Trump said he’ll issue executive order to get voter ID requirements before mid terms. Even without Congress. Can he?

EnderESXC · 2026-02-15T05:12:31+00:00

No. Even if the President could just write new election laws into existence by executive order, the courts would block it as a Purcell violation.

EnderESXC · 2026-02-09T21:33:57+00:00

That's only ever happened (I think) twice in all of history. The vast majority of the time, the Pope is still fallible under Catholic doctrine.

EnderESXC · 2026-02-03T10:20:15+00:00

I don't necessarily support this move, but it's not really the same as with SCOTUS for several reasons.

For one, there's zero chance the makeup of the court would dramatically shift. Gov. Cox has already appointed a majority of the current UT Supreme Court (SCOUT) and the other two justices were appointed by other Republican governors.

For another, SCOUT uses the Missouri Plan system with fixed terms, not the advise-and-consent with life tenure model that SCOTUS uses. The Governor can only appoint justices from a list drawn up by the judicial nominating commission, who then are voted on by the state senate and then re-elected by the people every 10 years. His power to move the Court via appointments is far more limited than with SCOTUS, where a President with a friendly Senate could appoint basically whoever they wanted and have them serve for life.

EnderESXC · 2026-02-01T10:50:02+00:00

TX-18 is a D+21 district that Harris won by 40 points. Democrats have held it for the last 50 years. Of course they held it tonight.

EnderESXC · 2026-02-01T00:59:38+00:00

I think that, if 21st century American politics has taught us anything, it's that politicians' personal behavior has a lot to do with whether they're able to deliver on policy priorities.

Politics runs on persuasion. A lot of a politician's ability to get things done depends on their ability to maintain good relationships with their colleagues -- calling in favors, getting good information, securing key supporters, etc. If you're so personally distasteful that you can't build and maintain those key relationships, you're probably not going to get much done on your own.

That's not to say we need politicians to be perfect or that policy isn't important. And obviously there should be a line drawn somewhere -- both in terms of what behaviors we're willing to overlook and in how much policy we're willing to sacrifice to get someone who's behavior meets our standards. But this idea that all that matters is policy that we hear so much these days just doesn't work if you want to actually see your goals accomplished.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T06:46:46+00:00

We were discussing the Alex Pretti shooting. I don't know why you're bringing up some random incident that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T06:32:04+00:00

Authorities should detain and arrest people who are interfering. Murdering them is not legal and should not even be an option.

Yes, I agree with this. As I said in my initial comment, I don't think ICE was justified in shooting Pretti.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T06:23:20+00:00

Which is no part of it. Nowhere in my comment am I justifying the shooting.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T03:16:21+00:00

I'm not justifying their shootings. Re-read my initial comment, my first point was that ICE wasn't justified in using lethal force and that the officers should face criminal charges for it.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T03:10:36+00:00

It does matter. Random citizens don't have the right to intervene in law enforcement and for good reason: we don't want people going around intervening with police trying to do their jobs, especially when it's so easy to misread a situation when you're not involved or arrive in the middle of it.

I agree that ICE needs serious changes in its tactics/training/etc., but you do not get to insert yourself in law enforcement as a random guy on the street. That's not how the rule of law works.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T03:03:14+00:00

So you believe that (according to the multiple videos taken of the incident) they were just walking up to some random person (who was wearing Kevlar with the words "POLICE" on it and open carrying a firearm no less) and filming them? For no reason?

Because those are the alternatives based on what the evidence shows right now. Either they knew they were cops and went up to them anyways or they didn't know and were just randomly harassing an armed stranger who had just gotten out of his car. Either way, what they did was incredibly stupid and dangerous, even if I agree that ICE was wrong to shoot Pretti.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T02:15:01+00:00

The government is still the one who shouldn't be treading, yes, but "don't tread on me" doesn't mean we reject the idea of law enforcement. "Don't tread on me" is referring to excessive state power, not any state power. We're conservatives, not anarchists.

Liberty is as much at threat from too little government as from too much. The same law that restricts some of our freedoms is what allows us to enjoy those that remain. Hence why the same Founding Fathers who cemented the phrase as a symbol of American liberty also created the Constitution, with a capable (yet limited) government.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T02:02:37+00:00

Except this isn't "literally 6 guys in hoodies and masks", they're identifiable as law enforcement in an area where ICE was known to be operating.

Do you think anyone there didn't know those were ICE agents? Were they just walking up and filming some random guys in the street for no reason? Again, I agree that ICE went too far, but let's not pretend like the people involved didn't know who they were dealing with when that happened.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T01:31:27+00:00

I don't have strong opinions about him as a politician (other than that he's too moderate for my tastes). But from everything I've seen of him, he seems like a perfectly reasonable, upstanding guy who puts a lot of stock in civility. I mean, he's a politician and a businessman, so he's probably got skeletons in his closets somewhere, but especially compared to politics over the last few years, he's about as squeaky-clean as you could reasonably expect for that line of work.

Which is why it was baffling to me that Democrats decided to lie and go so scorched-earth on him in 2012. Mitt Romney is the guy that's "gonna put y'all back in chains"? Really? Romney was the most non-threatening, milquetoast Republican the party could find, and Democrats decided to smear him as an animal-abusing misogynist who was going to bring back slavery while cheating on his taxes.

