the legal system is famously soft on people who violently attack police, about time somebody addressed this
‘new criminal offenses’ for participation in ‘disorderly assemblies’, to roars of approval from people who consider mask mandates to be fascism
biden wrote the crime bill, proposed a ‘police officer bill of rights’ after rodney king, wants to give police an additonial $300m, accuses trump of wanting to defund the police, and is currently running an ad nationally where he denounces ‘rioters’ and ‘looters’ without once mentioning police brutality, but none of this has punctured the right-wing permavictim bubble
almost as if trying to reclaim the mantle of ‘law and order’ from somebody like trump is a fool’s errand
What this opens the door to is for a Boogaloo provocateur to show up at a polling place, begin trouble and then have the people waiting in line to vote be arrested.
Mitch is the most adept politician of our time, maybe of all time. The dude consistently gets exactly what he wants. Rather than whining about it all the time, maybe the Dems need to have a bit of introspection and figure out how to do it themselves?
With Romney on board, he has the votes he needs to push through a SCOTUS nom. Dems will need to work to make sure they hold a solid majority in the Senate for a while so that when Thomas goes, they can put one of theirs in.
I find myself agreeing with @DioufGates in that Ginsburg and even Breyer could and should have stepped down during Obama’s second term. One can’t help but feel it was part of a plan to make a Hillary presidency more consequential than usual by allowing her to put 3-4 judges on the bench and cementing some sort of legacy. They managed to spectacularly fuck that up.
Yes, she should have resigned the day after Obama was sworn in. However, the Republican tactics really do make a mockery of any kind of bipartisan consensus. For a democracy to work there has to be a certain level of trust and compromise, and destroying that is a dangerous game. The more that democracy is eroded in these ways, the weaker it becomes and the easier it is for an authoritarian regime to take power. That’s the direction the US is headed.
I think the Democrats should just take this one on the chin instead of making the election one fought over one of the few issues they might lose. Then, if they get in, appoint 27 Supreme Court justices under the age of 40 and end the whole ‘control the court, control the culture’ game. Republicans are relying on a set of norms they have been happily trampling for at least a generation.
and use case management to ensure that Thomas and Kavanaugh don’t see cases more substantive than parking tickets.
I think this sort of interpretation overlooks the absurd degree to which the Senate enables minority rule and misses what the end game here is. One of the over riding philosphies of the modern GOP is how to entrench minority power, which requires disenfranchisement of the voters and a lessening of democracy. There is no end of stuff they have done around voting to enable this, but nothing is worse in this regard than their approach to the court. For all their whining about “activist judges”, this is precisely what they want, and then want to create a situation where legislation occurs in the courts, the courts they have stacked so that the will of the people gets minimized. They are a minority party and they know it. Rather than evolve, they decided their best course of action was to burn the place down.
The difference here is not of a party that knows how to wield power vs one that doesnt. It is an issue of a party that is willing to destroy institutions to entrench their interests vs one whose interest is in not doing that. That is not a level playing field and the sitting back and saying "well the dems should have just won more elections, doesnt really work when the Dems do routinely get more votes but it counts for less and less as your democracy is being eroded in front of your eyes.
I don’t disagree with you, but the results are evident. It was the same with Mourinho when he was winning things. His methods were turgid, and he himself was a shithouse, but he got results. Mitch is in the same bracket for me.
there were 18 dem votes to confirm a trump judicial appointment yesterday (and sinema was absent, probably another ‘yea’)
schumer fast-tracked a slate of them in 2018 so senators could go home to campaign
i think the narrative that one party wields power ruthlessly and one doesn’t holds, even with the entrenched disadvantages
house democrats had a sit-in in 2016 over restricting gun sales to people on the terror no-fly list, imo because they know that the vast majority of voters agree with them, and the NRA’s power will prevent anything from happening
if they showed a willingness to play hardball here i think it would motivate their base, through revoking UC for any senate business and using the filibuster they could at least grind things to a lurch
Yeah, some good points in here. Mitch only needs a simple majority, but you’re right, at least exhaust every resource you have to make life miserable for them.
thing is, Mitch knows this probably means the end of the GOP majority in the Senate and likely puts Biden in the White House, but he doesn’t care. GOP can take a bit of time to re-organize, probably lose their majority for a cycle or two, then voters will have forgotten all about this and will vote them back in. tale as old as @SBYM.
One is football. The other is the democracy of the 3rd largest country in the world and most powerful. There was an analysis recently that showed that with where we are currently in a slide towards losing democracy, only 1 in 5 times does the situation reverse itself in time. Make no mistake, this is not JUST about Trump. So I think allusions to football is a pretty significant trivialization of the situation.
As is the “they should just win more elections” given that getting more votes, something the Dems have routinely done, doesnt actually give them political power.
Yep, we’re kind of fucked, but I guess Mitch, Donald and Barr played a hell of a game.
yeah a 6-3 SCOTUS majority and the scores of 35 year-old regent university law grad kooks on federal benches (‘i don’t give a f–k about judicial appointments’–rahm emanuel) are an effective curb on any progressive impulses biden might have anyway
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. I wasn’t making commentary on the state of politics and democracy in general, I was pointing out that Mitch is an extremely adept politician. If you want to dispute that assertion, then do so with examples of him NOT being an extremely adept politician, but you’re turning it into an argument over the moral and ethical arguments of Mitch’s tenure.
the republican governor of arizona just packed the state supreme court to put more conservatives on it, and the state of north carolina had the worst score for fair districting of any entity in the world ever evaluated by the election integrity product
and those gerrymandered republican-controlled state legislatures are the result of a decades-long project by the koch brothers & ALEC to defeat the popular will going forward
Yup. It’s absolutely fucked. How do you go about counteracting stuff like that? This is kinda why I harp on the Dems’ messaging a lot - and you do too. they aren’t effective enough in alerting the populace as to what’s happening, and why it’s inherently bad for them. The likely reason being that Dems gain enough from the status quo to make any kind of upheaval a net loss for them.
Take the money out of politics, and break the two-party system with ranked voting, and you’d have a good start towards restoring an actual working democracy in this country.
my 95 year-old grandfather is a third-grade dropout from the hills of kentucky who became a union operator and had his own excavating business, and in 2016 he hated bernie sanders & said everything he wanted was a fairy tale. i’m sure that it’s just a coincidence that MSNBC was on the tv every time i visited and the phillies weren’t playing
my father (who voted for bernie in the 2016 primary and would have in 2020 if we, you know, had the chance in pennsylvania) tells me i’m not allowed to talk to him about politics any more because he thinks criticizing democrats enables trump, although occasionally something like amy mcgrath calling herself a ‘pro-trump democrat’ or hillary clinton emerging in february (iirc) to say ‘nobody likes bernie sanders’ does break through
i voted for clinton in 2016, democrats in both the 2018 midterms & 2019 local elections (somebody running for county commissioner had done me a favor but still), and i’ve been called a trump supporter and ‘ivan’ or ‘boris’ quite literally hundreds of times in the last four years
it seems to me the democrats have used the visceral offensive idiocy of trump as an excuse to offer even less
