1/ A THREAD on the death of honor in the Senate and why we can't just let it go and brush it off as "Republicans doing Republican things".
2/ Democracy is predicated on the exercise of restraint and fair play. Our Constitution has enormous amounts of wiggle room in it - enough so that a democracy could be converted to a one party system without a technical violation of our founding document.
3/ For instance, the founding fathers didn't require a Senate vote on a President's nominee for the Supreme Court bc they assumed fair play. They never envisioned a situation like 2016 where the Senate's majority party refused to vote on the president's pick.
4/ McConnell's figured out the Constitution lets him operate the Senate any way he wants, and he's moved to demolish tradition at a dizzying pace. SCOTUS filibuster, blue slips gone. Debate on nominees curtailed. He's tasted how easy it is to grab power, and he isn't finished.
5/ And there's no logical end. He can keep cutting down debate. He can start denying resources to the minority party. Now that he's made the decision that power is more important than comity, he can effectively muzzle the opposition.
6/ Further, now that lying has been normalized (and newsflash - they were lying when they said there was a new rule not to confirm judges in an election year), an institution that requires deal-making and compromise cannot function - if keeping your word in now passe.
7/ Any democratic parliamentary body runs on the principles of restraint and honor. And in the last 10 days, McConnell and his caucus have destroyed both.
Now there are new rules - I get this and I will have to live by them - but it's potentially lethal for our democracy.
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I have some bad news - buried in the appropriations bill being voted on this week is a terrible new gun policy rider that significantly rolls back the firearms background check system.
1/ You need to know about this - it’s bad enough that I will vote against the entire bill.
2/ Republicans (and one or two Democrats) pushed for the new rider that allows, for the first time in 30 years, veterans judged by the VA to be mentally incompetent to buy guns.
These are very very mentally ill veterans - those at the highest risk of suicide.
3/ I can’t sugarcoat this: this provision - which could result in 20,000 new seriously mentally ill individuals being able to buy guns each year - will be a death sentence for many.
It’s unacceptable this provision was pushed by Republicans. Democrats shouldn’t have acquiesced.
Minutes ago, the text of the bipartisan national security funding bill was released. It:
-funds Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian relief
-secures our border and reforms our asylum law
1/ As the co-author of the immigration provisions, here's a THREAD on the key elements:
2/ First - it would be easy to just keep immigration and border policy as a political cudgel for another 40 years. But politics at its best is about finding bipartisan compromise on the toughest issues. That's what we've done here.
Here's a snapshot of what's in the bill.
3/ A quicker, fairer asylum process. No more 10 yr wait. Claims processed in a non-detained, non-adversarial way in 6 months.
A slightly higher asylum screening standard at the border.
Also, no more waiting for work permits. Most asylum seekers can work immediately.
I support Israel in its mission to seek justice for the worst terrorist attack in their history.
1/ That means providing funding and weapons. But it also means making sure they don't repeat our mistakes in Afghanistan when we invaded after our nation's worst terrorist attack.
2/ We were too permissive of civilian casualties, and we did not understand that our operations were creating two Taliban recruits for everyone we eliminated.
You cannot defeat a movement if you are constantly providing it bulletin board material for recruitment efforts.
3/ War planning is not complete without a realistic endgame.
Shutting down all ungovernable space, creating a western style Afghan democracy, and killing every Taliban member were not realistic goals. Had we admitted this at the start, our war plan would have been different.
The UAW fight is so important because it strikes at the heart of America's spiritual crisis.
The hollowing out of workers' economic power has been devastating for American families. So many people feel not in control of their lives, because they work so hard and get so little.
Both parents work. Child care is outsourced to strangers. There's not enough money coming in to do anything other than pay the bills. No vacations. No college savings. One big medical bill away from insolvency. No breathing room.
It's an exhausting existence.
And all the while, these families watch the mega-rich, including the executives at the companies they work for, get richer. They know that the system is rigged against them. And the anxiety and anger that was already there boils over.
2/ Conversation, composition, creativity, discovery, in person connection - these are the things that make us human and fill our lives with meaning and value.
What happens when AI writes our e-mails, composes our music, creates our art? What happens as machines replace teachers?
3/ I know it's not black and white. I know there are huge benefits to AI and machine learning. Yes, AI could enhance our creativity, make our composition better, help us find new friends, improve educational experience.
2/ Only people "engaged in the business" of selling firearms have to conduct background checks on buyers. In the era of gun shows and , with thousands of part time sellers making big profits off selling guns, the pre-internet definition had become outdated.armslist.com
3/ The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act changed the definition of "engaged in the business" to clarify that selling guns didn't need to be your "livelihood". You just had to be selling guns in order to make a profit.
It was a big, important - but largely unnoticed - change.