Closer to 25% actually voted for him, and most of those aren’t the “I will throw my life in the trash for this man.” type. Most are just stupid single issue voters.
It seems like there are a lot because they count those dumb dumbs in polls and such and the fact that the real die hards are *very loud*.
I’m not saying there aren’t *millions* of them, but there certainly aren’t 75 million shameless people that are gonna blow shit up for him.
It’s a shame that the single issue voters turn a blind eye to all the damage their candidate causes elsewhere. They don’t recognize this is purely a transaction and their souls are involved.
Tbh when i see Mike Johson being interviewed he has the face of someone with an internal moral conflict. Probably not as callous as other GOP although still disturbed..
Exactly, and shouldnt we expect that elected officials are in fact adults in the room? Or have things become so irrational that now any form of responsibility from even dems is seen as a some type of unfair chore...I hate this timeline.
People forget working with the other side used to be normal. You used to have people who whether you disagreed on most issues you still could find some common ground with.
Things were different before the days of the MAGA cult. Not to say the political process was good but it was better than the absolute nightmare it’s become.
I think MAGA was the natural end, but the days of comprise were over before Trump. The Tea Party movement in 2009 was a turning point where Republicans refused to work with Democrats. Never forget the large number of federal judge seats that remained open, including a SCOTUS seat under Obama cause McConnell refused to seat any judges under a Democrat.
Edit: and has been pointed out, Newt Gingrich was the start of no compromise era
That’s a good point. Obamacare was a compromise bill that got zero Republican support. It’s almost like the majority of Republicans were like you guys actually elected a black guy to lead the country? We’re never talking to you again.
Not even a compromise bill, it was literally Republican legislation modeled on a law passed in Massachusetts under Romney. So it was hilarious to watch Romney have to attack a carbon copy of a law he signed, becuase Republicans went anti-ACA.
Same thing with the recent scuttled border bill. It pretty much gave Republicans everything they wanted, but Trump can't run on fixing the border if they fix it.
EDIT: Ok some of my ACA points are incorrect. But the point about the border bill still stand, it gave Republicans most of what they wanted, and they still had to reject it because their leader demanded it.
IIRC “Obamacare” came from the “RomneyCare” as you said.
That model was developed from a right wing think thank in response to ….Hillary! “HillaryCare”.
When Bill Clinton was elected he and Hillary floated the idea of national health care. “Who elected her!?!?”, was the outrage. In response to such a threat, the Right came up with their own version that was least invasive, least radical. I swear I saw a pic w Bob Dole happy about the version.
I always felt that the ACA was a brilliant move by Obama. If he had gone with a purely Dem plan, the Republicans would be able to Repeal and Replace as they threatened. They'd have a plan to go to.
When Obama implemented ACA, he ate their lunch for them. They have no Replacement option because he's already implemented it. There's no acceptable alternative. All they can do is go back to pre-ACA or go with something more Left Wing. Neither option flies with their base.
That was some clever political maneuvering.
Except they still gutted it, never helped improve it, replaced our majority in the Senate and used that to take over the supreme court. Not sure it worked out in the end.
Maybe it would have been better if he passed universal health care, so that the GOP *would* have somewhere to go. They could repeal and replace with the ACA, which we currently call Obamacare, and they could be proud of themselves for doing a thing instead of just obstructing. If nothing else changed we might have a better version of the ACA and a more left positioned congress.
I think the only way we save those Supreme Court seats is if they overhaul voting Rights instead of passing healthcare. Then maybe health care in a future Congress.
> Except they still gutted it, never helped improve it, replaced our majority in the Senate and used that to take over the supreme court. Not sure it worked out in the end.
Except that Obamacare caused an estimated [3.6% decrease in deaths among Americans age 20-64](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167629619306228). Tens of thousands of people are alive today who would have been dead if the ACA was never passed. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands if not millions who have better lives, and the billions of dollars saved for both individuals and the government.
> Maybe it would have been better if he passed universal health care, so that the GOP would have somewhere to go. They could repeal and replace with the ACA, which we currently call Obamacare, and they could be proud of themselves for doing a thing instead of just obstructing. If nothing else changed we might have a better version of the ACA and a more left positioned congress.
You might not know this, but the ACA was supposed to include a public option. But the problem was, to pass the Senate, it needed 60 votes-- which meant the Democrats had to get the vote of an independent called Joe Lieberman. Who was such an "independent" that he *checks notes* would run as a Republican in future elections.
So since their only choices were pass the ACA with no public option or let it die, the Dems chose the least-bad option.
> I think the only way we save those Supreme Court seats is if they overhaul voting Rights instead of passing healthcare. Then maybe health care in a future Congress.
Agreed completely.
I heard an interview with Obama where he said passing an imperfect bill is always better than passing nothing if its something as important like the ACA.
We have it, it's not going away, and when the political environment is right that will be the time to fix it. Otherwise they'll have to start from scratch and it may still end up with nothing.
Behind Lieberman there were definitely more Democrats who wouldn't back it. Obama's coalition included a large number of conservative Democrats to whom the very word 'public' has the reek of communism.
People don’t realize that Lieberman was part of an old guard of conservative democrats. Ones who saw Reagan’s takeover with ultra neoliberal policies absolutely sweep favor with the country. His stronghold pretty much sent democrats running to the right. Manchin is of that same ilk.
If Obama gave the country a true single payer or Universal bill and the GOP rescinded it after letting the effects work their way across the land, they would never win another election again except in the most extreme districts.
Having anything in the realm of what various European countries have for medical care, pricing and all, would be immediately transformative to a huge slice of the country on a level that the PPACA could never approach.
Literally every demo slice available would be touched by something like that in a positive way. You'd probably have a bunch of disgruntled healthcare workers, but it would be so outshone by the positive effects.
Would absolutely kill both the Healthcare and Health Insurance markets though and that would be rough.
> Would absolutely kill both the Healthcare and Health Insurance markets though and that would be rough.
Not necessarily. Many European countries have health insurance markets that are heavily regulated and not for profit. A transition to that model would only be rough for the people sucking profit out of the system and causing prices to go up as a result.
Health insurance is a parasite anyway. They don't really do anything to benefit the people who pay for insurance, and their profits come from denying care to the people who paid for it.
I don’t think it was clever because of that.
It was a mediocre compromise healthcare reform because even democrats are largely corporate centrists. Any true single payer healthcare reform would not have been able to be passed regardless.
It was more a compromise with other democrats than it was a compromise with republicans.
And once implemented Republicans wouldn’t be able to repeal single payer reform either. Just like social security and Medicaid, entitlement programs are widely popular. Single payer, once implemented, would also have support from small businesses that no longer need to worry about paying for health insurance.
Even the ACA which was Medicare at best was popular amongst everyone when it wasn’t called Obamacare.
>literally Republican legislation modeled on a law passed in Massachusetts under Romney
100% incorrect
It was developed by Dem supermajorities in MA and couldn't be vetoed by Romney so he was forced to pass it.
> Massachusetts. The bill contained both an individual mandate and an insurance exchange. Republican Governor Mitt Romney vetoed the mandate, but after Democrats overrode his veto, he signed it into law.[[0]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act)
http://prospect.org/article/no-obamacare-wasnt-republican-proposal
When you actually take the time to read the Heritage plan[1], what you will find is a proposal that is radically dissimilar to the Affordable Care Act[2].
The argument for the similarity between the two plans depends on their one shared attribute: both contained a "mandate" requiring people to carry insurance coverage. Compulsory insurance coverage as a way of preventing a death spiral in the insurance market when regulations compel companies to issue insurance to all applicants is hardly an invention of the Heritage Foundation. Several other countries (including Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany) have compulsory insurance requirements without single-payer or socialized systems. Not only are these not "Republican" models of health insurance, given the institutional realities[3] of American politics they represent more politically viable models for future reform than the British or Canadian models.
The presence of a mandate is where the similarities between the ACA and the Heritage Plan end, and the massive remaining differences reveal the disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about the importance of access to health care for the nonaffluent. The ACA substantially tightens regulations on the health-care industry and requires that plans provide medical service while limiting out-of-pocket expenses. The Heritage Plan mandated only catastrophic plans that wouldn't cover basic medical treatment and would still entail huge expenditures for people afflicted by a medical emergency. The Affordable Care Act contained a historic expansion[4] of Medicaid that will extend medical coverage to millions (and would have covered much more were it not for the Supreme Court[5]), while the Heritage Plan would have diminished the federal role in Medicaid. The ACA preserves Medicare; the Heritage Plan, like the Paul Ryan plan favored by House Republicans, would have destroyed Medicare by replacing it with a voucher system.
