Yes, as far as you know.
Not that it matters; your “two tweets is a twend” assertion is as ludicrous as the thought that Stephen Colbert’s tweet was a serious, reasoned statement designed to do anything but get people to chuckle.
FTR, I don’t give a flying fuck about anyone’s tweets.
We want the same thing. We disagree on the tactics. I think that the obstructionist tactics you advocate will cause more votes against Dems in November than for them, and I think that if Kavanaugh is confirmed before the election, it will cause more Reps to be complacent than Dems.
Kavanaugh’s going to be confirmed before the election. That’s a given. Democrats can’t stop that - they can only delay it. What matters is how much Democrats show they’re willing to fight. Why vote for a Democrat if they show that they’re not going to stand up?
Quick quiz for you: What are the four reasons people generally betray their country?
Answer:
Money
Ideology
Compromise
Ego
A judge that can barely stay afloat financially is a judge that can be bought. Trump would know this because Trump has also been bought.
What evidence do you have that Judge Kavanaugh has, or even can be, bought?
…what point? Which voters?
Nope. My “profound insight” is that you were wrong.
You said Republicans were fighting for “something.”
But they weren’t fighting for anything. They were fighting for the sake of a fight.
“Republicans lying” wasn’t my point.
You do realize that you are agreeing with Smapti, not disagreeing with him, don’t you?
Its all very well that you did a complete 180 degrees on the position you held literally a day ago once you got spoon-fed information everybody else knew a few days ago. Perhaps before you start threads based on bad information you spend a bit of time doing a bit of research first.
I really think its time to stop trying to second guess whats going to alienate independents and whats going to alienate maybe many dems. Its the exact type of thinking that plays right into the Republican playbook. It creates cookie-cutter politicians with wishy-washy stances and cookie-cutter politicians with wishy-washy stances don’t energise electorates.
The last New Zealand election was a boring, bog-standard election between a boring cookie-cutter right-wing politician and a boring cookie-cutter left-wing politician. And the right-wing party lead the polls easily and they were going to win a landslide victory.
So against all conventional logic the boring cookie-cutter left wing politician stood down. And was replaced by Jacinda Ardern, an exciting, vibrant young politician who actually stood for something. And the left-wing party came from back-from-the-dead and clawed back the votes, they went into coalition negotiations with good-old Winston, and now Jacinda Ardern is our Prime Minster.
You don’t need to compromise your value system to win. And you shouldn’t waste your time trying to figure out how to convert the undecideds when in reality what you need to do is get that have already decided out to vote.
You can’t energise the vote if you don’t have skin in the game.
This happened today.
“One of the great acts of American generosity and charity.”
Spokesman for the Whitehouse Alex Azar.
Talking about the child separation policy.
This is propaganda. Literal, actual propaganda. The United States Federal Government is broadcasting propaganda on a daily basis. We laughed at Bagdad Bob. We laugh when we see clips from North Korea. But you guys aren’t laughing at this. You guys are barely noticing this. This is your new normal. Listening to and accepting propaganda from the state as if Obama or even GW was still President. Accepting this. Being complicit.
I bet you never even knew this happened. This was barely was a pimple on the news cycle. But this propaganda is being funnelled, targeted, propagated, to millions of people. Who hear the message loud and clear. Who believe it. This is what you are fighting.
The stakes have never been higher. And yet here you are quibbling over the difference between “opposition” and “obstruction.” As if that matters.
You want to energise the vote? Over the next few years you will see a huge turn-out of people-of-colour than ever at the next lot of elections. They don’t give a fuck about “opposition” and “obstruction.” They are living the consequences of the decision of white people to vote for Trump. They have skin in the game. They have everything to loose.
If you want to energise the vote then you need to make it clear what is at stake. And what is at stake is the heart and the soul of the United States of America. It isn’t too late to reverse course. But if Trump wins again in a couple of years America is fucked. FUCKED. Stop sweating the small stuff. Stop trying to second guess how to win over the “undecideds.” Focus on one thing. Vote the fuckers out of office and never let this happen again. Stop worrying about the big picture. You aren’t going to be able to stop what congress or the senate will do and if they decide to obstruct instead of opposing or oppose instead of obstructing nobody is going to give a fuck because I’ve already forgotten the difference. Think local. Work your arses off to vote the fuckers out where every you can because its at the local level everyone can make a difference.
