Quote:
Originally Posted by senor rubirosa  That and the rest you posted was quite fascinating, Jason.
By the citizenry, I basically meant the population at large, as reflected through polls that seem to show very strong national support for the death penalty, on the order of 70 percent or higher, with half or more of the population believing the death penalty is not applied frequently enough.
Of course, this varies widely from state to state and region to region. |
Perhaps. I find many polls say what whomever funds them wants them to say. The death penalty though is waning. Some states which reinstated the death penalty have have rescinded it and others have done so
de facto.
Quote:
|
I wonder if you have an exaggerated sense of the autonomy of the individual states.
|
I don't think so. There are constant shifts in power from the federal government to the states and back again, but basically no state can pass a law which contravenes US Code or the Constitution of the United States, cannot make treaties with foreign governments, and cannot regulate interstate commerce. Other than that, states can do what they want. Now obviously some states have done just these things and, when they do, the federal government has to step in and go to court to try and force the state to do what they want. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That pesky constitution enumerates very specifically what the federal government can and cannot do with some very broad powers reserved specifically to the states. Congresses and presidents have tried since the beginning of the republic to overstep their bounds, as have states, but the federal government is actually pretty limited in what it can and cannot do.
Quote:
|
Canadian provinces, I am given to understand, have quite a lot more power than American states do.
|
I wouldn't know though perhaps you do? Do the provinces have any particular powers above and beyond the ones I mentioned?
Quote:
|
FWIW, there are four states that are officially commonwealths (Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Virginia). Does that appelation actually change anything about their powers ... make them in a significant and consistent way different from states that are just 'states'? (This is a serious question ... I have no idea.)
|
Now I could be really cagey and say I really meant Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas which the two political entities which the federal government does consider commonwealths of separate status from states. The peoples are citizens but have no federal voting power though they do send non-voting representatives to congress. They also don't pay
some taxes.
But that isn't what I meant.
Commonwealth is what these four states call themselves and it does, to some small degree, influence the political orientation of the constitutions and laws of these states to what one might call a slightly socialist lean in theory if not in practice. It's the sort of thing lawyers and windy politicians might invoke when they talk about, "the spirit of the law."
Quote:
|
I didn't know they had their own military forces. Are these state militias?
|
Yes, though we generally call it the National Guard. These forces are at the disposal of the governors of their respective states and used in times of disaster or extreme civil unrest. They're a holdover from the days when communication and travel was such that the country could be invaded and half conquered before anybody in Philadelphia (or New York or Washington) found out. The president can federalize national guard units at his discretion. National guard units may be deployed for combat duty abroad but they can also be used to enforce federal law. Eisenhower did this in Arkansas when the governor refused to desegregate the schools following a Supreme Court decision and used the state police to bar black students from entering white schools.