US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5293

As an example: the reason SCOTUS has lifetime appointments is because it was always supposed to be a nonpartisan, professional “balls and strikes” institution. Technocratic, if you like. For those purposes having seats be determined by the semi-unpredictable whims of biology is meant to ensure there’s no obvious way for partisans to seize control of the court. But once everyone understands justices are partisan, and figures it’s just another power center to battle over like Congress or the Presidency, lifetime appointments becomes a ludicrous system. It’s like having a legislature in which seats are determined primarily by your faction’s actuarial understanding; if you can predict your people’s deaths far enough in advance, you’ll always have an opportunity to have them step down and replaced with someone younger, and you’ll never lose a seat.

This budgetary process wasn’t functioning *well* before, but it is kind of fundamentally broken by an executive that feels completely unconstrained by Congress’s dictates. If Congress allocated money for something, and the executive doesn’t like it? Doesn’t happen. If Congress didn’t allocate money for something the executive wants to do? It happens anyway. What, then, is the point of the budget anyway?

Then there’s this farce where Republicans are gloating that a shutdown gives Trump some new powers to carry out mass firings. That’s ludicrous as a matter of law. But what do legal protections mean now anyway? He’s been firing people all year that were supposedly entitled to legal protections against this kind of arbitrary dismissal, and court cases have been playing out all year but they’re mostly not getting hired back. Maybe in a few years the court cases will conclude and they’ll get awarded a bunch of back pay, maybe they won’t, but in the meantime there doesn’t appear to be any mechanism preventing Trump from reconstituting the government however he sees fit, regardless of any shutdown.

Anyway. “What should the Democrats do?” IMO the only reason to be talking about the Democrats at all is if we’re hoping that defeating Republicans in some future election is going to end this, or at least if the threat of that will somewhat restrain the worst abuses. With that in mind, I think it makes perfect sense to choose something like the ACA subsidies – a popular, kitchen-table provision that people are already enjoying, and which the Republicans would be eliminating with a “clean” CR. If they succeed, it will mean Republicans are chastened by unpopularity out of a change they wanted to make, which is bullish. If they fail (e.g. if Republicans nuke the filibuster) they can point to the premium increases people will experience and pretty plausibly say “we did everything we could to prevent this, you’d better vote out these Republicans if you don’t like it.” None of that is even pretending to “fix” any of the ongoing catastrophes but I don’t see how any Dem response to the budget shutdown could.

Sure, and I know GreenHorizons feels that way. I guess I was trying to engage with LibHorizons’ challenge (since you often seem frustrated that no one is willing to). Of course, the other reason they might hesitate to engage is because they know LH is a performance, not a true held belief (“bad faith,” someone might say) and they suspect you’ll use any resulting discussion as ammunition for your “stop voting for Democrats” hobby horse.

I mean, the thing about liberals is their politics is not particularly motivated by self-interest. There’s a kind of “noblesse oblige” to the whole faction. They tend to be pretty affluent, pretty white, and most of their moral commitments don’t particularly impact them personally. If you want to be uncharitable, you could accuse them of being motivated by the appeal of smug self-righteousness and the social standing obtainable through right-think. But in the last election they widely took the position “Donald Trump is an existential threat to our way of life, and if we don’t stop him he’ll create a fascist autocracy.” The general response was “fuck you, everybody hates you, go away and never come back.”

It’s not surprising that the response would be to politically disengage and say “well, we tried to tell you, now I guess we’ll all reap the consequences, you imbeciles,” is it? I’m not saying it’s the right response, or that we need to be more considerate of their feelings or something. But I don’t think there’s much to be accomplished by telling them to despair at the Democrats’ prospects right now. They’re in gallows-humor watch-the-world-burn mode because they’re *already* despairing.