If the Blue Wave happens, the backlash on them trying to ram through a pick during lame duck will be enormous. That's partly why they didn't wait for the national archives to produce the docs.
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US PoliERA 2018 |OT9| Next week has been EXHAUSTING
- Thread starter Midnight Jon
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Their attempted overreach has been one issue. The other is Trumps ego and the need to weigh in or have the last say on everything, which has typically tended to provoke much more questioning and opposition, shining a spotlight on stuff that otherwise would have slid through.
If the GOP took the easy wins and Trump kept his mouth shut, their agenda would be far further along and Trumps approval rating would be far higher.
The sharks sensed the blood in the water but have ended up eating themselves because they got greedy.
Yup they 100% tryin' to ignore this and say there's not enough evidence.
Republicans are in full kamikaze mode.
If only mcain lived a few more months, and rand pauls neighbor beating him up happened around now
The longer this has gone on, I think some on the left have forgotten that the never-trumpers are still conservatives. Them being reasonable on this one subject means nothing in the long run. If you think this is bad, watch how fast they try to pretend everything is normal again if a President Pence happens.
Yeah, if a federalist society nut is gonna be confirmed, might as well make it one that's easy to attack and lower confidence in the conservative court.
Like I don't get Republicans. They could easily get what they want without going full on treason and Trump but they seem to want to sink with the ship all in the name of falling in line. Like...bruh...the electorate is dumb. You know this. Why continue being such dipshits when you LITERALLY don't have too AND you still get damn near 100 percent of what you want?
Sure there are - the ones who've switched to Democratic from the '60s onward.
They don't know how to win by any other means than cheating.
Imagine if they spent months crafting an ACA repeal bill that took Collins' and Murkowski's concerns into consideration (remember, McCain only voted the bill down on process, not substance). Or passed a corporate tax cuts bill that didn't deliberately fuck over the middle and lower class to "pay" for it (even though it still blows up the deficit).
Trump's like, one good idea for a bill is an infrastructure package because how hard is it to screw up a bill that just gives everyone jobs and money for services that pretty much everyone benefits from? But nope, even Trump's version of that bill is a handout to the rich and McConnell refuses to take it up anyway (because there are so many other important things going on).
Imagine a decent (read: competent and charismatic) Republican President and a party apparatus that had its shit together. They could really be putting the squeeze on Heitkamp, Jones, Donnelly, Manchin etc right now to support a boring conservative justice and be on track to expand their very slim majority. But no they had to put up a fucking rapist because the president is also a fucking rapist who empathizes with other fucking rapists and give every red state Democrat an out for opposing them. Same with the tax cut and ACA votes, there was no downside for Dem Senators to vote no. Now the best they can probably hope for is breaking even in the Senate with a small majority that can already barely get anything done.
Normally I'd say I can't believe how colossally they've screwed this up but this has been the GOP for years. "Winning is easy young man, governing is harder." They failed upwards into power and all they've done since gaining it is fail. Can't wait for the reckoning in just less than two months.
Kavanaugh is Mitch's biggest compromise to Trump. Nunes is Ryan's.
They play the game to keep the big baby happy long enough to sign the next tax bill and keep Trump's base showing up at the polls. Kavanaugh is a temporary popularity L that will pay dividends for 30+ years.
Come on, you've seen the West Wing
Using a sober alcoholic's disease against them in a political context is pretty despicable, and it's doubly so when the only reason we know about it is because the alcoholic thought writing a memoir might help some other people.
Well even if Kavanaugh gets confirmed, he'll be massively tainted and he'll perfectly exemplify a Trump Supreme Court Justice, a judge following the "Grab'em by the Pussy" ethos. This could even turn away soft conservative women who are probably wondering how hard is it to nominate a conservative judge to the Supreme Court that's not a rapist.
Kavanaugh already had historical low approval ratings this will likely put them in the toilet. If Ford's account gets reported and retold wildly, I think most middle of the road people will say just pull the nomination and replace it with some other generic conservative judge.
