3822

And this is what I’m complaining about. “There was a partisan effort to push these allegations” became “It’s a conspiracy to get revenge for the Clintons!” became “It’s actually Soros paying protesters!”. Perhaps the asymmetry is simply that the US population sucks and there’s literally no way to stop them from being terrible, but after Ford’s testimony people were ready to say this was a disaster for the GOP… then whitey got angry and suddenly it was a party. Better leadership would have better strategies and would use moments like this to destroy their opponents, the way the GOP immediately shifted gears and jumped all-in with BK, rather than just assuming that the truth will win out.

3823

Democrats are accused of not doing everything in their power to bring about results. But that’s not a fair accusation. In fact, they are willing to “break the norms” just like Republicans. When Reid got rid of judicial filibusters, he broke the norm. When Bork’s nomination was filibustered, that was also a broken norm.

The reason that people are more frustrated by Democrats is that they have to accomplish things to achieve their goals, and Republicans only have to sabotage whatever Democrats accomplished. So the Republicans have a far easier job. But I think both sides are willing to do whatever it takes.

I definitely heard both narratives, and so did most people. The Republicans got what they wanted in the end, but that was never much in doubt.

3824

As long as it’s the 1940 on this side of the Atlantic, I’ll call it a win!

3825

That’s all that matters, frankly.

3826

Has everyone not heard the Democratic side of the Kavanaugh nomination? I think everyone has.

There is nothing the minority party can do to stop judicial nominations. They can try to make it politically costly to the majority when unpopular nominees are pushed through, which is what they tried here. Will it work? We’ll never really know, but they gave it a pretty good shot.

3827

What a doozy of an ending to Infrastructure week!

3828

A lot of the recent posts in this thread have to do with procedure and technicalities so I shall don my technicality hat and help out:

All federal prosecutors are in the Department of Justice, run by Jeff Sessions, who was appointed by Trump. In addition, the local US Attorneys (federal equivalent to DAs) are all appointed by Trump.

Senate could in theory vote to hold Kavanaugh in contempt but that would require 60 votes to overcome the filibuster. In theory the Dems could do away with the filibuster with 51 votes and then pass a contempt vote with 51 votes, but that’s all moot. The Dems only have 49 votes (48.1 really b/c Manchin is 90% a Republican) so that’s not gonna happen.

The one thing that the 49 Senate Dems can do is tie up non-budget legislation using the filibuster. That’s it. The GOP can use the budget reconciliation process to ignore the 60 vote requirement once per year. That means they only need 51 votes, which is how they passed their tax cut.

With the single exception of blocking a non-budget-reconciliation law, the Dem Senate minority has no real world legal power. None. They cannot issue subpoenas to compel testimony (only the majority can). They do not direct the federal prosecutors (Trump does).

That’s actually why despite the threat that Kavanaugh posed, this was a nearly impossible fight all along. The only way to block Kavanaugh was to convince at least 2 GOP Senators (3 if Manchin voted Yes) to vote No. That’s it. That was the only option, and GOP party loyalty ended up overriding everything else.

So, although I like to criticize the Dems as feckless milquetoasts all the time, the Dems this time did every damn thing they could. Really. They just didn’t have the power to stop Kavanaugh.

We need to win some elections. Full stop. End of sentence.

Vote. Contribute. Canvas. Vote. Talk to undecided voters. Vote. Vote. Vote motherfuckers VOTE.

If that doesn’t get it done in November I think I will probably need a long hiatus from P&R, and perhaps from current events altogether. To quote Castiel, if the Dem’s don’t get at least one house of Congress in November, I’m gonna feel like it’s time to “start drinking heavily and wait for the inevitable blast wave to arrive.”

3829

What Sharpe just said.

3830

Part of the issue I see is in some of the above… The Democrats really didn’t have anything to do with this guy being a terrible choice. They didn’t (and couldn’t) actually do anything to stop it. The man himself derailed everything by being who he is, an abusing, lying, cheating weasel with partisan goals.

The news narrative should not be about Democrats at all. It should be about how the Republicans are voting to confirm someone who is obviously unfit for the job.

