I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but if the GQP takes even just the house, they are going to make life very hard on Biden. His polling numbers are bad as is. I don’t see how he manages to finish the term, much less run again.
And I’m saying this as someone who likes Biden.
He will complete the term regardless.
Sure the House can approve Articles of Impeachment by a majority vote. The trial in the Senate requires a supermajority to convict.
Time to holler at your representative and senators.
The email I sent out a few days back:
(The version I sent didn’t have the “Learn more:” links; this started as an op-ed I wrote for the county Democratic party’s blog.)
My phone script:
This framing of “why can’t the dems pass something with the a trifecta” is disingenuous at best. The slimmest possible Senate majority, complete with two swing voters who are in love with the idea of the filibuster, means that the only things the Dems are passing are reconciliation bills that deal in budgetary matters or painstakingly negotiated compromises like the recent guns bill. There are absolutely not 10 Republican senate votes on any sort of Roe codification bill. This is not something Biden and Harris have control over and it’s wrong to lay it only at their feet.
I think it’s probably worth getting people on the voting record, and I think we should have more open discussions about the structure of the supreme court. The path that gives us actual progress on codification, though, is to get at least 2 more senate seats held by progressive (and anti-filibuster) Dems and allies, and to hold the House. Anybody who tells you otherwise is showboating or, worse, intentionally trying to worsen divides and make it harder to actually get to progress.
Just to address two of the suggestions in the post, Biden cannot expand the size of the Court. Only Congress can do that, and they have to do it by amending the law setting the size of the Court, so they would need a filibuster-proof 60 votes. We know they don’t have that. So that brings us to the second suggestion: ending the filibuster. I’m all for that, but Manchin and Sinema have made it abundantly clear they will never support that. So that suggestion is dead in the water unless Democrats expand their lead in November. I know everyone is tired of hearing “VOTE” as a plan of action, but it is literally necessary before any of the other ideas can happen.
The hard truth is, we lost this battle. The war isn’t over, but Roe is, and there’s no quick fix to protecting abortion rights nationally. Even had Congress codified Roe into law during Carter’s Presidency (I have admittedly no idea if anyone proposed that at the time or how likely it would have been to pass, but let’s just assume it could have), Alito et al would have just concocted some legal justification for declaring that law unconstitutional and we’d be in the exact same spot right now. Clearly, if Congress passed a law today, state Republican AGs across the country would file suit tomorrow, SCOTUS would grant an emergency injunction, fast track that suit, and declare it unconstitutional. If Biden issued an executive order, same result. And I know some people argue that it’s important to see Democrats at least try, but I’m not sure piling up loss after loss after loss would help. It sucks. It all sucks, but I think voting is our only way out of this. Well…there’s another way, but I’m a pacifist, so I’m not ready to go there yet. And I’m not sure that would be successful either.
That’s not how it’s being framed, at least not here where we all understand the current constraints. This is discussing the hapless leadership of the executive branch and of the party establishment. There are things they can both call for in the future as a summons to action for voters (even if it’s not currently possible) and actually do right now, but they won’t.
Instead we get the VP saying “do what?”.
Nobody in Dem leadership should be asking “what should we do”, they should be telling us what the plan is. This is literally what they’re there for…
FDR lost when he tried to pack the Court - but he actually won because the Court changed its position.
Quoting from the CNN anchor:
What do you say to Democratic voters who argue “Wait a minute, we worked really hard to elect a Democratic president and vice president, a Democratic-led House, a Democratic-led Senate. Do it now.”
That is absolutely how it’s being framed here. Yes, we here know the answer. The CNN anchor knows the answer, too, and if they wanted to they could have set up the question as “what is necessary in addition to what you have already to enact what Democratic voters want here?”
It’s a small but important difference. It acknowledges the truth, that what we have is not enough - that as @danimagoo says, we lost this battle.
By “here” I meant Boingboing.
And as @KathyPartdeux points out, there are things they actually can do right now to mitigate the results of this horrible decision. But further, as @RigelT informs us, they’re not going to do them.
Not all battles are won via legislative action. That’s why the other side keeps winning; they know that.
