For my American readers: Contact your representatives · 4:30pm Dec 2nd, 2017
Sorry to do this to you guys but, the US senate just passed a bill. It's 479 pages, and the Democrats were given only a few hours before it was passed, because it's been hammered out behind closed doors.
You might want to look into this. With a 51-49 majority, all Republicans (minus Bob Corker) against all Democrats.
It also looks a bit like this:
For those who don't click through, some of the amendments include:
An abortion law reclassifying life at conception.
A clause to drill oil in Alaska’s arctic wildlife preserve.
It pulled the mandate for the ACA. 13 million lose insurance
From Reddit:
It doesn't just allow drilling, it requires it. They must sell at least two leases of at least 400,000 acres each within ten years of the Act becoming law.
Source: Title II, Sec. 20001(c)(1)(A-B)
So yeah.
Contact your senator and your congressman.
Cue the alt-right trying some way to justify all of this through some mental gymnastics because they don't want to admit they didn't realize what they were voting for.
Now let it sink in that the greatest obstacle to this . . . thing passing the House is a group of Representatives who don't think it's reactionary enough.
How is it that the people I do not elect KEEP GETTING ELECTED!? Pardon me, in addition to writing/calling up certain government officials, I also have a desk that needs my face planted into it repeatedly.
Unfortunately, my representatives are the asshats who voted in favor of that shit, and no matter how many times I vote against them in elections, it never gets rid of them. I can only pray that, with all the shit the republicans are pulling, when the next election rolls around there will be some much needed changes.
Not that the democrats are really any better, because hey, that's politics, but at this point we're not just playing with fire anymore, we've dropped the torch, set the house on fire, and instead of trying to put it out we're selling marshmallows and sticks in a last ditch effort to make a few bucks before the end. Almost literally anything is better than what's happening right now.
4740232
Whenever someone says "The democrats aren't any better" I'm compelled to link these two comment chains.
4740231
I know, right? I'm not even a US citizen, and I still failed to influence the vote sufficiently. I thought foreigners were supposed to be deciding American elections?
Less comedically, the current political situation is a test of the status quo in the US. There are millions upon millions of people who pride themselves on their party loyalty, who treat the other party as if they were evil commie terrorist scum, yet who have no idea what their party actually stands for.
4740232
Anybody that says "the Democrats aren't much better" haven't realized how badly the tax law is going to impact them, personally. You understand that you're going to have more difficulty paying for college now, if the House's part of the tax bill gets reconciled? And that your health insurance premiums are going to increase by several hundred dollars per year? The "700 dollar average decrease in taxes" that most Americans will see is not enough to cover just those alone.
The Democrats health care plan, AKA Obamacare, spent eight months in bi-partisan committees. Eight months where Republicans were able to read the proposed bill, suggest changes, and find middle ground.
The Republicans released their "final" bill in the Senate three hours before the vote. And denied the Democrats the option of a recess so they could read the entire bill.
The Republicans, at this point, are far worse than the Democrats by a hilarious margin.
4740234
It's easy to be the good guys when the other side is this travesty of a government we have now. But I have no doubt that once they take the top spot, they'll prove to be every bit as corrupt and corruptible as the republicans. It's the nature of politics.
...Well, maybe not every bit as corrupt, because this is some epic level bullshittery we've got going right now, but still far too much so for my liking. Let's not forget that when they thought they had the presidential elections in the bag, when they thought they were the top dog and Trump couldn't possibly succeed, they played games with their own primaries, ignored their constituents, and did whatever they thought would be most beneficial to the party and their lobbyists instead of the people who voted for them.
4740241
You seem to be misunderstanding something. I never once claimed to support this bill, the republican party, or literally anything you seem to think I'm ok with or don't understand. Believe me I know just how bad this is. I have tried, at every opportunity, to do everything in my power to prevent this from happening. In a choice between the democrats and the republicans, at the moment, I whole-heartedly choose democrat.
But at the end of the day, they're still politicians, and lobbyists have too much power in this country. Once the democrats take the top spot we'll be having this same discussion again about a different topic because someone with enough money bought the right politicians and is taking the chance to make even more.
