esoteric political thread: somebody replied in a heated exchange with a trumpster under an original comment of mine, re: mail-in voting, "Why don't you like democracy?" The trumpster: We live in a Constitutional Republic not a democracy!

Many other trumpsters continue to come along and like the guy's sloganeering, but in fact the whole issue with mail-in voting is that BECAUSE we live in a constitutional republic, the President can't prevent vote-by-mail, because...wait for it...

...the constitution gives states the power to hold their own elections.

Not only can the states use any technical means to hold elections they see fit, they don't even have to award Presidential electors the same way (Nebraska and Maine do that differently than the other 48)

It really illustrates how all the GOP babble about "strict constitutionalists" and those things they pepper their arguments with are just that... babble. In fact their argument here boils down to, "It's illegal to vote by mail because I don't like it."

one trumpster replied to me, "I haven't read about any states passing any laws to make mail-in-voting legal, so they can't do it"....

this is an interesting definition of "the law": everything is illegal unless there is a law allowing it on the books.

so in trumpster's minds you can't slice a lemon unless your state passes a law specifically allowing you to slice lemons; they are truly deranged in their pursuit of actual Orwellian fascism in their definition of what law is.

as an end note: I took a great college class in Colonial American literature, and as we were reading some very early Massachusetts writings the prof noted: "You can tell what people were doing by looking at the laws that were quickly passed to outlaw it ."