involuntary servitude (slave labor by prisoners) didn’t pass
This was honestly not a great time to try to pass restorative justice legislation in CA. People are still pissed about the uptick in crime after the pandemic. Tough on crime stuff has been passing across the board in CA for about 2 years now. SF recalled its DA in 2022, and Oakland just did the same and recalls its mayor.
I would’ve tried to push for this bill at a later date. People are grumpy right now. This thing never stood a chance in 2024.
The Oakland mayor recall wasn’t related to crime. A rich fuck who owns coal mines wants to resume shipping coal through the port so he’s trying to intimidate politicians with money.
Yeah, Philip Dreyfuss, a coal hedge fund bro from Piedmont, bank rolled a lot of the recall efforts.
That said, all the of campaign messaging and mailers were about crime. That’s the thread he pulled on to get people to vote for her recall. Dreyfuss’ ground campaign wasn’t about coal at all, he tried to bury that because Oakland hates that shit.
Well that’s because California is pro-prison and also because the simple arguments for prison labor are well known and arguments against it aren’t.
Most people don’t think about it beyond “they committed a crime and it costs money to keep them in there, therefore they should be helping to pay for that”. That’s about as deep as it goes.
how’s this going to work when the supreme court criminalizes being gay?
works.
*worked
everyone needs to stop assuming that anything regarding individual freedom is going to “work” the same way that they’ve grown accustomed to, moving forward
The East/West Coast should hold an emergency election and just fucking annex themselves from the red states. Trump can rule the USoChristianTalibanistan. Offer asylum to all the immigrants so they have no-one to work the farms and the locals have to work in forced labor camps. I give Talibanistan 6 months before they collapse.
Except local refusal to enforce doesn’t really work with gay marriage. If feds refuse to accept gay marriage, they won’t be able to file jointly on federal taxes, and the protections to Rights for spouses like medical visitation / decisions would have to be repeated locally, which could (would) get challenged and ultimately overruled by SCOTUS
SCOTUS doesn’t write legislation, they interpret the Constitution to rule on existing cases. They couldn’t criminalize being gay on their own. If a new case on gay marriage were brought to SCOTUS, the most they could do is overturn US v. Windsor, removing federally recognized gay marriage and federally protected gay marriage benefits.
Congress, however, could potentially criminalize being gay with legislation, unless vetoed by the President or challenged during SCOTUS’s judicial review.
interpret the Constitution
you’re thinking in the past now. please stop assuming that the constitution is a thing anymore. the country chose fascism. they got everything they want, and if what they want is “illegal,” then it will soon be legal.
if you are not a billionaire, then i’m sorry–you have no protections. legal or otherwise. i would say buy all the guns you can, while you can, but honestly that might not even make a difference
It absolutely still is, they just have the full trifecta now, so there’s no accountability. If SCOTUS makes an unjust ruling, it’s Congress’s job to challenge it. If Congress writes and votes for unjust legislation, it’s the President or SCOTUS’s job to challenge it.
The Constitution can’t be discarded by any branch, and requires 2/3 majority to amend through Congress. However, infringement could be outright ignored by those charged with checking the power of the other branches.
If the Supreme Court strikes down Lawrence v TX (the ruling that struck down anti-spdomy laws) homosexual acts will only be illegal in states with anti-sodomy laws on the books. California is not one of those states. California has a law against sex acts with a minor, but not sex acts between consenting adults.
Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas all have statutes criminalizing consensual sodomy on the books and, if scotus reveals Lawrence, homosexual acts will be criminal once again.
…what about lesbians?
No seriously, if they’re defaulting to anti-sodomy laws, what about the other spectrum of the LGBTQ+ that are married and don’t (presumably) practice sodomy?
This is from the TX sodomy law. Oral sex, anal sex, women touch another woman’ breast in a sexual manner, and sex toys are outlawed. The law is pretty comprehensive and seems to cover everyone in the community.
"Sec. 21.01. DEFINITIONS. In this chapter:
(1) “Deviate sexual intercourse” means:
(A) any contact between any part of the genitals of one person and the mouth or anus of another person; or
(B) the penetration of the genitals or the anus of another person with an object.
(2) “Sexual contact” means, except as provided by Section 21.11 or 21.12, any touching of the anus, breast, or any part of the genitals of another person with intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person. … Sec. 21.06. HOMOSEXUAL CONDUCT. (a) A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.
(b) An offense under this section is a Class C misdemeanor."
Here’s what I think is going to happen:
- someone’s going to bring a case to the SC that results in Obergefell v. Hodges getting overturned. That’s the one that legalized same-sex marriage nationally.
- this will be used as a test case to force the CA government to comply with something that openly conflicts with and violates the CA constitution.
- CA will be legally forced to comply.
- any civil disobedience or refusal from state officials spur more lawsuits to either strong arm or even straight up politically imprison CA state officials as punishment
- CA maybe tries to secede
Maybe that’s how CW2 starts, idk.
Tbh, this could also be done in the context of abortion rights with the numerous states that have passed that, but I think whatever is going to be used as a “test case” for this is going to involve CA, because I’m kinda convinced at this point that Trump and the conservative sphere want to try to make an example of CA to attempt to scare everyone else into line. Who knows. They see CA as a threat, because as a state, it has the 5th largest economy in the world when compared to other whole-ass countries. They want to bring CA fully under their control.
this will be used as a test case to force the CA government to comply with something that openly conflicts with and violates the CA constitution CA will be legally forced to comply.
Problem with your theory: there’s nothing at a federal level saying California cant mandate that, at least not yet. They’d need to overturn OvH AND pass something federally that says it’s explicitly not allowed, else California can do as it pleases
Whether other states recognize it is no longer guaranteed, though, thats the big thing it being federally legal forced
Yea. Most of the Republicans schtick is more states rights and handles things at a state level.
California will say fuck you states’ rights. California is a bogeyman to flyover fucksticks and southern shitstains. I worked with a guy who diligently researched everything he bought, and wouldn’t buy anything that profited California business. He was the extreme end of incel gross.
I give that as an example to show how much the extreme right hate California. It doesn’t matter to them that there are many pockets of conservatives there, they would like to see the entire state burn. They don’t think about or care about the national economy, they just use twisted versions of economics to hurt people.
Donald Trump is an sick old man slipping into senility. He won’t be running the country. The people who will be would never endanger the tax money they get from California. That may be the only silver lining to the shit cloud.
Now the test case stuff might go right ahead in order to eliminate the rights of people in the rest of the US. You could be right about that.
If this was possible why hadn’t it been done sooner?
There’s a finite amount of political will. Expending effort to make a change, even a positive one, that doesn’t actually show a benefit takes more of it than something with perceived immediate benefits.
For obvious reasons, codifying those protections feels less redundant at the moment.
Codifying a right in the constitution when the case law making it legal has been explicitly name dropped as something to overturn by a supreme court justice is not in the least performative.
Before Roe was overturned, it was understood that the supreme court didn’t flip precedent because it messed with too much stuff, removing legal assumptions that people have been relying on, like unconstitutional laws banning gay marriage or abortion being inapplicable.
Not necessarily in this case I would think. If the supreme court got rid of the cases that make same sex marriage legal nationwide, and the republicans due to not doing away with filibuster or due to infighting among themselves don’t pass a law to ban it nationwide, it would revert to the state by state basis it used to have. In such a scenario, which isn’t that implausible, Cali probably wouldn’t want to still have old stuff banning it on the books