There is literally no point in contacting your representatives on this. It's done. This shit was going to go through the second all three branches turned majority Red.
The only thing we can do now is vote. America needs to have some record voter turnout and I don't care what side you're on, we need to vote out all incumbents. This shit needs to end, and it's going to take a serious act as the people of this nation to pull it off.
4740234
A bit of international perspective on that, it's not only in the US. Conservative a right leaning parties are also blindly followed in Brazil. The left is somewhat more stable, such as on the rejection Lula suffers now after the corruption scandals.
So yeah, they are not the same. Not in the US, not in Brazil, and I'd say not anywhere.
Gonna save those links, though. They give a nice insight on American political behavior, and when you have an Economy and military the size you have, the world needs to pay attention to shit you do.
Despite the fact I am one of the few people this bill will not fuck over (Because single, no debt, done with school, insurance through my job, etc), it still makes me livid. And of course, the whole 'Every man, woman, and child in America was just saddled with an extra $3,000 in debt last night' bit.
4740289
A lot of people (in many countries and on many sides) have a very narrow view of what's personally good for them, and don't see the bigger picture.
I am not a child, nor do I have any children currently in education, yet I benefit from having a good education system.
I am not currently sick, yet I benefit from having a good health system.
I am not a religious or racial minority, yet I benefit from a society that treats these minorities well.
I am not a woman, or gay, or transgender, yet I benefit from living in a society that doesn't accept misogynistic hatred.
I am not a criminal, yet I benefit from living in a society where the law follows rules, where a suspect is innocent until proven guilty, where everyone is entitled to a fair trial, and where the government can't just decide to imprison you because it feels like it.
I don't live on top of an oil field, yet I benefit from living in a society that doesn't permit fracking under people's homes.
Self-interest doesn't have to be short-sighted. It doesn't have to be about what's specifically good for your immediate interests.
>contact your representatives
>American "representatives"
>America
Guess I'll die
4740249
This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Literally every single Democratic administration going back to the 1960s has been notably less corrupt and corruptible than every Republican administration in the same time period. "The nature of politics" is not to produce parties that are equally corrupt and corruptible to each other. This is not some immutable law.
Second of all, this is not a matter of corruption. There is indeed much corruption within the Republican caucus, but that you attribute their recent enormities primarily to it is missing the mark widely.
They actually believe in this stuff. "Loot the country" is a core Republican governing principle and has been for my entire life. These guys aren't voting for this shit because they got paid off; they're voting for it because they actually believe in it. Paul Ryan would be actively salivating to destroy the entire social safety net even if he weren't getting one thin dime from it, because he actually, really, truly believes that Atlas Shrugged is a policy manual.
These, again, are extraordinary claims. The 2016 Democratic primaries were conducted along rules set well beforehand and commonly agreed upon by fifty state parties and what passes for national party leadership; there were no "games played" with them. Your other claims are so generic as to be meaningless, and in some cases are actively good things; some of the lobbying groups most active in pushing on the Democratic party are organizations actively attempting to make the Democratic Party better than it would otherwise be.
I mean, for fuck's sake. You dropped into a thread about how the Republican Party, after a full year of governing according to principles of open, xenophobic racism, installing a reactionary conservative who thinks that workers are serfs onto the Supreme Court, abrogating vital international agreements, and otherwise pursuing an agenda charitably described as "ethnically cleanse the country so far as we're able, then loot it," has just enacted legislation that goes a long way towards implementing the "looting" part of that equation... to talk about how the Democrats will be "every bit as corrupt" if they ever regain power.
The guys who, in the eight years they just had executive power, and the two years they had legislative power, accomplished an enormous raft of good things. I know people, personally, who would be dead, actually literally dead, if many Democrats hadn't walked the plank on health care in 2009 despite knowing they'd pay an electoral price on it. I know, personally, people whose jobs got much less shitty because of Democratic labor law and control of the NLRB. People whose basic human rights only are affirmed and upheld because of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
You can make a colorable argument that the Democratic Party's policy prescriptions are not sufficient to the needs of the country. And that they've done some enormously shitty things for enormously shitty reasons. That's fair. But that's not an argument they're anything remotely comparable to the Republicans, and if you're going to argue "not good enough" you also need to be prepared with a followup "what alternative political coalition can be assembled?"