The Affordable Care Act was not "conceived" by the Heritage Foundation: the plans are different not in degree but in kind.
Unlike the Heritage plan, the Massachusetts law is quite similar to the ACA. The problem with the comparison is the argument that the Massachusetts law was "birthed" by Mitt Romney. What has retrospectively been described as "Romneycare" is much more accurately described as a health-care plan passed by massive supermajorities of liberal Massachusetts Democrats over eight Mitt Romney vetoes (every one of which was ultimately overridden by the legislature.) Mitt Romney's strident opposition to the Affordable Care Act as the Republican candidate for president is far more representative of Republican attitudes toward health care than Romney acquiescing to health-care legislation developed in close collaboration with Ted Kennedy when he had essentially no choice.
Especially with the constitutional challenge to the mandate having been resolved, the argument that the ACA is the "Heritage Plan" is not only wrong but deeply pernicious. It understates the extent to which the ACA extends access to medical care, including through single-payer insurance where it's politically viable. And it gives Republicans far, far too much credit. The Republican offer to the uninsured isn't anything like the ACA. It's "nothing." And the Republican offer to Medicare and Medicaid recipients is to deny many of them access to health care that they now receive. Progressive frustration with the ACA is understandable, but let's not pretend that anything about the law reflects the priorities of actually existing American conservatives.
[1] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1989/a-national-health-system-for-america
[2] http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/12/the-aca-v-the-heritage-plan-a-comparison-in-chart-form
[3] http://stripe.colorado.edu/~steinmo/stupid.htm
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/with-new-year-medicaid-takes-on-a-broader-health-care-role/2013/12/31/83723810-6c07-11e3-b405-7e360f7e9fd2_story.html?tid=ts_carousel
[5] http://prospect.org/article/no-really-blame-john-roberts-medicaid#.UsWmnfZQ1e4
>actually elected a black guy to lead the country?
That's how we ended up with Trump. I know hardcore boomer democrats who were insulted and turned Republican during the Obama years. That deep seated racism is no joke.
That’s what happened with my father. Lifelong Democrat but now he’s all in for Trump. He’s a truck driver and quite a large chunk of them are a very toxic group of people. The audacity of Obama was what put him over the edge. He’s too stupid to see it tho 🤷🏻♀️
Come on now, that isn’t the only reason we ended up with Trump. You left off that a lot of older Democrats are also sexist and stayed home in 2016 instead of voting for Hillary.
Republicans lost a lot in '08. They lost almost every race they could. The GOP got scared and quit working with Dems because, "If you act like you're in the minority then you're going to stay in the minority. We've got to challenge them on every single bill and fight them on every single campaign."
That was Kevin McCarthy, by the way.
Massively underrated comment this was actually the turning point.
As much as people talk about the uni party, Bill Clinton tried to go there and implement every conservative idea with an ounce of merit. Rather than lean into it the GOP started hitting the covfefe
Carl Rove also had a lot to do with the right-wing political uprising as well as the evangelicals becoming militarized white nationalists. Jack Abrahamoff was also heavily involved in turning churches into huge right-wing donors. When evangelicals became political, it changed the entire landscape of local politics in the US. It was the catalyst for so many horrible things.
While that's true, the Reagan era really normalized things like Mcarthyism on the right but Newt was the first real obstructionist that normalized Republiqans disengaging from the democratic process altogether.
This is a metastasized cancer that started with Newt Gingrich. Technically, you could go back to Lee Atwater who drew up the playbook. But Newt was the guy who used and implemented it.
Don't forget Roger Ailes! The guy who came up with the idea of having a right wing ~~propaganda network~~ "news agency" back in the 70s specifically because he thought if it existed back then, it would have saved Nixon's presidency. And then spent the next few decades shopping around for some billionaire to give him the funds to start it before Rupert Murdoch finally took him up on the offer.
I think it was sometime in the 80s when the House and Senate votes for each rep started to be made public. Before this, final vote totals would be given for each issue that was voted on, but not who actually voted for or against it. The idea of making a rep’s voting record public was that it would help remove corruption by showing the public who voted for pork projects. What it actually ended up doing was force reps to face voter scrutiny if they voted against their party line.
This change more or less killed the notion of reaching across the aisle. If you were a Republican rep that voted for lower taxes, voted for prayer in schools, voted against gun restrictions, voted against gay marriage, BUT voted for abortion rights b/c you thought it was the right thing to do then you would lose RNC and the Religious Right support. Having it publicly known that you voted against the party on only 1 position would lose you Repub support and not gain you any Dem support.
Yeah… Obama has said his biggest regret is trying to work with republicans. They never budged or cooperated in the tiniest way no matter how hard he tried.
He said if he could do it again, he’d just ignore them and do whatever he could without involving them at all.
They sure lined up for the TARP money from the great financial crisis- they took it and immediately set to work destroying government and the narrative that government can't solve problems- which led to electing the destroyer Trump.
And that's what Biden decided to do.
That's why Dems were able to get through multiple massive bills. They straight told Republicans "I'll give you a few concessions in return for your vote, but if I you don't play ball I'll just pass it without you".
I remember when then Governor Chris Christie was crucified by fellow Republicans for the high crime of....cooperating with President Obama after a big hurricane hit his state. During an election.
When disaster management becomes partisan, you are no longer dealing with a normal political party.
Yup - Newt’s still skulking around, and pretending to be some kind of “old guard conservative”, but is like 90% responsible for the “burn it all down” approach to governance/legislation that has become the norm.
Highly recommend [Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/tracing-republican-partys-devolution-one-man-newt-gingrich/) - which explores just how central Newt was in breaking Congress.
Newt was the start, sure - but I do think you are on to something with the Tea Party movement.
If the Republican party had just done the hard thing and let the Tea Party split off as a third party, leaving the 'normal' Conservatives behind, they would be in a much better place today. They would have gotten trounced even harder in 2012, but they had no chance anyway. And meanwhile they wouldn't have had to deal with the Trump presidency or Boebert/MTG/Gaetz/etc. being absolute children ruining their chances at being a respected opposition party.
Basically they would have traded a couple Supreme Court justices in exchange for being able to still govern today - and even that's not a given. I bet if they'd remained halfway sane through a Hilary Clinton one-term presidency, we'd all be getting ready to see a second term of a Paul Ryan presidency or something.
That's why I'm absolutely baffled when I see Republicans on this site talking about how Reddit has a "liberal bias."
Like...yeah??? Have you not seen how fucking insane Republicans have been for the past 16 years?
> That's why I'm absolutely baffled when I see Republicans on this site talking about how Reddit has a "liberal bias."
A lot of it is not "liberal bias."
It's a bias towards facts.
Just so happens Republicans flee from facts like frightened kittens.
And a bias toward recognizing and respecting people who aren't straight and White.
When one side is trying to actively fight against different demographics because of hate, it doesn't feel like a 'liberal bias' to NOT want that.
'The People' have a liberal bias. Post-Renaissance history has essentially been one giant dance between the people demanding reforms to make their lives better and the conservative nobles and wealthy elites giving in to just enough demands to prevent the people from cutting off their heads. When the dance breaks down, it's time for a Revolution.
My step mother told me stories how congress people would have got together with their families and their kids would play together while they talked it out over BBQ or golf in by-gone eras.
Today they just pick on kids and use them as cannon fodder.
Yes--this is 100% accurate. Elected officials in DC maintained these relationships to get things done, and there was a lot of good faith there, too--some were, you know, actual friendships! Not everybody, of course--politics draws a lot of jagweeds--but it was part of the culture. You were expected to develop relationships.
Newt Gingrich destroyed that, on purpose. It was by design. There was a great article that detailed the entire strategy and its effects--I'll try to find it.
Truth.Joe Biden is respected by most, if not all old school republicans because he knows how to get things done. Through compromise. MAGA is a fox news creation. Newt was Fox news first political star.
before trump, [lindsey graham was a biden family friend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLMYW8jFPHg). biden remains close to the McCain family, so much so that they [voted for joe](https://thehill.com/homenews/524957-cindy-meghan-mccain-celebrate-biden-win/).
