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The GOP will appeal the ones they actually care about. LGBT rights, economic regulations, race-intersecting civil rights, reproductive rights.
You are taking comfort in unstable shelter.
So yeah there is a lot going on out there and much of it fucking blows. What exactly do you propose we do to Manchin for not playing ball on some key legislation? What tools do you think the party or the president have that wouldn't just completely turbo fuck any other chances we have to get things secured.
If we threw Manchin out last year like people wanted us to, we don't get Justice Jackson. The seat would have been held open in perpetuity until the next fascist, and then they would have rammed one of their own through again.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
https://www.manchin.senate.gov/about/committee-assignments
especially energy and natural resources. His conflicts of interest in being a carbon fuels magnate alone should have disqualified him from holding the seat, and yet…
As well, the man who killed the CTC on the basis of his paranoia regarding welfare freeloaders has no business being on the Senate appropriations committee in a Democratic Party-held Senate.
They see the ones that really, really matter. Like Roe V Wade.
Also, the GOP is now incentivized to take everything all the way up, because it's almost guaranteed to go in their favor.
I'm not one to take confidence in "But it's never been a problem before because <x>."
A 35-year-old "judge" with almost no actual experience in her field very recently stripped authority from the current President that a thousand other judges were perfectly content with his predecessor having. It's really hard for some of us to value these appointees when the federal judiciary is a never-ending game of Calvinball anymore.
Except this is an example of the exact opposite of what is being argued:
1) Lower court appointments matter because the SCOTUS doesn't decide every case
2) Lower court appointments matter because the more seats you fill, the lower the chance of shit like this happening
My point was it's a fragile system that is constantly upended by bad-faith actors making it difficult to put a whole lot of stock in it. Also, a centrist Democrat getting two years of appointing normal judges isn't all that strong of a counter to the appointment of hard right ideologues that will potentially control their seats for 3-4 decades.
Yeah, he probably shouldn't be on those committees, but I can see why they wouldn't want to kick him off them and piss him off. He 100% strikes me as someone who'd say "fuck this" and flip parties if they were to take his committee seats.
We all know the Senate is worse in McConnel's hands (so please stop lecturing people about it) but Manchin flipping parties is preferable to his likely Trumper replacement at the end of his current term.
His popularity is rising in West Virginia because of what he is doing (57% approval as of most recent polling). He does actually seem to be performing to his constituents here, and if that keeps the chair from falling into the hands of a coup-supporting trumpist its just a shitty thing we probably need to accept while we try and expand our majority elsewhere.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Is it? I feel like we're getting that Trumper replacement either way, so pushing to flip is just shooting ourselves in the foot in the meantime.
And yeah, the Senate is worse in McConnell's hands. Which is why I pointed out that a concrete suggestion for something we should do would probably give it to him. Unless I misread that and we're just talking about stuff that'd be nice if everything worked out. If that's the case, it'd be nice if Manchin and the rest of the Senate voted for some sort of universal/single-payer healthcare. That would help a lot of people.
Trump won WV by almost 40 points. If he backs an opponent I have a hard time believing people with "Let's Go Brandon" flags in NASCAR font that currently appreciate him tanking Biden's presidency will actually vote for Manchin.
Which is evidence of how fucking stupid they are, as he continually votes against things that would help them.
But that's Republicans in most states, I suppose.
SCOTUS doesn't have to take that many cases in order to fuck around with lower court decisions, or were you not aware of the alarming number of unsigned shadow docket decisions being put out by SCOTUS as of late?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
We can't punish Manchin because he holds all the cards. If you take his seats as punishment for his intransient, he will stop approving judges and other nominations. It's a shitty situation where all we can do is make things worse.
He absolutely has the power in the current relationship
First of all, if it's not actually illegal, then the laws need to be changed, because as they currently stand there are some sore oversight gaps.
But secondly, something doesn't need to be actually illegal to be outrageous and drive a lot of ire against a politician - especially if there's a whole political party and the media playing up an outrage angle.
Thirdly, something doesn't need to be actually illegal or considered outrageous by the public at-large in order for Congress to take disciplinary measures against Manchin, up to and including impeachment.
Edit: It should go without saying but I might as well make it clear that none of these things are likely to happen because the Democratic Party as an entity doesn't want to pursue any of these things even symbolically.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Except he does keep winning the state. If his Big Pharma daughter (in a state with one of the biggest opioid epidemics) publicly laying off masses of people in the state AND having a Scandal due to not actually earning her degree at the biggest university in the state didn’t sink him neither will that.
