I don’t think Harris has made any really substantial missteps. She could have made different choices here and there and maybe she has made the wrong ones at times - but everything she does are calculated risks at this point. Frankly she has performed better than I would have expected from her (I’ve never been a big fan). I have co-workers that are (old school) Republicans-leaning “centrist” policy wonks that want “specific proposals” and hate that she is so prone to the normal eely politician side-stepping of making firm policy promises. But they’ll likely vote for her with grumbling (or just not vote in very blue CA) because they can’t abide insane clowns (juggalos aside). And the fact is most people don’t vote like policy wonks, so they’re hardly representative.
If she loses, her campaign will be thoroughly dissected about the thousand mis-steps she supposedly made. But just this one time, especially given the oddness of the mid-campaign switch from Biden, I think I’m going to give her a pass for doing her best and am just going to mostly chalk it up to a substantial enough proportion of Americans either being okay with insane clowns or just being color-blind and deaf.
IOW, if Harris comes up short, it pretty well wasn’t winnable by any D. Trump lunacy had enough of a hold on enough of the public that nobody (of those actually available, not some imaginary dream candidate) could have beaten the sum of trump and his propaganda supporters like Faux & Putin and …
Because it’s really more of an urban/rural split, or if you’d like, educated vs. uneducated. Simply brilliant, those founding fathers were, so that it would always be a close race.
I think the founding fathers did want to ensure that there was minority representation. If it wasn’t for the electoral college, then the sparsely populated rural states would be virtually ignored during the election. The candidates would just focus on the needs of the dense population centers. Unfortunately we’re in a situation where Trump could benefit from this system, but in general, I think it’s beneficial to ensure that the people in the less populated states feel they have a voice in government.
And instead ensure that people in California and Texas don’t have a voice?
States don’t vote. Acres don’t vote. Any attempt to give them a vote is anathema to democracy. All votes counting equally certainly has its problems, but it’s less bad than any other system anyone’s ever come up with.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but this is a common, and wrong, assumption.
At its founding and like many other countries at the time, the U.S. was largely a rural country. In 1790, only 5.1% of U.S. residents lived in urban settings.
And it’s less that the Founders wanted disproportionate minority small states representation than a requirement to get them onboard in the first place.
Each of the states thought of itself as a ‘state’, i.e. an independent, sovereign state. There was not a lot of impetus to give up their sovereignty to the Massachusetts or Virginias of the new nation without getting something in return. That and several of the Founders were from those small states, felt loyalty to their state, and got what they could for their homes.
It was a compromise, and like most compromises, it was imperfect and had (has) its own issues. Issues that in this case persist to today.
But if both sides are doing this, they split the city vote pretty evenly. So the party that says, “Sure, mostly cities, but some stuff for farmers!” Takes the win.
But you can play that game with any minority. “Professional interests should not be ignored, so less popular professions get a slightly goosed vote.” “Racial interests should not be ignored, so racial minorities get a slightly goosed vote.” “Gender interests should not be ignored, so women get a slightly goosed vote.” Either you end up goosing everyone’s vote, so it’s back to parity, or you distort the system to favor a few at the expense of everyone else, or you give up on it and just give one equal vote to everyone.
Right now, I’m primarily thinking about how President Harris would have to deal with a Republican Senate but Democratic House. It looks likeliest that the Republicans will have a 51-49 Senate majority. Kamala’s judge nominees would stand a solid chance since all it takes is one (R) defector to create a 50-50 tie for VP Walz to break. I can’t recall the last time Republicans in the Senate ever voted unanimously against a Democratic judge nominee, if ever.
The House would produce the legislation. The Senate Republicans are known for being more moderate than House R’s - the Senate by its nature tends to do that, since races are statewide and not precinct-local-crazy. Kamala won’t be able to pass anything hugely groundbreaking but overall Democratic business would largely hum on as usual.
You forget that the Senate Majority Leader (R) has absolute personal discretion on letting any nomination reach the committee, much less the floor. They can pull the same trick they used in the late Obama administration of simply rat-holing 100% of the judicial appointments until the next R administration.
Yep. Susan Collins can moan and wail all she wants about the lack of civility and bipartisanship in the Senate, but the only vote she casts that really matters is in the Republican Caucus for who will be party leader. That individual has sole discretion over whether and when any nomination or legislation will be considered. There is no mechanism in the Senate to force the Majority Leader to act, besides making him not-Majority Leader. That would take a majority of Senate Republicans.
Well, the President of the Senate could, as laid out in the Constitution, Preside. Yes, the Senate has the power to set its own rules, but only within the bounds set by the Constitution.
I’m not sure what you think the President of the Senate specifically could do. It’s a well-established Senate precedent that the Majority Leader determines the floor schedule. If Tim Walz were to pick up the gavel and simply declare “we’re considering the Administration’s Supreme Court nominee now,” even Republican Senators who were uncomfortable with the stonewalling would rebel. Frankly, so would many Democratic Senators at such a precedent.
Yeah, and that also has a long and well established history - from the very first Congress, the Senators got pretty tired of John Adams trying to do much more than be an ornament, except when he needed to cast a tie-breaking vote.
But presiding is what a President, by definition, does. And deciding what comes to the floor is unambiguously a function of presiding. By the Constitution, the Vice President of the US absolutely can bring a motion to the floor of the Senate.
Elon Musk is now tweeting “Kamala hates Christians” because of her shutting down hecklers at her recent rally. Apparently, they were shouting “Christ is king” or something similar.
NOTE: link takes you to a screenshot of the tweet, not to Xwitter itself.
The Senate as a body decides how motions come to the floor.
The President of the Senate presides over that process - not defining the process itself. There’s already enough people deciding what the Constitution “really” says based on their own reading and how that means their own side can do whatever it wants. There’s no need to bolster their ranks.