Quote:

---

Opinion
Democrats, Here’s How to Lose in 2022. And Deserve It.
You don’t get re-elected for things voters don’t know that you did.

Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist

Jan. 21, 2021

President Biden takes office with a ticking clock. The Democrats’ margin in the House and Senate couldn’t be thinner, and midterms typically raze the governing party. That gives Democrats two years to govern. Two years to prove that the American political system can work. Two years to show Trumpism was an experiment that need not be repeated.

Two years.

This is the responsibility the Democratic majority must bear: If they fail or falter, they will open the door for Trumpism or something like it to return, and there is every reason to believe it will be far worse next time. To stop it, Democrats need to reimagine their role. They cannot merely defend the political system. They must rebuild it.

(Ya' hear that Nancy*? NOBODY will be served by your partican failed attempt to impeach Trump and - what - remove him from office? YOUR political games are an obstacle to democrats* regaining relevance and approval.)

“This is a fight not just for the future of the Democratic Party or good policy,” Senator Bernie Sanders told me. “It is literally a fight to restore faith in small-d democratic government.”

Among the many tributaries flowing into Trumpism, one in particular has gone dangerously overlooked. In their book “Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy,” the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government — and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”

Donald Trump was this kind of populist. Democrats mocked his “I alone can fix it” message for its braggadocio and feared its authoritarianism, but they did not take seriously the deep soil in which it was rooted: The American system of governance is leaving too many Americans to despair and misery, too many problems unsolved, too many people disillusioned. It is captured by corporations and paralyzed by archaic rules. It is failing, and too many Democrats treat its failures as regrettable inevitabilities rather than a true crisis.

But now Democrats have another chance. To avoid the mistakes of the past, three principles should guide their efforts. First, they need to help people fast and visibly. Second, they need to take politics seriously, recognizing that defeat in 2022 will result in catastrophe. The Trumpist Republican Party needs to be politically discredited through repeated losses; it cannot simply be allowed to ride back to primacy on the coattails of Democratic failure. And, finally, they need to do more than talk about the importance of democracy. They need to deepen American democracy.

The good news is that Democrats have learned many of these lessons, at least in theory. The $1.9 trillion rescue plan Biden proposed is packed with ideas that would make an undeniable difference in people’s lives, from $1,400 checks to paid leave to the construction of a national coronavirus testing infrastructure that will allow some semblance of normal life to resume.

And congressional Democrats have united behind sweeping legislation to expand American democracy. The “For the People Act,” which House Democrats passed in 2019 and Senate Democrats have said will be their first bill in the new session*, would do more to protect and expand the right to vote than any legislation passed since the Great Society, and it would go a long way toward building a fairer and more transparent campaign financing system. In June, House Democrats passed a bill to grant statehood to Washington, D.C., which would end one of the most appalling cases of systematic disenfranchisement in the country.

(I have read the bill, and it has major flaws. Among the are: 1) it does nothing to guarantee only citizens with a right to vote actually vote - in fact it erases any protection against voter fraud, and 2) it does literally nothing to validate the voting after the fact, the only protection available to detect vote manipulation. But there are many, many other flaws.)

“It’s time for boldness, for there is so much to do,” Biden said in his Inaugural Address. “This is certain, I promise you: We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era.”

But none of these bills will pass a Senate in which the filibuster forces 60-vote supermajorities on routine legislation. And that clarifies the real question Democrats face. They have plenty of ideas that could improve people’s lives and strengthen democracy. But they have, repeatedly, proved themselves more committed to preserving the status quo of the political system than fulfilling their promises to voters. They have preferred the false peace of decorum to the true progress of democracy. If they choose that path again, they will lose their majority in 2022, and they will deserve it.

(I've been noting for sometime that democrats* are just another party of big-money influence. And that If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?)

Just Help People

The last time Democrats won the White House, the Senate and the House was in 2008, and they didn’t squander the moment. They passed the stimulus and Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. They saved the auto industry and prevented a second Great Depression and, for good measure, drove the largest investment in clean energy infrastructure in American history.

