Really fucking tired of Do Nothing Politics in America

The BBQ Pit
1

OK you stupid fucking lazy bastards, start telling me what you plan to do as President.

Lay out your plan of action. What you HOPE to accomplish. Because people of any intelligence know that at least one third of the shit you promise will not be passed by Congress (and usually a lot higher percentage than that) and another third you straight out don’t have the power to do (such as $2 a gallon gas).

What I find even more annoying is that one of the two people NOT telling me what his plan is as President, IS THE PRESIDENT.

REALLY? Look Barack, you’ve been doing fuck all nothing for far too long. You’ve spent political capital on the wrong things and for the most part, you’re only taking bold action when issues have been pushed at length or it’s abundantly clear that it’s about time you fucking manned up and did something. You’re not the visionary President you told us you were. You’re a reactive President, not moving until you’re forced to react. You’re continuing far too many of the same old business as usual policies and politics that you derided as candidate, and needlessly so. Frankly, at this point I have to doubt anything you might promise to do, not just because we all know the Republicans are going to work hard to deny you the slightest victory even if it costs the Republic, but because you’re far more likely to continue coasting along in a reactionary mode.

You know what? I supported GHW Bush over Reagan in 1980. I voted for him for President in 1988. But when he couldn’t tell me what the fuck he planned to do if re-elected in 1992, while Bill Clinton could, I voted for Clinton.

Romney? Dude, I wouldn’t trust you to hold to the same decision on what flavor of ice cream you wanted between the time you told me and the time I retrieved it from the fridge. You have zero moral courage or integrity of thought. You’ve changed your positions far too often, and very visibly, you’ve done so repeatedly at the slightest hint of pushback or disapproval from your handlers, party members or your audiences. You won’t take a stand on anything that might risk alienating or irritating anyone you want to vote for you, so why the fuck would any of us think that you’ll do so once you’re President? All I see is the future-possible Republican version of Jimmy Carter, so wishy-washy and indecisive as to be ineffective and incompetent as President.

Unless you man up, grow a spine and start giving me real reasons to vote for you, I’m sorry, but I have to stick with Obama, or possibly vote third party.
Every election, I wait for the candidates to tell me what they will do, and I try to give them each a chance to impress me. As much as I have always disliked John McCain, I honestly gave him a chance to convince me that he would make a reasonable President. Unfortunately, he chose to ignore his own message and concentrate on a negative message.

I don’t vote for people who cannot articulate their own message and define their own goals.

So far neither of you idiots has made the slightest attempt to do that.

And that really pisses me off.

2

Couldn’t this easily have gone in the elections forum? There’s a lot of US politics in the Pit already.

3

This is an uninteresting thread.

4

If “do-nothing” politics is your beef, Romney and Obama aren’t the people you should be blaming. For someone complaining that people make promises they can’t keep, it’s somewhat ironic that you seem to expect the president to order Congress to pass productive legislation - because the real problem is in Congress, specifically in one bloc of one party in Congress, which are more interested in making sure their team “wins” than in improving the state of the nation.

5

Uninformed voter, heal thyself.

Romney’s 59 policy proposals for economic growth:
http://mittromney.com/sites/default/files/shared/BelieveInAmerica-PlanForJobsAndEconomicGrowth-Full.pdf

Obama breaks his into more categories, but here’s one. I’m sure you can find the rest with a little googling:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/blueprint_for_an_america_built_to_last.pdf

6

Yeah. Please give me an example of how he could have been more pro active. Hell, there are people who agree somewhat with some of his policy positions but think that putting them into practise is “executive overreach”. You can’t do much against people who vote against the same policy positions they supported 4 years ago and vote against you explicitly in order to make you a one term president. So it’s not like he would find any cooperation even if he were to propose 80% of what the other side wanted.

7

Obama has done a ton of things, what have you been smoking? Just a couple days ago he issued orders not to deport people who came here illegally when they were kids. He did an end-run around the GOP for their continued opposition to the DREAM Act. That was a smooth move

8

Obama is in over his head!

9

Where are the Obama Democrat candidates for the House of Representatives? If the GOP hold onto the House, what’s the point of re-electing Obama?

10

It’s hard to sympathize with the outrage of people who haven’t been paying attention. That being said, you’ll see more proposals and specific ideas over the next couple of months.