4740256
... eh?
What's the logic here? Many incumbents are, you know... good at their jobs. And in many cases voting one out would mean... voting Republican. Unless you think "literally everyone gets primaried with someone who has never held public office before" is a viable plan.
This part is more true than you know, tho.
The House, at this point, is so incredibly gerrymandered that it would take, according to most analysis, a D+8 election in order for the Democrats to attain a slim majority. By which I mean, nationwide, the Democrats would need to do around 54% to a Republican 46% in order to achieve a slim working majority.
Michigan is the gold standard here. It is actually so expertly gerrymandered it is possible for Democrats to get more votes than Republicans... and for the election to result in Republicans not only sending more reps to Washington, but having a supermajority in the state lege while getting 46% of the vote to the Democratic 53%.
The Senate, of course, is grotesquely malapportioned, and the principle that land should have votes rather than people should have votes is a terrible one. But it is, oddly, somewhat protected from gerrymandering because you can't move state lines.
Even there, achieving a working majority any time before 2020 will be difficult; the only thing keeping the Democrats alive there is that ticket-splitting is still alive and well. If people ever start voting for Senators the way they vote for President, we could eventually end up in a situation where around 40% of the country routinely controls about 65 Senate seats.
It amazes me that despite only having hours to try and read this, a few Denocrats still spent that time making videos conplaining about it instead.
If that's the actual state of the bill, I'd be mildly suprised only one republican voted no.
4740323
It's 479 pages of dense legal document. They had three hours. Even if all of them voted against it unanimously, which they did, them having read it would be a meaningless waste of time.
What was a better use of their time than making videos explaining to the voting public just how absurd the situation was?
4740344
Trying to convince more Republicans than just Bob to vote against it. You can make the videos after the vote. It was at almost two in the morning, people won't notice the difference in timing.
And it's not to the voting public, it's just to their constituents. Keep in mind both political parties are giant echo chambers, their suppirters are incapable of speaking to eachother in a civil manner.
4740345
I'm watching the videos, and I'm Australian. It's international news. It's to the whole voting public, not just their constituents. Not just their citizens, at this point. The beauty of putting videos on the internet.
As to the 'echo chamber' remark, I'll point you up to 4740308 's fantastic comment above. I'll also say he rather nails why I don't particularly believe a civil manner of speaking is owed, required, or helpful anymore.
4740354
Yet I guarantee as a Wyoming resident that 80% or so if my peers will never see those videos, and I imagine it's very similar for most red states. People tend to block communication from those on the other side if the coin quite thoroughly, and I bet you those videos won't be circulating very frequently on FOX news.
If course you can pass legislation through an echo chamber, that's excatly what just happened. Its just impossible to compromise and therefore slow and disenfranchising to a large part of the voter base every time anything happens. It's a less than ideal situation, and its how you get Trump in office.
Yeah, 95% of Alaskans are okay with drilling in ANWR. We need to drill more there, end of story.
The individual mandate sucks as well. In fact, getting rid of it was one of the big things that Trump campaigned on.
Oh and they doubled the standard deduction to $12,500. So that’s a lot more money in the pocket of low or low middle income pockets.
All good here.
4740308
Mentioning the democrats was actually just a footnote in my original comment, but it amused me that people got so upset that I even dared to mention them in the same thread as republicans I just couldn't let it go. Apparently you guys just have a higher opinion of politicians in general than I do. Yes, a few of them are actually decent people trying to do the best they can with a really fucked up system. But that's not good enough anymore (not that it ever was). We need more than that.
That's something that we could debate forever and a day. How to fix things and what could be done differently is an argument that's been going since politics was a thing. As much as I'd like to propose that we just torch it all and start over, the only thing that will actually work is a lot of slow, steady changes. The entire system is messed up all the way down to its core, and has been from the moment we ended up with two opposing political parties. That's not going to change in eight years, no matter which party controls the government.
