[pilowsky]

<outstanding>

[Chas_P]

awm, on 2021-January-24, 03:02, said:

But you won't get any significant number of Democrats admitting to any of the description above

Perhaps not. But I do remember Obama saying, "They cling to their Bibles and their guns." Granted one Democrat is not a "significant number", but Obama was a fairly "significant" Democrat. I also remember HRC's pronouncement about "a basket of deplorables". Perhaps not significant but in my view it signals the elites' view of ordinary Americans.

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

I’m seeing a lot of arguments right now about whether Democrats should eliminate the filibuster and move toward a majority-rules U.S. Senate. The main thing to understand about this is that the 60-vote Senate that’s been around since 2009 (and, to a lesser extent, since 1993) is unstable. It will not last.

Hardly any senators from either party appear interested in restoring the Senate that existed 30 or 40 years ago — a chamber that talked about the rights of individual senators, in which each senator was able to offer amendments and most things were decided by majority votes. Filibusters existed, but plenty of bills, amendments and nominations passed with fewer than 60 votes.

That system had a lot going for it. It encouraged compromise, but didn’t make passing most bills impossible. It gave narrow constituencies a chance to have their interests heard, because any senator could offer any bill as an amendment. And because amendments were easy to offer, senators would negotiate in order to prevent too many of them from dragging down major legislation. Whether that added up to ideal democracy or not is something that can be debated, but the Senate of the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t the older one, where filibusters were used mainly to preserve white supremacy against civil rights majorities.

Though the Senate has always been malapportioned, and that can’t be justified on any rational basis, and 1970s and 1980s senators were even less demographically diverse than senators now, at least the Senate of that era really did legislate and seemed to do a good job of representing its constituents.

Since then, Republicans decided to abuse the rules by establishing a 60-vote threshold for everything, a practice Democrats continued when they were in the majority. Both parties have made it impossible for most senators to offer amendments.

Want to save the filibuster in its previous form? That would take a Gang of 30 or more, evenly divided between the two parties, all agreeing to vote to restrict debate on most bills, allowing filibusters only on rare cases, and also demanding more open voting on amendments. But that’s not going to happen. At best, maybe there are 10 senators who would make that deal and keep it. Maybe five. Maybe fewer.

In part, that’s because senators from both parties have become more frightened of tough votes on controversial measures than they are interested in using the legislative process to advanced the interests of constituencies. Yes, the leadership of both parties has made the freewheeling amendment process obsolete, but that wouldn’t have happened if individual senators from the majority party opposed it.

And in part, it’s because important elements of the Republican Party simply oppose compromise in principle, even if it costs them in other ways — and many Republican senators who might otherwise be inclined to compromise are terrified of being labeled RINOs, Republicans in name only. That’s what ended the filibuster on nominations in 2013: Republicans could have cut a deal to use the filibuster sparingly and defeat those judicial and executive-branch choices that they strongly objected to, but instead they insisted on a 60-vote threshold for all nominations, giving the Democrats a choice between majority-imposed reform or allowing the minority party to run things.

That’s the case with the filibuster rules still in place for most legislation. Ten years ago, I used to write about possible ways to adapt Senate rules for an era of partisan polarization. But the problem isn’t coming up with rules that can work; it’s finding senators who appreciate the strengths of the old Senate and want to revive it.

With few if any senators committed to a Senate in which the filibuster makes sense as part of a functional legislative body, it will be gone as soon as short-term incentives line up for eliminating it. That didn’t happen in 2009-2010 because Democrats either had 60 seats or very close to it. It didn’t happen in 2016-2017 because Republicans had practically no governing agenda.

The filibuster may survive for awhile longer in today’s 50-50 Senate only because Democratic control is so fragile. Most Democrats would rather pass as much of the party agenda as possible while they have unified government, but for West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and others in states where seats will be difficult to defend, becoming the deciding vote on a bunch of bills that may or may not play well at home is a huge risk. Still, even Manchin wants to govern, and during an era of partisan voting, helping the president of one’s own party succeed is almost always the best bet for re-election. What’s going to determine the outcome? More than likely, it will be, as it was in 2013, just how far Republicans will push them. And with this set of Republicans, that’s apt to be pretty far.

[kenberg]

The Bernstein articles that you post are interesting. I might have to sign up with Bloomberg.

