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I dont think so. The Teaparty is the GOP's Obamacare. Those nutbars continue to marginalize anyone approaching moderate.
not a very deep analysis, more just wishful thinking
what's your analysis state by state?
I dont think so. The Teaparty is the GOP's Obamacare. Those nutbars continue to marginalize anyone approaching moderate.
Sorry no link. From TNR. My device is ed...
WAR NOVEMBER 21, 2013
Nuking the Filibuster Is Great. Sanctimonious Beltway Types Just Won't Admit It.
BY ALEC MACGILLIS @AlecMacGillis Share
To understand why Senate Democrats took the historic step they did Thursday to allow a simple majority vote to confirm many presidential appointments, it helps to look beyond Washington, to put what’s been going on here in a national context.
In Texas just recently, Attorney General Greg Abbott, the likely Republican nominee to replace Rick Perry as governor, explained in a court brief that the redistricting plan passed by Texas Republicans had not been racially discriminatory, as alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is challenging on similar grounds the state's new Voter ID law. Rather, Abbott argued, Republicans had simply been trying to crush the state’s Democrats, who, it so happens, are disproportionately non-white:
"In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats," read a court brief filed by Abbott. Abbott also qualified the tactics, noting that partisan districting decisions are still cons utional, despite "incidental effects on minority voters." The brief cites Hunt v. Cromartie, a South Carolina case in which it was decided that "[a] jurisdiction may engage in cons utional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact."
Two years earlier, the majority leader of the Wisconsin state senate, Scott Fitzgerald, explained with equal candor in an interview with Fox News that the move by his fellow Republican, Gov. Scott Walker, to decimate the state’s public employee unions was motivated by a desire to weaken a key pillar of the Democratic Party:
If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the au es of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.
The Senate Democrats’ 52-48 vote Thursday was met with predictable laments about the resulting loss of bipartisan comity. The vote “ensures an escalation of partisan warfare,” declared the home page of The Washington Post. “So you didn't think partisanship in the Senate could get worse? It just did,” tweeted USA Today’s Susan Page. "Filibuster Vote Marks Escalation in D.C.'s Partisan Wars," frets an NPR.org headline.
But such laments willfully overlook that we have long since entered an era of total partisan warfare that would be difficult to escalate any further – it’s as if a moral philosopher showed up at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 fretting about the use of automatic weapons. “I realize that neither party has been blameless for these tactics. They developed over the years,” Obama said after the vote. “But today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal. It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations we can’t let it become normal.” The laments are particularly curious considering how proudly – almost admirably! – candid Republicans have been in recent years in embracing whatever tactics they can to advance their team’s prospects, whether it comes diluting the influence of Texas’ black and Hispanic voters or eviscerating the organized-labor funding base of Wisconsin Democrats or, yes, maintaining an edge on the crucial D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that lay at the center of the current filibuster showdown.
That, after all, is what set this judicial nomination fight apart from those before it: Republicans’ striking opennness in declaring that they were blocking President Obama’s three judicial nominees not out of any plaint with their qualifications or ideology, but simply because they did not want to give Democrats a majority of appointees on that D.C. appeals bench, which rules on so many key regulatory issues, from the new health care law to carbon emissions standards. As it now stands, the court is split evenly between Republican and Democratic appointees, while Republicans maintain an edge among the pool of subs ute judges that are frequently called on to fill in. Some Senate Republicans and conservatives made a half-hearted attempt to couch their blockage of the nominees as a budget matter, arguing that the court’s workload didn’t justify any more judges. But in general, they were as blunt as could be in their motivation: they simply were not going to allow Obama and the Democrats to reap one of the age-old benefits of winning two elections in a row, being able to appoint judges of their choosing to the federal courts and thereby tilt their makeup slightly in their favor. “They want to control the court so it will advance the president’s agenda,” said Mitch McConnell in explaining why Republicans would do everything they could do prevent that control – as if the Democrats’ desire for such influence in the third branch of government was somehow untoward or authoritarian (indeed, they went so far as to equate Obama's filling established slots on the court with Franklin Roosevelt's attempted packing of the Supreme Court by adding extra seats to it.) This followed the equally undisguised attempt to keep Obama from implementing his agenda by simply refusing for months to confirm nominees to head executive departments, such as the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose actions carried no official weight without a confirmed director. If there was any doubt that such a strategy bore the traces of John Calhoun, the famous father of a famous senator put it to rest with a recent speech (in Richmond!) urging Republicans to adopt, yes, "nullification."
The legal historians note that opposition parties have long been more reluctant to confirm judicial nominees to federal courts that were in close partisan balance. That is, the norm of presidents being able to select qualified people of their choosing to the federal bench had been in the process of being undermined for some time now amid the feints and quailing by both sides regarding this or that nominee’s qualifications or alleged extremity (with good reason, in some cases: among the judges allowed onto the D.C. appeals court as part of the Senate's "Gang of 14" compromise in 2005 -- a deal whose spirit was breached by this fall's filibuster of the three Obama nominees -- was Bush nominee Janice Rogers Brown, who has called liberal democracy a form of “slavery” and post-New Deal regulations “the triumph of our socialist revolution.”)
From the standpoint of this history, the sheer brazenness of the Senate Republicans in laying bare their partisan intent this time around was refreshingly honest, in a way, as was Greg Abbott and Scott Fitzgerald’s acknowledgment of their plans to pulverize the other side. But it also had the clarifying effect of upending the norm around presidential appointments far more completely than all previous rounds of gamesmanship had done. It left Democrats no choice, really, but to upend a norm of their own. You can have unwritten norms in an atmosphere of bipartisan comity, but without the latter, you can't have the former. And bipartisan comity not only left the barn long ago; it had been tracked down and shot behind the woodpile. It’s long past time to stop mourning it and start to reckon with what its absence means for a cons utional system that was not designed for parliamentary-style, ideologically-coherent parties of the sort we are left with today, facing off across a muddy field.
