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Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate Firewall (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter TripItUp
- Start date
sho nuff
Footballguy
His obstruction is hardly good deeds...he is one major reason the system is so broken in Washington. Bills that pass the house are not supposed to just be ignored...he is ignoring the will of the people through our elected representatives to ever even see proper discussion and debate on the senate floor.
Was it a good deed to the American people to ignore possible stimulus and rush through a Supreme Court Justice? How many other things has he ignored in his time as speaker?
Was it a good deed to the American people to ignore possible stimulus and rush through a Supreme Court Justice? How many other things has he ignored in his time as speaker?
Godsbrother
Footballguy
McConnell and Pelosi need to be run out of town. There are others of course but these two are a big part of the problem
Mile High
Footballguy
His policy seems to be to only advance legislation he thinks the president will sign. His policy under a president Biden will most likely be to not advance legislation he thinks the president will sign.
Marauder
Footballguy
The GOP Senate does not have any legislative agenda. The only thing they are doing now is approving conservative judges as fast as possible. They'll probably continue that through January 19th then go into full obstruction mode. Suddenly approving judges will be of no interest to them at all.
leave a whisper
Footballguy
52 GOP Senators that rep 18 million less people than the 48 Dem Senators ....... add in Electoral College & Gerrymandering (allowing Congressmen to select their voters) -- we are NOT a divided country, we are ruled by a loud 35-40% minority thanks to out outdated and unevenly weighted election systems #EndMinorityRuleInAmerica
fatguyinalittlecoat
Footballguy
Apparently the only vacancy in all the Courts of Appeals is Barrett’s spot she just gave up to join the Supreme Court. Nobody’s going to be approving a lot of judges next year no matter who controls the Senate.
tri-man 47
Footballguy
Worst case, the Senate has Murkowski, Collins, and Romney as reasonable leaders who would not be afraid to work with Dems on good legislation.
Ministry of Pain
Footballguy
Two 78 year old Men are going to shake hands and say nice things about each other ramping up to them working together but once Biden takes office and major things are unrolled to be passed by what many anticipate will likely be a GOP controlled Senate by 1 or 2 seats, in the end it's theatrics so that the GOP can shoot everything down or have a daily presser on all the networks where they cry cry cry.
I'll keep it short, it's a good topic for discussion but probably not a lot is going to get done the next 4 years and if you are conservative minded then you probably are not that worried about Joe taking over...if he can make it four years as I believe he steps down in 18-24 months and let's Kamala take over and start her election/re-election campaign.
I'll keep it short, it's a good topic for discussion but probably not a lot is going to get done the next 4 years and if you are conservative minded then you probably are not that worried about Joe taking over...if he can make it four years as I believe he steps down in 18-24 months and let's Kamala take over and start her election/re-election campaign.
This is irrelevant if only McConnell gets to decide what is brought to the floor for a vote.
MAC_32
Footballguy
It's only a good discussion topic if the senate gets flipped in 22. Otherwise I do not expect there to be anything to discuss. Each day will be groundhog day, but since we're now 8 months deep into that in 2020 most of us have had plenty of practice.
Ministry of Pain
Footballguy
tri-man 47
Footballguy
Doug B
Footballguy
While I understand that this is true ... HOW is it true? I mean, does the Constitution that all floor votes are filtered through one person?
And if so, why did past Senates ever consider bills raised and passed by the opposite party? Why had no past Senate attempted naked obstruction before?
The Z Machine
Footballguy
In the past, the Senate was "the gentleman's chamber" where deals were brokered and there was comity between the two parties, regardless of who held power. Those working relationships have eroded considerably in the last 20 years for a variety of reasons. Most of those relate to the risk of being primaried for "being a RINO" vs. garnering votes for being a centrist. This goes for both parties, but the GOP under McConnell has taken obstructionism to new levels, and thus far have not been punished for their actions.
