Government

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Justifications for the Filibuster Fight

Republicans are angry that the rules have been changed to allow for a simple majority to decide judicial nominations in the Senate (where that had been the norm for more than 200 years).  Democrats responded:

“Any President’s judicial nominees should receive careful consideration. But after that debate, they deserve a simple up-or-down vote”.

“Let’s get back to the way the Senate operated for over 200 years, up or down votes on the president’s nominee, no matter who the president is, no matter who’s in control of the Senate”.

“[W]e can’t find anywhere in the Constitution that says a supermajority is needed for confirmation”.

“I believe [filibustering judicial nominees] is in violation of the Constitution”.

“I will vote to support a vote, up or down, on every nominee. Understanding that, were I in the minority party and the issues reversed, I would take exactly the same position because this document, our Constitution, does not equivocate”.

“Why not allow the President to do his job of selecting judicial nominees and let us do our job in confirming or denying them? Principles of fairness call for it and the Constitution requires it”.

Oh!  Wait!  My bad.  Those are all quotes from Republicans arguing against using filibusters at all to stop judicial nominee votes, made at a time when Bush was President and before there was that 60 vote rule.

Clearly, things are much different today. Because, um … well, there must be some difference. Or else all these Republicans would be flaming hypocrites now, wouldn’t they?

 

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The Nuclear Option

As you know, in a democracy, the majority rules. Unless you’re in the Senate where, because of some stupid rule, you need a Super Majority (able to leap tall precedents in a single bound!). public-law-congress

Senate President Harry Reid today used a parliamentary loophole to get around the rule that allowed a minority of Senators to block legislation without having to do a damn thing except say that they wanted to block it. This is why the current Congress has passed less laws than any Congress in the past 70 years. No jobs bill, no infrastructure bill, no tax reform — although they did try almost fifty times to repeal Obamacare. That must have kept them busy.

On one hand, I hate the idea of using these kinds of loopholes. On the other, this is getting ridiculous. We need judges appointed so that courts aren’t so overworked and justice gets done, and the Senate is blocking them for no good reason other than that they can. This move by Reid will allow our government to do the work it has to do. Well, at least regarding appointments. blocked In order to keep the minority from blocking legislation, another rule will need to be changed. Maybe in January.

It’s about time that we, the majority, took the government back from a group that actively is trying to destroy it. They closed us down during their childish crying fit when they didn’t get their way over Obamacare, and they’ve been doing everything they can to prevent anything from being accomplished in the meantime.

So Reid used the “nuclear option” to try to take democracy back. I am now having a difficult time not imagine him riding a bomb down to the ground like Major Kong…

Anyway, I’d say “let’s use the nuclear option to bomb the Republicans back to the stone age” but they’re already there.

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Unsolicited Advice for Democrats

by guest blogger Jesse Hendrix

In the wake of the Republicans setting a world record for synchronized shooting yourself in the foot, Democrats are feeling good about themselves. And why not? Polls show that if the election were held tomorrow, there would be a good chance of them taking the House while keeping the Senate. DemocraticLogoUnfortunately, the election won’t be held tomorrow. There’s a whole year to go. A whole year of dealing with this House. A whole year for the Democrats to screw something up.

In the spirit of my advice to Republicans, here are five rules to help Democrats make the most of a bad situation.

Rule 1. Go big on the budget.

The shutdown-ending deal has set the stage for yet another round of budget talks, which will in all likelihood go up to the last possible second. Treat this as an opportunity. Don’t just try to maintain the current budget levels–the current budget levels suck. Make the argument for more job-creating spending and more tax fairness. Keep hammering the damage austerity has done and make the Republicans own it. When they say “We can’t afford that,” point out the military program we could cut that costs more, or the small tax changes that would pay for it. Anything that costs 24 billion or less should be compared to the economic cost of the shutdown. Republicans are down. Kick them.

Rule 2. Go big on everything.

On the rare occasion that something gets done in Washington, the discussion goes like this: Republicans make a far right proposal, Democrats make a center-left one, and we end up with a center-right compromise. This needs to change. They say “Defund Obamacare” you say “Expand Obamacare.” Then suddenly the compromise is “Maintain Obamacare.”

Since Republicans are blocking everything, you might as well go for the wish list. Push a jobs bill. Push infrastructure spending. Show the public what they would get if they put Democrats in charge of the house and senate. Keep reminding them of the first two years of Obama’s presidency when stuff got done.

Rule 3. Be the reasonable ones.

This follows on from Rule 2. Push for what you really want, but be ready to take what you can get. Practice variations on the following: “We believe that [Strong Liberal Policy] is what is best for the country, but in the interests of bipartisan compromise, we are willing to accept [Weak Liberal Policy]”

Work with any Republicans who are willing. You’ll get more done. As an added bonus, this makes you look good to independents and moderates, while opening the Republican involved to attacks from the right.

