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Cont: The Biden Presidency Part II

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Trebuchet said:
A bit off-topic, but how the heck did she get to be so important? She's only ten months into her third term.
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She's the current chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus. She leads 90-ish House reps out of about 210. You kind of have to care about her if you watch this stuff closely.
 
Random said:
She's the current chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus. She leads 90-ish House reps out of about 210. You kind of have to care about her if you watch this stuff closely.
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I understand that, but how did she get there? Presumably others in the caucus are significantly more senior.
 
Trebuchet said:
I understand that, but how did she get there? Presumably others in the caucus are significantly more senior.
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Inside baseball I guess. They really just need one person to head up meetings and to go out and be the face of the caucus, as 90+ reps have a hard time showing up on TV simultaneously (would love to see Biden try to meet with them all in the Oval Office). Don’t think there’s a formal vote or anything, but I assume that they have some way to seek a consensus. Not sure how many of them would even want the job.

Not sure if the exact details are that important really. At the end of the day, she is one person who provides voice to a group of ninety, but any one of those ninety can drop out of the group at any time.
 
Trebuchet said:
I understand that, but how did she get there? Presumably others in the caucus are significantly more senior.
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I would assume the membership votes on their officers. Pure seniority would be fraught with concerns. You'd end up with relentless careerists in charge. Many Reps don't have the skills (or interest) in leadership/high profile roles.
 
plague311 said:
Uhm, what? If they gerrymandered the districts then they're creating districts of people that will vote for them. Meaning, they're representing those people. What am I missing?

I've pretty much said all I have to say about this whole thing. I would like to say that I was told that if I was discouraging people to vote for Democrats, I was working for Republicans. So far, in my view, our forum Democrats have put up the best, most solid, most rational reasons to either not vote for Democrats, or to not vote at all, than I ever will.
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You are missing "gerrymandering." :)
 
Random said:
I guess we are waiting for the Liberal Leader who will come forward, run on popular Liberal policies, and then actually do them. The odds of it happening under the current system are low, but the odds of it happening without us voting for Democrats is effectively zero.
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I'm not so sure about that. The odds of getting the DP to ever start actually doing stuff look pretty much like zero. Yes, it's only 2 Senators blocking the way, but the blockage is equally effective no matter how many or how few are doing it, and they're not getting enough other Senators to get past those 2 any time soon, if ever again at all. They're working hard to lose the next few elections, right when the Republicans are gearing up to rig elections as hard as they can as soon as they're in control again, which will prevent the Democrats from ever having another majority again even if they do someday start actually trying to win. We're just a few years away from practically permanent single-party rule. And in a single-party system, real change can only come from that one party. So our most realistic path to getting any real improvements in this country might be to wait for the complete Republican take-over and official banning of the DP, then have a movement for improvement (hey, there's a slogan!) within the one ruling party. (After all, the voters who want change aren't going away, and once we have a one-party system, those voters will only have that one party to vote in.)

SuburbanTurkey said:
The 2016 Hilary loss was an honest shock, so you can give the party a break on that one. People were screaming from the rafters about the danger of runnign such a terrible candidate, but you can understand why the party had their doubts. Insisting on running status-quo ghouls in 2021, 2022, 2024 and onward is hard to excuse.
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But... but... but... ELECTABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Then again, demanding that people support the Democrats while the party refuses to make changes to keep their project viable is also helping the Republicans win.

The 2016 Hilary loss was an honest shock, so you can give the party a break on that one. People were screaming from the rafters about the danger of runnign such a terrible candidate, but you can understand why the party had their doubts. Insisting on running status-quo ghouls in 2021, 2022, 2024 and onward is hard to excuse.
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Other than Trump, all have been old fart insiders for quite a while. This is mainly due to election fund raising. In Europe where there are limits to spending on elections and even support for very small parties, young politicians have a chance.
 
plague311 said:
Then why would you vote for them? If they don't have the will to change then the only reason you're voting for them is so they can be obstructionists. That's it, there's no other positive to having a Dem in a political position...

The Dems are a do-nothing party. They stand in their own way at every given opportunity.
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Keep in mind that, although it's easy to sum this kind of thing up as a failure of the party as a whole, and its effect on elections might tend to work as if it were a failure of the party as a whole, they aren't all the same. In the latest debacle, the President wanted Congress to pass a pretty good bill, the Democrats in the House Of Representatives were in favor of it, and all but two Democrats in the Senate were in favor of it. It got ruined not by the whole party, but by those two Senators. So the bill would have succeeded with just two or three more in the Senate. The problem was quite simply a straightforward case of not having enough of them. The solution to that would be to elect more of them.
 
Delvo said:
Keep in mind that, although it's easy to sum this kind of thing up as a failure of the party as a whole, and its effect on elections might tend to work as if it were a failure of the party as a whole, they aren't all the same. In the latest debacle, the President wanted Congress to pass a pretty good bill, the Democrats in the House Of Representatives were in favor of it, and all but two Democrats in the Senate were in favor of it. It got ruined not by the whole party, but by those two Senators. So the bill would have succeeded with just two or three more in the Senate. The problem was quite simply a straightforward case of not having enough of them. The solution to that would be to elect more of them.
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Good luck keeping voters' eyes on the ball there.
 
Delvo said:
Keep in mind that, although it's easy to sum this kind of thing up as a failure of the party as a whole, and its effect on elections might tend to work as if it were a failure of the party as a whole, they aren't all the same. In the latest debacle, the President wanted Congress to pass a pretty good bill, the Democrats in the House Of Representatives were in favor of it, and all but two Democrats in the Senate were in favor of it. It got ruined not by the whole party, but by those two Senators. So the bill would have succeeded with just two or three more in the Senate. The problem was quite simply a straightforward case of not having enough of them. The solution to that would be to elect more of them.
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I would suggest that while what you are saying is mostly true, the "pretty good bill" was not killed just by the two rogue Democratic senators, but also by the entire Republican party. Once upon a time a bill that was tolerable might have had some bipartisan support. Now the Democratic origin of the bill guarantees that it will never get a single vote from the lock-stepping opposition. We have become so used to their scorched-earth approach that it doesn't even warrant mention. We blame the Democrats for lacking the knee-jerk unanimity that is the shame and downfall of democracy.
 
Delvo said:
So the bill would have succeeded with just two or three more in the Senate.
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I'm not convinced of that. The most plausible explanation I can come up with for the complete deference to Manchin is that behind him are a half dozen or so senators who are nearly as conservative and would be holding up progress with nearly the same demands if he wasn't there yelling in front.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
I'm not convinced of that. The most plausible explanation I can come up with for the complete deference to Manchin is that behind him are a half dozen or so senators who are nearly as conservative and would be holding up progress with nearly the same demands if he wasn't there yelling in front.
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I don't buy that.
 
Venom said:
Good luck keeping voters' eyes on the ball there.
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It can be done... just not with methods that they've shown any capacity to consider so far. They would need to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Manchin-Sinematic Universe. For most Democrats, that means running a campaign that treats the DINOs as the enemy, because they are. Biden can take another step on top of that to help everybody else in his party have a chance at election next time: start signing progressive executive orders so the difference between some Democrats and others like S&M is not just stated but demonstrated with real actions & results.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
The most plausible explanation I can come up with for the complete deference to Manchin is that behind him are a half dozen or so senators who are nearly as conservative and would be holding up progress with nearly the same demands if he wasn't there yelling in front.
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The one doing the deferring has been Biden, who is much easier to explain: he's pretty conservative himself and has never really cared much about the contents of the bill.
 
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