the whole 2020-2024 era of “dems shouldnt aggressively use the levers of power bc then republicans will do the same thing when theyre elected” sure looks dumb as dog shit right now huh
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I regularly think of him, with a growing level of rage. I bet to be super above board, Biden and Garland never really talked after beginning his term. And at some point, everything was too late. I wish Garland long and painful days with the knowledge that all this is mainly his making.
Trump was… literally charged federally on like 70 different counts.
Do it earlier? Fine. Maybe. But they literally did it. You can’t charge someone with crimes “harder” or something and nothing woulda guaranteed the Supreme Court wouldn’t have been willing to delay things for any given amt of time
You are mistaken. When someone is found guilty, they go to prison. Jail is pre-trial detention for those who are deemed flights risks or sufficiently dangerous.
Trump could have been jailed while awaiting trial.
The government likes pretrial detention and extrajudicial murder for things like “maybe trying to pass a counterfeit 20” so it’s real suspicious when an old white guy gets 70 counts of much more serious crimes and experiences neither of those consequences.
especially since the GOP simply abandoned all levers and are just cowering in the corner while FOTUS and fElon smash thru the gov't like absolute wrecking balls
They won’t, they'll come out and say “well we have to work across the aisle so we don’t wanna get rid of everyone”. If this country even comes together we'll be right back where we were with Vought on our heels, waiting to continue the destruction.
they have raised scapegoating to an art! They're still saying their complete ideological overturning of the judiciary is just fair revenge for the blocking of robert bork! You literally cannot avoid the blame game by not doing shit.
and the dems know this, and it's an excuse, not a reason
Even on his way out, as the GOp was actively setting fire to his office, Garland was breaking his arm to pat himself on the back for sticking to norms. He confused integrity with tradition.
Bro this goes all the way back to Obama. Dems love this shit and they’re rubbing their little hands together over how much they can fundraise off of it.
Perhaps a middle ground? Between Dems being afraid to use the power they were elected to use, and the Dems being so brazen with it that they violate the law.
Perhaps they could be aggressive and smart, while staying in the confines of the law?
It seems worthless to relitigate anything at all when we are dealing with an actual house on fire that requires our entire focus, tbh. And demoralizing to boot. We can address the holes in the ship once we’re finished saving it from sinking.
Your thinking makes sense, and yet I can’t get past the fact that this is an all hands on deck moment, and also that democracy is us, and our reps are still just people. They’re the same as the rest of us. I don’t expect them to be better than we are. It’s our laws that require retooling.
And the OP was specifically calling out failed methods of "saving it from sinking". We can't learn from our mistakes, if can't recognize them... or if people think it's worthless thinking about them.
There’s a time for that and it ain’t now. We must of course determine what new amendments to the Constitution need to be added to body-block future such attempts at fascistic overthrow, but first we need to dump a bunch of water on the rats setting the document on fire.
So you'd agree that Democrats should "aggressively use the levers of power" that they have to "dump water on the rats setting the [Constitution] on fire"?
Because that's what the OP directly implies. Perhaps you misread it?
It's maddening because prosecuting people who committed crimes during the Trump administration got framed as an abuse of power anyway, so doing good things truly had no drawback
Trump isn't using the levers of power. Musk is going into the power machine and pulling out parts to see what happens. And he's not trying to build anything. Breaking things is a lot easier than building them.
Focusing on Trump is a mistake, he's not making any decisions. This is the implementation of an ideological project for permanent minority rule engineered by the Silicon Valley elite and backed by the entire Republican party. Don't allow yourself to be convinced that anything here is random.
None of this is contradictory- the point is that Dems couldn't have actually successfully gotten any of their goals by just hacking away randomly and unconstitutionally and if they did, they’d probably just have to declare themselves dictators cause they weren’t gonna win an election that way
If the Dems actually delivered for their constituents then they might have stood a chance of winning this election. It seems the whole country except for Dem electeds can recognize that the constitution isn't fit for purpose and hasn't been for nearly a century, but the party's allergic to action.
That obviously wasn't possible but they should have stretched the rules to their limits and stacked the courts in order to deliver concrete benefits to voters. No amount of playing by the rules was going to induce Republicans to do the same, and now there probably won't be any more real elections.
Delivered what? Ending post-pandemic inflation without massive unemployment? Pass a couple bills sending $2 trillion to infrastructure & green projects? Forgive $190 billion in student loans? End the Forever War in Afghanistan?
There was always going to be someone mad about something.
What is it about reading the words "use the levers of power" to be "commit crimes".
Are serious that you think using the tools available to those in power is illegal?
You don't seriously think there will be another election in any serious way?
All votes will be cast electronically on terminals supplied by musk, and overseen by him
The next 4 years will see English rule of the americas seem like a cakewalk
No taxation without representation?