Good paste, push. That last sentence is a perfect summation.
But such laments willfully overlook that we have long since entered an era of total partisan warfare that would be difficult to escalate any further – it’s as if a moral philosopher showed up at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 fretting about the use of automatic weapons. “I realize that neither party has been blameless for these tactics. They developed over the years,” Obama said after the vote. “But today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal. It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations we can’t let it become normal.” The laments are particularly curious considering how proudly – almost admirably! – candid Republicans have been in recent years in embracing whatever tactics they can to advance their team’s prospects,
So when did this destructive partisanship begin and what prompted it? If the system was set up poorly, why has it reached the pinnacle of destructiveness now?
What's different about our current president than the previous 43?
Does it really matter?
It has existed in various levels for the centuries (See Civil War). The dynamics behind intractable opposition are temporal and are direct results of specific issues. However, if I had to assign an overly broad definition of "Blame", the Jerry Falwellian Moral Majority movement of the 80's would be a player.
+10 Cloak of intractability....Republicans.
Kabuki theater. Both parties pushing TINA neoliberal agenda.
NB4 False Equivalence!!!!! 1111 Repugs!!!!! VRWC!! 111 Human Amercans!!!!! et al....
Yes.
It would be nice to know when we might expect a log jam or how to avoid one.
The Civil War... That's a sad statement on your assessment of today's state of partisanship.
And so Obamas statement that this is just not normal is disingenuous?
Last edited by pgardn; 11-22-2013 at 11:00 AM.
So you are saying a black president has illicited this kind of response?
He has followed a very nice Republican line on defending our country (NSA snooping) and the generous use of drones.
Give him some Republican kudos.
When the VRWC became well established after its start in the 70s. I remember reading one veteran Senator saying he NEVER saw anything happen so bad as when the Repugs took the House and Gingrich started all his , including shutting govt down.
Then there was the non-stop witch-hunting and harassment of the Clintons, financed by 1% asshles like Mellon-Scaife, 1992-2000.
When the Dems, and that n!gg@, won in 2008, the Fox, VRWC, ALEC, US CoC, the right-wing hate machine had advanced tremendously from the 1990's and went nutz on everything Dem AND at every level of govt.
So it basically got its jump start with Nixon?
earlier than Nixon.
Lewis Powell's famous memo, in my VRWC long thread, formalized the VRWC strategy as "take the 1%'s country back" from the progressive 1960s (VRA, Medicare, Medicaid, killing Jim Crow laws, forced school integration, etc, etc)
The real ignition was when Repug Tricky Nixon was forced out of office (remember it was extreme right wing asshole Bork who accepted to execute the Sat night massacre) and something like 40 lawyers in the Exec being sent to prison, humiliating the Repugs.
“Congress is broken,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday before holding a party-line vote that disposed of rules that have guided and protected the chamber since 1789.
If Congress wasn’t broken before, it certainly is now. What Reid (Nev.) and his fellow Democrats effectively did was take the chamber of Congress that still functioned at a modest level and turn it into a clone of the other chamber, which functions not at all. They turned the Senate into the House.
From Dana Milbank of WP
I chose this quote because the author, in my estimation, is very hard to pin down.
"If Congress wasn’t broken before, it certainly is now."
it was blatantly broken WILLFULLY by the Repugs' obstructionism.
Repugs don't care about govt, St Ronnie's "GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM" they fix by destroying govt.
Again, in the contxet of contemporary politics, his statement is false but not disingenuous.
My assessment of todays political climate, while undeniably cynical, does not include a Civil War scenario. Not sure how you got there. It wouldnt even be a cosideration were it not for the brain dead ideologues such as the Tea Party and the boutons of the world who would rather bask in their tautoligical constructs than engage in rational discussion. Thinking is hard!
As always, Jon Stewart delivers
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/2...onist-asholes/
funny how that works sometimes. imagine the 2012 GOP Presidential primary debates as a multi-stage bicycle race in which nearly every rider briefly contends for the lead before flaming out pathetically, leaving the field clear for -- yet again, the establishment Republican next in line for the job -- Romney.
My hunch is that the next in line is Christie and if not Christie, Jeb Bush.
http://chickenhead.com/psychedelic/
So you think the inability of our branches of government to function constructively is more of an ebb and flow based on events and a political climate that are not necessarily predictable. It has happened in the past, it will subside, and then happen again? ANd that the rules that Congress plays by are partially to blame? We need a better system (parliamentary? Or modified version) and it could solve some of the problems of any one party's intransigence?
Ahh intransigence is probably too nice. It's more like opportunism for the Cruz type characters.
There is a clear fear of majority rules type phenomena. This is how the minority gets squashed and has no power. In this particular case I don't know that it's that big a deal. Unless the Republicans rule and push through a judge like an m>s hero.
I am surprised there are not more left left democrats advancing a slippery slope hypothesis like they did with 9/11 patriot act backlash. It is kind of strange that no one seemed to make fun of the phrase "nuclear option" until it happened.
"This is how the minority gets squashed and has no power"
majority rules.
elections have consequences
the Senate Repug asshole minority ABUSED its negative power, and now gets kicked in the balls.
Seems like none of you right wingers whine and about Repugs abusing their majority power to gerrrymander and suppress minority, non-white voters.
Absurd ideologue strikes again.
you better believe it, my naive little
lol simpleton
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