#because someone in the senate would filibuster any abortion bill

[theinsidiousdice]

Useful Information to Know about the Labyrinthine Hellscape that is the American Political and Governmental System

Disclaimer: I am not a political scientist and I am not a historian. I am just someone whose special interest some years back was politics. I am trying to present this information in a way that is both helpful and not condescending. The operative word there is "trying". I am not trying to convince anyone of anything, I am not trying to tell you you should or should not be angry at x or y politician, I just want to make sure people know what is and is not true. The information here represents the state of things currently (ie, January 2024), and is thus very different in some places than how things were in, for example, 2008.

Onto the show.

THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH

The Senate, as it currently stands, has a baked-in advantage to Republicans. This is because the Senate has equal representation per state, and more states, numbers-wise, are Republican.

The Senate is the body that can change the number of justices on the Supreme Court. The president cannot do this.

One of the reasons the Senate has not done this is because it would require 60 votes to break a potential filibuster.

The reason the Senate has not done a lot of things is because it would require 60 votes to break a potential filibuster. For example, abortion protection and LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not true for every vote in the Senate, but it is true for most, if not all, new legislation.

The last time any party had 60 votes in the Senate was for roughly 5 months in 2009-10. The Democrats had 58 votes, plus 2 independent senators who voted with them.

The Affordable Care Act was passed at this time.

The most recent time before that that either party had 60 senators was in the 1970s, to illustrate what a monumental task that is.

The filibuster has shifted from an actual act that someone has to do to simply a threat over time.

Removing the filibuster would require a simple majority vote in the Senate.

Doing so would require, in the current Senate, 50 senators + the VP tiebreaking.

The Democrats have 48 senators currently, plus 2 senators who caucus with them. (Sinema is a weird case, but basically she is not a reliable Democratic vote, especially not after leaving the party.)

At least one of those senators will not vote to remove the filibuster. This senator is Joe Manchin, who represents a very very Republican state.

The House of Representatives, as it currently stands, also has a baked-in advantage to Republicans. This is because the number of representatives is allocated by population BUT there's a cap on the number of representatives, meaning that since every district has to have a representative, the smaller-population states have more representatives relative to their size than the bigger states.

Smaller-population states are, currently, overwhelmingly Republican.

The number of seats in the House was frozen in the 1920s.

Expanding the House would require a new law, which would have to pass both the House and the Senate. Republicans will not help with this, since the current system favors them.

For a bill to pass, it needs to make it through the House, the Senate, and the President. Ideally, it also would then need to stand scrutiny by the Supreme Court.

Effectively, in our current political climate, this means all but the most basic of bills require a party having full control of the government - president, both legislative houses, and the supreme court.

The last time the Democrats had full control of the government was in the 1960s. (See below section.)

THE SUPREME COURT

The Supreme Court has not had a Democratic advantage since 1969.

With the polarization of today's court, this functionally means that just about anything that Republicans don't like can be struck down in court.

Examples of this include Roe v Wade and student debt forgiveness.

Justices typically are only replaced when they die or retire.

New justices are proposed by the president, then voted on by the Senate and require a simple majority.

In today's political climate, this means that a party has to control the presidency and the Senate to appoint new justices.

The Senate is the body that can expand the size of the Supreme Court, not the President.

Because the Senate and the Presidency (see below) have Republican advantages baked in, and the Senate and the Presidency are both required for the nomination of Supreme Court justices, the Supreme Court also has a baked-in Republican advantage.

THE PRESIDENT

The president is not all-powerful.

With the exception of executive orders, pretty much everything else has to make it through the other branches of government.

Executive orders only apply to the operations of the federal government.

Executive orders can also be overturned by the Supreme Court. (See student debt forgiveness.)

The presidency has a Republican advantage baked in via the Electoral College.

The Electoral College has a Republican advantage in our current political climate for the same reasons the House of Representatives does - it's governed by population but has a cap and a floor, giving outsized influence to smaller states.

OTHER

Every state has their own political system. Most of them are similar, but they all have their unique quirks.

Political gerrymandering - creating the districts in one's state to benefit one's own party - is legal, which was decided fairly recently by the Supreme Court (which currently is Republican).

Political gerrymandering directly impacts the elections for the House of Representatives, as well as the state-level House and Senate races as applicable.

Political gerrymandering indirectly impacts all other elections - if you believe your vote doesn't matter because your district is gerrymandered, you are more likely to not vote, which impacts elections for governor and other state-wide races.

Racial gerrymandering is illegal, but proving that a particular district map is racially gerrymandered and not politically gerrymandered is difficult at best. (See the North Carolina legislature's various defenses for their gerrymandering.)