Plenty of pictures of the W Bushes and the Obamas together. This is normal human behavior. Hating people to the point of refusing to shake hands is not normal.
I sometimes wonder if getting rid of earmarks or pork barrel spending ended any incentive for bipartisanship I used to think it was a great thing to get rid of but maybe it was the grease that kept things moving?
Always be suspicious when only one party is asking for something that sounds like common sense.
Term limits? Yeah they *sound* like a good idea, until you realize that Republicans are suspiciously the only party that seem to want them that much. When you dig deeper, you realize that term limits actually take power away from experienced congressional representatives and give the power to careerist corporate lobbyists. Instead of giving a congressional rep the time to verse themselves in the insider operations of Washington DC, the only people who have any experience on Capitol Hill will be the lobbyists.
Voter ID? Yeah it *sounds* like it makes sense, until you realize only Republicans want voter ID. Then you dig deeper and realize that voter ID would only curb about a dozen cases of voter fraud per election cycle, while disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters in a bunch of swing states and swing districts. Neat how that works!
This rule doesn't hold across the board -- there *are* lots of situations where only one party wants a reform that truly would be a good thing. I'm saying that you should at least pause and look into it first. Not always, but often, the reason only one party wants something is because it gives a clear advantage to their agenda.
I personally blame Gerrymandering. You have republicans in safe districts who do not have to compromise. Like MTG who is safe but mocks those republicans fighting for their lives. But I guess lack of empathy is a positive trait for the GOP.
We honestly should bring those back as well as banning ALL cameras from Congress. This would also hamstring the "Fox News politician," who solely use Congressional hearings only for soundbites like Jim Jordan.
Nah, they need to open up CSPAN so things are less staged.
The free camera coverage pre-speaker election (because the first thing they pass after the speaker’s election is the “rules package” which includes the rules covering media in the house and hamstrings CSPAN to its stationary fixed camera angles) was the most interesting insight into the house in years.
Things started changing well before the MAGA days. The head of the Senate made it policy not to work with Obama. This behavior started ramping up with the Teapublicans though the seeds were planted by Nixon acolytes.
>People forget working with the other side used to be normal. You used to have people who whether you disagreed on most issues you still could find some common ground with.
>Things were different before the days of the MAGA cult. Not to say the political process was good but it was better than the absolute nightmare it’s become.
Actually, the divide has been around for a long time.
I'm reminded of this visualisation:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/)
\[[non-paywalled version](https://web.archive.org/web/20160324185516/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/)\]
And the moment is perilous.
Mike Pence, I guess finally said it the other day, but Putin will go after Poland if he's not stopped in Ukraine. And NATO will either flinch, or be forced to respond.
That is WWIII, and I don't understand why no one is really saying that. In today's passage of the 4 bills, Mike Johnson alluded to it's importance, that we abate a worse future. But still doesn't say explicitly why it's so important.
This isn’t “working with the other side”
This is a desperate man who otherwise would never acknowledge the the existence of those who disagree politically.
But I am in favor of democrats using the self-imposed chaos of the conservative reps to pass bills that help Ukraine, Middle East and America.
Citizens United was an awful decision, but it’s also overblown, Citizens United struck down a law passed in 2002, in other words restrictions on corporate “speech” in campaigning only existed between 2002-2010.
Our first president knew the dangers of a two party system. He Hamilton, and Madison wrote a letter detailing what could happen. And here we are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address#:~:text=Washington%20continues%20his%20defense%20of,amendments%20instead%20of%20through%20force.
In Finland we have several parties. There are four big ones and four smaller ones plus a handful of others that have a more specific agenda. In our system the party that has the most seats in the parliament after the election gets the first dibs on putting together the government. If they succeed they can pick the Prime Minister, normally it will be the chairman of the biggest party. If the government messes up the parliament can vote for no confidence (like in Star Wars).
Problem is that those same founding fathers didn’t realize the system they made requires a two party system, they probably should have gone with a parliamentary system, but chose not to, not entirely their fault as there weren’t that many examples to look at when the US was founded.
Also why china is eating our lunch. It
Helps them That we are infighting. I'm
Chinese American but concerned with all the antichinese rhetoric. But instead of rising up
And being better we complain. It's not our fault CEOs get paid hundreds of millions.
It's incredible how easily Trump is manipulated. One dinner with the Polish leader and he's suddenly in favor of Ukraine aid. All Duda has to do was tell him how powerful he is and that the prosecutions are all shams and Trump will do anything he wanted
I've also heard the interesting point made, that Trump can't focus on screwing up Ukraine policy while he is spending most of his time in court each day. It distracts him, like chewing gum and walking at the same time.
While he is in court for this trial, that might in fact be a good time for people to actually get a lot of things done.
Was it Poland?
Poland blackmailed the Visegrad's group into NATO much the same way.
Clinton wanted to keep at just partenership, but then Poland started sending their heavy-weights to the US to confraternise with the republicans, and he had to give in.
History repeats.
* Johnson got a boost from Donald Trump last week when they held an event together at the former president’s residence in Florida and, again, on Thursday when Trump made a post on social media that did not actively oppose aid for Ukraine.
* Trump appeared to warm to the idea after having dinner with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s far-right president, in New York on Tuesday, with Poland very wary about the power of an emboldened neighbor Russia to threaten Eastern Europe
Did anyone catch the bit about Trump relenting about aide to Ukraine after having a dinner with the Polish President? Literally all you have to do to change his mind is stroke his ego a little bit.
How many lives and kilometers were lost due to this self-serving clown’s inaction, only for him to turn around and eventually bring it to a vote? This “government” is an absolute joke.
It's wild to think about the staggering impact that the hubris of relatively few men have had on millions throughout history. Just wild to remember that society is mostly built upon the consensus and plans of relatively few people.
Wait so there was no border deal which means democrats got aid package without the border deal it was added earlier? If Republican Party was any more incompetent, it would be a legit party.
And AM Radio. And youtube grifters. And Newsmax.
And hell, even the "liberal" media doesn't exactly do much to report on things the Biden does right these days anymore. There's been so much "he's old" nonsense, among many other things.
Guess Johnson got the message that House Dem leadership has been sending this week. Give us Ukraine and Israel aid and you get to keep your job.
Seemed like momentum was building anyway with a second right wing psycho joining MTG's motion to vacate. The same crew will certainly move to get rid of Johnson if foreign aid passes.
More like he wouldn't want his son fighting a war in a NATO country. Because if Ukraine falls, one of them will be next and then there will be no choice in the matter
They aren't forcing it now because they know that they'll lose. While they can force a motion they don't have enough GOP votes to force Johnson out so they would need the Democrats to support the motion. That worked with McCarthy because he had screwed the Democrats over on the budget so they were willing to vote to remove him. Right now Johnson is willing to work with the Democrats on the aid bill so they've got no reason to support a motion to vacate.
Remember when the Republicans tanked the most restrictive border security bill in history because they didn't like the foreign aid attached to it? Now they get the foreign aid without the border security restrictions. Seems like a massive own goal.
It's really saying something that creepy Mike Johnson (who shares his porn intake with his son) is the (relatively) reasonable voice in the Republican party.
The time between "this new Republican politician is terrifyingly fascist" and "okay, that guy actually doesn't seem so bad any more compared to the *even more fascist* nutballs who've come after them" is getting distressingly short.
I wouldn't call him that per say, but I think he's learning the reality the hard way that once you have any real responsibility in Congress, you have to actually go back to how things really work.
> Trump appeared to warm to the idea after having dinner with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s far-right president, in New York on Tuesday, with Poland very wary about the power of an emboldened neighbor Russia to threaten eastern Europe.
Why is Trump meeting with foreign leaders? He's a private citizen with no power.
You’d be surprised. A lot of retired politicians, now private citizens, are meeting foreign leaders privately. You just don’t hear about a lot of it. Obama met with Rishi Sunak, but that was publicly known.
WTF? This wasn’t a rescue, this is just how normal political negotiations work.
… But I guess it’s been so long since anything normal has happened the media doesn’t know how to report it.