But the problem there is that slow changes become really, really slow in a system that changes leaders and people of power so frequently. It's great for times like now, when we've got some people we really need to get rid of, but it means that the ones who are actually doing good work don't get to stick around long enough to see it through. They have to hope that whoever comes after them can pick up the torch and keep going, which doesn't happen all that often. We take two steps forward and one and a half steps back all the time. And like you yourself admitted, it's not just because of one side of the political spectrum.
So for now, as things stand, yes, the democratic party is clearly the better choice to move things in the right direction. Literally no one in here is disagreeing with that. But that doesn't mean they always have been or always will be. What we really need is a benevolent dictator. We need Princess Celestia.
- Be American
- Become a senator.
- Scribble "[ME] is the Unquestionable All-Ruling Imperator of all the states for life" on the back page of a bill two minutes before the vote on it
- Bill passes
Apparently this would make you legally the emperor of America, then?
A reasonable system would have a minimum of 24 hours between any final changes and a vote, but I guess America isn't doing so good at "reasonable" these days.
Not that I voted for any of these fucksticks, but I apologize on behalf of my country for this historic embarrassment all the same. I'm beginning to think Guy Fawks had the right idea.
4740473
It's happening, gradually. Or possibly suddenly, any day now.
Just another day in American politics.
Hehehe... heh...
68.media.tumblr.com/6680a317391a55b31619edc287b915c0/tumblr_nzirpbByTU1tmqxb5o1_r3_400.gif
4740432
Well, you'd have to get the HoR to agree and the president to sign it, and then keep the SC from striking it down.
4740432 4740514
HoR: Easy, be part of the right party. "Well, it's true that I don't particularly want Spectrumancer to be our eternal overlord, but this is a partisan issue so I should really vote loyally."
President: Distract him. "The Russians/Chinese/North Korea/commies/gays/black people/Mexicans/Democrats/Google don't want you to sign this."
Supreme Court: Get expensive lawyers (funded by the taxpayer at this point, of course) to delay the case long enough and they'll all die of natural causes. "I'd like to draw your honours' attention to article 14 subsection 2,924c of the auxiliary attachment to the brief made by the..."
4740538
Well, the supreme court doesn't need to open an actual case to declare a law unconstitutional, but other than that it is plausible.
...what? What's the source for this information? That's just weird.
This is the same the tax bill that the House already passed, so... it's passed. They just have to reconcile the versions. So it's a done deal at this point, isn't it?
4740633 No, the House passes a bill, then the Senate does massive, horrible, shreddy things to it. (or as they like to say, 'Improve' it beyond recognition.) Then it goes to a conference committee, and if there are *any* changes, it goes back to both houses for a second vote. Really, Newt has a *wonderful* description on how bills, the house, and the Senate work but I can't find it on Youtube. He's gotten so snarky in the last few years. It's wonderful, particularly when he describes what happens to House members who move to the Senate and turn from "Bob" to "The Senator" in conversations :)
In all odds this case, the Senate version will be frozen as the 'final' version, and the conference committee will simply send the Senate bill as is to the House, where the vote will be easier. (Since there are at least three Republican senators who love killing a Republican bill more than free candy, and the House has a good edge in numbers) Seriously, actually getting *any* bill through this bunch of yaa-hoos is an amazing accomplishment, written in crayon or not.
4740432 Neat idea, it would throw a whoopie cushion under the people that need it most, but moot practically. I'd love to see that, though.
FYI: The reason why it *requires* oil leases to be sold is institutional inertia. There are enough former administration holdouts in the department to squelch any sales unless it is forced. It's like the Concealed Carry stuff that went through in states where the sheriffs were told "may issue" instead of "shall issue" and they decided "may" means "don't"
You know, I still remember the Republican promise of 3 days between a bill being presented and voted on. I'm an Idealist, I suppose. Head in the clouds.
We have this going on . We also have......
Net Neutrality in danger again.
Kate's Law [ A bill to be voted into law that would charge illegal immigrants with murder rather than just send them home like it does now. ] It is currently been tucked away and sat on and avoided by a congressman in Cali.
All of these are a thing this month.
Do they think the holidays distract us from their shitty practices?
4740753
let me get my pitchforks again, also i recently got a flamethrower think that may be helpful??
