They’re wrong.
Look at the chart I posted. In the '71 session the Republicans go from less than 10 to more than 20. Then it remains roughly stable until Clinton. Then it stays roughly stable until Obama. Anyone looking at that chart can see the trends.
Both parties have their problems. But there are multitudes of differences between the parties, and if you cared about your country you’d put your vote into making it better instead of sitting aloof in a cloud of deluded superiority.
Birth control, abortion, the economy, foreign policy, healthcare, the deficit. All these things are differences between the two parties.
The difference is my assessment is made on reason. 
[QUOTE=Bricker]
Yes.
The rules permit it, and they feel it’s in their best interest. I will say that, based on my ten minute study of the issue, if I were in charge, I wouldn’t take this action, but I won’t substitute my judgement for theirs by declaring that they should do something based on my ten minute study of the issue.
[/QUOTE]
This seems to me (in my 5 minutes of analysis of this issue) to be the crux. All the rest is bullshit of finger pointing and yowling about who killed who, or who burned down who’s castle. The rules allow for it. If it’s an egregious use or abuse of those rules then we already have a mechanism in place to deal with that…it’s called re-election. Granted, the constituents of those elected officials might not feel the same way about this issue as other, and might not see that it IS an egregious use of the rules current in place…but, hey, that’s democracy for you.
Since neither party is going to be willing to make substantial changes to those rules (being as they know that one day they will want to use the same rules when it favors them), all I can say is c’est la vie. Need to just suck it up and move on, IMHO.
-XT
Maybe you need more than five minutes to understand this issue? Sucking it up and moving on is a great solution. But in the short term they are damaging the country.
Again, up until Obama came in office, both sides had some level of self-control and class. What Republicans have taught us is that they can’t be trusted with an open bar.
Oh, fer Christ’s sake, I’m not saying they dont hold ideologically differences. Of course they do. Again, they are diametrically opposed sides of the same coin, power and control of the government for the sake of staying in power and controlling government. They aren’t there for some magnanimous service to G-d and country. What a load of naive horseshit.
BTW thanks for the condescension, Buckaroo. but I do vote. Every election. Local, State and National. The difference is that I am not sitting on a corner with my dog, cane and glasses selling pencils out of a tin cup for a nickel and voting for a candidate based on the letter in the “Party Affiliation” box.
We’re just gonna have to agree to disagree, Ray (Btw loved what you did with America the Beautiful <tear>).
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
Maybe you need more than five minutes to understand this issue? Sucking it up and moving on is a great solution. But in the short term they are damaging the country.
[/QUOTE]
No, I don’t think I do, unless I’m missing something here. The Republicans aren’t breaking the rules…merely using those rules to game this particular situation. The solutions to this seem minimal, considering that I seriously doubt that either party is going to go for real, meaningful change to the current filibusterer rules. No? Assuming that’s the case, then whoever happens to be on the other side of the turning worm is going to whine and complain (until said worm turns back in their favor) while the other side is going to use the advantage. IOW, nothing substantial is going to be done, and there is nothing anyone in this thread or really anywhere else can do about it.
Sounds like ‘suck it up’ is the only option…that, and await the next turning of the worm. Which is what I’d do, with great anticipation of the irony possibilities inherent in this comedy we call a political system.
If it’s in the rules, then someone is going to game those rules and up the bar. It’s happened before, it will happen again, and continue to happen until said rules are changed or modified…which will, in turn, allow for unexpected or unanticipated consequences and gaming. Or, until the entire process is taken down…which, of course, will have potential unanticipated and undesirable consequences as well, especially when that worm turns again. As worms are wont to do…
-XT
They’ve been blocking those too.
The glaring over-use of the filibuster is what will kill it.
It’s like a school board censoring library books. If they do it once or twice a year, well, they’ll probably get away with it forever. But when they suddenly go apeshit and start censoring every single book the librarian asks to purchase… Suicide.
If the Republicans had the self-control to use it only in the really important cases – like when a wise Latina is nominated to the Supreme Court – they wouldn’t be imperiling it.
Gee, I wonder where I’ve read something like that before. Hmmm.
Oh yeah! In post #64
No, he’s actually right about this one. See my nearly identical post linked to right up there 
But yes, we know this behavior that prevents nearly any work whatsoever getting done in Congress is severely damaging to the country. Naming post offices and debating anti-abortion legislation is not what we pay Congress to do. And now that the Republicans have shown the country exactly what depths they’re willing to sink to in order to destroy a president at the expense of moving the country (and especially the country’s economy) forward, we have an ethical obligation to do everything in our power to wrest any semblance of power away from them.
