Funny thing is, the protests outside his house are being organized by his neighbor.
That sounds like an excellent strategy. Treat your political opponents like unruly children. Win! 
We are looking at a group of people that will be outmaneuvered by the likes of Falwell and Trump.
And MY strategy bad?
How about doing something? Anything?
Those guys don’t need McConnell to block them, it is a miracle any of them ever arrive at work. They made a career about pointing at the other guy, whining that they suck and doing nothing.
Warren’s whining really pissed me off. “They have been planning this for 50 year” - Yes. It wasn’t a secret. You let them pull it off. How about a resignation? You utter failure. You (and the rest of D leadership) allowed Hillary to run: you are responsible for Trump and this mess. Own it and clean it up or accept that the Boomers’ day is past.
I am unclear on why you are complaining that Warren didn’t fix everything? Do you think she had the sole power to change things and refused?
I do not mean to hijack this thread to a debate on whether Elizabeth Warren is a good or bad legislator. I am just curious why she gets the hate in this case?
The soundbite at the protest where she was whining just pissed me off. No, it was never in her power to prevent it, but she really didn’t do much to try either.
She has been a important part of D leadership for decades, large parts of those they had someone in the White House. It is not like she was a powerless bystander: in that soundbite she is sounding like she just found out and is going to call mom to do something about it.
She was first elected to office in 2012 (took office in 2013). So, not even one decade.
Thank you for the correction.
She still pisses me off. Acting like a big boy took your lunch money is not a good look if you are a major player in all of this.
I dispute the notion that she is a “major player.” The party likes having her at the table for the wonky business of converting policy to legislation, because she’s smarter and understands detail better than most of them, but they keep her on the margins in terms of party events and public profile, because she’s very demanding in terms of change and upsets the big-money supporters. Note that this event was entirely her own, without any of the other party mucky-mucks in support. To whatever extent she makes a national splash, it’s because she has forced her way into a conversation where the party establishment would prefer to keep her quiet.
This threatens to become a hijack, so further debate should be split off. But I can’t let the assertion go unanswered.
Clinton won the nomination through the Democratic primaries. The party didn’t « allow » her to run.
Expand the House - the original proposed first amendment would have us at about
6,000 right now, but I think setting the minimum size to the national population divided by the population of the least populous state would be a good start.
I’ve read this three times, and it still doesn’t make any sense.
I understand what he’s saying, and I don’t entirely agree, but he has a point:
The Democrats have been watching this all (not just Roe, but the whole nationalist/religious/culture war) unfold in slow motion for quite a long time. And despite several instances where Democrats were in control of a majority or even all of the key elements (House, Senate, WH), they’ve been ineffective politically.
She also isn’t part of Dem leadership under any definition of that word.
For sure, as someone who is only relatively recently Democrat-aligned since 2014 or so (I still won’t call myself a Dem), I absolutely agree with the premise that the Democrats have been deliberately obtuse on the culture war. They really seem to just want to believe that all their problems will be fixed when old people die off and they can give social welfare programs to their voters and glide to easy elections. There is little evidence to support that hypothesis. There has been little evidence to support it since 2010.
Part of improving the party is going to be expecting more from it, and in that sense I see where @The_Librarian is coming from. However I don’t think it is beneficial to just believe in reality being different than it really is. Democrats have been soft on abortion until relatively recently. Hillary who is described as being weak was the first major Democratic leader to abandon the age old party line of “safe, legal and rare.” Instead she staked out a more progressive vision and even pushed for Federal funding of abortion.
I guess on one hand you can say Democrats not pushing the envelope harder on abortion is some political failure, but a more reality grounded approach would suggest that in much of the country where abortion is not a 51% issue but a sub-50% support issue, Democrats can’t run on a progressive abortion policy. In the 90s and the 2000s a still significant portion of the Democratic House and Senate caucus were representing areas that are hostile to abortion, and many of those Democrats were predictably either pro-life or “soft” pro-choice.
Given that the very moment culture war issues became paramount, Democrats got wiped out in all those districts and States, I’m not really convinced a strategy of going hard in the paint on abortion 10, 20 years ago would have been beneficial. If anything it may have just pushed those major wipeouts further back in the timeline.
While I’ve pointed out how we are not a direct democracy, we obviously have a democratic system of government that is imperfect. The voters still get a say on many issues–sometimes their say doesn’t translate to real power, but it does translate to who wins House elections and Senate elections. Neither party has the magic ability to force the electorate to change to be what they want.
The core problem with the Democratic position on abortion is they never had to convince the public in most of the country–the Supreme Court simply ruled. The Supreme Court’s ruling ended up being one that was sufficient for most people who don’t live and breathe this issue to be “fine” with the status quo. Namely that abortion is not criminalized, but that the States can restrict it in many scenarios. It is hard to rile up people who aren’t diehards on that issue when legal abortion was secured by a constitutional ruling that the public never seriously thought would be overturned until probably halfway through Trump’s Presidency.
On the flipside the core pro-life faction of the GOP cares more about this issue than almost anything else, and for them it is a serious moral and religious crusade. We can argue about the logic of that, the various shitty hypocrisies they may engage in, but there’s a lot of people who are true believers on this issue.
Countries like Ireland, and now some in South America, legalized abortion in part because of how messy it was not being legalized, and that took time and a lot of exposure for the public in those countries to realize. America never went through that process because we legalized relatively early in reference to where our national discourse was on the issue.
Yes, invasion of privacy is certainly abhorrent. I’d hate for his life to be disrupted by an outside agency or organization.
But is there a right of privacy in one’s home? I don’t see that expressly stated in the Constitution.
FWIW, I’m by no means a Democrat either. When I say independent, I mean it. In fact, as a young man I would have told you I leaned Republican just because of the (supposed) “leave me alone plank.” We could debate whether the crazy wing was not there yet, or I just didn’t see it, but it doesn’t really matter.
So for instance, I support LGBTQ issues, gay marriage, etc. not because I really care all that much, but because I don’t care what someone else does, if that makes sense.
But back to the Democrats, the truth is that they’re just as beholden to their identity constituency as the Republicans. Most Americans are relatively centrist, but there is no centrist option. Make college affordable? YES. Pay off the Boston University bill for the degree in navel gazing ($58k/yr)? NO. Go to UMass and keep the cost of that public institution affordable. - I don’t want to hijack, just trying to show there’s a lot of space between “I don’t want to pay for some snowflake’s elitist humanities degree” and “I’ll pay for anything no matter the cost or value.”
I don’t think this is a hijack becahse this is a great demonstration of how propaganda works. Barely 10% of college degrees are in the humanities. Yet based on how much time and effort is spent by the right talking about these degrees, you’d think at least half of all college students are getting supposedly useless degrees in Gender Politics of Underwater Basket Weaving in the Third Through Eighth Centuries.
Maybe things will change but I’m just going to point out that this view is to the left of the democrats at the present moment.
#4?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.