No congressperson is going to give a shit about any feedback from someone that’s not a constituent.
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generally I agree with you, however the two women that shamed Flake into requesting a delay were not from Az.
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Except the delay was all theater to give Republicans cover for their eventual confirmation.
He didn’t care what those women had to say - he saw an opportunity to spin it and he played the whole situation masterfully.
He was able to feign compassion and Concern. This supposed pressure kicked into gear a sham investigation that was scoped and restricted to near worthlessness. The whole time building fervor and support on the R side and spinning a narrative of them being the Good Guys. This all makes Kavanaugh’s confirmation feel like a huge “win” despite him still being deeply unpopular.
This all couldn’t have played out any better for Trump and Congressional Republicans.
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Collins is one of very, very, very few national level, explicitly pro-choice, Republican politicians. And she’s from a state that, while pretty fucking crazy. Has the 2nd highest popular support for legal abortion, after Vermont. Somewhere around 70% of Mainers are pro-choice. She apparently gets a decent amount of financial support from Pro-Choice groups as well. Collins was a potential no vote because a no vote would be keeping in line with her campaign promises and over all platform, which were explicitly pro-choice. And included explicit promises to never confirm a Supreme Court judge who was likely to over turn Roe v Wade.
And because even if that was bullshit she didn’t really believe. A vote to confirm Kavanaugh, who is likely to overturn Roe v Wade. Likely means she won’t be winning re-election in 2020. If Roe v Wade gets overturned before then. She’s done for sure.
Aside from the “vote no or we’ll donate all this money to your eventual challenger” campaign. All of the pro-choice groups that have warily funded her, and supported her. Have been openly threatening to spend even more for a DNC challenger if she votes to confirm. To pull all support. And so forth.
I would have expected Murkowski to be a yes and Collins to be a no. If any Republican broke with the party line. Murkowski is a right wing nut in a low population right wing nut state, Collins has a significant reason at the polls to be wary of a yes vote.
I don’t know if that’s the case. They were going to get a confirmation, if not for Kav, then for another party hack with the same legal positions but less baggage one way or another. They have a majority.
But now its a month to the mid terms. The current session has to end (I think it was loosely scheduled to end a couple weeks ago) so they can all go back to campaign. Almost nothing else has gotten done in the mean time. So everything else has been put off till the lame duck. Kavanaugh is historically unpopular, and getting less so. Polling heading into the midterms is still increasingly in the DNC’s favor. The GOP has been cutting funding for candidates in house districts that were likely wins until the last couple of weeks. Basically just giving up, and not because they’re safe. And there’s this REALLY BIG. CONGRESSIONAL controversy. And a messy process where the GOP clearly couldn’t get their shit together, with a whole bunch of bad to roll around the press and the campaigns. Stuff that’s very clearly about congress, and not about Trump.
Assuming everything goes as expected tomorrow. They’ll get their SC seat. But they very well may have fucked themselves on everything else to get it.
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I’ve been following the polling closely and if anything R women are being energized by the confirmation process - to vote for Republicans. The margins for victory in the House are getting slimmer and the Senate is more of a long shot than ever. Trump’s popularity has actually been trending upwards in recent weeks.
They have played up the Kavanaugh confirmation masterfully as a wedge issue - a hill to die on and I don’t see them making this gamble without a lot of strategy behind it. “Who cares what Kavanaugh did or didn’t do - he’s being smeared by Democrats and special interests! They are trying to ruin his life!”
I want to see a huge blue wave hit come November as much as anybody here but I’m keeping my expectations low.
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That shift is pretty slight. And the polling on female GOP voters is drawn from subsets of poll’s data. Which means they’re pretty god damn small sample sizes. I think one I saw had 36 people in the subset. Quite of a few of the specific polls I’ve seen pointed to to say GOP women are rallying, are polls with an established GOP bias (both partisan pollsters, and independent polls with samples that skew that way). And there’s been about as much polling, and about as many claims that it’s driving GOP women away (with pretty much the same shortcomings). And polling on Kavanaugh directly continues to trend down. Whatever upticks for the GOP have appeared have only appeared in the most recent polling. Like last few days. And again slight. Like Trump’s approval uptick. Started about 2-3 weeks ago. And while he’s been on an uptrend. He’s still just revolving around the 41ish% spot he’s been in since the beginning of the year. We say he’s on an uptick. But we’re talking about fractions of a percent to 1% at most. And he’s still sitting in a shitty spot.