Rule 4. Don’t fear the Deficit.

Republicans are going to try to make the discussion all about deficit reduction. This is code for cutting social programs. Do not fall for it. We do not have a short term deficit problem. The deficit is falling faster than Wile E. Coyote holding an anvil. We have a growth problem, and to encourage growth the government needs to invest money. The way you say it matters. Don’t call it “Government Spending.” It’s “Investment in America.”

Rule 5. Don’t do anything stupid.

This is both the most important rule and probably the most difficult to follow, but you have to try. We need to see no dirty tweets, no affairs, no prostitutes, none of it. As Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner taught us, it only takes one Democrat with a sex scandal to completely distract the media and public from Republican wrongdoing.

So there you have it. Five ways for Democrats to capitalize on Republican self-destruction. You guys have finally been showing some spine, and you need to keep it up. To completely misquote Margaret Thatcher, “Someday the Republicans will be in charge of government again. The Democrats’ job is to hold on until they are sane.”

Jesse Hendrix writes political satire at www.stoptellingliesaboutliberals.com. Questions, comments, good jokes and job offers can be sent to him at jessemhendrix@gmail.com

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Unsolicited Advice for Republicans

by Guest Blogger Jesse Hendrix

It goes against my nature to try to help Republicans, but I’m starting to feel sorry for them. They were so proud of the shutdown, and the whole thing just blew up in their faces. They’re kind of like children who just wanted to make breakfast for mom and are then left wondering why everyone is shouting about the waffle in the blue-ray player and the juice in the toaster.

While many liberals are enjoying the GOP’s self-destruction the simple fact of the matter is that our democracy requires at least two sane parties to run. In the interest of avoiding future disasters, I’m offering five simple rules to save the Republicans from themselves.

Rule 1. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.

When you preach Armageddon and it doesn’t happen people tend to stop listening. Take Obamacare. Your side has been saying it’s going to wipe out the economy and kill everyone’s grandma. As you can see, that’s not happening. At all. If instead you said, “Obamacare has some good ideas and some flaws, here are our ideas on fixing the flaws,” you would have been participants in a real debate. You would get to say “I told you so” on the failures and take partial credit for the successes. Instead, you’re the boy who cried wolf.

Rule 2. Google is your friend.

While preparing any kind of speech or statement, do a quick search to make sure that what you’re saying is (A) Grounded in reality; (B) Won’t offend an entire ethnic/religious group; and (C) Doesn’t contradict something you said yesterday. If you are going to contradict yourself, be sure to mention the new information that caused you to change your mind.

Rule 3. Ignore the voices in other people’s heads.

In other words, stop listening to the crazy wing of the party. They’re not helping. Any plan based on the assumption that we are in the End Times is a bad plan. Any plan supported by someone waving a confederate flag or a picture of Obama with a Hitler ‘stash is a really, really bad plan. Treat these people the way Democrats treat people who think Bush is a reptilian who ordered the 9/11 attacks. Thank them for their support, and back away slowly.

Rule 4. Solutions are not the problem.

Believe it or not, Republicans used to have the government do things, and some of those things turned out pretty good. Interstate highways come to mind. But today’s so-called conservatives have decided that small government means inactive government.

Let’s use climate change as an example. Right now Democrats say, “Fight Climate Change through EPA regulations” and Republicans say “Climate change doesn’t exist.” Right now droughts and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and 95% of climate scientists say we really need to stop emitting so much CO2. This is not going to end well for the deniers. Instead of denying the problem, give us your own solution. How about tax breaks for companies that reduce emissions? You love tax breaks for companies! Or how about Cap and Trade, that’s a free market idea right there. Suddenly you’re part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Rule 5. Think outside the bubble.

Let’s do a quick experiment. Raise your hand if you went into Election Day 2012 thinking that Mitt Romney was going to win. Keep it up if you thought the shutdown had a chance of derailing Obamacare. Now lower your hand if you regularly get news from a source other than Fox, Talk Radio, or similarly aligned web sites. I’ll bet that anyone who raised their hand in the first place still has it up. That’s the right-wing information bubble in action. When you only listen to people who agree with you you’ll lose sight of what’s really going on.

Now, this isn’t just a right-wing problem. Liberals have their own bubble to deal with. The difference is that the left-wing bubble contains fewer actual lies than the right wing one. This is because the conservative bubble tends to respond to bad news (for their side) with denial, while the liberal bubble responds to bad news (for their side) with panic. Neither response is exactly constructive, but at least the left knows what’s going on.

