The Biden Presidency

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The_Animus said:
Interesting idea to change it rather than throw it out completely. Is someone in the senate proposing this route? What change is suggested?
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To poke at this a little, it looks like Manchin is signaling some willingness to change the filibuster.

“Maybe it needs to be more painful,” @Sen_JoeManchin says of the filibuster. “It should be painful to use it,” he adds to Chris Wallace, while also re-upping his strong support for keeping it in place.
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To poke at some related opinion analysis -

Maybe Manchin realizes that the idea that the filibuster fosters more bipartisanship — as Sinema had said earlier last week — is totally off. On Saturday, he voted for Rob Portman’s amendment on unemployment insurance, just to see Portman vote against the whole package. Lisa Murkowski slipped help for Alaska drillers into the deal and then voted against it, too. They only want to weaken things, not offer any actual support.

Republicans are back in their blow-it-all-up stance. They are doing exactly what they did under Obama: Nothing. They refuse to compromise or participate. They only want to stop any and all legislation in its tracks. That means no minimum wage increase at all, no climate change plan, and certainly no voting rights reform.
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Voting rights would be the perfect point to blow the filibuster up over. Passing it is insurance that Republicans will have to try and get votes, which will involve participating in government
 
Ladewig said:
From survey conclusions (highlighting mine)
He argues “voters find [the Republican Party’s position on economic issues] so outlandishly bad that they’ll only believe someone espouses them if you can convince them first that the person in question is a heartless monster.”​
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This reminds me of the people who claim that the attack on the Capitol in January was done by Democrats/liberals/Antifa/BLM to discredit them. Actual Republican & Trumper thinking is so awful that other Republicans & Trumpers can't believe a Republican/Trumper would actually think it.​
 
Delvo said:
This reminds me of the people who claim that the attack on the Capitol in January was done by Democrats/liberals/Antifa/BLM to discredit them. Actual Republican & Trumper thinking is so awful that other Republicans & Trumpers can't believe a Republican/Trumper would actually think it.
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In relation to this, it may be worth pointing towards the studies that show that self-proclaimed liberals and conservatives are roughly equally charitable and empathetic, with the biggest difference being that self-proclaimed conservatives tend to have that empathy and charity strongly focused on a very limited group of people, such as family, close friends, and those who they closely identify with. That also consequently means that they're not at all empathetic or charitable with those who aren't in that group... to the point where many of them can be rather sociopathic in their relations with that out group.

Elsewhere...

dirtywick said:
Voting rights would be the perfect point to blow the filibuster up over. Passing it is insurance that Republicans will have to try and get votes, which will involve participating in government
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In some Biden Voting Rights news from the White House...

Fact Sheet: President Biden to Sign Executive Order to Promote Voting Access
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
What progressive have "joined with the Republicans"? Is there a shred of evidence for this horseshoe theory BS?

I see 8 conservative Democrats voting with the Republican block to undermine the party agenda on minimum wage. For all the crying about how progressives aren't team players when it comes to party politics, these conservative elements of the party are almost always the ones preventing the party from governing effectively. When have progressives ever voted with the Republicans to block the party's platform, as we see here?

Seems like this is a problem that the party machine should be trying to deal with.
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The post was about voters, not Senators. Progressives on this board are happy to join with the Republicans on this board in attacking the Democrats.
 
Kestrel said:
At one time filibustering a bill required Senators to literally stand before the Senate and talk to keep a bill from being voted into law. The modern rules require a supermajority vote to stop debate and vote on the measure, even when there is no actual debate. Going back to the old system is one possible change.

Another possibility is to limit the number of days of debate once a bill reaches the Senate floor. For example, 30 days after reaching the floor only a simple majority vote is required to terminate debate and vote on the bill.
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The filibuster is a joke and certainly wasn't intended by the founders. It really is a power grab. The great compromise in conjunction with the filibuster grants far too much power to rural states. Here we are kowtowing to WV's Manchin and Montana's Tester.
 
Thermal said:
We get things done by basically pushing gov't out of the way as much as is practical. That's what Operation Warp Speed was all about.
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Except Operation Warp Speed was a government program!