In other words yeah the polls moved in a particular way. Very slightly. And last week they moved very slightly in the opposite direction. There hasn’t really been a breakaway in either direction. Polls run at a delay. And it takes a few weeks after any given event for public opinion to react. The over all thrust month to month. From the beginning of the year to now has been more and more in the DNC’s favor. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that’s suddenly reversed. Even as the top level stuff focused on this has been “Oh no .3% increase for the GOP!” a lot of individual key races seem to still be trending ever more DNC when polled in isolation. I really think it’s just noise, as reported by the horse race.
But polls aren’t predictive, its a snap shot. Of where we were 4 days ago. At best. There’s 30 days of active campaigning with this hanging over the GOP. And technically it hasn’t even happened yet (I have SUSPICIONS about the vote being set on a Saturday) And there’s other things to suggest they’re expecting big problems. The fact that they pushed so hard on Kav, instead of moving on. And again. They’re pulling money from congressional races in districts Trump won. With majority GOP histories. Because they now look like likely losses.
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Funny. But the image that that conjures up…EEEEeeeeeewwwwww!!!
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Senators not only can be impeached, they have been. William Blount in 1797 seems to have been the first.
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Can’t they be recalled as well?
Or am I thinking of state offices?
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Collins jumped on Al Franken with guilty until proven innocent and denied him his requested investigation. Now Brett is innocent, PERIOD, and wants us to accept a sham investigation as genuine. We see through her.
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This is where I got my answer from. Haven’t actually read the whole thing yet.
http://www.answers.com/Q/Can_US_Senators_and_Representatives_be_impeached
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I wonder what Al Franken thinks of all of this ?
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She is a lickspittle. No other word captures the essence of her and the other submissive toadies as eloquently.
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I wish all Democrats under 35 would participate in Democratic primaries. That’s actually a strategy that wins.
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Turn out for younger Americans is atrocious. Whenever I see that really hard lined “blargh anyone over 35/40 thrown out of politics” thing. Yeah there’d be noone left in politics. Voter turn out isn’t just bad, but younger Americans run for office, get involved at various levels at lower rates.
My own age group, (Just under 35, hooray! I survive the purge!) apparently outnumbers boomers in terms of living citizens currently eligible to vote.
But just google “voter turn out by age” and get depressed.
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There’s a good piece here on the topic of millenial turnout:
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Weak attempt at self-defence. So HRC didn’t fire your cohort up to vote: your job as a citizen is to turn up and vote. It is your(*) country, not just hers. Sure, if she does a bad job she has to take personal responsibility for running a crap campaign or being a tainted candidate, but if you don’t show up to vote don’t complain that it was because the candidate didn’t satisfactorily entice you, you should be enticed by the power of your vote and your civic responsibility.
She didn’t fire me up either. None of the people I’ve voted for in the last 40 years did, and I’ll bet that’s true for most older Republicans as well. African-American women vote for president at a rate of around 60-70%, and did so even before Obama. You think candidates like Dukakis and Gore fired them up? No, they understand firsthand how valuable their vote is, not least because so much effort is made to take it away from them.
(*) You Smiley, not you Wanderfound
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About 49% of eligible Millennials voted in 2016. Not great, but not as bad as people are saying. Had they turned out at the 65% of generation x voters, or the 70% of boomer voters, we’d have a much different country today, and every sign points to more of them voting as they age, and that they are far more progressive than any of the generations that precede them. As a generation X voter and liberal, I welcome them to the fight and look forward to more of them joining in. We are definitely more liberal than the boomers, but Millennials outshine us there by far, and I can’t wait to see the changes this will bring as the boomers fade from power.
Everyone should vote. If they did, we’d be far more likely to have the country we dream of, one where citizens can trust their government to have THEIR backs, not the backs of rich corporations and elitist oligarchs. Double check your registration this weekend, because voter purges are real, especially in minority districts, and eligibility to vote in November starts expiring in some states this coming week, so you’ll need to re-register.
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Work every day to have your revenge.
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Well, you should pay more attention.
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