US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2648

On September 20 2020 02:16 JimmiC wrote:

I have a American acquaintance who voted Trump with his reasoning being that American politics was so cancerous that you needed to elect a poison to show how rotten it was and start to actually fix things. If a blue wave happens and there is enough pressure to actually change and fix things he might have been right and I would have to eat some crow.

This is going to be one of the most interesting and intense elections of my lifetime because there is actually a very dramatic difference between the candidates and the parties. And there is way more people passionately pissed off. There seems to be so much dry tinder and a whole bunch of sparks. This could go so many dramatically different ways. Many of them frightening.

On September 20 2020 02:16 JimmiC wrote:

I have a American acquaintance who voted Trump with his reasoning being that American politics was so cancerous that you needed to elect a poison to show how rotten it was and start to actually fix things.

On September 20 2020 03:02 JimmiC wrote:


You are fairly famous for awful analogies and this is one of your worst!


To the rest of you you are making it very hard to find a silver lining

On September 20 2020 03:02 JimmiC wrote:


You are fairly famous for awful analogies and this is one of your worst!


To the rest of you you are making it very hard to find a silver lining

On September 20 2020 03:23 Gorsameth wrote:
The only 'silver lining' to Trumps election was the world realising that America was more fucked then we thought and that the EU has to stand on its own.

On September 20 2020 03:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
I certainly wouldn't vote for Trump, but it's hard to imagine the brunch liberals would be realizing how bad things have been for decades or how vulnerable the system is to actors like Trump without him.

On September 20 2020 04:20 Introvert wrote:

Now today the courts have a lot of power, and that should be reduced. That would be one way to cool things. But one side now feels like they are winning the courts and the other still wants to use them to push through things the electorate didn't vote for. So good luck.

TL:DR complain about this as a matter of raw political power if you must, but do not claim it is unusual, and that is a grave threat to democracy. That's worse. And wrong.

On September 20 2020 04:20 Introvert wrote:
So hopefully I'll point out the following and not need to do so again (hahaha!)

With exceptions usually caused by outside factors, presidents always nominate replacements, even near presidential elections (and of course midterm elections). When the Senate has belonged to the same party, they have almost always confirmed those nominees. When they didn't agree, they are often rejected, unless the president nominates someone who the Senate actually wants.

These the "norms." It is NOT normal to hold these seats open in this situation. Putting aside how the party of "norms" has spent four years crapping all over them in other areas, Democrats cannot point to history, they instead try to use what some Republican senators said in 2016 and 2018. And you will notice that they are not, in fact pointing to any norms or history. They are going back a grand 4 years. There is no doubt, because we know the history, that Democrats would do the same thing in this situation. And they'd point to the historical precedent Republicans are pointing to now. I highly urge, for anyone interested, the following article. It's not bombastic (it was written a little over a month ago, and is now timely). It is longer than your average online article, just fyi.

A few GOP Senators said there should be no vote taken in a presidential election year, and a few took a few days to fully look into the history. McConnell's first statement in 2016 was wrong, but he quickly corrected himself. Graham is in a harder spot, but he's now saying the Kvanaugh hearings changed things for him. He's obviously covering his ass, although the Kavanaugh hearings absolutely changed things for Republican voters.

And we shouldn't forget the what they tried to do to Kavanaugh, for all the people saying Democrats don't play dirty. From Bork to Thomas to Ailto to Kavanaugh, they absolutely play dirty. The difference is that they have been unlucky with SCOTUS roulette. The last time this scenario appeared for a Democrat WH and Senate, LBJ nominated someone for CJ (who was already on the Court) who had corruption issues that ultimately forced him to resign altogether.

It's not that they are too weak, or play too nice. We know from 2018 that that's some horsepucky. They are short-sighted and tactically inept, not morally superior. Voting to filibuster Gorsuch, at the very start of Trump's term, with no possibility of success, may cost them not one SC seat (Kavanaugh) but two.

On hypocrisy, we have the a prominent Democratic senator, now their nominee for president, who argued in 2016 that the Senate should have taken up and confirmed a lame-duck president's nominee (which again, would have been a historical anomaly). He argued in the 1990s that if the Democrats had control at the end of Clintons term, they would confirm. He argued in 2016 that the Republican senate should confirm. Even if you totally disregard what I said above about history, there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around.

I think what is more dangerous than a new nominee before an election, in these politically intense times, is lying about "norms" and "democracy" in ways that will inflame certain segments of the public to believe things to be worse than they are.

Now today the courts have a lot of power, and that should be reduced. That would be one way to cool things. But one side now feels like they are winning the courts and the other still wants to use them to push through things the electorate didn't vote for. So good luck.

TL:DR complain about this as a matter of raw political power if you must, but do not claim it is unusual, and that is a grave threat to democracy. That's worse. And wrong.

On September 20 2020 06:19 TheTenthDoc wrote:
All you need to know to see how irrelevant history and precedent are to the modern context are to look at how rushed sitting politicians were to redefine "lame duck" from "period in between an election one loses or does not run in and the inauguration of their replacement" to "within their final year of office." It makes it really hard to figure out what people are talking about, and much easier to distort historical reality, which is of course precisely the point.

It's not like Schumer proposed that Obama should fill a vacancy that opened in December-nor, as far as I'm aware, did he say we should fill a vacancy that opens in September (I'm sure a vague out of context results a la Jones' "full birth abortion" that proved to be utter nonsense might be findable, though)-but this is what a cursory read of Introvert's post suggests in the terms of the actual meaning of lame duck, and would indeed be dumb.

