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[Aaron Strife]

So ...... based on various polls over the past few years, the majority of Americans want gun control, single payer healthcare, regulations on greenhouse emissions, higher taxes on millionaires, and immigration reform. Why aren't we living in a liberal utopia yet?

Because they also want SMALL GUBMINT

 

[TacticalFox88]

So ...... based on various polls over the past few years, the majority of Americans want gun control, single payer healthcare, regulations on greenhouse emissions, higher taxes on millionaires, and immigration reform. Why aren't we living in a liberal utopia yet?

Again.

America is a center-left country.

The politicians we elect...are not.

 

[Oblivion]

Glad to see Dems are really taking advantage of getting rid of the filibuster:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/filibuster-weakened-senate-oking-judges-faster

 

[thepotatoman]

I would imagine they're basically planning an up to the last minute fight but not an actual shutdown. I know that's what I said before last years shutdown, but a shutdown right before an important election for them over coal emissions is just way way too far to ever believed.

As for why they're using coal emissions, Kentucky is the 3 largest producer of coal in the US. I can't help but think they want to do anything possible to help out McConnel, because losing two party leaders in the same year would be disastrous.

Colorado's up there too, but Colorado's never loved coal politically despite the coal industry doing everything it can to make them love it. I guess it'd incentivize more money into the Colorado race, but that's about it. It's really just all about KY.

 

[Particle Physicist]

Glad to see Dems are really taking advantage of getting rid of the filibuster:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/filibuster-weakened-senate-oking-judges-faster

This image is so obscene.

How anyone can say A) Both sides do it, and B) No racism involved is beyond me. The jump from Clinton (who was also incredibly hated by the Right), to Obama is insane.

 

[Wilsongt]

This image is so obscene.

How anyone can say A) Both sides do it, and B) No racism involved is beyond me. The jump from Clinton (who was also incredibly hated by the Right), to Obama is insane.

Yeah, both sides do it argument is a piss poor one. There is simply no evidence of it.

 

[GaimeGuy]

Both sides do it.

It's just that one side does it like 10x as much as the other. :V

 

[TacticalFox88]

Both sides do it is simply a way for those conspiracy idiots who have no interest in how politics actually works can seem "above" the fighting and seem intelligent, when all actuality it's the exact opposite.

 

[NYCmetsfan]

Again.

America is a center-left country.

The politicians we elect...are not.

I think its more of "People all over the world generally like things that help them"

Its not a coincidence right leaning movements in regards to economics typically are tied into social conservatism, xenophobia, religion which can in many people over power the social welfare part.

Look at France, Look At the Middle East, Look at BNP/UKIP

This image is so obscene.

How anyone can say A) Both sides do it, and B) No racism involved is beyond me. The jump from Clinton (who was also incredibly hated by the Right), to Obama is insane.

I don't think their racism in their filibuster or in most of their votes or in DC in general. Republican reps aren't particularly racist. Their ideology just is tied up in racist history and their base is often racist or at best xenophobic.

Spoiler

But who elected Tim Scott?

 

[speculawyer]

So ...... based on various polls over the past few years, the majority of Americans want gun control, single payer healthcare, regulations on greenhouse emissions, higher taxes on millionaires, and immigration reform. Why aren't we living in a liberal utopia yet?

Good question. I think it is combination of several different factors:
1) The Senate design . . . it has become a tyranny of the rural states.
2) Money in politics. What voters want is only part of the equation. What else heavily matters is what the monied-interests that fund campaigns want.
3) The filibuster. It is damn hard to get anything done when you require 60 votes to get anything done.
4) Gerrymandering. The Congressional Dems received far more votes than the Congressional GOPers. But the GOPers have a sizeable majority in Congress. Go Figure.
5) Irrational greedy petulant voters. They want all sorts of services . . . but they don't want to pay for any of them.
6) Lazy electorate. Most of the voter base is lazy and can't be bothered to vote. But the super-hardcore anti-abortion voters, gun-rights voters, and cranky old people will always show up to vote.


We basically have a system designed for gridlock and we voted in people that ensured gridlock.