Doug B
Footballguy
Just as an aside: this makes me think open primaries for all elections (from dogcatcher to president) needs to be pushed much harder in all 50 states. I admit to knowing little about what initiatives along these lines are ongoing except that they exist.
BoltBacker
Footballguy
As much as I can't stand what McConnell stands for I kind of felt the current atmosphere of obstructionism started with the tea party in 2009. So when people look around and ask how we got here and there is no stimulus they should really look at the tea party first. That was their platform, right? It was a tantrum responding to poor people getting healthcare. No new spending..... unless it's on defense budgets.
McConnell definitely contributed to getting that fuse lit but it has probably blown up in the face of a lot of small business minded people that have suffered with the lack of more stimulus. The tea party goals of obstructionism have contributed to more people needing a healthcare safety net than ever before. Unintended consequences.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
The ironic twist of libertarian/ultra conservative politics. By having less laws and being more "free", it often makes people less free as they are burdened by lower wages, more expensive health care, less education and social investment, etc. Building tanks isn't the only way to defend freedom. Building better schools and making sure people are healthier mentally and physically is also protecting freedom. However, we are headed towards a likely 2 year standstill in government meanwhile we will likely be facing a crap economy and a raging virus. Terrible time to have a do nothing legislature and to be fixated on a "government just needs to get out of the mentality".
the rover
Footballguy
This Is not factual. Biden’s time as a Senator established relationships with the old guard of the GOP. There is clear history of bipartisan cooperation in place, unlike the current situation.
trader jake
Footballguy
Good luck with that.
Biden will embrace Executive Actions. Each successive POTUS has done this and it will no doubt continue with the Biden Administration.
Due to the increasing bipartisan non-sense Presidents have very few options if they want to accomplish anything in office. Without the back and forth that previous legislatures had with those gentleman's agreements we're now stuck on this continuous slide toward a more and more powerful President.
History should tell us this isn't a great path to continue down for the health of our democracy.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
Congress needs to take their power back, but due to partisanship the party in power won't let that happen because it shares power with the out of power party. Plus, they risk being held accountable for the policies that are ascribed to the president, thus risking their own livelihood.
The system is broken.
trader jake
Footballguy
Good points. Gerrymandering has a lot to do with it. Also, the Senate over respresents smaller and more rural states.
That and the Dems are just not at as good at politics as the Republicans.
Most GOP advantages didn't come from winning more votes overall, having issues poll on their side, or any other item the left doesn't have. The GOP stayed focused on bending states to their will and then keeping that advantage by gerrymandering where possible and packing the courts.
To use a poker analogy, the Dems get dealt slightly better hands but keep getting outplayed by the GOP because they're rarely willing to go all in. If the Biden Administration wastes four years trying to reach across the aisle (with McConnell and company digging in and doing nothing) we'll see very little has changed.
However, if the Democrats do whatever they can via Executive Orders and bending other unwritten rules (see: Trump Administration playbook) maybe we'll see two sides playing the same game. I'll believe it when I see it. It = we start seeing FBGs posting Fox commentators melting down in this forum about the same things they've been praising for the past four years.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
GordonGekko
Footballguy
How is the system broken?
If the DNC wants to do what it wants, it needs to run the table, if it wants to run the table, it needs to win all the elections. If you win the POTUS, you can fill the court with your own people when an opening comes available. Hillary Clinton and that Blackberry/Email/Comey situation was on her own ledger. No one forced her to put that private server in her basement or to use a non secure system when she was advised to do otherwise. There's a good chance she could have won the election without that and then she'd would have been in a position to fill all the SCOTUS seats that Trump ended up doing.
A whopping 12 HOR seats flipped to red this election cycle. Can you blame that on Trump and McConnell and Barr and the rest?
You know who would have looked pretty damn good in blue? Tulsi Gabbard. But the DNC couldn't control her and couldn't dig enough to blackmail/leverage her and so they canceled her, even though she could have easily beaten Trump with full DNC/MSM/Social Media/Big Tech/Hollywood/Traditional Leftist strongholds/etc/etc support.
