Good article in The Guardian above. Conclusion: abolish the filibuster, expand the court, seek to make America a representative democracy again.
I agree that’s what needs to happen, but… I don’t see it happening. There will be talk, and some movement - Stacy Abrams is a capable one to watch - but I don’t see the organization, political ring craft and zeal in the Democrat Party overall. I think the younger breed has it, but the old school Dems don’t seem equipped to tackle the emergency. They look like Queensbury Rules to me, while the Republicans are MMA, fighting by any means, fair and foul, to hold sway and prevail.
I think something that got lost in the shuffle was the criticisms from Roberts to the rebel 5. Roberts agrees with them on the desired outcome, but thinks there is a decorum that should be followed in pushing their rulings to that place in a way that cloaks their motives in a pretense of legal legitimacy. He explicitly said that the overruling of Stare Decisis, something that goes beyond the idea that settled law is settled, was dangerous and not necessary to agree with the specific case that was brought before the court. He’s explicitly calling out his side for being activists who don’t care about their rule is viewed.
I think you can draw an analogy in the conflict between him and the rest of his conservative majority with the conflict between old school GOP and the new MAGA wing. They want many fo the same things and are comfortable ignoring democratic principles to get their way, but there is a way that should be done that allows them to still appear decent and honorable. They’re not uncomfortable with the outcomes or direction, merely the tactics, and that is why it is so difficult to get people like Bowers, Cheney, or Kinzinger to come out and say they’d vote Democractic party despite their acknowledgment of the illegality of their own candidate.
I’ve always thought that the Obama administration was bad. He personally had charism, but that’s about it. The way how he reacted in 2008, after his election, to the previous excesses by the banks, was pitiful and didn’t correspond to what people expected from him. He had the double majority at the time, so for me, it was the act of a coward, and nothing he did in the eight years afterwards convinced me otherwise. That first non-action defined his whole presidency imo, which was one of indecisiveness and passivity.
I see parallels between Tony Blair and Obama. I remember very well when New Labour came to power, and the sense of hope for things to really improve. They had a large mandate and while they did get some things done, it wasn’t nearly as impressive as we had hoped, and the overriding memory now is of an illegal Iraq war and a slippery Tony Blair playing politics and not leading the country to a much better place, as was within his grasp.
Obama’s story is similar (not the same) but a huge mandate, a real swell of hope and optimism at the outset, but along the way it didn’t really deliver what you thought it might.
PS - as I think about America, it has to do something with regard to how the Constitution is regarded, and used.
It is a document set in its time, and the point is, you use the guiding principles, not the letter of the law. It can’t possibly speak to todays world, in a specific sense, as many of the issues we deal with were not really in play in the 18th Century.
So it is desperately odd, to me, to have people scouring through the Constitution looking for certain buzzwords e.g. abortion, and because they are not there, abortion is ruled as unconstitutional.
Might as well ban the motor car, because it’s not in the Magna Carta.
Interestingly, its the same phenomenon than with the literal reading of the Bible, the Quran or other religious texts. It seems that some people have a real problem to transpose what they read in today’s world, which obviously isn’t the same than two-thousand, two-hundred or twenty years ago. They feel the need to absorb and believe texts literally, and then try to adapt the existing world to what they’ve (mis)read. With a total lack of critical thinking.
All those idiots who currently celebrate because they have managed to stop legal abortion, and think that less women will abort as a result, are totally wrong. Women will continue to abort, either in another state, or at their place if they can’t travel. The only difference will be that they will do it in far lesser safety conditions (for the lesser wealthy ones), and some of them will have health issues because of this, or possibly die. That will be the only result of all of this. But it seems beyond these people to grasp that simple reality.
Elected with a mandate, but without a true legislative super majority that practically limited what he was able to do with legislation. If you look at the history books it will say they got 60 Senate seats from that election, but remember the details. Al Franken was the 60th, but his seating was held up for months because of legal challenges of the result. He was not seated until July, and then Ted Kennedy died just 6 weeks later removing his legislative super majority. That seat was won by a Republican who explicitly ran on the platform of opposing Obama, an idea that already taken hold in the public discourse. That was the context of his mandate - it only ever existed in the context of a major thin legislative majority where the incentives existed for members of his own party to oppose his legislative agenda.
People need to appreciate the President is a not a magician. There is a lot a president can do to unilaterally fuck shit up, but the system is made to ensure that constructive movement is hard and slow.