The Senate needs to stop being a national embarrassment. They pass continuing resolutions to keep the government open because they cannot come together on a budget. Last December they finally passed something that kept help coming to the unemployed but it was so late that payments were, I think, delayed or missed. The packages that they finally come up with could have been, but weren't, agreed to much earlier. There is something seriously wrong with any Senator who does not find this incompetence to be seriously embarrassing. Sort of like not wearing a mask when crowding together as the capitol building is stormed by a mob. Some actions are very difficult to defend.

If I studied the situation I could get at details. But that's a trap, sort of like trying to discuss reality with a True believer of any stripe.

The Senate has been dysfunctional. The Senate needs to be a functioning body. Start there.

[awm]

Chas_P, on 2021-January-24, 17:26, said:

Perhaps not. But I do remember Obama saying, "They cling to their Bibles and their guns." Granted one Democrat is not a "significant number", but Obama was a fairly "significant" Democrat. I also remember HRC's pronouncement about "a basket of deplorables". Perhaps not significant but in my view it signals the elites' view of ordinary Americans.

If being an elite is synonymous with “saying negative things about people you disagree with” then of course we are all guilty. But somehow no one applies this to the Republicans who call liberals “welfare-dependent” or “moochers” or tell them they should go back to the “shithole countries” they came from (even where they are US citizens). If it has more to do with attending top universities then this applies to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley just as much as to the Obamas and the Clintons. If it’s about coming “from money” that would seem to apply a heck of a lot more to Trump than any Democrat in recent memory. I’ll agree that our leaders tend to be highly educated and wealthy (but if anything this is more true of Republican leaders than Democratic leaders) but this charge of elitism seems misplaced.

In any case, no Democrat will admit to being elitist! And a lot of Republicans will admit to being gun-toting climate change deniers who oppose mask wearing.

[kenberg]

I guess there is elite and elitism. Hank Aaron was among baseball's elite, hardly an insult. A conversation I had yesterday might illustrate the point.

My friend Roger from Minnesota called just to chat about what we were doing to keep busy. I mentioned I am reading Ken Follett's The Evening and the Morning (900 pages and I don't recommend it). Anyway, it's set in England from the year 997 to maybe 1005. It turns out that Roger has knowledge of his family going back almost that far, they lived in Normandy, then in Scotland, then in the US and so on. The point? I have known Roger for 70 years and that's the first time I have heard this. It came up because I was talking about Follett's book, and then we went on to other things. It made for an amusing contrast. My father was never sure just which country he was born in.

We need to not lump people together unless they clearly need to be lumped. Some do.

About the Follett book: A reviewer mentioned that some readers might figure how it will end before they reach page 900. Yes. Around page 40 or so. On page 700 and something the man and woman who are clearly destined to end up together have finally had sex. I understand about going slow but...

[pilowsky]

kenberg, on 2021-January-25, 14:21, said:

I guess there is elite and elitism. Hank Aaron was among baseball's elite, hardly an insult. A conversation I had yesterday might illustrate the point.

My friend Roger from Minnesota called just to chat about what we were doing to keep busy. I mentioned I am reading Ken Follett's The Evening and the Morning (900 pages and I don't recommend it). Anyway, it's set in England from the year 997 to maybe 1005. It turns out that Roger has knowledge of his family going back almost that far, they lived in Normandy, then in Scotland, then in the US and so on. The point? I have known Roger for 70 years and that's the first time I have heard this. It came up because I was talking about Follett's book, and then we went on to other things. It made for an amusing contrast. My father was never sure just which country he was born in.

We need to not lump people together unless they clearly need to be lumped. Some do.

About the Follett book: A reviewer mentioned that some readers might figure how it will end before they reach page 900. Yes. Around page 40 or so. On page 700 and something the man and woman who are clearly destined to end up together have finally had sex. I understand about going slow but...

Well, Somerset Maugham once remarked, "the English have sex on the brain; which is a very uncomfortable place to have it".

It doesn't surprise me at all that it took so long to reach it.

When I used to watch TV I would often hear the line "Well one thing led to another and blah blah blah" (or yadda yadda yadda for older Americans, or like like for anyone born after 1990).

What is this 'one thing' can you buy it from Amazon? Learn about it in books?

I suppose if it exists we would have seen bottles of TRUMPonething on the shelves.

Get yours in a one-gallon bottle and you can grab as much ... as you like.


And people say that fundamentally we are all the same! Well, I think some people might disagree with the idea that fundamentally they the same as Trump, Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison.

[pilowsky]

A moment that will live in famy. Watch the House present the article of impeachment to the Senate http://bit.ly/DJTImpeached

[Chas_P]

awm, on 2021-January-25, 09:08, said:

And
In any case, no Democrat will admit to being elitist!

