Schadrach

DOGE?

Department Of Guzzling Ejaculate? Explains why they’ve got Big Balls working there. Somebody’s got to be the supply side.

My understanding is that constitutional amendments also take a high bar to pass with 2/3 of states agreeing to the proposal and 3/4 ratifying. Given the issues getting even more basic things through the Senate/House I could definitely see this getting blocked by red states.

Two routes to amend the Constitution.

1. Both houses of Congress pass a proposed amendment by a 2/3 majority. Then 3/4 of states ratify that amendment in their state legislatures. This is how every amendment to date has occurred.
2. 2/3 of state legislatures call for a Constitutional Congress, during which any number of changes may be made, but any changes must be agreed to by 3/4 of the states. Congress gets no say in this process. Congress getting no say in this process is the point - it exists so that if there’s an issue with the Constitution that Congress is unable or unwilling to resolve (for example if Congressional power needs to be curtailed in some fashion), it can be fixed despite them.

Note the key thing here: Republicans have been pushing hard at the state level for decades, and 2 is why. If ever 38 state legislatures are red, they can more or less arbitrarily rewrite the Constitution to their will regardless of what the remaining states or anything at the federal level has to say about it.

It should have been written into the damn constitution with an ammendment along with bodily autonomy for women. But that would have taken some guts and foresight by the democratic leaders.

An amendment would have taken 38 state legislatures ratifying it. There aren’t 38 state legislatures likely to pass ratification of an amendment that guarantees a right for any two adults to marry without exception and also guarantees a right for any woman to terminate any pregnancy without exception at her will.

That’s probably tied for the lowest odds any hypothetical amendment has of being ratified.

and whether or not they want to respect the interracial marriages performed by other states.

That’ll require some very entertaining twisting of the full faith and credit clause, or do you think we’ll be well past the point where they even go through the motions to pretend to have a legal rationale for anything they’re doing by the time this happens?

Later a list will be created and distributed.

I have a gay friend who’s in a long term relationship but not married. Given when he and his guy got together, I half expect the reason is worries that having his orientation be a matter of public record might become a serious liability in a potential future that is reasonably likely.

How do those food stamps work anyways? Can you use them like money? I’m not American so it’s a foreign concept yo me.

You get an EBT debit card with an amount of money based on some calculations that can only be spent on certain things (in the case of SNAP aka food stamps, you can only spend that balance on food). WIC is another subsidized food program that sometimes gets included when talking about “food stamps” targeting people with small children, which has a more restrictive list on what you can buy with it.

Some of the guidelines have been painfully dumb, even if there was an intended logic to them - like “no hot food” where the goal was to disallow restaurant purchases and purchasing pre-cooked meals because they are generally a less efficient use of the funds, but led to dumb shit like Subway noting that they sell subs cold and so could hypothetically still sell, then just offer to toast the sub post-sale so that the division was meaningless.

Then you have the abuses of the program that really do need fixed, like stores that are well known to be willing to buy certain stock from just anyone, at a stupidly low price. The idea being that you go to Walmart or wherever and buy up a bunch of product that you can buy on SNAP, take it to the store and resell it at a massive loss to launder your SNAP funds into regular cash. In my area it was certain convenience stores that were known to buy certain brands of soda in cases of cans for much less than they could be bought through legitimate channels as a way of laundering SNAP funds.