We don’t have a parliamentary system where a party can kick out an elected member for not supporting the party’s agenda and replace them with someone else. Each member is individually elected to represent their state or district. For better or for worse, they get to decide what is best for their constituents and their constituents get to respond in the next election.

Joe Manchin was the major impediment in 2021-2023. He mostly supported the party’s agenda but had some sticking points. He had to be onboard with whatever passed given the razor thin majority.

I saw all these screeds about how he should be kicked out of the party, but the objective reality is there is very little you can do to pressure a centrist Democrat from a state that voted for Trump by 50 points. The only option available was to placate him and come to a compromise (which he ultimately agreed to for major climate change reduction investment).

The reality is that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, it has some centrists who don’t support some of the more ambitious goals of the party. If you want bigger action, you have to have a bigger majority. Slim majorities give small wings of the party outsized influence on policy.

The thing you have to keep reminding yourself is just how disconnected from politics the average voter is. We’ve seen 2 full months of every day bringing some new chaos, but for most Americans, the only major things that have happened are:

1. Elon Musk is firing lots of government workers
2. Trump is enacting tariffs

Everything else is just noise to them and they filter it out. Until things really start to affect them directly, apathetic Trump voters who thought voting for him would magically turn the economy back to what it was before Covid are going to assume things are improving (because they already were before the election, they were just in a sour mood and refused to admit it).

Democrats don’t usually force shutdowns because the people most likely to suffer under a shutdown are federal, state, and local government employees, people who work in academia, and people in major metropolitan areas, all of whom make up a significant portion of the Democratic base. It doesn’t make sense to force a shutdown if your own voters are just going to blame you for the disruption it causes to their lives anyway.

Now there’s far more to lose, and Trump is going to get the blame for it. Shutdown for a few weeks to protect a few hundred thousand federal workers for at least a year is a pretty safe gamble when you’re not likely to get blamed for the short-term disruption anyway.

Absolutely. They can’t amend the Constitution through ordinary means. Which is why they’ve installed a bunch of extreme right-wing Supreme Court justices who can interpret the Constitution however they want to benefit right-wing extremists.

Here’s a completely plausible scenario: Donald Trump orders ICE to deport any child born here to non-citizen parents in complete defiance of the court order. The district court judge gets really annoyed and issues criminal contempt rulings against the head of DHS and ICE for disobeying an order of the court. Trump orders DHS and ICE to ignore the court and promises pardons to anyone facing criminal contempt charges.

Because the SCOTUS has ruled “core powers” are “absolutely immune” and the pardon is an explicit power granted to the president with no limitations, he can use the pardon power literally however he wants, including as part of a criminal conspiracy to break the law.

And bam, full blown constitutional crisis because the SCOTUS basically neutered the entire judicial branch and gave the president dictatorial powers.

This may help

https://youtu.be/24ib5pMkprY?t=95

Short answer: the Supreme Court

Longer answer: National emergencies are perfectly reasonable to the SCOTUS when declared by a Republican but ridiculous overreach when done by a Democrat and the SCOTUS will use any opportunity to neuter the power of the federal government where a Democrat is in charge.

“So why don’t they just try anyway?” you might ask. And the answer there is that the SCOTUS can do more than just say “you can’t do that one thing anymore.” They can use it as an excuse to block 100 other things that were either flying under the radar or were being challenged one-by-one previously and tied up in appeals.

Biden tried to regulate CO2 through the EPA. The Supreme Court not only said he couldn’t do that, but they concocted a brand new standard called the “Major Questions Doctrine” that basically says government agencies aren’t allowed to implement any significant new regulations unless Congress explicitly authorizes them. And now all those under-the-radar regulations are falling like dominoes in the district courts with no path for appeal.

Every family gathering with my conservative relatives starting on 1/20, I’m going to complain about prices and ask why Trump hasn’t brought them down yet like he said he would on day 1.

Any time gas prices go up, I’ll be sure to point it out. Airplane tickets, same thing. Any item that fluctuates in price, I’ll be sure to let them know it’s clearly Trump’s fault it’s gotten more expensive. It must be his policies.

When they inevitably bend over backwards to try to explain that it’s more complicated than that, I’m going to remind them just how often they complained about Biden being singlehandedly responsible as President for high prices and how easily they said he could bring them down if he just “changed his policies.”

I’m sure they’ll see no issue with their past positions, but it’ll be cathartic for me nonetheless having to listen to them for the last 4 years.

Right now, it’s 50 R and 46 D with the 4 Independents (Sanders, King, Sinema, Manchin) caucusing with the Democrats to give it a 50/50 tie.

The Senate is currently 51-49. The Democratic Caucus has 51 members.

Stephen Miller is an advisor to Trump and is probably a psychopath. I don’t use that label lightly either.