Of course not. But I do remember Nancy Pelosi consoling herself with $12/pint Jeni's ice cream while suffering through her quarantine. Poor pooby!

[pilowsky]

So you believe that an elitist is a person that eats expensive ice-cream? OK - that makes sense.
I'll keep a lookout sharp for expensive ice-cream eaters.

Thanks for the 'hot' tip.

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg said:

The House of Representatives delivered the article of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate Monday evening, and after some time for everyone to make their cases, we’re going to have at least a brief trial of a former president.

Republicans are converging on an appeal to process, claiming that a post-presidential impeachment is improper. I suppose that’s better than actively supporting Trump’s attempts to undermine U.S. democracy by promoting his baseless stolen-election fantasy and provoking the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, but they’re not fooling anyone. At least I hope not. I hate to pick on Missouri Senator Josh Hawley when he’s already getting well-deserved grief elsewhere, but c’mon. Really? Hawley: “I think that this impeachment effort is, I mean, I think it's blatantly unconstitutional. It's a really, really, really dangerous precedent."

What could that possibly mean? Dangerous?

There are two kinds of impeachments: legitimate and illegitimate. We don’t have to worry about setting a precedent that supports the illegitimate kind, right? If a rogue House decides next week to impeach former president George W. Bush because Democrats don’t like his brushwork (he paints, you know) — a clearly illegitimate use of the impeachment power — they aren’t going to care what the precedents are about impeaching a former president.

Then there are two kinds of former presidents alive today: One-term and two-term. Only a one-termer is technically eligible for a future term. Still, it seems to me there couldn’t be any serious harm, and certainly not “really, really, really dangerous” harm, to impeach and convict a former two-term president. Suppose we find out tomorrow that Bush and Barack Obama were … well, given where we are, I’d rather not construct this particular hypothetical. But something bad, and the House responds by impeaching both of them. Senate convictions, especially with bans on holding future office, wouldn’t be entirely symbolic, since they could take away post-presidential perks and prevent running for Senate or serving as secretary of state. Overall, however, such actions would be almost entirely symbolic. It’s hard to see the menace in that, even if one wants to argue that it’s based on a misreading of the Constitution.

So we’re down to one-term former presidents who have committed some serious violation. Even in that case, there are important disincentives for impeachment and conviction. To begin with, the two-thirds vote required for conviction demands either a massive partisan advantage in the Senate, the kind that’s rare in the nation’s history, or a bipartisan vote that could only take place for a violation that was serious, indeed. It’s not just that. We can see right now that impeachment of the outgoing president is a distraction from the agenda of the new president and his or her party in Congress. They’re not going to do it just for fun.

By what standard is it so dangerous to bar from further office a defeated one-term president who has created a legitimate case for impeachment, one so serious that Congress wants to move ahead despite the obstacles and disincentives and is somehow able to muster at least 67 votes in the Senate? Suppose it is a mistake in that situation to prevent the electorate from changing their minds and electing this unpopular, disgraced president to a second term after all. Is it really a significant danger only avoided by closing the impeachment window as soon as the next president takes office? Or is it, more realistically, a circumstance so unusual that it’s unlikely to happen again, and wouldn’t matter a whole lot if it did?

To be sure, the text of the Constitution doesn’t settle the issue. A 20-year-old law review article by Brian Kalt of Michigan State University that supported the legality of impeaching former officials long before Trump appeared on the scene concluded that most, but not all, scholarly opinion holds that the Constitution allows these actions. Even if those arguments are incorrect, it’s hard for me to see very much harm to the republic.

It’s just easier to pretend that Democrats (and some Republicans) are hijacking the impeachment process than it is to defend Trump’s attempts to undermine the Constitution. So expect Hawley and company to spout plenty of the former, and precious little of the latter.

[y66]

Ross Douthat at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

For conservatives interested in economic populism — meaning, basically, a more middle-America-friendly economics, a program of sustained support for workers and families rather than just upper-bracket tax cuts — Trump’s ascendancy has always been a weird mix of vindication and calamity.

First, the list of vindications. Trump proved in his 2016 primary campaign that Republican voters weren’t particularly wedded to right-wing economic orthodoxies. He flipped the blue-collar Midwest in the general election in part by repudiating the austerity economics of the Paul Ryan-era party. His support for looser money broke with the party’s Obama-era monetary hawkishness and helped deliver the lowest unemployment in decades. And even in defeat, his surprisingly strong 2020 coalition suggested the possibility of a pan-ethnic, working-class future for the G.O.P.