4740753
... the what?
4740671
Pardon my stupidity. You know, it's funny that in all my years of public schooling in America, we were taught about the Pilgrims and the American Revolution over and over again, but never anything about how politics works today.
4740833
Strangely enough that's the same over here. Until the Brexit vote I knew a lot about the historical foundation of our political system but for some reason no one thought to explain what 'First Past The Post' actually was more than once and actively sought to ridicule other voting methods (our only experience of what 'Proportional Representation' was happened during our discussion of the Weimar Republic and how it lead to the election of Adolf Hitler, so not exactly an unbiased view).
It's almost as if someone has an incentive to make sure that future generations know as little as possible about how their country is run or something.
4740831
Sorry i was half asleep when i wrote that post. I cleaned it up.
4740399
Really? People are upset merely that you mentioned Democrats in the same thread that the Republicans were mentioned?
This is another extraordinary claim that does not seem to have much evidence behind it.
Politicians as a class tend to be no better and also no worse than the the population at large. This seems likely to represent a higher opinion of politicians than you have, yes.
Most politicians went into politics because they had a strong desire to govern. And for most of those people, getting into politics was hard, grueling, soul-destroying work. Low-level politicking, at the local and state and even that of Congressional backbenchers is hard. It doesn't involve a lot of money or glory; what it does involve is working your ass off to convince people to vote for you and to hold a political coalition together and then trying to implement policy when most people don't even know your name, and those who do either want something from you or regard you as someone to be destroyed.
Problems enter into this because "strong desire to govern" is a neutral descriptor. The tax bill monstrosity that precipitated this thread was written and implemented by people who have a strong desire to govern. But the way in which they wish to govern is terribly awful. This doesn't necessarily make any of them corrupt, although of course a fair few are. The actual fight at hand is an ideological one, tho.
Paul Ryan is genuinely trying to do the best he can. So is Ted Cruz. So are Tom Cotton, and Steve King. They all work their asses off trying to build the best world they can. But their vision for it is a terrifyingly awful one; they are not decent.
There are of course exceptions to this. It's possible for people to parachute into politics at the top. Very difficult, but possible. Schwarzenegger did it. Jesse Ventura did it. Trump did it. Many political "legacies" do this, running on the family name. This is still hard, but it's much much easier than "start showing up to local party meetings, run in a local primary for local office, win, win the general, serve well, move up, repeat."
Those guys are very much an exception, however, and the ones who are actual political outsiders tend to not do well. Politics is a profession, just like any other one. Schwarzenegger hated being governor, because it turns out that being governor doesn't make you king, and he didn't know the first goddamn thing about how to work the levers of power to achieve his desired policy outcomes. Trump, above and beyond his manifest incompetence, vile morality, and terrible ideology, is reportedly not that happy with being president for the same reasons; he knew next to nothing about what the job entailed going in, and did not and does not understand that he can't rule as he pleases, and that you can't tell a Senator "You're fired."
(Sidebar: This is a common myth about the presidency that far too many people believe; that we're essentially electing a king, instead of an administrator who also controls a veto point. It's why the party of the president gets blame for everything that goes wrong and credit for everything that goes right even if the connection is tenuous at best. It's why you get people who say things like "if the president really wanted to get this done, he'd have twisted some arms in the Senate!" Presidents don't get magical leverage powers just by virtue of being president.)
(Sidebar to the sidebar: Ventura is a bit of a special case. Ventura was apparently actually really passionate about governing and loved barnstorming Minnesota and learning everything he could about it and how it worked. This gave him a leg up. Scions of political families often tend to be the same way; they usually have some grasp of the family business.)
Politics is, and always has been, the slow boring of hard boards, yes.
That's not going to change, period.
Saying "opposing political parties" is the wrong terminology. What you really want to say is "opposing political coalitions."
And having two opposing political coalitions is basically an inherent feature of representative democracy. It simply is.
The nature of representative democracy is that, if you wish to govern, you need to assemble a political majority in whatever your representative lawmaking body is, at minimum. (The U.S requires a supermajority sometimes, because you need to control four veto points to make policy.) That's sort of baked in.