3831

Sadly, the Dems do not have that option. I don’t mean they’re too good for it but I mean they cannot do it. Their voters just aren’t the same type of hate-filled racially-motivated conformist tribalist reality-denying asshats as the GOP base. There are no strategies that could use Kavanaugh’s outburst to destroy the Dems’ opponents. Nothing the Dems could say would lessen the intensity of GOP support for Kavanaugh. The Dems had no political power to do anything political or legal, as I described above. They did a couple “yeah worth a shot monkeys might fly out of my butt” tactics like Sheldon Whitehouse suing and some Senator (Whitehouse?) filing an ethics complaint but neither one of those can or will go anywhere.

The problem is, the Dems just don’t have a majority, and the Dem base, as flawed and foolish as it can be, just does not have the same level of zealotry as the GOP. (And that’s actually a good thing b/c if the Dems did, we would be looking at a real live shooting war, and as bad as shit is, we don’t want a civil war. Civil wars are horrible and deadly and in the modern era, I shudder.)

The Dems in the last few decades have been worthless and weak in my view but they are really trying now and they just don’t have the goddamn power to magically stop the GOP.

We need to win some elections.

3832

Yes… and?

The media is a huge part of the problem. But there’s no available solution to that as long as they’d rather chase clicks than report the fucking news.

3833

I guess I’m just saying that people here seem to be helping advance the GOP narrative. Don’t do that.

3834

This is an important point.

The goal of the Democrats was not really to stop Kavenaugh. Because that’s impossible.

The goal was to make Republicans pay for it. They put a lot of effort into helping achieve that goal.

But now it’s on us to make it happen.

3835

The all or nothing nature of things really fucks things up.

Why I loudly declare that our electoral system is a huge part of the problem. Single seat, first past the post, districts are the fucking worst. Our electoral system needs reform, badly.

3836

Did Collins mention Ramirez at all? Avoiding all this shit and watching small foot with my 5 year old daughter who has to grow up with this shit.

3837

Pro tip: repeatedly and forcefully remind every republican voting family member that they are hypocritcal assholes.

Shame them, shame them repeatedly. Rub their noses in it. Shun them if you must.

That’s how you make them pay, their voters must feel the pain and shame, as they enable this bullshit.

3838

If they really did intentionally leak the allegations at the last minute to stir this up, then they at least did something. They did it poorly, though, and it doesn’t seem to me like they did it intentionally (more like someone went rogue). I also think it would be highly unethical in a real-world sense to leak the accusation without Dr. Ford’s permission. But, they had a lot of time to dig up other people who could testify and they had absolutely no corroboration. They basically stumbled into an issue that could have been a big deal and then each of them reacted independently. This is a failing of leadership and made for a thoroughly botched moment that put Dr. Ford through hell for basically nothing. This is what makes me angry about the injustice of it.

I get that “don’t boo, vote!” represents the real power we have as individuals, and I’m mostly just blowing off steam, but the system is broken not only because the system sucks, but because the people who represent our side suck. There is no chance that the Dems, if they retook power, would right the ship. We can hope they will turn Trump into the boogeyman that Clinton has become, but will they? They got 1 term after Nixon. An example of this is people calling for them to pack the court by bringing it up to 11. No, if you are going to go nuclear, you don’t just drop the bomb in the water. You add 9 more justices (at least 6 of them women), impose an 18 year term limit (1/year) to rotate Thomas, Breyer, and Ginsburg out while you still control the presidency, then once all your picks are in you make it 60 votes to confirm and 60 votes to revise the court.

Doing stuff like that, though, requires ideologues instead of power brokers.

3839

I remain convinced that “first past the post” is a red herring.

Our three-branch government has essentially become two branches, because of the outsize power of the Executive over judicial appointments. When lifetime appointments were written into the Constitution, judges lived to be 70-75 tops, and most folks figured that these judges would probably retire before they dropped dead. You’d typically get maybe 8-10 years out of a SCOTUS judge. Now you get 20-30.

And then where we DO separate the branches, we also hurt ourselves. Because unlike a parliamentary democracy where the Executive is a sub-branch of the Legislative, in the American system we’ve separated the two completely, which basically means a 2 party system is the default setting.

3840

More like 1890 before the GOP is done. Civil Rights? Nah. Environmental protection? What’s that? Labor unions? “Conspiracies in restraint of trade.” Unemployment insurance benefits or workers compensation? Eff that noise!

3841

https://twitter.com/heykmenz/status/1048301724333748229

EDIT: oopsie.