3480

Almost everything about how the Senate operates is based on rules that the Senate sets for itself.

3481

Inmates running the asylum, lol

3482

SO MUCH THIS. It lets the “obstruction for its own sake” folks off the hook to not even go through the process.

3483

This is absolutely true, but also hilight the failures of the founders.

Because they did envision precisely he means of failure we see. The disciplined parties, the ability of a charlatan to ‘inflame the passions of the people’, and were wary of such things. But they ultimately dismissed them as infessible.

So while in their mind the senate should be representatives of a state, and therefore place state interests first, they failed to account for how their political apportionment would ultimately lead to a rigid two party system we see.

3484

I think this is kind of a simplification of the founders’ processes and ideas. The Democratic-Republican party was founded by Jefferson and Madison. The Federalists by Hamilton. Jefferson wrote many times that he thought two parties were natural, inevitable and mutually censoring.

Wherever there are men, there will be parties; and wherever there are free men they will make themselves heard. Those of firm health and spirits are unwilling to cede more of their liberty than is necessary to preserve order; those of feeble constitutions will wish to see one strong arm able to protect them from the many. These are the Whigs and Tories of nature. These mutual jealousies produce mutual security; and while the laws shall be obeyed, all will be safe. He alone is your enemy who disobeys them.

[Those] States in which local discontents might engender a commencement of fermentation would be paralyzed and self-checked by that very division into parties into which we have fallen, into which all States must fall wherein men are at liberty to think, speak and act freely according to the diversities of their individual conformations, and which are, perhaps, essential to preserve the purity of the government by the censorship which these parties habitually exercise over each other.

The Constitution is a historical document–the product of considerable debate and acrimony among disparate interests and the various flamboyant personalities of these men. They weren’t gods. They didn’t sit above and beyond their own historical context. They weren’t universally wise. And they made many mistakes. Two parties have been a persistent feature of U.S. politics since the very beginning of the country.

3485

So the choirboy high-schooler wrote:

“any girls we can beg to stay are welcome with open…”
and
“we get beds” — “this week has big potential. (interpret as wish)”

3486

Yes, I don’t really buy the argument that, having already themselves formed parties that were in diametric opposition with each other on basic principles, they somehow failed to anticipate or believe this would continue to happen.

If anything, the Constitution seems designed to make sure that it would always be two parties, and not three or four. There’s no lever for a minority third party to wield any power in our system, which is why we rarely have any strong third.

3487

Also, he signed it

FFFFF,
Bart

So… FFFFF isn’t a joke about the f word, which would make no sense, whereas the Find them, French them, etc. definition does make sense there… and, he’s apparently got the nickname Bart? Like in the book where he claimed not to be the Bart in question?

3488

Good thread from Matthew Miller:

"*
Reading the tea leaves, looks like Flake is yes, no indication from the other four (Murkowski, Collins, Heitkemp and Mancin.) Can’t really foresee all four voting no.

3489

Clearly Brett, PJ, and Squi have read their Jefferson.

3490

Yeah, this part seemed really damning to me, but since nothing matters anymore, who knows.

3491


3492

These two things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. If they envisioned parties of Whigs and Tories as the only logical and universal split between ideologies, envisioned each state containing “men [who] are at liberty to think, speak and act freely”, and therefore thought that the party lines would never be drawn such that a bunch of low-population states lined up against the high-population ones, they wouldn’t have seen the Senate as undemocratic in the way it currently is.

Of course, it’s entirely possible they did see this and just couldn’t do anything about it because the real key issue was slavery. They knew that states would divide into pro- and anti- slavery parties, and that the Senate itself was a way to convince the slave states they wouldn’t be forced to give it up. Perhaps they just hoped that those parties would be alliances of convenience on that single issue only and that other issues would divide every State equally. There’s no reason to assume they would have had the power to foresee the warping effects slavery and its violent abolition in the Civil War would have on all issues of diversity and equal rights, or that they would have been able to anticipate Marxism and the new ideological positions that would stem from mass production and the rise of white collar and blue collar jobs, or even that they could have guessed how improvements to transportation and communication technology would have resulted in static State boundaries driving ideological sorting across States (because individuals are free to go where the State government does things they like and not lose touch with their family and friends from home).

The problem with the Senate isn’t really the inherently un-democratic nature of it, it is that a) without the filibuster it fails to act as the check on radicalism it was meant to be, b) the lack of pork means that only campaign contributions, sound bites, and the committee memberships that help you earn them are available as grease, and c) the Hastert Rule breaks the whole concept of representative democracy. A vote for Joe Manchin is really a vote for Chuck Schumer and the majority of Democratic Senators. A vote for Susan Collins is really a vote for Mitch McConnell and the majority of Republican Senators. You are no longer able to get much more than a little bit of marginal value from your choice of representative, and that person now has very strong incentives not to buck the party when it actually matters. It’s turning the old maxim on its head - all politics has become national.

As for the Supreme Court, ideological impartiality is not a reasonable demand and the very fact that the President is supposed to make the selection means that it isn’t really possible. What you want instead is a qualified individual that falls within the mainstream view at the time of appointment (that is, you want to have a fixed time limit after which the Senate is required to vote and to require at least 60 votes to confirm a nominee), and a regular cycle of new appointments that ensures the Court itself is responsive to the current situation. Or even better, you could have the Court have no fixed membership and instead be a rotating selection of Appellate Court justices (or have both the Appellate and Supreme Courts be selected according to a rotating schedule from the active District Court justices).

3493

On some level, the current incarnation of parties, at least the GOP, must certainly transcend anything the founders predicted.

It doesn’t actually represent any kind of coherent view of how the government should be run. It has literally no core principles beyond the success of the party itself. Things that are being promoted now, like whacked out trade policy, are antithetical to stuff they advocated a few short years ago.

I can imagine the founders thinking that folks would form parties based on legitimate ideological differences… but I do not believe they would have imagined folks forming political parties based on pure, unadulterated tribalism.

3494

Isn’t the current GOP view that the government is evil, and everything should be done to either hinder or destroy it?

3495

No, that’s just a talking point.
They absolutely don’t want to reduce the power of government, because they want to use that power to implement authoritarian policies.

3496

I never forgot what those men did to me, but I forced the memories down into a tiny, locked compartment. “This will not matter,” I swore to myself over and over. My life was not derailed. Silence enabled that victory. Had I been dealing with the misogyny, with the outraged, aggressive sympathy for men that erupts when women disclose sexual assault in a hostile epistemic world — I knew this intuitively even at 19 — the shame would have been fed and grown. It would have taken me down.

3497

Great piece.

This.

Whereas sexism justifies patriarchal social arrangements by differentiating between women and men, she points out, misogyny works by differentiating between “good women” and “bad women,” by rewarding the good ones and punishing the bad.

Is a surprisingly common problem. If you’re an an assertive, vocal woman who has any trait whatsoever some guy doesn’t think should be attributed to your sex or just doesn’t like, often the same trait they would allow and even praise in a man, you get put in the bad woman slot to be shouted down, ignored, and often with some weird explanation,if they give one at all, as to why its okay to do that.

I cannot imagine what these women go through to step in front of the world like they do so a bunch of people can shift them into the bad or good woman camp and then judge everything about them. Their aggressors get so many people who defend them when that happens to them, and… seeing this fold out in our politics like that. It infuriates me. Anyone who wants to put me in the bad woman camp for that, so be it.

3498
3499

Wait, what?
Cornyn is saying not to rush things?