One of the themes of the early phase of the Democratic primaries was how to operate in an environment where simple majorities are insufficient to get shit done. There is an insulting narrative that developed in the aftermath that support for Mayor Pete was simply a show of liberal bonafides by supporting the gay guy, but the reality is Pete got attention because he came out talking directly about the challenges of governing in a system where minority rule limited what you could do. Both he and Warren took the lead here, which is why they were both doing so well in the early polling, because it attracted the interest of the sort of people who pay attention that early. Biden was not my guy because he presented an attitude that was oblivious to this reality, but he impressed the degree to which he started coming around once it became apparent he was going to win the nomination. But it’s also clear he isnt doing enough. The power of the bully pulpit is overstated by people who think the west wing is real life, but you’re certainly not going to make the movement necessary in these times by making public comments that put the priority on upholding institutions that are demonstrating how broken they are.
I think one of the mistakes Dem leadership makes is treading carefully to avoid opening doors for attacks. It’s not so much they are centrist by ideology, but by strategy. The younger generation I think had their political opinions formed in a different era, one that showed that no mater what you do you’re going to be mercilessly attacked. They realise any energy you spend trying to figure out how to appear fair and reasonable to people who have no interest in allowing you to be seen as such is wasted energy. They need to play by the rules of the game that actually exist, not the rules they pretend exist.
Predictions are a dangerous game, but I think his appeal is likely significantly over stated. One the things that’s become apparent is rump’s appeal is only partly due to the positions he takes, and partly due to the stand up nature of his performances. To the people who like him, he has a charm and charisma. What we’ve seen over the past few years is that Trumpism looks a lot different when the schtick is copied by others who don’t have that “charm”. De Santis doesn’t and is generally considered a pretty unlikeable guy with a shitty personality. I think that will become apparent when he’s forced to campaign and cannot use the position as governor to hold court.
The new ruling today is another one bolstering supposed religious liberty. The case was of a teacher/football coach at a state funded school who was ultimately fired for continuing to conduct prayer on the field with his players as part of his post-game activities… The school made clear he was free to pray just that he was not allowed to lead the players in group prayer. This is a fairly uncontroversial ruling, as no teacher would be allowed to start or finish a class with prayer, and so the case had lost at every court all the way up to the supreme court. But in the majority opinion they said the school was censoring an act of person religious observance, and that is a brazen misrepresentation of the case.
This is not about religious liberty, but about imposing Christianity onto our public institutions. It’s untestable, but just ask yourself how it would be perceived by the court if the issue was over whether he could use his state funded salary to lead the players through muslim prayer as part of the team activities
AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not Ox!) has been ramping up the rhetoric against these ‘judicial’ scum but there doesn’t yet seem to be wider appetite to do something about it. It’s high time to completely shake up the SC by adding diluting out the crazy scum. Appointing another 81 moderate justices would make it hard for a subsequent republican ‘administration’ to similarly skew the balance - I doubt they could even find 500 literate supporters to sit on the bench. The time to pick a fight against this republican scum is when you are in power not out of it.
Yeah! here we go democrats are weak and crap.
Who’s hands do you wish to be in?
This is playing the Republican game, just look at how history has been rewritten by them with help by such silly statements as this.
No president is perfect, least of all Reagan (yet he is put on a pedestal), I remember Obama using the cards he had on many issues. Lets face it no country in the world to my knowledge reacted well after 2008 and we all ended up paying for those rich fucks 5 to 10 times over. We stagnated!
On the other hand, 6 of the US Supreme Court justices are products of Catholic schools, and only Sotomayor is not part of the GOP majority bloc. Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Roberts, and Thomas are all Catholic-educated (as is Sotomayor).
There is a trope, and we saw it a lot in the run up to the 2016 election, that the President isn’t really THAT important. It’s hard to make laws, especially when the country is polarized, so there is limited scope to make things worse for you. In the absence of your vote being able to do something important, you may as well vote on things that directly affect you, like taxes (or who you taxes go to helping).
I think a lot of people convince themselves that is true to justify voting the way they do (I’m not anti-gay, I’m just voting for the anti gay guy because I don’t think he’ll actually be able to do anything to make the lives of gay people tangibly worse). But we’re also a country that has a childlike view of how the government works (Dems are in control of the Senate so why don’t they do something), which maybe allows people to authentically hold positions like this.
The one caveat I’ll give to my earlier response is there is a vibe based on the greater extent of Fox’s coverage that Murdoch has tired of Trump and would prefer De Santis. They’re not King Makers but they can definitely shift the needle and help clean up some missteps in the primaries
