tstorm823 said:
Nedoras said:
Okay, no one else responded to this point and I can't let this slide. This is absolute nonsense to the point where I can hardly believe that you're saying it. The Republicans WANT to be the obstructionist party. Do you even remotely remember the Obama years? Your point of view is selectively taking certain Republican politicians at their word, which is insane. They're bad faith actors and literally BRAG about being bad faith actors. They don't want to work with Democrats, not unless the Democrats do exactly what they want and nothing more. Even then, it may not happen as they don't want the Democrats to get ANY form of perceived "win". Mitch McConnell's entire strategy for over a decade now has literally been "why let them get a win, why let them have anything?". And you're going to honestly say it's on the Democrats? Republicans aren't going to vote on a bill made by the Democratic party, regardless of what's in it. McConnell openly brags about how he won't ever let it happen.
What planet are you on, where you think it's anything other than that? Are you just ignoring that the Republican leadership exists, and taking Trump at his word when he says shit like "the Democrats and I, we could do so many great things, but they're just so nasty and don't want to"? Honestly this perspective of yours baffles me, as it ignores over a decade of political history. It just takes Trump and a few Republican politicians at their word, and as their colleagues are saying otherwise.
Not only all of that, but Democratic strategy has literally just been capitulating to Republicans and ignoring their own base for fucking DECADES. The thought that the Democratic leadership doesn't want to work with Republicans and do "common sense solutions" is laughable.
First order of business, please don't do that thing you did at the end where you put words in quotes while trying to describe my position as though I had said them. I'm sure you weren't trying to mislead anyone, but it's really, really irritating and I hate it.
But here's the planet I'm on. I'm on the planet where Democrats package together election security with every other election rule they can dream of, from rewriting the rules on congressional redistricting to making universities designate a "Campus Vote Coordinator", and then putting this bill up as "H.R. 1" for the term so that when Republicans say "no, we're not voting for those 700s pages of nonsense, Democrats can say "oh, Mitch McConnell hates election security and wants Russia to run the US." I'm on the planet where Democrats make a law to help lower drug prices, and then package it with rollbacks of every change Republicans made to the ACA for 2 years, and then say "oh, Republicans don't really want lower drug prices" (and Vox calls it clever politics). I'm in the world where Democrats have proposed "no fly, no buy" repeatedly despite it being really, really stupid because they really love saying that Republicans want terrorists to have guns.
I'm not taking anyone's word on this. I've seen the bills. This is my own informed opinion. They bundle crap together because it makes a no lose situation where if the bill fails, they can trash Republicans for it. It's a pattern of behavior. And I'm guessing you're way off on who you think the Democrat's base is. It's not socialist college students, it's yuppy rich people. What you think is capitulating to Republicans is satisfying their actual base. People can say all they want that Obamacare wasn't socialized medicine because they gave everything up to please Republicans, but the line "people who like their insurance can keep it" still has a ton of play in the Democratic Primary and you can't blame Republicans for that.
And Mitch McConnell absolutely votes on bills by Democrats. 55 of 86 bills [https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22source%22%3A%22legislation%22%2C%22bill-status%22%3A%22passed-both%22%7D] that passed both chambers this year were sponsored by Democrats. You just don't hear about things like H.R.259 - Medicaid Extenders Act of 2019 because you might get the idea that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Presiding Officer Chuck Grassly are human beings who don't want to abolish healthcare for the poor.
I put the common sense solutions thing in quotes as it's something that gets thrown around a lot by both the Republican and Democratic leadership. I wasn't trying to attribute it to you, and I apologize if it seemed like I was.
