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Politico: Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows
- Thread starter Smokeymicpot
- Start date
Ok, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Look up Arlen Spector switched parties, look up when Al Franken when seated, and look up when Scott Brown was elected. You are, very simply, wrong.
And it's not calling peole DINOs, when they are, in fact, not even Democrats in name. That's what being an Independent means.
They look at them as more resources for that school to prison pipeline that results in legal slavery.
The Dems can primary incumbents, why can't they focus on primarying DINOs? Look at Texas now, Just in the last couple days we have 3 congressional leaders vocally all backing an anti-choice incumbent candidate against a progressive woman.
No, assuming that the Dems can just do whatever they want whenever they want and that that is a good idea is alarming though yes.
They back incumbents.
Good or bad, that means they back AOC and the squad. Cori Bush will be supported forever. (Which I think is good.)
Because they back incumbents, generally. I don't think in this situation they should be, but that's more because of Cuellar's FBI run-ins.
Everyone keeps mentioning this but the votes in the House aren't in question. If these were Senate candidates, I'd get the point.
And I'm saying it's a bad thing to always back incumbents. It's not a law. It's not required. It's a formality that has protected people who don't support (what should be) democrat party values.
"Spreadsheets full of women"
What a bunch of fucking idiots, who the hell would report this?
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But in this case, they shouldn't back Cuellar. And I think they shouldn't back him because he's anti-choice, yes. I think this should be a dividing line. I understand others disagree and how valuable individual House seats are, but I think being unified on this (which should be the easiest thing to be unified on) is important.
That's not what he's saying. Y'all talking past each other.
But "only some, not all, Democratic officials advance my interests" does not logically lead to "don't elect Democrats." The people who believe that (and I'm not saying you are, but several people in this thread and throughout the history of this site) are wild.
This is also part of being a big-tent party, which the Democrats (ostensibly) are.
So, I agree, a big tent party is in concept a good thing. But you have to draw a moral line. In my opinion, Democrats shouldn't be openly supporting an anti-choice candidate no matter what, especially days after the Supreme Court news.
It's the safest policy when you have to work with people.
If you start playing favorites internal politics gets dicey.
I actually agree with this.
I think people DO need to understand that the party backs incumbents by default. This is why The Squad, who campaigned on being agitators of the establishment, got establishment backing in their reelections. This is not inconsistent behavior.
But if there was ever a time to break consistent behavior, I would say it's now.
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Won't get any personal argument from me. Cuellar sucks.
That is just why they do it though.
Oh yeah, I completely get that. I just think there does need to be a line for the party that is known, stated, and enforced.
He factually had 60 votes for 4 months in late 2009 to early 2010. The 58th and 59th of those 60 votes were pro-life Dems, one of them from Nebraska where 2 pro-life Republicans currently serve. The 60th vote was Joe Lieberman, by then an independent and had endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008.
"Doing something" about those votes would not have resulted in getting 60 pro-choice votes. Purity tests don't increase your power. We might as well not have nominated Obama because he didn't support gay marriage and Kucinich the candidate who was the most far left would have lost to McCain.
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I tell them this is a crisis. And that people have put their lives on the line for us to be able to vote and not doing so is spitting on their sacrifices. And that the country sucks and it's an unjust place but this is a long game and that the struggle never stops. Ever.
i agree with almost everything here, but i've never quite understood the rhetoric of "it's okay if you personally are against abortion as long as you leave it at that." i do understand it in the sense that yeah, of course we should leave it at that because the only alternative is letting republicans own the issue as they pretend to give a shit about anything other than their own greed and malice
for the sake of discussion though (hopefully good faith—it's not like i ever get to explore this particular topic with any other progressives), if someone is personally against abortion it's because they think it's some form of wrongdoing. and that notion of wrongdoing would apply to all terminated pregnancies—not just the pregnancies that individual is involved with. you know what i mean? i really, really despise hypocrisy, and the position of "abortion is ethically wrong for me and my family but ethically fine for anyone else" has never tracked for me as logically consistent
again though, just to continuously be clear here (since this is understandably a raw topic with a lot of high emotions), i'm not at all trying paint the pro-life movement in any sort of positive light. front line pro-lifers are almost all religious zealots whose hypocrisy does 100x more damage than what i'm talking about
and regardless, as previously alluded to it's a moot point because of how blatantly obvious it is that Rs give zero shits about life or well-being or justice or anything else that's worth fighting for. basically, i find this issue very important on a theoretical and philosophical level, but in the real world we're all stuck in the conversation isn't good for anything other than intellectual enrichment and curiosity
hanging up my thoughts here on this particular angle for now, but i hope everyone can find ways to stay safe and sane in the coming days/weeks(/months/years/the rest of your life)
So, politely...you're wrong about how things work. In Canada, we only have one house (House of Commons) responsible for all laws. We also have rule by majority. So if you have 50%+1 seats, then you can pass whatever you want, no questions asked. Despite this, things still don't get done. The reason? It's a hell of a lot of work to pass laws. You need agreement in the caucus, you need to write the bills, you need herds of lawyers to cover your ass by making sure everything is constitutional, etc. The same is true in the US, only magnified tenfold since your system is so old and you also need it to pass two different bodies and get signed by the executive. And the Democrats are a big tent party even more than the Liberals in Canada, which makes it harder to get enough of them on board the same things.
