US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

look me in my eyes then tell me insatisfied

yes otm. I read an LGM article published this summer questioning what Manchin and Donnelly, to name two, get for voting for a conservative nominee. Manchin is popular enough to count many Republicans in his base, but the ones he lose he may compensate for by getting more Dem/left support.

*the ones he loses

I can't get no insatisfaction

wpost:

THE BIG IDEA: As senators today review the findings of the FBI’s investigation into sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) looks increasingly poised to score a hat trick.

Not only are he and President Trump growing more confident that they will be able to wrangle the votes to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court — starting with a key procedural vote on Friday — handicappers also believe Republicans are more likely to maintain control of the Senate than they were a week ago because the party’s base has been so galvanized by the battle. And, even more importantly over the long-term, a Justice Kavanaugh — at just 53 years old — would help McConnell realize his long-term vision of tipping the balance of the nation’s jurisprudence to the right for a generation.

GOP pollster Chris Wilson said he’s seeing “similar trends” in local data from six states with competitive Senate races: Montana, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, North Dakota and Missouri. “Any Dem enthusiasm gap has been erased and even surpassed by GOP due to Kavanaugh hearings,” he tweeted this morning.

OK so the WaPost publishes claims by GOP pollsters who link to FOX News? OK.

'I remain unconvinced that Kavanaugh is a worthy nominee for the supreme court. I think an investigation is in order.'
(FBI agent grabs a crayon and spends three days carefully scrawling 'KAVONAW = OK' on the back of a Denny's placemat and passes it to the wavering senator in question)
'I am now convinced that Kavanaugh is a worthy nominee for the supreme court.'

nice hat trick: 2 of the 3 are about the same thing (kavanaugh getting confirmed), and the third (senate retaining control) is something that was likely anyway, with fivethirtyeight giving republicans a 2 out of 3 chance to retain control even at their lowest ebb of the election season so far

xp

but yeah, i agree that mcconnell is probably feeling incredibly evil and content today

Would these problems be fixed by a different constitution/division of powers

at least some of them, absolutely! the two-senators-per-state thing comes to mind. but specific to judicial appointments and without even changing the basic three-branches structure of the thing: you could eliminate life appointments to the court. you could lower the threshold for impeachment. you could enshrine the 60-vote threshold (eliminated by the "nuclear option") as a real requirement rather than a chummy old agreed-upon code. you could make "advise and consent" more specific, for example having a rule where if the senate doesn't take the nominee to a vote they get automatically seated (see merrick garland and about a million of obama's lower-court picks). there are countless other ways this process could be set up; some of them would probably have horrible unintended consequences of course but clearly the current system has also yielded those.

getting $$ out of politics would be nice too

yeah but those things fall under the header of reforms (as you noted.) there definitely needs to be legislation to address the abuses we have seen from the republican party. but the problem is still them, not the basic outlines of how the federal government is supposed to work

people were saying that the system is fracturing after 200 years so we need a new system. but it seems like any constitutional republic relies on norms and whatever. it could never survive a party like the modern GOP.

i agree with granny, though, that getting money out of politics is a huge one

The longer the basic structure of a given system is left essentially unchanged, the longer those given to exploitation (and they're always going to be there) will learn how to most effectively exploit that system in their favor.

you guys have all these plans but have u considered just waiting for death

Why wait when you can hasten.

Great job guys

handicappers also believe Republicans are more likely to maintain control of the Senate than they were a week ago because the party’s base has been so galvanized by the battle.

i don't really get this -- the people that have been "galvanized" were going to show up at the polls anyway! the only base that seems galvanized (in a "not voting-->voting") by any of this is on the left, surely?

I just walk around eating entire cheesecakes these days because fuck it that's why.

I'm sure the next thing to be shotgunned into law will be a couple billion dollars into Mitch's wife Elaine's budget to build a wall and repay benefactors.

Good luck getting ANY money out of US politics since money pretty much equals free speech. I think a first step would be forcing those superpacs and others to be more transparent where the money originates.