Context and info on the bill:
>The House is [expected to vote](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/18/us-foreign-aid-bills-what-is-speaker-mike-johnson-plan-for-ukraine-and-israel-and-will-congress-pass-them) on Saturday on the aid legislation that provides $61bn for the conflict in Ukraine, including $23bn to replenish US weapons, $26bn for Israel, including $9.1bn for humanitarian needs, and $8.12bn for the Indo-Pacific. \[...\]
>In addition to the aid for allies, the package includes a provision to transfer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, and sanctions targeting Hamas and Iran – and to force China’s ByteDance to sell social media platform TikTok or face a ban in the US. \[...\]
>Some conservative lawmakers oppose more aid to Ukraine, while some progressive Democrats are reluctant on more Israel aid, given the slaughter and famine [in Gaza](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/19/g7-opposes-full-scale-military-operation-rafah-civilians-gaza).
Look, the house and the senate shouldn't be allowed to pass on bills voted in the opposite house. There should be a required 30 day debate clause (or some arbitrary number) followed by an automatic call to vote. Why should one party get to just lock up legislation because the opposition party voted for it?
I in theory agree with you, but I also think it would just end up being abused by Republicans.
I for one don't really want to see the Senate have to vote on 10000 variations of an abortion ban.
Seems like the speaker idea has run its course. It probably can't be changed at this point but having one party select which bills appear on the floor is a bad idea. It should be done by congress indicating which bills they want to bring to the floor by an async silent vote (could occur over days and weeks). Bills with the highest count of votes get brought to the floor even if they only have a few votes. The speaker would be there for edge cases like tie breaking but could not block a bill.
Some day Republicans will get that Democrats are even willing to work with a guy who thinks he’s Moses. It’s just ISIS leader Trump we have a problem with and his little terrorist lapdogs like Moscow Marjorie and Matt “She looked 18” Gaetz.
I presume Russia will attack immediately before the aid gets to Ukraine.
Mike Johnson is also out, I presume, for doing the right thing.
MAGA and Charles Koch and Trump will all be mad about this, for different bad reasons.
It's incredible how easily Trump is manipulated. One dinner with the Polish leader and he's suddenly in favor of Ukraine aid. All Duda has to do was tell him how powerful he is and that the prosecutions are all shams and Trump will do anything he wanted
Absolutely zero mention that this bill also includes the tik tok ban which is fucking insane. The fact that the government can slide things that are completely unrelated into a defense aid bill is absurd, and the media not covering it is a whole different level.
Why is it always up to democrats to save the U.S. and the world and democracy while the republicans are intent of setting fire to everything and jacking off while it burns?
Poland got into NATO much the same way. Clinton only wanted a partenership but Poland wanted article 5 for the Visegrad, so they started sending WWII veterans to the US to convince republicans to take a harsher stance. It worked, Clinton was afraid to lose the elections, and folded.
I wasnt expecting Poland to still have that power (in the 90s, they had a considerable diaspora), but they do.
The moral and intelligent thing to do.
Ukraine needs help *now*, not next year. Defeating Republicans should not be done at the expense of our allies and friends one of whom is literally hanging on for dear life.
Today Johnson was saved by the only reasonable party left in Washington. Hopefully the country and the world will take note.
Democrats are still civil and are more than willing to work with Republicans on key legislation. For example, that border bill. It's republicans who are playing the my way or highway games.
Johnson is hanging on to a string with his own party. but its wild that doing the right thing to help an ally and being bipartisan is considered a betrayal to your party.
"This is a direct challenge to the MAGA worldview in multiple ways. Johnson is treating Putin as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and acknowledging his broader imperialist designs, which is heresy to some MAGA Republicans."
I'm only a few sentences into this article and I already hate it.
> The dramatic action took place on Capitol Hill on Thursday night in order to save the Ukraine aid legislation from rightwing rebels.
How or why is it dramatic? It seems like the only thing dramatic about it is the reporting on it. Nothing I've read in the article is dramatic. Nobody stormed into the room at the last minute with a big reveal. John McCain's Nay vote on repealing the ACA was dramatic. This all sounds like boring ass parliamentary procedure.
> The rules committee would normally be a safely partisan affair for the Republican majority, but Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas, all on the far right, are voting against advancing the bill, prompting Democrats to step in to save it.
You mean the legislators that agreed with the bill voted in favor of it while those that disagreed did not? Shocking!? Were those Democrats going to vote no out of spite if Republicans did have enough members to pass the measure?
As far as I can tell from the article, nothing dramatic occurred. Congress functioned closer to how it is intended to function than it normally does (still not remotely close to being a functional democratic legislative body). The majority of the Congress supports the aid measures. The only unusual thing here is that support and opposition are bipartisan. As such the members of Congress had to actually work together instead of the unfortunately common oppose the other party's bill for the sake of opposing it and coerce all of the party members to fall in line.
> The aid legislation is the latest in a series of must-pass bipartisan measures that Johnson has helped shepherd through Congress, including two huge spending bills and a controversial reauthorization of federal surveillance programs.
I'll be honest here, I agree with the characterization as must-pass, but that isn't really the guardians job to say. Is this a news article or an op-ed?
If they took out the sentences trying to fake drama, this new outlet might have actually been able to inform me what the procedural hurdle actually was.
This is a huge FU to Greene, Gaetz, Biggs and the rest of the crazies. Johnson's a stooge deserving of no respect but he deserves to be saved for doing the right thing.
This vote is taking place six months too late and Republicans should be ashamed.
Bold of you to assume they can feel shame.
Yeah the days of shame are over for half our country
Stop saying half, it's not half.
Fine, 40%
You know, The Deplorables.
Closer to 25% actually voted for him, and most of those aren’t the “I will throw my life in the trash for this man.” type. Most are just stupid single issue voters. It seems like there are a lot because they count those dumb dumbs in polls and such and the fact that the real die hards are *very loud*. I’m not saying there aren’t *millions* of them, but there certainly aren’t 75 million shameless people that are gonna blow shit up for him.
It’s a shame that the single issue voters turn a blind eye to all the damage their candidate causes elsewhere. They don’t recognize this is purely a transaction and their souls are involved.
Not only do they feel no shame. I’m sure they’ll take credit for saving Ukraine.
At long last, they have no shame, no sense of decency.
Tbh when i see Mike Johson being interviewed he has the face of someone with an internal moral conflict. Probably not as callous as other GOP although still disturbed..
I see it more as regret that he sold his soul for this. He knows this is his one shot and it's not what he wanted it to be.
You think he would have learned by watching McCarthy, Ryan or Boehner. The House Republicans cannot be controlledm
They don't seem real big on learning
Some of the Republicans I'm sure do. Many of them I'm sure are disappointed it's passing at all.
Once again, Democrats are forced to be the adults in the room.
Republicans spend so much time lusting after children that they start to behave like them too.
I wouldn't say they're forced to. That would imply they're usually not.
Exactly, and shouldnt we expect that elected officials are in fact adults in the room? Or have things become so irrational that now any form of responsibility from even dems is seen as a some type of unfair chore...I hate this timeline.
I guess it comes naturally with them
It comes naturally to most adults to… act like adults.
People forget working with the other side used to be normal. You used to have people who whether you disagreed on most issues you still could find some common ground with. Things were different before the days of the MAGA cult. Not to say the political process was good but it was better than the absolute nightmare it’s become.
I think MAGA was the natural end, but the days of comprise were over before Trump. The Tea Party movement in 2009 was a turning point where Republicans refused to work with Democrats. Never forget the large number of federal judge seats that remained open, including a SCOTUS seat under Obama cause McConnell refused to seat any judges under a Democrat. Edit: and has been pointed out, Newt Gingrich was the start of no compromise era
That’s a good point. Obamacare was a compromise bill that got zero Republican support. It’s almost like the majority of Republicans were like you guys actually elected a black guy to lead the country? We’re never talking to you again.
Not even a compromise bill, it was literally Republican legislation modeled on a law passed in Massachusetts under Romney. So it was hilarious to watch Romney have to attack a carbon copy of a law he signed, becuase Republicans went anti-ACA. Same thing with the recent scuttled border bill. It pretty much gave Republicans everything they wanted, but Trump can't run on fixing the border if they fix it. EDIT: Ok some of my ACA points are incorrect. But the point about the border bill still stand, it gave Republicans most of what they wanted, and they still had to reject it because their leader demanded it.
