Voting in elections is like breathing. The next one is always the most important one of your lifetime.
But...they said the last breath was the most important, and I'm sitting here alive with nothing to show for it!
god the number of people around hwre who said they were sitting out the 2024 election because they voted in 2020 and not everything got fixedâŠ
Something something good men do nothing.
Look up Jerry Falwell and his 'Moral Majority.'
Falwell was a TV preacher who decided he wanted to get into politics. He had a simple formula to take over the GOP. The Party depends on small local clubs to do all the little things like getting petitions signed and driving folks to the polls on election day. Those clubs pick local office holders like sheriffs and county clerks.
Falwell told his people to show up at those clubs whenever there was a decision to be voted on. If there'd been twenty folks there for the last vote, Falwell's 'Moral Majority' would show up with fifty. Pretty soon Jerry had a lot of local folks in his pocket. Those soon became Congressmembers and Governors.
AOC did it in one Congressioal district.
The last important one was in 1980. The people celebrated their own destruction as they counted the days when they would be the millionaires inflicting themselves on society.
Fucking suckers.
Big capital owns both parties now, the literal 5ish spoilers between both chambers that the neoliberals hate more than their opposition party can't do a thing in a sea of hundreds of well bribed, oh I'm sorry "donated," sycophants. There's no escape under the current framework.
Worse, we've used our massive hard and soft geopolitical power since then to make the rest of the world as exploitative, sociopathic, and greedy as us, and we've been wildly successful at it.
Look up Jerry Falwell and his âMoral Majority.â
Falwell was a TV preacher who decided he wanted to get into politics. He had a simple formula to take over the GOP. The Party depends on small local clubs to do all the little things like getting petitions signed and driving folks to the polls on election day. Those clubs pick local office holders like sheriffs and county clerks.
Falwell told his people to show up at those clubs whenever there was a decision to be voted on. If thereâd been twenty folks there for the last vote, Falwellâs âMoral Majorityâ would show up with fifty. Pretty soon Jerry had a lot of local folks in his pocket. Those soon became Congressmembers and Governors.
AOC did it in one Congressional district.
If they owned the elections they wouldn't be trying so hard to stop people from voting.
democracy is when you let a bunch of unelected elders in robes dictate how society operates
They don't entirely, though. In fact, much of what the SCOTUS has struck down has been them saying Congress needs to do their job and write laws to do what they want the laws to do, versus having the SCOTUS legislate from the bench. Don't get me wrong, this SCOTUS is fucking awful, but there's some slight truth to some of what they've said on some of their rulings. For example, Roe v Wade could've easily become a national law, but Congress won't do it.
It's bad when even RBG was saying roe shouldn't have been used as law. The dems have had a ton of times to solidify it into law via the proper channels but won't because it gets votes.
Have they, though?
It wasn't because it gets votes, but because it loses votes. People will strongly object to one thing a hell of a lot faster than they'll give you credit for doing anything. Look at Biden's entire administration. We handled post-covid inflation* better than any other developed nation, but he didn't get credit for the 90% he fixed. He got shit on for the 10% left to go.
* And I'd argue a good chunk of that inflation was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the bipartisan bill Trump signed into law while rejecting the oversight the Dems wanted. That was the biggest corporate giveaway in our nation's history. Literally just giving public money to private corporations. A step far beyond "privatize profits, socialize losses".
Dems believed, reasonably, that Roe was settled and wasn't in imminent danger. Holding a vote on that just pushes people away. Of course, in hindsight, they should have done it anyway. But as you can tell from this past election, and all the states that went red while passing women's rights legislation, having the issue out there is not getting them votes.
This only sounds reasonable until you think about it for 2 seconds. Do you really want the Senate and Congress to have to learn about and try to legislate the details of chemistry, medicine, finance, engineering, etc, rather than delegating figuring out the details of tasks like âmake the food safeâ or âmake the water cleanâ to scientists and other experts at agencies?
Notice how I emphasized "some" twice in my comment. It wasn't a catch-all statement.
The Supreme Court only has the power it does because the legislature has been dysfunctional. Most of their terrible decisions are not based on the constitution, but rather their interpretation of laws written by Congress. Congress can easily override them by passing a law saying "No, that Is not what we meant".
Lol remember signing our supreme court justice approvals. Fucking silly us.
I'm just glad Obama rolled over and allowed Mitch McConnell to steal a seat. Because the decorum that preserved really helped this country.
"When they go low, we go high." is a saying I'll remember for ever and teach others...
As an ominous warning to never, ever, EVER be an Honest Man in a lying contest.
Senate was under republican control, Obama wasn't getting any justices confirmed.
Refusing to hold a hearing could have been interpreted as de facto confirmation.
It's funny (funny in the sense that I have an uncomfortable chance of not fucking surviving the next four years) that so many self-proclaimed leftists have a strategy that boils down to "Let the fascists win and then complain about it".
Including a bunch here who have also seemingly deleted months worth of their comments as cover.
