They succeeded in preventing judges from being appointed. Trump weakened regulatory authorities more than any other president.

Obama appointed more federal judges than Bush: https://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/barack-obama-george-w... (As of April 2014: “Over the course of his presidency so far, Obama has nominated 301 judges and gotten 237 confirmed. By this point in his presidency, Bush had nominated 267 judges and had 234 of them confirmed.”).

Remember that Democrats controlled the Senate for all but the last two years of the Obama presidency. Republicans weren’t in much of a position to block his judicial appointments.

There is of course Garland, a rare show of GOP competence. But even for the Supreme Court judicial appointments are contentious. Kennedy was Reagan’s third pick for that seat. He went on to be a liberal squish that voted to uphold Roe, etc.

I would bet that if the filibuster could be depended on to prevent movement on these issues, you wouldn’t see close to $15 billion going into federal election campaigns.

Anyway, McConnell successfully blocked pretty much all Obama lower court judge appointments, causing huge huge backlogs in the justice system nationwide and allowing GOP to later install people who are e.g. trying to make the abortion pill illegal.

Our government HAS been changing pretty radically deep down in the bureaucracy. The justice system and election boards are extremely ripe for non-filibuster-able overhaul.

You don’t have to make things up. You can just look at agency budgets to see if any GOP president was able to make meaningful cuts in the federal bureaucracy. Remember that democrats controlled the House through Reagan’s entire presidency.

The GOP did succeed in overturning Roe. Overturning a precedent that was baseless to begin with and which by the end Democrats wouldn’t even defend on the merits isn’t exactly what I’d call a major victory.

Is budget size the singular metric by which government power and capability is measured?

Lack of success (and, frankly, probably authentic desire) in one dimension is not evidence of lack of success or desire in another dimension. Government power is not as simple as “more dollar = more powerful,” and you know it.

https://youtu.be/mtPgUrVPXeI

Why would they have a “lack of authentic desire?” Over 90% of federal employees are democrats: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe.... These are people who (deeply) believe in the missions of these agencies. If democrats continue to control agencies whose budgets are undiminished, what explains the “lack of success” that you assert exists?

It’s like blaming crime waves on “defund the police.” There are discrete measures you can point to that were adopted, like bail reform, that has had some effect. But in general, it was more rhetoric than something which actually happened.

“Lack of authentic desire” is referring to the GOP’s lack of authentic desire to reduce government spending. They wish to disrupt Dem agendas and to prevent money from going to Dem areas (made abhorrently obvious every single time a disaster strikes a blue area), but they’re not all that interested in reducing spending itself beyond paying lip service — so no, you wouldn’t expect to see budgets to go down. This doesn’t mean govt capability is left untouched though, because capability is not derived monocausally from budget.

Republicans have huge incentives to cut the budgets of these agencies. Again, 90% of the federal bureaucracy is democrats, many are members of the federal employees union, etc. Why wouldn’t republicans want to cut those budgets?

But they have been unable to do so. So what’s your theory of causation for why is agencies are ineffective?

Wow, now that is a shocking (and revealing) argument. Dismantle government not because you hate government, not because you think it has overreached, not because you think it’s ineffective, but to own the libs. And by own the libs you don’t even mean to disrupt their agenda, but just to put libs out of work. Do you hear yourself?

I never said agencies are ineffective, I said that the lack of reduced budgets is not evidence of much of anything.

I’m just responding to your theory that republicans don’t have an “authentic desire” to reduce agency funding—even if you assume they have some hidden political motive that’s different from what they say, what possible reason do they have for not wanting to cut agency funding?

You did say agencies were ineffective, because republicans had made them ineffective. I’m asking you to offer a theory of how that could be the case. Their budgets are undiminished, and they’re run by democrats who believe in the agencies’ missions.

Because federal programs are actually very popular among the people who depend on them (e.g. get your government hands off my Medicare)? They do like holding budgets hostage though to get policy concessions, it’s not some secret motive, it happens literally every budget cycle.

I did not say agencies are ineffective. I said GOP tries to dismantle federal agencies and insofar as they succeed, it yields dysfunction, which is of course the purpose of dismantling them (so it’s not bad faith). But this has almost nothing to do with saving money, as evidenced by the fact that GOP does not actually reduce budgets when they have the ability to.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-supreme-court...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/us/politics/trump-asylum-...

So agencies are dysfunctional, but not ineffective. And that dysfunction is caused by the GOP “trying to dismantle” agencies—but not by reducing their budgets. (How? When did the GOP have any opportunity to reduce any agency budget meaningfully?)

Also, entitlements like Social Security are an entirely separate category of spending, subject to different rules. That’s not what we’re talking about here.