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US Congress: John Boehner STILL Can't Count (But Nancy Pelosi Is A Boss)

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  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    There are fixed costs which disincentivize hiring a higher number of employees for a given task. Defining employees at a lower number of hours as full time means that to successfully avoid paying full time benefits, an employer would have to hire more employees than if the cutoff was at 40 hours. Ergo, extending full time benefits at 30 hours makes it less profitable for an employer to game the system in that way.

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  • nexuscrawlernexuscrawler Registered User regular
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

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  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    So what you're saying is that there is a mandate?

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  • PhyphorPhyphor Building Planet Busters Tasting FruitRegistered User regular
    Which is why employers should have nothing to do with it

  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    moniker wrote: »
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    So what you're saying is that there is a mandate?

    The requirement for coverage to be treated as affordable is what I was referring to. Employers are not mandated to provide coverage, affordable or otherwise. An investment bank could drop coverage for its employees and never pay a penalty, for example.

    They are not mandated in that they can pay a penalty instead of offering health insurance. In the same sense then, there is no individual mandate. But that is splitting semantic hairs at best.
    (a) Large employers not offering health coverage
    If—
    (1) any applicable large employer fails to offer to its full-time employees (and their dependents) the opportunity to enroll in minimum essential coverage under an eligible employer-sponsored plan (as defined in section 5000A (f)(2)) for any month, and
    (2) at least one full-time employee of the applicable large employer has been certified to the employer under section 1411 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as having enrolled for such month in a qualified health plan with respect to which an applicable premium tax credit or cost-sharing reduction is allowed or paid with respect to the employee,
    then there is hereby imposed on the employer an assessable payment equal to the product of the applicable payment amount and the number of individuals employed by the employer as full-time employees during such month.

    It may well not be a strong mandate, but that is not a good argument to weaken it further.

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  • nexuscrawlernexuscrawler Registered User regular
    If that's the argument you're better off eliminating the employer mandate altogether rather than changing the hours definition to encourage cutting employment

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.

    My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • JragghenJragghen Registered User regular
    edited January 2015
    Senator Boxer announces she's not going to run in 2016.

    I'd have preferred Feinstein, but it'll be good to see some new blood in there.

    Jragghen on
  • DehumanizedDehumanized Registered User regular
    Ehh, I don't see any way that Boxer's replacement doesn't end up being some shift to the right.

  • PreacherPreacher Registered User regular
    Other than it being california in a presidential year?

    I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.

    pleasepaypreacher.net
  • enlightenedbumenlightenedbum Registered User regular
    Preacher wrote: »
    Other than it being california in a presidential year?

    Jungle primary + Democrats' usual capacity for organization = GOP opportunity.

    The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.

    My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.

    Earning $1 less than 4x poverty for a family of three would cover ~67% of households and for a family of four would cover ~75% of households. (for 2010 families, I don't want to bother with looking up the new SCF versus hitting wikipedia) For individuals it'd cover 70% of earners.

    Also, for employees and hours worked:

    work_hours.png

    Setting the threshold at 30 hours per week the odds of screwing with people in order to drop them to 29 hours is real, but only effects a fairly small slice of the workforce. Eyeball it at 15m workers, even though people working 34 hr/wk may well not get screwed around as much as somebody working 31 hr/wk. At 40 hours per week you're talking about 70m workers, and really, damn near everyone. Hell, you don't even really need to screw with people's hours that much. Just require an hour lunch and that they clock out at 5:00. Presto, 37.5hr work week for your newly 'part-time' workforce.


    Though, ultimately, I'd be fine with scrapping any employer requirement and just having a national individual system which would be a bit more akin to Switzerland's. Beef up the subsidies more and maybe provide some tax incentives for employers to give you the equivalent of an HSA contribution to spend on Healthcare.gov but ultimately just decouple healthcare from employment. Which is likely going to be where this winds up. Just in ~20 years rather than tomorrow. Sort of similar to how pensions no longer really exist.

  • ArtereisArtereis Registered User regular
    30 hours creates an administrative burden because a lot of companies don't have that data readily available.

    I question the actual severity of this. My wife handled benefits for a pretty large restaurant group with thousands of employees. She was the only person pulling the data to determine their average hours per week for the years in question they had to review. It all came straight from payroll and she just had to do some extra work in Excel.

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    ...and moniker shows up with actual fat stacks of stats.

    Though I think that's the first time I've seen anybody point out that the "full time" definition is intentionally different from traditional breakpoints because they don't want there to be too much determined by the 40th hour worked.

    Go go Democratic messaging.

    I also question just how much of an administrative hassle it is. I mean, it should just be some brand new excel/access reports but if it isn't a fucking computerized search...well I don't know where the fuck that business has been for the last 30 years.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    Artereis wrote: »
    30 hours creates an administrative burden because a lot of companies don't have that data readily available.