I may be incredibly naïve but I do not think ramming Kavanaugh through after a sham investigation is going to wind up being a good thing for the GOP come midterms

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/the-real-reason-the-white-house-told-the-fbi-not-to-interview-christine-blasey-ford/

...Forgoing these interviews undermines the FBI’s report and makes it easy for critics to contend that this has been a sham investigation. So why would the White House take such a step? The Democrats on Senate Judiciary Committee have a theory: Trump White House officials blocked an interview with Ford because they were worried about the FBI questioning Kavanaugh.

...Kavanaugh, that is, did not undergo a true and professional grilling. An FBI interview would have been a much different experience. “When you’re in front of the FBI, you cannot refuse to answer questions, you cannot attack the agents, you cannot change the subject,” a Democratic member of the committee says. “The White House did not want Kavanaugh in such a situation. And if he said anything to the FBI that could prove false, he could end up in a lot of trouble.”

Yet there was no practical way for the White House to keep Kavanaugh off that hot seat and still allow Ford to be interviewed by the FBI. A White House order to the FBI to proceed with the Ford interview but give Kavanaugh a pass would have been widely assailed as a transparent attempt to rig the probe. Consequently, Democrats believe, the White House had to instruct the FBI to strike both Kavanaugh and Ford from the list of interview subjects. (At the hearing, Ford noted her willingness to cooperate with an FBI investigation, and Kavanaugh repeatedly refused to express support for such a probe.)

...The White House instruction to not interview Ford and Kavanaugh, as could have been expected, has created a firestorm and undermined the credibility of the the FBI’s work and its report. The case remains unresolved. To many, it looks like the fix was in. Yet Trump and his aides, including White House counsel Don McGahn (a longtime friend of Kavanaugh), apparently preferred taking this hit over having Kavanaugh face federal investigators. It does make one wonder just what Trump, McGahn, and other White House officials feared about a Kavanaugh sit-down with the FBI.

xpost Possibly even for Trump. I mean, he didn't do anything and is still personally ineffectual as hell but, hey, two conservative justices were installed on his watch! Why not vote for the guy a second time!

you guys have all these plans but have u considered just waiting for death

lol but really tho, my mom (just turned 70) is SUPER into politics now, even more than she used to be. I would never say this to her but I think to myself jeez why spend your last decade or 2 fretting over all this shit. Makes me hate Republicans even more, giving my mom a coronary when she should just be at a park somewhere feeding birds and patting herself on the back for raising such a great son who is also v handsome and a giving lover.

Good luck getting ANY money out of US politics since money pretty much equals free speech.

money=speech now because of a very recent supreme court decision, but that (in theory) could either be overturned by a court decision or adjusted with a constitutional amendment. it's not inherent in the first amendment, which is a good amendment.

well yeah, but it's not gonna be reversed by a kavanaugh court

xposts I don't know how the elderly and infirm are even hanging in there at this point. The last two years have almost certainly shaved a decade off my life from the basic wear n' tear of constant stress.

You say you'll change the constitution, well, you know...

xp no of course not. i'm just saying that the problem in our politics is a specific organization--the republican party--rather than some structural flaw in our system of government. harping on this point bc my ex gf yesterday was texting me and saying the constitution should be overturned

you've correctly identified a major problem - the republican party. now comes the simple task of eliminating the republican party and convincing the quarter of the country that consistently votes for it and owns all the guns that it was ok to eliminate it because the republicans weren't being fair

she really shouldn't expect you to overturn governments for her if you're no longer dating xp

a very specific organization that tens of millions of Americans support

my ex gf yesterday was texting me and saying the constitution should be overturned

― Trϵϵship, Thursday, October 4, 2018 12:18 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It probably should be overturned since the GOP has spent so long wiping their asses on the side with all the writing on it. It's really gross to look at imo.

we should start by stating some basic facts about what's happening - THAT will convince them!!!!!!!!!!!

handicappers also believe Republicans are more likely to maintain control of the Senate than they were a week ago because the party’s base has been so galvanized by the battle.
i don't really get this -- the people that have been "galvanized" were going to show up at the polls anyway! the only base that seems galvanized (in a "not voting-->voting") by any of this is on the left, surely?