When a normal person gets genuinely angry, their facial expressions and body language convey the anger too. It’s a natural reaction humans have when experiencing emotions and it’s tough to hide or fake.

Stephen Miller raises his voice, he uses an indignant tone, he makes aggressive motions with his body, but his face shows no change in expression at all. It’s not just this clip either, he’s like this all the time. He’s generally good at lying and changing topics during normal interviews, but he was cornered here and fell back to “pretend to be angry and change the topic.” Clearly this reporter was having none of it.

I don’t know about firstest, but he was definitely firster. That’s why they call him a founding father, not a founding fathest.

The role of a district court judge is to do two things:

1. Apply existing precedent to individual cases to the greatest extent possible.
2. Set new precedent only when absolutely necessary because the facts of the case don’t align well to existing precedent.

Cannon has basically decided to do the exact opposite of these two rules by pretending that the facts of this case are so incredibly unprecedented that she has to throw out the rulebook and set new precedents on everything.

Literally the only unusual thing about this case is that the defendant, a private citizen who currently gets free government security protection for the rest of his life, used to be a president. That’s it. Everything else about this case is straightforward obstruction of justice and willful retention of national security information.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pretty-happy-with-their-finances

I get a lot of people are struggling, but you can’t claim that the average person isn’t doing well when 63% of Americans rate their financial situation as “good” or “very good.”

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We’re not in a recession. Economic growth last quarter was almost 5% (which is massive) and growth has been positive for the last 4 quarters. The average quarterly growth over the last several decades has been closer to 2%.

The economy is doing just fine. Frankly, most people hear their neighbors complain about the economy, so they think the economy is bad, so they complain about the economy, and the result is everyone thinking the economy is terrible when it objectively isn’t.

Inflation is relatively high by recent historical standards, but it’s really not that high anymore and hasn’t been for most of 2023. People got sticker shock during the height of it last year and haven’t forgotten. But the labor market is still tight, people who gave up trying to find work a long time ago are entering the market and getting jobs again, wages continue to rise, business investment is up, and small businesses are being created at a historically rapid pace.

When pollsters ask people, “how is your personal financial situation?”, most people are answering “good.” When those same people are asked, “how do you think everyone else’s financial situation is?”, they scream “TERRIBLE!” That doesn’t mean there aren’t people suffering, but things aren’t nearly as gloomy as everyone insists they are.

That and the fact that there’s a not insignificant number of people who are center-right politically and identify as Republican but don’t like Trump or the recent direction of the party. It’s not a majority or even a plurality of Republicans, but it’s enough to have an impact in close races.

Biden attacking “MAGA Republicans” instead of “Republicans” gives the center-right voters a permission structure to support Democrats because the choice gets reframed from “us (Democrats) vs. you (Republicans)” to “us (the sane ones) vs. them (the crazies)”.

I assume this is the one? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8lJMpZXYAEBjHt?format=jpg&name=900x900

Here’s a ProPublica article about that pediatrician’s reason for getting involved: https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-join-political-battle-over-abortion-laws

Her rationale is basically that young children (and teenagers) can get pregnant and want to end the pregnancy or get birth control to prevent it. Part of her job is supporting their choice to do so.

But I see what you mean. It almost seems like it could be the start of a satirical flyer trying to paint the pro-choice position as extreme.

Nancy Mace claimed, with a straight face, in an interview with Jake Tapper that she’s spoken to Democrats in Congress that say they trust Jim Jordan.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/10/11/mace-house-speaker-jordan-democrats-scalise-jake-tapper-lead-vpx.cnn

I burst out in laughter. I honestly had not laughed that long in a very long time.

Jake Tapper finally got her to admit that they “trusted Jim Jordan more than Kevin McCarthy.” Not exactly a high bar there.

Nope, he got them their sick days. He kept the pressure on even after imposing the contract. Directly from the IBEW union:

https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

The thing to remember about most Republicans (and Republican politicians especially) is that any arguments they throw out in pursuit of a particular goal only apply to that goal.

Impeachment of Trump was bad, so they said the Speaker didn’t have the power, that impeachment should be only for extreme situations, that high crimes and misdemeanors means you have to break the law to be impeached, that Democrats were on a mission to impeach Trump since he was elected.

But now, impeachment of Biden is good, so the Speaker clearly has the power to initiate an inquiry, that vague, shady insinuations with no hard evidence is sufficient to impeach, that they’re definitely not on a witch-hunt to impeach Biden despite investigating him from the moment they got their majority and moving forward to impeach with zero actual evidence.

You can point out their hypocrisy and they won’t defend themselves. Some of them might even try to convince you the situation is somehow different, but most don’t care. They set their sights on a goal and backfill an argument to justify it.

This woman literally voted to overturn Wisconsin’s free and fair election and hand it to Donald Trump. She deserves no sympathy for having her voice taken away when she was perfectly happy to take away the voices of millions of Wisconsinites.