 

[Particle Physicist]

I don't think their racism in their filibuster or in most of their votes or in DC in general. Republican reps aren't particularly racist. Their ideology just is tied up in racist history and their base is often racist or at best xenophobic.

Spoiler

But who elected Tim Scott?

There is racism involved in everything they do with regards to Obama. What major differences are there between Obama and Clinton that would make them go balls out obstructionist towards everything he does? If their votes are completely swayed by their constituents, and it's their constituents that are racist and not the Republican reps, it is still racism that is involved in the decision to do this shit.

 

[eBay Huckster]

Today's TPM backpat (fresh off the presses) and/or more evidence that Obamacare's going to sink Democrats this fall: Vitter 'not opposed' to Medicaid expansion if elected LA governor

U.S. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who is running to replace Bobby Jindal as Louisiana's governor in 2015, said Monday he would consider adopting Obamacare's Medicaid expansion if elected.

The Associated Press reported that Vitter said he would not be opposed to expanding Medicaid under the health care reform law, on the condition that the state improved the performance of its Medicaid system and as long as it would not negatively affect other state programs.

 

[Wilsongt]

Today's TPM backpat (fresh off the presses) and/or more evidence that Obamacare's going to sink Democrats this fall: Vitter 'not opposed' to Medicaid expansion if elected LA governor

We've already had our helping of TPM backpats today. =P

 

[speculawyer]

There is racism involved in everything they do with regards to Obama. What major differences are there between Obama and Clinton that would make them go balls out obstructionist towards everything he does? If their votes are completely swayed by their constituents, and it's their constituents that are racist and not the Republican reps, it is still racism that is involved in the decision to do this shit.

The party tacitly condones racism. As much of a chump as McCain is, he did at least stand up to that woman that said Obama as a Arab (although he did it clumsily). But there are SO OFTEN little town hall meetings and some local nut-job floats a birther theory or Obama is Muslim theory and the GOP representative almost never condemns the question with the questioner. They just say "Well, I have opposed Obama in . . . . "

Even House Speak John Boehner . . . when asked about the issue he said "It's not my job to tell the American people what to think,"

 

[eBay Huckster]

We've already had our helping of TPM backpats today. =P

Well then you get another.

(This is why this thread is overweight.)

 

[NYCmetsfan]

‏@tanehisicoates
One way unserious people tire you out is by taking 15 minutes to write something unserious. It takes you four hours to undo their ignorance.

Benjipwns on notice

Seriously though this has been a new thing for the right. Just mocking which takes so much time to respond to.

He's responding to this shit article responding to his Reparation article.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2549774/

I love how it completely misses the point and begins with a "I think slavery is bad but..." preface

Also the ignorance, falsehoods and fear running through this paragraph is breathtaking:

The only way for government to give one American a dollar is to first — through intimidation, threats and coercion — confiscate that dollar from some other American. Therefore, if anybody cares, a moral question arises. What moral principle justifies punishing a white of today to compensate a black of today for what a white of yesterday did to a black of yesterday?

Also it seems he's just recycling a Op-Ed from 2000

http://www.wnd.com/2000/07/7564/

 

[benjipwns]

I don't think there's anything to the IRS so called scandal, but I think we should keep all government emails forever.
Not only would it help in investigating misconducts, this will be treasure trove for future historians.

Storage is dirt cheap these days, no reason not to do it.

The reason not to do it is the same reason some people are using unauthorized private e-mails to deliberately avoid FOIA.

I don't see how states changing parties means anything in the context we're talking about. He's asking why it seems that the republican party in particular is making a ton of violent changes and moves in a policy sense, and that does line up.

The 60s was defined by civil rights, 70s was abortions, 80s was welfare queens and lazy union members, 90s was tough on crime, 00s was tough on islamic terrorists, and the 10s are about obstructing the first black president in every single way possible. I can't say the abortion stuff was about race in the 70s (though it clearly is today when looking at the Bundy rant for example) but all the other ones have some pretty clear attachments to the lazy black thug getting to cheat his way through life thanks to the government, or i guess more recently fear of anything about the middle east.

