Next time there’s a thread like this it oughtta be named “Stupid Republican Idea of the Hour”, or maybe even of the minute. If only stupid ideas were a resource that could be used up… Better yet, if only we could figure out how to turn them into electrical energy.
I would suggest burning Republicans in ovens that would generate steam to turn a turbine, but that would be wrong!
“Next time?”
This thread has been going for more than two years. What makes you think it will ever be replaced?
It would be worse than Chernobyl if it breeched containment.
I’m guessing the board software will eventually hit some numerical overflow on the number of posts it will support for a single thread. When the program was written none of the programmers could conceive of just how many bad ideas Republicans could have.
“We”? You live in California, which is sorta cool. But you live in Anaheim. Please.
That you want to show your circumcision to Arizona election officials? 
Well, I think that’s just sort of taken as read.
The Repubs are pushing to have vouchers in Medicare. They also want to boot most of the seniors off of it. 58 percent of the Repubs polled don’t want Medicare trashed. How can that be a winning strategy?
If it somehow turns the crisis around and ushers a new age of American prosperity by putting the elderly poor on ice floes, then they were courageous in passing a much needed albeit unpopular measure.
If it turns out to be a piece of shit legislation which only makes life just that much harder for everyone (except the upper 2% of course), then it happened on Obama’s watch.
Win/Win
Here are four consecutive posts from this thread:
If this doesn’t win the Funniest SDMB thread of the Day award, I’ll be surprised.
Here a stupid Republican idea, in the same way that suicide is stupid:
Republicans threaten filibuster on the debt ceiling if Congress doesn’t pass a balanced budget amendment.
Of course, they don’t realize a balanced budget is going to require tax increases or significant defense cuts. There just aren’t enough socialist, atheist social programs to cut to make up the difference.
Well, they’re likely referring to the Balanced Budget Amendment bill that all 47 Republican Senators have signed on to, also known, and this may be hyperbole, but really not by much, as “The Worst Idea In Washington.”
Since there’s so much wrong with it, Ezra Klein breaks up some of the biggies into four parts. In Part I we see that:
So, Congress wants to balance the budget by adopting California’s method of fiscal sanity. I’ll also note that Bruce Bartlett points out that since the 18% is calculated from the previous year’s GDP, in reality we’d be looking at something along the lines of 16.6% of the current year’s GDP, numbers not seen since Hoover’s presidency.
In Part II, he explains who’s likely to be hit the hardest:
Although today’s Republican Party probably considers this more a feature than a bug.
In Part III, we see that since emulating California’s budget process isn’t likely to actually balance the budget, the courts are likely to get involved. So the Republicans also plan to tie their hands:
In Part IV, I think Ezra’s just getting in the gratuitous, though justified, jab that the proposed amendment would declare Paul Ryan’s Roadmap (I think this was written before the current Ryan budget plan was released, but I think is true of it as well) unconstitutional.
If they persist in holding the debt ceiling hostage for the balanced budget amendment, I see no alternative for Democrats other than the nuclear option, to change the Senate rules and do away with the filibuster altogether. Good riddance.
Nonsense! They can simply cut all spending, except for the costs incurred in collecting the dead.
And they have lots of stuff to sell off to the private sector. I’ll bet any major corporation would love to acquire a squadron of B2 bombers.
Simple. In 2016, blame Obama for it.
I guarantee the Republicans would filibuster that vote.
BTW, whatever happened to the Democrats’ idea of changing the filibuster rules on Day 1 of the new Congress? There was all this buzz about how they could do it with a simple majority vote, but only on the first day because of some obscure procedural rules.
<Typical Republican> I’m confused. I read somewhere that Planned Parenthood was responsible for 90% of the deficit. I can’ t possibly be incorrect, so therefore the democrats would rather kill babies than balance the budget. </TR>
I think they agreed to some rule changes far short of abolishing the filibuster. As for why it has to be done on the first day, as I understand it, it’s because the Senate meets as a continuing body, keeping the same rules from one session to the next, unlike the House. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that no Congress can tie the hands of a future Congress. So, at the beginning of a session, the Senate can adopt new rules, and they wouldn’t be bound by any of the previous rules when doing so. I’m not sure if this maneuver can be overruled as a breach of the rules by the President of the Senate (the VP), but in this case that’s not an issue.
As I understand it, on the first day, Senate rules can be changed with a simple majority. Senate rules can be changed during the session, but it requires 60%.
So why did the Democrats fail to do it? Not that they need a reason to fail.