The last time a third-party candidate for president got above 5% of the national vote was in 1996, when the Reform Party candidate, Ross Perot, got 8.4% of the national vote.

The time before that was 1992, with Ross Perot (again).

The times before that were 1980 and 1968.

1968 is also the most recent time a 3rd party candidate got *any* electoral votes for president.

In 2020, the total percentage for all 3rd-party candidates was 1.85% (1.18% Libertarians, 0.26% Greens)

In 2016, the total percentage for all 3rd-party candidates was 5.19% (3.28% Libertarians, 1.07% Greens)

In my lifetime, the presidential elections that 3rd-party candidates have had a significant impact (meaning that had the people who voted for a 3rd party instead voted for the major party that is closest to the 3rd party views-wise, the election would have swung to the losing candidate) have been: 2016 (Green Party votes in several swing states going instead to the Democrats would have made the Republicans lose the presidency) and 2000 (famously, Green Party votes in Florida going instead to the Democrats would have made the Republicans lose the presidency). There's debate about the 1992 election, but the major 3rd-party candidate for president that year, Ross Perot, pulled from both parties equally.

I also know that someone voting for a 3rd party in no way guarantees that they would have chosen to vote for the closest party ideologically if the 3rd-party candidate weren't in the race.

Read 13 again. I know this. Do not tell me this.

3rd-party candidates have, however, had considerably more success at the local level.

Local level politics are WAY more important than most people realize.

So are the primaries.

Please vote in your local, municipal, state-wide, and primary elections, especially if you subscribe to affecting change via electoral politics.

Okay, this ended up a lot longer than I expected. I hope you find this useful and not condescending (I really tried, I promise). Go in peace.

[triviallytrue]

what if the democrats proposed a law codifying right to abortion only in specific citcumstances in which almost everyone supports the right to abortion? would that pass?

Hmm, so my understanding is that you need 60 votes to get through the Senate unless you're doing budget reconciliation shenanigans, and it just seems very hard to get 10 republicans to support any law on abortion. The way around this would probably be to pick up a few more senate seats, nuke the filibuster, and then pass with 50 votes.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Because Republicans in the U.S. Senate changed the rules last year to prevent the filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination, President Trump can basically appoint anyone he wants to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on Wednesday — Trump doesn’t need a single Democratic yea vote to reach a majority. Instead, the operative question is this: Will any Republican vote against Trump’s choice?

That’s a difficult question to answer before Trump makes his pick; presumably some Republicans would balk at an extreme enough nominee, either ideologically or personally. But I think it’s likely that Trump will select another figure in the vein of his first Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch — someone who has clear and deep conservative credentials but doesn’t have a long record of politically-charged rhetoric, like (for example) publicly saying, “I will vote to strike down Roe v. Wade.” So let’s assume that kind of pick and look at the process from there.

First, let’s say all 49 Democrats1 oppose Trump’s pick. That’s not at all a given — remember that Democrats Joe Donnelly (Indiana), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia) all voted for Gorsuch last year; others red-state Democrats, particularly Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, may also feel like they can’t buck Trump this close to the election. But we want to focus on the Republicans for now..

In theory, Republicans, with 51 seats, can afford one defection and have Vice President Mike Pence case the tie-breaking vote. In practice, however, remember that Arizona Sen. John McCain, suffering from brain cancer, has not been in Washington for months. So if McCain doesn’t vote and it’s the 99 remaining senators, then 49 Democrats plus one Republican could stop this nomination.

So one big question is this: If Republicans needed another vote for this new justice, would McCain, if he couldn’t make it back to Washington, resign, thereby allowing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, to appoint his replacement? I would assume a Ducey pick would back Trump’s nomination.

Aside from McCain’s health, it’s worth thinking about five other Senate Republicans in particular: Maine’s Susan Collins, Tennessee’s Bob Corker, Arizona’s Jeff Flake, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse. That group, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score, represents five of the eight GOP members who have opposed the president’s position in congressional votes most often.