Everybody is assuming because Clarence Thomas still got confirmed after the Anita Hill revelation the same will happen here. I beg to differ. Sadly Anita Hill was a black woman. Black girls can get abused abducted and not that many people really care. But a white girl goes missing, we make it a national issue, create amber alert systems, and etc. I don't know what race Ford is but I'm guessing she's white. The simple fact is more of the American public will probably show sympathy for a white woman. This is also 2018 in the #metoo era and I think there is a much bigger risk just speeding through the voting process without clearly hearing from both sides in detail. What exactly is Kavanaugh denying? Just the incident itself or any knowledge of the woman? He can't do it through written statements, he'll have to look into the camera and make the denials for this nomination to go forward. Right now the WH and the GOP are just posturing, but they know now that she has a name and face, and provided a good amount of details, this can't be swept under the rug. Otherwise they'll face an even bigger disaster in the fall mid-terms.
Kavanaugh already had historical low approval ratings this will likely put them in the toilet. If Ford's account gets reported and retold wildly, I think most middle of the road people will say just pull the nomination and replace it with some other generic conservative judge.
Everybody is assuming because Clarence Thomas still got confirmed after the Anita Hill revelation the same will happen here. I beg to differ. Sadly Anita Hill was a black woman. Black girls can get abused abducted and not that many people really care. But a white girl goes missing, we make it a national issue, create amber alert systems, and etc. I don't know what race Ford is but I'm guessing she's white. The simple fact is more of the American public will probably show sympathy for a white woman. This is also 2018 in the #metoo era and I think there is a much bigger risk just speeding through the voting process without clearly hearing from both sides in detail. What exactly is Kavanaugh denying? Just the incident itself or any knowledge of the woman? He can't do it through written statements, he'll have to look into the camera and make the denials for this nomination to go forward. Right now the WH and the GOP are just posturing, but they know now that she has a name and face, and provided a good amount of details, this can't be swept under the rug. Otherwise they'll face an even bigger disaster in the fall mid-terms.
Embattled Supreme Court Justice Nominee Brett Michael Kavanaugh.
Yup, this is the right take. Any dissent in the ranks is essential.
Maybe he can just go back to Zambia for a while.
See this is the shit that drives me crazy. You have so much leverage! You're one of 100 in a very closely divided Senate! If he voted with the Democrats on the judiciary committee he could sink the vote right now without even letting it go to the floor. He's not even running again so there's not that much incentive to stay in the party's good graces (yeah, it might cost him some lobbying/consulting gigs with conservative clients, but he'll be treated as a hero by the center and even the left). And who knows, he might, but by almost every action I doubt it.
The only cool thing Flake did was openly endorse Jones and give him money, even if it was a pittance ($100). That suggests to me that at least Flake can draw a line somewhere, and it's a similar situation with Kavanaugh. Maybe he will here too. Delaying and blocking Kavanaugh can give him a legacy.
"I didn't think they should have moved forward on it, but since they did, I'll be stuck voting yes anyway".
Lefty spaces really need to lay off the defeatism.
I mean, set aside for the fact that this particular kind of defeatism just makes no sense. Republicans are back on their heels, many of them are facing re-election campaigns, and MeToo doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. Moderate Senate Republicans are going to want to have votes that prove they're independent from the national party if they go into their election 2020 with a Trump carrying sub-40 approval ratings. We already know that said moderate Republicans are willing to completely fuck over the Republican legislative agenda because they've already done so. I'm an inveterate optimist and I would have told you saving the ACA was a pipe dream in January 2017, and here we are. This knee-jerk pessimism never has to justify itself and never has to answer for when its predictions prove spectacularly wrong, while the social penalties for being optimistic and being proven wrong are much more severe.
It's annoying enough when this defeatism is just a kind of malaise floating around in the room making things generally unpleasant, but it's genuinely making us less effective at activism. Defeatism makes it harder to hold Collins, Murkowski, and the rest accountable, because it concedes the inevitability of their votes in favor of confirming a rapist Supreme Court justice. And it de-mobilizes the base and makes it harder to motivate people to take action. I called my senators nearly every day while the ACA debate was going on, and I've been way too late to jump into this issue, largely because I didn't think it would make a difference, and I doubt I'm alone in that regard in this thread.
