Once something is in place, a simple majority is usually enough to keep it in place. Republicans were unable to roll back the ACA, for instance. People objected to implementing it, but once people were actually benefiting from it, they didn’t want it taken away.
So I don’t think that it’s as much of a pendulum as @Sage_Rat is claiming, there is going to be at least something of a ratchet effect, as people don’t want things taken away from them.
Oh I don’t think the filibuster is a good thing at all, and I think legally enshrining it would be a disaster.
I do think that the pendulum effect is overblown, and it’s probably worse now than in a system with no filibuster. As it is now, so much policy is enacted by executive action and it’s way easier for one person to reverse something than to get a congressional majority to do it.
I think even if the filibuster was good, there is basically no way to restore what it was 15 years ago and there certainly is no way to do it while passing reforms to our election system like banning gerrymandering.
I meant my post to be in support of your position, not in opposition.
Right, and that person is less likely to pay a political price than a congressperson who eliminates a benefit that their constituents enjoy.
What was it 15 years ago? It wasn’t as used, but it was procedurally the same. I’d like to take it both back to when you had to stand to filibuster, but also change it so that doesn’t stop other senate business. You want to filibuster, you go to one of the filibuster rooms and do so. Your presence counts as towards the quorum, but you cannot vote on bills on the floor while filibustering.
And that’s one that people like to say, but it’s actually a whole lot more complicated. You can’t just “ban gerrymandering” as one person’s gerrymander is another’s perfectly reasonable congressional district map.
There are a number of things involved. The first is that if you just did a purely random map, then most likely, if one party had a decent majority of voters, then they would get all or nearly all of the seats. The second is that there are reasons why you may want to cluster certain demographics, to insure minority representation.
Personally, I like the random walk to appropriate apportionment. You start with a more or less random map, and then randomly change precincts along borders until the representation of the delegation most closely matches that of the voters. But that ones complex and I don’t see it actually getting much support with those who don’t understand it.
Let’s say that I am President of a fresh new country with no laws and I make two proposals for some of our first laws:
If both of these can pass 60% then we’re screwed. If neither of them can then we’re screwed.
The filibuster, under a rational system of government is a vestigial element of the rules with no practical effect. It’s really just a rule like in the science world that you need 95% confidence to announce a result. It’s a sanity bar not a political machination.
Think of who hates the 95% confidence rating. Do you think it’s physicists or chiropractors? Chemists or dowsers?
The filibuster is only a political issue when things are fubar. If you’re antagonistic towards the filibuster, then you’re the political cousin of a homeopath. Turn to real medicine and you’ll find yourself loving the hell out of the confidence rating. I promise.
Likewise, fix the system so that we can elect normal, boring people and let them go work in privacy, with trust, and you’ll stop giving a fig about needing a supermajority.
…sigh…
I don’t get this hate at all. It’s very likely that if Joe Manchin wasn’t a moderate there would be a Republican in his seat. Progressives don’t get elected in West Virginia.
So, did you want Joe Manchin to just pretend to be a moderate then vote for progreesive legislation his constituents don’t want? That seems awfully cynical, and like political suicide on his part. If not, then your real problem isn’t Manchin, but the simple fact that the progrssives are a minority and the only way Democrats have a majority at all is with a coalition of moderates.
It’s not just Manchin and Sinema, and it’s entirely possible that if one or both of them caved, some other moderate would step up in opposition - someone who is currently happy laying low and letting them take the heat, but who would step up if they wavered. There are at least a half-dozen Senators in swing districts keeping their heads down right now.
In sane times, the party would look at their razor-thin margin of control, the fact that build-back-better is opposed by a majority of the country and by large majorities in West Virginia and Arizona, and decide the time is not right for sweeping progressive change and work towards smaller incremental wins.