How often GOP senators vote with Trump’s position

As of June 27, 2018

Senator State Trump Score Rand Paul Kentucky 74.6 Susan M. Collins Maine 79.7 Mike Lee Utah 82.4 John McCain Arizona 83.0 Lisa Murkowski Alaska 83.6 Jeff Flake Arizona 84.3 Bob Corker Tennessee 84.7 Ben Sasse Nebraska 87.7 Lindsey Graham South Carolina 89.2 John Kennedy Louisiana 89.2 Steve Daines Montana 89.2 Michael B. Enzi Wyoming 90.5 James E. Risch Idaho 90.5 Patrick J. Toomey Pennsylvania 91.5 Mike Crapo Idaho 91.8 Joni Ernst Iowa 91.9 Ron Johnson Wisconsin 91.9 James Lankford Oklahoma 91.9 Chuck Grassley Iowa 91.9 Cory Gardner Colorado 91.9 Ted Cruz Texas 91.9 Dean Heller Nevada 91.9 Tom Cotton Arkansas 93.2 Mike Rounds South Dakota 93.2 Deb Fischer Nebraska 93.2 John Barrasso Wyoming 93.2 Richard Burr North Carolina 94.4 Lamar Alexander Tennessee 94.4 Dan Sullivan Alaska 94.4 Jerry Moran Kansas 94.5 David Perdue Georgia 94.5 Rob Portman Ohio 94.6 Bill Cassidy Louisiana 94.6 James M. Inhofe Oklahoma 94.6 Todd Young Indiana 94.6 Johnny Isakson Georgia 94.7 Thom Tillis North Carolina 95.9 Richard C. Shelby Alabama 95.9 John Thune South Dakota 95.9 Tim Scott South Carolina 95.9 Mitch McConnell Kentucky 95.9 Shelley Moore Capito West Virginia 95.9 Roy Blunt Missouri 97.3 John Hoeven North Dakota 97.3 Pat Roberts Kansas 97.3 John Boozman Arkansas 97.3 Orrin G. Hatch Utah 97.3 Roger F. Wicker Mississippi 97.3 John Cornyn Texas 97.3 Marco Rubio Florida 97.3 Cindy Hyde-Smith Mississippi 100.0

The other three are McCain, as well as Utah’s Mike Lee and Kentucky’s Rand Paul, both of whom have, at times, opposed GOP initiatives from the right. They are very unlikely to try to block a fairly conservative Supreme Court justice. Why not? Because they are likely to line up ideologically with a conservative pick, and because they are believed to have presidential aspirations of their own and wouldn’t want to annoy the party base, which cares deeply about judicial nominations.

Let’s dispense quickly with Sasse, who has sharply criticized the president, but almost exclusively for his tone,2 particularly Trump’s tweets and attacks on the press. I think it’s fairly unlikely that Sasse, who also seems to have presidential ambitions, will block a conservative Supreme Court justice.

Corker and Flake are more interesting. Both are retiring at the end of this term, so have little to fear from the Republican base. Both have been sharply critical of the president in the past and not just on tone: The two senators are right now strongly attacking Trump over his tariff policies. Flake is even threatening to withhold his votes for other Trump initiatives over the tariffs, so the Supreme Court pick gives him more leverage. But here’s the thing: Corker and Flake are fairly conservative on a wide range of issues. In terms of abortion (Trump’s pick is almost guaranteed to be anti-abortion), both have traditionally opposed abortion rights and both backed an anti-Planned Parenthood provision last year.

Instead, I think Collins and Murkowski are the ones watch. They voted against that Planned Parenthood provision and have opposed a number of anti-abortion measures in Congress.

They also, of course, joined Democrats (and McCain) in killing the “skinny repeal” of Obamacare that the GOP hoped to pass last year, so they have shown the gumption to buck Trump with the world watching and a major political victory at stake. Electorally, they may have some freedom too — Collins is not up for reelection until 2020 and represents a Democratic-leaning state, while Murkowski is not on the ballot till 2022.

Ultimately, a conservative pick to replace Kennedy is a huge priority for the Republican Party — and Collins and Murkowski will be under immense pressure to back whomever Trump chooses, even if he or she is an ardent opponent of abortion rights. It’s just hard to imagine any Republicans in the Senate joining with Democrats to block Trump’s nominee, unless that person is found to have some kind of personal scandal. Such a vote would virtually guarantee the offending GOP senator a primary challenge in their next election — and likely a challenge with strong support from the party base.

But I wonder if the more moderate members, either privately or publicly, are able to constrain Trump in the nomination process, pushing him to pick someone who is likely to vote like Kennedy and Roberts (meaning mostly with the conservatives but not always), instead of a justice in the mold of Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas or Gorsuch, who are more conservative? Someone who might be hesitant to strike down Roe vs. Wade or rule in favor of a broad exemption for religious people who want to avoid offering services to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender Americans.

In other words, the most important fight over this nomination will likely be during Trump’s selection process, not during the confirmation hearings or the votes, when I suspect party loyalty will outweigh other concerns about the nominee, particularly for Republicans. Are the red-state Democrats and the more moderate Republicans able to push Trump to pick a more centrist person — or are they basically ignored in the process and dared to vote against whomever the president wants? I strongly expect the latter, both because the more centrist members of the Senate seem to have little influence in Washington and because Trump has not shown much inclination to bend to the will of the more moderate members of his party.

