That’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s bug when every single bill gets filibustered and no laws can get passed.
Then the bills are bad. Our government was not set up so that one side gets everything they want. It was specifically designed to force compromise.
I’m glad you mentioned the Brits.
I am very impressed that they had to guts to allow Brexit and to allow Scotland a secession vote.
When you talk about modern secession and partition in U.S., you often get the argument that the question is settled for all time by the Civil War. While it may be true that it was settled for a time, it certainly wasn’t settled for all time and generations throughout eternity.
It would be productive to have a conversation about a divorce procedure for irreconcilable differences that doesn’t involve killing your spouse.
Conservatives live in imagination land; reality will eventually deal them a hand they weren’t actually prepared to live with. And when that day comes, new liberals shall be born.
But there is no compromise anymore. Both sides vote the party line, so nothing can ever get done.
And the filibuster was never used as an everyday thing. Now every single bill is filibustered. This isn’t a case where I think one side should get everything they want. But what does it mean to “control the senate” anymore? You don’t control the senate with 50 votes anymore. You control it with 60, because otherwise, the minority can block everything you do, and that’s not healthy for governance.
So since the sides are not compromising, we should give up the idea of compromise entirely and just let whichever party is in the majority dictate what gets passed?
No. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Rickjay had said:
“If you said ten years ago that one party would control the White House, House of Reps, Senate, and, hell, effectively the Supreme Court, but would be unable to pass major legislation, people would think you were crazy.”
What I’m saying is that the Republicans don’t control the Senate, because nowadays, to pass major legislation through the Senate, you need 60 votes, and because of the polarization of the two parties, there’s no way the majority party can get minority party members to support their legislative agenda.
The filibuster only hampers the majority because a sufficient number of majority senators want it to. They can get rid of it whenever they want.
That’s entirely the product of modern Republican party politics. Going back to when the Republicans were in the minority in 2009, they opposed everything entirely on party lines. One would have thought that during a time of national crisis, moderate economic legislation (moderate tax increases and spending increases that would have been paid for through higher taxes) would have had at least some Republican support. Obama’s stimulus actually included tax breaks and incentives - yet hardly any Republican support. Conservatives will say that it’s Harry Reid who first killed the filibuster, but it was a reaction to partisan obstructionism at a time when the country couldn’t really afford it (context is important, too). The Republicans are supported by special interests that threaten to cut funding if they compromise even once. Both sides may do it, but it’s the fault of one side exclusively. The only way this problem will be solved is when the current Republican party is driven into political extinction.
And I suspect they will, and probably fairly soon. It’s already half dead anyway.
Yeah, well, the GOP is actively legislating the other side into extinction (through gerrymandering, for example) and actively preaching the desirability of their extinction to the general public (via Fox News, Breitbart, etc.), thus constantly whipping up support.
Gonna take more than patience and a reliance on the good nature of the general population to counter that.
I was trying to visualize the U.S.'s political spectrum on a Bell curve and had the thought: What if, we could eliminate the 15% on the extreme far right, and the 15% on the extreme far left from consideration. Please use your judgement as to the definition of, “Eliminate”
I can see a best case scenario of the middle 70% having the realization: Wait a minute, if the 70% of us in the middle can get together and get things done we will have some real power. We don’t have to listen to any of you nutjobs anymore.
That is a real super majority, able to pass any bill and override any veto. The added bonus is that since we don’t care about the far right or far left, they don’t get squat. That means 30% more for us in the middle.
Once this power is realized the political party is dead. They don’t matter any more. What matters is being in the middle, the center, the heart of the power.
Their slogan: We are the Doers - The Maximum Middle.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. As in battle, “The center must hold”.
If the extremists just go away quietly and let the rest of us get down to business, Great! If not, we are really going to have to define, “Eliminate”.
Not sure where to start, but can you elaborate a little more on that?
ETA: (I’m feelin’ all “How To Do It”-y)
I would really hope that the very first order of business for this 70% Maximum Middle would be to say “fuck this anti-First-Amendment bullshit” that you’ve expressed in the quoted paragraph.
Good luck getting the “middle 70%” to even bother coming out and voting.
It’s going to take a disaster to make it happen. Rhetoric and logic won’t change people’s opinions; experience does. When this country experiences misery, it will change.
If more centrist election winners is the goal, you can pretty much get there by pure mathematical districting models instead of gerrymandering.
This site has the states mapped out current vs. mathematical:
This was so much easier with earmarks. For less than a percent of the budget too…
Your West Wing cartoon version of American politics really brightened up my day. Thank you.
The radical center has logged on.