    I question the actual severity of this. My wife handled benefits for a pretty large restaurant group with thousands of employees. She was the only person pulling the data to determine their average hours per week for the years in question they had to review. It all came straight from payroll and she just had to do some extra work in Excel.

    In my experience, restaurant employees aren't very thrilled about asking them to pivot tables...

  • ArtereisArtereis Registered User regular
    When you work in a corporate office, you either use them all the time, or start crying due to all the time that will be saved when someone finally shows you how to use them.

  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    ...and moniker shows up with actual fat stacks of stats.

    Though I think that's the first time I've seen anybody point out that the "full time" definition is intentionally different from traditional breakpoints because they don't want there to be too much determined by the 40th hour worked.

    Go go Democratic messaging.

    Eh, I've heard them talk about how much it would screw over workers whenever McConnell or Boehner bring it up. And really, that's mostly just because you don't really need to justify current law as it is current law. The inertia is in your favor. Republicans can snark about it all they want, but until they get a new President it doesn't really matter that much and bitching about the ACA just doesn't work in elections like it used to. Which is why it took a backseat for the midterms. I'm sure it'll be a thing for 2016, but I doubt it'll do much to return in 2018, and by 2020 everything will be implemented and mentioning it will basically be the same as bitching about welfare generally.

    And, really, I'd be fine with them using the employer mandate as a bargaining chip to fix some of the drafting errors in the law and maybe do some other stuff with it. Same with the medical device tax. It isn't that essential a thing, and if they can get something good in return, well, I like things that are good.

  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    Artereis wrote: »
    When you work in a corporate office, you either use them all the time, or start crying due to all the time that will be saved when someone finally shows you how to use them.

    I was making a terrible pun. Really just awful.

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    moniker wrote: »
    ...and moniker shows up with actual fat stacks of stats.

    Though I think that's the first time I've seen anybody point out that the "full time" definition is intentionally different from traditional breakpoints because they don't want there to be too much determined by the 40th hour worked.

    Go go Democratic messaging.

    Eh, I've heard them talk about how much it would screw over workers whenever McConnell or Boehner bring it up. And really, that's mostly just because you don't really need to justify current law as it is current law. The inertia is in your favor. Republicans can snark about it all they want, but until they get a new President it doesn't really matter that much and bitching about the ACA just doesn't work in elections like it used to. Which is why it took a backseat for the midterms. I'm sure it'll be a thing for 2016, but I doubt it'll do much to return in 2018, and by 2020 everything will be implemented and mentioning it will basically be the same as bitching about welfare generally.

    And, really, I'd be fine with them using the employer mandate as a bargaining chip to fix some of the drafting errors in the law and maybe do some other stuff with it. Same with the medical device tax. It isn't that essential a thing, and if they can get something good in return, well, I like things that are good.

    Oh, I think I wasn't clear. I've heard the Republican/Business grumbling over the difference but I have literally never heard anybody give any defense of it much less say "It was done intentionally because of x, y and z."

    Like, I could understand it won't be a five second sound bite but even in longer form discussions I've never seen a D point out it was to avoid the destruction of the 40 hour work week.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    moniker wrote: »
    ...and moniker shows up with actual fat stacks of stats.

    Though I think that's the first time I've seen anybody point out that the "full time" definition is intentionally different from traditional breakpoints because they don't want there to be too much determined by the 40th hour worked.

    Go go Democratic messaging.

    Eh, I've heard them talk about how much it would screw over workers whenever McConnell or Boehner bring it up. And really, that's mostly just because you don't really need to justify current law as it is current law. The inertia is in your favor. Republicans can snark about it all they want, but until they get a new President it doesn't really matter that much and bitching about the ACA just doesn't work in elections like it used to. Which is why it took a backseat for the midterms. I'm sure it'll be a thing for 2016, but I doubt it'll do much to return in 2018, and by 2020 everything will be implemented and mentioning it will basically be the same as bitching about welfare generally.

    And, really, I'd be fine with them using the employer mandate as a bargaining chip to fix some of the drafting errors in the law and maybe do some other stuff with it. Same with the medical device tax. It isn't that essential a thing, and if they can get something good in return, well, I like things that are good.

    Oh, I think I wasn't clear. I've heard the Republican/Business grumbling over the difference but I have literally never heard anybody give any defense of it much less say "It was done intentionally because of x, y and z."

    Like, I could understand it won't be a five second sound bite but even in longer form discussions I've never seen a D point out it was to avoid the destruction of the 40 hour work week.

