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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Regarding the filibuster, here's my thought.
The existence of the filibuster makes it harder to do good things. And also harder to do terrible things. It slows down the legislative process in both directions.
The removal of the filibuster makes it easier to do good things. And also easier to do terrible things. It would make the legislative process into a race to see who can pass more legislation whenever they hold the Senate.
So. Like. As things stand now, it is really hard to help the poor. And also really hard to eat the poor. If we remove the filibuster, then we enter a situation where we lightswitch between eating the poor and helping the uneaten poor every 2-6 years or so. Like a Schrodinger's Box filled simultaneously with generosity and human suffering.
I'm honestly not sure which is better.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 19th 2019 at 8:21:35 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.There's a school of thought (not that I subscribe to it necessarily) that holds that it should be hard to pass laws and easy to repeal them. This tends to be a Libertarian idea, but the fact that you are making it harder to do good things is less important than that you are making it harder to do bad things. The harm one can do with government is arguably a greater problem.
Another way of looking at it is that a good idea should be popular enough to get more than just half of the people to go along with it. Of course, that's false to fact: many of the most beneficial things we've ever done were not highly popular at the time, only in retrospective.
It also ignores the problem that, in a two-party system with a filibuster, the minority party can sabotage all attempts to legislate, and if that party is composed of ideologically motivated obstructionists like the GOP, the whole system falls apart.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 19th 2019 at 10:37:07 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I think these points are meant more as removing the filibuster not being too difficult, but too dangerous.
It’s easy to remove, you just need a senate majority. What’s up for debate is if it’s wise to remove it.
The debate should be interesting, Bernie and Warren being on stage at the same time may well enable her to draw away some of his supporters, likewise as the big target on night one Bernie has to either step up or risk falling behind Warren.
Edited by Silasw on Jul 19th 2019 at 2:47:23 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranCorrect. It's relatively easy to remove: a simple majority vote in the Senate can change Senate rules. It's just that it carries severe downstream risks.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The filibuster has historically not been used to help the poor or the oppressed.
It’s a choke point for stubborn bigots and ideologues to destroy popular legislation and reforms.
Arguments for preserving the filibuster come in two flavors: misguided and bad. In the first category, there’s the notion that, given the radicalism of the modern Republican Party, and the fact that the Senate’s biases make it fairly easy for the GOP to assemble a 51-vote majority, Democrats should safeguard minority power in that chamber, even at a cost to the progressive agenda.
There are two problems with this line of reasoning. One is that the filibuster isn’t actually an effective check against a truly radical majority party. Which is to say: It only takes 51 votes to abolish the legislative filibuster, and Senate Republicans would surely do so the moment they decided it was in their party’s interests (already, they have severely undermined the filibuster by bending the rules of budget reconciliation). Mitch Mc Connell has not left the legislative filibuster alone out of a faithful devotion to norms of bipartisan comity. He has done so because he recognizes that the filibuster is an inherently conservative institution; if you are the party that’s more skeptical of ambitious government programs, a rule that makes such programs nigh-impossible to pass is extremely valuable to your cause.
It is worth remembering that the filibuster did not save Obamacare — the profound unpopularity of the conservative vision for social welfare did. Even the modest “skinny repeal” bill could not garner 50 votes. And the same is true of Social Security, Medicare, and the other crown jewels of New Deal liberalism. Progressives don’t need supermajority requirements to protect most of their favorite programs because progressive policies aim to serve majoritarian interests, and thus, tend to attract majoritarian support once implemented. By contrast, conservatives do need supermajority requirements to protect against progressive advances, because conservatives aim to serve a plutocratic minority that has had (relatively) little luck in rolling back universal social welfare programs once they’ve been enacted.
Separately, there is the simple fact that we do not have the luxury of passing no major legislation for the next decade. A deepening ecological crisis will (almost certainly) be humanity’s central challenge for the rest of our lives. We have a short window of time to take actions that will keep that crisis in the category of “not quite catastrophic.” And there is no sign that a critical mass of Republican senators will be willing to back the kinds of “big government” interventions necessary for mitigating climate change before it’s too late.
Meanwhile, as indicated above, the Republican Party is actively fomenting a democratic crisis in states across the country, as it seeks to protect its fragile majorities from demographic changes that undermine their popular support. If your central concern is restricting the power of a radical conservative movement, then you should demand that the next Democratic Senate majority abolish the filibuster, and pass a new voting rights act on a party-line basis. From there, that majority could proceed to approve D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood (if the Puerto Rican people are so willing), thereby reducing the GOP’s structural advantage in the Senate.
The bad argument for the preserving the filibuster is the one Cory Booker made: That it is a good institution on the merits, as it forces bipartisan compromise and protects “minority rights.” This is an obscene stance for anyone who claims to believe in the American people’s capacity for self-government — or the public sector’s capacity for advancing the collective good — to take. At present, the 26 smallest states are home to roughly 17 percent of the U.S. population. Which is to say: The filibuster allows lawmakers elected by less than 17 percent of voters to exercise veto power over any and all laws. This is a monstrously anti-democratic institution with no parallel in any other advanced democracy.
And while the filibuster has protected the rights of minority coalitions in the Senate, this has often come at the cost of protecting the human rights of minority populations. In the 20th century, the filibuster enabled southern segregationists to block anti-lynching laws and delay civil-rights legislation. This millenium, it enabled to nativists to block a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers.
