So at the convention last night, we were debating one of the final resolutions of the evening – a proposal by a delegate to remove language supporting the Death Penalty in the current GOP platform.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t my resolution – I submitted two at the caucuses, both of which passed easily – but I spoke in favor, for reasons discussed elsewhere <\/a>in this blog.\u00a0 Now, “speeches” around resolutions are pretty limited; two in favor, two against, generally short; they’re never what you’d call “great oratory”.\u00a0 Mine was something like “I support the death penalty for every reason but one – the inevitability of human error.\u00a0 Now, in the 34 years since the Supreme Court reinstated the Death Penalty, there’ve been over 200 complete exonerations – as in, people who were considered guilty beyond a reasonable doubt that were released directly from death row.\u00a0 And it now seems absolutely certain that Texas executed an innocent man<\/a>.\u00a0 Since government can’t even fill in potholes correctly, should we trust them with the power of life and death?”<\/p>\n A woman a few rows in front of me rose to speak for the resolution.\u00a0 “That just seems wrong, saying the government can’t get anything right.\u00a0 Aren’t we the part of possibilities?”<\/p>\n The rules didn’t allow me to respond to the response, so I couldn’t leap to my feet and say “NO!\u00a0We are the party that believes the people <\/em>are capable of anything they set their mind to, and the government is too stupid to trust with a cardboard knife!”<\/p>\n We are, indeed, a huge tent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So at the convention last night, we were debating one of the final resolutions of the evening – a proposal by a delegate to remove language supporting the Death Penalty in the current GOP platform. It wasn’t my resolution – I submitted two at the caucuses, both of which passed easily – but I spoke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,16,72],"tags":[284],"class_list":["post-9027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-conservatism","category-mngop","tag-death-penalty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9027"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42375,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9027\/revisions\/42375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}