I read a story recently about how prosecutions for violent crime are now at an abysmal pace in the newly expanded reservation, because only tribal or federal courts now have jurisdiction in the area over natives. Gorsuch really put that ruling in noble terms though. Republicans will hit rock bottom one day. I have stopped predicting when that dat will arrive, because I thought that 2006 when the Iraq war went totally off the rails was that moment (then I thought it was 2008-9, then I thought it was 2016, so my predictive powers are nigh on worthless). One thing that separates us from Chile or 1920s Italy is that we're fucking rich, sedentary, prima donnas. Anything that messes with our lifestyle is going to get politicians punished. The women's march happened in the beginning of Trump's terms, but most of the protesting was low stakes, because, after all, for all Trump's bluster and mendacity, people's lives, on balance, were still improving relative to the Great Recession. The fruits of Trump's labor are only beginning to be felt, since it takes a minute for landmark cases to meander through the courts. But now that rubber is meeting the road, and all the Little Mitt Romneys of the suburbs may not be able to get an abortion for their 16 yr old daughter, their behavior is going to change, and fast. The trouble is that even most republicans don't believe this bullshit. The republicans I know, and I know a lot of them, for the most part talk a lot of shit, but in the end care simply and solely about what their tax bill looks like relative to their total compensation. Taxes lower = Good. The equation is that simple. Everything else is window dressing to help justify their complete and total lack of philosophy and empathy. I know some religious ones, too, but they aren't the ones who are going to decide where we go from here. While I won't be surprised if we see an uptick in political violence, it will be limited in scope. No one is going to risk the financial collapse of the nation over social issues. The rhetoric is out of control, though. I just saw that the consumer sentiment index is at an all time low...lower by several points than the depths of covid or the Great Recession when unemployment in Michigan where I live was 17%. SEVENTEEN. It's 4.3% now, pretty much in line with the nation, which it at 3.6%, and people feel they're in a worse situation economically than at the worst economy since pre WWII. That can only be explained by political rhetoric, and the social media echo chambers that amplify and further distort it. Gerrymandering only works insofar as the margins are thin. You can take a 50/50 state like NC and turn it into 9-1 GOP Congressional seats. But you can't do that to a 55-45 state, and that will happen at some point when the mendacious nature of the GOP starts hurting people lives. It's up to Democrats to be the adults. Don't get bogged down in rhetorical fights. Come up with modest, workable, appealing policy proposals and stick to them. Stop calling literally everyone a bigot. There are a lot of bigots in America, but politics is the art of compromise and like it or not, you need some bigots on your side, so shut the fuck up with the antagonism, and simply work to ensure that bigotry is contained rather than eradicated. If all this requires making an unholy alliance with Mitt Romney or Susan Collins or even Satan's Spawn herself Liz Cheney, then so be it. Offer one of them a cabinet position prospectively before the election to show you're serious about expanding the appeal. And shut the fuck up about a civil war. As the Dalai Lama once said, the lesser of two evils means LESS EVIL. Let's aim for less evil and appreciate that we don't live in 1970s Chile or 1920s Italy which were by and large poor countries with ruined economies. Sorry for the rant. This was going to be a very short reply, but then I started venting.
It's good to vent, particularly when you aren't surrounded by people accusing you of thoughtcrime for not fearing Trump enough. My own sister launched into a screaming fit when I refused to agree in 2016 that Donald Trump was going to put homosexuals in concentration camps. Someone on Twitter was dunking on Liz Cheney by pointing out that she voted with Trump more often than Elise Stefanik did. And it's like duh, that's what makes her a good Republican. Republicans are never going to stop voting Republican, because what makes a Republican a Republican is being Republican. Libertarians mostly vote Republican because ultimately they only give a shit about taxes and know and understand that laws about drugs or whatever don't fucking matter to them, they're white. The problem the Republican Party has had since the CIvil Rights Act is most of their voters vote Republican because the Republican brand has been about curtailing the rights of Darkies for more than 50 years. You're right, though - the crazies have been running things for long enough that they're curtailing the rights of the Captains of Industry and that's just tedious. I read a tedious book about politics whose name i can't remember that argued during the '50s, '60s '70s and '80s, there were liberal democrats, conservative democrats, liberal republicans and conservative republicans. It was too stupid to point out that LBJ nuked the shit out of that the minute he said brown people have rights. You can run on that for a while; California was a reliably red state until they stomped the darkies too hard. Arizona, of course, did the exact same thing and are now full-crazy so it doesn't have to go that way? But the only reason Arizona exists is because Barry Goldwater colonized it. I maintain that the political battle of our time is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between Republicans and Fascists. The core platform of the Republican Party no longer espouses Republican values, nor does it generate money from Republican donors. It serves ideologues and racists only and you can only fundraise off them so much because Charles Koch cares more about his money. If the Republicans wish to survive they need to wrest control from the fascists.