If the Democratic Party’s Senate majority had abolished the legislative filibuster in 2009, it could have conceivably passed a larger stimulus, card check for unions, a public health-insurance option, cap and trade, and a pathway to citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants on a party-line vote. Such legislation would not merely have hastened the onset of the economic recovery, bolstered the labor movement, lowered the uninsured rate, reduced carbon emissions, and spared 11 million vulnerable immigrants from the nightmare of Trump’s radical enforcement regime. It would also have quite likely prevented Trump’s election; add a few million more immigrants to the electorate — and a couple percentage points to the rate of private-sector unionization — and you end up with a country that is both more democratic and more Democratic.
If the erosion of vital democratic norms brought our republic to its present crisis, the faithful observation of anti-democratic norms did, too. If the next unified Democratic government doesn’t learn from this history, they may very well make us all repeat it.
A simple majority is possible by if not the 2020 election, then likely the 2022 election. Right now those two elections have more opportunities for Democratic gain than republican gain.
Ideally, all the good that can be done by democrats without a filibuster will encourage the people to never give back the majority to republicans, but Viewers Are Morons. (Or perhaps Humans Are Morons would be the more applicable trope, though I usually associate that one with works with multiple sentient lifeforms.)
Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Jul 19th 2019 at 10:58:34 AM
My musician page
The problem, though, then becomes if the Republicans (or an even worse party) ever get back both Houses of Congress, then there's nothing to stop them from reversing everything.
While I do agree that the Filibuster has been abused for bad reasons, I wouldn't advocate for removing it. What I would advocate for is limiting it; make it so that only 2-4 Filibusters can be used a year, not a Filibuster every single law that is disagreeable to. Then both parties have to use the Filibuster more strategically, and not for everything.
They'd still use it to block the sort of major reforms — like voting rights and climate change legislation — that we need.
As the article just posted points out, major legislation has never been saved by the filibuster. The main use of it has been to block major reform that has widespread popular support. What saves popular reforms is not the filibuster, it's the fact that it's popular.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.While I do agree that the Filibuster has been abused for bad reasons, I wouldn't advocate for removing it. What I would advocate for is limiting it; make it so that only 2-4 Filibusters can be used a year, not a Filibuster every single law that is disagreeable to. Then both parties have to use the Filibuster more strategically, and not for everything.
This is incorrect, popular programs have a habit of becoming entrenched and thus things like social services become difficult to remove. This phenomenon is exactly why the ACA still exists despite repeated Republican attacks.
If we create a universal healthcare system then the Republicans will either have to deal with it or remove it and face a massive backlash. Same with other comparably sized reforms.
So no, they would not be able to easily roll back all progress. And I would argue making it easier for both parties to pass policy is a good thing by its own merits, if a party does something bad it should be up to the people to punish them for it. The system being unwieldy and inefficient isn't actually a good substitute. That just makes it resistant to popular pressure and that's not good in the long run, our system should be flexible and mutable not ossified and hidebound.
Limiting the filibuster to a few times a year just means that Republicans will strategically use it to cause the most damage by frustrating the most vital reform. So that would in no way improve the current situation.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 19th 2019 at 10:57:28 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangFUCK this entire god damned, bullshit administration, and in particular I hope Stephen Miller gets sodomized with a rusty spork for this Moral Event Horizon.
They are now pushing for not letting in a SINGLE fucking refugee next year
.
During a key meeting of security officials on refugee admissions last week, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services representative who is closely aligned with White House immigration adviser Stephen Miller suggested setting a cap at zero, the people said. Homeland Security Department officials at the meeting later floated making the level anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000, according to one of the people.
The proposal for a near-shutdown of the refugee program is alarming officials at the Department of Defense, who don’t want to see a halt in admissions of Iraqis who risked their lives assisting U.S. forces in that country. The possible move comes after the Trump administration cut refugee admissions by a third this year, to 30,000.
If the administration shuts down refugee admissions, it would give President Donald Trump a powerful talking point as he makes immigration restrictions a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.
At the same time, it would strand thousands of people already far along in the process and damage the ability of resettlement agencies to process refugees in future years, according to advocates tracking the issue.
“In the long-term, it would mean that the capacity and the ability of the United States to resettle refugees would be completely decimated,” said Jen Smyers, a director with Church World Service, one of the nine U.S. resettlement agencies.
The State Department declined to discuss the possible cap. The departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense and the National Security Council, which had representatives at the meeting, did not respond to requests for comment.
And it's especially galling from him, as his own ancestors were refugees
, and he just epitomizes the "Fuck You, Got Mine!" mentality of this fucking administration.
Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 19th 2019 at 2:21:00 PM
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"
Yeah - fuck the guy who committed Suicide by Cop by attacking one of the detention facilities. That shit just plays into the narrative.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"Ironically this is only going to make antifa-perpetrated terrorism more likely.
I think that's what Cruz and the others want.
Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Jul 19th 2019 at 2:28:17 PM
My musician pageObviously. If they provoke the left to violence, they can call, "See, they're no better than what you accuse us of," and retake ground in the moral debate. Moreover, the centrist media will buy it, hook line and sinker.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 19th 2019 at 2:29:03 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Considering how incredibly rare it is that doesn't say much, a 10% increase of 0% still 0% (to use an exaggerated example).
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang![]()
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It's a loose affiliation, unlike the Proud Boys and the like, at least to my knowledge. Quite a few Antifa folks (including the aforementioned asshole that gave cause to that legislation) are also Anarchists, which is... not great at organization.
Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 19th 2019 at 2:33:53 PM
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"

Also, people who are getting effective government help are more likely to know just how important said help is. Hence the problem with red governments aggressively flipping the bird at welfare programs, thus encouraging their constituents to see welfare as a big crock for other people...