2024 Presidential Election | 41 Days to Election Day

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Ddseddse said:
The Manchin examples are more numerous, but credit where credit is due, we shouldn't forget this...

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ETA: I think this may be as literal an example of "The exception proves the rule" as you'll every find, though.
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That example always makes me cringe. McCain's objection wasn't to the substance of the bill. He didn't like the way it was pushed through the Senate. In particular, he didn't like that his committee had been excluded. And the fact that Trump insulted him probably didn't help matters. But it was not a principled stand.

If you want to give credit, give it to Murkowski and Collins who both voted no from the outset.
 
uncgriff said:
I would be fine with the filibuster if the Senate actually represented America more fairly.

The 49 GOP senator represent 150 million Americans while the 51 Democratic senators represent 204 million.

Land over people simply has to be fixed somehow. A vote in wyoming is worth a hell of a lot more than a vote in California and that is just not right. Particularly when California pays for all the red states.
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Here is the graphical representation. One white Wyoming vote compared to other states.

Add the filibuster on top of this there is no wonder why our politics is the way it is.

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uncgriff said:
I would be fine with the filibuster if the Senate actually represented America more fairly.
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It's still a bad idea no matter what. It's based on the fiction that the Senate is some great deliberative body. Maybe that was true at one point (again, doubtful), but that time was fairly long ago.

I would be less opposed to the filibuster if it was used only to block monumental changes without more than bare consensus. You know, the way it used to be deployed -- for exceptional circumstances only. Give the minority party one filibuster per year.

One of its worst effects is the way it clouds responsibility in our environment. To those of us who follow politics, we understand that there's not really a Senate majority without 60 votes. But you constantly hear American voters saying things like, "the Dems had control for two whole years and they did nothing with it." Well, they had a majority but they didn't have control. Explaining that to people who don't follow politics is excruciating. In fact, even explaining it to people who do follow politics can be maddening. I can't count the number of times I've had to remind my mother that stuff doesn't get done because it takes 60 votes, except for reconciliation.
 
superrific said:
It's still a bad idea no matter what. It's based on the fiction that the Senate is some great deliberative body. Maybe that was true at one point (again, doubtful), but that time was fairly long ago.

I would be less opposed to the filibuster if it was used only to block monumental changes without more than bare consensus. You know, the way it used to be deployed -- for exceptional circumstances only. Give the minority party one filibuster per year.

One of its worst effects is the way it clouds responsibility in our environment. To those of us who follow politics, we understand that there's not really a Senate majority without 60 votes. But you constantly hear American voters saying things like, "the Dems had control for two whole years and they did nothing with it." Well, they had a majority but they didn't have control. Explaining that to people who don't follow politics is excruciating. In fact, even explaining it to people who do follow politics can be maddening. I can't count the number of times I've had to remind my mother that stuff doesn't get done because it takes 60 votes, except for reconciliation.
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agree. just pointing out that even a 50/50 vote already greatly skews toward the GOP because of the senate representation problem.
 
Given how long and how hard West Virginia has sucked off the government teet and that West Virginia was the national incubator for the OxyContin and fentanyl abuse disasters that have so damaged our country, I think Joe Manchin has more important priorities to deal with than whether a non-Constitutional legislative procedure created to protect slavery is preserved.
 
superrific said:
That example always makes me cringe. McCain's objection wasn't to the substance of the bill. He didn't like the way it was pushed through the Senate. In particular, he didn't like that his committee had been excluded. And the fact that Trump insulted him probably didn't help matters. But it was not a principled stand.

If you want to give credit, give it to Murkowski and Collins who both voted no from the outset.
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You're somewhat correct but it was called "The Skinny Repeal" for a reason. It wasn't what the republicans said they were going to do. It was a bull shit bill.

"not because he was opposed to dismantling the Affordable Care Act, but because he fundamentally believed the process – the lack of hearings, the one-party, closed-door negotiations, the fact that in the end all that Republican senators could agree upon was a shell of the plan they’d promised – was flawed."

“Why did you vote no?”

He answered simply: “Because it was the right vote.”
 
superrific said:
It's still a bad idea no matter what. It's based on the fiction that the Senate is some great deliberative body. Maybe that was true at one point (again, doubtful), but that time was fairly long ago.

I would be less opposed to the filibuster if it was used only to block monumental changes without more than bare consensus. You know, the way it used to be deployed -- for exceptional circumstances only. Give the minority party one filibuster per year.