A huge part of the mess the US made with responding to the pandemic was the refusal of the Trump administration to get involved. It instead denied there was a problem, then left it to the individual states to complete with each other to get badly needed supplies. Supplies the Trump administration let run low because they refused to fund the national stockpile.

When it comes to the vaccine, private industry can do the work. They have the scientists and the equipment. But the vaccine came ten months into the pandemic. For those ten months you needed the government to lead, provide direction, and work to get everyone pulling together in the same direction. The Trump administration failed miserably at that, with the result over 315,000 Americans died needlessly.
 
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Blue Mountain said:
Except Operation Warp Speed was a government program!
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Yeah, a gov't program that basically said "we agree to temporarily step aside and let you do what you gotta do".

A huge part of the mess the US made with responding to the pandemic was the refusal of the Trump administration to get involved. It instead denied there was a problem, then left it to the individual states to complete with each other to get badly needed supplies. Supplies the Trump administration let run low because they refused to fund the national stockpile.

When it comes to the vaccine, private industry can do the work. They have the scientists and the equipment. But the vaccine came ten months into the pandemic. For those ten months you needed the government to lead, provide direction, and work to get everyone pulling together in the same direction. The Trump administration failed miserably at that, with the result over 315,000 Americans died needlessly.
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Agreed that the Trump administration did little to nothing, but in the internet age, we don't need government to hold our hands every step of the way. People made conscious, individual choices to not take this seriously enough, which resulted in a lot of those deaths, too. Yes, Agent Orange fueled the anti-masker fires, but ultimately it was individual choices that filled the body bags.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
Who proposed these 'earmarks', and why were they included?
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An entirely fair question, given the penchant of Republicans to work to toss earmarks and amendments in only to vote against bills anyways. I haven't seen any reporting on the sources, though, so I can't give a direct answer. Perhaps delving into records from the relevant committees would handle that, if they're public, but that's not something that I feel like doing myself.
 
Thermal said:
Yeah, a gov't program that basically said "we agree to temporarily step aside and let you do what you gotta do".

Agreed that the Trump administration did little to nothing, but in the internet age, we don't need government to hold our hands every step of the way. People made conscious, individual choices to not take this seriously enough, which resulted in a lot of those deaths, too. Yes, Agent Orange fueled the anti-masker fires, but ultimately it was individual choices that filled the body bags.
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Oh BS. We do need the government to help as well as point people in the right direction. We also need government to control those who use events like this as a way to cheat the system. Such as what appears to have happened in Florida.

One of the things government needs to do is control individuals who view everything as an opportunity to make money. Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer did not want to work together because they wanted to keep vaccine supplies tight which led to bribery, extortion and overpriced vaccines. It's also interesting that GOP leaders particularly in Florida and Texas downplayed and dismissed COVID.
 
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wareyin said:
The post was about voters, not Senators. Progressives on this board are happy to join with the Republicans on this board in attacking the Democrats.
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Criticizing is not necessarily attacking ... and who better to criticize a Dem than a fellow member of the clan. It might provoke change while criticism from elsewhere is easy to toss aside as just partisan hackery.
 
Aridas said:
To poke at USA Today, just because that's the first obviously relevant article that popped up in a quick search - ...
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From the portion you quoted:

....the bill contains unrelated projects. Examples cited in that fact check included a $1.5 million bridge connecting New York and Canada....
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Either the "million" is a misquote or the bridge is a pedestrian bridge about 2 meters long. ;)
 
SezMe said:
Criticizing is not necessarily attacking ... and who better to criticize a Dem than a fellow member of the clan. It might provoke change while criticism from elsewhere is easy to toss aside as just partisan hackery.
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There is such a thing as constructive criticism, so yes criticism is not necessarily attacking. Of course that is in no way a valid description of what we get here. You could say it is partisan hackery anyway, when the same folks who told us to vote for Trump over Biden are busy bashing Biden as well as every Democratic Congressperson when Republican lockstep obstruction wins again.
 
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