Again, this is beyond simplistic. The Republican Party has not had any violent changes in policy any more than the Democrats. And none came about in the 1960's or thereafter in an outsize manner. The same jumbled coalition is still fighting over the party for the most part.

What's changed is that Republicans are actually getting elected to legislatures.

This image is so obscene.

How anyone can say A) Both sides do it, and B) No racism involved is beyond me. The jump from Clinton (who was also incredibly hated by the Right), to Obama is insane.

The "source" is the number of cloture votes. Which doesn't mean there's a filibuster. The Democrats have been successful at trying to obfuscate this and the fact that it's Harry Reid who is deliberately filing multiple cloture motions at once even when there's no filibuster happening or even being threatened.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/f...-mcconnell-blocked-the-senate-over-400-times/

On March 12, 2012, for instance, Reid filed 12 cloture motions on nominees; all of the motions were withdrawn and all of the nominees with approved without any objection. And in 2007, Reid filed a cloture motion a mere 45 minutes after an amendment was first offered.

A close look at the data shows that many of these votes are unanimous or nearly unanimous, but Reid found it easier to file cloture than to allow votes on amendments. Indeed, a chunk of those cloture motions were simply dropped, never actually voted on, or “vitiated” in the senatorial nomenclature.

...

If you want to measure the extent of “blocking” in the Senate, you first need to look at the number of actual votes on cloture. That adds up to 309 since 2007. Then you have to look at figure for “cloture invoked,” which means that the Democrats prevailed in a vote. That adds up to 189 — a success rate for the Democrats of better than 60 percent.

Subtracting 189 from 309, that means 120 Senate actions have been blocked during McConnell’s tenure as minority leader.

By contrast, during the eight years that Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) was minority leader (not counting a brief period in 2001), here’s how the statistics work out. There were 210 votes in that period, and cloture was invoked 67 times. Thus Democrats blocked 143 actions in that period–meaning the Republican majority had a success rate of only 32 percent.

By the data, it looks like McConnell is actually pretty bad at obstruction. Most of time, Democrats prevail over Republicans.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL32878.pdf

Until 1949, cloture could not be invoked on nominations. From then through 2012, cloture was sought on 122 nominations. On 46 of these nominations cloture was invoked, and on 49 others no cloture motion received a vote. All but one of these 95 nominations was confirmed. Only on the remaining 27 nominations did the Senate ultimately reject cloture; of these, 21 were not confirmed.

...

In all the Congresses or periods identified, no more than a quarter of nominations with cloture attempts failed of confirmation, except in the 108th Congress (2003-2004), when almost 80% of such nominations (mostly to judicial positions) were not confirmed. Prominent in this Congress were discussions of making cloture easier to get on nominations by changing Senate Rules through procedures not requiring a super-majority vote on cloture. In the 112th Congress, by contrast, cloture was moved on a record 33 nominations (again mostly to judicial positions), but on 23 of these nominations, no cloture vote ultimately occurred.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-reids-tweet-on-obamas-filibustered-nominees/

“I wouldn’t count a simple majority cloture motion as a filibuster,” Binder said. “On the other elements of the cloture rule though, it’s hard to distinguish between following the rules and plain old obstruction. Take the 30 hours of post-cloture debate for appellate nominees, even under the new post-nuclear regime. The leader sometimes asks for unanimous consent to waive the 30 hours of post-cloture debate. Would that count as obstruction if the minority refuses to consent? Tough call. If the minority refused to consent just to slow down a confirmation vote to keep a judge off the bench, that seems like obstruction to me. But of course it’s hard to discern senators’ motives from their actions.”

The CRS data show that of the 147 nominees that faced the cloture gauntlet, just 20 received between 50 and 59 votes and yet did not eventually get confirmed. Fifteen of these people were nominated before Obama became president—and most were derailed when Democrats were in the minority.

“I would think that filibusters are a fact-checker’s nightmare,” Binder said. “You have counts of cloture motions but not counts of filibusters or obstructive acts. It’s very hard to make sense of competing majority and minority arguments without solid evidence from both sides. And most obstruction takes place behind closed doors, precluding equitable analysis of the two sides’ claims.”