But too little of their work was evident in 2010, when Democrats were running for re-election. The result was, as President Barack Obama put it, “a shellacking.” Democrats lost six Senate seats and 63 House seats. They also lost 20 state legislatures, giving Republicans control of the decennial redistricting process.

Democrats have less margin for error in 2021 than they did in 2009. Their congressional majorities are smaller — 50 seats in the Senate versus 60, and 222 seats in the House versus 257. Republican dominance of redistricting efforts, and a growing Senate and Electoral College bias toward red states, has tilted the electoral map against them. The nationalization of politics has shrunk ticket-splitting voters down to a marginal phenomenon, making it harder for red and purple state Democrats to separate themselves from the fortunes of the national party.

In 2009, Democrats might reasonably have believed they had a few election cycles in which to govern, to tweak their bills and programs, to see the fruits of their governance. In 2021, no such illusion is possible.

Tom Perriello is the executive director of U.S. programs at the Open Society Foundations. But in 2009, he was a newly elected Democratic representative from Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, where he’d narrowly beaten a Republican. Two years later, Republicans took back his seat. They still hold it. Democrats cannot allow a wipeout in 2022 like they suffered in 2010, and looking back, Perriello told me what he thought Democrats could’ve done to save his seat.

“There’s a belief among a certain set of Democrats that taking an idea and cutting it in half makes it a better idea when it just makes it a worse idea,” he said. As we talked, he ticked off the examples: The stimulus bill was whittled down and down, ending far beneath what economists thought necessary to rescue the economy. The House’s more populist health reform bill — which included a public option, heftier subsidies and was primarily financed by taxing the rich — was cast aside in favor of the Senate’s stingier, more complex proposal. The House passed “cramdown” legislation, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of mortgages so banks took losses and homeowners would have been more likely to keep their homes, but the bill failed in the Senate, and the impression took hold — correctly — that Congress was bailing out the banks, but not desperate homeowners.

The Obama administration believed that if you got the policy right, the politics would follow. That led, occasionally, to policies that almost entirely abandoned politics, so deep ran the faith in clever design. The Making Work Pay tax credit, which was a centerpiece of the 2009 Recovery Act, was constructed to be invisible — the Obama administration, working off new research in behavioral economics, believed Americans would be more likely to spend a windfall that they didn’t know they got. “When all was said and done, only around 10 percent of people who received benefits knew they had received something from the government,” said Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell. You don’t get re-elected for things voters don’t know you did.

Nor do you get re-elected for legislation voters cannot yet feel. The Affordable Care Act didn’t begin delivering health insurance on a mass scale until four years after the bill’s passage. That reflected a doomed effort to win Republican support by prioritizing private insurance and a budgetary gimmick meant to keep the total price tag under $1 trillion over 10 years. Obamacare eventually became a political winner for Democrats, but it took the better part of a decade. A simpler, faster, more generous bill would have been better politics and better policy.

“Democrats are famous for 87-point programs which sometimes do some good but nobody understands what they are,” Senator Sanders said. “What we need to do now is, in very bold and clear ways, make people understand government is directly improving their lives.”

That’s particularly important in a time of fractured media, polarized parties and widespread disinformation. Democrats cannot rely on widely trusted media figures or civic leaders to validate their programs. Policy has to speak for itself and it has to speak clearly.

“The wisdom from much of the political science research is that partisanship trumps everything,” said Amy Lerman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “Good Enough for Government Work.” “But one of the insights from the policy feedback literature in particular is that when people experience policy, they don’t necessarily experience it as partisans. They experience it as a parent sending their child to school or a patient visiting a doctor, not as a Democrat or Republican. And because people are often thinking in nonpolitical terms during their day-to-day lives, they are much more open to having their views changed when they see the actual, tangible benefits of a policy in their lives. It’s a way of breaking through partisanship.”

Make the Senate Great Again

President Biden’s agenda will live or die in the Senate. Odds are it will die, killed by the filibuster.

The modern Senate has become something the founders never intended: a body where only a supermajority can govern. From 1941 to 1970, the Senate took only 36 votes to break filibusters. In 2009 and 2010 alone, they took 91. Here’s the simple truth facing the Democratic agenda: In a Senate without a filibuster, Democrats have some chance of passing some rough facsimile of the agenda they’ve promised. In a Senate with a filibuster, they do not.

