Mark Murphy, president of Strata Production Co., argued in a subcommittee video hearing Tuesday, “There seems to be a misconception out there that you’re operating from that somehow the oil and gas industry have benefits from some special sort of tax structure. We don’t.”
“You do benefit from special rules,” Porter said, after interrupting him. “There’s a special tax rule for intangible drilling costs that does not apply to other kinds of expenses that businesses have. You get to deduct 70% of your costs immediately, and other businesses have to amortize their expenses over their entire profit stream. So please don’t patronize me by telling me that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have any special tax provisions. Because if you would like that to be the rule, I would be happy to have Congress deliver.”
Lee argued that the American electoral process has always been managed at the state and local level
Yes, they have always been “managed” at the state and local level in Utah. In San Juan County UT, the federal government was asked to step in to ensure representative government in the county.
And now - in a county that has always had a majority native population - 2 of the 3 County Commissioners are Native.
He must be thinking about Trent Franks’ old district in Arizona, which literally traced the route of the Grand Canyon to loop the Hopi Reservation in with Luke Air Base and the tightwad retirees from Sun City. This was before AZ set up an independent districting process and before Trent Franks tried to pay his young staffer to be a surrogate mother. But only if he could inseminate her the old fashioned way.
Right, it’s a very effective voter-depressing tool for Virginia and New Jersey. And 36 more states, including almost all of the Solid South, hold their state elections in off-presidential cycle years, when turnout is also historically much lower.
Well all of what you said, but let’s add in the state’s who haven’t acted in good faith to allow all eligible voters to vote without making more difficult than it has to be.
I keep coming back to my journey as a voter. I was nabbed walking down my high school’s main hall by a woman from the League of Women Voters. She asked my my age, and signed me up. I may or may not have shown her my DL then, but my point is before all these calls for voter ID, purging the “every once and while voters”, and “OMG massive voter fraud” claims, we signed up, we showed up, and we voted.
The only major story that I remember about voting when I was teenager, or young adult was when Senator Kit Bond was having a cow because the some polling place was allowing voters who were standing in line to vote at 7PM to vote, even if that meant keeping the polling place open longer. I don’t remember the specific problem that happened at this particular polling place, but there was something that happened that prevented them from allowing voters to vote, earlier in the day. And this was when either it became standard practice, or law that if you are in line before 7PM then you get to vote. I mean how is it the voter’s fault that the polling place lost electricity (this was when we all still voted on paper ballots), or the polling place ran out of ballots (this used to happen a lot), and if they have been standing in line since 4PM and are still in line at 7PM they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
I swear Kit was screaming on the local news just like Don Ameche’s character in “Trading Places”, except instead of screaming “turn the machines back on!”, it was akin to “shut the machines off”.
Fact Check: Obviously true. (Although, to be completely fair, before it was the Republicans, it was the Democrats; they traded places in the 1960’s, to the extent it wasn’t both parties between 1865 and 1964.) But if we are to judge God on her results, then we can definitely say that she does not favor universal voting.)
The fact that Congress has the constitutional authority to make laws affecting the “times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives,” does not mean whatever law it may pass is per se constitutional and therefor immune to review by the Supreme Court.
The law would have to be so grossly out of line as to be laughable for SCOTUS to step in—and someone would have to challenge the law all the way through the court system on the hope that SCOTUS would jump in.
I know I am speaking to ‘The Choir’ on this forum, so I cannot better highlight the absurdity of this guy equating decency to Satan, or him trying to conjure up images of a fake religious place to scare his benighted people. Just shameful.
But I will relate a revelation I had as a young man. I was never religious but was forced thru the Methodist version of confirmation as a youth. I know, it was lite stuff compared to some other strict religious upbringings. I always viewed it askance, and shed that stuff as fast as I could. But I was well-versed in xtianity.
As a young guy, my friends were all in late 80’s Minneapolis thrash and speed-metal bands. I lived for almost 2 years in a house where all my room-mates were in different bands. They all gathered at our place, sometimes practiced there, and even brought back some well-known acts to our house for after-partying.
I was always gobsmacked that these 20-somethings (and often very young 20s) were dishing out demonic visions to the gullible young album-buying rublings. “From the very depths of hell, my soul was tormented and chained…blah blah blah” I thought it was hilarious. As if these cushy, slumming, party-head dudes had ever faced anything worse than a possible arrest. Certainly, they had never witnessed the coming of the Horsemen or the earth-cracking open to reveal the pits of hell. Or diced it up with Satan and survived to write a song about it.
Similarly, I doubt Mike Lee as a messenger or reporter from the dark dominions.
This can lead to more public awareness of the Federalist Society but I doubt it will result in any meaningful regulation of its practices.
There are few intellectual movements in modern American political history more successful than the Federalist Society. Created in 1982 to counterbalance what its founders considered a liberal legal establishment, the organization gradually evolved into the conservative legal establishment, and membership is all but required for any conservative lawyer who hopes to enter politics or the judiciary. It claims 40,000 members, including four Supreme Court Justices, dozens of federal judges, and every Republican attorney general since its inception. But its power goes even deeper.
It serves as a credentialing institution for conservative lawyers and judges and legitimizes novel interpretations of the constitution that employ a conservative framework. It also provides a judicial audience of like-minded peers, which prevents the well-documented phenomenon of conservative judges turning moderate after years on the bench. As a consequence, it is able to exercise enormous influence on important cases at every level.
During the Fox News interview on Wednesday, Lee argued that the American electoral process has always been managed at the state and local level and that the proposed bill would be an effort at micromanagement.
Didn’t we have a federal voting rights act for certain states until SCOTUS obviated it relatively recently? Don’t tell me he’s a lying little devil.