No one forced the DNC to embrace BLM and "defund the police". No one forced the gaggle of leadership in rioting/looting cities like Lightfoot/Durkan/Wheeler/de Blasio/Cuomo to lose so many moderate/undecided voters. No one forced the DNC to push that insane "Latinix" mantra. No one forced the DNC to assume the minority vote they always held would stay that way for free. No one forced the DNC to ignore the HBCU's and their legacy vote which Trump bought while in office. No one forced the DNC to ignore the massive wave of young voters who leaned conservative because they felt Democrats were veering away from the party of the common people. No one forced the DNC to encroach on court packing.
The systems REWARDS WINNERS. All systems rewards winners.
I don't agree with what happened to Merrick Garland, I find the due process stolen from him was treasonous. But Hirano going senile/psychotic during the Coney Barrett hearings didn't win the left any more favors or votes.
AOC is talking about taking down lists and archiving people, lending shades of McCarthyism. Do you think that will draw in moderates and undecideds?
When Tom Brady went to the Bucs, he could do whatever he wants. He wants Gronk. Cool. He wants headcase Antonio Brown. Cool. He wants this coach or that coach? Cool. He wants to peddle that bizarre life/happy avocado spirit juice brand crap? Cool. He wins. He keeps winning. When you win, you can do what you want.
The GOP cheated Merrick Garland. That was BS. You don't need to cheat if you can win on your own. Biden doesn't need to talk about court packing if the DNC was just winning everything in sight.
The problem with blaming the system and blaming Trump ( and each have their own flaws, no doubt) is it shades the reality that the DNC could have done many things better. Refusing to acknowledge this doesn't lend towards progress. Would anyone be complaining if they leaned left and Big Blue ran the entire table?
Winners do what they want. Winners don't complain. Winners make the most of every situation and are introspective to keeping their own house in order first.
whoknew
Footballguy
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GordonGekko
Footballguy
But the question remains. It's easy to immediately vilify Cocaine Mitch. And there's plenty of material there for it.
What could the DNC have done better to win those critical Senate seats? What could the DNC have done to stop those 12 HOR seats from flipping?
Liberals had the MSM, social media, Big Tech, Chinese related interests, Hollywood and an entire generation of college educated Americans fresh from the clearly woked out lefty friendly cancelled culture school system on their side. Can anyone explain to me how you can have this kind of power in entertainment, news, mass media, education backed by big money and not completely dominate the American political landscape? ( Does no one want to give credit to Trump, even being an unhinged greedy corrupt narcissist, that he toppled TWO political dynasties in Clinton and Bush then ran over MSM and fought against the ENTIRE establishment and still won POTUS in 2016 saying whatever he wanted like a loony high level God tier troll? With no previous political experience and a lifetime of failure and scandal to boot. That achievement is incredible, even for a loser like him. )
Political tribalism will only get you so far. What could the DNC have done better to win the Senate? Will any of you lefties actually engage that question?
trader jake
Footballguy
Politicians have very, very, very little incentive to do anything but cast votes for their side. Not what's good for their constituency, their own morals/beliefs, or what would be best for the country overall. That no longer exists as it once did. When pointing out the idiocy on your own side is akin to treason, that's not a great sign for democracy.
Greed is good. Thanks for the reminder.
dkp993
Footballguy
Not really. All it did is expose American addiction to reality TV, drama, envy of the wealthy and a being a sucker for few catchy branding statements. Many a fortunes have been made using this exact playbook via late night infomercials.
GordonGekko
Footballguy
Political tribalism/"Orange Man Bad" will only get you so far. What could the DNC have done better to win the Senate? Will any of you lefties actually engage that question?
GordonGekko
Footballguy
Political tribalism/"Orange Man Bad" will only get you so far. What could the DNC have done better to win the Senate? Will any of you lefties actually engage that question?
dkp993
Footballguy
How about you stop casting aspersions if you want an answer. I’m not a “lefty” and didn’t vote for Biden. My post to your statement was a direct answer. It wasn’t orange man bad. Political tribalism is at a modern day all time high and is extremely real and relevant.