― gbx, Thursday, October 4, 2018 1:05 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can maybe envision a small but statistically meaningful coalition of political disengaged dudes who are so butthurt about the injustice of a man being held accountable for shitty past behavior (especially to the extent that right-wing media has been successful in turning this into an "attack" on binge-drinking/youthful shenanigans rather than, y'know, sexual assault) that they become activated.

btw flake agrees with collins that the investigation was "thorough"

this is over

it was over as soon as Kavanaugh blamed his rapes on the Clintons

It was over as soon as Kavanaugh was initially nominated.

I've been wondering about how the current SC justices feel about serving alongside this choad. I mean, yes, there are other choads on the bench, but is he arguably the choadiest?

I mean at this point it may be asking a lot for the elders among them to not retire/die in disgust before dems get some measure of control over Congress again.

but the problem is still them, not the basic outlines of how the federal government is supposed to work

the point is that the structure/outline/system has exploitable flaws and this minority factional party is exploiting them to wreck everything. so we can talk about punishing and destroying that faction, or we can talk about addressing the flaws; neither one is likely to happen in the near-term future but i feel like, in terms of dropping seeds into the conversation in the hopes of medium- and long-term payoffs, the latter might just be a little more lucrative. and in the meantime just try to boost turnout for the party not committed to exploiting and wrecking everything.

right. i am in favor of all of those reforms -- publicly funded elections, scrapping the electoral college, reforms to limit redrawing districts along partisan lies, all the other ones. however, i doubt there is a bulletproof system that could be constructed and new flaws could always be found.

I feel like the end of your post is kind of a key observation, Dr. C. This is a party that has remained in power largely by cheating like a motherfucker, and to some extent they realize that this is the case and express their illegitimacy by lashing out (see also: white dudes in general who maybe possibly didn't quite earn as much as they like to tell themselves they did).

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

yeah i read that. good article.

Apropos of little beyond my abject feelings of hopeless anxiety...I occasionally entertain a thought experiment which goes a little something like this: what if everyone who'd fought to preserve slavery had been deported (or removed from American society by whatever means you feel are the most just) once the Civil War was over rather than simply allowed to stew in and infect subsequent generations with their resentment? Can you even imagine how vastly different a country this would be?

@ Treesh: not saying a bulletproof system is possible but some of these reforms seem more likely than prosecuting and eliminating The Republican Party, if that's what you're gesturing towards. and fixing some of the holes is better than not fixing them. we'd be in a very different place right now if we'd fixed the electoral college problem after 2000, for example. unfortunately with all the other clear and present dangers in circulation it may seem hard to build a massive public movement behind something seemingly as dry as "the senate is broken and must be reformed." it's not unprecedented - see the progressive-era public obsession with municipal corruption, the 'boss' system and so on, which did lead to real change. or the 17th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, and 26th amendments.

there's a lot of inchoate frustration with "politics" and "the system" and trump was able to capitalize on a lot of that obviously. some of that is just language people use to express racism, sometimes layered with economic grievance. the part of it that's just about recognizing that politics is a broken system which doesn't seem to really respond to your life should be extricated from this, just as much as we can extricate some of the economic questions with a different progressive language going back at least to Occupy - "the 1%" and so on. but i think it's possible that someone finds a hooky language/narrative that resonates emotionally with the public as to why it's urgent that we pass the 21st Century Bill of Rights. it would be cool to at least have a passel of viable amendments that candidates are pressed to take positions on.

getting $$ out of politics would be nice too

but where would Dem-oriented orgs be w/out CAN YOU CHIP IN? emails

ppl wd hafta do stuff

that's not the scale oof $$ being discussed, surely?

Xpost Please rank your favorite Allan Dwan blu-rays. Make this your very next post. Thanks in advance.

the biggest frustration is only having two choices of candidates than can conceivably win - and they are both beholden to corporate interests , lobbyists, PACS etc