Something that the Democrats need to realize is that they (especially Obama) assumed too much good faith in the congressional GOP.
You can stick to your principles while doing it but, when you are against a party who now considers its last nominee (Romney) a radical BLM leftist, when they go low you need to be ready to kick them in the head.
There is a desire, specifically and especially on the left, to get so caught up in their principles that people believe it is the primary source of change.
For example:
What should be the first acts and priorities be of a democratic administration?
Healthcare? Nope.
Climate change? Nope.
A federal holiday for election days? Yes.
Passing legislation mandating mail-in ballots? Yes.
That’s how you think about politics. About power. Lock in any advantage and expand it. Democrats have popular support for their policies but cannot for the life of them think strategically.
Consider Corbyn in the UK - Awful polling from day 1, doesn't help much with Brexit, loses 2 elections (One meh, one disaster) but the lessons learned is that they won the "argument" and it's all good?
The Corbyn fans love to talk abut media smears but they neglect to mention that he never polled above 0% net approval in his entire term as leader.
Starmer, his replacement, is a man of intellect, principle, and service to the public - he is already doing better than Corbyn ever did - i.e. the media who didn't like Corbyn were writing amicable praise of Sir Keir (the mail love a nickname) even when he was making a mockery of their man (Boris)
The media besmirched Corbyn BECAUSE he was a decent man with the interests of the public at heart, which is unacceptable to the owners of the media apparatus.
Now, now. Starmer might not be a militant marxist, but he spent a good chunk of his life fighting for workers' rights in court. He also served faithfully in the shadow cabinet under Corbyn - are you saying that Corbyn chose a "corporate stooge" as his shadow minister, and on the hottest issue of the day at that (brexit)?
One of Corbyn's lackings was that he was unable to make friends in his own party, to the point that half of his own rank & file literally sabotaged him at the last election. By calling good people all sorts of unwarranted names we're only going to see a repeat, and $deity knows this country deserves better than yet another Tory government.
Now Starmer may not be ideologically committed to the ruthless exploitation of the public like they are, but at the very least he harbours delusions about the possibility of compromising with a right wing, both within his party and in the media, that is implacably and rabidly opposed to any project of positive reform. They will never relent in their shameless calumny and perfidy until Labour's program has been completely neutered.
The top three amendments (in my opinion) that the US needs most:
- ending gerrymandering
- taking money out of politics (federally financed elections)
- forcing votes on nominees within a certain time period, otherwise they are assumed confirmed
You think they don't understand this stuff? Democrats have been deliberately "failing" to get shit done for 20 years. They keep holding out progressive and populist policies, tantalizingly close to enacting meaningful change -- but nope, somehow it always seems to be a matter of political strategy, badly run campaigns, and bad messaging that derails things.
Surely the Republicans haven't somehow had the better political strategists for decades. They aren't always better funded and they aren't always better organized. And certainly they don't have access to some kind of magic politics potion that the Democrats lack.
The only plausible scenario that I can see is that the Democratic party leadership has no interest in actually getting policy enacted, as long as they keep their cozy niche in power. Another 4 years of Trump will help them do very well in the 2022 midterms, and it will help keep their friends at the NYT, CNN, and MSNBC in business.
It would also explain why they hated Sanders and the DSA candidates so much. Liberals (not to mention leftists) who actually wanted to take power at the national level and actually do something? That would fuck up the whole game.
Basically you'd have to show me some actual evidence that Democratic party leadership actually wants to do anything other than campaign on a progressive platform and consistently almost-win. The whole thing seems worked to me.
For example, they had to have known that McConnell would kill the Trump impeachment. But they went ahead with it anyway. The only explanation I can see for this is that they wanted to somehow signal their opposition to Trump with their core voter base, while wasting and effectively discrediting the usefulness of a last-resort tool for asserting their authority.
And what is Biden campaigning on? What is his campaign even doing [0]? Where are the attack ads branding Trump as an anti-American grifter? This feels like 2016 all over again, except with the added danger that we already know how dangerous Trump is, and if he wins again he'll have nothing to lose -- and his handlers in the halls of power will take full advantage of it. They know they are ruining America and they simply don't care, they'll just run to the bunker when shit gets bad for normal people [1].
[0]: https://sirota.substack.com/p/where-is-bidens-ground-game
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2020/03/27/billionair...
w.r.t Sanders: he lost in a small d democratic primary. It wasn't the leadership: it was the voters that chose Biden over Sanders.