What i say goes...
Sure, but there were quite a few R senators who also voted against it. Not sure how "I'm going to vote for the party that universally opposes what I want because the other party only mostly supports what I want" is a sound theory of the electorate.
It was always an excuse for centrist democrats to do nothing. Democrats run claiming they need to win to exercise power, once they are in charge, they claim if they used their power they would get voted out of office. They failed to realize we want the power used or they have failed us, as they did.
Please please please please please stop making the current moment about democrats. Of course, it's fair to criticize strategy in the past and present. But it is republicans who are burning this country down. Every time we post this anti-dem stuff, we lose that focus. Get your head in the game.
The same people that enabled "this moment" are still running the Dem party. They're already talking about moving further right and fundraising for 2026, rather than figuring out how to check or balance the Exec branch. Sorry that makes you feel uncomfortable, but the current guard needs to go.
We don’t yell at the rabid dog.
We yell at the owner of the rabid dog who was given an itemized list of everyone the dog would bite, and didn’t do a fuckin thing about it.
I see some have interpreted this as Dems should be as venal as Republicans. I don’t. I think Dems should have suspected Republicans of all of this and used the levers of power to prevent it. Starting with election monitoring and the Supreme Court.
That’s assuming Trump in fact actually had the votes. When one candidate has millions more grassroots small donors than the other, and has to expand all their rally venues while the other has to size-down, they typically win. There are now also indications of incongruent vote numbers in NV. Dunno..
Your plan either needs to include how you bypass Joe Manchin or magically get him to agree with this stuff. It’s not Dems fault broadly that voters gave a crazy dipshit in WV veto power in the senate
That is called "whipping votes". Whether summoning Manchin to the White House every day or making WV the HQ of the Pacific Fleet, it is leadership's job to pass things.
Voters won't, and didn't, accept excuses. "Almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Not policy.
Manchin was a day 1 threat to switch to the Republican Party. It would have made his reelection so easy to stop cooperating with Biden. As it is, he lost his seat for passing the IRA and voting for Biden judges. So then, what process would the Senate Dems have executed from the minority?
That is an excellent excuse. With the benefit of hindsight, do you think the threat of Manchin defecting is what catapulted Kamala Harris into the White House?
I’m not defending the Biden ‘24 campaign. That was garbage. Pretending like Biden could have openly pressured Manchin into doing anything he didn’t want to is foolish. On your theory, Biden might as well have whipped Ted Cruz or Tommy Tubberville for all the leverage he had on Manchin.
Sorry and media actually. A media standards board with regulatory control over what is actually news and what is batshit inflammatory propaganda might have helped..
For the record I suggested Biden give the corrupt Trump SCOTUS one month to repeal "Total Immunity", or he would use it to violently enforce 14th Amendment ban on insurrectionists holding office.
I mean let's be real, pretty much every excuse Dems gave for refusing to represent the people over the billionaires looks dumb as hell now. They sold us out and no one got anything out of it but the billionaires.
If Democrats expect us to all rally around them in any future elections they're going to be very shocked. If we are going to have to do all of the fighting ourselves why exactly do we need them?
Is this some more Joe Biden should have magically packed the Supreme Court BS? Democrats never had a filibuster-proof majority or the votes to abolish the filibuster. What are all these things they could have done? But of course you will get lots of likes for this post.
You genuinely don’t see the fallacy in that equivalency? Do you think there is some magic solution? Ds have been - appropriately - committed to rule of law. Trump and Rs are not. Ds warned voters that if Trump was given power, he’d be a dictator with nothing to stop him. Now that’s where we are.
It’s the “run a candidate people actually wanted to vote for” that I love here. It reveals the utter lack of ability of the left to think more than one step ahead. Beyond Harris’ clear qualifications, the candidate at the top shouldn’t have mattered at all. Everyone should have voted to stop Trump.
it has been incredibly stupid since the 80s, then Democrats elected Democrat Reagan. It was deeply stupid after the 2000s, so ppl elected "hope & change" and got Democrat Reagan II
Its pretty telling that the most 'transformative' Democratic president--who was still just picking around the edges & was unpopular bc of what he didnt do--was only that bc he was in his 80s and from a completely different era of politics where government was expected to do good things sometimes
The “progressives” of the party wouldn’t even withhold their vote for Pelosi as speaker in order to try and get a vote on a policy supported by a majority of the country. Dems care about their ability to make money more than their voters. They’d have had a primary last year if that wasn’t the case
The Dems had 1 good idea 15 years ago in the ACA but even that was highly compromised and a huge handout to the private healthcare industry. Since then they've decided never again to do try doing something on the same scale with a similar positive impact.
the ACA was Mitt Romney's state plan with the serial numbers scraped off. the main good it did was largely raising the age children can be on their parents insurance. you can trace a direct line from the mandate to have insurance meaning it becomes more expensive, more profitable, and much worse.