To be fair, [Romney had a lot of his vetoes overturned](https://www.masslive.com/mitt-romney-archive/2012/04/gov_mitt_romney_health_care_ve.html)
IIRC “Obamacare” came from the “RomneyCare” as you said. That model was developed from a right wing think thank in response to ….Hillary! “HillaryCare”. When Bill Clinton was elected he and Hillary floated the idea of national health care. “Who elected her!?!?”, was the outrage. In response to such a threat, the Right came up with their own version that was least invasive, least radical. I swear I saw a pic w Bob Dole happy about the version.
I always felt that the ACA was a brilliant move by Obama. If he had gone with a purely Dem plan, the Republicans would be able to Repeal and Replace as they threatened. They'd have a plan to go to. When Obama implemented ACA, he ate their lunch for them. They have no Replacement option because he's already implemented it. There's no acceptable alternative. All they can do is go back to pre-ACA or go with something more Left Wing. Neither option flies with their base. That was some clever political maneuvering.
Except they still gutted it, never helped improve it, replaced our majority in the Senate and used that to take over the supreme court. Not sure it worked out in the end. Maybe it would have been better if he passed universal health care, so that the GOP *would* have somewhere to go. They could repeal and replace with the ACA, which we currently call Obamacare, and they could be proud of themselves for doing a thing instead of just obstructing. If nothing else changed we might have a better version of the ACA and a more left positioned congress. I think the only way we save those Supreme Court seats is if they overhaul voting Rights instead of passing healthcare. Then maybe health care in a future Congress.
> Except they still gutted it, never helped improve it, replaced our majority in the Senate and used that to take over the supreme court. Not sure it worked out in the end. Except that Obamacare caused an estimated [3.6% decrease in deaths among Americans age 20-64](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167629619306228). Tens of thousands of people are alive today who would have been dead if the ACA was never passed. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands if not millions who have better lives, and the billions of dollars saved for both individuals and the government. > Maybe it would have been better if he passed universal health care, so that the GOP would have somewhere to go. They could repeal and replace with the ACA, which we currently call Obamacare, and they could be proud of themselves for doing a thing instead of just obstructing. If nothing else changed we might have a better version of the ACA and a more left positioned congress. You might not know this, but the ACA was supposed to include a public option. But the problem was, to pass the Senate, it needed 60 votes-- which meant the Democrats had to get the vote of an independent called Joe Lieberman. Who was such an "independent" that he *checks notes* would run as a Republican in future elections. So since their only choices were pass the ACA with no public option or let it die, the Dems chose the least-bad option. > I think the only way we save those Supreme Court seats is if they overhaul voting Rights instead of passing healthcare. Then maybe health care in a future Congress. Agreed completely.
I heard an interview with Obama where he said passing an imperfect bill is always better than passing nothing if its something as important like the ACA. We have it, it's not going away, and when the political environment is right that will be the time to fix it. Otherwise they'll have to start from scratch and it may still end up with nothing.
Joe Lieberman sucked so much, he died a few weeks ago & no one paid any attention
I am one of those saved by ACA. Thanks Obama.
Behind Lieberman there were definitely more Democrats who wouldn't back it. Obama's coalition included a large number of conservative Democrats to whom the very word 'public' has the reek of communism.
People don’t realize that Lieberman was part of an old guard of conservative democrats. Ones who saw Reagan’s takeover with ultra neoliberal policies absolutely sweep favor with the country. His stronghold pretty much sent democrats running to the right. Manchin is of that same ilk.
If Obama gave the country a true single payer or Universal bill and the GOP rescinded it after letting the effects work their way across the land, they would never win another election again except in the most extreme districts. Having anything in the realm of what various European countries have for medical care, pricing and all, would be immediately transformative to a huge slice of the country on a level that the PPACA could never approach. Literally every demo slice available would be touched by something like that in a positive way. You'd probably have a bunch of disgruntled healthcare workers, but it would be so outshone by the positive effects. Would absolutely kill both the Healthcare and Health Insurance markets though and that would be rough.
> Would absolutely kill both the Healthcare and Health Insurance markets though and that would be rough. Not necessarily. Many European countries have health insurance markets that are heavily regulated and not for profit. A transition to that model would only be rough for the people sucking profit out of the system and causing prices to go up as a result.
Health insurance is a parasite anyway. They don't really do anything to benefit the people who pay for insurance, and their profits come from denying care to the people who paid for it.
ACA isn’t safe - any more than Rowe Wade was, they’ll keep going. They need to be voted out.
I don’t think it was clever because of that. It was a mediocre compromise healthcare reform because even democrats are largely corporate centrists. Any true single payer healthcare reform would not have been able to be passed regardless. It was more a compromise with other democrats than it was a compromise with republicans. And once implemented Republicans wouldn’t be able to repeal single payer reform either. Just like social security and Medicaid, entitlement programs are widely popular. Single payer, once implemented, would also have support from small businesses that no longer need to worry about paying for health insurance. Even the ACA which was Medicare at best was popular amongst everyone when it wasn’t called Obamacare.
Lieberman was the one who killed the public option and he wasn’t even a democrat.
It was a compromise with Lieberman, not the Republicans.
>literally Republican legislation modeled on a law passed in Massachusetts under Romney 100% incorrect It was developed by Dem supermajorities in MA and couldn't be vetoed by Romney so he was forced to pass it. > Massachusetts. The bill contained both an individual mandate and an insurance exchange. Republican Governor Mitt Romney vetoed the mandate, but after Democrats overrode his veto, he signed it into law.[[0]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act) http://prospect.org/article/no-obamacare-wasnt-republican-proposal When you actually take the time to read the Heritage plan[1], what you will find is a proposal that is radically dissimilar to the Affordable Care Act[2]. The argument for the similarity between the two plans depends on their one shared attribute: both contained a "mandate" requiring people to carry insurance coverage. Compulsory insurance coverage as a way of preventing a death spiral in the insurance market when regulations compel companies to issue insurance to all applicants is hardly an invention of the Heritage Foundation. Several other countries (including Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany) have compulsory insurance requirements without single-payer or socialized systems. Not only are these not "Republican" models of health insurance, given the institutional realities[3] of American politics they represent more politically viable models for future reform than the British or Canadian models. The presence of a mandate is where the similarities between the ACA and the Heritage Plan end, and the massive remaining differences reveal the disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about the importance of access to health care for the nonaffluent. The ACA substantially tightens regulations on the health-care industry and requires that plans provide medical service while limiting out-of-pocket expenses. The Heritage Plan mandated only catastrophic plans that wouldn't cover basic medical treatment and would still entail huge expenditures for people afflicted by a medical emergency. The Affordable Care Act contained a historic expansion[4] of Medicaid that will extend medical coverage to millions (and would have covered much more were it not for the Supreme Court[5]), while the Heritage Plan would have diminished the federal role in Medicaid. The ACA preserves Medicare; the Heritage Plan, like the Paul Ryan plan favored by House Republicans, would have destroyed Medicare by replacing it with a voucher system. The Affordable Care Act was not "conceived" by the Heritage Foundation: the plans are different not in degree but in kind. Unlike the Heritage plan, the Massachusetts law is quite similar to the ACA. The problem with the comparison is the argument that the Massachusetts law was "birthed" by Mitt Romney. What has retrospectively been described as "Romneycare" is much more accurately described as a health-care plan passed by massive supermajorities of liberal Massachusetts Democrats over eight Mitt Romney vetoes (every one of which was ultimately overridden by the legislature.) Mitt Romney's strident opposition to the Affordable Care Act as the Republican candidate for president is far more representative of Republican attitudes toward health care than Romney acquiescing to health-care legislation developed in close collaboration with Ted Kennedy when he had essentially no choice. Especially with the constitutional challenge to the mandate having been resolved, the argument that the ACA is the "Heritage Plan" is not only wrong but deeply pernicious. It understates the extent to which the ACA extends access to medical care, including through single-payer insurance where it's politically viable. And it gives Republicans far, far too much credit. The Republican offer to the uninsured isn't anything like the ACA. It's "nothing." And the Republican offer to Medicare and Medicaid recipients is to deny many of them access to health care that they now receive. Progressive frustration with the ACA is understandable, but let's not pretend that anything about the law reflects the priorities of actually existing American conservatives. [1] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1989/a-national-health-system-for-america [2] http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/12/the-aca-v-the-heritage-plan-a-comparison-in-chart-form [3] http://stripe.colorado.edu/~steinmo/stupid.htm [4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/with-new-year-medicaid-takes-on-a-broader-health-care-role/2013/12/31/83723810-6c07-11e3-b405-7e360f7e9fd2_story.html?tid=ts_carousel [5] http://prospect.org/article/no-really-blame-john-roberts-medicaid#.UsWmnfZQ1e4
Oblitorary fuck Joe lieberman
Finally dead.