700 pages of nonsense? That bill made a hell of a lot of much needed changes to our election system as a whole. I get why the Republicans don't want those changes, as it's in their best interest to make sure as few people vote as possible, but at that point they're choosing party over country. Same deal with reversing the ACA changes, although the ACA is pretty damn flawed to begin with to where that complicates the issue. Also, that "No fly, no buy" thing was written by a Republican and was pushed as a bi-partisan bill by both Republicans and Democrats. Look, my point was that you don't factor the Republicans or their decisions into this equation at all. You're ignoring Obama's nearly two terms of playing nice. The idea that if he was willing to compromise and be reasonable, so would they. It failed. The Republicans refused to work with him, and demonized him. And in the end, it totally worked out for them.
McConnell's entire strategy since Obama took office was to obstruct. That's been their M.O. I'm not even saying that it's illogical to do so, or that it's bad of them to do so. It's really fucking worked out for them. I'm simply objecting to the notion that they're not doing so. The Republicans circle the wagons very well and it works out for them. I'd argue that eventually it's going to backfire, but there's a chance that may not even happen. Also, I'm not excusing the Democrats for doing any underhanded nonsense either. Hell, they do the party over country thing too and actively try to keep new blood from getting into power within their party. It's just the Republican party is much, MUCH, better at it. To where it's actually effective and not just #MoscowMitch being a thing on Twitter for a few days.
I mean, that depends on what you mean by base. Yuppy rich people, in many ways, are the base of both the Democratic and Republican party leadership. I'm talking about the average voter, and I'm very much aware they're not DSA members (I'm not either). In the last presidential election Hillary Clinton, the garbage pile that she is, actually won the working class vote in 2016. Any exit poll I've seen that mentions income of the voters, puts her way ahead of Trump when it comes to people making 30k or less, or around 40-50k or less. And that's with Clinton, who is a corporate bought, dumpster fire. Trump won the vote of people making anywhere from 50k to 250k. Granted, Clinton is pretty close to Trump when it comes to those people too, to the point where it's within the margin of error. These numbers go beyond the 2016 election too. You can see very similar numbers by income in previous elections as well. The issue is that people making less than 30k or within that 30-50k bracket aren't super reliable when it comes to going out and voting. They're not even the majority of voters as one might think they would be. But that's due to a whole other set of problems and is an entirely different topic.
The Democrats however, are aware that this group of people who very often will vote for them, don't go out to vote very reliably. And it's why they try so hard to appeal to voters who are going to vote Republican anyway. It's why every decision the leadership makes, is always followed by "will this energize the Republican base?". Because they flat out have no faith in their own base, and don't think it's worth it to try to energize them. The poor and the downtrodden tend to vote for Democrats, it's just they need to make them want to do so. They need to energize them, as these people are not going to turn out unless they give them a reason to. Meanwhile, the Republican base are EXTREMELY reliable voters, who turn out every damn time. But that's because the Republicans actively keep their base energized 24/7. And they're very loyal to their party. The Democrats going after them is a fool's errand, but they view it as less risky because they're perpetually terrified babies. They've learned nothing from the Obama years either, where this strategy was actively proven wrong and lost them a lot of their power.
Also the whole "people who like their insurance can keep it" line is not exactly doing wonders. The main candidates pushing that trite are polling very poorly, with the exception being Biden. But that's not why Biden is/was polling so well, and he's losing his time in the sun as people are starting to see how garbage he is. It does get a lot of play though, and I don't blame the Republicans for that. I blame the media and the Democratic leadership for that.
Well of coarse not literally every bill thrown up or sponsored by a Democrat is going to be shutdown. I should have been more specific. I just mean that anything that can be presented as a "win". We both know that the vast majority of bills passed by the Senate and that are signed into law go by unnoticed. Those aren't really "wins", regardless of the content of the bills. I've seen Democrats try to flaunt certain bills like this as big wins and selling points...and it doesn't work. Also I find it weird you use a Medicaid bill as an example. I know that McConnell knows that it's political suicide to go after either Medicare or Medicaid, but that doesn't stop him from openly saying that he wants to and would if he could. He even tried to use the tax cuts as an excuse to do so.
This ended up being much longer than I originally intended and I apologize for that.