If the past 18 months have been any indication, expect some complaining from senators such as Collins and Flake about how partisan this nomination process is — and then for them to vote Trump’s way.

[patriotsnet]

Why Are Republicans Against The Era

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-republicans-against-the-era/

Why Are Republicans Against The Era

Republican Governors Revolt Against Cdc Mask Guidance

Bill Maher explains why intelligent people vote Republican

Republican governors are rejecting new mask recommendations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued Tuesday, casting the health guidance as a step back amid a push to vaccinate millions of Americans that is already struggling in their states.

In statements and public comments, governors said their states would not return to the mask orders issued in 2020.

“The CDC’s new guidance suggesting that vaccinated people wear masks indoors flies in the face of the public health goals that should guide the agency’s decision making,” Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said in a statement. “The State of Nebraska will not be adopting their mask guidance.”

“Public health officials in Arizona and across the country have made it clear that the best protection against COVID-19 is the vaccine. Today’s announcement by the CDC will unfortunately only diminish confidence in the vaccine and create more challenges for public health officials – people who have worked tirelessly to increase vaccination rates,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement.

Newly revised guidance from the Atlanta-based agency recommends that some fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors if they live in areas where the virus is spreading rapidly.

Most of Nevada, Utah and Wyoming are areas of high concern. So are parts of California, much of Indiana and Kentucky, and eastern swaths of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Video: CDC Reverses Mask Guidelines

CNBC

President Truman Integrates The Troops: 1948

Fast forward about sixty shitty years. Black people are still living in segregation under Jim Crow. Nonetheless, African Americans agree to serve in World War II.

At wars end, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, used an Executive Order to integrate the troops.

These racist Southern Democrats got so mad that their chief goblin, Senator Strom Thurmond, decided to run for President against Truman. They called themselves the Dixiecrats.

Of course, he lost. Thurmond remained a Democrat until 1964. He continued to oppose civil rights as a Democrat. He gave the longest filibuster in Senate history speaking for 24 hours against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

House Votes To Reauthorize Violence Against Women Act Despite Gop Opposition

WASHINGTON The House on Thursday passed an extension of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections for survivors of domestic violence, and includes new gun-related provisions that are opposed by the NRA.

Lawmakers approved the bill in a 263-158 vote, with most Republicans voting against it.

The measure, which expired in February, was sponsored by Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa. The bill today, which would extend the law for five years, includes new provisions that would make it harder for domestic abusers to gain access to guns.

Those include an attempt to close the so-called ‘boyfriend’ loophole, prohibiting those convicted of stalking or abusing individuals with whom they have been in a relationship that did not include marriage from buying a gun.

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Lawsuit Regarding Deadline Extension

On December 23, 1981, a federal district court, in the case of Idaho v. Freeman, ruled that the extension of the ERA ratification deadline to June 30, 1982 was not valid, and that ERA had actually expired from state legislative consideration more than two years earlier on the original expiration date of March 22, 1979. On January 25, 1982, however, the U.S. Supreme Courtstayed the lower court’s decision, thus signaling to the legislatures of still-unratified states that they may continue consideration of ERA during their spring 1982 legislative sessions.

After the disputed June 30, 1982, extended deadline had come and gone, the Supreme Court, at the beginning of its new term, on October 4, 1982, in the separate case of NOW v. Idaho, 459 U.S. 809 , vacated the federal district court decision in Idaho v. Freeman, which, in addition to declaring March 22, 1979, as ERA’s expiration date, had upheld the validity of state rescissions. The Supreme Court declared these controversies moot on the grounds that the ERA had not received the required number of ratifications , so that “the Amendment has failed of adoption no matter what the resolution of the legal issues presented here.”

Emergence Of New Conservatism

The relief programs included in FDRs New Deal earned overwhelming popular approval, launching an era of Democratic dominance that would last for most of the next 60 years. Between 1932 and 1980, Republicans won only four presidential elections and had a Congressional majority for only four years.

Though the centrist Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president from 1953 to 1961, actively supported equal rights for women and African Americans, a conservative resurgence led to Barry Goldwaters nomination as president in 1964, continued with Richard Nixons ill-fated presidency and reached its culmination with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The South saw a major political sea change starting after World War II, as many white Southerners began migrating to the GOP due to their opposition to big government, expanded labor unions and Democratic support for civil rights, as well as conservative Christians opposition to abortion and other culture war issues.

Meanwhile, many black voters, who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since the Civil War, began voting Democratic after the Depression and the New Deal.

