This bit should be commandeered by Greenpeace and other environmental groups for general usage.
Altogether quite felicitous!
If you had said in the Senate I’d have agreed. But there are typically a number of coastal Republican-held House seats, particularly in CA and FLA, that routinely vote to extend moratoriums or oppose new drilling. They’re generally in wealthier districts where the locals don’t want their views sullied by oil platforms and their beaches covered in tar. It’s a case of local politics taking precedence. I think in the last Trump drilling push in 2018/2019 about two dozen House Republicans voted against his plans.
That would be Major Charles Emerson Winchester III, good sir!
Fuck you, indeed. May you burn in Hell, Joe Manchin.
Oh, goody.
My hopes are pretty low that BBB will pass, unfortunately, but Manchin’s public statements don’t mean much to me. He’s a bullshitter – this could well be yet another negotiation tactic. He sucks either way, but we’ll see.
I literally just saw Biden negotiate with the House for two months as to meet this guy’s demands, to help ensure this bill will pass the Senate. It passed the House and now he is gonna kill it.
He is also a no on filibuster carveout to protect voting rights. But he was a yes to extend the government debt. But a ‘no’ on reducing insulin copays.
Biden got in with Republican support because he was going to work on healing the partisan divide. To do that means reforming the rules for elections and governance.
Minus a change to the rules, any progressive legislation is going to get axed every time the government flips back Republican. And you can look back at history to demonstrate to yourself that it’s going to flip back. We have over two hundred years of “which team has majority” ping pong and it’s not liable to stop anytime soon. If you think the Democrats are going to stay in power for the rest of your life or even the rest of this decade, you’re being completely unrealistic.
And, note that I’m not saying that like I want it to be true or want the Democrats to lose. It is just history and statistical inference.
Every law you want, you will never have for more than a few years. That’s the current political reality of America. And the longer you don’t internalize that reality, the longer that it stays true.
The only way that you get what you want is by reforming the system. You can’t bypass a rules change and accomplish anything beyond angst, whiplash, and disappointment. Build Back Better was most of a year of wasting time on something with a 2-6 year expiration date.
Joe Biden was completely stupid to come in after the world’s largest partisan troll and try to go back to partisan egging on of the other team, and push through legislation that was dreamed up by the leftmost third of the country. I don’t care if he needed to do it, politically, because he needed the support of the progressives. He needed to have sat them down and explained reality until they cried and accepted the bleakness of the world they live in.
You’re getting jack shit until there’s a rule change.
We only get progressive legislation to keep when you give up the desire to legislate through political strength. You have to give up power. You have to get rid of gerrymandering - not just for them, for yourselves as well - you have to enshrine the filibuster in law, you have to give up political donations from the unions and force them to give up political donations from corporations, you create a voting day holiday so that people have the time to actually research their options, go back to the voice vote, don’t let the electoral college be full of hacks, and in all ways go about killing the political machines.
You do all of that and you’ll get the trust of the people. With that trust, you will be able to pass and keep any legislation that you can actually make a solid, science based argument over and it will be enacted, and it will remain the law of the land.
But, so long as the basis of politics is to circumvent red tape, circumvent argument, circumvent compromise, and to get your most crazy, partisan friends into office - there will be no legislation from either side that becomes the law of the land and stays that way. You cannot have a stable political reality without trust.
This is just engineering. You have to restore trust. Nothing else will come before it and remain.
Pick one
That just won’t ever happen. Parties are full of the ambitious and self-serving. They are just a mechanism used for power. Why would those who use that mechanism knowingly act in a way to weaken their own power?
There are two potential ways to pass reform, if you mean to say that you can’t pass it while the filibuster remains.
- You drop the filibuster, for an agreement to immediately restore and make it unremovable after that.
- Bribe everyone in Congress, as a component of passing reform. Money, a lock on reelection, etc.
I think that you’ll find that once you strip out partisan gains for the left from the bill, you’ll have lost the 50% majority. #2 is probably the right answer.
I honestly don’t even know where to start with this.
The way members in the house guarantee their seats is gerrymandering. The risk of another party breaking a pinky promise not to run against you is so much greater than your +10 seat flipping within 10 years.
So I guess you have to go with a fix being somehow outspending everyone else currently doing the legal version of bribing congress? Or just going further and doing it illegally?
Legal and illegal is what Congress decides. If they decide to grant themselves a bonus, and the law says that it’s a bonus, and there’s a clear legislative purpose to the bonus, then it was a bonus.
If you think that BBB is worth $3t and you’re not going to get it until the system is fixed then fixing the system is worth more than $3t. That is simply math and logic.
There are 538 people in Congress. That would be $5.5b per person. Personally, I bet you could get there at a far lower expense, but that is how much were saying this is worth, if you’re a big proponent of BBB.
You give each of them a choice between office for life, a flat $100m to keep - no taxes - or a yearly income of 350x the median national salary from the moment they leave office, and make clear that everything being asked for is not to any party’s benefit, not to any policy benefit, and purely to perform a reset so that their children and grandchildren live in a land of prosperity, strength, and fortitude… If there aren’t any takers then we need to know that we need to vote all these people out of there, because that would not make sense. If you can’t sell them on that, these people are too insane to hold office.
The bribe is worth it, whether they take it or not.
He’s doing his best to ensure we all burn right here.
I don’t think your proposed fixes get me build back better at any rate.
The groups that currently try to influence congress don’t do what you’re proposing for whatever reason, and even if they did, the knock on effects of replacing a democratically elected congress with an aristocracy that had found a way to insulate itself from ever being voted out would not be worth the benefits.
Actually, they cannot. The 27th amendment says that any sort of pay increase cannot take effect until after the next election.
I’m sure that they will take the money, but how do you hold them accountable once they have it?
The proposed fix is to allow the government to be boring, rational, and evidence based.
If you don’t believe that BBB can survive that then, yes, it won’t get you BBB. But likewise, if that’s true then you shouldn’t want it.
As said, you won’t get reform minus a bribe. Once you just try to make things better, without trying to favor one side or the other, you will lose your 50%. And that is proof that this needs to be done. There are not enough there who can simply and honestly work for the country and for the benefit of all, minus adherence to special interests and utopianism, to do the basic work of keeping the country running.
Julius Caesar destroyed the system for reasonable governance to persist from decade to decade. It took centuries of a slow decline for the system to completely fail but, the key aspect is that the decline was so subtle and slow that it wasn’t until centuries later that we could say that it was an inevitable, downward spiral from there minus a foundational correction to restore things.
Course correction requires stepping back and doing the hard thing of choosing country over party, over policy, over political strength. It needs to be done. It’s worth everything. It’s not just us, today. It’s the lives of your children, their children, and all your descendants until the land rots.
If BBB was worth it, a better group of people than you and I will choose it and they will keep it. If it deserved to die, them it will stay dead.
That is as it should be.
In what way is the Fillibuster part of government being boring, rational, and evidence based?
Nitpick: There are 538 electoral votes, but 535 people in Congress.
The BBB legislation is not going as you say it should be.
If a simple majority had supported it, our system allows for preK, childcare, green incentives, public healthcare expansion. It apparently happens that there is no simple majority for it.
And a fix to the perceived problem of simple majorities getting to do things has to involve a solution that could work, which is not something you’ve presented.
Also I’m pretty sure an amendment would be required to mandate a supermajority in the senate. Because the constitution allows the senate to do everything by majority, and doesn’t allow congress to bind a future congress.