“I’ve said to the president-elect, ‘reach out across the aisle. Try to work with the Republicans. But don’t let them stymie your program,’” Representative Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, told me before Inauguration Day. “You can’t allow the search for bipartisanship to ruin the mandate the American people gave you.’”

This is a lesson the Obama administration learned the hard way. Tellingly, both Obama and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader at the beginning of the Obama administration, have come to support the elimination of the filibuster. “It’s not a question of if the filibuster will be gone, but when it’ll be gone,” Reid told me by phone. “You cannot have a democratic body where it takes 60 percent of the vote to get anything done.”

When I asked Biden, during the campaign, about filibuster reform, he was reluctant, but not definitively opposed. “I think it’s going to depend on how obstreperous they” — meaning Republicans — “become, and if they become that way,” he replied. “I have not supported the elimination of the filibuster because it has been used as often to protect rights I care about as the other way around. But you’re going to have to take a look at it.”

Senate Democrats could eliminate the filibuster if every single one of them wanted to, but even a single defection would doom them. Senator Joe Manchin has promised to be that defection. Mere days after the election, he went on Fox News and said, “I commit to you tonight, and I commit to all of your viewers and everyone else that’s watching. I want to allay those fears, I want to rest those fears for you right now because when they talk about whether it be packing the courts, or ending the filibuster, I will not vote to do that.”

Red state Democrats like Manchin have long held to a political strategy in which public opposition to their party’s initiatives proves their independence and moderation. And there was a time when that strategy could work. But the nationalized, polarized structure of modern American politics has ended it.

Ticket-splitting has been on a sharp decline for decades, and it has arguably reached a nearly terminal point. According to calculations by the Democratic data analyst David Shor, the correlation between the statewide vote for Senate Democrats and the statewide vote for the Democratic presidential candidate was 71 percent in 2008. High, which is why Obama’s sagging approval ratings hurt Democrats so badly in 2010, but there was still some room to maneuver. But by 2016, it was 93.2 percent. And in 2020, it was 94.5 percent. With few exceptions — and Manchin, admittedly, has been one — Democrats live or die together. They certainly win or lose the majority together.

(And yet, Biden*'s many millions of votes barely translated to the Senate, and not at all to the House. So there must have been many, many ballots with only a single presidential vote. "Does that seem right to you?")

To give Manchin his due, a more high-minded fear — shared by others in his caucus — is that we have just come through a long, ugly period of partisan norm-breaking. Surely the answer to Trump’s relentless assaults on decorum, to Mitch McConnell’s rewriting of Senate rules, is a return to the comity they cast off, to the traditions they’ve violated, to the bipartisanship they abandoned. A version of this may appeal to Biden, too: Trump stretched the boundaries of executive authority, so perhaps he should retreat, offering more deference to Congress and resisting opportunities to go it alone, even when stymied by Republicans. But if this is what he means by “unity,” it will just empower the merchants of division.

In their book, Howell and Moe write that this is a common, but dangerously counterproductive, response to populist challengers. Defenders of the political system, eager to show that normalcy has returned, often embrace the very defects and dysfunctions that gave rise to the populist leader in the first place. The nightmare scenario is that Trump is defeated, driven from office, and that augurs in an era when even less appears to get done, as Biden submits to congressional paralysis while embracing a calmer communications strategy. If Democrats permit that to happen, they will pave the road for the next Trump-like politician, one who will be yet more disciplined and dangerous than Trump.

Democrats for Democracy

“Democracy is precious,” Biden said at his inauguration. “Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”

It’s a stirring sentiment, but wrong. Democracy barely survived. If America actually abided by normal democratic principles, Trump would have lost in 2016, after receiving almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The American people did not want this presidency, but they got it anyway, and the result was carnage. In 2020, Trump lost by about seven million votes, but if about 40,000 votes had switched in key states, he would have won anyway. The Senate is split 50-50, but the 50 Democrats represent more than 41 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans. This is not a good system.

(And once again, we hear whinging about following the Constitution.)

Democracy is designed as a feedback loop.