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Hayden Rider And Protective Labor Legislation

In 1950 and 1953, the ERA was passed by the Senate with a provision known as “the Hayden rider”, introduced by Arizona senator Carl Hayden. The Hayden rider added a sentence to the ERA to keep special protections for women: “The provisions of this article shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or exemptions now or hereafter conferred by law upon persons of the female sex.” By allowing women to keep their existing and future special protections, it was expected that the ERA would be more appealing to its opponents. Though opponents were marginally more in favor of the ERA with the Hayden rider, supporters of the original ERA believed it negated the amendment’s original purposeâcausing the amendment not to be passed in the House.

ERA supporters were hopeful that the second term of President Dwight Eisenhower would advance their agenda. Eisenhower had publicly promised to “assure women everywhere in our land equality of rights,” and in 1958, Eisenhower asked a joint session of Congress to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the first president to show such a level of support for the amendment. However, the National Woman’s Party found the amendment to be unacceptable and asked it to be withdrawn whenever the Hayden rider was added to the ERA.

Democrats V Republicans On Jim Crow

Segregation and Jim Crow lasted for 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

During this time, African Americans were largely disenfranchised. There was no African-American voting bloc. Neither party pursued civil rights policies it wasnt worth their while.

Democrats dominated Southern politics throughout the Jim Crow Era. Its fair to say that Democratic governors and legislatures are responsible for creating and upholding white supremacist policies.

Southern Democrats were truly awful.

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Why Are So Many Republicans Refusing Vaccination Because Russia Is Telling Them To

What is the difference between doubt and distrust? Doubt can be overcome by evidence. Distrust cannot.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine has now become completely politicized in the USA. Among Democrats, 93% report that theyve already gotten at least one shot or are likely to, compared with only 49% of Republicans.

Why so much refusal to vaccinate among the GOP? Because theyre being targeted by a deliberate campaign of disinformation. Science denial isnt a mistake, its a purposeful lie.

Despite ample data that the vaccines are safe, false stories circulate on the internet claiming that scientists are lying to us, that the vaccines can make you infertile, that they contain microchips, that they can alter your DNA. Do these worries arise organically? Maybe some do. But such disinformation is often intentionally created to serve someones financial, political or ideological interests.

Among those with something to gain is the Russian government, which is diligently working to undermine confidence in the vaccines as part of its goal of destabilizing American society. It has been spreading misinformation for years on a host of other virus-related topics, including flu and Ebola. From there, its a short hop to having their message amplified by conspiracy-embracing, right-wing media, whether witting or not, and by the soulless churn of algorithms on social media.

But can it work with strangers?

Why Do Republicans Hate Everyone

BATRA’S BURNING QUESTION PERIOD: Memo to Trudeau: Why do you hate Canada? Where’s the budget?

In fairness, the question should be: Why does the extreme right-wing;hate everybody? The majority of republicans are just as friendly as your average floundering democrat. In reality-tv-obsessed America, however, the people who yell the loudest and say the most outlandish things are those who make the news and get elected President.

With that in mind, we can still generally answer the question: Why do republicans seem to hate everybody?

Lesson one: look to history. There are countless periods in political history in which we find anger-driven uprisings against all things other by the right-wing. Every time the economy swung in favor of the wealthy and against the average worker, the right-wing increased its political power by blaming The Other: Irish, Italians, African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, even alcohol. Today that blame is targeted at Mexico and predominantly Muslim nations.

Same problems, different scapegoats. Assigning blame is the easiest way out of complex situations especially for the simple-minded. Assigning blame is also the shortest path to a culture of hate.

Like chanting, hate is a infectious. It spreads like a cancer and a wave in a stadium. As a result of decades of fear-mongering on right-wing media combined with GOP election strategies of encouraging blame and;disgust;of the opposition, hate has become a permanent motivator in;republican brain function.

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Why A Republican Who Co

By: Ned Oliver– February 21, 2019 6:19 pm

Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment rallied at the Capitol in Richmond earlier this year.

The Equal Rights Amendment only needed two Republican votes to pass the House of Delegates.

And two Republican delegates signed on as co-patrons to the ratification resolution that passed the Senate, where the chief sponsor was also a Republican.

So what happened?

After the ERA failed in subcommittee, where four or five members of the majority party can kill legislation, the only way it could get a full vote on the floor of the House was through a rules change.

Thats what Democrats tried; twice on Thursday. But when it comes to procedural votes, the Republican caucus is known for toeing the party line.

I dont believe that we change the rules in the middle of the game, said Del. Roxann Robinson, R-Chesterfield, one of the two Republican ERA co-sponsors with Del. Chris Stolle, R-Virginia Beach.