    Eh, I've seen it. But then I haven't really watched cable news since 2008 so it might just be that I'm looking at the wrong (or rather, right) outlets. Though I do wish Democrats would get back to knowing how to talk to people about that stuff, since it'd make things so much better. There's a quote from a random voter in Ken Burns' thing on FDR that really should encapsulate Democratic messaging. "He's the only President we've ever had who understands that my boss is a sonofabitch!"

  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    Artereis wrote: »
    30 hours creates an administrative burden because a lot of companies don't have that data readily available.

    I question the actual severity of this. My wife handled benefits for a pretty large restaurant group with thousands of employees. She was the only person pulling the data to determine their average hours per week for the years in question they had to review. It all came straight from payroll and she just had to do some extra work in Excel.

    30 hours has been the breakpoint for full-time/part-time benefits at both the jobs I've had post-college too - I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it's actually a common one (at least places with sane HR, since shift workers might fluctuate around 35-45 each week for instance)

    Steam: Polaritie
    3DS: 0473-8507-2652
    Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
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  • ahavaahava Call me Ahava ~~She/Her~~ Move to New ZealandRegistered User regular
    As much as I'm going to cringe with reading this thread, I appreciate that you made it, Bum.

    That way I can at least have an Idea of what's happening back home.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.

    My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.

    My prior employer, a staffing company whose bread-and-butter was electronics assemblers making $15-25/hr, absolutely had to deal with the employer mandate.

    Saying there's no employer mandate because the mandate doesn't cover a minority of companies with particularly high-income employees is silly. It's a mandate with a significant exception, but it's still a mandate.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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  • schussschuss Registered User regular
    Also - 30-39 hour stuff is pretty common across industries. Technically, the standard workweek at my company is 37.5 for full timers (they don't count lunch breaks) and we're a fortune 100. 30-32 hour people are pretty common in our company as well, and get basically full benefits.
    Any thought that 30 vs. a different number is a burden is BS, as they're tracking those people hourly anyhow, so payroll will be able pull numbers super easy (or your payroll company). Unless changing a filter is a burden.

  • monikermoniker Registered User regular
    Feral wrote: »
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.

    My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.

    My prior employer, a staffing company whose bread-and-butter was electronics assemblers making $15-25/hr, absolutely had to deal with the employer mandate.

    Saying there's no employer mandate because the mandate doesn't cover a minority of companies with particularly high-income employees is silly. It's a mandate with a significant exception, but it's still a mandate.

    Even if all your employees are low paid and you don't offer coverage, you still will not incur a penalty if none of your employees gets a subsidy. This could happen if they all have coverage through their spouses, for example. Further, it is currently under whether the employer shared responsibility payment even applies in states that adopted the federal exchange. Based on the statutory language, it does not seem to, but it is really going to be up to the supreme ct in the end.

    You can say this is semantic or splitting hairs all you want, but one of the people who wrote the provision of the act is a dear friend of mine who always complains about people saying there is an employer mandate to provide coverage when the ACA explicitly does not include one. Employers are not required to maintain health insurance plans under the ACA. They are required to pay penalties if their employees receive government subsidies. These are not the same thing, even if the result is the same for some companies.

    Except that the penalty does not apply solely for the individual who wound up getting coverage through the exchange. If any-one employee gets their insurance through the exchange with a subsidy then you are fined for every-one of your FTE's. That's not a cost sharing mechanism to make up for the government outlay, it's a penalty. I mean, I guess companies could choose to only hire people under 26 and fire them on their birthday, or exclusively hire married persons and fire them in the event of divorce or their spouse losing their job, or just pay everybody $100k down to the janitor, but that seems like a rather odd argument to make.

    Employers either need to offer all their FTE's insurance or pay the government for offering all their FTE's insurance. When coupled with the 'Cadillac Tax' provision only growing by CPI rather than medical cost inflation it may well reach a new equilibrium point where it's not really a mandate for group coverage so much as a tax to help fund universal exchange coverage. But that would only be the case in an inexorable future where employers were going to drop everybody from insurance anyway.

  • HefflingHeffling No Pic EverRegistered User regular
    Feral wrote: »
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.

    My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.

    My prior employer, a staffing company whose bread-and-butter was electronics assemblers making $15-25/hr, absolutely had to deal with the employer mandate.

    Saying there's no employer mandate because the mandate doesn't cover a minority of companies with particularly high-income employees is silly. It's a mandate with a significant exception, but it's still a mandate.

    Even if all your employees are low paid and you don't offer coverage, you still will not incur a penalty if none of your employees gets a subsidy. This could happen if they all have coverage through their spouses, for example. Further, it is currently under whether the employer shared responsibility payment even applies in states that adopted the federal exchange. Based on the statutory language, it does not seem to, but it is really going to be up to the supreme ct in the end.

