OK, at least I’d heard of South Bend.
Only because they have a football team, I’ll warrant. 
Right: Miramar is actually bigger than South Bend.
Asahi, I like your analysis. But a lot of people would be shocked you don’t include Bernie on that list!
Yep, Bernie should be on the list of Dem contenders. But he’d probably lose against the Don.
So, Warren just called for the end of the filibuster for legislation today.
She’s now firmly, firmly off my list, almost to the extent of not voting if she’s the nominee. She’s gone from “I like her policies, but don’t think she’s making smart political decisions to win the General” (the Native American thing) to “out of touch on what people care about at all” (going after tech companies like Amazon as opposed to, say, Comcast and AT&T) to “downright dangerous” (remove the filibuster).
Regardless of what McConnell et al. have done with judges, can’t she see how much worse things would be right now if the R’s had been filibuster-free for the past two years?
Huh. And the Filibuster thing makes me more likely to vote for her.
Sorry, since some of my own job budget comes from Federal sources I tend to track the politics around that. Remember the awful Trump budgets and all the things they propose to cut? It’s pretty much the filibuster that stopped a huge % of those. Those cuts remove capabilities from the government that take years to rebuild even if the funds come back.
When used by Republicans for whom the rules don’t apply.
Comes a time when, once you realize your opponent is no longer playing by the same rules, you have to change the game.
Well so far, the legislative filibuster is the only remaining red line McConnell has been vocal about defending. I agree that “if a rule is going to be broken anyway, you want your side to do it first to not be a chump” but as an slow-change institutionalist I still find it hugely disturbing that Warren as a senator is bringing it to the table (which also raises the probability that the R’s will do it first).
All the hard lefties I know want to abolish the filibuster. It’s a very poorly conceived idea, for the reasons outlined above. Give Bernie credit, he’s resistant to the idea–although he may have to cave if his fans want it bad enough.
Yeah, the filibuster is the only thing that stopped the tax givaway to rich folks, too! Oh, wait.
The Republicans want the filibuster rule to continue to exist, because they’re just going to break the rule whenever they feel like it.
I find it a little weird how Joe Biden is touted to bring back some normality to the White House, yet at the same time people are concerned about his age that they would prefer him to be a one term and done president. Handing over the reigns to a young VP like Beto or Harris.
In that case Biden is essentially a lame duck after one year. 2022 is the mid-terms, 2023 is when candidates start their campaigns for president and 2024 is the year a new president is elected.
What is normal about that?
I guess the same applies to Bernie Sanders who is older than Biden.
As Bernie pointed out, Trump does NOT want to preserve the filibuster: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/891259245106278400
But I’m not just opposed because Trump wants to do it. Progressive programs and institutions take time to create, build, fine tune, and get public support behind them. Repealing them takes none of that: you can instantly tear them down. So if we just seesaw back and forth based on whoever gets a slight majority, small government budget slashers have the advantage.
Filibuster?? Is someone here defending the filibuster??
Remember P.L. 115-97, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017? The law that transferred Trillions of dollars from the needy to the rich, guaranteeing an ever-increasing debt as far as they eye could see. The middle class was bought off with $339 average tax cut just so that millions each — or billions — could be given to corporations and the super-rich. Now the Republicans are whining that there’s no money for regulators, no money for food stamps, no money to help the neediest children attend school. Of course there’s no money left — it was all given to the billionaires and the big corporations that fund the political shit-show. P.L. 115-97 passed the Senate by a 51-49 margin; there was no filibuster-proof majority there.
Remember Betsy DeVos, one of the most egregious criminals ever to sit in a U.S. Cabinet? Tom Price? Scott Pruitt? They and other Trump appointees make Teapot Dome look like a model for good governance. Not one of these criminals received 60 confirmation votes. To install Betsy DeVos, whose open goal is destroying public schools, as head of the Department of Education, her fellow deplorable Jeff Sessions had to un-recuse himself to get a 50-50 tie in the Senate. Mike Pence made the vote 51-50; that’s why this filthy criminal is in the Cabinet. There was no filibuster-proof majority there. (Merrick Garland, OTOH, would have had well over 51 votes, but he was denied a vote by the evil-doers.)
Oh, the GOP is still clever enough to keep filibuster rules active when they serve their interests! Why has ACA never been repealed? McConnell and his fellow turds could rule out that filibuster in a flash if they wanted to, but they’re not stupid. It’s much better to whine “The Ds won’t let us replace ACA with something better” then to actually deny medical care to millions of Americans.
For several years now, R policy is very simple: It takes 60 D votes or 51 R votes for a measure to pass the Senate. Ds, mostly honest good-spirited folk, don’t see what’s happening — they just can’t believe how utterly despicable the R Senators (or at least their leaders) have become.
TL;DR: @ Any Doper who thinks there’s the slightest smidgen of honor among R’s in the Senate, or who think its historic rules have any relevance in today’s clime: Wake up and smell the coffee!
Bad news for Warren.
Doing that poorly in your home state does not bode well.
Wow, yeah. Granted that that’s just one poll, but with anything resembling a reasonable margin of error, she’s toast with those numbers. If it were, say, Biden and Booker ahead of her, but she were still ahead of Sanders, she’d have a chance, but with the voters preferring Sanders 2 to 1 over her, it’s pretty clear that she can’t even take the progressive lane.
Swalwell is in. Likely another dude looking for a cabinet position.
His signature issue is gun control. I mean that’s the issue that he’s actually making the focus of his campaign, according to his Wikipedia. And I actually remember when he said something to the effect of “if a civil war broke out over the 2nd Amendment, the government would use nukes.”
I’m sorry, that’s an idiotic remark and he caught flak for it deservedly. There is no conceivable scenario where the American government uses nuclear weapons against people inside its own borders. Whatever the hell you think about either gun owners, or some hypothetical anti-government rebels who would probably never exist in real life, nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons. They’re hell on earth.
Whether he actually believes they would be used, or was just joking, Swallwell majorly fucked up his chances of advancing politically with that remark. It’s way beyond “Dukakis in the tank”. If by some INSANE - utterly INSANE - twist of fate, he actually got the nomination, he would be completely destroyed by Trump. The NRA and all the right wing groups would work up Republican voters into a frenzy based on that idiotic gaffe, and he would be toast.
Having debates like the ones on this board, or between individual acquaintances, and someone bringing up this hypothetical about civil war in America and gun owners, and someone saying, “well, I mean, the government has nuclear bombs,” is one thing. A politician in office, a representative of the government, saying it, is quite another thing.
Honestly, for quite a number of these, I think their runs are just no-harm-no-foul rehearsals for another presidential run in the future.
The many folks in the race diffuse Trump’s ability to focus on just one target, it allows them to speak simultaneously about a wide variety of important kitchen table issues and gives them the opportunity to cut their teeth in a race and gain valuable experience where soon, it will come down to just a few.
While it will be interesting to see who outperforms expectations, I don’t take many of them seriously at this point. I’m grateful for their diverse messages, their fundraising efforts and their enthusiasm. It will take them all to bring out enough voters in 2020 for a decisive win for Dems sufficient to overcome voter suppression efforts by Republicans, Russians and god knows who else. But the key is unity, and they all seem to understand that. (Except Howard Schultz, who is a dickhead who should GTF out.)
I happened to catch his announcement on Colbert just a little while ago, which was on because I hadn’t changed the TV after basketball yet (lead-ins are still a thing, apparently). I was pretty impressed. I sent him a few bucks, so that should help his first-day number.