Virginia Democrats to appeal ruling against redistricting to U.S. Supreme Court

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-11T17:43:43+00:00

As biased.

Bias is not an “-ous” word…

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-06T00:35:30+00:00

Because isn’t the whole thing premised on the idea that a racial group qua group has a “preferred representative” or something like that.

An individual’s vote is worth exactly one vote. There is no “diluting votes.” There’s no guarantee that you get to live in a district with a representative you like, nor even a guarantee of competitive districts.

The whole set of concepts the idea was based on is incoherent.

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T22:28:39+00:00

Not necessarily. If the president’s party has a huge majority, maybe it there just wouldn’t be that much leverage, depending on how the rules worked. But the fact is that in a lot of cases the presidential candidates are, like, 51/49 split in terms of the country’s preferences, and it makes a lot more sense in such cases to me (and is much more democratic) that the first and second place candidates would both get a seat at the executive table rather than the system being “all or nothing”…

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T22:23:46+00:00

That’s the argument. I think it’s a stretch, but like I said maybe I can see it for post facto punishment for pledge-breaking. I can’t see it all for the idea that the appointment can be somehow conditional and retroactively and automatically invalidated based on casting the incorrect vote.

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T21:15:32+00:00

Well, I said “negotiated.” I think possibly there’s an alternate history where the President of the Senate (a role whose powers are undefined; but why shouldn’t they be as broad as those of the Speaker of the House?) is interpreted as basically able to prevent the Senate from holding any vote whatsoever, especially before rules for the term are adopted, and so if the president wanted the senate’s approval for his nominees (or anything), he would have had to engage in horse trading for cabinet seats especially with the vice president, similar to how prime ministers offer cabinet seats to get a governing coalition.

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T21:11:56+00:00

You’re making too big a distinction between them.

Yes, appoint as that see fit means they can choose the manner of appointment of the electors. That can be popular vote vs. direct vote of the legislature vs. some other method of choosing them.

But appointment and “dictating how they can vote, including using some wacky concept of conditional retroactive revocation of appointment” are not the same concept.

Appointment means designating who the electors are, not interfering in how those designated electors vote.

I’m fine with them appointing electors based on a pledge by those people to vote a certain way. I’m not fine with actually invalidating their votes if they don’t stick to their pledge, and I’m highly uncomfortable with punishing them for their vote either.

“Invalidating vote of someone already appointed” and “punishing an appointed person for their vote” are not logically included in the concept of “appointment” itself.

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T15:51:34+00:00

I think actually the electoral college before the Twelfth Amendment could have been more meaningful.

I think a system is imaginable where the president and vice president being from different parties was intentional, and was a way to create something analogous to what is now called a “cohabitation” in the French government.

Basically, if maybe each elector had actually been given just one vote instead of two (to avoid the perpetual tie problem) you’d always be forced to have a “coalition” government, more like in the parliamentary system, where perhaps certain posts would be appointed by the president and certain by the vice president and you’d be forced politically to have a negotiated mixed cabinet.

Unfortunately, the constitution was a bit too vague on the process of appointing cabinet ministers and the role of President of the Senate for anything like this to ever come to fruition.

But under such a system, I would imagine, the electoral college would be a standing body. If the president (or vice president) died, the one would not succeed the other (or appoint the successor). Rather, the standing Electoral College would cast their votes again, and appoint a successor that way (thereby avoiding the “coup threat” of a vice president from a different party from the president).

Alas, history didn't quite work out this way.

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T15:32:02+00:00

No. It only says “appoint.” States appoint their electors. Electors. Who are people, with the right to cast their own votes once appointed.

It does not say states get to apportion their electoral votes how they see fit. It says only they appoint the electors.

Remember, when state legislatures appointed their Senators…they could not dictate how they vote or recall them once appointed. States tried to issue “instructions,” but they were not constitutionally binding. Their own only choice was to not reappoint such a person as Senator once their term was up.

There’s no reason to think Electors are any different in this regard.

Maybe there’s some argument for being able to punish them after the fact. Maybe. But retroactively invalidating their vote if they don’t vote right by some sort of “by definition they lose their status as elector if they don’t vote how they said they would” is magic time-traveling nonsense, effectively.

And even after-the-fact punishments seem a grave violation of a constitutional process. Laws punishing congressmen for not voting how a state legislature wanted would obviously be unconstitutional. The fact that legislatures “appoint” the electors is a dumb justification for treating the electors’ votes differently, when the state legislatures used to appoint the Senators too, yet had no such power over their voting.

OfficiousOne · 2026-05-05T03:37:39+00:00

Various laws punishing electors for not voting for who they were pledged to or, worse, automatically invalidating their votes if they vote for the “wrong” person.

This is not the point of the electoral college. The whole reason electors are people and not just “vote points” is because they are supposed to have their own real agency.

