This is also not how Congress works as meant to work - deadlocked yes, but not a deadlock driven by partisanship.

Republicans get primaried for supporting Dems.

This creates the reality which is sold in their information and news networks. Dems always have bad bills, and see - no Republican is supporting it.

Dems have oddly bad party discipline. Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled, and yet this doesn't happen. They've not yet got serious.

Party discipline contributes to the decline of democracy. It reduces the representation of opinions down to whomever sets the party line.

Better than party discipline would be more effective intra-party debate, discussion, consensus processes etc. It's probably slower than line enforcement tho'.

I agree in most other times. But in current dire times of this constitutional crisis, a bit of discipline is necessary. We gotta resist wherever we can and slow down process until the people can speak.

There is no constitutional crisis, stop gaslighting as if the dems do not stop attempting to force their ideals then you will see more of this “constitutional crisis” as you call it.

> Obviously any D voting for any R should be immediately expelled

Why? If we had a couple more Manchins and Sinemas right now, you know what we'd have? A majority.

The question is whether you have more of them in addition to the rest of the party, or instead of some members of the rest of the party. 4 machins in the same number of seats would really make it impossible to do anything.

> 4 machins in the same number of seats would really make it impossible to do anything

One, we did a lot with one Manchin and one Sinema. (To the degree the former had concerns, it was well-founded ones over the inflationary effects of the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Two, not doing anything beats the status quo. A weak majority would be a check on the executive. We’re paying the price for ideological purism.

You would think so, and that would be a reading of the American Legislative machinery which is incorrect.

Simplifying: Congress was never meant to be deadlocked on simple party lines. It was always meant to have people figuring out ways to work together, even at the expense of the party, but in favor of their constituents.

That dynamic is essential to any stable democracy.

This would drive partisanship, probably the most immediate problem in the US and beyond. I am not from the US but the impacts of similar perspectives are sadly more and more widely spread.

If you cannot accept an idea because it was brought forward by a political competitor, you lack the necessary detachment to make good decisions.

Sometimes party discipline is sensible for political pragmatism, but in all other cases democracy is the better solution. It should be handled with care.

Rejecting this philosophy wholesale and labeling it as explicitly anti-American is the sensible political pragmatism at this point.

Partisanship is only something to be concerned with when you're dealing with functioning political parties. In America, I think the bare minimum for a political party should be that it believes in the ideals of America: a government by and for the people.

MAGA is not that, it's an explicit rejection of the ideals of the American revolution. Fundamentally they have a vision for America run by a king who has absolute authority over state, congress, and the judicial system.

There's no meeting of the minds that can be had with such a perspective, our forefathers figured that out and started the American Revolution over it.

I accept this philosophy, as this is the correct way a functioning democracy operates. Independents and Republicans are tired of the riots, the attempts at forcing ideals (such as forcing the use of pronouns, forcing deviation from one’s religion). Maybe get rid of the crazy ideas, stop spending so much money and focus on american citizens before foreign citizens and you’d have more people on your side.

Your rights to practice your religion are not eroded. But guess what, your rights to practice your religion end where they impinge on other people's rights.

Nothing makes your rights more important than theirs. I'm sorry that is a bitter pill for you to swallow.

> This is also not how Congress works as meant to work - deadlocked yes, but not a deadlock driven by partisanship

Yup. We let the pointers take precedence to the point that that they don't actually point at anything, we just like how they look.

And they're still nearly evenly matched and Trump is still doing what he's doing. The Democrats could have done all the same stuff Trump is doing, but for good instead of evil. The problem is that the Democrats are not willing to accept that the system is entirely broken, so they keep clinging to a belief in "institutions" that they think will somehow magically protect us, when in fact those institutions are destroying us.

You can not destroy democracy and rule of law for the good. By definition, you are destroying democracy and rule of law. Even if you believe yourself to be good, and Trump and MAGA are under that illusion, you are doing something horrible.

Democrats could not do it. If they had done it, they would be as bad as Trump is now.

The point is that what we have now (and what we had before Trump) is not democracy and is not the rule of law, and Trump's actions show that, because those actions are taken within that system. We have been living for a long time under the illusion that our governmental system was democratic when it never was, it was only due to coincidence and luck that it appeared that way. When I say "do the same stuff Trump is doing" I mean use similar methods to create a system that actually supports democracy and the rule of law.

Havimg "democracy and rule of law" isn't a question of yes or no, it's a matter of degrees on several only partially aligned axes. Something like that can slowly shift.

You make it sound like "our democracy was never perfect, so obviously we always just had a mad emperor all along"...

Sure, it's a matter of degree, but I think recent events have shown that the actual guardrails we have are significantly less than what we thought we had.

It's like, if you built a bridge to carry 10,000 tons because you need it to carry 10,000 tons, and then it turns out it's starting to fall apart under 5,000 tons, it doesn't make sense to me to say that you should just fix it so it securely holds 5,000 tons, or if it breaks just restore it to hold 5,000 tons. You need to rebuild it so it can do what you need it to do.

If it can be fixed, any civil engineer would clearly prefer to fix it rather than tearing it down and rebuilding it.

This is still not a noce analogy because tearing down a bridge is just expensive (and maybe unnecessary). Tearing down a political system isn't something you can "just do". Most people don't seem to want that and as long as that's the case it won't happen.

US citizens still enjoy vastly more rights, protection and political participation than most people in most countries. If you tear the system down, quite likely what you get will be even worse. Gradual change can be for the worse but also for the better, there's ample historical precedent for both. There's still a lot of ways this could go.

>Most people don't seem to want that and as long as that's the case it won't happen.

Most people, as usual, are apathetic and don't care as long as it doesn't affect them.

For those that do: it seems that that's exactly what they want to do. Hence 2016 pushing a supposed anti-establishment Trump (an obvious mistake, but no one ver said the people made well informed decisions). It's a shame the DNC spent the last 3 elections rejecting such a sentiment.

I think there's a lot of ways things could be fixed without necessarily "tearing everything down". More like shifting in a new foundation while leaving a lot of the superstructure intact. Like we could still have a lot of the same basic governmental functions and operations even if the constitution were entirely rewritten.

The irony is that Trump is doing the exact opposite, tearing down those "surface-level" operations without doing anything to improve the foundations ---and in fact causing major cracks in those foundations, thus making it even more necessary to replace them.

Then what was the American revolution?

A bunch of rich, white, influential businessmen getting a better tax deal.

America hasn't actually come that far.

It was a fight against tyranny. It destroyed the rule of a king, thereby ushering in democracy and the rule of law.

>but for good instead of evil

A lot of people have decided that what Trump is doing is good. A lot have decided that it is evil. It is not so clear cut.

To be precise, Biden had around 5 months of presidential immunity. He could have done a lot as a lame duck, but this was not the case when he came in.

And I think it's even simpler than that. the only bipartisan point is that both sides are bought out by corporate interests. Many reps are not looking out for their constituents.

To be fair, we now know that Biden wasn’t sure what was going on.

The result of what your seeing is because democrats did things for 4 years and the majority of Americans didn’t like it.

> but for good instead of evil

This is rich for the party that lacks morality and supports murdering children, forcing the removal of religion, and forcing acceptance of trans individuals lying about their gender. From my perspective dems are the evil ones.