Thread by @TrumpFile

THREAD: Listening to "Kill the Filibuster: The Adam Jentleson Interview," the new episode of @GaslitNation with @sarahkendzior, @AndreaChalupa, and @AJentleson!

"Why do we even have a Senate?"

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.@AJentleson is the former deputy chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid and the executive director of Battle Born Collective, which helps progressives build change. He is the author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.

The Senate "gives a lot of power to states that simply don't have huge populations... Why does this even exist in the first place?" - @AndreaChalupa

The framers wanted to give "the elite, sort of the house of lords, a stronger voice in the shaping of laws." - @AJentleson

I'm posting the above tweets now and live-tweeting as I listen from here. This episode of Gaslit Nation will be available wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early with a Patreon subscription like I do! patreon.com/gaslit

If you'd like something to read as I update this thread, I just got done listening to Roger Stone and Matt Gaetz talk to Trumpers on Clubhouse. Matt thought he was off the record. 😉

https://twitter.com/TrumpFile/status/1366906188743417860?s=20

I am grateful that for a third week in a row I feel the need to address some new followers, because there are over 100 of you who weren't here last week. ❤️

Hello, newbies! We do this Gaslit Nation live tweeting every Tuesday night. It's an awesome podcast. Check it out.

James Madison "opposed the idea of giving each state the same number of representatives... He pointed out that the biggest state then, Virginia, was about 10x the size of the smallest state, Delaware." - Adam

Madison literally called the idea of the Senate an "injustice."

Okay, so Madison thought it was an INJUSTICE that a state with 10x the number of people would have the same number of representatives.

Now, California has 70x more people than Wyoming. Both get two Senators.

"Who are the SCOUNDRELS who got us the Senate? Name names." - @AndreaChalupa 👏

"[All the framers had] a desire for the elite to have a stronger role in the shaping of laws... They were very afraid that the mob of the majority would come and take their property." - @AJentleson

After civil rights, "forces of white supremacy took a Senate that was already created to amplify the voices of elites a little bit, and made it amplify them... specifically the southern white planter elite... so much more powerfully than the framers ever intended." - @AJentleson

I am carefully removing words from Adam's quotes so they'll fit in a tweet. Just assume his quotes are slightly away from being verbatim.

The "forces of white supremacy" altering the Senate to give elites more power led to the filibuster.

The Senate wasn't designed to stop things altogether, but the filibuster "has come to allow people like McConnell to fully shut down our democracy & any progress they oppose."

Sarah: So, what exactly is the filibuster? For those who don't know.

When I think of the filibuster, I think of @BellamyYoung as Mellie Grant on @ScandalABC.

What do you guys -think- the filibuster is, if you aren't sure?

"When people think of the filibuster, they think of [someone] giving a longwinded speech on the Senate floor and representing the underdog standing up against the powerful forces of corruption. It's basically the opposite of that today." - @AJentleson

You don't even have to speak on the Senate floor to deploy the filibuster. Back then, you could only filibuster as long as you could stay standing and keep talking.

Now you can just ask for a bill to require 60 votes instead of 51, blocking most bills in today's divided Senate.

"If all Democrats decided they wanted to reform the filibuster, either outright or start an incremental series of reforms, they could do so tomorrow." - @AJentleson

And we haven't?!

"Conservatives, by the very nature of their party and what they're trying to accomplish, benefit more by making it easier to block big change. Progressives, on the flip side of that, suffer much more by making it harder to pass big change." - @AJentleson

Sarah: Don't Democrats recognize the urgency of the situation?

Andrea: And especially with the assault on voting rights and needing to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Adam: The vast majority of Democrats want to get rid of the filibuster as soon as possible.

The top two Democrats preventing us from ending the filibuster are Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema. There are about three others that are kind of like "eh, maybe?"

Democrats relying on reconciliation to pass legislation fast will work for COVID stuff now, but it will never work for infrastructure bills or civil rights legislation. We need to pressure Senate Dems to end the filibuster now, before the most important bills are voted on.

.@AJentleson: "Call your Senators and tell them that you want the filibuster to be abolished. I think this is something that anybody with a Democratic senator can do... They think the public doesn't care."

Tell them you do.

"One thing that's worrying me about 2022... is the demoralization that a lot of Democrats are feeling... There's still a sense that the Democrats are not fighting hard enough against a very violent, very anti-Constitutional GOP." - @sarahkendzior

Democrats have a few reasons not to kill the filibuster, but the most dangerous reason is that it stops them from accepting accountability. They can blame the filibuster for not passing urgent, necessary legislation. "It's not our fault it takes 60 votes!"

Yes, it is.

"The hallmark of [Mitch McConnell's] career is doing things to win that other people thought were outside the bounds of normal political discourse at the time." - Adam

Lots of stuff about Mitch in here that I'm saving so you'll listen to the podcast. 😉

Just a thought, not mentioned in the podcast, but...

You know what we could probably do if we ended the filibuster?

Expand the Supreme Court.

"When Pelosi is negotiating with her own caucus and trying to get progressives to back off some demand that they're making, one of the things she will say is 'We shouldn't bother with this because it's never going to pass the Senate.'" But if we killed the filibuster... 😉

"For the first 200+ years of its existence, the Senate was a majority ruled body, and policies passed or failed based on a majority in the House [&] Senate, and signed by the president... more checks and balances than most other countries have." And that's before the filibuster.

"The filibuster wasn't actually there for most of the Senate's existence, but it gives everybody an excuse to not fight for the things that they claim to believe in. I think we'd be better off if that excuse was taken off the table." - @AJentleson

"The filibuster is a monument to white supremacy. If these members of Congress, especially on the Democratic side, are serious about Black Lives Matter... Shouldn't that be leading the fight? Just get rid of this token of white supremacy?" - @AndreaChalupa

"We've been gaslit to believe that America wasn't ready for civil rights until it started passing bills in the late '50s... but that's not true. There were civil rights bills... in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The only thing that stopped them from passing was the filibuster." -A

Andrea points out that Adam's former boss, Sen. Harry Reid, was outspoken about the Kremlin in 2016.

In August 2016, he warned the FBI that he knew Russia was interfering in the election. In October, he accused James Comey of working in Russia's favor. trumpfile.org/harry-reid-pen…

"He was freaked out, for lack of a better term," by Russia's activity, close connections to the Trump campaign, and Comey's lack of urgency to combat it.

"He would say, if he were here today, that he did his best... He tried to do what he could to raise awareness of the public."

Adam: If there's any reason that other members of Congress didn't echo Harry Reid's warnings about Russia, it's that "there was this sense that Hillary was going to win, and none of this was going to matter... Unfortunately that didn't turn out to be the case."

"Gaslit Nation is very much like a mullet. The public show we do every week is our serious side, the business in the front. The Patreon bonus episodes we do are the party in the back." - @AndreaChalupa / @gaslitnation

Andrea asks @AJentleson what he learned about #Area51 while working in the Senate. Anddddd

You'll have to listen to the episode to find out!

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This week's bonus episode is "MEGA-BONUS: Disappointing Dems & GOP Autocrats." You can get access to the bonus episode by subscribing at the Truth-Teller level or higher on Patreon. patreon.com/gaslit

If you don't already, make sure to follow @gaslitnation @sarahkendzior @AndreaChalupa @AJentleson & @_Battle_Born_. And call your Senators! Tell them to kill the filibuster!

For last week's Gaslit Nation thread ⬇️

https://twitter.com/TrumpFile/status/1364423071289933827?s=20