The only reason Democrats are even in power is not because of the public’s yearning for progressive policies, but because Donald Trump was uniquely odious. You wouldn’t have a majority at all if Trump hadn’t acted like an ass in Georgia. Biden would never have been elected if he didn’t A) have a virulently anti-Trump media protecting him, and B) Covid allowing him to campaign from his basement.
So you got lucky, and you are temporarily in power. This is a time for small steps and reasonable movement forwards, not for a ‘radical reshaping of the country’. It’s not Joe Manchin’s fault, It’s the reality of the political situation, Keep yelling and demanding that people accept your unpopular bill, and you’ll be wiped out in 2022.
This was the perfect opportunity for Democrats to show they are the sober serious ones in contrast to the Trump show. Instead, you are letting people like AOC and Bernie be the face of the party, and are going all-in on a massive restructuring that is very likely to fail. Poor tactics.
Instead of trying to drive this through at all costs, you should be thinking about what happens if the Republicans wind up with 65 seats in the Senate and 280 in the House. They’ll declare a mandate, kill the rest of Biden’s term, and undo everything you’ve done with filibuster-proof majorities. If Supreme court seats open, you won’t get your pick through.
When will Manchin switch parties?
0 voters
What you’re describing is what the Democrats have done for the last 3 decades or so, and it’s never worked for them electorally. Furthermore – what’s the point of getting political power if you’re not going to try and use it? Doing nothing, which is effectively what you advocate, would not get them reelected. They still might lose, especially if they don’t end up doing anything else that helps people in a significant way, but losing while trying to do good things is better than losing while trying to do nothing.
A better analogy is hysteresis in a control system.
If you have a furnace thermostat set to 20 degrees without hysteresis, when the temp drops to 19.9 the furnace goes on. At 20.1, the furnace goes off. So you get this constant cycling of the furnace switching on and off. To prevent it, we add hysteresis: If the thermostat is set to 20, we might not turn on the furnace until the temperature hits 19, and not turn is off until it hits 21. The two-degree gap adds a lot of stability to the system.
Without the filibuster, a 50-50 country will ping-pong between legislative extremes every time a single seat flips. The filibuster basically says that when the country is split down the middle, change should only happen on the margins, and large changes should only happen if both sides are okay enough with it that no one filibusters. So non-controversial, bipartisan change is the order of the day. I suspect you’d all agree with this if Republicans were in charge.
Parliamentary democracies such as Canada’s have a similar mechanism: In close elections we wind up with minority governments that are forced to seek consensus or form coalitions with other parties to make sweeping change. An absolute majority can do what it wants, just as a filibuster-proof majority can in the US. But a minority either acts as a caretaker government or forms coalitions to get things done, which tends to moderate legislation.
I guarantee that every minority government wishes it could govern as a majority. That doesn’t mean it would be smart to change the rules to allow it. It would be bad in the same way that eliminating the filibuster would be bad.
The answer is that doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. Legislation and end results matter. What letter a guy floats over his head during an election is about as meaningful as whether a particular scientist is male or female. All that matters is the work that they put in.
What you are really complaining about is that the country isn’t as progressive as you want it to be. It’s like libertarians constantly whining that the Republicans get in power and don’t dismantle big government. Well, guess what? You live in a divided nation where the two major parties are both minorities, and most people are in the middle between them. And within the parties themselves, the progressive wing and libertarian wing are small. So no, we aren’t going to get ‘fundamental change’. You’ll get futzing about on the margins. That’s reality.
My opinion is that Democrats are currently heading for a shellacking next year. It didn’t have to be. If Biden had been the uniting, caretaker President he promised to be and Democrats had shown that they are simply better stewards of the government with rational ideas appealing to the middle, you could have built on the wins from 2020 in 2022, and maybe got to a filibuster-proof majority next year. Instead, you went all-in with a very weak hand, and you’re going to lose the pot.