Thats the bottom line. Bills live and die here all the time, and when your bill doesnt go the way you want it, you dont just change the rules to make it happen.

Does she consider her votes to be against the ERA?

I voted against the rules change, she said. Definitely I voted against the rules change.

Whether voters appreciate that distinction in November remains to be seen, but political observers say they doubt it.

Robinson and Stolle also face uphill battles, with Kaine winning their districts by 10 and six points respectively.

Which Came First: Republican Hate Or Gop Misinformation

Hate is a great motivator. All political parties have used it to get out the vote. Generally, those who seek elected office shape information in a way that helps a certain voting block hate their opponent. Thats how we elect people in America. That is a sad reality we just have to accept in order to fix it. Hope doesnt fix it.

Whats unique and new about negative politics in the post-Obama era is that we have this thing called the Internet and dare I acknowledge itSocial Media. ;Social media has completely isolated the Republican Party base. The Internet and social media have created hard-edged, isolated buckets of information where facts dont matteragreement;and emotion matter. For republicans, agreement with their own bias is considered fact, whereas disagreement is a lie they literally transform reality to support their own opinion: the Post-Truth Era. In order to maintain that alternate reality, they have to hate those who dont agree, otherwise their reality bubble starts to break apart.

This is the case on both sides of the aisle, but the hardliners have taken it to a new level, which is why they seem to hate everything. Theyre even taught to hate things that help them like the ACA, unions, and public education.

Social media and 1000 cable channels dont increase the information we receive they focus the information and repeat it 1000 times more often. Anything can become the truth when its repeated enough times.

Recommended Reading: What Caused Republicans To Gain Power In Congress In 1938?

Us District Court Lawsuit Supporting Ratification

On January 30, 2020, the attorneys general of Virginia, Illinois and Nevada filed a lawsuit to require the Archivist of the United States to “carry out his statutory duty of recognizing the complete and final adoption” of the ERA as the Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution.On February 19, 2020, the States of Alabama, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee moved to intervene in the case. On March 10, 2020, the Plaintiff States filed a memorandum in opposition to the 5 states seeking to intervene. On May 7, 2020, the DOJ filed a motion to dismiss, claiming the states do not have standing to bring the case to trial as they have to show any “concrete injury”, nor that the case was ripe for review.

On June 12, 2020, the District Court granted the Intervening states motion to intervene in the case. On March 5, 2021, federal judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the ratification period for the ERA “expired long ago” and that three states’ recent ratifications had come too late to be counted in the amendment’s favor. The plaintiffs said they will consider their options, including appealing this ruling. On May 3, 2021, the plaintiff states appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Mcconnell Walks Back Language About Stopping Biden Administration

Finally, on free market philosophy, Trump completely upended the way Republicans talk about the relationship between government and the economy.

Prior to Trump, the partys closest thing to a guiding light among members were then-Rep. Paul Ryans budgets, which called for partially privatizing Medicare, lowering tax rates and slashing overall spending. Tea party grassroots activists often took their cue from more libertarian-minded thinkers like Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman from Texas, who played up the beauty of the free market. They opposed barriers to trade, hated bailouts and subsidies, and looked down on the takers” who wanted the government to finance their lifestyle.

In fact, just one cycle before Trumps first run, a popular conservative take was that the working class paid too little in taxes relative to the rich a position illustrated by the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, and his famous .

While Trumps administration tended toward conservative orthodoxy, his message to voters frequently undermined it. He promised not to mess with entitlements. He threatened individual companies whose CEOs crossed him and slapped tariffs on imports. He boosted spending and said it was a good time to borrow.

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House Republicans Vote Against Equal Rights For Women

A House resolution removing the ratification deadline for the Equal Rights Amendment passed Thursday with just five GOP votes.

Nearly every House Republican voted against a resolution that could help ratify the Equal Rights Amendment on Thursday, citing a litany of excuses not to enshrine equality on the basis of sex in the Constitution.

The House of Representatives voted, 232 to 183, for a resolution to remove the 1982 deadline for states to ratify the ERA. Five Republicans joined all 227 Democrats present in voting for the measure; 182 Republicans and a conservative independent voted against.

During Thursday’s floor debate, some Republicans said they opposed the resolution on constitutional grounds, but many argued against the Equal Rights Amendment on its merits.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner warned that banning discrimination would mean women could no longer enjoy discounts. “Girls get substantially lower rates on auto insurance because they’re better drivers,” he said, adding that, with a constitutional ban on sex discrimination, such advantages “would become unconstitutional and girls are going to have to pay boy-drivers’ rates for auto insurance.”

