Originally published at: Elizabeth Warren: "We will make Roe alive again" | Boing Boing
…
12 Likes
More of this please. Rally the troops! Flood the f*cking zone in November!
31 Likes
How hard to we have to clap?
4 Likes
I’m an outsider. A Canadian. Looking in. We have our own fight coming; seems it’s always crawling around in the shadows, and the tentacles frequently lash out across the international border.
I can’t help but think both parties wanted this. Hear me out: we all saw this coming, but neither party seemed to want to do much about it. Seems to me that with midterms coming up this year, the GOP wanted to show their base they were getting work done, and the Democrats—lagging in the polls— wanted to point to something terrible to tell everyone why it was so important for folks to vote for them.
This is a profoundly cynical take, but it’s hard for me to see it any other way.
12 Likes
If it makes a difference, as hard as we can. Until our hands bleed. Also mobilize - get out on the streets and let them see our numbers - vote, and make sure that everyone we know does
This is not over
14 Likes
We’re in a fight for our very lives here. We need to get the young people of our nation to vote along with everybody else who gives a shit about a free America. The narrow minds in the country can’t stand the very idea that people who look, act or think different have any right to exist. They aren’t really openly saying it yet but you can bet your ass they would exterminate a bunch of us if they could. The time to fight back is right now before the November elections. The orange wave wants to wash us out of existence, we owe it to ourselves and our kids to fight these nazi swine just like our grandfathers did.
21 Likes
Don’t tempt me.
12 Likes
Your cynicism isn’t helping.
10 Likes
What precisely do you think the Democrats could have done to stop the overturning of R-v-W?
I don’t expect you to have a deep knowledge of the American system, but do you actually think the Dems could have stopped this, but decided not too? They don’t have a senate majority, and so can’t pass ANY legislation without the republicans. They also can’t overcome a filibuster. The president can not single handedly declare abortion legal. They can’t just add supreme court justices because they want to. They have NO power to stop the packed republican christian court from doing what it did. None at all.
The Nazis (republicans in name only) WANTED this to happen. It has been their plan for years. The only thing they wanted to do about it was to hasten this happening.
There’s no Both Sides to this.
15 Likes
This is a good reminder that there are members of the duopoly party who are responding to this disaster appropriately, rather than reading poems or doing yoga. Warren is not alone amongst the progressives and fighting liberals in party, either. We need more of them (and obviously fewer complacent “centrists” and Third Way types and other appeasers).
22 Likes
In the last year or so, not much that Ds could have done to stop this. In our wildest fantasies maybe they could have broken the filibuster & got a 1-line bill that asserted that bodily autonomy is one of the protections 14A grants everyone.
Casting the net further back? I don’t remember the numbers offhand - was there any way they could have got Obama’s last SCOTUS appointment through? Or blocked any of Trump’s given the shenanigans over Obama’s last pick? Is there any point in Biden’s term where there was the numbers and political capital to stack the court? Obama’s?
Was “FBI announces one of the candidates is under investigation 1 week before the election” illegal at the time? Is it illegal now?
I say this not for both-sides-ism, but to point out that Roe died a death of 1000 cuts, and the Ds need to be ready to fight the next 1000 cuts.
7 Likes
Answers to all of your questions is no. Republicans held the Senate when Garland was nominated and Turtle had made it very clear he would not allow any Democratic president to put a USSC nominee through. The FBI statement did violate policy, but nothing enforceable, and the Dems were a minority in the Senate during Trump’s appointments, and there is no filibuster on SC nominees. So, no. We really need to not try to both-sides this. Dems are far from perfect, but the only weapon we have is to vote them in at every opportunity.
18 Likes
It’s kind of water under the bridge now, but perhaps the democrats could have considered doing something about this during at least one of the times they held control of the presidency, senate and house at the same time. Carter, Clinton and Obama all had those chances and we got zero federal legislation to protect these rights.
You know, perhaps if they had done something at least once in fifty years at the times they had the power to, we might think that the human rights of people who want any sort of reproductive freedom actually mattered to the party.
17 Likes
-
Vote to end the filibuster. Don’t SAY you can’t, take an actual vote. Make Manchin stand up and vote nay. If for some reason there’s a surprise and it works, immediately force votes on the voting act and abortion rights and gay marriage to codify them as legal.
-
Change the rules of the senate on filibusters and force the GOP to have to take the floor and hold it to be successful. Stop letting them say “we filibuster” as if that’s the same thing.