During the 111th Congress, the Senate confirmed 920 nominees and rejected one: Craig Becker to be a member of the National Labor Relations Board.

During the 112th Congress, the Senate confirmed 574 nominees and rejected two: Goodwin Liu to be a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit; and Richard Cordray to be the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

During the 113th Congress, the Senate has confirmed 66 nominees and rejected one: Caitlin Halligan to be U.S. Circuit Judge for the D.C. Circuit.

 

[Wilsongt]

Well then you get another.

(This is why this thread is overweight.)

How cruel. Now it's going to go commit suicide.

 

[eBay Huckster]

How cruel. Now it's going to go commit suicide.

On a related note to TPM backpats, that Vitter article's already getting some good comments:

Q: Will he expand Medicaid in Lousiana?
A: Depends.

 

[PhoenixDark]

Today's TPM backpat (fresh off the presses) and/or more evidence that Obamacare's going to sink Democrats this fall: Vitter 'not opposed' to Medicaid expansion if elected LA governor

I definitely expect more republicans to adopt the Indiana or Arkansas approach to it. It's a nice cash grab for insurance companies (paying them with Medicaid money) and helps citizens, most of whom are poor and white in those states.

 

[kehs]

275 Contigent Military Group to Iraq.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/06/16/iraq-insurgency/10569133/

 

[Avon Barksdale]

Joe Cool after the U.S. victory over Ghana.

 

[NYCmetsfan]

Joe Cool after the U.S. victory of Ghana.

Joe is so awesome

 

[speculawyer]

A whole bunch of filibuster rationalization.

That is a convoluted mess. And OK, let's assume the number is exaggerated a bit.

But you really can't say that things did not change. You didn't have to get 60 votes to pass anything of substance in the past.

And yeah, they do eventually get a lot of them through . . . because the GOP is using it as an endless roadblock strategy. There have been nominations that get a 'hold' put on them for year or so and then eventually pass UNANIMOUSLY. They are just being obstructionist.

 

[Frank the Great]

You know when Democrats lose the Senate that they won't be obstructionist with the filibusters. They will probably try, and then the conservative media will bombard them until they give up and start letting things come to vote.

 

[zero shift]

Both sides do it is simply a way for those conspiracy idiots who have no interest in how politics actually works can seem "above" the fighting and seem intelligent, when all actuality it's the exact opposite.

"If there are good politicians out there then why haven't they helped me?

"

Good question. I think it is combination of several different factors:
1) The Senate design . . . it has become a tyranny of the rural states.
2) Money in politics. What voters want is only part of the equation. What else heavily matters is what the monied-interests that fund campaigns want.
3) The filibuster. It is damn hard to get anything done when you require 60 votes to get anything done.
4) Gerrymandering. The Congressional Dems received far more votes than the Congressional GOPers. But the GOPers have a sizeable majority in Congress. Go Figure.
5) Irrational greedy petulant voters. They want all sorts of services . . . but they don't want to pay for any of them.
6) Lazy electorate. Most of the voter base is lazy and can't be bothered to vote. But the super-hardcore anti-abortion voters, gun-rights voters, and cranky old people will always show up to vote.


We basically have a system designed for gridlock and we voted in people that ensured gridlock.

Good post. The system is designs to halt progress. No surprise that the only country that copied our political model (the Philippines) also has problems.

 

[NYCmetsfan]

lol heritage lol

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...5a3-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html?hpid=z6

Representatives of prominent conservative groups converged on the Heritage Foundation on Monday afternoon for the umpteenth in a series of gatherings to draw attention to the Benghazi controversy.

But this one took an unexpected turn.

What began as a session purportedly about “unanswered questions” surrounding the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Libya deteriorated into the ugly taunting of a woman in the room who wore an Islamic head covering.

Panelist Brigitte Gabriel of a group called ACT! for America pounced. She said “180 million to 300 million” Muslims are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.” She told Ahmed that the “peaceful majority were irrelevant” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and she drew a Hitler comparison: “Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million died.”

Panelist Clare Lopez of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi said the perpetrators of the attack are “sipping frappes with journalists in juice bars.”

