"It's called precedent," the Senate Judiciary Committee chair said of violating the same rule that Republicans ignored to move forward with judicial nominees.
Still I understand why they hesitate. It basically drags our government permanently into shitty behavior. This is why they don't start this stuff but reluctantly utilize it. You don't want to be known as the guy going for the balls but if that is how the opponent is going to fight whelp then I guess we are ballers.
This is a good opportunity to do it, and very calculated. Skipping the discussion portion would have no impact as it wouldn’t have changed the vote, and it’s the third discussion, so two already occurred. Its a “safe” way to demonstrate rules can’t be dodged by one side.
I think until anyone in government sees consequences of their actions then nothing will change. If it’s used against them, maybe they’ll help legislate against it
Nope. Same rules should apply for both. They should not be the least bit reluctant to use the same tools the Republicans do. If the Republicans are breaking rules then the Democrats need to break the same rules. If the Republicans don’t like it, they can stop breaking the rules whenever they feel like it.
Holy cow! Is that where the term ballers comes from? I did not know that. I kinda assumed it was about pro basketball players, in reference to their wealth and success.
This article totally misses the point: they didn’t care about the judges. They were trying to run out the clock to prevent subpoenas of major conservative donors to the Supreme Court from getting out of committee.
Nobody’s shooting them for allowing debate. It’s not a binary where they have to either allow Republicans to obstruct endlessly or eliminate debate completely.
That is an impressive selective reading of the article. One could be left to wonder how, in good faith, you could have possibly missed all of this:
Durbin went straight to their votes, saying senators already had two chances to debate their nominations.
...
“I understand what you’d like to do, but I’m saying, in fairness, we’ve debated these nominees twice,” Durbin said. “I ask the clerk to call the roll.”
...
Through all this, Durbin sat expressionless, waiting for breaks in the attacks to quietly direct the clerk to continue the roll call. He periodically reminded Republicans that they’d already had two chances to debate both nominees in two separate hearings.
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“This is the third time they were brought up,” he added of the two nominees at the center of Thursday’s hearing. “That’s the reason the ruling was made by the chair.”
... A committee spokesperson noted that Kennedy spoke on Kasubhai in a Nov. 2 hearing and again in a Nov. 19 hearing, for a total of 12 minutes.
... Graham spoke on both nominees in the Nov. 2 hearing, for about two minutes, too. And Cotton spoke on Kasubhai in the Nov. 9 hearing for about six minutes.
Why should Dems follow all the rules when repubs don’t? If anyone cares about the rule, they should have punished the previous committee leaders even though they have an R by their name.
The same reason Dems should do a SHITLOAD of things differently than the Republicans: because they’re better and more honest or at least pretending to be.
They’re not being taken advantage of. They’re CHOOSING to not use powers they legitimately have in order to protect their owner donors from what they, the Dem leadership, say in public that they want to do.
Like back when they “had to” take the minimum wage increase that the vast majority of the population wants out of the infrastructure bill because one unelected bureaucrat didn’t think it was a budget item 🙄
Ok fair, that was a misnomer. They are definitely not being taken advantage of.
That being said, what exactly do you think should be happening? Because I think things are escalating because of decisions made by reps, and dems have to do something in response no?
Love when people have that argument. I always politely remind them that we didn’t just turn all of our cheeks to Hitler and hope he stopped. At a certain point you gotta go all in.
If one party ignores the rules, while the other party follows them, the party with no regard for the rules will take all the power, and we definitely won’t have a democracy anymore.
Well…a wrong is a negative thing. Two wrongs would be a double negative. A double negative is a positive and a positive thing is a right. Therefore two wrongs do in fact make a right. (Please note: I don’t believe this and an just using words recreationally)
Its not the multiplicative of wrongs its just the summation. If you rob a bank and also commit wire fraud that person isn’t responsible for a wire fraud worth of bank robberies. In fact, that statement is nonsense. Two wrongs add up having done more wrong.
That’s weird. When the right is gaslighting others about injecting deeply radical activist judges into the system, they claim that judges should just be calling balls and strikes and so on. And now they are screaming about what are most likely center-right judges, LOL.
The butthurt is strong with the GOP, that’s for sure.
once you assume that everything they say and do is about manipulating the system to gain as much power as possible, then using that power to reward loyalists and inflict violence on people they don’t like, everything starts to make sense. at this point the republican party is an attempt at a junta in the US.
I kind of wish everyone who set foot in that room was fitted with a device that electrically zaps them every time they say some disingenuous bullshit. It's always so uncomfortable to watch, and they know exactly what they're doing.
I was saying the other day we need a neutral third party the hangs around Congress and every time they do something unconstitutional or stupid, the whole class room has to watch Schoolhouse Rock episodes about civics.