The solution here is simple. Every once in a while listen to people who disagree with you. Remember that you can question someone’s conclusions without denying their facts, and that people who have different opinions are not the enemy. You can put your hands down now.

There you have it. Five rules to get the Republicans back on track. Will they listen? Probably not, but as a liberal I have a soft spot for hopeless cases.

Jesse Hendrix writes political humor for www.stoptellingliesaboutliberals.com. If you enjoyed this piece why not put a dollar in his tip jar?

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Disloyalty on the right?

by Guest Blogger Steve Vaughan

You can’t be an American patriot and advocate that we default on our debt.

If you believe in American exceptionalism, you can’t also believe that our country should behave like some Third World banana republic and not pay its bills.

That’s aside from the fact that the international monetary system is based on the bedrock that “the full faith and credit of the United States” actually means something. We inherited that role from the British. No one is prepared to inherit it from us. The Chinese don’t abide by international monetary norms. I suppose if the Tea Party throws the world into a period of economic chaos that will make the Great Depression look like a minor slump; Germany might emerge as the central economic power. That would be pretty stupid given that our problems are fixable, easily fixable, given the political will.

But that’s not what one is hearing from the political right this week, with the federal government shut down for two weeks.US_Capitol_west_side

Instead, we hear serious arguments put forth that it would be better for the U.S. to default on its debt now, rather than later. Because these “conservatives” believe that this is it for America that we’ll never pay our debt back or get our financial house in order and that default is “inevitable.”

They’ve given up on America.

Not me. I say, let’s get the government back open without holding the Affordable Care Act hostage. And let’s raise the debt ceiling so we can pay the bills on what Congress has already put on the credit card.

Then let’s look at what we can do to get our financial house back in order.

Spending cuts? Absolutely. Let’s start with the oil depreciation allowance, all farm subsidies and about half our military installations in Europe – which were designed to perform a mission that no longer exists.

Then, let’s do some common sense entitlement reform that everyone knows we need. Phase in a higher retirement age and eliminate the income cap on Social Security taxation. It wouldn’t break my heart to see Social Security means tested either.

That’s about all it would take to put us back on the path to fiscal sanity that we were on before we decided to fight two wars and fund a major entitlement reform on the credit card.

And then conservatives can go back to whining about social issues and how America’s morals are going to Hell in a hand basket – because that’s what they are really good at.

Steve Vaughan is a reporter and political blogger who has at various times worked on political campaigns and written speeches for prominent officeholders.

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A Mission from God

One of the main reasons many Tea Party members are so stubborn is because they are on a Mission From God.

They sincerely believe that these are the End Times and Jesus will be here soon. Of course, religious fanatics have been making such predictions since the year 666, but somehow the fact that every single one of them have been wrong again and again doesn’t deter these folks. last130529All the signs were present last time, but they’re really present this time so it’s bound to be true!

Loony Michelle Bachmann is one of those believers. “The baton of global leadership has been passed by America to the Mullahs, the Marxist world, and other dark forces,” she stated recently, all but calling Obama the AntiChrist. “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.” I am not making this up.

This is important because, like many religious fanatics, they are convinced that they and they alone know the true meaning of whatever holy book they wave around, and everyone else is a heathen who just doesn’t get it. And, not surprisingly, many of these same people identify with the Tea Party and their fanatics. They believe they are fighting for God — against those who would allow abortions, against those evildoers who would encourage gay marriage, against the unwashed who would support taxing the very rich. (I’m not exactly sure how that last one matches what is in the Bible, but they seem to think very strongly that it’s important.)

And that’s why compromise is not possible with these people. They think they are performing God’s will, and if we oppose them, then clearly we must be working for the Devil. There is no other possibility in their black-and-white simple little worldview.

Just ask Justice Antonin Scalia, who believes the Devil is in the details. “In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore. It’s because he’s smart. He just got wilier.” In this interview, he made it pretty clear that he believes that evil in the world is caused by the Devil, who is apparently a lobbyist and probably a Democrat too. It’s the only thing he can come up with to explain how it is possible people could disagree with him.

Politics is the art of compromise. Compromise is what reasonable adults do in order to accomplish things. It is not, however, what fanatics do, because otherwise they’ll burn in Hell.

So the next time you wonder why these crazy politicians refuse to compromise, keep in mind that they don’t care about this world — they’re just trying to work their way into the next.

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Defending Columbus

Yes, Columbus didn’t really discover anything, because there were already millions of people in America. Yes, others from Europe had been here before him.

And yes, he promoted slavery and thought there was nothing wrong with killing the natives and taking their land — But so did just about everyone back then.  (EDIT: I wrote this article years ago and have since learned that he was indeed worse than the average person in those days, so some of this no longer applies.)