Well, there's blood in the water now. Now's not the time to prove your 'I *really* hate Republicans' bona fides by insisting that even moderate Republicans are so terrible they'd vote for a rapist to be installed at the Supreme Court,. Get mad, get organized, stick your Senators' numbers in your speed dial, and let's see if we can do the impossible twice.
I mean, set aside for the fact that this particular kind of defeatism just makes no sense. Republicans are back on their heels, many of them are facing re-election campaigns, and MeToo doesn't look like it's going anywhere anytime soon. Moderate Senate Republicans are going to want to have votes that prove they're independent from the national party if they go into their election 2020 with a Trump carrying sub-40 approval ratings. We already know that said moderate Republicans are willing to completely fuck over the Republican legislative agenda because they've already done so. I'm an inveterate optimist and I would have told you saving the ACA was a pipe dream in January 2017, and here we are. This knee-jerk pessimism never has to justify itself and never has to answer for when its predictions prove spectacularly wrong, while the social penalties for being optimistic and being proven wrong are much more severe.
It's annoying enough when this defeatism is just a kind of malaise floating around in the room making things generally unpleasant, but it's genuinely making us less effective at activism. Defeatism makes it harder to hold Collins, Murkowski, and the rest accountable, because it concedes the inevitability of their votes in favor of confirming a rapist Supreme Court justice. And it de-mobilizes the base and makes it harder to motivate people to take action. I called my senators nearly every day while the ACA debate was going on, and I've been way too late to jump into this issue, largely because I didn't think it would make a difference, and I doubt I'm alone in that regard in this thread.
Well, there's blood in the water now. Now's not the time to prove your 'I *really* hate Republicans' bona fides by insisting that even moderate Republicans are so terrible they'd vote for a rapist to be installed at the Supreme Court,. Get mad, get organized, stick your Senators' numbers in your speed dial, and let's see if we can do the impossible twice.
Flake and Sasse could realistically torpedo the entire nomination if they really wanted to put the screws to Trump on the way out the door.
If Graham had a spine he'd be doing the same in MCain's memory. I don't see the point in being the "adult in the room" if you still end up giving the misbehaving children their toys and cookies no matter what.
Edit: Ambiguous Cad, fwiw I've already reached out to Sasse regarding Kavanaugh.
If Graham had a spine he'd be doing the same in MCain's memory. I don't see the point in being the "adult in the room" if you still end up giving the misbehaving children their toys and cookies no matter what.
Edit: Ambiguous Cad, fwiw I've already reached out to Sasse regarding Kavanaugh.
we got this
btw we have to get rid of Marco Rubio. The guy is apparently a huge bully behind the scenes.
So when she said that the accusation was not brought up in the phone call before... that was a complete lie. Wow
Edit: oops. I got the story wrong. She didn't say one way or the other if the accusation was brought up.
Unless more women come forward, nah. But it'll be another albatross in November.
He's supposed to get confirmed this upcoming week on Thursday
Isn't that just the committee vote?
I thought the general vote wasn't until next week.
Really? It's hard to imagine him trying to be threatening with that meek voice of his.
Also Anita Hill was 30 years ago and helped start the pendulum swing on sexual assault that we're seeing today. Race definitely played a role in what ultimately amounted to the dismissal of her claims, but I don't think her being white would have made a difference. The burden of proof for a woman accusing a powerful man of rape was simply too high in that day and age.
Thought general vote was Thursday. Maybe you are right. I'd expect them to force through the general vote immediately after the committee vote or on Friday though.
I think if one republican goes on record as a no, others will start falling in line and say no also. Just need one to come forward.
A very big Albatross. One that could follow a few of them to 2020.
Like we all know the unofficial reasons they want to put him on the SC, but is he really worth it. They can put another full-blooded conservative on the bench a whole lot easier than this guy. I am legit thinking that this might sink him and they move on to another candidate without nearly as much baggage.
If this falls apart I wonder what the response from the Trump administration will be? This seems like exactly the type of stupid fight that Trump would never give up considering his own accusations. Also, it's likely that a condition of the nomination was that Kavanaugh would be willing to let Trump pardon himself given that McConnell knew this was going to be a hard sell and had so many other options (who probably failed that precondition and therefore weren't selected). It could slow things to a crawl.
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