)(No it's not. If democracy was a feedback loop, people could vote the President, their Senators, and Representatives out at any time they lost broad public approval, like in parliamentary systems. Instead, people and electors select kings and lords who rule unchallenged by removal for set periods of time. And if we want a MORE representative feedback loop, we need to drastically change the Constitution to make early removal easier.)

Voters choose leaders. Leaders govern. Voters judge the results, and they either return the leaders to power, or give their opponents a chance. That feedback loop is broken in American politics. It is broken because of gerrymandering, because of the Senate, because of the filibuster, because of the Electoral College, because we have declared money to be speech and allowed those with wealth to speak much more loudly than those without.

(The supposed feedback mechanism of the vote has also failed because the system to hold elected officials accountable isn't timely, letting broken promises, misdeeds, and misrule accumulate and fester. And the lack of timeliness also means that as circumstances change, government isn't held accountable to address them in a timely way. As a result, people notice that it doesn't matter what candidates SAY, their ACTIONS go unchecked.)

It is also broken because we directly disenfranchise millions of Americans. In the nation’s capital, 700,000 residents have no vote in the House or Senate at all. The same is true in Puerto Rico, which, with 3.2 million residents, is larger than 20 existing states. For decades, Democrats promised to offer statehood to residents of both territories, but have never followed through. It is no accident that these are parts of the country largely populated by Black and Hispanic voters. If Democrats believe anything they have said over the past year about combating structural racism and building a multiethnic democracy, then it is obvious where they must start.

“It would be a devastating civil rights failure if we didn’t achieve statehood now,” Stasha Rhodes, the campaign director of 51 for 51, which advocates D.C. statehood, told me. “It would also be a sign that Democrats are not interested in restoring and strengthening American democracy. We can no longer say Republicans are anti-democracy when we now have a chance to restore and create the democracy we say is important, and then we don’t do it.”

After Representative John Lewis died, Obama used his eulogy to address those in Congress who called Lewis a hero but allowed the rights to which he had devoted his life to wither. “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute.” And, he continued, “if all this takes is eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.”

Democracy is worth fighting for, not least because it’s the fight that will decide all the others. “One of the things a Trump administration has shown is that democracy is inextricably linked to the things that matter to Americans,” Rhodes said. “The rules are not separate from the issues. If you want effective Covid response, if you want robust gun violence prevention, if you want a strong economy, then you need a true American democracy.”

The Vaccine Opportunity

Great presidencies — and new political eras — are born of crises. Thus far, America has bobbled its vaccination rollout. But the fault doesn’t lie only with Trump. In blue states where Democrats command both power and resources, like California and New York, overly restrictive eligibility criteria slowed the rollout, and huge numbers of shots were locked in freezers. It’s an embarrassment.

(But now NYC has run out of vaccines as of last Friday, exposing the ultimate bottleneck, which is production.)

A successful mass immunization campaign will save lives, supercharge the economy and allow us to hug our families and see our friends again. Few presidents, outside the worst of wartime, have entered office with as much opportunity to better people’s lives immediately through competent governance.

Biden’s team understands that. Their $20 billion plan to use the full might of the federal government to accelerate vaccinations hits all the right notes. But it’s attached to their $1.9 trillion rescue plan, which needs 10 Republican votes it doesn’t have in order to pass over a filibuster (Senator Mitt Romney already dismissed it as “not well-timed”). Letting the resources required to vaccinate the country — and to set up mass testing and to prevent an economic crisis — become entangled in Republican obstruction for weeks or months would be a terrible mistake.

Here, too, Democrats will quickly face a choice: To leave their promises to the American people to the mercies of Mitch McConnell, or to change the Senate so they can change the course of the country.

Some, at least, say they’ve learned their lesson. “I’m going to do everything I can to bring people together,” said Senator Ron Wyden, who will lead the powerful Senate Finance Committee, “but I’m not just going to stand around and do nothing while Mitch McConnell ties everyone up in knots.” They will all need to be united on this point for it to matter.