You want to energise the vote? Get out there and make a difference. This is a war being fought on many different fronts and you need to decide which side you are going to fight on. This isn’t a normal situation. This. Isn’t. Normal. This clusterfuck, this maelstrom that is happening all around you at the moment is a crisis. You should be yelling this from the rooftops.
And if that isn’t enough to energise the vote: then you guys deserve everything you get.
The sudden disappearance of this rather large (on the scale of his finances) debt should give any reasonable person concern that he already has been bought.
This is silly.
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Midterms aren’t about independents and median voters. They’re about turning out your partisans.
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Most people want candidates that stand for something, and preferably are willing to fight for it.
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What gridlock? You can’t have gridlock without traffic. And other than confirming the occasional judge, the Senate just doesn’t have that much on its calendar. If the Dems could bring the Senate to a screeching halt (which they can’t), nobody would notice, because nothing’s going on.
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The Dems can’t obstruct this nomination. (Said that in #3, really.) They need a majority, which they don’t have. Their powers are limited to moral suasion.
They can ‘demand’ that Kavanaugh’s full record from his Bush years and his Ken Starr years be made public before the committee hearings start, but only in the sense of asking real loud, and making the point that this is how it ought to be done. They can’t force anyone to do anything.
If Mitch McConnell wanted a committee vote today and a floor vote tomorrow, there isn’t a damn thing the Dems could do about it. Well, they might be able to come up with enough procedural stuff to delay the vote a day or two, but hardly “long past any legitimate inquiry into his qualifications.” You’ve got nothing to worry about here.
When fighting is using double standards and encouraging your base to " resist " by confronting people in public " you’re cutting off your own nose to spite your face.
Giving a dissenting opinion on a battle you can’t win is better than being a sore loser in a battle you can’t win. Choose wisely. But they won’t.
Democrats have always been a fragmented lot that takes a gifted leader to organize. I don’t think Shumer, Pelosi, or Sanders are in the class of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Who’s encouraging the base here? I don’t see any Dem politicians recommending this course of action. ISTM that this is coming directly from the ‘base.’
And when any of these confrontations are 1/100 as painful for the recipient as having your child taken away from you and sent off to who knows where, let me know.
But I digress. This thread’s about resisting (or not) by trying to prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
I don’t understand why people think that. Congress has investigative and subpoena authority. Congress (the House) is the impeachment arm and Congress (the Senate) is where a trial takes place after impeachment to determine whether the president should be removed from office or not.
The thread shows by experiment with left leaning voters, albeit an unscientific cross section, why the OP theory is wrong. The problem with it is that any overt sign by the Democrats they are yielding in their ‘resistance’ to Trump getting his pick for the USSC will anger their own base most of all.
The OP theory is that stalling the confirmation process past the election would energize the GOP base with anger but depress the Democratic base with ‘satisfaction’. That probably has some validity in a vacuum. But it ignores the likely tendency of the Democratic base to blame their own elected establishment if the confirmation process isn’t delayed noticeably.
Which it probably won’t be no matter what the Senate Democrats decide to do, which is simply the no win aspect of lacking votes in today’s super-polarized alignment. The GOP elected establishment routinely faced the same lose-lose during the Obama years: “why aren’t you fighting?!?” without the votes (minorities first two years, always below Senate filibuster majority later, never remotely near the votes to overcome a veto on a partisan issue). That was a staple of right leaning talk media for years v the “GOP establishment” and a major prelude to the 2016 presidential primaries.
Wrong, I do know. According to their own website, the NARAL has 1.2 million members. There are only nine cities in the United States with a population greater than that. It’s not a “tiny organization” as you claimed.
If we’re talking about voting along party lines against Kavanaugh, I don’t see that as problematic at all. But IIRC one poster brought up quorum breaking, which is a strategy that I’ve seen discussed elsewhere online. Such tactics could work, but I could also seeing them backfire as well.