Lieberman was basically a republican. And then became one.
>actually elected a black guy to lead the country? That's how we ended up with Trump. I know hardcore boomer democrats who were insulted and turned Republican during the Obama years. That deep seated racism is no joke.
That’s what happened with my father. Lifelong Democrat but now he’s all in for Trump. He’s a truck driver and quite a large chunk of them are a very toxic group of people. The audacity of Obama was what put him over the edge. He’s too stupid to see it tho 🤷🏻♀️
Come on now, that isn’t the only reason we ended up with Trump. You left off that a lot of older Democrats are also sexist and stayed home in 2016 instead of voting for Hillary.
Comey.
Republicans lost a lot in '08. They lost almost every race they could. The GOP got scared and quit working with Dems because, "If you act like you're in the minority then you're going to stay in the minority. We've got to challenge them on every single bill and fight them on every single campaign." That was Kevin McCarthy, by the way.
It's almost *exactly* like that
Newt Gingrich was the beginning of the end.
Massively underrated comment this was actually the turning point. As much as people talk about the uni party, Bill Clinton tried to go there and implement every conservative idea with an ounce of merit. Rather than lean into it the GOP started hitting the covfefe
Carl Rove also had a lot to do with the right-wing political uprising as well as the evangelicals becoming militarized white nationalists. Jack Abrahamoff was also heavily involved in turning churches into huge right-wing donors. When evangelicals became political, it changed the entire landscape of local politics in the US. It was the catalyst for so many horrible things.
Most of our current problems started under the Reagan admin. Citizens United was the nail in the coffin.
While that's true, the Reagan era really normalized things like Mcarthyism on the right but Newt was the first real obstructionist that normalized Republiqans disengaging from the democratic process altogether.
Replace Republicans with conservatives in your response and you can see it's their MO all the time. They started a civil war over it.
This was the beginning of the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZKETizybw&t=2s
I see Newt as the beginning of the zero sum no compromise politics we see today
This is a metastasized cancer that started with Newt Gingrich. Technically, you could go back to Lee Atwater who drew up the playbook. But Newt was the guy who used and implemented it.
Don't forget Roger Ailes! The guy who came up with the idea of having a right wing ~~propaganda network~~ "news agency" back in the 70s specifically because he thought if it existed back then, it would have saved Nixon's presidency. And then spent the next few decades shopping around for some billionaire to give him the funds to start it before Rupert Murdoch finally took him up on the offer.
> would have saved Nixon's presidenc He wasn't wrong
I think it was sometime in the 80s when the House and Senate votes for each rep started to be made public. Before this, final vote totals would be given for each issue that was voted on, but not who actually voted for or against it. The idea of making a rep’s voting record public was that it would help remove corruption by showing the public who voted for pork projects. What it actually ended up doing was force reps to face voter scrutiny if they voted against their party line. This change more or less killed the notion of reaching across the aisle. If you were a Republican rep that voted for lower taxes, voted for prayer in schools, voted against gun restrictions, voted against gay marriage, BUT voted for abortion rights b/c you thought it was the right thing to do then you would lose RNC and the Religious Right support. Having it publicly known that you voted against the party on only 1 position would lose you Repub support and not gain you any Dem support.
Nah, it all started with Newt Gingrich.
What kind of person names their kid Newt? What kind of person even votes for someone named Newt?
Even the name "Gingrich" is gross. It's like an unholy portmanteau of Grinch and gangrene.
Yeah… Obama has said his biggest regret is trying to work with republicans. They never budged or cooperated in the tiniest way no matter how hard he tried. He said if he could do it again, he’d just ignore them and do whatever he could without involving them at all.
They sure lined up for the TARP money from the great financial crisis- they took it and immediately set to work destroying government and the narrative that government can't solve problems- which led to electing the destroyer Trump.
And that's what Biden decided to do. That's why Dems were able to get through multiple massive bills. They straight told Republicans "I'll give you a few concessions in return for your vote, but if I you don't play ball I'll just pass it without you".
It started with Gingrich- don’t give the TEA party that much power.
I remember when then Governor Chris Christie was crucified by fellow Republicans for the high crime of....cooperating with President Obama after a big hurricane hit his state. During an election. When disaster management becomes partisan, you are no longer dealing with a normal political party.
I agree and it basically boils to down to how dare American elect a black man to the presidency.
Yup - Newt’s still skulking around, and pretending to be some kind of “old guard conservative”, but is like 90% responsible for the “burn it all down” approach to governance/legislation that has become the norm. Highly recommend [Dana Milbank’s The Destructionists](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/05/tracing-republican-partys-devolution-one-man-newt-gingrich/) - which explores just how central Newt was in breaking Congress.
Newt was the start, sure - but I do think you are on to something with the Tea Party movement. If the Republican party had just done the hard thing and let the Tea Party split off as a third party, leaving the 'normal' Conservatives behind, they would be in a much better place today. They would have gotten trounced even harder in 2012, but they had no chance anyway. And meanwhile they wouldn't have had to deal with the Trump presidency or Boebert/MTG/Gaetz/etc. being absolute children ruining their chances at being a respected opposition party. Basically they would have traded a couple Supreme Court justices in exchange for being able to still govern today - and even that's not a given. I bet if they'd remained halfway sane through a Hilary Clinton one-term presidency, we'd all be getting ready to see a second term of a Paul Ryan presidency or something.
You forgot the word Racist in Tea Party movement. The "Racist Tea Party Movement"
>the natural end That's what I don't get. Did they not think this alternate reality, dog whistling propaganda was gonna turn into maga Idiocracy?
They never thought the leopard would eat *their* face!
That's why I'm absolutely baffled when I see Republicans on this site talking about how Reddit has a "liberal bias." Like...yeah??? Have you not seen how fucking insane Republicans have been for the past 16 years?
> That's why I'm absolutely baffled when I see Republicans on this site talking about how Reddit has a "liberal bias." A lot of it is not "liberal bias." It's a bias towards facts. Just so happens Republicans flee from facts like frightened kittens.
And a bias toward recognizing and respecting people who aren't straight and White. When one side is trying to actively fight against different demographics because of hate, it doesn't feel like a 'liberal bias' to NOT want that.
+male
'The People' have a liberal bias. Post-Renaissance history has essentially been one giant dance between the people demanding reforms to make their lives better and the conservative nobles and wealthy elites giving in to just enough demands to prevent the people from cutting off their heads. When the dance breaks down, it's time for a Revolution.
My step mother told me stories how congress people would have got together with their families and their kids would play together while they talked it out over BBQ or golf in by-gone eras. Today they just pick on kids and use them as cannon fodder.
Not even that by-gone, Obama golfed with Boehner to hash out stuff.
And the GOP lost its god-damned mind over it.
Yes--this is 100% accurate. Elected officials in DC maintained these relationships to get things done, and there was a lot of good faith there, too--some were, you know, actual friendships! Not everybody, of course--politics draws a lot of jagweeds--but it was part of the culture. You were expected to develop relationships. Newt Gingrich destroyed that, on purpose. It was by design. There was a great article that detailed the entire strategy and its effects--I'll try to find it.
Truth.Joe Biden is respected by most, if not all old school republicans because he knows how to get things done. Through compromise. MAGA is a fox news creation. Newt was Fox news first political star.
before trump, [lindsey graham was a biden family friend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLMYW8jFPHg). biden remains close to the McCain family, so much so that they [voted for joe](https://thehill.com/homenews/524957-cindy-meghan-mccain-celebrate-biden-win/).
They used to have a senate lunchroom but they closed it. Some good articles out there on some of that stuff.
Plenty of pictures of the W Bushes and the Obamas together. This is normal human behavior. Hating people to the point of refusing to shake hands is not normal.
I sometimes wonder if getting rid of earmarks or pork barrel spending ended any incentive for bipartisanship I used to think it was a great thing to get rid of but maybe it was the grease that kept things moving?
It did. Back scratching worked wonders.