We have to talk to everyone we know; convincing democrats that their vote is critical and get their 100% commitment to do so, and enlightening republicans with the growing mountain of evidence that the republican party is not legislating in good faith. Make absolutely certain that each and every one of them read David Frum’s New York Magazine op-ed, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?”
This time, the [republican] party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.
It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recovery program.
I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess.
<4 pages of snip>
It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but** an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote.**
Even he fucking gets it. Good luck getting arrogant ass Bricker to concede this though.
And there is only one way that we will ever be able to get the republican party on the right track; and that’s to squeeze the life out of it to show it how it will be dealt with if and when it stops working for the good of the nation merely as a way to destroy the other side.
The republican party has become a flesh-eating bacteria. In order to prevent its spread, we literally have to amputate it. Cut off its blood supply. Only give them access to the patient once the healing is complete, or at least well on its way such that it cannot be infected again.
And while I’m sure Mr. Frum would disagree with my cure, he does not disagree with my diagnosis:
We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party. Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime. But a great political party is worth fighting for.
Frankly, I don’t think the republican party has been a “great political party” in my entire lifetime. From Nixon & Watergate to Reagan/Bush & the blatant lie of “supply side economics” (which has never worked and will never work*) & Iran/Contra to Bush II/Cheney & CIA outing, torture & a war of aggression against a non-threat, they have been a disaster and a disgrace.
But as deeply left-wing as I am, I don’t pretend that Democrats have been without their scandals or that they alone hold all the answers. We need pragmatism. We need common fucking sense. We actually have a president right now who’s willing to give us that and has been desperately trying to. He has been willing to incorporate conservative policies to such an extent that he has pissed off the nutjob extremists on our side.
But as far over as he’s been willing to bend, republican “Leadership” has slapped him across the ass and said, “thanks anyway, but we’d rather destroy you than work with you.” Never mind that so much of Obama’s legislative efforts, from health care reform to the fucking DREAM Act,** were all republican ideas in the first place. They will not work with this president under any circumstances.
However, democrats cannot be left unfettered control over the reins of government indefinitely or this country will be equally destroyed as they become equally drunk on any power they obtain. We need sensible, reasonable and workable conservative input to temper potential liberal excess.
This republican party is not the one to do it. Nor can a new generation of conservatives rise up with the poison injected into their minds by the despicable lies they’ve been programmed to believe. As Frum points out, it is going to be a long, hard fight. But we have to fight it. Start deprogramming people right now.
So get your ass out there and volunteer. Campaign. FIGHT!
**Statement of Senator Orrin G. Hatch before the United States Senate - On the Introduction of the “DREAM” Act “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act”
Hatch skips DREAM Act vote he calls “cynical exercise”
Well, I wasn’t rifting off of your post there, Shayna…I had just skimmed the thread and saw Brickers post and thought I’d expand on that. Sorry if you thought I was plagiarizing you or not giving you credit…or whatever. Teach me to jump into a thread without reading all the other posts.
-XT
Doesn’t answer the question. Why should the majority even when it is a tiny majority, rule?
A “recess appointment” is “gaming the system” as much as filibustering is. Or as much as blocking recess appointments is.
A tiny majority would be 1-2 seats. A 57-41 majority (59-41 if you count the independents who caucus with the Democrats) is pretty significant in this country’s electoral climate (where presidential elections are decided by a few percent of the popular vote), and just happens to coincide with the period that the minority party used the most filibusters by a factor of two.
Ah good. So you’re cool with the filibuster right now, after the 2010 elections, right?
Nah, I was mostly just ribbin’ you a bit, as well as using it to back up your assertion in one post.
Do you recognize a difference between preventing a steamrolling and simple obstructionism? Do you recognize that being outvoted is not necessarily the same as a steamrolling? Or that you ever have to accept losing?
You know, I don’t really give a shit if it’s in the Republican party’s best interest. It’s apparently in their best interest to do as much damage as possible so they can “prove” that government does not work and Obama is a poopy head.
The question for every thinking person should be: “Is it in the country’s interest?”
Well, the country keeps electing and re-electing Republicans, so …
Sure. What for you is “obstructionism” for others is “preventing a steamrolling”.
So… A large number of the country seems to believe it when a Republican running for the nomination tells them that our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. Or I guess some folks believe Perry when he says that Obama is conducting a war on religion.
But I guess lies are OK if the Republicans feel it’s in their best interest to fool the American people.