 

[Chumly]

My state's government purges employee email after 3 months unless there's a litigation hold on a certain individual. As a result, many people "save" email by moving it offline to their computer. Of course the computer savvy know how to back up that local copy, but I bet the average user does not and a loss of their machine means loss of anything older than 3 months.

I don't know what the IRS purge period is, and I bet it's longer than 3 months, but loss is possible.



Too small and definitely too poor.

Link

The IRS has described the missing e-mails as dating from 2009 to mid-2011. At that point, the agency says its computer system had a strict limit for the e-mail capacity of each employee’s account. If a worker went above that capacity, they had to either move e-mails to their hard drive or delete them. When Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011, the agency states, her saved e-mails were lost from her account and computer.

The IRS provided e-mails from 2011 in which Lerner asked IT support staff for help with her broken hard drive and missing e-mails. The agency says it has recovered 24,000 of those e-mails by searching the accounts of 83 other IRS employees who corresponded with Lerner.

But the largest question is whether the agency purposely delayed or tried to hide any key e-mails from Congress. Koskinen points to the agency’s $10 million, 250-person hunt for Lerner’s e-mails and says the IRS wants to complete this investigation as much as anyone.

Looks like to me this is completely overblown. Obviously they didn't have ideal storage procedures back in mid 2011 but considering this is two years before the controversy and only covers a portion of it I don't think this was intentional. Obviously people are playing it up to the partisan tactics but I don't think when her hard drive crashed they could have known that congress was going to go on a witch hunt.

The scary part is we have spent 10 fucking million dollars to comply with ridiculous republican demands.

 

[RustyNails]

lol heritage lol

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...5a3-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html?hpid=z6

She told Ahmed that the “peaceful majority were irrelevant” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and she drew a Hitler comparison: “Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million died.”

 

[thefro]

It is overblown... our e-mail where I work (a Fortune 500 company) is the same way. Limited quota and you have to archive some of your mail to your local hard drive if you go over.

In IT we always tell people to back that file up to the network drive, but there's another department that charges people for extra data on that like it's the mid-90s (same reason the Notes quota is so low).

Luckily we are finally moving to Office 365 in the fall, so we'll have tons of space.

250 MB isn't very much when a lot of people are constantly sending you scans of documents.

 

[RustyNails]

It is overblown... our e-mail where I work (a Fortune 500 company) is the same way. Limited quota and you have to archive some of your mail to your local hard drive if you go over.

In IT we always tell people to back that file up to the network drive, but there's another department that charges people for extra data on that like it's the mid-90s (same reason the Notes quota is so low).

Luckily we are finally moving to Office 365 in the fall, so we'll have tons of space.

250 MB isn't very much when a lot of people are constantly sending you scans of documents.

We have 500 mb, and it's a pain in the goddamn butthole. I have autoarchive settings to archive everything prior to two months, but when you have 10mb attachments flying around during presentations/reports time it's so frustrating.

 

[Oblivion]

Wow, some words I don't say very often: Erin Burnett done good! She took some stupid neocon to task tonight:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/erin-bur...-arent-you-the-one-who-got-us-into-this-mess/

 

[Owzers]

Wow, some words I don't say very often: Erin Burnett done good! She took some stupid neocon to task tonight:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/erin-bur...-arent-you-the-one-who-got-us-into-this-mess/

Obama ruined everything Everyone wrong about Iraq are trying to rewrite history, Iraq was won and Obama ruined it.

 

[benjipwns]

That is a convoluted mess. And OK, let's assume the number is exaggerated a bit.

But you really can't say that things did not change. You didn't have to get 60 votes to pass anything of substance in the past.

And yeah, they do eventually get a lot of them through . . . because the GOP is using it as an endless roadblock strategy. There have been nominations that get a 'hold' put on them for year or so and then eventually pass UNANIMOUSLY. They are just being obstructionist.

What's convoluted about the fact that invoking cloture doesn't mean there's a filibuster? And what's convoluted about how Harry Reid is making cloture motions on his own then turning around and yelling "filibusters!" when there aren't (hence why there's no vote)?