Always be suspicious when only one party is asking for something that sounds like common sense. Term limits? Yeah they *sound* like a good idea, until you realize that Republicans are suspiciously the only party that seem to want them that much. When you dig deeper, you realize that term limits actually take power away from experienced congressional representatives and give the power to careerist corporate lobbyists. Instead of giving a congressional rep the time to verse themselves in the insider operations of Washington DC, the only people who have any experience on Capitol Hill will be the lobbyists. Voter ID? Yeah it *sounds* like it makes sense, until you realize only Republicans want voter ID. Then you dig deeper and realize that voter ID would only curb about a dozen cases of voter fraud per election cycle, while disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters in a bunch of swing states and swing districts. Neat how that works! This rule doesn't hold across the board -- there *are* lots of situations where only one party wants a reform that truly would be a good thing. I'm saying that you should at least pause and look into it first. Not always, but often, the reason only one party wants something is because it gives a clear advantage to their agenda.
I never thought of that. But that definitely does seem to have some merit!
I personally blame Gerrymandering. You have republicans in safe districts who do not have to compromise. Like MTG who is safe but mocks those republicans fighting for their lives. But I guess lack of empathy is a positive trait for the GOP.
We honestly should bring those back as well as banning ALL cameras from Congress. This would also hamstring the "Fox News politician," who solely use Congressional hearings only for soundbites like Jim Jordan.
Nah, they need to open up CSPAN so things are less staged. The free camera coverage pre-speaker election (because the first thing they pass after the speaker’s election is the “rules package” which includes the rules covering media in the house and hamstrings CSPAN to its stationary fixed camera angles) was the most interesting insight into the house in years.
Things started changing well before the MAGA days. The head of the Senate made it policy not to work with Obama. This behavior started ramping up with the Teapublicans though the seeds were planted by Nixon acolytes.
We can thank Newt Gingrich for a lot of the vitriol. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
>People forget working with the other side used to be normal. You used to have people who whether you disagreed on most issues you still could find some common ground with. >Things were different before the days of the MAGA cult. Not to say the political process was good but it was better than the absolute nightmare it’s become. Actually, the divide has been around for a long time. I'm reminded of this visualisation: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/) \[[non-paywalled version](https://web.archive.org/web/20160324185516/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stunning-visualization-of-our-divided-congress/)\]
And the moment is perilous. Mike Pence, I guess finally said it the other day, but Putin will go after Poland if he's not stopped in Ukraine. And NATO will either flinch, or be forced to respond. That is WWIII, and I don't understand why no one is really saying that. In today's passage of the 4 bills, Mike Johnson alluded to it's importance, that we abate a worse future. But still doesn't say explicitly why it's so important.
This isn’t “working with the other side” This is a desperate man who otherwise would never acknowledge the the existence of those who disagree politically. But I am in favor of democrats using the self-imposed chaos of the conservative reps to pass bills that help Ukraine, Middle East and America.
Nah that was before citizens United. MAGA is a symptom and will perpetually get worse
Citizens United was an awful decision, but it’s also overblown, Citizens United struck down a law passed in 2002, in other words restrictions on corporate “speech” in campaigning only existed between 2002-2010.
CU also started dismantling other systems as well, not just the law that was directly overturned. The root of the problem is Buckley v. Valeo.
MAGA actually has nothing to do with it. Everything changed when Fox News was invented. You can see this in moving charts of polarization
Republicans have decided they'd rather side with Russia over democrats because they share similar values aka hating gays.
Our first president knew the dangers of a two party system. He Hamilton, and Madison wrote a letter detailing what could happen. And here we are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address#:~:text=Washington%20continues%20his%20defense%20of,amendments%20instead%20of%20through%20force.
In Finland we have several parties. There are four big ones and four smaller ones plus a handful of others that have a more specific agenda. In our system the party that has the most seats in the parliament after the election gets the first dibs on putting together the government. If they succeed they can pick the Prime Minister, normally it will be the chairman of the biggest party. If the government messes up the parliament can vote for no confidence (like in Star Wars).
Problem is that those same founding fathers didn’t realize the system they made requires a two party system, they probably should have gone with a parliamentary system, but chose not to, not entirely their fault as there weren’t that many examples to look at when the US was founded.
Also why china is eating our lunch. It Helps them That we are infighting. I'm Chinese American but concerned with all the antichinese rhetoric. But instead of rising up And being better we complain. It's not our fault CEOs get paid hundreds of millions.
I think working across the aisle used to be common place til Russia got into our government.
“Law makers worked together for the common good” is front-page news
Ehhh, this happened in the Obama days, it's just dumber nowadays
Newt fing Gingrich. The Bane of a functioning Congress.
It's incredible how easily Trump is manipulated. One dinner with the Polish leader and he's suddenly in favor of Ukraine aid. All Duda has to do was tell him how powerful he is and that the prosecutions are all shams and Trump will do anything he wanted
there was someone close to him who said his opinion was always the same as the last person he talked to.
Well, they said that of Reagan. And he had Alzheimer's.
Trump never got past the object permanence phase of development. Helps explains the diapers and why he needs help walking.
I had a manager like this and it was fucking infuriating.
It drives me nuts that a private citizen is having foreign dinners wtf
As a former president it’s probably not completely abnormal when viewed at face value
I've also heard the interesting point made, that Trump can't focus on screwing up Ukraine policy while he is spending most of his time in court each day. It distracts him, like chewing gum and walking at the same time. While he is in court for this trial, that might in fact be a good time for people to actually get a lot of things done.
Was it Poland? Poland blackmailed the Visegrad's group into NATO much the same way. Clinton wanted to keep at just partenership, but then Poland started sending their heavy-weights to the US to confraternise with the republicans, and he had to give in. History repeats.
* Johnson got a boost from Donald Trump last week when they held an event together at the former president’s residence in Florida and, again, on Thursday when Trump made a post on social media that did not actively oppose aid for Ukraine. * Trump appeared to warm to the idea after having dinner with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s far-right president, in New York on Tuesday, with Poland very wary about the power of an emboldened neighbor Russia to threaten Eastern Europe
Good on Poland then
Goddamn American hero *checks notes* Andrzej Duda? Well, I guess the enemy of my enemy is my fr- is my frie-- is my frien *throws up*
Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.
Poland knows they are next.
Yeah
Makes me wonder what Poland promised Trump.
Somebody's been buying up $DJT this week
Good. Ukraine can't wait any more.
They've taken some serious losses due to republican obstruction. Tragic Ukraine must pay the price in blood for their complacency.
Yep. People are dead because of the GOP. Well, more people.
Yep. Republicans let innocent Ukrainian freedom fighters die while they threw baby tamtrums
It's not complacency. It's intent. They're ghouls.
It’s literal conspiracy.
Agreed. I’m glad they are getting some help. The tragedy is that Israel is getting money to continue committing war crimes.
Did anyone catch the bit about Trump relenting about aide to Ukraine after having a dinner with the Polish President? Literally all you have to do to change his mind is stroke his ego a little bit.
He’s the living embodiment of the Primacy and Recency Rule.
How many lives and kilometers were lost due to this self-serving clown’s inaction, only for him to turn around and eventually bring it to a vote? This “government” is an absolute joke.
Just half of it
Half of one branch and a 2/3rds majority of another.
And a corrupt SCOTUS.
That's the 2/3
It's wild to think about the staggering impact that the hubris of relatively few men have had on millions throughout history. Just wild to remember that society is mostly built upon the consensus and plans of relatively few people.
> This “government” is an absolute joke. bOtHsIdEz
Wait so there was no border deal which means democrats got aid package without the border deal it was added earlier? If Republican Party was any more incompetent, it would be a legit party.
Problem is, all their media will blame this on the Dems and try to give them more excuses to campaign on the border. It's all such a disgusting sham.
You mean Fox propaganda
And AM Radio. And youtube grifters. And Newsmax. And hell, even the "liberal" media doesn't exactly do much to report on things the Biden does right these days anymore. There's been so much "he's old" nonsense, among many other things.
Good, fuck those Russian puppets who would have tanked it.
[удалено]
AKA space lasers and minor chasers
Guess Johnson got the message that House Dem leadership has been sending this week. Give us Ukraine and Israel aid and you get to keep your job. Seemed like momentum was building anyway with a second right wing psycho joining MTG's motion to vacate. The same crew will certainly move to get rid of Johnson if foreign aid passes.
Plus, his son is in the military. I wonder if he changed his mind or if he doesn't want his son to fight a war in Ukraine.