You can't just pass a law, for example, that says marijuana is legal. You need so much time and research to draw things up.
People are aware that various groups have had to fight throughout history to secure a whole bunch of things we currently have access to. That doesn't engender a responsibility to participate, and that's not going to move people. People want to vote FOR something that is going to help their lives in some way, even if it's just for something as minor as an increase in food stamps. It is on those in power to make due on the work involved to actually get there.
Using Marijuana as a point of comparison is incredibly poor because Biden could, right now without having to do anything else decriminalize marijuana, put a complete halt to the federal raids and effectively legalize it. The US is not Canada.
And I don't really care about the 'big tent party' bullshit line because that's how you get pro-life democrats in the first place that tank policy. Because they don't want to take a hardline stance on something.
We get them because that's the only way we get any power to do anything at all.
You aren't getting a Jamal Bowman Senator from West Virginia. You're not even getting a Joe Biden.
The answer isn't to purge the moderate Dems who won't step up for the harder votes (but vote with us 95% of the time elsewhere), it's more Dems period.
If it weren't for those Dems, we'd have McConnel as leader and a 6-2 court instead of a 6-3 court.
If it weren't for those Dems, we'd have McConnel as leader and a 6-2 court instead of a 6-3 court.
So what's next? If the GOP continues on their power tirade and starts rolling back LGBT rights as well, should we start voting in and supporting democrats that want to ban it? That think my existence is a sin? After all, big tent party. The only way we can maintain power is by slowly sliding to the right so that we elect dems that are more and more republican. The only other option is to wait another 20-30 years for the people in power to start dying off and hope that we're not a further dumpsterfire by then as the next generation is saddled to fix the issues we've started.
Being pro-choice is strictly my line in the sand now. Let me make that clear: I live in Texas and I will never vote for someone that is not pro-choice.
Well for one, no one is advocating for the Dem party backsliding. As I stated Lieberman makes Manchin look like Sanders.
What it means is you might have to vote and tolerate other people being in this big tent who aren't with you 100% but will hopefully compromise and agree to things. Yes this means sometimes you don't get what you want or need but to just throw your arms up and say " to hell with it all " is a fundamental misunderstanding of the fight going on.
Politics and society is a game of staring each other down until society is either ready to blink or shit gets bad enough that they call it off and concede.
The Democratic Party currently runs on, by far, the most progressive platform for a major party in American history. There is one Democratic member of the House that is anti-choice, the lowest amount in history.
You have demonstrated, over and over agin in this thread, that you have no idea what you're talking about.
This and any other severe decisions by the court will hurt Republicans dearly in the mid-terms. I fully expected liberals to get rolled before this but the Republicans seem determined to cater to the most extreme and least helpful parts of their platform for winning independent or swing voters. They're screwed now. If the Dems get to 52 in the senate Manchin and Sinema won't be able to save them anymore.
Your argument was that they could use their supermajority to pass law, making this irrelevant to your point though.
we wont even get another joe manchin in WV after he's gone
Is there any evidence to back this up? Trump did abhorrently extreme things on a daily basis for four years and was rewarded with the second highest amount of presidential votes in american history. If extremism was a detriment to republican electability we wouldn't be in such dire straights at the moment
Nope.
A trump supporting Democratic candidate lost by double digits. We're getting a GQP KKK nutjob after he's gone.
His opponent got more both times.
Biden hit historic levels even.
Don't know what your story is but I grew up in a reliable blue city with worthless and corrupt Democrats. In my case it was mostly people voting for those corrupt politicians out of tradition or familiarity. Many things went down that hurt neighborhoods.
It's a hell of a cycle to break and even when one got replaced with someone that actually cared the city didn't shift much. All the corrupt asshats needed to go but honestly it seemed like not enough people cared or thought it would matter. We saved some parks, recreational centers, schools, etc. The city never felt saved.
It still came down to getting people to vote and help get out the vote. You can protest all you want but if you're not removing the problems from positions of power things will only get worse.
I see the same thing going on in national politics. Same faces in charge while people complain they're not getting the change they want. Those same faces keep winning their elections though.
Corruption needs apathy to thrive and thriving corruption leads to more apathy.
I didn't have time for it then and I don't now. I 100% believed my vote wouldn't count for shit in red ass Georgia. Even less so when I voted in the runoff election. I was wrong.
Yeah ,Republicans are worse than Democrats. Apathetic voters that make it harder to remove corrupt Democrats are a nuisance. I see where they're coming from, but if you're not fixing the problem... Apathetic voters
that lead to the racist death cult Republicans getting power get no empathy from my Black ass. That's about as close as being a threat to me as you can get.