We should pay people to vote, that would help turnout (up to about as much as it would ever get).
Reminds of me of 3rd grade when kids would make a christmas tree out of their scantron tests. That is what we need -- randomness added to voting.
If it weren't to the stigma of "literacy" tests and how the were historically used, I'd be fully in favor of "licensing" voters.
Early voting (in several states already?) does a good job of this IMO.
I'm totally okay with a test where the only document you need to study from is the US Constitution.
I don't think the changing media landscape can be disentangled from this, which is a trend happening for unrelated reasons. If the only thing happening was urban concentration, then the mathematical predicted response of politicians would be that the liberal part becomes political-center and the conservative part skews further right.
Or at least it was until it was perverted by the two major National Conventions. As mentioned earlier, read the Federalist papers for more context; but be prepared for a let down when it starts to sink in how much care was put into the system just for things to go off the rails, and I don't mean because of things like suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement either; but by the slow degeneration of the integrity of the system through the death by 1000 cuts of self-centered legislation, dismantling and delegation of Legislative authority to the executive, excessive politicization of the Judiciary, non-mandating of sunset dates for legislation, and the cancerous taint that is the lack of House or Senate limits on consecutive terms.
An alliance of states can make sense. Everyone at the table knows they're not equal, because they're representing totally different entities. However, they all have a voice because they all have decision power. In an alliance, votes don't make sense as a decision-making apparatus with power. The gathering is for the purpose of international diplomacy, and freedom of action is determined by the real capabilities of each sovereign.
To me, it is the terrifying ease with which instantaneous information/sentiment propagation can be utilized to sever one from a rational ground state and whip up a furor with which to push through an carve up of the Nation's civil liberties that truly sets us apart now.
Even reading literature from the time, it factors heavily in that to prevent misbehavior and oppression by a majority, there must be a realistic point of view taken as to the weakness of such a large mass to chaos and lack of coordination to operate in concert. This is a point that I don't think many truly appreciate that the Founder's understood and accounted for. To them, the majority was not always right. In fact, it would be accurate to state that the structure of government they settled on was designed to effectively serve the purposes for which it was intended, and no more; so great was the risk represented by such an edifice. The amount of Liberty preserved so great, and the sacrifice of civil freedoms was meant to be as minimal as possible, leads me to believe they saw legislation as more of a failure state than as a desirable State of affairs. At least in as much as said legislation did not tend to reinforce and preserve the Unity of the Nation as a whole.
>If California broke up into 5 states, they would get 5x the power by the holy virtue of making that administrative decision.
That is dead on point. By the way, Federalist Papers 6-10 touch on the ills of factionalism, and the delicate balance that must be struck between the number of representatives, and the population they represent. It was a conscious decision at the time to try to satisfy suffrage in order to safeguard the liberties of the Nation as a whole.
But in terms of direct action that democrats could pass in the first week (the bills exist already), those are my picks.
Gerrymandering would take a constitutional amendment. Yes, it would help more, but that’s a moot point if the people we’re talking about can’t do it.
Edit: That said, I could think of much worse outcomes.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/mitch-mcconn...
Do you think that might have affected the ability of the current president to successfully appoint a supreme court justice now?
To give a short version - if you oppose a filibuster, then don't use it to prevent Merrick Garland from being on the court.
Nothing about Schumer's position on the filibuster in 2002 can be used to argue that the trajectory of court appointments since then is a culmination of any logically consistent argument in response to it.
*Democratic
Chuck Shumer, a Democrat, is a member of the Democratic Party.
When used as an adjective the correct usage is “Democratic”
By analogy, you'll more often hear "Texas senator Mr Bean" (using the singular noun) vs "Texan senator Mr Bean" (using the adjective).
In any case, it's not something anyone should get worked up over.
"democratic senators"
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"democrat senators"
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"democratic senators" site:breitbart.com
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"democrat senators" site:breitbart.com
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Childish. Come on.
He was a great orator and liked using that come together message as an attempted bait to push popular support in his favor, though. It was also a great excuse for pushing an extremely conservative healthcare bill through congress as if it were some major achievement for his more progressive supporters.
Remember that they got rid of a public option in negotiations to win Republicans over. And got zero Republican votes.
Obama was many things, but he was not good at congressional politics. He saw himself as about the fray, and it showed.
