Watch: Marjorie Taylor Greene tells a crowd it's time for the GOP to fight each other

Maybe the only store in the US, but the EU, for example, would break it up faster than you can say “anti-trust” if there was even the possibility that was happening.

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It would be great, but wouldn’t it require completely reworking the US system? The Senate can’t work that way. Do we really need the Senate? Discuss

ETA: I also like ranked choice because I think it gives people more courage to vote their beliefs and not worry about their vote “not counting”

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“No.”

that was easy

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Yep, Betteridge’s law of headlines applies to more than just headlines! :wink:

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You can do both. In Ireland our parliamentary elections are ranked choice, and every constituency has at least three representatives. These are divvied up by population, so some parts of Dublin have as many seats as an entire rural county - but both areas have multiple representatives.

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Also…
If gravity is so strong it shapes the universe, why can’t we make it work for us? How come all it does is pull us down?

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Yep. If they’ve shown us anything this past several years it’s that our country can keep chugging along even when a majority in the senate not only doesn’t want to do anything productive, but actively obstructs anyone else doing so.
We’d be better off without them.

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The problem here is structural. California and Montana both get 2 senators. Despite huge population disparities. Low population, very conservative states skew the representation in the senate in a way that is tough to alter, other than, for instance, adding DC and PR as states. This is why Republican (and Manchin) oppose this so bitterly. Majority minority states would largely offset their structural advantage and gut their stranglehold on the senate. The house is more a gerrymandering situation, and subject to reasonable laws for redress. The senate is a much tougher nut to crack.

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What’s frightening is that there’s definitely a electorate for people like MTG and they’re becoming less shy about being visibly fascist. If anything, it’s becoming a badge of honor for them which emboldens them to do acts of violence.

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image

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They’ve learned that saying the racist shit out loud gets racists to vote for them on election day. At the same time, all of those that vote Republican because of money, Jesus, whatever don’t seem to be bothered at all by the racist talk.

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Because they are also racist, they just pretend like they are not.

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Their wealth and the dominance of their religion and a bunch of other things they vote for are deeply intertwined with systemic racism. They may not say that out loud but a lot of them are aware of it. It’s why this anti-CRT nonsense pushed by the more overt racists is getting particularly broad traction on the right.

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It also hugely contributes to the overrepresentation of tiny populations. We don’t need it.

If it was important wouldn’t we make sure it was part of the system when we impose a democracy elsewhere?

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Hydroelectricity.

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Yes, I do think it would be better. I think he has a lot of power because he is alone. Surely having 59 democrats will be more likely to pass democratic policies than 51.

Can you generate electricity from the GOP’s thundering rush to the ever-distant bottom? At least that would be something.

Actually, probably not. You could get a Freedom Convoy to run in a giant treadmill forever, but the energy always comes from outside.

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Quality is as important as quantity in these matters. The question is, why must the additional Democrats be more “centrist” (i.e. conservative)? That the DNC thinks that they couldn’t find more progressive candidates to make up their majority betrays a lack of imagination and – more importantly – a lack of willingness to do so.

Why is the default assumption of the DNC always that they need more Manchins instead or more Ocasio-Cortez’s?*

[* who, as a reminder, they didn’t support when she was primarily-ing out the old machine hack who preceded her in the seat]

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They need to win in the districts they are running in, otherwise it’s just academic. Coming back full circle, you can run an AOC, but that person would need to frame the policies to those voters in a way that they see a benefit. You know, tailoring the message to them. And that is my general point, the DNC is not doing it. They are running the same message everywhere as far as I can tell and complaining that the voters there are too stupid to get it. I would set the same policy goal everywhere (the platform) but change the marketing to meet the consumer. For instance income inequality. You could easily make a case against farm subsidies to Conagra, but not by just saying you’ll cancel them. You need to sell something else beneficial to the actual residents there and the price of that great thing - say direct payments to people below an income line - is letting go of corporate farm subsidies. Otherwise they will just see at as a zero sum game loss.

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Just when you think you’ve hit the bottom it turns out you’ve only scratched the surface.