In order:
Annnnd right now you need his vote for that. Oops.
The ire has to be in his own state to matter and even then only matters to a point. Everyone fucking hates Ted Cruz he gets elected anyway.
Oh yes I'm sure Manchin will think impeachment is a real threat when the Dems are 17 votes short of what's needed even if he voted to impeach himself
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
"You don't have the votes to do what you want" is kind of a thing in any democratic (small d) body.
Indeed it is! I really don't know of a democratic solution
I wish the USA has some bravery like say France, and just rewrote their entire constitution every few decades
Sadly, the evil founding fathers were mostly very careful to keep legal democratic power restricted to the already powerful
No it goes deeper than that; we go back to the founding the point of the Senate was a means of control against lower case D democratic will is pretty clear in its construction, because the guys in charge were, well, wealthy, landed, slaver aristocracy who didn’t want to lose their standing and power to the whims of the rabble.
When did they decide that a failed bill is worse than getting people to vote against popular legislation on record?
Does a Constitutional Convention in a country that put Trump in the White House five years ago seem like a wise idea?
Like the Constitution definitely needs an update and has massive flaws, but I don't think sitting down and rewriting the Constitution today would lead to nearly the utopia people on these boards want.
It's very well designed to achieve something bad, there's a slight difference.
And this one will get written by oil tycoons, Disney, Raytheon, Elon Musk, Saudi Arabia, and people who engage in slave labor overseas for fun and profit.
None of those are "cards we can play to break Manchin" which is what I was replying to. The public at large doesn't care how nakedly corrupt he is. Half the electorate thinks what he does is cool and smart if he played for their team.
The New York Times publishing a "scandal" on a politician used to lead to the kind of outrage that caused impeachment and resignations but now it vanishes in the news cycle like a fart it the wind.
How many democratic (small d) bodies out there require 60 of 100 votes in order to hold a vote?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
In the case of impeaching Manchin, you wouldn't even get 49
I've compared our current government to a proof of concept that got pushed to production and is holding together on patches and ritual for 250 years. Nobody really knew what they were doing when they wrote it, and most of the most heinous compromises got written out at least in part over the years - typically at a cost of many lives.
A Constitutional Convention means a rewrite with the worst-faith actors knowing exactly how to poison and break the system. And a whole set of new compromises that will over time hopefully be able to get patched out.
Unless you're arguing to do it with no compromises with the GOP which...good luck I guess? I can't see how things end up actually better in any way that the mess we've already got. The idea is that there's nowhere to go but up has sadly been disproven countless times throughout history both past and recent.
By design, yes.
I'm not necessarily suggesting we shouldn't also be launching the occasional moonshot. I mean, sure, try to overhaul SCOTUS or whatever. But also put your efforts into changing things from the ground up.
Maybe it's too late for incrementaliam to save us from the worst of climate change. But what happens if we spend the next decade putting all our energy into dramatic solutions for climate change and it still fails? At that point, we get to either continue on from a position of ten years' work improving the political environment, or a position of the same garbage right-favoring environment we have now. If maybe prefer the latter?
It feels like a lot of the sentiment is "We will literally cease to exist as a species if we don't completely solve X in the next six months, so doing anything on a smaller scale is pointless."
And like.
No.
Even if things get really really shitty, there will still be a world that needs saving. And how would you like to try to save it? With a bunch of conservatives or a bunch of progressives?
Every inch of ground we gain increases the likelihood of success on any given measure. Maybe right now the odds of a Big Sexy Plan succeeding is 3%. But maybe if we work hard, next year it'll be 5%. And in another year, it'll be 7%. And eventually, we get to a point where the chance of success isn't negligible, and then things start to get better.
If (generalized) you legit don't think there's a point in putting effort into bettering the political environment because we're going to be Gilead in 12 months, I mean, okay. But at least have the decency not to denigrate the ones who DO think it's worth the effort as lazy moderate sum who just don't care enough.
Now it’s in the Parties thread
Regarding the bolded: the problem is the democrats categorically do not do this. There is no group saying to that idea “if you want to be lazy about it” because the democrats simply do not even try to. The closest thing to what you have suggested was OFA and after Obama won and they folded it into the DNC’s structure, the DNC strangled it and harvested it’s data collection. We needed a frame work being developed years ago and the party literally demolished the entity that was constructing one in favor of the existing networks that leadership preferred since the Clinton era