The facts are that Democratic Senator Max Baucus, Chairmen of the Senate Finance Committee and Obama's pointman in the Senate who was responsible for writing the language of Obamacare (Romneycare) invited a cabal of insurance industry lobbyists into the negotiating room to write the bill and specifically excluded all single-payer advocates from the negotiating table. Its pure revisionist history to suggest that Obama and his minions did everything they could to push a public option (let alone single-payer or even a Medicare-for-all type provision). The facts are that Obama and the Democratic leadership caucus were determined to pass a bill that enshrined the predominance of the for-profit, employer-based health insurance industry. Obamacare (Romneycare) was designed from the beginning as an effort to preclude real, substantive change and improvements to our healthcare system by implementing some very minor improvements (such as the pre-existing conditions clause) and some cosmetic changes. This was abundantly clear to everyone who was paying close attention at the time and not getting their information from corporate news outlets.
https://pnhp.org/news/max-baucus-should-not-be-deciding-heal...
Your party aggressively screwed over a candidate who could have energized the base and still would have captured 99.99% of the center in a trade for a principle-less barely coherent snooze fest of a human being who would toe the old party line and then you claim the only remedy is to play as dirty as the other side?
Excuse me for not buying it.
I voted for Obama but the democratic party is bordering on as repulsive as the republicans these days and this type of thinking is to blame.
He's a protectionist idealist who the republicans were dying to run against because they knew he'd be easier than Biden.
Also just because a person loses a primary does not mean they are they weaker candidate in the general election. The math can easily go the other way.
Very very few people in Congress do anything but vote along party lines on pretty much everything.
I don't know how you can democrats are principled to a fault with a straight face when you have Nancy Pelosi who is just the Democrat's McConnell.
His full name is Randal Howard Paul.
Also, which libertarians have been fine raising the deficit? They are pretty much the only ones that consistently argue against it whether the budget increase comes from Republicans or Democrats.
The whole "Republicans are hypocrites" thing is true - but obviously so. Whatever was said about not doing it in election year was simply a political lie they felt they had to say to avoid the "We are doing this because we can" reality.
Make it absolutely clear to McConnell and Democratic leaders in the Senate that if McConnell fills this seat in an election year, then the Democrats must increase the size of the SCOTUS.
McConnell needs to fear the reprisal more than he fears the delay. Because you're right, this is about power. Nothing else matters to them. So make them fear this.
The only other option to pass such a bill in the Senate would be to gain a Senate majority and use that Senate majority to end the legislative filibuster, which is the last filibuster anyways. With the filibuster out of the way, we'd just need the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress.
This is what I call for in another comment. There's no way to get a supermajority in the Senate, so the legislative filibuster would have to die.
While your comment is both technically and strategically correct, this sort of binary "us vs them" mentality has caused america such harm and always strikes me as somewhat reductionist. I wish more focus would be on policies and individuals instead of D vs R (as if greens, libertarians, socialists, etc simply do not exist in america's 300M+). Perhaps i am just romanticizing an impossible future, though.
I'm of the opinion that a first past the post and winner take all voting system will almost always produce a 2 party outcome. As such, until we change the voting system I've decided to stop considering myself independent and throw in with the party most closely aligned with my views.
I don't think your imagined future is impossible, though! I just think it's heavily discouraged by our voting system. We can change our voting systems, though. I'd really strongly encourage you to check out and support Ranked Choice Voting (or other proposed voting systems). I don't think it's a silver bullet, but I think RCV would go a long way to breaking down the 2 party system
It's time Democrats recognize that, and play offense when they have the ball.
It's sad to see the institution end as a non-political body, but it's been happening for the last couple of decades. This will be the absolute end of it.
I personally haven't read an opinion from either that most democrats would be disappointed with. Most people actually don't follow what the supreme court does and the extent of the attention they pay is just making sure that the president they support gets to pick SCOTUS justices.
So if there's a court-packing arms race, that may not be a bad thing. It would bring this anachronism to a head.
Maybe we have LOTS MORE justices. Then each appointment would not be so politicized because their influence would be lessened. See https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/12/academic-highlight-epps-a...
One party coalition has demonstrated they will do ANYTHING for power, and now there are very few good choices available.
Either respond in kind, or face permanent defeat
What they should do is physically barricade the Capitol. I’m not really joking. It will come to that.
My first guess of the most action they will take:
Staging a walk-out of the vote.
There was nothing procedurally that Democrats could have done to stop Kavanaugh. If there were, they would have.
They cannot stop this nomination by traditional means.
This threat assumes that Democrats would take this action once they control the House and Senate.
