The senate democrats appear to have forgotten how to negotiate from a position of advantage. What would happen if they communicated privately to the republicans that they are planning to suspend the fillibuster, and use budget reconcilliation whenever they need to, until they choose a senate leader who is willing to place the good of the nation above their party?
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That’s what happens when you sell your soul.
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Well, yes, there are of course outliers. And yes, there are a range of other factors that can effect how long one lives.
I am just saying that is the cold reality I have had to come to terms with, with my parents. They might have another 20 years, they might have a couple. My dad, who is in great health for his age, had a heart attack a couple years ago. They “widow maker” type, but he pulled through ok. Whew. Still, you never know when the big one will hit.
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My dad had a heart attack at 55, got a triple heart bypass that the doc said “will give you maybe 10 years”. That was 29 years ago. Mind you, my dad is a proper whinger. I remind him that: “the more you complain, the longer Dog makes you live.”
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It’s the same with the UK’s Conservative Party. They knew from long experience that Johnson was pathologically lazy and unfit to be PM, but they voted for him to become party leader purely because he was popular with a public who had only ever seen Johnson’s cartoonish side.
A couple of years later and we have a bloated, lazy narcissist overseeing an economic collapse and failing to get to grips with Covid.
We’re all paying a heavy price so the Tories could put the ‘fun’ back into their party after the Teresa May years.
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Nothing at all would happen. There are only a small handful of repuglicans who have the slightest interest in the good of the country (and only to the extent that doing so will keep the country stable enough to allow them to increase their personal wealth, as they realize that chaos would throw the stock-market into free-falll). And most of those are doomed to be primaried out-of-existenace. The Repugs are vehemently opposed to the good of the nation, and would never under any circumstances countenance giving authority to anyone who would work with the democrats in any way. They would much rather convince the democratic members to kill the fillubuster (and [barely] pass the legislation required to keep the country from collapsing for a few more years) so that they can whine and complain about how the hurculean efforts of the Dems will fail to erase all the pain and suffering that the Repubs worked so hard for 4 years to create, and that the Dems failure to reverse everything means that only republicans should be in power.
Plus, don’t forget all the local state efforts that are going to make it neigh impossible for urban voters to vote in the coming elections. (reducing/eliminating early voting, reducing polling places and funding for high population areas (imagine 1 polling place per county like Texas was aiming for) beeing seen as “willing to work with the dems for the good of the country” would make them un-electable to the new trumpian base.
Repugs would much rather force the Democrats to kill the fillibuster so that they can use that to claim the Democrats are attacking democracy, or something.
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I wish we could depend on this, but hatred and corruption seem to have a preservative effect. I think Rush Limbaugh is only gone because he accidentally sat on his phylactery.
Any chance Trump will be in jail by 2024?
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Everyone thought Mitch was turning on trump when he blamed him for the riots. In reality that is just how he sounds when complimenting someone on a job well done. The masters are pleased.
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Knowing Mitch, this should not have been a surprise, really. He has no beliefs, no ethics, and it’s now abundantly clear, when it challenges his self-interests, not even the vestiges of a moral center of any kind. In other words, he’s completely emblematic of the entire Republican party right now.
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Any leverage the Dems had evaporated when Joe Manchin publicly announced he wouldn’t support removing the filibuster.
One thing both parties have in common is that they’re only really united when they’re in the minority. The house spent 2019 and 2020 banging out tons of appeal-to-the-base legislation that was dead on arrival in McConnell’s Senate; Expect there to be a lot more debate and internal caucus negotiation now that proposals have a chance of actually becoming law.
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I like how confident McConnell is that he will live to see 2024, There is a 40%+ chance some Q-knucklehead will probably try to harm him for the sheer hell of it.
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The good die young.
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I’m just glad they moved it out of our county (this year, at least).
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Successful political leaders know how to bring holdouts like Manchin into line with the party’s objectives. Newt Gingrich, for example, hammered the republicans into a unified force during the Clinton admin and they’ve remained sufficiently in lockstep on critical votes ever since.
Granted it’s dicier when the senate is 50-50 and there’s no room for dissent by dems in red-purple voting districts, but they have to be forcefully made aware of what’s at risk. They are still playing the ball game that worked a decade or so ago, when the future of democracy in the USA was not on the table.
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Resources right? People who hog more resources live longer. Selfishness, misanthropy, and greed leave you with more resources and more resources = longer life. That’s cynical sounding and I don’t like it but however I feel about it, I can’t quite bring myself to believe it is any less true.
I’m also in the camp that sees no real incongruity for Mitch here. He is in the business of keeping a certain kind of power dynamic going because it benefits him and men like himself and those are the only people he believes are even fully human.
One thing that has been brewing in the back of my mind though is that almost every social group that functions well pushes back pretty hard on selfishness, greed, avarice. I wonder if in order to have a functional social group the raw ugliness of greed’s utility has to be actively kept in check through active social discouragement. I dunno… I’m rambling.
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I know, let’s let fringe Democrats block the DNC from doing anything because otherwise they might be replaced with Republicans who block the DNC from doing anything!
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