The cool thing about Democrats’ strategy of simply not doing anything when they’re in office is that they can save time and money by running every single election making the exact same promises, just find and replace the last year with the next one
I’m joking, obviously. What they actually do is pay millions of dollars to consultants, who tell them that they’ve got to try the bold new strategy of focusing on the economy and health care, different from the last election, when they focused on health care and the economy.
Democratic Party motto ought to be “I’m sorry America, but the princess is in another castle”
In all seriousness I truly believe that when elected DC Dems encounter some tough procedural obstacle for their agenda, they feel the exact same palpable psychological relief normal people do when dinner plans get canceled and now there’s an excuse to sit and do nothing instead
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Is there any stretch of congressional maneuvering in modern history as inept as the Democrats over the past six months?
"Hm, let's set aside our entire agenda and spend six months trying to get the GOP to strike a deal with us, despite them opposed every single thing we did for 12 years"
"Okay, what if we put all the easy stuff in our agenda in one bill and then watered it down a bunch to get GOP votes, and then put all the bigger stuff in another bill, I'm sure that won't backfire"
like half of our politics can be summed up as "people born at the top of society desperately trying to avoid the psychic distress of having to wonder if their privileges are unearned"
a lot of people seem to live inside carefully-maintained bubbles in which the comforts and conveniences of their day-to-day lives are regarded as fair and deserved. narratives that suggest that similarly deserving people have been deprived of those privileges threaten the bubble
injustice and unfairness that are geographically or historically distant are less threatening - most people can admit the universe was unfair in other times or places. but they freak out if they're asked to admit that the unfairness extends to the here and now, to their own lives
if you had to explain US politics to space aliens their first question would be why the smaller party gets to constantly attempt to write new rules to favor itself while the larger party has to endlessly labor under the least favorable interpretation of existing rules
People are responding to this arguing that it's good that Dems follow the rules and we shouldn't emulate the GOP's Calvinball tactics, and that's kind of true, the problem is that you can't do it unilaterally
At some point the ~80 million Americans worried sick about extremely real, extremely urgent, very long-standing, and enormously threatening problems facing the country are going to need an answer that's not "Ha, you don't understand how DC works, stop living in fantasyland"
I know that if you're ensconced in some comfortable sinecure where everyone treats you as an important expert, it's very satisfying to explain all the reasons nothing can change and nothing can get fixed. But the problems are real and eventually, something WILL give
The thing that gives out can be "Parliamentary traditions less than 30 years old" or it can be "The centuries-old constitutional system of the United States," but there is no pathway in which we just maintain the late 20th century status quo forever and everything is hunky dory
I find the reflexive blaming of Manchin and Sinema so bizarre. I mean, yes - they’re a huge obstacle. But the idea that two senate votes render the party that controls the White House, House, and Senate powerless? A party that represents well over half the country?
The idea that America’s tens of millions of Democrats should simply accept that their priorities and their preferences are meaningless and cannot be expressed at all, except to the extent they reflect the priorities and preferences of these two Senate dilettantes, is insulting
If 48 senators, the White House, and a House majority strongly desired dramatic action, and then 2 senators were bottling it all up, don’t you think you’d detect a teensy bit more frustration with the state of affairs? Instead of “Oh well, that’s that! Maybe after midterms!”
People like to say “You just can’t accept that Manchin and Sinema won’t ever change their mind and there’s nothing more Dems can do,” but that argument would be more persuasive if obscure party figures like Joe Biden didn’t also publicly support the filibuster.
Pretty funny max pressure campaign we’ve got on, where the White House virtually buries filibuster-obstructed legislation of vital importance to focus on an infrastructure package that can get through reconciliation. Probably nothing else could possibly be done, though, right?
I mean I don’t watch cable TV but I’m guessing barely a day goes by where you don’t see moderates like Coons or Warner getting worked up on the news about how we HAVE to kill the filibuster to pass Biden’s agenda? I mean, unless Dems are lying about pushing as hard as they could.