Crimson847 wrote:I get the sense Doodles is almost exclusively responding to sellers, since his points don't seem to apply to my argument (I welcome Republicans eventually getting the same chance Democrats get). So, no response there.
Re Jamish: So instead of just passing a bill that gets between 50 and 60 percent support (as would happen without the filibuster), we would instead bribe the remaining needed senators by tacking on some pork-barrel spending, so we can pass the same bill but with extra wasteful spending? That doesn't seem like a recipe for better policy in either the long or short run.
Unlike ditching the filibuster it also threatens the core principle of majority rule, since a bill that would fail to get a majority at all on its own merits (and hence probably shouldn't be made law from a democratic standpoint) could potentially be dragged over the line this way, especially in the House.
I basically was, yeah, but my argument still isn't far away from what it was before. To your point about both parties ushering in their agendas for the country to decide whose is better:
I consider the right in its current form a virulent danger to the laws, foundations, and mores of this country. This was a path I think they began to trod precisely at the point of Newt Gingrich's rise, and it has been sustained by Fox News in particular. When I was Republican, it was during the time of McCains and Paul Ryans, where some of the callousness of conservative voters bothered me yet the top had not yet been infected with it. Now the acquisition and exercise of power (thanks Tom Nichols) is practically all the party exists for (a party that once stood for the limiting and restraint of power), and it has a breathtaking ignorance to it where facts cannot penetrate the shield provided by its chief informants (Fox News), where it stands for whatever the man at the top stands for regardless of whether he's consistent, where it can decry socialism on one hand and then have Trump carelessly handing out billions of dollars to farmers and companies (not the tax cut, think of the Carrier deal) like we're in the Soviet Union, and the absolute vapidity of the average conservative voter now deeply scares me. Not to say that a conservative is unintelligent, but as someone with a well-educated family that is deeply Republican, they treat facts and logic with utmost disdain if it gets in the way of the thrill of a tribal victory. If Trump just wanted to suspend the presidential elections tomorrow, I'm not sure anything could genuinely stop him. I think the only thing that really keeps him from doing it is that he's too dumb to.
Conservative voters by and large have this hollow patriotism where they believe in an America which has a lot less to do with what America's actually about and more about whatever Fox News says America's about that day, where American=Republican, where Trump attacking John McCain isn't un-American because he once didn't vote to repeal Obamacare, where they're fighting against authoritarianism by deposing any system which stands in the way of their president, and have this not-so-subtle attitude that they're saving the country from itself. Perhaps it's a little hypocritical or hyperbolic of me to say that keeping that veto might be one of a very few checks still left against a party that's becoming increasingly vapid, nihilistic, and authoritarian. The only real Republican moderate left in the Senate seems to be Lisa Murkowski, and as the GOP is making clear by their refusal to cobble together a veto-proof majority to oppose Trump's seizing of the last real congressional responsibility, they have no real interest in trying to temper him if it means they might actually have to lose a primary. With a three-man majority, they no longer have to care if Murkowski has an objection or if Susan Collins wants to symbolically vote on something so she can run for a governorship she's almost certainly going to lose. There is no angel on their shoulder; even those folks at National Review have, as I knew they would, slowly managed to "but the Democrats!" their way to getting behind Trump.
What the people want? The people don't want this, yet by and large it doesn't really seem to matter. You can go down the line on Trump's positions and they usually come out to about 35% in favor with the majority opposed, and it doesn't stop him or the GOP from shrugging their shoulders and doing it anyways. Yes, a president usually has an unpopular policy or three forced through (or if you're Truman, everything you do is unpopular until it turns 30 years later that you were right to do nearly everything you did), but other than Truman (who you can understand considering the state of the world at the time) I can't really recall a president who had an agenda so unpopular and a congress so supine. It's not just about Trump, however, I'm probably more concerned about whatever Republican president comes next, probably someone smarter whose seen that he can do whatever he wants on the blind will of 30-something percent of the voters and decides he wants in on that. Even then it's not necessarily safe; I've said before that I worry more about us falling into the trap of more party-oriented authoritarianism in the vein of Poland than being run by a dictator in the vein of Russia.
I'm not going to do this "Both sides are equally bad" thing. The Democrats have their warts, but the GOP has become far, far more odious. They already have too much power for their vote share, frankly, too say little of how they've ratfucked their way into dominating the courts, and I'm disinclined to give them more by way of a political experiment. I've made clear that I'm kinda counting on the clock running out on the GOP; It's hard to sustain a political movement when a sizable majority of your voters are 55+.
So in short: no, I don't want to give the GOP a chance to push through whatever they want so the voters can decide after they've decimated everything. Were we in more rational and calm times, perhaps I'd consider it, but right now isn't that time. The GOP have had about forty years of dominance in this country, with only the mildly liberal 16 years of Obama and Clinton (fleeting in both cases as they were quickly constrained by hardcore conservatives) to break it up.