This means that you have to get to 50%+1. That means assembling a political coalition. In this country, we do this prior to the election; that's what the Democratic and Republican Party are, political coalitions. Other countries do this after the election; Israel, with its highly proportional system of representation and its many, MANY political parties, does this.
The viability of third parties is usually strongly linked to whether or not your polity has single-member, first-part-the-post style elections. In FPTP, you only need a plurality to win a seat. People know this, which means they want to avoid the situation of "there's me, guy sort of like me, and guy who isn't at all like me. If all three of us run, me and guy sort of like me will divide the vote, and guy who isn't at all like me will win. We should instead team up and make a deal." This political coalition building happens BEFORE the election, which highly incentivizes the formation of two parties that are also two coalitions.
In a system using well-designed proportional representation, however, you can always run for office without worrying about dividing the vote. This means that you don't need to give a shit about building a political coalition until after the election; the parties and the coalitions are separate.
But the number of political coalitions always shakes out to two. Pick a country with a functional representative democracy, and I'll show you one with two opposing political coalitions. Some nation-states in which a multiparty system is possible have parties that absent themselves from this process of coalition-making; those parties and the ideological interests they represent then become absolutely irrelevant to governing until such time as they re-enter that process.
Only really true in the context of the term-limited presidency, and honestly, before the presidency was term limited the only president who managed to go the distance anyway was FDR, who is competitive for "top three presidents."
Legislators can and do stick around for ages, doing their work. There's an argument that in a strong-executive system, term limits are proper for a position that powerful and important. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm sympathetic to it. I don't much think we should term-limit legislators; for them, with their diffuse power and the need to develop your politicking skills over time, I think elections suffice as a term limit.
And having said THAT: the main reason why change happens so slowly in the US isn't because of frequent turnover. It's by explicit design.
The United States has four separate veto points that must be overcome for any change to be made to our laws: two separate legislative houses, an executive veto, and judicial review. One of those legislative houses is hideously malapportioned and has adopted rules requiring supermajorities for most legislation on top of that.
This is a lot of veto points. Canada, by comparison, only has two: a single legislative chamber (their Senate doesn't really count) and judicial review. The UK has one, as does Germany.
Our system was designed by people whose explicit thought process was "you're going to have to either assemble an overwhelming consensus to get shit done, or nothing will get done."
This might not've been the best idea; there's significant evidence to suggest that the only reason it worked as well as it has is that we got luckier than we've any right to expect.
Benevolent dictators do not exist. Princess Celestia is a fictional character for a reason.
Plato, yes, that Plato, thought as you do; that what the world really needed was a benevolent philosopher-king. He tried super hard to educate future rulers to be that king, to wield the supreme power with grace, justice, and wisdom.
Basically all of them ended up turning against their teacher and coming to bad ends.
Wanting a benevolent dictator to make everything all better is a very human impulse. But among other things, it's high ineffective; dictatorial systems just don't appear to work well.
The responsibility lies with us to govern ourselves.
4740964
Holy shit, this thread is still going? Not gonna lie, I stopped caring a long time ago. After my very first comment, I was literally just here to kick the hornet's nest, because it was either amuse myself with that or curl up in a corner and do my best to pretend the world didn't exist for a while (inb4 "This is another extraordinary claim that does not seem to have much evidence behind it."). I kinda figured you had realised what I was doing after that Princess Celestia bit I threw in and that's why you stopped responding, so I almost feel like apologising for the amount of effort you've put into responding to someone who was just here to blow off steam.
But serious talk now, I honestly hate talking politics seriously. I would rather discuss religion with the most fanatic evangelical preacher than talk politics. That said, your responses actually did give me at least a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe all hope isn't lost. I had almost forgotten that not all voters live up to Churchill's opinion of us. Because I won't lie, after continuously voting against this crap and the people who support it, writing to my representatives only to be brushed off with contemptuously insulting form letters, and having all of it come to naught, I was really starting to lose hope. And that's saying something, because I'm normally a very optimistic person. So if nothing else, thank you for that. Who knows, maybe the next time I get to vote for something, there will be enough people fed up with this shit too that it'll actually work.