In her book “Good Enough for Government Work,” Lerman argues that the U.S. government is caught in a reputation crisis where its poor performance is assumed, the public is attuned to its flaws and misses its virtues, and fed-up citizens stop using public services, which further harms the quality of those services. The Trump years add another dimension to the analysis: Frustration with a government that doesn’t solve problems leads people to vote for demagogic outsiders who create further crises. But this is not an inevitability. Her titular phrase, she notes, “originated during World War II to describe the exacting standards and high quality required by government.” It was only in the 1960s and ’70s that it became a slur.

It is no accident that World War II led to the idea that government work was a standard to strive for, not an outcome to fear. Crises remind us of what government is for in the first place. Biden has an extraordinary opportunity to change the relationship between the people and their government. If he succeeds, he will not only deprive authoritarian populists like Trump of energy, he will give Democrats a chance to win over voters who’ve lost faith in them, and he will give voice to millions more that the American political system has silenced. “The best thing we can do right now to reduce levels of anger and frustration on both sides of the aisle is to give people the things they need to live better lives,” said Lerman.

In other words, what Democrats need to do is simple: Just help people, and do it fast.

Roge Karma provided additional reporting.


© 2021 The New York Times Company

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nothing good comes out of the next two years.

If we're lucky, nothing bad does either.

---

Quote:

---

In a statement released late Monday, the Kentucky Republican said his concerns about the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes for most legislation to advance, had been assuaged by comments from Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., reaffirming their opposition to its elimination. Their statements earlier Monday signaled that Democrats don’t have the votes needed to kill the filibuster, since it would take all 50 Democrats, plus Vice President Kamala Harris, voting as a bloc to kill the filibuster unilaterally.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

If you give Democrats new toys, you give those same toys to Republicans too. If you take the Republican's toys away today, you take those same toys away from Democrats tomorrow too.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:
Nearly everybody in Congress wants to avoid making decisions. That is why there is a filibuster in the first place. That's why Congress hasn't declared war since 1942. Americans have elected, for the most part, Congressmen who no more feel responsible for what happens than the average American feels about what happens at their jobs. So we get the expected crappy results.
https://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_index_subjects/Cloture_vrd.
htm

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'll agree with you there.

Nobody likes Congressmen or House Reps outside of their immediate family.

Even that statement might be too generous on my part.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol

You sure you want to give that toy to Republicans?


Pandora's box there buddy.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol

You sure you want to give that toy to Republicans?


Pandora's box there buddy.

---

Read a few paragraphs from the Senate website about the origin of the filibuster. www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Clotur
e.htm

American Senators have always loved to talk-talk-talk so that they didn't have to act-act-act. It is the reason the Federal government has always been a mess. The other reason? Senators from different states have no loyalty to other states. America pretends it is United, but the different states don't have more loyalty to one another than countries like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, India, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and the UK have loyalty to each other. It is obvious those former British colonies have incompatible goals, since they are also separated by thousands of miles, but the States (and their Senators) of the United States also have incompatible goals, even when the states share a border.

What does the Senate historian write about Filibuster and Cloture? This:

Using the filibuster to delay or block legislative action has a long history. The term filibuster—from a Dutch word meaning "pirate"—became popular in the 1850s, when it was applied to efforts to hold the Senate floor in order to prevent a vote on a bill.

In the early years of Congress, representatives as well as senators could filibuster. As the House of Representatives grew in number, however, revisions to the House rules limited debate. In the smaller Senate, unlimited debate continued on the grounds that any senator should have the right to speak as long as necessary on any issue.

In 1841, when the Democratic minority hoped to block a bank bill promoted by Kentucky senator Henry Clay , he threatened to change Senate rules to allow the majority to close debate. Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton rebuked Clay for trying to stifle the Senate's right to unlimited debate.

Three quarters of a century later, in 1917, senators adopted a rule (Rule 22), at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, that allowed the Senate to end a debate with a two-thirds majority vote, a device known as " cloture ." The new Senate rule was first put to the test in 1919, when the Senate invoked cloture to end a filibuster against the Treaty of Versailles. Even with the new cloture rule, filibusters remained an effective means to block legislation, since a two-thirds vote is difficult to obtain. Over the next five decades, the Senate occasionally tried to invoke cloture, but usually failed to gain the necessary two-thirds vote. Filibusters were particularly useful to southern senators who sought to block civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching legislation, until cloture was invoked after a 60-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1975 the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 of the current 100 senators.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuste
r_Cloture.htm

There is a whole lot more about the filibuster at that URL, but the underlying reason for its existence is to avoid making decisions, taking action, being responsible for outcomes. That is why the Senate has the filibuster. But if the Senators ever decide to live up to the Founding Fathers' expectations of honest, mature and wise behavior, the filibuster will be deleted from the rules.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Okay. Not sure what the point of bringing the origins of it up now though are.