In any case, I agree with you that democrats need to show resolve. Voting in unison against a SCOTUS nominee is certainly one way to rally the troops, but they need to agree give voters something else to vote for, like Gingirch’s contract with America. Voters should already be fired up, and they should vote for the one party that is going to oppose Donald Trump. If you’re a progressive, the choice is obvious, even if some Democrats don’t meet our progressive litmus test.
The available evidence indicates that you did not know who they were before you googled them just now to write that post. And yeah, a claim of 1.2 million members is tiny: it’s .27% of the population of the US. There are at least a dozen mukbang channels on YouTube with more subscribers than that ffs. Grumpy Cat alone has more than twice the number of followers as NARAL, and she’s only 6 years old.
Your argument was crap. You know it; we all know it.
And now you claim not to care about tweets: why the hell did you bring them up then? Oh, just more Gish Galloping and deflection, no doubt.
My experience agrees with this. I think that if the Democrats fought the nomination and lost they’d be extra fired-up and angry going into the midterms. Contrawise, if the Republicans won they’d have less motivation to vote. Making this a big fight and then losing (because winning isn’t really an option) might be the best thing that could happen from a midterm perspective.
What about the other guys, the knuckle-walking Bible thumpers? What do they want?
While Trumpco dances around the issue, trying to pretend they have no idea! how Mr K will vote on Roe…really, no clue, they didn’t ask and they aren’t going to ask and if they did ask he sure as shit isn’t going to say “YES! Yes! First chance I get!”. Which is what the aforementioned group wants to hear. They don’t want to hear about not offending the moderates, they want to offend the moderates, they want to grind them beneath the heels of their massive popular support…
These people have been strung along for decades! Just one more election, one more big push, and then, at long last, the Day of Jubilee! Are they going to buy one more string along? Senate, House, President…now what’s the excuse? Today is Payday, dammit, stand and deliver! The hard core doesn’t want any moderation, they want it both ways, ram it down our throats and shove it up our Nixon.
Have they written their checks yet? Or are they waiting?
No, only the first half is right. My theory is that the GOP base would be satisfied if Kavanaugh is confirmed before the election, and thus be less energized, while the Dems will be angry whether or not he’s confirmed before the election, thus it’s a net win for the Dems to confirm him before the election. I think taxes and the Supreme Court are the only legitimate reasons anyone not a diehard Republican would vote for Trump, and if both are settled before the election, the Rep vote will be less energized than if the Supreme Court nomination is still on the news every night before they vote.
Since about half the posts of the last 24 hours are berating me for presuming to have an opinion on what will or won’t cause Dems to turn out, I don’t know what can be gained by repeating that I disagree with your opinion.
Obviously, I can’t prove I’m right that Dems will not be inspired to vote by obstructionist tactics, but I do know that Dems were disgusted by obstructionist tactics when the Reps were in the minority, and I just don’t see the gain in being equally disgusting. Oppose all you want, debate the nomination fiercely, vote no when it’s time to vote, but don’t drag it out with stupid delaying tactics.
I agree with his basic premise, i.e. that showing the voters you are willing to fight even for a lost cause can energize your base. I disagree with his implication that proposing and voting on bills to that effect (which the Reps did with ACA) is equivalent to obstructionist tactics based only on procedure (which many in this thread advocate).
I have not changed my position at all. I have clarified it in the sense that I did not mean that Dems should vote “yes” on Kavanaugh or otherwise not vigorously debate it, but rather that they should not engage in procedural obstructionist tactics that add nothing of substance to the debate, with the only reasonable goal to postpone the confirmation until after the election, which IMO will only enrage the Reps and disgust the Dems who did not already have their votes cast in concrete. I am sorry I wasn’t more clear about that in my OP, but that has always been my position.
In particular, learning that Kavanaugh was on the record against criminal as well as civil investigations into a sitting President had no effect on my opinion, since I assume that Trump will get a private assurance to that effect from anyone he nominates. I don’t think Trump is very smart, but I do think he learned from his experience with Jeff Sessions to get everything spelled out before he nominates anyone to a position that can help or hurt him.