Anti-Abortion: about or above sixty percent of Americans support legal abortions
Climate change: two thirds of Americans view it as a top priority and that the benefits of action outweigh the costs
Guns: sixty percent to two-thirds of Americans support stricter gun control. 90–92% support mandatory background checks
Taxing Wealthy: again, sixty percent to two thirds support higher taxes on the wealthy.
Those are the pillars. Those are the core propositions.
Americans do not support them or not by a margin of 1.1%
The assertions themselves are so unbelievably vague that they could easily go either way with cherry-picked polling. Most people support abortion in cases of rape, so if you do a poll asking if people think some abortion should be legal, you will easily get a majority. If you ask about easy access to abortion in the 9th month, you get far lower levels of support. Saying "most support legal abortions" is practically meaningless without specifying what type of abortion they support.
The other two depend very much on how you ask the question. It’s nowhere near as simple as you make out.
Getting the most votes isn't what translates to forming a government in the US. The big things are: having your family members run state governments, setting district lines, and setting up laws to prevent people that disagree with you from voting. Not to mention just having a lot of money to bribe already elected politicians.
Anti-voting regulations, while frankly absolutely despicable, I've not yet seen any studies regarding a significant effect. Do you have any data on that?
Add to that the fact that many voters are single issue voters, so their opinions on different policies don’t end up amounting to much.
So even if some policies are popular overall, they need to be popular enough to overcome these things to form a durable coalition that advocates for them in the halls of power.
I wish I bookmarked the statistics on this because they were eye opening to me, but 2016 polls were showing about 40% democrat to 35% republican leaning in the country. So if the public at large is 5% more blue than red, but Republicans hold near-even seats in government, thats a bias in their favor. And as this and many other articles show this isn't the product of random swings of popular support but structurally orchestrated power grabs meant to keep a minority party in power.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/gop-man...
Edit: And to be fair the Senate isn't a democratic institution whatsoever to begin with. Its going to naturally lean red because there are many states with low urbanization and population that produce permanent seat Republican senators. Because the distribution of states has nothing to do with the distribution of people that lends the senate to be hugely incongruent with the actual ideological makeup of the populace at large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
Both the democratic party and the republican party only represent a small fraction of the electorate, for your information.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/25/american-pol...
"As they go to the polls in a historic presidential election, more than six in 10 Americans say neither major political party represents their views any longer, a survey has found."
The left has been talking about stacking the supreme court since Kavanaugh. Democratic senators played games with the filibuster. There are plenty of other examples of weaponizing politics that I could cite (from both sides).
I would like to see Senate Republicans show some fair play and wait for after the election, though there is some wisdom in wanting to avoid the possibility of a split decision should this election go to the supreme court.
Considering the court has had a Republican majority since 1989, I don't blame them.
Judging by the wikipedia page on judicial leanings[1], Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorusch are all fairly moderate, whereas Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor are (relatively) more ideological. Only Alito and Thomas are particularly conservative.
And it's not like rulings have always been one-sided. I know plenty of conservatives have their gripes with Roberts.
Democratic appointees even held all nine seats during the 40's, and Republicans didn't stack the court.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_leanings_of_United...
The Supreme Court does need to be expanded though. It hears half the cases it did fifty years ago. While they are at it, split the Ninth Circuit. Give California its own circuit since the majority cases originate from that state.
I saw some interviews with her, pretty amazing lady. Sad to see her go.
I’m curious if they wait until after the election. Dangle it in front of their base as “we have to save this seat”.
Or maybe it’s actually a dis-incentive for republican turnout because RBG dying was a strong selling point for next term.
It will be interesting for sure.
EDIT:
I take that back. They will confirm before Election Day. They need a fifth judge for Trump to contest the election.
Why would they? There are no consequences to bad behavior!
Republicans push tax cuts through for the wealthy, leaving the country deeper in debt. So what do Democrats do when they get back in power? Let those cuts stand!
Imagine, if, for every Republican shenanigan, their price to pay would be much higher than any potential gains. They would think twice about being assholes then. But as things stand, they suffer no consequences! So why would they ever change??
So the Democrats are basically complaining that they can't stop a Trump nomination, but only because they changed the rules themselves.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/21/harry-reid-sen...
Sounds about right.
> the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
They do not give a fuck.
That’s not how they see power and it is why they have a far disproportionate share of power/representation than their support across the electorate.
This is about power. In politics, nothing else matters.