It’s so hard to find a neutral observer when on party keeps trying to drag us back to the dark ages. How do you debate people that think a cosmic entity is personally planning out their lives.
This is why using precedent and RROO is bad mojo for US American parliamentarianism. Very few act in good faith for a legal fiction that is the United States of America. And when the leader, the person in The Office Of The President, acts in bad faith we are fucked for generations if not permanently.
Now the representatives are abandoning their structure and tradition because the other side did, too.
We are done here.
The Hard Left needs to consider revolution.
edit: maybe i don’t mean the revolution … but the Senate of Rome became vestigial doing the same thing.
The question for me is this: who will be our person to go from Octavianus to Octavian in front of the world ?
I doesn’t make me happy either, it’s also the right thing for them to do in the circumstance. They can’t pretend as though things didn’t change, as consequences of the recent decades of Republican treachery.
Though tempted to view these breaches of precedent by Republicans in isolation, I have to remind myself that the reasons they wanted to do so and got away with it are systemic. I mean, years ago, some of these things might have resulted in pressure from their own constituents. The Republicans have been chipping away at everything for decades to sculpt the nation into a shape that enables them to act with impunity. You can trace the progression in Congress starting with, say, Newt Gingrich. It’s like an abusive sociopath overstepping boundaries little by little until they’re in complete control.
That said, there was a time when politics broke out in fist fights. Thinking long term, it may not always be like this. But we can’t expect a single election, or mere voting, to fix this.
You’re absolutely correct, they’ve been working hard at creating this situation. I think the left will need to get mean for anything to change, maybe this is a step in that direction.
Yep, it’s been the boiling frog for decades now. It’s surreal to compare 1970s Republican politician antics to what they’re doing now. Back then, much of their current bullshit would have outraged their constituency and the nation in general. It would be the headlines of every paper. Now their supporters cheer for it, the corporate news spins it in a positive light if they report on it at all, and many more progressive voters just tune it out.
the leader, the person in The Office Of The President
The POTUS specifically is NOT the leader. That’s the whole point of checks and balances; the three branches of government are equal in power and can veto each others. This very different of other countries with a Parliament system.
Now the representatives are abandoning their structure and tradition because the other side did, too.
So the Democrats should just keep adhering to rules that allow the Republicans to block their every move despite the fact that the Republicans ignore those rules whenever they see an advantage to doing so?
That foolish mindset is why we now have the judicial cluster fuck which is putting our very Democracy is at risk. We are in a fight for our lives and freedoms and you don’t go into such a fight with your hands tied behind your back. It is long past time the Democrats should have come out swinging.
When Blackburn said again she wanted to talk, Cotton interjected, “Now I guess Sen. Durbin is not going to allow women to speak either. I thought that was sacrosanct in your party!”
They create a specious argument, present it as a straw man of "what democrats want," and then ridicule it as if they didn't make the whole thing up themselves.
It's dumb as shit, but it's all on purpose. These people are ivy League lawyers who took speech and debate. They know what a fallacy is, they just choose to use it for its effectiveness in mass psychology rather than actually governing or leading.
Right, if conservative women weren’t fucking stupid (which they have to be to be conservatives), they’d know he was admitting Republicans don’t care about them.
It’s not about that. It’s about stuff like Clearance Thomas does. He used to be a black panther fighting for black rights(was still a misogynist creep). Then he eventually switched sides, prob for money and power, but claimed the Dems were just as racists as Republicans, but Republicans said it to your face and Dems hid behind a facade.
The right continously parrots this narrative (which definitely has a kernel of truth especially with NIMBYs) in an effort to either discourage voter participation or to get lucky and get Pick Mes like Thomas and Candence Owen’s.
Same reason idiots claim Trump says it like it is; they think everyone really is as racist and sexist as themselves, but that Dems are just virtue signaling while their side is “honest.” They don’t want to change, learn, or hide, they just want their shitty beliefs to be mainstream again.
The GOP leadership consists of extremely manipulative sociopaths; they will say literally anything to benefit themselves or hurt others. They will weaponize anything with no shame and no hesitation. Everything they do is in bad faith.
Equality? They understand it but don’t want it. Equality and fairness is the opposite of what they aspire to. They view themselves as better and therefore rules should benefit them and hurt others, to paraphrase the well known quote.
I reject modern political labels but would say I lean slightly right. Over the years I’ve wrote to many of our politicians but Mr. Durbin is the only one who actually gave me the time of day, and for that he has my respect.
Same, actually. He’s the only office I’ve gotten a response from that shows my letter was actually read. Everyone else just sends the generic canned reply back.
Googled it and it seems like not precise, just a sliiiiight marker they can be narcissists. Not convincing at all. Being a politician and with GOP tho…
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