One of its worst effects is the way it clouds responsibility in our environment. To those of us who follow politics, we understand that there's not really a Senate majority without 60 votes. But you constantly hear American voters saying things like, "the Dems had control for two whole years and they did nothing with it." Well, they had a majority but they didn't have control. Explaining that to people who don't follow politics is excruciating. In fact, even explaining it to people who do follow politics can be maddening. I can't count the number of times I've had to remind my mother that stuff doesn't get done because it takes 60 votes, except for reconciliation.
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And that exact confusion, of course, is a large part of why Republicans are so desperate to keep it - they know regular Americans don't care/understand, and so they can do nothing but obstruct and still go out on the campaign trail and blame Dems for not doing anything.
 
maxcrowder said:
You're somewhat correct but it was called "The Skinny Repeal" for a reason. It wasn't what the republicans said they were going to do. It was a bull shit bill.
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That's because of the filibuster. They could only pass the financial part through reconciliation -- i.e. the Medicaid expansion, the penalty, the marketplace funding, etc -- which left a bill that was even worse than a clean repeal. The insurers would be left with a requirement to issue insurance to anyone who asked when they asked, but without the money to keep everyone in the pool. The result would likely have been a death spiral of health insurance. It would have become prohibitively expensive for anyone. Insurers probably would have been forced to stop issuing individual policies altogether.
 
rodoheel said:
And that exact confusion, of course, is a large part of why Republicans are so desperate to keep it - they know regular Americans don't care/understand, and so they can do nothing but obstruct and still go out on the campaign trail and blame Dems for not doing anything.
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Republicans only care about the filibuster when democrats control the senate, house and presidency. They actively dislike the filibuster when they have all three.
 
nycfan said:


Ukraine should just “settle up” with Russia, eh?
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To be fair, he said he wants to get Russia to settle up with Ukraine. Given that I’m pretty sure he feels no love for Ukraine though, I’d expect that settling up to be something along the lines of Russia saying “We’ll keep the territory we took and you can get out of ours and maybe we’ll throw you a few bucks for destroying your cities and infrastructure.”
 
Rougemont said:
To be fair, he said he wants to get Russia to settle up with Ukraine. Given that I’m pretty sure he feels no love for Ukraine though, I’d expect that settling up to be something along the lines of Russia saying “We’ll keep the territory we took and you can get out of ours and maybe we’ll throw you a few bucks for destroying your cities and infrastructure.”
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Strike that last part about compensation and add a “Ukraine promises never to seek NATO admission,” and I think you’ve nailed it.
 
aGDevil2k said:
And milk. And any of it.

Also big props to her for being the most powerful VP in world history
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I can see paying $9.99 for a nice hunk of fresh salmon, though.

But the chart reminded me of how I felt as a kid watching the Price is Right grocery shopping game. I always thought their prices for a box of rice or whatever were way more than what we paid (and I had a good feel for that at a pretty young age because I ran the prices on a calculator from the time I was in second grad while my mom kept my two younger brothers from destroying the store — had to do the price per unit for stuff sometimes, too, plus know our budget and alert my mom if we were pushing it with stuff in our cart) — assumed those were California prices.
 
How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House

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It is no surprise that the effects of gerrymandering tilt in favor of the GOP. This decade, as last, Republicans disproportionately controlled the redistricting process, drawing 191 (or 44 percent) of the districts that will be used in this year’s elections. By contrast, Democrats fully controlled the drawing of only 75 districts. The rest were drawn by commissions, courts, or divided governments.

State courts also played a role in creating Republican advantages, because courts in states where Republicans drew maps (many of them with judges elected in partisan elections) have been much less inclined to police partisan gerrymandering than their counterparts in Democratic states. Thus, while large Democratic-favoring skews have been mostly corrected through legal review, Republican-favoring skews have almost uniformly remained uncorrected. Indeed, courts in many GOP states have followed federal courts’ lead in declaring gerrymandering claims to be political questions that courts have no authority to address.

Democrats also drew skewed maps in a few places, but the 7 extra Democratic or Democratic-leaning seats in those maps are less than a third of the 23 extra GOP or GOP-leaning seats in states with Republican-favoring maps.
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"Freedom to Vote Act", if passed, would've helped
 
gregh1 said:
How Gerrymandering Tilts the 2024 Race for the House

---
It is no surprise that the effects of gerrymandering tilt in favor of the GOP. This decade, as last, Republicans disproportionately controlled the redistricting process, drawing 191 (or 44 percent) of the districts that will be used in this year’s elections. By contrast, Democrats fully controlled the drawing of only 75 districts. The rest were drawn by commissions, courts, or divided governments.

State courts also played a role in creating Republican advantages, because courts in states where Republicans drew maps (many of them with judges elected in partisan elections) have been much less inclined to police partisan gerrymandering than their counterparts in Democratic states. Thus, while large Democratic-favoring skews have been mostly corrected through legal review, Republican-favoring skews have almost uniformly remained uncorrected. Indeed, courts in many GOP states have followed federal courts’ lead in declaring gerrymandering claims to be political questions that courts have no authority to address.

Democrats also drew skewed maps in a few places, but the 7 extra Democratic or Democratic-leaning seats in those maps are less than a third of the 23 extra GOP or GOP-leaning seats in states with Republican-favoring maps.
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"Freedom to Vote Act", if passed, would've helped
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But, you see, keeping the filibuster is far more important than Americans' voting.

Signed, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema
 
He's Not Here said:
For shits and giggles…..
Almond honey flat white at Starbucks - 5.65
Gallon of milk - 3.81
Salmon filet - 8.85
Potatoes - 1.19/pound
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Gallon of milk is over $7 Canadian by me. $5.50 American, but not many (besides me) are paid in freedom dollars. Wish people screaming about the "worst inflation ever" would look around the world for a second.
 
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