In modern times, the filibuster protects half of America at any given time from having a bunch of bullshit they'd never be on board with being passed.

Right now, it's protecting me from stuff you want done. In 2016, it protected you from stuff that I wanted done.

This country is fucked until we find our way back into the middle for sure.

Until then, it's a good idea not to let these assholes make any changes.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Okay. Not sure what the point of bringing the origins of it up now though are.

In modern times, the filibuster protects half of America at any given time from having a bunch of bullshit they'd never be on board with being passed.

Right now, it's protecting me from stuff you want done. In 2016, it protected you from stuff that I wanted done.

This country is fucked until we find our way back into the middle for sure.

Until then, it's a good idea not to let these assholes make any changes.

---

There is divide in understanding that can't easily be crossed about the difference between what devices like filibusters or guns were designed to do and what you think those devices do. I will tell what the devices were designed to do and you can keep believing your myths:

1) The filibuster was designed to prevent the Senate from making decisions, not to "protect" you. Often, both sides in Senate are pleased that filibuster was used because neither side really wanted to eventually face the voters on a decision. Civil Rights was the perfect example. Neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted to touch that subject for 100 years after the Civil War because the voters back home might not reelect them if they expanded rights. Best for the Senator's reelection to hope somebody filibusters Civil Rights so that the Senator can safely do nothing.

2) Firearms were designed to kill, not to "protect" you. If you ever were in gun fight, you'd know that. TV and movies give Americans peculiar ideas about what happens. I've seen what happens when soldiers raised on TV Westerns get into a firefight. Those soldiers kill civilians and guys on their own side. The soldiers might, or might not, feel bad about it afterwards, but it would not have happened if they showed self-control and aimed rather than spraying bullets randomly for "protection".

Pat Tillman killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pat-tillman-killed-by-frie
ndly-fire-in-afghanistan

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

It doesn't matter what things were designed to do. It matters how they're used now.

I live right by one of the most historically dangerous cities in the entire country. I even do some shopping there. And most of the time I'm part of the minority.

But you know what doesn't happen in my state? BLM and Antifa bullshit. Ain't nobody clogging up the streets or beating through car windows to yank somebody out of their car and do god knows what to them. Ain't nobody even doing any carjacking out here, while only 50 miles from me the amount of carjackings in Chicago so far this year are nearly 1/3 of what they were for the entirety of 2020.

We've got conceal and carry here. I don't even have to go out with a gun to be protected. The implication alone does that for me.

Just the idea that some random dude like me has a pretty good chance of walking around with a deadly weapon makes people a whole lot more polite.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:
The filibuster has always worked the way it was designed -- to delay making decisions by the majority. Senators and political scientists understand. Ordinary people will continue to misunderstand by describing the filibuster as "protection" for the minority, but it can't be "protection" because the majority can deactivate the filibuster rule, if the majority wanted. The majority won't deactivate because it is to the individual majority Senator's advantage to avoid decisions without it being obvious that is what the majority is doing. Making decisions makes enemies and most Senators hate to make enemies among voters if they can avoid it without looking like cowards. That's why there is filibuster rule. Too many Senators on both sides of any issue always feel safer when no decision is made. The filibuster gives the majority cover for doing nothing and adroitly shifting the blame to the other side.

---

Let them get rid of it then. And two years from now it won't matter for them since so many will be voted out. And god help them if a Republican wins the Presidency in 2024 with a majority in the House and Senate.

Outside of a couple of crazies like AOC, and idiots at MotherJones and Salon that don't know how things work, nobody wants to fire that first nuke.

Sure... It will be great to let 11 million illegals have even more rights than actual US Citizens do right now...