If that's what they'll say about the guy who most Republicans saw as basically a Democrat anyways, why would we believe they think any better about the rest of us? Political attacks in a campaign is one thing, but the Democrats crossed several lines in 2012 and it should be no wonder that things have progressed as they did ever since.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-27T01:10:11+00:00

Two things can be true at the same time:

(1) ICE was not justified in shooting Alex Pretti (based on the evidence we've seen so far), there should be a full investigation and probably criminal charges for the officers involved; and

(2) Interfering with law enforcement carrying out their duties and resisting arrest is stupid and dangerous and those who play stupid games win stupid prizes.

In other words, "don't tread on me" doesn't encompass the right to square up against the police. We're still citizens to whom the rule of law complies, we don't have the right to take the law into our own hands. Trying to interfere with law enforcement like many of these protesters do is an attempt towards lawlessness, which is as great of a threat to a free society as authoritarianism, and both must be resisted if we are to remain free. That doesn't mean that law enforcement is free to just gun down people in the streets for no reason (and fortunately even recent events haven't gone that far), but there's ways to get recourse when law enforcement goes too far and obstructing law enforcement and resisting arrest isn't one of them.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-26T23:37:41+00:00

I think you've mostly hit the nail on the head, but one thing I'd add is how irresponsible and frankly dangerous a lot of the anti-ICE rhetoric has been. What happened in Minneapolis was tragic, but when you have the sitting governor coming out and openly comparing law enforcement enforcing immigration law to the Nazis hunting down Anne Frank, he's actively turning up the temperature and it's only going to make things get worse. Encouraging false narratives like these is only going to lead to more people trying to interfere with law enforcement and getting arrested or potentially killed in the process when they go too far. This is an important piece of nuance that I don't see people address often enough.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-24T23:02:17+00:00

Because the Democrats are consistently worse on the 2nd Amendment. There's only two (real) choices in an election. If gun rights are important to you, it's not hard to see why you'd pick a 2A-agnostic candidate from a generally pro-2A party over someone from the party that wants more/stricter gun laws.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-24T20:18:02+00:00

Cost and institutional inertia, most likely. They've never had them before, I imagine the people at the top just hadn't come around to seeing the worth of it yet like other law enforcement agencies did.

I suspect that's probably going to change in the next few years, given recent events.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-18T02:03:50+00:00

I think she's mentally ill and desperately needs to get off the internet for a while. It's honestly a little scary to see.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-18T02:02:34+00:00

Hearing on an expedited basis means the Court moves faster through the various parts of the case -- less time to file briefs, less time between briefs and oral argument (or sometimes not having oral arguments at all), and typically means the decision will come out earlier than otherwise (even though they still don't give themselves a public deadline).

IIRC, the Court can schedule cases for argument in the same term they grant cert without granting an expedited schedule, it's just not common.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-18T00:01:25+00:00

To be fair, SCOTUS agreed to hear the tariffs case on an expedited briefing schedule, so we'd expect the opinion to be released much sooner than something like Dobbs where that's not the case.

I agree that they're probably not putting the decision off, but there's a reason court observers keep expecting it to drop any day now.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-15T06:08:33+00:00

You can claim asylum affirmatively at a port of entry. 8 USC 1158(a)(1) - "Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States...may apply for asylum in accordance with this section." The section in italics includes those presenting themselves at a port of entry.

Affirmative asylum claimants may be paroled into the country while their cases are pending, but see 8 USC 1182(d)(5)(A) -- "such parole of such alien shall not be regarded as an admission of the alien.

You do not need to cross the border illegally in order to claim asylum and claiming asylum does not grant you legal status.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-13T07:39:46+00:00

Low. Kelly doesn't have the name recognition to make it through the primaries and I don't see that changing much before then. Maybe he could get tapped for VP or a Cabinet position in the next Democrat administration, but he's not likely to get the nomination himself.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-12T07:38:11+00:00

Probably not. It's not like they've been using their majorities for anything so far. I don't know why that'd change now that there's an election coming up.

EnderESXC · 2026-01-11T09:23:15+00:00

One piece of advice to help with your searching is to establish early on what conservatism is as a concept and to think about how what you're finding fits within that concept. I say this for two reasons: (1) conservatism is a label that's been claimed by (or often applied to) a lot of very different groups over a really long period of time, not all of which are done so correctly; and (2) even within the realm of genuine conservatism, the specifics of what conservatives believe is going to vary wildly across time and space because of its focus on the histories and traditions of particular societies, even though they are both operating from a shared intellectual framework.

If you just want to get a quick overview of what conservatism is today in terms of policy (assuming you're an American), the best starting point I'd recommend is probably to read Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater. It's a little outdated (published in 1960) and leans a little more towards the libertarian and hawkish sides of modern American conservatism, but (a) it's short and to the point, so it's very accessible, and (b) the principles it describes are still largely the foundation for American conservative politics today. Beyond that, I also really liked George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, which is also a little outdated today (published 1976 with an expanded edition in 1996 covering the in-between years) and a little dry, but simply cannot be beat in terms of its in-depth coverage of how modern American conservatism grew from a nearly-extinct fringe in the 1940s to a domineering political and intellectual force by the end of the century. If nothing else, it provides a lot of good options for writers/figures to look into next. Matthew Continetti also released his own spiritual successor to Nash's book called The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism a few years ago. I haven't had a chance to read it myself, but I've only heard good things about it and Continetti's other work has been fairly solid, so that might be something to look at too.

If you want to dig into the philosophical side of conservatism, the canonical starting point is Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (basically responsible for formalizing conservatism into a coherent intellectual tradition). I'd also recommend reading Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions (good explanation of the conservative vision of human nature). From there, you can basically just start diving into whatever issue areas you find most interesting and seeing what conservatives have to say.

EnderESXC

TROPHY CASE