But even when he vindicated populists, Trump wasn’t really following their script; he was defining, in his own selfish and demagogic way, what a conservative populism meant. Sometimes that involved race-baiting and bullying and lying; sometimes it involved incompetence and corruption dressed in the language of resentment; often it meant either bog-standard Republican policies or no policy at all; always it meant playing to his base rather than trying to build a potential populist majority.

When the coronavirus arrived, Trump had a great opportunity to put both nationalist and populist impulses to work — the former in trying to keep the virus at bay, the latter in dealing with the economic fallout. Instead he practiced denial, leaned on hack advisers and folk-libertarian theories and presided over unnecessary death and political defeat.

Throughout this experience, populist idea guys as well as politicians like Hawley planned for a future in which populism’s vindication could be extended and developed, and its connection to Trump’s vices and failures gradually severed.

But that severing became less and less likely the more Trump made himself the focus of all of right-wing populism’s cultural impulses, which he did with great success. If you felt disdained by the meritocracy or the media, if you felt ignored or sidelined by the power centers on the coasts, or if you feared the revolutionary mood apparent on the left in 2020, then siding with him against his enemies became not just one means to express those sentiments, but the first and only way.

Now this kind of populist loyalty to Trump requires embracing the belief that he just had a landslide election stolen. And as long as that idea defines the right, the space to be a populist who isn’t just working to restore him or his family in 2024 (with all the prospects for Hawley-like debacles such work entails) seems somewhere between cramped and nonexistent.

Over the next few years, this will have two likely implications for the right’s sincere economic populists. First, they will watch the Biden administration poach issues that they once hoped to own, from big tax breaks for families to big spending on domestic infrastructure. Second, they will watch their party nominate self-proclaimed populists, in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Arkansas that should be the base for a working-class conservatism, who are just acolytes for the cult of Trump — figures like Jim Jordan and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, let’s say, with a policy agenda condensed to owning the libs and dog whistling to the QAnoners.

Such a future might seem to vindicate the left-wing view, expressed eloquently by Daniel Luban in a recent Dissent essay, that the general possibility of right-wing economic populism never materializes as specific political reality: “Protracted experience suggests that we should only believe the American right can move left on economics once we’ve witnessed it happen.”

Except this isn’t quite what experience suggests. In fact, the American right usually moves somewhat left on economics when it takes the presidency: George W. Bush’s spending habits were to the left of the Newt Gingrich-era Congress’s, just as Trump’s loose-money policies and abandonment of entitlement reform were to the left of the Obama-era G.O.P.’s. (Even Ronald Reagan wasn’t really a limited-government Reaganite of the sort his own cult recalls.)

It’s more accurate to amend Luban’s point and say that the American right doesn’t usually move leftward on economics in a thoughtful, coherent and sustainable way — that the move is usually ad hoc, undercooked and cheerfully unprincipled, which makes it more likely to be abandoned once the party is out of power, treated as rubble instead of a foundation.

This is the problem that conservative policy thinkers and the occasional farsighted politician have sought to solve: If the party’s move to the center is inevitable, why not make it sustainable and serious and effective at achieving conservative goals?

And in a way, the Trumpification of the party makes this problem more urgent, because his downscale political coalition, even more than the suburbanite-heavy G.O.P. coalitions of 10 or 20 years ago, clearly needs a populist economic agenda if it’s going to ever build outward to a national majority.

But for the immediate future, no populism is likely to emerge that isn’t primarily about fealty to Trump, and no national majority can be forged on the basis of that fealty — not by Trump himself, and not by Hawley or Ted Cruz any other too-clever courtier hovering beside the Mar-a-Lago throne.

So a populist imperative will remain, but until Trump himself recedes — someday, someday — its fulfillment will be pushed ever further out of reach.

[y66]

9 questions about budget reconciliation you were too afraid to ask by Dylan Scott at Vox

Quote

Democrats can pass a big bill through the Senate without any Republican votes. Here’s how.

[Chas_P]

pilowsky, on 2021-January-25, 22:08, said:

So you believe that an elitist is a person that eats expensive ice-cream? OK - that makes sense.
I'll keep a lookout sharp for expensive ice-cream eaters.

Thanks for the 'hot' tip.

You obviously missed my point which is not unsurprising since you are the same guy who has argued here previously that "at least" and "at most" mean exactly the same thing. So here is (probably an ill-fated) attempt to clarify it for you: Adam stated

Quote

And in any case, no Democrat will admit to being elitist!