Until the GOP can work unchecked and just start putting anybody who crosses the border for any reason to death because now everybody can just do whatever the fuck they want to do.


It's not really even worth debating though, since it's not going to happen.

Quote:

---

As for your understanding of guns, I point you to the story of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two. His defense team will claim he used his rifle for "protection" against BLM. That's both a lie and stupid. Kyle killed because he is a 17 year old fool who learned from TV dramas that guns are for "protection," not for murder. His defense team will have to confuse the jury about how he ran back to Mommy who lives in another state immediately after "protecting" himself, when he should have stood over the bodies and bragged to the police about how good he is at "protecting" himself.

---

Your understanding on the issue is incorrect.

Those ADULTS who attacked a minor carrying a non-concealed rifle while holding it properly and not aiming it at anyone are Darwin award winners and got what they deserved. The ADULT who attacked Kyle that didn't die got his fucking arm blown off at the elbow seconds before firing his handgun into Kyle's brain.

If the cops were allowed to do their fucking jobs, that incident would never have taken place. Kyle and others were there simply being Rooftop Koreans protecting businesses that Antifa and BLM were burning to the ground. They even stopped those idiots from blowing up a gas station that night.



And it still doesn't change the fact that despite being well armed myself, I never leave my house with a gun. Concealed or otherwise. But I very well could.

And nobody pulls any of that bullshit anywhere near me. Kyle's incident would never have been a thing here because that doesn't happen here. Antifa and BLM only operate in Democrat ran shitholes that don't allow people to arm themselves.


The day you successfully disarm every violent lawbreaker out there. The day that you successfully remove every bad cop off of every force. The day that you remove every corrupt politician on both sides of the aisle who enjoy nothing more during their day than taking more rights away from the citizens they're supposed to be serving...

On that day, we can talk about guns.


In the meantime, prepare yourself for a lot more of them for a very long time with SCOTUS being as it is today.

--------------------------------------------------

A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.

Quote:

---

Election changes such as ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan primaries are popping up across the country — and are already upending national politics.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Your understanding on the issue is incorrect.

Those ADULTS who attacked a minor carrying a non-concealed rifle while holding it properly and not aiming it at anyone are Darwin award winners and got what they deserved. The ADULT who attacked Kyle that didn't die got his fucking arm blown off at the elbow seconds before firing his handgun into Kyle's brain.

If the cops were allowed to do their fucking jobs, that incident would never have taken place. Kyle and others were there simply being Rooftop Koreans protecting businesses that Antifa and BLM were burning to the ground. They even stopped those idiots from blowing up a gas station that night.



And it still doesn't change the fact that despite being well armed myself, I never leave my house with a gun. Concealed or otherwise. But I very well could.

And nobody pulls any of that bullshit anywhere near me. Kyle's incident would never have been a thing here because that doesn't happen here. Antifa and BLM only operate in Democrat ran shitholes that don't allow people to arm themselves.

The day you successfully disarm every violent lawbreaker out there. The day that you successfully remove every bad cop off of every force. The day that you remove every corrupt politician on both sides of the aisle who enjoy nothing more during their day than taking more rights away from the citizens they're supposed to be serving...

On that day, we can talk about guns.

In the meantime, prepare yourself for a lot more of them for a very long time with SCOTUS being as it is today.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

FWIW, the House of Representatives is based on the House of Commons in Britain, quick to react to the hoi polloi's concerns and temper of the day. The British House of Lords is supposed to be the more deliberative body, thinking more long-term and being slower to pass laws until they've been thoroughly examined ... but since we don't have Lords in the US, we have the Senate. If the Senate is putting the brakes on quick changes, it's performing its assigned function.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

FWIW, the House of Representatives is based on the House of Commons in Britain, quick to react to the hoi polloi's concerns and temper of the day. The British House of Lords is supposed to be the more deliberative body, thinking more long-term and being slower to pass laws until they've been thoroughly examined ... but since we don't have Lords in the US, we have the Senate. If the Senate is putting the brakes on quick changes, it's performing its assigned function.