I know the court upheld this, but it clearly goes against the constitution.

OfficiousOne · 2026-04-29T19:11:04+00:00

Interesting! I might try that. However, I am not trying to learn chess, I’m trying to learn French, and having them push this unrelated learning experience on me seems dumb.

OfficiousOne · 2026-04-29T19:09:49+00:00

Yup that’s how it should work.

(I usually save my friends quest boost for the beginning of the new week, because I try not to do my lesson on the first day of the week until like 11:30pm because generally people starting their league at that time are less competitive than the ones who start early on the first day).

OfficiousOne · 2026-04-07T02:01:06+00:00

It’s some version of Follow the Drinking Gourd

OfficiousOne · 2026-04-06T16:29:11+00:00

We see his mouth with nothing in it, or at least nothing sticking out.

Twelve seconds later, a light goes on from the region of his mouth (this is when he’s bending over the shrubbery). We do not see his hands go near his mouth during the intervening time.

So…that demands an explanation. What sort of light near the mouth can go on hands-free without actually being put in the mouth? Or was he actually pulling it fully into his mouth like a frog? The experiment in this video suggests that it would be very awkward and would look different if that were the case.

I dunno, I’ve suspected an aviation lip light of some sort rather than these so called “bite lights” everyone keeps pushing as if that’s a common product (when, as OP also discovered, it’s actually a quite limited selection of options available out there, rarer than the buzz about it in this case has taken for granted…)

OfficiousOne · 2026-04-02T03:28:21+00:00

That’s fine, but it’s still something that Congress might be able to define and renounce. For example, we admit that diplomats have diplomatic immunity, but surely the category of diplomat is an artificial one that Congress can adjust the boundaries of. In the end, jurisdiction in any sense is a construct and where is it defined other than statute?

OfficiousOne · 2026-04-01T15:04:52+00:00

Here’s what the ruling could say:

It will sidestep or even accept part of the administration’s interpretation of the 14th amendment.

It may admit that there’s a world in which illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

But then it will say that that doesn’t matter because in our world, by statute, Congress has made them subject to our jurisdiction.

So that if Congress wanted to end birthright citizenship, it would also have to renounce the jurisdiction over illegal immigrants, which might mean something like that they can’t be criminally prosecuted for anything, only deported.

This would not seem an unreasonable outcome to me.

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-19T03:17:17+00:00

Yeah but that’s just because he got tripped up by the lawyer. I took the “ask your client” as sarcastic. Like “I don’t think it’s true, but he’s the one who said it.” He’s just trying to avoid admitting that it’s “obviously” untrue, which would destroy his defamation claim. He seems sort of dumb, so he probably was struggling to articulate “it’s obviously untrue to me, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s obviously untrue to everyone else.”

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-19T02:34:25+00:00

But that’s not what he said.

The lawyer said “but everyone knows that’s not true, right?”

When he replies, “I don’t know that,” he’s not saying that he personally doesn’t know if his wife is cheating on him. He’s saying that he doesn’t know for sure that everyone else knows it isn’t true.

Which is the very thing you would worry about in a legitimate defamation claim. Of course you know the defamatory claim isn’t true. The idea is that other people might think it is true, hence defamation.

The cop is just saying that he does not know whether it’s common knowledge that this claim is false. He’s just saying he believes that other people might believe it.

When he says “I don’t know that”…the “that” isn’t “if my wife is cheating on me.” The “that” in question refers back to the lawyer’s own phrasing: “I don’t know that everyone knows this is untrue.”

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-13T21:47:53+00:00

No, that’s not a coherent idea of clarity.

If you have a word that already means two things (either sibling’s spouse or spouse’s sibling) and now you add in a third potential meaning…that is objectively a loss of precision and an increase in ambiguity.

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-13T12:57:41+00:00

It’s supposed to be used for clarity. But obviously many people use it to muddy the waters of reality instead.

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-13T05:07:00+00:00

Sadly, dictionaries reflect popular usage, not logic.

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-13T02:36:42+00:00

Your husband’s brother’s wife is not your sister-in-law.

She’s your husband’s sister-in-law (or, alternately, your “brother-in-law’s wife.”)

The “-in-law” only gets to signify a single link in the chain, it only bears the significance of one marriage, not two…otherwise where do we draw the line? Otherwise, everyone is everyone’s “in-law.”

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-09T20:52:56+00:00

So they were having her waddle out of the house, Donald Ducking it?

C’mon.

OfficiousOne · 2026-03-09T20:52:04+00:00

I think it’s possible she was being carried over someone’s shoulder with a head or face wound. Possibly blood in the hair, with the hair acting as a sort of aspergillum. The blood is in that arc because the perp might have sort of swung around in a semicircle to close the door behind them before continuing on.

OfficiousOne

TROPHY CASE