This is giving Republicans credit for things they haven't done. They should have to earn it on their own rather than being praised for an artifact of Harry Reid's Senate management style that seeks to avoid amendments.

 

[Joe Molotov]

Obama ruined everything Everyone wrong about Iraq are trying to rewrite history, Iraq was won and Obama ruined it.

History will judge him harshly for unwinning the Iraq War.

 

[speculawyer]

What's convoluted about the fact that invoking cloture doesn't mean there's a filibuster? And what's convoluted about how Harry Reid is making cloture motions on his own then turning around and yelling "filibusters!" when there aren't (hence why there's no vote)?

This is giving Republicans credit for things they haven't done. They should have to earn it on their own rather than being praised for an artifact of Harry Reid's Senate management style that seeks to avoid amendments.

I'll just quote from your post:

“I would think that filibusters are a fact-checker’s nightmare,” Binder said. “You have counts of cloture motions but not counts of filibusters or obstructive acts. It’s very hard to make sense of competing majority and minority arguments without solid evidence from both sides. And most obstruction takes place behind closed doors, precluding equitable analysis of the two sides’ claims.”

It is hard to get an accurate count ... but things have certainly changed. When you have to get at least 60 votes to anything more controversial than name a Post Office then the system is broken.

 

[Mario]

Good post. The system is designs to halt progress. No surprise that the only country that copied our political model (the Philippines) also has problems.

Was the system really designed to halt progress though?

My understanding was the system was designed to "maintain the status quo", and halting progress is just an understandable side effect of that.

Of course, progress is slowed/halted either way, but I can understand the reasoning and philosophy for why things were set up that way initially.

 

[Chichikov]

Wow, some words I don't say very often: Erin Burnett done good! She took some stupid neocon to task tonight:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/erin-bur...-arent-you-the-one-who-got-us-into-this-mess/

Good on her, nice follow up questions too.
And fuck Paul Bremer, that incompetent fuck has a lot of blood on his hands, I can't even believe the nerve this motherfucker has to even talk about this subject (or any subject for that matter).

 

[pigeon]

What's convoluted about the fact that invoking cloture doesn't mean there's a filibuster? And what's convoluted about how Harry Reid is making cloture motions on his own then turning around and yelling "filibusters!" when there aren't (hence why there's no vote)?

Primarily, the lack of understanding of how the Senate operates.

The Senate doesn't have the option to move the previous question, remember? It's not possible for Reid to call a vote to end debate, because all debates in the Senate end by acclamation only -- one Republican objection prevents a vote.

Since all it takes is one objection, senators register their desire to object to specific motions with their leader, and they make sure somebody's on the floor to object to those specific motions. This is the famous secret "hold." Generally these holds are communicated in advance to the other leader to avoid wasting time. Sure, Reid could call votes on those motions just to force the objection, but it won't lead to a vote. It'll just lead to an objection. But make no mistake -- the use of a secret hold requires a full 60-vote cloture motion to successfully pass that bill. It's a filibuster.

If you want to use a metric other than cloture motions to measure Republican obstruction, the best one is objections to motions on the floor, especially motions to proceed to debate and motions to end debate. Of course, this would be an incredibly noisy statistic, and require digging through miles of Senate minutes, but it's really the only correct one.

Alternately, of course, you could assume that Reid has no reason to call unnecessary cloture motions (since all they do is delay his own bills by several days), while Republicans have lots of reasons to force cloture motions (with objections, which are generally not visible) and then vote for the unobjectionable bills afterwards (since they are perfectly happy to delay every bill by several days), and question the idea that Reid is calling a lot of cloture motions for no good reason.

 

[FyreWulff]

Was the system really designed to halt progress though?

Nope, since the filibuster didn't even exist when the system was designed. It's actually part of the legislative rules that can be changed and voted in each session, not anywhere in the Constitution.

 

[benjipwns]

Right, but that's nothing new and none of it is "historic" obstructionism, just the Senate operating as the Senate does. (And I thought the secret hold got defanged?) But as I mentioned Reid does have a reason to invoke cloture, to prevent amendments. He's used it ever since he became Majority Leader which indicates to me that it's part of his management style and not racist Republicans who started two years early to get practice reps in.