"Oh, but words change in meaning!" Yes. But here they are changing specifically for political ends, probably decided on by some marketing team. Finding against redefinitions for such naked power-grab purposes is, at least in my opinion, something worth doing.

Moreover, pretending there is any ideological basis for any Senator's decision in 2016, or any one made in 2020, is just silly, and hypocrisy only means anything in ideological terms. Norms haven't mattered to most of the people at the levers of power in Washington since at least 2012 and probably not since 1996. Graham will vote whatever way maximizes his personal power. McConnell will vote in whatever may maximizes his own personal impact and legacy power. Of course Schumer will do the same.

On September 20 2020 03:46 JimmiC wrote:



I must have missed the "be so embarrassingly awful your allies no longer trust you in the slightest' as one of his promises. Not one I would be proud of, but me and you have almost nothing in common so I guess that makes sense.

@Nouar fuck 2020.

On September 20 2020 04:31 Jockmcplop wrote:

Aren't the very same people who you are describing here pretty much advocating for a return to exactly the way things were a few years ago?

On September 20 2020 04:20 Introvert wrote:
So hopefully I'll point out the following and not need to do so again (hahaha!)

With exceptions usually caused by outside factors, presidents always nominate replacements, even near presidential elections (and of course midterm elections). When the Senate has belonged to the same party, they have almost always confirmed those nominees. When they didn't agree, they are often rejected, unless the president nominates someone who the Senate actually wants.

These are the "norms." It is NOT normal to hold these seats open in this situation. Putting aside how the party of "norms" has spent four years crapping all over them in other areas, Democrats cannot point to history, they instead try to use what some Republican senators said in 2016 and 2018. And you will notice that they are not, in fact pointing to any norms or history. They are going back a grand 4 years. There is no doubt, because we know the history, that Democrats would do the same thing in this situation. And they'd point to the historical precedent Republicans are pointing to now. I highly urge, for anyone interested, the following article. It's not bombastic (it was written a little over a month ago, and is now timely). It is longer than your average online article, just fyi.

A few GOP Senators said there should be no vote taken in a presidential election year, and a few took a few days to fully look into the history. McConnell's first statement in 2016 was wrong, but he quickly corrected himself. Graham is in a harder spot, but he's now saying the Kvanaugh hearings changed things for him. He's obviously covering his ass, although the Kavanaugh hearings absolutely changed things for Republican voters.

And we shouldn't forget the what they tried to do to Kavanaugh, for all the people saying Democrats don't play dirty. From Bork to Thomas to Ailto to Kavanaugh, they absolutely play dirty. The difference is that they have been unlucky with SCOTUS roulette. The last time this scenario appeared for a Democrat WH and Senate, LBJ nominated someone for CJ (who was already on the Court) who had corruption issues that ultimately forced him to resign altogether.

It's not that they are too weak, or play too nice. We know from 2018 that that's some horsepucky. They are short-sighted and tactically inept, not morally superior. Voting to filibuster Gorsuch, at the very start of Trump's term, with no possibility of success, may cost them not one SC seat (Kavanaugh) but two.

On hypocrisy, we have the a prominent Democratic senator, now their nominee for president, who argued in 2016 that the opposing party Senate should have taken up and confirmed the nominee of a president in his final year (which again, would have been a historical anomaly). He argued in the 1990s that if the Democrats had control at the end of Clintons term, they would confirm. He argued in 2016 that the Republican senate should confirm. Even if you totally disregard what I said above about history, there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around.

I think what is more dangerous than a new nominee before an election, in these politically intense times, is lying about "norms" and "democracy" in ways that will inflame certain segments of the public to believe things to be worse than they are.

Now today the courts have a lot of power, and that should be reduced. That would be one way to cool things. But one side now feels like they are winning the courts and the other still wants to use them to push through things the electorate didn't vote for. So good luck.

TL:DR complain about this as a matter of raw political power if you must, but do not claim it is unusual, and that is a grave threat to democracy. That's worse. And wrong.

“Let me be clear: if Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year. Nothing is off the table.”

On September 20 2020 07:44 Nevuk wrote:
Introvert, you're flat out wrong that there's precedent for this. Scalia's death was towards the edge of a normal time to have the debate. There's literally no case like this where the person was nominated and confirmed this close to the election.

Here's 538's table on it:


What there IS precedent for is refusing to seat candidates when a lame duck president tries to ram through a bunch of judges. Marbury V Madison, the case that actually gave the SC its most noted power, to overturn unconstitutional laws, was over that. Adams tried to pack the courts with a bunch of candidates in 1800-1801 after he lost re-election, and Jefferson opposed this and refused to seat candidates who hadn't been officially seated before he took office (ie, they were confirmed by the senate but still waiting on the SoS to confirm their positions). The SC decided that Jefferson was violating the law, but that the law was unconstitutional, so that he wasn't required to in the first place.


So far there's a bunch of posturing from democratic leadership. "You better not, you hypocrite" basically, but no one in leadership is going out and saying what they'd need to say to stop it : "do this and we'll pack the courts".

edit :
I said that, then immediately see this from Schumer on politico.

Schumer: "Nothing is off the table" if GOP moves to fill Ginsburg's seat
https://www.axios.com/schumer-republicans-ginsburgs-seat-supreme-court-1aef856e-2e87-40dc-a3d7-876b863caec7.html

Nadler also backs Markey's comments that they'll expand the court the next chance they get if RBG gets replaced during lame duck session
https://twitter.com/RepJerryNadler/status/1307379171354652673