The Commish
Footballguy
It's like we forgot that this "flipping the Senate" talk was considered completely crazy and inconceivable just a year ago. Consensus was that it was virtually impossible....fast forward to today and we're asking why the Dems blew it. Weird.
Stompin' Tom Connors
Footballguy
All the schtick and pot-stirring aside, the second sentence is one of the many reasons the system is broken.
It's a well-researched and documented fact that diversity breeds better decisions. The same is true for government -- you need diversity of thought and the willingness to work together and be open to different perspectives, all of which will inevitably help you arrive at a better decision as a result.
Government wasn't meant to be a single party's viewpoints being ramrodded down throats of citizens just to score a win against the other party. It's not meant to give a single party a sole, unfettered, and unchecked path to legislation. It shouldn't be that in order to make positive change for its citizens, a political party needs to run the table.
What you see in the US has really devolved to this, however, with either obstructionist tactics solely for political purpose that can cause true harm to citizens, or to dismantle what a previous administration did rather than build change on top of any true benefit that existed.
The Commish
Footballguy
Therein lies the problem....what it "feels" like does not trump (pun intended) reality of what it actually IS
Though I do acknowledge, it might have been a year and a half to two years ago...not just a year ago.
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Thunderlips
Footballguy
I think the question better to ask is that what could Donald Trump and the RNC have done better to keep the White House and flip the House?GordonGekko said:
I'm not a Leftists by any means......but the Senate hasn't been lost yet.
Godsbrother
Footballguy
Trump's biggest failure was to not treat the coronavirus pandemic seriously. Had he been more upfront to the American people and followed the guidelines put forth by his own administration I think he wins the 2020 election.
He was more concerned about blaming others and downplaying the risks, as we watched 1000s of American die and millions losing their jobs. It is ironic that is what cost him the election.
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GordonGekko
Footballguy
This is a fair question.
Could Trump have done things better in his four years? Yes. Could he have handled the pandemic better? Yes. His trolling caustic style helped him in 2016 but was untenable for 2020. A lot of people despised the Clintons and their legacy so that was a different animal than Grandpa Joe Biden. He should have taken a note from AOC's playbook. I'm not a fan of AOC but she did the smart thing by starting out and making name by aggressively going after softballs. Going after Big Pharma was a big fat softball for AOC.
Trumps caustic outrage style needed to be focused on things that were intolerable to society in general. For example pushing for convicted child molesters to be treated as a capital crime. That's a softball. Would anyone here shed too many tears if convicted child molesters were executed en masse and quickly? Big pharma was another one. You need to target things that indefensible beyond partisan lines.
To cover for decades of the hot mess of his public life before politics, Trump needed a larger issue that the DNC couldn't fight and no spin control/crisis management could stop.
Trump opposed China. Link the DNC with China and open the pathways to crimes against humanity. The Uighurs situation is political Kryptonite. Organ harvesting, torture, forced sterilization, executions, concentration camps. Link the major DNC players to Chinese financial interests and influence and then those ties to genocide. Keep hammering at it. Since the lefty MSM would actually try to shade that down, it would only look complicit. In the mass media, you MUST FRAME THE NARRATIVE and you must hold the tone and lines of debate. This is where Trump's methodology would fit. His high constant pressure and overwhelming carpet bombing technique.
SIMPLE MESSENGING is what matters. That complex "Defund the Police is not what it means, it means something else" cost the DNC badly this cycle. The mantra was dumb and polarizing and the follow up was condescending and looked weak.
"The DNC Profits From CHINESE GENOCIDE."
Simple message. Would have destroyed Biden, Pelosi, AOC, the DNC, everyone. Turning that many House seats is a big task, that's the one issue that would outrage the American public at large. The idea of some child in a concentration camp stitching together a pair of Nikes or an IPad is repugnant against one's sense of humanity. We are talking core attack of individual dignity.