Whenever we judge those in the past, I think it’s important to look at them in relationship to their times. chriscolumbusThose who were ahead of their time deserve much more respect than those who may have done great things in their time but did nothing to advance humanity in any way.

We must realize that taking over the natives and controlling them was how things were done. Europe held vast parts of Africa, India, and the east under their control, where the “sun never set” on their empire. That in no way makes it right.

Columbus was a product of his time. It’s not like he said, “Let’s exploit this new place I found and subjugate the natives,” and then everyone said, “That’s a terrible, evil idea!” No, they all said, “Hey, great! Just like we did to the natives in the Congo. More stuff for us!”

Slavery was a part of the history of the world for thousands of years before Columbus. He didn’t invent it. The ancient Greeks, with their democracy and philosophy, thought that enslaving those conquered in wars of expansion was perfectly fine. The Bible has rules about slavery and those rules aren’t “slavery is bad.”

We can’t hold everyone to today’s standards. Jefferson and Washington, who proudly grace Mount Rushmore, had slaves. Lincoln would never have agreed to give women the right to vote. Do you think Teddy Roosevelt would have supported gay marriage?

Society advances. There were people who disagreed with Jefferson and Washington about slavery (notably Franklin and Adams). There were people in Lincoln’s time who even advocated for woman’s suffrage. There are always people ahead of the majority, pushing to make the world a better place.

Maybe in the future we will have provided some rights to dolphins and whales. Or maybe there will some other new right we haven’t even considered today. I certainly wouldn’t want someone 500 years from now calling us all evil and terrible for treating them so poorly.

Columbus is important not because he “discovered” a place where people already existed and had been visited by Europeans long before him. He is important because his “discovery” was a big turning point in the history of the world, for better or worse.

So when you judge Columbus, keep these thoughts in mind. So let’s use Columbus Day not as a celebration of the subjugation of natives, but instead as a day to think about how far we’ve come and what roads lie ahead. Let’s treat it as a day of contemplation, like Veteran’s Day is supposed to be, where we learn from our mistakes.

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GOP hits lowest favorability rating ever

Gallup says this is lowest either party has ever rated in twenty years, since they started asking this question.

Look at the numbers. And look at that drop, which matches perfectly the shutdown (or as the Daily Show calls it, “Shut Storm”). Americans are smart enough to know who to blame for this.

2013-10-09-GallupGOPFavorability

As my last two posts have commented, this is suicide for the Republican party. The fact that they cannot see that it is shows how deluded they are and how out of touch with the American people.

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If the election were held today …

Speaker Pelosi would be once more moving this country forward, if the election were held today.

I’ve already pointed out more than once that this shutdown is suicide for Republicans, but that they are so much in the bubble that they cannot see this. Since they only listen to Fox News and talk to each other, all they ever get are reassurances that everyone agrees with them when that is far from the truth.

The latest polls have shown that if the election were held today, they’d lose the House. This was not true a month ago.

Of course, a year is forever in politics and anything can happen by next November, but you would have to be absolutely clueless and/or stupid to deny that the shutdown is bad for the GOP. Yet I still have friends on Facebook who support it and who blame Democrats for it.

One Facebook friend today posted that we should all email the White House to demand that Obama negotiate. When I pointed out that Obama had invited Republicans to the White House and most of them refused to attend, his response was along the lines of “Sure, why should they since it won’t accomplish anything?” (Pause for laugh track.)

OK, fine, don’t listen to me. I don’t mind that you’re committing suicide — good riddance. But do you have to kill my country along with you?

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Cruz Control

Senator Cruz has been practically giddy with the government shutdown. As a man who has never seen a government program he liked that did not involve regulating women’s reproductive rights, this has been a lifelong dream.

“And why stop here?” the Senator asks. “If this works, we can force Obama to get rid of other laws that have passed. Why limit ourselves to just laws that have passed and been upheld by the Supreme Court in the past two years? The Civil Rights Act, Social security, votes for women — the list is endless!”

“I never realized that people who hate government could possibly try to destroy that government once elected,” said one clueless voter.

Other clueless voters have different views. “Our government may be destroyed, we may lose our place as the richest country in the world, and we may never again have the respect of the world when it comes to our good credit, but at least in exchange we’re letting poor people without health insurance die, right?”

Cruz sees no problem with his venture, and thinks it fits perfectly with his idea of the desires of the Founders. “Simply because the law was passed and signed by the President and then upheld by the Supreme Court and has already been implemented despite our 43 failed votes to repeal it doesn’t mean we can’t keep fighting to get rid of it,” he says. “As every schoolchild knows, once a bill becomes a law that doesn’t mean it gets implemented.”