Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this.
One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.
It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.
0 - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-19/trump-...
“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”
I know I'm probably pissing in the wind here, but I was looking forward to a president ceding some of his power back to congress, so this one really sticks in my craw. Oh well.
Generally, if you run the federal government, you don't want states objecting to your agenda. And if the opposition is running the federal government, you insist on your right to do things at the state level.
Watching Democrats and Republicans make the exact same arguments depending on whose in power is absolutely hilarious, and it leads to great soundbites, like those of Trump and McConnell talking about what the President should and shouldn't do... depending who the President is.
Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marriage? Let the states decide. Abortion? States should be free to ban.
Edit: swapped "Republican" with "Conservative", since the parties' ideologies have shifted over time.
Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.
Second, we're talking about the 1960s, not the 1860s. By that time, the Democrats were already the party of FDR and JFK, and Republicans were already the party of Richard Nixon. JFK won the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beat Nixon in Alabama and Mississippi, because it was perceived that he had a poor record on civil rights.
The idea that the “party labels flipped” is just blatant historical revisionism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats were the party both of African Americans (who switched from Republicans during the FDR era), the War in Poverty, and southern segregationists. What happened is that, at some point, support for outright discrimination became unviable, and the battle front moved to other issues, such as affirmative action. That naturally fit into Democrats’ willingness to use the power of government to address social inequities.
I have since changed it to “conservatives”, which is the ideology that supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights Act regardless of what the party name happened to be.