JayHawkFanToo said:
Here is info on the other topic…nothing really changes.
Automatic voter registration is something that happens in nearly every new democracy where the U.S. goes to oversee elections. They simply register everyone to vote that is eligible, then hold an election.
And before you start talking about voter ID, most countries (aside from the U.S.) issue each citizen a voter ID when they reach voting age. Nearly every developed country on the face of the earth does this. It’s actually one of the ways those countries combat fraud because everyone is registered to vote, so you can’t double register, or use someone else’s ID to vote, because that person is already registered to vote and has a voter ID.
Automatic registration makes double registering more difficult because everyone is accounted for. There’s no possibility that you aren’t already registered, so there’s much less confusion. Automatic registration with an automatically issued voter ID is even better because then you have a unique identifier for each voter. If the GOP was serious about rooting out fraud, they would have proposed this years ago (hint: they aren’t). And before you say no one has suggested it, this exact system exists in many countries around the world. The U.S. has even helped implement a similar system in new democracies.
As for Citizens United, you should understand that it extends free speech to corporations, and more specifically, to donating money to political candidates, saying that money = speech.
If you are against politicians being bought by large lobbying interests, you should be against Citizens United because that’s some of what that ruling essentially allows. Now, obviously I am generalizing here a bit, which is always dangerous, but I can’t really type up an entire rant on this opinion.
As for gun control, universal background checks and mental health screenings have been proposed (and rejected) for years. I doubt we see anything substantive on gun control because too few people lack the political will to do anything on the subject, other than offer their “thoughts and prayers” after the next mass shooting.
What we will likely see over the next couple of years is the Senate rejecting every proposal coming out of the House simply because the Democrats support it, and the GOP and Trump speed packing the courts - Republicans complain when the Democrats question judicial nominees now, conveniently forgetting that after the GOP took over the Senate, many Obama nominees didn’t even get hearings because the Republicans wouldn’t even bring them before the Judiciary Committee, let alone the full Senate. But that’s another story for another day.