One of the most powerful political images is Tank Man. A lone unknown who stood in front of a column of tanks.
Effective political strategy would be to find a universally jarring image of a Uighur child from a concentration camp and have people put that on their phones and every time a DNC stalwart goes out in public, hundreds surround them and hold up their phones showing the image. No words, no violence, just holding that phone up with that image. Of course there's the irony of those phones being made by likely slave labor as well but the narrative won't go that far.
Your turn, what could the DNC have done better in 2016 and 2020?
Thunderlips
Footballguy
2020 is easy. They did about as well as they could do when the protest/riots superseded COVID as THE important issue in the eyes of the American public in the summer. Joe Biden was the only candidate who could have beaten Trump. Sanders/Warren? Nope....too Socialist. Butitgeg? Nope...too gay. Bloomberg?...too phony in the eyes of the DNC. Biden was a man capable of rallying the "Old Machine" while being a good juxtaposition when held up against Trump of what "old white men" SHOULD be...(the world works best when an old man plants a tree whose shade he will never sit under). He might have been able to pick better on his VP; I'm one who kind of agrees with John Nance Garner and his opinions on the office of VP; but Harris checks a lot of boxes.....and (most importantly) seems capable.
As far as local and low level Federal races go; Democratic candidates at the local and low-level Federal had an impossible tightrope to walk; protests v. riots, reform v. defund. They couldn't thread that needle well enough and being the "anti-Trump" candidate means less and less the more down the ticket you go.
2016 is a tougher one. To me, 16 (and the current Senate situation) was the culmination of running Obama in 08 instead of Clinton. I always come back to a woman who was a mentor for a handicapped man I knew in 08. She was OG Southern Democrat. Loved the Party thru and thru. Loved Hillary.Loved Bill. Loved Jack Kennedy. Was a big fan of how the New Deal saved her mother/grandmother. She was wary of Obama though and thought him to be a "line-jumper". She ended up voting McCain in 08 and even though I haven't seen her since...I'd bet just about anything she supported the Tea Party in 10/12 and was a full fledged Trump supporter against Hillary in 16.
Obama destroyed the traditional DNC Machines in his 08 run. It was still a Clinton Machine then and when he won, his people moved in and upset a lot of people. That was a Machine that was still capable of winning Senate races in traditionally red states; something that might be over for the Democrats now. 08 was going to the D's anyway. There wasn't a need for Obamas cult of personality to win that one. Hillary would have smoked McCain and they would have kept that Machine intact. It and she would have brought along Obama and his people (because ever since his 2004 DNC Speech...even a blind man could have seen he was going to eventually win the Presidency) gradually....which would have resulted in her passing the baton in 16 to Obama.....which he would have won; as he would have won in 2020.
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The Z Machine
Footballguy
Yeah, but Obama was a better candidate than Hillary. So who cares. Time to move on from all the old fogeys.
Thunderlips
Footballguy
I think Barack Obama is a better person than Hillary Clinton. I think that Hillary Clinton was a better candidate for 2008.
I agree with the idea of moving on from all the old fogeys.....but I don't particularly like that the Democratic Party has a 59 year old fogey who has to sit on the sidelines for the rest of his life.
Obama in 08 was like a game of Hold Em when you draw AA and the rest of the table folds because they all have trash.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
Dude could be a king maker if he wanted to. It looks like he doesn't want to.
His wife could be POTUS if she wanted. It looks like she doesn't want to.
Ted Lange as your Bartender
Footballguy
He is a king maker now. He’s Biden’s king maker. Biden was done leading up to Super Tuesday, and then all the moderate candidates dropped out and the Machine got behind Biden. Obama’s Machine
whoknew
Footballguy
I do not think this is accurate. Its true Biden's campaign got a jumpstart in the South, but that was because of the voters down there. And Jim Clyburn.
Obama did not endorse anyone prior to those votes.
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