Senegoid, see post #2.
(I get all my news from the Dope too.)
With McCain, it’s always at least somewhat personal.
And he was right - the whole process behind getting this bill to a vote was utterly fucked up.
Good. Why shouldn’t the Senators who voted for this have to face the music with their voters (who uniformly hated this bill, don’t forget. That ought to have at least some weight on their Senator’s vote, you’d think).
Just ponder for a moment an Interior Secretary trying to put the screws on a sitting Senator (who is not up for reelection until 2022) and who just happens to be the ranking member on both the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies.
Murkowski controls the money for the Interior Secretary’s Department and for Donald’s assorted fossil-fuel boosting energy plans. Threatening her was a total amateur-hour move by the White house.
Murkowski responded by delaying indefinitely the hearings to appoint some of Donald’s Interior and Energy nominations. She blew off suggestions that this was anything but a little bump in their relationship. She claimed that she didn’t see Zinke’s threat as a real threat - I’m sure that went over big in the Oval Office. Then she went ahead and voted No like she said she would.
If you’re paying attention Donald (you’re not) - that is how powerful people get shit done.
Okay, got it now. I read that and didn’t really grok what CarnalK was saying there in the second paragraph.
Keep in mind that he had to show in order to move the debate to the floor. Else, none of the drama would have happened, and the party would still be trying to figure out how to appease both wings. It was a very good decision on his part to show up and force the debate to occur; the debate showed that the Emperor’s new clothes were pretty threadbare. :rolleyes:
Loved that McCain got to stick it to Trump so dramatically.
When Trump needed him, McCain suddenly went from ‘not a war hero because he was captured,’ to ‘Brave - American hero!’
PS - they’re out there sayin’ that the key to a responsible Republican is brain surgery.
Half of that.
His base doesn’t give a shit about healthcare. 100% of his base voted for him to repeal Obamacare and as is becoming increasingly obvious by their own admission, mostly because he’s an incredible asshole.
Oh man, that has me in tears.
But on a serious note, even though it is amateur hour it should be very concerning. Trump’s actions in this regard are not those of somebody who respects the democratic process or democratic institutions. These are the actions of an authoritarian. I honestly don’t believe that the USA will fall to authoritarianism, but I think Americans should be aware that’s there is a small percentage of people who want Trump to have dictatorial powers. That’s not good, awareness that it is real is important so that it can be counted to prevent the USA from going down that path.
There has always been "a small percentage of people who want [the leader of the moment] to have dictatorial powers. Mainly because so many people flatly don’t think things through, and imagine that said leader will do exactly what they expect or want him to do. That, and it never crosses their mind that a few years from now, the next President will have exactly the same power.
Remember the Reagan years, and how he wanted to have line item veto power? Remember how many Republicans thought it was great idea, until they noticed that the first President who would actually HAVE that power, was a Democrat? Suddenly all those “Authority of the President needs to be dominant” people melted away, and “states rights” and “Congressional Oversight” became their new favorite ideas.
I’ll take your word for it as I was a teenager when Reagan was president so not that interested in American politics, but I trust you based on your posting history.
It feels a bit different to me because Trump is exhibiting real signs for a penchant for authoritarianism; whereas, with Reagan (keeping in mind the paragraph above) never struck me as being so inclined. I can understand why when your man is in charge there will always be some inclination towards “Oh, I wish he just had the power to get it done!” but that is perhaps tempered a bit by even if he had dictatorial powers we wouldn’t fall into a dictatorship, i.e. Reagan. But with Trump, I think if he was given dictatorial powers (and again this is not going to happen), the USA would become a dictatorship. Trump would revel in such powers!
Agreed.
I think people in the media, and particularly on the left, are really not getting it in terms of his base. Most of the people who voted for Trump aren’t living in tents somewhere in the West Virginia mountains; they’re suburban and rural white voters who have money left over at the end of the month. Sure, there were some dirt poor voters who voted for Trump but look at the rallies and that’s pretty much your Trump vote. They’re not the kind who wear flashy suits, but don’t mistake them for dead broke and behind on rent payments. They’re the same people who would have probably voted for Sarah Palin if she could have handled the glare of the spotlight for longer than a few weeks.
His base never bought into that healthcare at a fraction of the cost nonsense - they bought into the idea that he could destroy the his democratic predecessor’s “socialist” legacy. And so far, other than being a media blowhard, he hasn’t delivered. That’s what ought to keep Trump up at night.
Ironically, had he delivered on the promise to destroy healthcare, he might have fired up his base, but he also would have fired up voters who otherwise don’t give a toss about elections, which would have been a problem of its own. Trump’s team has to calculate, how to fire up his own base while not setting off the fuse to ignite the other. The real kicker is, it’s entirely possible that by voting on it and not passing the repeal, this might ultimately play to Trump’s favor in the long run by simply destabilizing Obamacare to the point where it has to be reworked. And he can claim that any “rewrite” is a “repeal”. So he might not have lost. He might have successfully threaded the needle, but right now there’s no way to tell.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that the failure to repeal has his own base angry at him, but the attempts have fired up his opponents, or caused some of his voters to switch sides. We won’t know for sure until 2018 and 2020 (at which point, it’ll be obvious in hindsight).
He cannot fail with the base unless he stops being a sputtering pinwheel of bile and malevolence.
So what? Their socioeconomic status notwithstanding, they all have some combination of ignorance, selfishness, pettiness, ‘hero’-worship, and self-delusion that allows them to not only tacitly but actively approve of and support the paragon of all of those character flaws.
I don’t see anything about it in the rules, but from watching votes, it seems to me like you can cast your vote any time after your name is called, up until whatever cutoff time has been established.
On routine stuff, it looks like they go through the roll once, a lot of times there’s no response from individual senators, so they just sit around and wait for senators to show up and vote, or they vote on their way out the door, at which point their vote is announced.
I think that is his/her point.
All the post-mortems about Dems “needing to listen to these people because they’re genuinely suffering due to [fill in the blank]” is just a buncha bullshit. All the crap those voters spun about economics or any other fuckin’ thing related to policy was just a fig leaf. They voted for him because they’re Walter Mitty and he’s the asshole they’d be if they could get away with it.
And it was obvious before the election.
What wasn’t obvious was how many of them there are.
I can remember a time when the President was supposed to be a role model, not someone to warn your children against becoming. Seems eons ago, now…
And, apparently, you only get one of these types of votes per year. So might as well table this as early as possible, so maybe they can try to get something feasible done.
But that’s not true. The economics aren’t a fig leaf. The assholes have always existed, but they aren’t why Trump won the White House. We have to delineate between the diehard supporters who like Trump because he’s an asshole, and the people who were angry at their circumstances and thought an asshole could get things done.
And you’re completely wrong if you think the abortion issue didn’t factor in at all. The vast majority of people I knew think Trump is horrible, but they also thought Clinton was horrible. It was the abortion issue that pushed them over.
We’ve got to stop this broad brush lumping if we want to win. There are some deplorables. More than we thought. But these other reasons are 100% valid, and, if we address them, the deplorables won’t matter. Only about half of Trump’s supporters were the diehards.
I’ve literally had to drop exactly one Facebook friend who was one of them, while a 10 or so I know voted for Trump.
Gasp! Were there women present? I though he was not allowed to look at a woman after midnight.