My retort was the video of Nancy Pelosi. It appeared to me that she was saying in that interview that she was serving her constituents during the pandemic by eating Godiva chocolate and Jeni's ice cream. And in my view that is an admission of elitism.

I hope this helps.

[pilowsky]

Extremely helpful.
Hmmm, where's my Ben and Jerry's - or will people think that I'm elitist.

So Chas could you AT LEAST provide me with a list of food products that are sociologically safe to eat.

Do I have to use a spoon? What should it be made of?

[cherdano]

Imagine voting for the guy who announces his presidential run on a golden escalator and goes golfing all the time. And thinking it's the biggest political scandals that one of the opposition leaders has 12$/pint ice cream from a national chain in her freezer.

The leaders with the most disdain for the Republican base aren't Democratic politicians- it's everyone who serves them up this kind of bull***. Instead of telling them that Steve Bannon got sentenced for defrauding Trump supporters with a fake Wall fundraiser- and Trump pardoned him.

[y66]

Imagine all the people who do not put wc azzhole trolls on ignore.

[kenberg]

Elitism:


When I was a grad student we (wife, young daughters and me) lived in the upstairs of house in a neighborhood I liked very much. Daughter, age 2 or 3, had playmates and I would take her and some of them for a walk, stopping to chat with this person and that. I remember a woman looking at the kids and saying "You can sure tell which one is yours!". Nice and pleasant. But I also recall this. I was chatting with this guy and said "Well, I have to get home for dinner." ELITIST! He explained that in his family, and in this neighborhood, people go home for supper. High class people go home for dinner, but here we go home for supper.

Ok, I survived. But sixty years or so later I still remember it.

When I was ten or so I would bike downtown to Wabasha and Seventh street for a chocolate malt at Bridgeman's. That's a pleasant memory. It is not a statement of class, upper, lower or sideways. It's getting very difficult to talk these days.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2021-January-27, 08:07, said:

Imagine all the people who do not put wc azzhole trolls on ignore.

After 4 long years, America finally put the biggest azzhole of all on ignore!

[y66]

From A badge of shame’: Virginia Senate votes to censure Amanda Chase by Graham Moomaw at The Virginia Mercury:

Quote

After stinging personal critiques from Republicans and Democrats alike, Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, was censured by the Virginia Senate Wednesday, a formal rebuke that came after she repeated baseless election fraud claims and spoke in support of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Several senators said they wished the censure vote, the first since 1987, didn’t have to happen. But they said it became unavoidable due to Chase’s loose grip on the truth, lack of respect for her colleagues and the institution and a pattern of inflammatory behavior.

“The need to protect the honor of this body is what compelled me to proceed,” said Sen. John Bell, D-Loudoun, who sponsored the resolution censuring Chase.

Sen. John Bell, D-Loudoun, who sponsored a resolution censuring Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield, speaks during the floor session of the Virginia Senate inside the Science Museum in Richmond, VA Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2021. After much debate, the resolution passed, 21-9, with several members not voting. (Pool photo by Bob Brown/ Richmond Times-Dispatch).
The vote for censure was 24-9, with three Republicans joining the chamber’s 21 Democrats. Nine Republicans, including Chase, voted against censure. Six Republicans did not vote.

In an at-times heated floor debate, Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin, said some had suggested to him that Chase, who is battling many in her own party as she seeks the GOP nomination for governor, would wear the censure as a badge of honor. It should be seen, he said, as a “badge of shame.”

“So much promise, so much ability has been wasted on ambition and a sense of entitlement,” said Stanley, who, despite his floor speech, did not vote on the censure resolution.

Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, who has served in the body since 1980, said he had never seen a state senator cause as much trouble as Chase.

“No one has even come remotely close,” he said.

Elected as a Republican in 2015, Chase’s alienation from her GOP colleagues had already led her to leave the Republican caucus in 2019. The Senate stripped her of her last committee assignment last week.

Some of Chase’s former Republican colleagues seemed to question her mental state during Wednesday’s debate. Sen. Steve Newman, R-Bedford, said he saw her behavior has “a bit of a call for help.”

“I really hope that the senator from Chesterfield has the opportunity to get the help that’s needed,” Newman said.

The censure is a mostly symbolic gesture of disapproval and won’t affect Chase’s ability to continue to serve in the Senate. However, it strips of her seniority, which makes her lowest in the chamber when it comes to perks like seating and office space.