---

Maybe the Senate was invented to mimic the House of Lords of 18th Century, but 21st Century House of Lords has little power to slow down the House of Commons:

The House of Lords debates legislation, and has power to amend or reject bills. However, the power of the Lords to reject a bill passed by the House of Commons is severely restricted by the Parliament Acts. Under those Acts, certain types of bills may be presented for the Royal Assent without the consent of the House of Lords (i.e. the Commons can override the Lords' veto). The House of Lords cannot delay a money bill (a bill that, in the view of the Speaker of the House of Commons, solely concerns national taxation or public funds) for more than one month. There is more boring details about how the Lords are toothless old dogs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords#Legislative_functions

Unlike the House of Lords, the Senate can kill any legislation it pleases, stop any Presidential appointments, including judges, making the Senate more powerful in a negative way than the House of Representatives.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Still, it's obvious that in the US Constitution, both of the legislative branches independently and the executive branch independently have the power to kill a bill and keep it from becoming law. The system seems geared to work very, very slowly in making any changes at all ... especially when the country is closely divided on an issue. Which makes it a good democracy.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Your understanding on the issue is incorrect.

Those ADULTS who attacked a minor carrying a non-concealed rifle while holding it properly and not aiming it at anyone are Darwin award winners and got what they deserved. The ADULT who attacked Kyle that didn't die got his fucking arm blown off at the elbow seconds before firing his handgun into Kyle's brain.

If the cops were allowed to do their fucking jobs, that incident would never have taken place. Kyle and others were there simply being Rooftop Koreans protecting businesses that Antifa and BLM were burning to the ground. They even stopped those idiots from blowing up a gas station that night.



And it still doesn't change the fact that despite being well armed myself, I never leave my house with a gun. Concealed or otherwise. But I very well could.

And nobody pulls any of that bullshit anywhere near me. Kyle's incident would never have been a thing here because that doesn't happen here. Antifa and BLM only operate in Democrat ran shitholes that don't allow people to arm themselves.

The day you successfully disarm every violent lawbreaker out there. The day that you successfully remove every bad cop off of every force. The day that you remove every corrupt politician on both sides of the aisle who enjoy nothing more during their day than taking more rights away from the citizens they're supposed to be serving...

On that day, we can talk about guns.

In the meantime, prepare yourself for a lot more of them for a very long time with SCOTUS being as it is today.

---

6ix, that is not how it went down. If it was, then the indictment is totally fictional and the DA assistants who wrote it should be disbarred: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7047765-Kyle-Rittenhouse-Crimi
nal-Complaint.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's exactly how it went down.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by reaverfan:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

That's exactly how it went down.

---

God, you're dumb.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

But if you cherry pick your numbers hard enough, and throw out at least 7/8 of the data, I'm sure you'd have a conclusion that matches the article!

Every bit of news treats us like we're simpletons, unable to understand a complicated and nuanced reality. And that we need to have our thoughts guided with simple stories and real-sounding factoids (without evidence) told to us by sincere-faced news-actors and instant experts and tptb mouthpieces.

THO I GUARANTEE ALL THIS THEATER TO GUIDE US FOR OUR OWN GOOD. I'M SURE OF IT. /sarcasm

And so reading a simple news article or watching a news show is like writing a fucking PhD dissertation, where I have to track down every original research paper or project report or 'source' background and often recalculate the numbers just to try to figure out what the fuck is ** REALLY ** going on in any particular instance.

What an obvious crock they're shoveling at us, from all directions.

---

Quote:

---

1kiki, the news story was repeating the claims made by Transparency International.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:

---

1kiki, the news story was repeating the claims made by Transparency International.

---

Yes, god forbid the news should act as anything but transcribers.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Quote:

---

1kiki, the news story was repeating the claims made by Transparency International.

---

Yes, god forbid the news should act as anything but transcribers.

---

I saw how you "analyzed" the story. You came to your predetermined conclusion very quickly. Maybe you should work for the Christian Science Monitor as a fact checker before their editors can place a reporter's story on the internet. 1kiki becomes the final buffer preventing "erroneous" stories written by Christian Scientists from being spread far and wide.

FACT CHECK: 1kiki sees no correlation between governments run by liars, crooks and thieves and governments doing a poor job serving their citizens.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

---

Quote:

---

You came to your predetermined conclusion very quickly.

---