I personally exclude those dealing with extreme voter suppression, because that happens once Republicans are in power. Those marginalized groups are already being threatened. As with everything there is nuance to all of this.
A lot of places republicans need to win are swing states or even democratic leaning ones that could elect republican senators or representatives if they make a good case. Before they could go "I'm not like Trump" and manage to win probably given that it's the mid-term after Democrats got control of everything. Now with them making such a tangible move against 69% of voters it's gonna be a lot harder I think
It's not protecting people, it's about protecting the majority. Name recognition alone from mentions in the news for the last 2, 4, 6 years is a massive advantage when you have many people who don't pay attention to politics.
You ignored almost everything of what I said. Ignore marijuana and replace it with universal healthcare, then. My point still stands that government is hard, and you haven't addressed it.
There's a lot of myopia on display in this thread alone that suggests otherwise. At the very least, being "aware" isn't the same thing as putting it in the proper perspective.
how exactly were people's lives being helped that got 70 million of them to vote for Trump, a second time?
Trumpers aren't even really in this discussion. Conservatives get votes because a contingent of our country exists specifically to hurt vulnerable people, damn the consequences to themselves.
We're talking about the class of "non-voters" here, whose reasons for not voting range anywhere from legitimately not caring about the consequences of elections, to being arbitrarily rendered ineligible either for life or any given cycles, to being barred from voting due to ridiculous ID laws, to being trapped in sociopolitical disenfranchisement that makes it excessively difficult to vote, to having given upon on political representation because, historically, the country has never actually addressed their concerns, to disability, and so on and so forth. There's many different types of non-voters.
What I'm trying to communicate is that they're not all unsalvageable assholes who don't care about minorities. And that the moment we realize this, the moment we can start actually figuring out ways to make some of these people, many of whom invariably agree with us, feel like a valid part of the political process again.
It's not though. It's simply a necessary thing in a voting system that is not proportional. Maybe that is what you meant, but I just wanted to point out that there is nothing particularly wonderful about a big-tent party.
To be fair most large countries have them, even in multiparty ones.
Forming a consensus among millions of voters is hard.
I'd argue the former isn't really an option, though. That 60 vote Senate (short-lived as it was) that was insufficient for doing anything but ACA negotiations because it had plenty of people willing to take their turn being the bad guy holding legislation hostage (reminder, that was the Senate where Ben Nelson managed to extract the Cornhusker Kickback until the Reconciliation Sidecar gave them a chance to snuff it out), that was the first actually filibuster-proof majority since 1979.
There were 61 Democrats from 75-79, which is basically the Nixon backlash and another high water mark for the party. If you go back to the 60s there's some bigger splits, but also, pre-1973 the filibuster threshold is 2/3s so 60 isn't the relevant number but 67. Filibuster-proof majorities were more common in older eras of the Senate but have been the exception to the rule post-1967. Having power like that isn't a thing that comes around very often at all, it's not like that's just going to fall into our laps if we bide our time.
What if we can fix the filibuster? Can that fix the Senate? Maybe, but that's not a 2 more votes proposition. Manchin and Sinema are the ones taking heat right now, but if 5 GOP Senators from states with Democratic governors were to drop dead on the spot and get replaced with Democrats making this a 55-45 Senate, I'd wager money we'd quickly be introduced to Manchin and Sinema's 5 new allies who are Very Concerned about literally all the same shit. I don't know that anything short of 60 actually gets you to a filibuster change, and I think anything 60+ probably results in a lot of people hiding under the banner of "why don't we just leave it alone, we have the votes to ignore it".
In all likelihood, what is necessary to make this a functional institution is basically the sort of margin in the Senate that we haven't seen in over 5 decades. It's an institution now requiring a miracle to merely render itself into something functional.
And honestly, the Senate as an institution has basically been broken from the jump. It's a chamber that spent 100+ years with a rule book where one asshole could stop literally anything for as long as they wanted with basically no effort all because some people in 1804 were overzealous in trimming some procedural motions, and only in the last 100 or so years have they added a mechanism where a massive supermajority could finally make them quit eventually. It's an institution that was designed to empower the literal states themselves, with Senators being chosen by state legislators, a weird bit of misdirection entirely because the people behind the Constitution were enacting anti-democratic barriers to people's direct input on the system (see also: Supreme Court nominations, the electoral college). It's an institution that only managed to operate at all entirely based on The Power of Norms, and one of the parties abandoned playing by those rules a couple decades ago.
Make your choice, it's up to you, but let's be real about the actual effort and chances of doing the bare minimum to enable the Senate to not be a broken husk.
So as an example, would you agree Trans and NB acceptance and understanding has increased in the past few years let alone decades among the left/Democratic party?
The same as with BLM/racial injustice? Neither are were we need them to be but would you agree we've progressed from were the Dems were on these issues even 20 years ago? 10?