    You can say this is semantic or splitting hairs all you want, but one of the people who wrote the provision of the act is a dear friend of mine who always complains about people saying there is an employer mandate to provide coverage when the ACA explicitly does not include one. Employers are not required to maintain health insurance plans under the ACA. They are required to pay penalties if their employees receive government subsidies. These are not the same thing, even if the result is the same for some companies.

    What counts as a mandate, to you or your friend? Because to myself, if the Government says "Do X or be fined", that is a mandate. It is a legal obligation with a set penalty for failure to comply.

  • VeeveeVeevee WisconsinRegistered User regular
    Heffling wrote: »
    Feral wrote: »
    Well this rule change would make that different. Service industries can get by primarily on part time workers other industries cannot. And if they change the law to 40 hours you can effectively work full-time and your boss can send you home half an hour early on Friday and they can dodge the mandate.

    Again, no mandate. To pay the shared responsibility payment, the employer needs to have an employee with household income of 4x the poverty line and not have access to other coverage and need to actually buy exchange coverage with a subsidy. For an individual, $45k or so is 4x. For a family of two it's in the low sixties. This takes a lot of people out of the equation all together.

    Also, you can get out of it by providing amazingly bad coverage. There are insurers selling plans where the employee pays almost every dollar of the cost of the coverage, gets almost no benefits, and still satisfies the requirement.

    I'm pretty sure the slice of America you actually routinely see is warping your viewpoint on how frequent this is. Household median for the US is only 53k. That wage cap actually applies to a fuck ton of people once you get outside the financial sector and even more when you get out of NYC.

    My my employer, a small manufacturer, it absolutely is an effective economic requirement.

    My prior employer, a staffing company whose bread-and-butter was electronics assemblers making $15-25/hr, absolutely had to deal with the employer mandate.

    Saying there's no employer mandate because the mandate doesn't cover a minority of companies with particularly high-income employees is silly. It's a mandate with a significant exception, but it's still a mandate.

    Even if all your employees are low paid and you don't offer coverage, you still will not incur a penalty if none of your employees gets a subsidy. This could happen if they all have coverage through their spouses, for example. Further, it is currently under whether the employer shared responsibility payment even applies in states that adopted the federal exchange. Based on the statutory language, it does not seem to, but it is really going to be up to the supreme ct in the end.

    You can say this is semantic or splitting hairs all you want, but one of the people who wrote the provision of the act is a dear friend of mine who always complains about people saying there is an employer mandate to provide coverage when the ACA explicitly does not include one. Employers are not required to maintain health insurance plans under the ACA. They are required to pay penalties if their employees receive government subsidies. These are not the same thing, even if the result is the same for some companies.

    What counts as a mandate, to you or your friend? Because to myself, if the Government says "Do X or be fined", that is a mandate. It is a legal obligation with a set penalty for failure to comply.

    By the sound of it, if it doesn't compel a single person to do something then it's not a mandate.

    It's the biggest, goosiest pedantic argument this bored has ever had.

  • PriestPriest Registered User regular
    This just in: Government makes law, corporation finds loophole.

    Coverage at 11.

  • DrakeonDrakeon Registered User regular
    Preacher wrote: »
    Other than it being california in a presidential year?

    Jungle primary + Democrats' usual capacity for organization = GOP opportunity.

    California is pretty Democratic though. As long as we don't pick a Coakley, we should be just fine.

    PSN: Drakieon XBL: Drakieon Steam: TheDrakeon
  • enlightenedbumenlightenedbum Registered User regular
    Drakeon wrote: »
    Preacher wrote: »
    Other than it being california in a presidential year?

    Jungle primary + Democrats' usual capacity for organization = GOP opportunity.

    California is pretty Democratic though. As long as we don't pick a Coakley, we should be just fine.

    You don't understand my meaning. Because it's a jungle primary the top two vote getters in the primary are on the November ballot regardless of party affiliation. So if the Democrats are their usual selves and split the primary vote between like 18 candidates and the GOP only runs two...

    The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
  • DrakeonDrakeon Registered User regular
    Drakeon wrote: »
    Preacher wrote: »
    Other than it being california in a presidential year?

    Jungle primary + Democrats' usual capacity for organization = GOP opportunity.

    California is pretty Democratic though. As long as we don't pick a Coakley, we should be just fine.

    You don't understand my meaning. Because it's a jungle primary the top two vote getters in the primary are on the November ballot regardless of party affiliation. So if the Democrats are their usual selves and split the primary vote between like 18 candidates and the GOP only runs two...

    ... I am aware of how California votes, yes.

    PSN: Drakieon XBL: Drakieon Steam: TheDrakeon
  • rndmherorndmhero Registered User regular
    Louie Gohmert is such a caricature that I sometimes can't convince myself he's real.

  • TomantaTomanta Registered User regular
    He's real. I've been in the same room as him.

    Also (unrelated), he was a judge here. I think we are slightly better off with him in Congress.

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