The best bills will be passed with zero Republican votes.
A "magrillian" is "an amount exactly one greater than whatever number all the "fixed your post" twitter-reply one-uppers were hoping to tell you that you should have said.
I am now being told I should have asked for *fifty* magrillian.
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Do not read this as a defense of Ben Sasse, who sucks.
If Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and the rest of the allegedly sane, allegedly centrist, allegedly concerned with unity and comity Republicans actually were any of those things, they could end this madness tomorrow by pledging to vote for Biden’s mandate.
If you ever want to consider how committed our society is to the foundational lie that life must be earned, and those who fail to earn it must die, consider that the proposition “giving everyone money to spend would be bad for the economy” is widely accepted as truth.
“Giving money to people in poverty solves poverty” is an obvious truth, which needs (another) study for proof, for the same reason that this finding will be ignored (again).
We don’t want to fix poverty, even if doing so helps everyone—not if it means life for the “undeserving.”
It’s not about saving money.
There's a great fear in this country that a single dollar might go to someone who might not deserve it; or that a single given dollar might be spent on something we deem unworthy.
We'll spend five dollars to prevent the waste of that one dollar.
I mean it's such a common thing with real-life right wingers to identify with the villain—from Old Man Potter to pre-epiphany Scrooge to Nathan Jessup to Gordon Gecko etc—that I guess at this point Cruz just takes it as a given that of course we're meant to identify with Thanos.
Anyway, pretty rich talk coming from a guy who has, along with his party, been actively working to use a pandemic to generate a mass kill-off of vulnerable American citizens, and blockading any effort to provide any sort of prevention, alleviation, or relief.
Given the extent to which the GOP has delegitimized itself, it would be far more legitimatizing to pass legislation without any Republican votes. We shouldn't want fascist support. In much the same way, a scientist shouldn't want a flat-earther validating their dissertation.
Or to restate slightly differently, we've reached a point where Republicans have so degraded themselves that bipartisanship would harm the legitimacy of a bill for anybody who cares about decency, equality, fairness, rule of law, or shared reality based on empirical proof.
I'd feel the same way about a Voting Protection bill that had received broad Republican support as I would about one that was being backed by the KKK.
The only thing keeping a massive number of white Americans from becoming terrorists has been their knowledge that American legal institutions exist to deliver violence to minorities, and the proof is how quickly they've turned to terrorism at the first hint that this might stop.
They've always wanted to preserve the option to become terrorists.
That's what the guns are about. That's why gun massacres don't lead to change. The massacres were always the point. For American conservatives, the ability to massacre has always been the point.