-
If those fail, next you set up mobile Family Planning clinics and put them on public land, military bases, and any tribal land that agrees to host them. Places that states rights do not apply to. Put the military in charge of security of these clinics. Force the states and their good old boy militias to try something, we dare them. The President CAN do that RIGHT NOW.
-
Make abortion drugs available over the counter without a prescription like they are in most of the rest of the world. Then require pharmacies to include them.
-
Immediately stop taking donations from any corporation that also donates to anti-abortion theocratic politicians. Ask corporations like Dicks Sporting Goods - who took the courageous stance yesterday to support their employees with travel costs if they need abortion services - to pony up more if they can to bridge the gap.
-
Then and ONLY then, when you’ve done things to try and mitigate the damage, do you beg for donations and demand we vote. We already voted in 2020. We put you in charge. There are things you CAN do and SHOULD do, and right now… you’re demanding we vote again, rather than doing them.
-
Take to the streets with their constituents. Help organize protests in every damned state. Massive ones that call for everything, from securing reproductive rights, to ending slaughter of children and minorities due to gun violence, to ousting theocratic justices who lied. Maybe nothing changes, but at least the voices are being televised every damned day into the soul of America over its media.
-
Every American who supports reproductive rights needs to join the Auntie networks springing up on Reddit and elsewhere. Get involved, help folks who are trapped in theocratic states ruled by religious minorities.
-
Start dumping buckets of money into constant ads on every channel, every social media site, about the theocratic attack on our American values. Hang this shit around their neck 24 hours a day until November and remind Americans what they are voting for. All those folks who were against mask mandates and vaccine mandates? Remind them that in almost no case were those enforced by law, they were CHOICES.
-
Create a documentary spelling out these assaults on American values and ideals, just as the GOP seems to do every few years. You cannot change hearts and minds by having politicians standing in the capital spouting off about “you must vote,” you need to educate them. The Jan 6th commission televised hearings is a case study in how to do things like this well and effectively.
That’s 10 of the top of my head. What do you got? Any? Or just throwing up your hands and quitting? The dems had options, and so for they’ve used none of them. They are playing nice at a time we need them to play dirty, just like the GQP does.
31 Likes
I understand the frustration, but during those periods we had Roe. No one seriously thought that the decision was in jeopardy, which is part of why the leak, and now the reality, led to such shock. We need to be looking forward, and not trying to point the finger at the Dems for how this played out. The fascist right pulled off their long game successfully. That sucks. But it also gives us a playbook to go by. They focused initially on local elections, which most of us ignored. They built a dedicated, if utterly misguided, base. We already have that, but the party bosses seem loathe to appeal to it. We need to do that. We need to vote like our lives depend on it, because they do. Anyone who does not look like they do, act like they do and think like they do is a target, and they have to keep their base angry and afraid to keep power. Martin Niemöller’s poem is playing out in front of our eyes. I am not a woman, so this doesn’t matter to me. I am not trans, so this doesn’t matter to me. I am not Black, so this doesn’t matter to me. What do you mean they are coming for me? Why won’t someone stand up for me?
20 Likes
What precisely do you think the Democrats could have done to stop the overturning of R-v-W?
Nothing, in the last handful of years. But the long-standing republican strategy of filling the federal judiciary with their own appointments, and focusing much more heavily on state and local politics, are things the democrats could and should have been fighting against for decades, and mostly haven’t. Not that they haven’t been fighting, they have, and that’s why there is so much to defend in the first place, but you need deeper roots to prevent gains from being taken away. I am not sure when was the last time I’ve seen the Dems as a group make points that would be at all persuasive to the median voter nationally (without others tearing apart for those who try to, for not being progressive enough, which is true but not always helpful). (Keep in mind that, whether we like it or not, the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb). You can actively dismantle the current system to make radical changes, or you can work the system to make incremental ones, and the establishment Dems have spent decades mostly pretending to try to do the latter while pretending and half trying to do the former but only where they’re already strong.
3 Likes
Elizabeth Warren is an establishment dem. What else would you have had her do that she hasn’t done? Honest question.
1 Like
Oh yeah, the states that have firmly blue legislatures are barely any different from the states that have firmly red legislatures. /s
7 Likes
Elizabeth Warren would have made a great president.
22 Likes
I would dispute that Obama had a chance. As we all know, you need a supermajority of 60 to get anything through the Senate. Obama only had that really for 24 days that Congress was in session during the first year of his Presidency. Plus, that supermajority included Joe Lieberman, who had already left the Democratic Party and probably wouldn’t have touched a politically contentious issue like abortion rights with a 100 foot pole.
11 Likes
