The Affordable Care Act is probably the most impactful law passed by Democrats in the recent past. In a survey of 2000 voters, a staggering thirty-five percent did not know [1] that the ACA and the colloquial "Obamacare" were the same thing. Bizarrely, an additional number didn't know that 'Obamacare repealed = ACA repealed'.
I cannot blame either party for playing political football when dealing with this sort of electorate.
----------------------------------------
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/02/11/514732211/obamacare-and-affor...
I DO support a basic civics and mathematics test, on a recurring basis, for voters. HOWEVER, that's only with the catch that failing or opting out of the test creates benefits designed to encourage the citizen to pass the test in the future. A benefit like, access to public education to work on that math skills and civics awareness. Or possibly someone is disabled (often silently, dementia is a real issue!) and the voter tests might be one of the places it's discovered.
Also, literacy tests were ruled unconstitutional in Oregon v. Mitchell.
That's what is so mind-boggling to me.
The US as a whole spends more on healthcare than any other OECD country, and the fact that most people in the electorate don't care about this is kind of depressing.
Even Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator!
Even now I don’t think the Democrats gain much from bringing it up,
That's not how the Senate works. A 50-50 "majority" is not full control.
In any case, it's pretty silly to blame the party that's on your side for not being able to overcome the bad-faith obstructionism of the opposing party. It's not about political "footballs", it's about having finite time and public attention to be able to get things done. If every single fight has to be dragged into the public to shame the other side into taking a few minutes off from looting and pillaging, then you have to prioritize and pick the optimal time for each battle.
Is that really the case? It is a bias towards the status quo.
Regardless, IMO the constituents represented by those parties don't benefit from it.
Not a fan of the status quo, but with two largely insane parties fighting for power, I'm thankful for moderating forces.
Given that these kingmakers are what causes things to go over 50-50 they want to preserve their power.
> It is a bias towards the status quo.
These are the same thing.
Blaming the party rather than individual Senators is not a helpful way of looking at the problem.
The filibuster continues to exist because it gives people like manchin compete power, so the most moderate of each party will always try to keep it alive.
Not to be a complete downer, but there is so much special interest money involved in our political system, neither the Democrats or the Republicans are on your side. They are both on the moneyed interest side. These political footballs are, for the most part, to string along voters on "hot button" issues to keep the public disinterested on the numerous things that these parties actually agree on, like expanded military spending, global expansionism, corporate tax reduction, lessening monopoly laws, reducing banking restrictions, reducing spending on interstate infrastructure, cutting education spending and restricting the ability for fair and equal elections through redistricting. All of these (and more I can't think of) are bipartisan efforts.
Sorry... I shouldn't watch the news. It's a bummer =)
> expanded military spending
Democrats don't really vote for this, certainly not to the same degree, but sure, I wish there were more difference.
> global expansionism
Vague to the point of meaninglessness.
> corporate tax reduction
Definitely not the same. Democrats recently pushed for a minimum corporate tax (https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-corporate-tax-plan-th...).
> lessening monopoly laws
Also vague, but not generally true. Democrats will vote for actual antitrust legislation; they won't vote for the Republicans using "anti-trust" as a meaningless scare-word to bash businesses they don't like for unrelated reasons.
> reducing banking restrictions
Maybe in the 90s, but not recently. Who wrote the Dodd-Frank Act, and who repealed it?
> reducing spending on interstate infrastructure
Vague, but not generally true. There are a bunch of major transportation projects (e.g. California HSR, DC's Purple Line) that have been held up for ages because Democrats will vote to fund them and then Republicans will take it away, or because it's impossible to get Republican states/counties to pay their fair share. For telecomms, Democrats will tend to push more for equitable-access programs, whereas Republicans will frame corporate tax cuts as "infrastructure spending" as long as some infrastructure-related companies benefit. Go look at the numbers and priorities in the 2021 infrastructure bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...), which passed on mostly party lines, and tell me the parties agree on cutting infrastructure spending.
> cutting education spending
Laughably false. Go look at the per-student education budget per state. (Federal DoE spending YoY is kind of weird because it's washed out by college loan financing; most direct spending on education is at the state level.)
> restricting the ability for fair and equal elections through redistricting
Seriously, you're going to sit there and argue, in the year 2022, that the parties are the same on election fairness? The fact that the Democrats don't aggressively gerrymander is why they don't currently hold the House - the New York legislature could have chopped up Long Island differently to stem the losses. More generally, Democrats consistently vote for protecting ballot access, against Republicans who nakedly want to make it more difficult to vote - and that's setting aside the whole armed-insurrection-to-overthrow-an-election thing, which, last I checked, 90% of the Republican party will still fall in line for.
I've kind of become a bit of a voting reform absolutist for this reason. Publicly funded elections, get rid of first-past-the-post plurality voting (and replace with approval, ranked choice, anything really), electoral college reform, Wyoming rule, etc.
If these problems were fixed, the incentives to solve the other problems are much more aligned.
The only current method would be to somehow convince the people in power that they will need to overhaul the system to stay in power in the future. But that’s not gonna happen because the existing loopholes are so massive (e.g. gerrymandering), that they can basically guarantee that anyway.
It’s also not a policy issue, and it feels weird to vote for it (or vote for people who promise it), because it’s not a direct thing that will affect your daily life and is more second order than that.
Act how?
Unlike marriage (where the FFC clause gives Congress an explicit power), the “codify Roe” refrain was always hollow since without Roe being a 14th Amendment right there is no real Constitutional argument for authority for federal codification.
This was simply yet another issue that was intentionally managed to benefit The Politics Industrial Complex.
Note: I don't consider HuffPost to be a beacon of journalism. It's simply the top of the SERP. I'm confident better have reported the same.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-codify-roe-v-wade-congr...
Them having full control wasn't enough.
Democrats passed it in the House and all Democratic Senators supported it in the Senate. However, Republicans killed it because Democrats wanted the Omnibus bill to pass for which support from Mitch McConnell was necessary. Mitch McConnell was opposed to this Cannabis bill.
Link: https://thehill.com/policy/finance/3782514-marijuana-advocat...
The War on Drugs has effectively brainwashed most people to think that the best way to control "dangerous" drugs is to make them illegal.
And the politics of this is that were the Dems to try to do this then the GOP would campaign on the Dems trying to give drugs to kids like candy.
The DEA regularly describes it as dangerousness: “Schedule I is the most dangerous!”
But it’s not dangerousness, it’s whether there is a medical use.
Marijuana didn’t have a medical use, because it’s not very powerful. It makes you feel dizzy and hungry. If it was a drug, spinning around in circles would he schedule I.
Heroin is powerful enough to be a legit pain killer, so it’s Schedule II.
This really is a case of reporters not doing their job.
That’s what a democracy is. Democracies aren’t nicer places to live because our politicians are nice people. It’s because our interests happen to align with those of politicians. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
CGP Grey had a nice video on this, which I plagiarized for the comment above:
Every decision will result in some people supporting you and others working to kick you out of office.
If you don’t tread carefully you won’t be in power long.
It has nothing to do with the American system and everything to do with democratic representation in government.