Comment by ocdtrekkie
5 years ago
Both parties do this. For instance, Republicans are generally the party of "states' rights", but Democrats are jumping up and down about how the federal government shouldn't overrule the rights of liberal states now. Things like the fighting the FCC trying to prohibit states from making their own net neutrality rules, or legalizing marijuana, which is still technically illegal nationwide according to the federal government.
Generally, if you run the federal government, you don't want states objecting to your agenda. And if the opposition is running the federal government, you insist on your right to do things at the state level.
Watching Democrats and Republicans make the exact same arguments depending on whose in power is absolutely hilarious, and it leads to great soundbites, like those of Trump and McConnell talking about what the President should and shouldn't do... depending who the President is.
Conservative support of "states' rights" has always been a dog whistle for restricting civil liberties.
Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marriage? Let the states decide. Abortion? States should be free to ban.
Edit: swapped "Republican" with "Conservative", since the parties' ideologies have shifted over time.
> Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue.
Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.
Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.
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The GP's focus on the republican party over the individual voters is misplaced in a historical context [1], but holds for the alignment of modern day voting blocs [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System
You forgot to mention that Lincoln was also a Republican while pretending that the party names of decades ago have anything to do with the party names currently.
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> Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support.
The PATRIOT Act is hardly a champion of many patriotic things. Names mean... very little, so I'm not sure your point.
"Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters."
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I don’t believe the Democratic Party has ever advocated that states should have no rights, so I don’t see how your argument makes any sense. Of course in a specific instance they could advocate for states rights.
It is also perfectly fair on the Republican side.
That is a bit disingenuous. It is true to some degree that both parties do it to some degree, for example LGBT rights and abortion rights. But bigger picture "conservatives" have a long history of saying state rights when they mean white rights. There are still a significant portion of the population that pretends to believe that the civil war was over state rights.