11

Thank you. Hadn’t seen those. Gotta say I’m pretty apalled by Romney’s proposals. Pushing things off to states that are already broke doesn’t seem like a great option. And when we’re already at modern lows in Government Income as percentage of GDP, beating the 35 year old “tax cuts!” drum is getting really old.

The fuck they are.

The fuck you say.

Translation: “We promise to wage a war of Mutually Assured Destruction on both economies.”

12

“If you’re outraged, you’re not paying attention!”

13

Agreed. Moving on…

14

“I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

So you’re starting by pitting Romney because he doesn’t have any plans. And now you find out he has plans and you’re pitting him because you don’t like them?

15

You are absolutely right-and the blame lies squarely on the US Congress-particularly the Senate. Its been 20 years, and we have NO effective laws against identity theft. We have no “bill of rights” for Internet users, we have no protections under existing FCC regulations. Even Australia has been able to pass anti-spam laws.
Meanwhile we have no protections against fraud by banks, and no credit rating protection laws.
The reason? Congress is bought and sold every week-the members (House and Senate) are paid off through “campaign contributions”-which are just bribes by another name.Witness Jonathan Edward-he used 1$ million of his “contributions” to shield his mistress and child from scrutiny-and the jurors saw nothing wrong with it.

16

Reminds me of what I keep telling the DSCC when they ask me for money - I’ll give them cash when the Senate Democratic Caucus, as a whole, says they’re willing to implement at least some mild procedural reforms at the beginning of the next Congress.

I’m not expecting full-blown filibuster reform; I know that’s further than they’re ready to go. All I really want is two things:

  1. A limit of one hour on debate of a Motion to Proceed; and
  2. a similar limit on debate after a cloture motion is passed.

Until then, I’ll give money to individual Senate candidates, but not to the DSCC.

For the uninitiated, what these two reforms are about:

  1. A Motion to Proceed on a bill is the motion to debate a bill on the Senate floor. Debating a Motion to Proceed is debating whether or not you want to debate the bill. Currently, there is no limit on debate of a Motion to Proceed, which means you need to pass a cloture motion to bring debate on a Motion to Proceed to an end, and move on to the bill itself.

Since cloture requires 60 votes, this is the preferred place for the GOP minority to gum up the works and keep a bill from being debated to begin with. (Technically, blocking a cloture motion on a Motion to Proceed is arguing that you need more time to debate whether or not to debate the bill, which is really stupid of course, but it’s really just about preventing the Senate from even considering bills the minority opposes.)

Putting a time limit on debate of a Motion to Proceed would mean that no cloture motion would be needed to bring a Motion to Proceed to a vote. You’d just debate it for an hour, vote, and if a simple majority voted for the Motion to Proceed, the bill itself would be debated by the Senate. It could still be filibustered after it was debated, but they couldn’t shut down the debate itself.

  1. Currently, Senate rules allow for 30 hours of debate after a cloture motion succeeds. This allows a determined minority, no matter how small, to simply run out the Senate’s clock. If the Administration wants to appoint a judge to a District Court, or appoint an Assistant Secretary of HHS, a single Senator can force the Senate to debate the appointment for 30 hours after the cloture motion on debate has passed.

At 30 hours a pop, a few dozen of these a year can essentially burn through the available time the Senate has to meet. (This is what empowers a ‘hold’ if I understand it correctly: a ‘hold’ is the threat to force the Senate to spend this time in an already-resolved debate.) The GOP quite openly used this technique in 2010 to run out the clock while drastically limiting the number of Administration and judicial appointments that Obama could get through the Senate.

It doesn’t matter who’s in the majority and who’s in the minority: this crap has just got to go. If Romney wins the election, and the GOP controls both houses of Congress, I would be delighted if they made these changes to the rules.

17

I find the OP’s characterization of Obama as a reactive president quite insightful, but otherwise, meh.

18

My thoughts exactly. We created a whole forum so US American politics don’t have to bother the rest of us. :slight_smile:

By the way, I blame your whole system for being hopelessly broken and deadlocked, not the individual politicians.

19

Nope. There are discussions of elections in other countries, too. And this thread, if started in that forum, would have been moved here toot sweet.

20

And just in case some moderator thinks of moving it there… fuck Canada!