Funny that so many centrists have a strategy that boils down down to, "ignore leftists and then complain when they don't vote for us."
And this is why repubs want to shut down the Dept. of Education. We already stopped teaching Civics/Government in schools a long time ago, which has led us to this current level of ignorance about how our government works and what powers the president does and doesn't have. For the last year(s) I've seen comments demanding Biden do this or that thing he has no authority to do (even thinking he can order other countries' leaders to do what he wants!). They think it means he just doesn't want those things to happen.
They think POTUS is supposed to be a king who just has to decree whatever he wants and it happens, no matter what the other 2 equal branches of government do. They want a king, dammit! So they voted for a king. They elected Trump who will throw out the Constitution and be a king for them. Enjoy having a king, suckers.
There does seem to be a disparity between what biden can do and trump can do though doesnt there.
When government is functioning as it was designed, the checks and balances work, and a POTUS who does not respect the law would be checked, impeached, and/or removed. But when an entire party that is in power not only refuses to act as a check, but willingly does his bidding, then the law-breaking POTUS is effectively a king.
We have examples in the past, like Nixon, who was forced to resign under threat of impeachment by his own party. We have an example today, of the president of South Korea, cancelling his declaration of marital law under pressure from both the opposition and his own party.
The Constitution is an agreement, governing with the consent of the governed. Once the majority of those in power refuse to abide by the Constitution and rule of law, then it is no longer worth the paper it's written on and we no longer have a functioning democratic republic. That is where we are.
Voters allowed trump to stack it?!
Obama didn't fight for his pick because the party wanted to use it to motivate voters to vote for Hillary, which didn't work.
McTurtle refused to vote to confirm, and legally all that needs to happen is the Senate has an opportunity to vote to confirm. Obama had a year to say:
"I take no vote to mean no objections, Merrick Garland is on the SC"
Except Garland probably wouldn't be that much different than Trump's picks.
Stop blaming the voters for stupid shit the only option we have to vote for keeps doing.
The party refused to pressure Breyer & RBG to step down. Obama refused to play hardball with Garland.
Biden negotiated with himself and cut debt forgiveness to 10K. Then the SC strikes it down ~~, and he throws his hands up and walks away~~. I'm old enough to remember when Trump's obviously unconstitutional muslim ban got banned and he rewrote it and tried again until it stuck. It didn't fully take until the third try. Then he expanded it twice.
[Edit: I looked it up and he did give it another go, my b]
Biden didn't give up on debt forgiveness, he pushed 20 different forgiveness schemes instead of trying to get the original 1 scheme reapproved
Yep
It's because the same billionaires/corporations donate to both parties.
If a moderate wins, the most they'll do is "try" they were paid too much money to actually succeed, so they do the bare minimum till people stop complaining they didn't do anything.
And the donors know that means a republican will likely win the next election, which is their preference anyways.
The moderate wing of the party only exists to make sure the wealthy never lose and we never really win.
If there's one thing that's clear....
It's that people vote Republican because they legit don't know how politics works.
I'm sorry, who allowed Trump to pack the court? The Debt Collective?
The republicans I suppose. If I recall correctly they were against Obama appointing a judge before the end of his term for some reason while very supportive of Trump appointing judges before his term ended
Every single non-voter in the country willingly allowed the Republicans to fuck everyone over.
Edit: Going back decades, obviously. The latest election has nothing to do with the current SCOTUS. And sure, it's not the American non-voters' fault they're brain dead consumers with no will of their own. It's all very sad, blah blah blah.
Leaving out the part where Biden refused to even consider stacking the court and instead ordered a commission on Supreme Court reform. Then, after three years of silence, with only three months to go before the election, they came out with...term limits and a binding ethics code. Two milquetoast reforms they didn't even run on.
When democrats lose: "We could've had a utopia if you had simply voted for us!"
When democrats win: crickets
When democrats lose: âWe couldâve had a utopia if you had simply voted for us!â
"We could have averted fascism" is "utopia" now?
Funny, but considering that you repeatedly insisted that you didn't give a fuck how many Americans and Palestinians have to die to satisfy your urge for political purity in the run-up to the election, unsurprising.
When democrats win: ~~crickets~~ "We didn't win enough so I'm afraid our hands are tied."
Funny thing is they never win enough. Even when they win a majority, magically enough members switch sides to cancel any possibility of progress. It's like a rigged carnival game, but you think that if we simply adjusted our aim we could certainly get the ball in the hole. It's crafted to look like you have a chance when you really don't.
The most infuriating thing about that whole plot arc was that the people bringing the case to the Supreme Court had absolutely no standing to even file a complaint, and Bidenâs actions were actually, through any logical reading of the law, completely within his authority, but they were like âlol noâ
and Biden, a consummate Democrat, just was like âwell thatâs all we can do, corpo has spoken.â
I am still convinced Harris lost in most states because people were looking for Bidenâs name on the ballot and couldnât find Kamala so they just circled Trump.
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