In April, the Democrats had a four point advantage in the generic ballot queation of whether the people want Democrats or Republicans controlling Congress. Today, the Replicans have a 1.8% advantage. And the trend lines are still down for Democrats and up for Republicans. Build Back Better doesn’t even have majority support among Democrats any more, and independents oppose it almost 2-1.
28% support for build back better means you have ‘progressives’ and about 6% of everyone else.
When polled, voters main concerns are the economy, covid, inflation, jobs, immigration and crime. The Democrat’s main concerns are social change, climate change, and new entitlements. You are tone deaf to what the peopke are saying.
i.e. the filibuster still existed for appointments and reconciliation didn’t have as many exceptions that allowed it to be used as a way to push a policy agenda with a simple majority.
Nah. A RISC. Republican In Sheep’s Clothing.
Of course I want Democrats to enact progressive policies - that’s why I voted for them. And they have to some extent.
But you’re describing a fantasy. There’s no way to unite with Trumpers. We live on different planets that can’t be united at present. Biden has been good so far but he’s not a superhero, and there’s no way people who liked Trump’s policies are going to suddenly love a Democratic president.
You’re describing the typical bullshit beltway conventional wisdom that hasn’t meant anything for decades. Democratic policies are better on all those issues that your polling suggests is a priority.
At present there’s no uniting America. It’s just not possible. We’re much too far apart, culturally. I don’t know how to change this, but pretending we can just sing kumbaya and unite everyone isn’t going to accomplish anything. So Democrats might as well try to enact Democratic policy priorities. Otherwise there’s no point to getting elected.
By the way Sam, I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith. I think you get your information from biased bullshit sources that will always seek to excuse Republicans and blame Democrats, no matter the facts. That’s what you’ve shown so far - trusting Trump’s tweets, always spinning as if the Democrats are at fault and doing things wrong. I just don’t buy it.
Thought I should let you know.
And I vote for the right hoping for movement in a libertarian direction. The difference is that I understand the limits of what can be done, and accept disappointment. I have to be happy with improvements on the margin, as you should. Revolutions require popular support, and neither of us has that. If you push for revolution from the political margin, expect to be politically marginalized.
Really? Did I imagine the infrastructure bill passing with bipartisan support? You don’t need ‘Trumpers’, and clearly not every Republican is a ‘Trumper’. If they were, the infrastructure bill would have died as well.
It is not ‘bad faith’ to argue your convictions, Of course you think all my cites are bullshit when they disagree with you.
For the record, a ‘bad faith’ argument is one you don’t believe yourself but employ because it’s useful in an argument. Do you have any evidence that I don’t really believe my own arguments?
Also, you should look at a history of my cites. I am very careful to NOT use partisan cites on this board, if for no other reason than that they will be instantly rejected and be a giant waste of time.
Perhaps you could show some of my most partisan cites?
I posted about ONE tweet, said I wasn’t sure if it was true, said I normally discount anything Trump says, but in that case it seemed too concrete for him to get away with a lie. Turned out I was wrong, but it’s a far cry from ‘believing Trump’s Tweets’ and you know it. Since you invoked the plural, I’m sure you can link to the other tweets of his that I supposedly believed. Or, you could retract what you said. Or even better, stop making personal comments outside the pit.
As for ‘spinning’ that the Democrats are always wrong: I think I am more generous to the other side than most people on this board. When’s the last time you said anything good about Republicans?
This is the Pit motherfucker.
I have to say, anyone who thinks the democrats could do well in the upcoming elections by not really doing much right now is delusional. People are coming out of a massive economic crisis and want the government to do something to address their needs.
At any rate this:
seems kind of nonsensical. The Democrats have apparently succeeded at the thing you want them to do, which is not pass sweeping legislation on their own. They passed some modest bipartisan stuff (in addition to the ARP at the very start of Biden’s term) and it looks like now their waiving the white flag on their party-line agenda. So based on that why would there be a shellacking?
Because to Sam, every actual fact must be spun in the way most possibly negative for Democrats.
Oh, right you are. Carry on then.