And you don’t win elections by not motivating your potential voters.
Here’s the thing: laying out an actionable plan, even one you cannot currently execute, is a real constructive action. “Vote for us and donate,” isn’t a plan. Especially because the Democrats have a history of wielding power with, to be generous, too much restraint. There’s no rational reason to believe that, if we gave the Democrats any sort of majority, that anything would substantially change- to the contrary, in the last election cycle, their fucking promise was that nothing would fundamentally change.
It’s like the entire Dem leadership is the “This is Fine” dog, and it’s frustrating to watch. I live in PA and I’m getting to “enjoy” watching Shapiro sleepwalk his way into what is going to be a shellacking because he believes that since his opponent is full on MAGA election fraud mouth-foaming lunacy, Shapiro doesn’t need to campaign aggressively, or all his campaign needs to do is remind people that Mastriano is unhinged.
He is wrong, and he should know better. I’m going on a rant here, but it’s the goddamn fecklessness and absolute absence of urgency. Have a plan. Execute the plan. Measure progress against the plan. Adjust the plan. Even if you can’t do everything you can at least do something more than beg for donations and votes.
Here’s a wild-ass ain’t gonna happen notion that i’d at least like to see attempted within the executive branch: along with every HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine given the CDC budgets enough to hand the young person (unfortunately mostly young females even-though young males can be carriers) an unexpected pregnancy management kit of mifepristone or misoprostol. Yes the howling on the right would be shrill, but when isn’t it? Oh, and where’s the @#$ AMA complaining about politics interfering with basic medical practices and Hippocratic oath and what-not? (“You old @#$ you! The AMA is an eeeeevil corporate money making syndicate…!!!” yeah ok)
based on the context of what is printed, I would also ask for clarification to a statement like Do it now. and once clarified she did respond.
She absolutely should have known what was being asked, and express the collective outrage about the stripping away of rights, and at least a hint of a plan/direction/strategy.
Leaders should be leading, and that’s not what we saw.
yup. this.
sure abortion clinics on federal land might get the government sued and those clinics shut down. so what? they would help women who need health care while the battle drags out in court.
the gop had 5127 ( only a slight exaggeration ) bills to end obamacare. that they lost every time didn’t matter. the dems should be putting up pro choice bills, contraceptive bills, same sex marriage bills, privacy bills - everything that the supreme court plans to take away.
exhaust the gop utterly.
literally anything would help.
And how exactly are they to eliminate the filibuster and expand the court with the razor thin majority they hold and Sinema and Manchin unwilling to play ball?
I get that progressives are mad. But let’s be realistic. Until we pick up two more seats, those BIG changes are nigh impossible with the current majority.
There are plenty of things to criticize them over, but this is just absurd. As long as the filibuster stands, no meaningful reform will happen. As long as the dems hold this tiny majority, the filibuster will stand.
Get active, get organized, and get us two more democratic senators. THEN you can crab about what they do or do not accomplish.
I’m not convinced that holding doomed show votes on court packing or codifying Roe is how we energize the Dem base. People here on this BBS keep saying “there are things we can do,” but these are not (currently) solutions that actually lead to any change for the people harmed by the Dobbs decision.
Maybe an informative thing to look at here would be all the show votes that Republicans made of repealing the ACA when they held the house but didn’t have the votes in the senate. Did that actually work for energizing their base? It didn’t ultimately get them what they wanted. Would the same strategy work better for the Dems and the liberal base? I worry that failed votes made without any chance of succeeding would simply increase the sense that we’re in a hopeless / rigged situation and actually depress turnout and participation further. The one thing it would do would be to get certain opponents on the record against codification, but most of them are already so vocal about their beliefs that I doubt the utility of such a move.
I heard the NPR interview on these same points and she does do a deep dive into everything -else- the administration is accomplishing. But on this key point:
she says they do not have the votes. Both parties are trying to leverage this to get more people out to the polls.
I’m getting curious as I’ve seen some social media posts from Dallas Goldtooth, can clinics be located on tribal lands?
probably before today’s ruling, probably not after