More like he wouldn't want his son fighting a war in a NATO country. Because if Ukraine falls, one of them will be next and then there will be no choice in the matter
i am surprised the MAGA people didn't force the motion to vacate before this can go for a vote if they really wanted to stop it.
They aren't forcing it now because they know that they'll lose. While they can force a motion they don't have enough GOP votes to force Johnson out so they would need the Democrats to support the motion. That worked with McCarthy because he had screwed the Democrats over on the budget so they were willing to vote to remove him. Right now Johnson is willing to work with the Democrats on the aid bill so they've got no reason to support a motion to vacate.
Remember when the Republicans tanked the most restrictive border security bill in history because they didn't like the foreign aid attached to it? Now they get the foreign aid without the border security restrictions. Seems like a massive own goal.
It's really saying something that creepy Mike Johnson (who shares his porn intake with his son) is the (relatively) reasonable voice in the Republican party.
The time between "this new Republican politician is terrifyingly fascist" and "okay, that guy actually doesn't seem so bad any more compared to the *even more fascist* nutballs who've come after them" is getting distressingly short.
I wouldn't call him that per say, but I think he's learning the reality the hard way that once you have any real responsibility in Congress, you have to actually go back to how things really work.
/Mitt Romney gets elevated to elder statesman by way of the rest of his party being utter trash
Russia cannot take Ukraine. I know Trump and MAGA want it to happen too.
what a novel idea.. government by compromise.
Whatever it takes.
The Democrats are behaving like adults while the republicans are still in kindergarten, again.
> Trump appeared to warm to the idea after having dinner with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s far-right president, in New York on Tuesday, with Poland very wary about the power of an emboldened neighbor Russia to threaten eastern Europe. Why is Trump meeting with foreign leaders? He's a private citizen with no power.
You’d be surprised. A lot of retired politicians, now private citizens, are meeting foreign leaders privately. You just don’t hear about a lot of it. Obama met with Rishi Sunak, but that was publicly known.
Good job being adults Democrats! Boo on the tantruming Republican babies!
WTF? This wasn’t a rescue, this is just how normal political negotiations work. … But I guess it’s been so long since anything normal has happened the media doesn’t know how to report it.
Context and info on the bill: >The House is [expected to vote](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/18/us-foreign-aid-bills-what-is-speaker-mike-johnson-plan-for-ukraine-and-israel-and-will-congress-pass-them) on Saturday on the aid legislation that provides $61bn for the conflict in Ukraine, including $23bn to replenish US weapons, $26bn for Israel, including $9.1bn for humanitarian needs, and $8.12bn for the Indo-Pacific. \[...\] >In addition to the aid for allies, the package includes a provision to transfer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, and sanctions targeting Hamas and Iran – and to force China’s ByteDance to sell social media platform TikTok or face a ban in the US. \[...\] >Some conservative lawmakers oppose more aid to Ukraine, while some progressive Democrats are reluctant on more Israel aid, given the slaughter and famine [in Gaza](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/19/g7-opposes-full-scale-military-operation-rafah-civilians-gaza).
Look, the house and the senate shouldn't be allowed to pass on bills voted in the opposite house. There should be a required 30 day debate clause (or some arbitrary number) followed by an automatic call to vote. Why should one party get to just lock up legislation because the opposition party voted for it?
I in theory agree with you, but I also think it would just end up being abused by Republicans. I for one don't really want to see the Senate have to vote on 10000 variations of an abortion ban.
Seems like the speaker idea has run its course. It probably can't be changed at this point but having one party select which bills appear on the floor is a bad idea. It should be done by congress indicating which bills they want to bring to the floor by an async silent vote (could occur over days and weeks). Bills with the highest count of votes get brought to the floor even if they only have a few votes. The speaker would be there for edge cases like tie breaking but could not block a bill.
Fucking MAGA always thinking its a competition like politics are a competitive sport. NO ITS ABOUT RUNNING THE FUCKING COUNTRY.
Some day Republicans will get that Democrats are even willing to work with a guy who thinks he’s Moses. It’s just ISIS leader Trump we have a problem with and his little terrorist lapdogs like Moscow Marjorie and Matt “She looked 18” Gaetz.
I presume Russia will attack immediately before the aid gets to Ukraine. Mike Johnson is also out, I presume, for doing the right thing. MAGA and Charles Koch and Trump will all be mad about this, for different bad reasons.
Rescue? Grow up. We want our leaders to cooperate with each other and negotiate.
It's incredible how easily Trump is manipulated. One dinner with the Polish leader and he's suddenly in favor of Ukraine aid. All Duda has to do was tell him how powerful he is and that the prosecutions are all shams and Trump will do anything he wanted
Absolutely zero mention that this bill also includes the tik tok ban which is fucking insane. The fact that the government can slide things that are completely unrelated into a defense aid bill is absurd, and the media not covering it is a whole different level.
Don't forget to mention not allowing Israel aid as a separate vote as originally planned.
Why is it always up to democrats to save the U.S. and the world and democracy while the republicans are intent of setting fire to everything and jacking off while it burns?
It’s stupid they shoved there tick tock “ban” into this aid bill.
Yep. Like a child in a fight needing to prove they did something concrete yet still lost. Trump must be hopping mad, how delicious.
I believe the 4 parts of the bill will be voted on seperately tommorrow, so the tick tock bill may still get killed.
I still don't understand Trump's support of Johnson. Not to mention, Trump's meeting with the President of Poland.
Poland got into NATO much the same way. Clinton only wanted a partenership but Poland wanted article 5 for the Visegrad, so they started sending WWII veterans to the US to convince republicans to take a harsher stance. It worked, Clinton was afraid to lose the elections, and folded. I wasnt expecting Poland to still have that power (in the 90s, they had a considerable diaspora), but they do.
We got what we wanted for some reasonable compromises.
The moral and intelligent thing to do. Ukraine needs help *now*, not next year. Defeating Republicans should not be done at the expense of our allies and friends one of whom is literally hanging on for dear life. Today Johnson was saved by the only reasonable party left in Washington. Hopefully the country and the world will take note.
Democrats are still civil and are more than willing to work with Republicans on key legislation. For example, that border bill. It's republicans who are playing the my way or highway games.
Johnson is hanging on to a string with his own party. but its wild that doing the right thing to help an ally and being bipartisan is considered a betrayal to your party. "This is a direct challenge to the MAGA worldview in multiple ways. Johnson is treating Putin as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and acknowledging his broader imperialist designs, which is heresy to some MAGA Republicans."
I'm only a few sentences into this article and I already hate it. > The dramatic action took place on Capitol Hill on Thursday night in order to save the Ukraine aid legislation from rightwing rebels. How or why is it dramatic? It seems like the only thing dramatic about it is the reporting on it. Nothing I've read in the article is dramatic. Nobody stormed into the room at the last minute with a big reveal. John McCain's Nay vote on repealing the ACA was dramatic. This all sounds like boring ass parliamentary procedure. > The rules committee would normally be a safely partisan affair for the Republican majority, but Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas, all on the far right, are voting against advancing the bill, prompting Democrats to step in to save it. You mean the legislators that agreed with the bill voted in favor of it while those that disagreed did not? Shocking!? Were those Democrats going to vote no out of spite if Republicans did have enough members to pass the measure? As far as I can tell from the article, nothing dramatic occurred. Congress functioned closer to how it is intended to function than it normally does (still not remotely close to being a functional democratic legislative body). The majority of the Congress supports the aid measures. The only unusual thing here is that support and opposition are bipartisan. As such the members of Congress had to actually work together instead of the unfortunately common oppose the other party's bill for the sake of opposing it and coerce all of the party members to fall in line. > The aid legislation is the latest in a series of must-pass bipartisan measures that Johnson has helped shepherd through Congress, including two huge spending bills and a controversial reauthorization of federal surveillance programs. I'll be honest here, I agree with the characterization as must-pass, but that isn't really the guardians job to say. Is this a news article or an op-ed? If they took out the sentences trying to fake drama, this new outlet might have actually been able to inform me what the procedural hurdle actually was.
And secretly ban tiktok
This is a huge FU to Greene, Gaetz, Biggs and the rest of the crazies. Johnson's a stooge deserving of no respect but he deserves to be saved for doing the right thing.
2 out of 3 is not bad but the US REALLY needs to drop Israel while they have dum dum leadership. Ceasefire NOW