I just don't buy the narrative that the Democrats (especially in the Senate) are all unified and ready to pass an endless parade of super popular Landmark LegislationTM that fundamentally changes the country but those dang Republicans are tossing shoes into the machinery.

The incentives and the actions just don't line up with that popular narrative.

 

[Black Mamba]

The image brought isn't about legislation, though.

The image shows executive nominees being filibustered.

Just to clarify.

 

[benjipwns]

The image shows nominees who have had cloture invoked on them, but I don't think most complaints about Republican Obstructionism are about Harry Reid having nominations wait two days before they're approved to limit debate.

 

[Black Mamba]

The image shows nominees who have had cloture invoked on them, but I don't think most complaints about Republican Obstructionism are about Harry Reid having nominations wait two days before they're approved to limit debate.

Yeah, but the GOP has stonewalled a lot of nominees. Judicial nominees have often taken forever (over twice as long as Bush) and then there was the CFPB. And even the ATF couldn't get anyone confirmed for years.

 

[benjipwns]

Yeah, but I don't see this as any kind of historic racist Republican work against Obama.

If you look at the CRS report, wait times to confirmation have been going up with every administration, and wait times for hearings were actually highest by a pretty crazy amount under Bush: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43058.pdf

It's out of committees where it shoots up under Obama. But since it's time to hearings where it shoots up under Bush it seems to me that this illustrates a consensus for "obstruction" with it applied where the party has its strongest hand.

The trends on waits even apply to "uncontroversial" nominees (who have declined in number apparently): http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42732.pdf

I think if anything all of this "obstructionism" is indicative more of general Senate trends, especially once it became a much more competitive body, to simply try and run out the clock on many things that come before it. Things like say, passing budgets.

 

[Oblivion]

You guys were discussing this a page or two ago, but I was always curious to see what the GOP priority scale is when it comes to their positions on: gun rights, abortion, taxes, immigration, foreign policy. Do you guys really think they'd give up on the economic front before they would even think about giving up on the social front? Cause Republicans haven't raised taxes since Newt Gingrich waddled his way into office. I used to think that would be more paramount than anything. On the other hand, something like acting remotely humanely to Messicans completely destroyed Rick Perry's candidacy, so I dunno.

 

[benjipwns]

Cause Republicans haven't raised taxes since Newt Gingrich waddled his way into office.

Not on current taxpayers no...

 

[RustyNails]

Good on her, nice follow up questions too.
And fuck Paul Bremer, that incompetent fuck has a lot of blood on his hands, I can't even believe the nerve this motherfucker has to even talk about this subject (or any subject for that matter).

What's with this resurgence of neohawks being invited to discuss Iraq on TV, Cheney, McCain, Bremer et al, THE SAME GUYS WHO GOT EVERYTHING WRONG IN 2003?

 

[The Librarian]

Brian Beutler pointed this out.

William: Let's start fairly broad with the Republican Party. You watch— and probably see many more— polls than I do or we do in general. When you watch what's happening in presidential politics. When you see this shift that Hispanics used to be in the Republican Party and now they're clearly on the other side of the aisle —when you see all of these things that have transpired, what do you think about? what is going on in the Republican Party?

Tillis: Well I think it has more to do what's going on in the demographics of this country and recognizing that and then having a platform and a message that resonates. If you take a look, you mentioned the Hispanic population —the African American population, there's a number of things that our party stands for that they embrace. I think we have to do a better job of communicating it. I think we have to do a better job of being out there in between elections, garnering support for the things that we're trying to advance. And I think that we need a focus on limited government and free markets which is something that's appealing to everybody. That kind of work will position us for those growing sectors. The traditional population of North Carolina and the United States is more or less stable. It's not growing. The African American population is roughly growing but the Hispanic population and the other immigrant populations are growing in significant numbers. We've got to resonate with those future voters.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/tho...rs-north-carolina-hispanics-african-americans

 

[TacticalFox88]

2020 is going to be such a huge election it's not even funny.