I had to think about that But seems about right. Thinking about it don’t more have the democrats really given or clarified and questions on rights? Seems like most rights issues are solved at the courts. So Supreme Court could take away 100 years of progress if they wanted to. Go as far back as reinstate separate but equal and Jim Crow laws.
Problem is? It's impossible to be a bleeding-heart neoliberal. Things the Democrats have done since Kennedy: - Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cost LBJ the presidency, cost the Democrats the South ever since. - Watergate hearings. Cost Democrats Iran, which ultimately cost Carter the presidency. - Robert Bork. Created Mitch McConnell, cost the Democrats concealed weapons laws, roe v wade and government bureaucracies in one fucking weekend. - Obamacare. Cost the house and senate. I would argue that Nixon blowing up Breton Woods crushed British and American labor, created trickle-down economics and nudged the Gini Coefficient on a trajectory towards feudalism. The Democrats opted to be the "party of civil rights" in the '60s and then utterly failed to do anything with it for sixty goddamn years.
This is the vicious cycle. Liberals use the courts to expand rights, so conservatives do everything they can to stack the judiciary against the liberals. Congress can fix a lot of these problems summarily, but they won’t, because they lack courage to make choices. It’s much easier to vote that air should be clean and then delegate the mechanism of how to clean the air than it is to craft a meaningful law that will inevitably piss off some constituents.
Liberals use culture to expand rights. Culture always belongs to the liberals. That's why every judiciary in every country everywhere is more conservative than the culture: it's a conservative backstop and always has been. The problem is that you can't run for congress without spending half a million dollars and you're going to earn a salary of $174k a year for two years while you fundraise half a million dollars to protect your right to earn $174k a year. The democrats don't even hide it anymore. Where's my dead horse? There are 435 representatives. Electing them cost $1.13b. Limit a representative to 60,000 constituents and suddenly there's 5500 of them. If the funding doesn't change? That's a $20k investment for a $174k job. Does that change the demographic any?
Can we also reduce the compensation to something like $90k/year? It shouldn't be almost 3x the median U.S. salary. Maybe that would further help attract people who see it as a public duty instead of folks looking to profit. I know it's a demanding job, though, or it should be, so I dunno. It's actually not much of a concern, in terms of costing the taxpayer. You could fund 5,500 reps at $175k/year for less than a billion a year, which is peanuts, in the grand scheme of things, considering the benefits of expanding the House. Abolish or at least reform the Senate, end the electoral college system, and institute an impartial algorithm to handle re-districting. I liked mk's idea about placing limits on the ratio of district perimeter to district area. Invite international oversight in making the U.S. objectively more democratic (not that American exceptionalism would ever allow for that). We can dream, right?
Although Yang has done/said some kinda boob-ish stuff in more recent years, he did have some interesting ideas. And he wanted to institute term limits, I'm guessing? Is there something about banning former politicians from the labor pool intended to target revolving-door-style corruption, or is it solely to offset the negative implications (at a personal level) of instituting term limits?
I think he launched a third party because the Democrats refused to take him seriously. I don't think it was the right move. He was probably four years behind Pete Buttigieg, now I'm not so sure. Yang didn't have any problems with career politicians. He just wanted that career to be their career. His argument was that if you made the job itself pay enough that people wanted to stay in it, and that if the retirement was cushy enough that they were not permitted to lobby at all afterwards (I misspoke - he didn't require them to never work again, he wanted them to never be able to register as a lobbyist), you would get more "pure" politicians and fewer people leveraging the revolving door. I've seen term limits come up for forty years. I've yet to see a legitimate mechanism whereby term limits could be instituted. Shit's obviously broken but even if term limits did fix it, I don't know where we'd buy the glue.
It is. That's the whole point. You don't spend $500k to get a $175k job, you spend $500k to get on the board of directors of Dropbox and to end up at a sweet, sweet K-street lobbying firm. Which is utterly ineffective if you cease to be the representative from Dallas and instead become the representative from 87629.
100% correct. Yes, we absolutely need to get lobbying money of politics, and you'd think it'd be a bipartisan thing, but notsomuch. Expanding the House would also help with the lobbying problem. It would complicate the logistics and reduce the amount given to each politician, making them less betrothed to lobbying interests, generally. Unless companies spent about 10x what their current lobbying budgets are. Some might? The idea of this SCOTUS re-interpreting the Citizen's United ruling is hilarious though. sobbing intensifies I know you know all this, but for posterity. People do apparently lurk.