Sensenbrenner also said that, although women “live longer than men,” women would also have to pay more for life insurance than they do now.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler said the ERA “would not bring women any more rights than they currently have right now.”

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Proposed Removal Of Ratification Deadline

On March 8, 2011, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, Representative Tammy Baldwin introduced legislation to remove the congressionally imposed deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The resolution had 56 cosponsors. The resolution was referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution by the House Committee on the Judiciary. The Subcommittee failed to vote on the resolution, and as such, the resolution died in subcommittee when the 112th Congress ended in January 2013. On March 22, 2012, the 40th anniversary of the ERA’s congressional approval, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin introduced âwhich is worded with slight differences from Representative Baldwin’s . Senator Cardin was joined by seventeen other senators who cosponsored the Senate Joint Resolution. The resolution was referred to Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where a vote on it was never brought. The resolution, therefore, died in committee when the 112th Congress ended in January 2013.

On February 24, 2013, the New Mexico House of Representatives adopted House Memorial No. 7 asking that the congressionally imposed deadline for ERA ratification be removed. House Memorial No. 7 was officially received by the U.S. Senate on January 6, 2014, was designated as “POM-175”, was referred to the Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary, and was published verbatim in the Congressional Record at page S24.

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[prolifeproliberty]

What inspired you to start a pro life blog and dedicate your time and energy to helping people? I am pro life myself, and I don't mean to sound rude, forgive me if I do, only wondering if you've had personal experience here or felt God call you to minister in this way.

I started blogging about pro-life issues in 2013. The big turning point for me was when Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who is pro-abortion, filibustered for 11 hours against state legislation to regulate abortion facilities. 

I had been on Tumblr for a couple years, but I had always stayed out of politics. When I started seeing stuff on my dashboard about Wendy Davis, and realized a lot of people I followed were supporting her, it kind of woke me up. I did some research into the bill and started engaging people in discussion over the bill and abortion in general.

Now, I didn’t have the extensive pro-life apologetics training that I would later receive from multiple pro-life organizations, so my early arguments were awkward at best. But the more I engaged people on the issue, the more I realized how necessary it was. As I received training on pro-life apologetics and tested arguments on tumblr (I always say that if you want to find the weaknesses in a pro-life argument, just post it on tumblr and the pro-choice people here will find them), I got better at defending the pro-life viewpoint. 

Early on, I saw a lot of pro-choice people talking about women “needing” abortion because of a lack of resources. I knew there had to be resources out there, so I did some research and compiled a list. That was when I started to really get reactions, both from pro-life people who cheered me on and from pro-choice people who attacked me. 

There were two other incidents that solidified my determination to keep this blog running.

One was someone who followed me and who I’d interacted with a few times. One day he messaged me and told me that, partially due to my posts, he had not only become pro-life, but questioned all of his other beliefs and radically changed from a liberal to a conservative on basically all issues. I was kind of amazed by this, and I learned that yes, it is possible for people to change their minds on idealogical issues because of tumblr. 

The other was a woman who chose life. By this point I had offered pregnancy resources for several people who came to me for help. I often don’t hear back from them, and sometimes i don’t know if they chose life. This woman told me that she chose life because of a link I posted to Tiny Blue Lines, a blog about a woman’s journey through an unintended pregnancy. The person who messaged me had read the blog and chosen life for her own preborn child because of it. She contacted me a year later to thank me for posting the link, and to tell me about her little boy who had been born a few months earlier. 

That not only encouraged me, hearing that someone had chosen life because of something I posted, but also challenged me to really think about how any given post I make could influence someone’s life or death decision for their child. 

Those are the two stories that I look back to when I’m discouraged by anon hate or by difficult discussions with pro-choice people. They’re also the two stories I tell people when they ask me why in the world I would willingly debate people on the internet :)

[sneaksite]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://news.yahoo.com/major-gop-nightmare-moves-step-083244975.html

[weopenviews]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/386ZsAZ

[itssquidwarsjournal]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/386ZsAZ

[newslegendry]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/386ZsAZ

http://newslegendry.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-major-gop-nightmare-moves-step-closer.html

[7newx1]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Alabama may have just elected its first Democratic senator in 25 years, but the legislators in the chamber who feel most emboldened may sit on the Republican side of the aisle. By narrowing the Republican majority, Doug Jones’s arrival further empowers Republicans who are willing to break with the party to kill or force changes to legislation and block nominations that they disagree with.

Jones’s election means that the Democrats go from 48 members to 49. That makes for a very large Senate minority, but one that Republicans can still override on legislation that only requires a simple majority to pass — like judicial nominations and bills that go through the reconciliation process. (The reconciliation process can only be used on fiscal issues, such as tax reform and the Obamacare repeals that the Senate considered earlier this year.) So Jones himself is not likely to be the swing senator. But now any two Republicans — not three, like before Jones was elected — can swing a vote against the GOP in the Senate.

The senators to watch: Well, there have been six instances this year in which a 50-50 Senate tally left Vice President Mike Pence to cast the tie-breaking vote. He has voted with the majority of Republicans all six times, allowing those provisions to pass.1

In five of those six instances (all but one that rolled back a regulation created by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), the two Republican “no” votes were Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. This is not surprising. Both senators are among the five Republicans who most often break with the Trump administration’s position according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score. (Collins is the GOP senator who votes against Republicans most often.) And of course, Collins and Murkowski were two key opponents of the GOP’s push to repeal Obamacare.

Once Jones is seated in the Senate (which could happen late this month or in early January) and the GOP is down to a 51-person majority, Republicans can afford to have Collins or Murkowski vote against a bill, but not both. That pair can tank legislation if they both join with the 49 Democrats in the Senate. Think about how a 49th Democrat would have changed, say, the debate on Obamacare repeal, which was voted down only because Arizona’s John McCain emerged, in a surprise, to join Collins and Murkowski in voting against it.

Also keep an eye on the possibility of Collins or Murkowski joining with Tennessee’s Bob Corker or Arizona’s Jeff Flake or McCain, the anti-Trump trio that has more political freedom than most members because none of them are likely to face Republican voters again. (Corker and Flake are retiring in 2018, and McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer.)

In addition, unique coalitions may arise because of the ways that specific issues affect a certain constituency. For example, two GOP senators from the same state can now take down legislation by allying with the Democrats. Or senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, who are both deeply conservative and occasionally aligned, might join together to block something.

The issues where Jones won’t have much impact: This new dynamic probably won’t affect the most pressing matter before the body — tax reform. Congressional Republicans are trying to push their tax legislation through before Jones is sworn in and have discussed scheduling a final vote next week. With Republican Sen. Luther Strange still representing Alabama in the meantime, Republicans can afford two “no” votes on the tax bill and still pass it. Corker right now seems to be the only GOP senator who’s very likely to oppose the legislation.

In theory, Jones does cause some challenges on taxes. Republicans now face intense time pressure to pass the bill before Jones is installed. Moving quickly on a bill this complicated is difficult under any circumstances, and now some of the members who have reservations — such as Florida’s Marco Rubio, along with Flake and Collins — might join with Corker to stall the legislation until Jones arrives. Once Jones is seated, the Republicans will have exactly 50 senators who back this bill. That would give every individual member huge leverage to demand concessions that favor their constituents or agenda. As yet, though, there have been no signs that these reluctant Republicans will stall the bill until Jones is seated.

Jones is unlikely to have a dramatic impact on other policies, either. Remember, most legislation in the Senate can be stopped via a filibuster, which can be sustained with just 40 senators, meaning Democrats have a lot of power already.

The issue where Jones really matters: Both federal judgeships and posts in the executive branch can be approved with just 51 votes (50 senators plus Pence), so this is where having one fewer Republican senator could have a major impact.

The Senate has not yet voted down any high-profile Trump nominees — but that is not because Republican senators always back Trump’s selections. In February, Trump’s scandal-plagued nominee for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, withdrew after several Senate Republicans signaled that they would vote against his confirmation. Betsy DeVos wouldn’t have become secretary of education without Pence’s tie-breaking vote. This week, two of the Trump administration’s nominees for federal district judgeships withdrew after it became clear that they were not likely to be confirmed by the Senate. With Jones in the Senate, I expect to see more instances where the Trump administration considers nominating someone but pulls back because it is not clear that person can be confirmed, or nominates someone but then withdraws the nomination after a couple of GOP senators say that they are not on board.

So it will be even harder for Trump to get people confirmed, particularly more controversial figures like DeVos. McCain, Corker and Flake, for instance, all have long resumes on foreign affairs and could well try to block whoever Trump nominates to replace Rex Tillerson, should the secretary of state step down in the next few months as expected. There are rumors that CIA Director Mike Pompeo could be tapped for the role, which would leave open another key position that can’t be filled without the Senate’s approval.

So Jones, who has fairly traditional Democratic stands on most issues, will come to Washington with great fanfare after his surprising election win. But he is unlikely to be in the center of the action on Capitol Hill. The senators to watch will be the same ones we’ve been following all year. Collins and Murkowski were already some of the most influential people in Washington. Now, they have even more power.