Fwiw, the exact same things would happen as are currently happened, but Dems would climb over themselves to fall on their swords for "normalizing" this.
If you're referring to the current Supreme Court, well, voters screwed that up in 2000 and 2016. The latter was helped along by one Brihana Joy Grey, who told her boss's fans not to worry about the Supreme Court.
The 14th amendment is only as strong as the voters, who failed
As far as I can recall, this really started in ~2009, with the ACA. Dems basically took all of the Republican demands, and used them as the staring point for negotiations, got argued down even further, and then were like “we used all our political capital” when they had 60 votes in the senate
Democrats punch left at every opportunity, looking for their own Sista Soulja moment, declaring that they want nothing to do with good things. The "third way" allowed Republicans to run to the right with Dems following not far behind.
The Democratic Party spent 40 years rebuilding itself as loyal opposition of the GOP, never standing for anything or having any principles they wouldn't compromise for ~getting stuff done~, and it's why they're now polling one ass hair better (40-49) than Elon Musk (38-50) *within their own base*
You Dems sure have trouble defending yourselves so I imagine you know you're easier targets, pushing me off to criticize Repedocans is cowardace. no wonder you think the Dems are going to save you.
How do you manage the cognitive dissonance of "Trump is using all levers of power" and "Trump's actions are in violation of numerous federal statutes and the constitution"?
The Republicans evidently have a clearer understanding of the tolerance that the people of the U.S. have for the aggressive use of the levers of power.
If your opponent is "gaming the game" and there are no consequences for doing so, you will not defeat them by following the rules. You will only feel morally superior in your losers' chair.
I get this, but can we acknowledge that a perpetual unitary executive political seesaw signals the end of the U.S. democratic experiment as originally defined? And think cogently about what we might want to replace it with?
I understand the seeming necessity of meeting destructive forces on their own terms, but if we give up on the promise of mutually-selected and abided governance, what do we have left but an unstable dictatorship, destined to swing (as this one may) into permanent rule?
The dems should have re-written the playbook whilst they had the chance. Instead of which they’re all marching to poobin’s playbook. I mean Putin 😂🤣. And this shit is spreading like wildfire all around the world. Coming to fucking Germany next.
Trump should’ve been jailed swiftly after his Jan 6 coup while everyone still hated his guts. All that other Dems should’ve/ would’ve/ could’ve is unrealistic as Manchin & Sinema were never going to do any of that.
and it’s given us D congressional leadership that seems to think the savviest politcs is “keeping the powder dry”* and assuming that the electoral pendulum will swing their way in a cycle or three
*exceptions for say, a young rep daring to challenge a gerontocrat with throat cancer for Oversight
If your specific reason was "it will provoke Republican escalation" rather than "this is illegal and a betrayal of democratic legitimacy" then yeah, sure.
I wish people understood that the function of the Democratic Party is not to "succeed", it is to serve as a bulwark against all political policies to the left of the Overton window. It is to collect and contain Progressive demands, making them seem impractical and unachievable.
The American oligarchs set the boundaries of political possibility through the manipulation of the 2-party system. They have fought the Progressive march for decades, and the result is the unintended empowerment of a rightward march. But Fascism doesn't threaten their power, so they tolerate it.
I'd honestly appreciate it if you'd elaborate. What happened to the German "billionaires" (or however rich they were back then) after Fascists took control of their government? My understanding is that Capitalists of the time were mostly fine (until they lost the war).
I would be very curious if there were any books about extremely wealthy families in Germany and how they were affected by WW2.
It's counterintuitive, but at a certain wealth level, it's possible to come out the other side *wealthier*. Like how billionaires benefit from recessions.
I’m incredibly worried about the possibility of the next Dem administration consciously overcorrecting on this by taking pride in and almost reveling in a self imposed weakness where they do absolutely nothing that hasn’t passed 1000 self-imposed barriers of bipartisanship and moderation
Ok, I will run for President in 2028. Glad to know I can count on your support as you seem equally committed to ensuring the next administration isn’t feckless and weak
Lately I've been more interested in blocking people like that weirdo "everyone unhappy with the status-quo should run for president" but this particular weirdo gets a block for the condescension dripping off their posts
Yuck
They just want to blame someone instead of working for a better world
Why would you be worried about this? Have they ever taken over after some idiot dipshit ruined everything and proceeded to do a bunch of quarter measures to fix things while claiming they just can't do anything about the problems? I feel like I would remember that happening
Yeah I think it’s inevitable- partly because they’re lazy and don’t want to do anything but also because deep down they think Trump’s racism and transphobia are actually popular so when he loses support it will be for his authoritarian behavior, not his policies
I think you're right but I don't think it's laziness. The candidates they select for are just fine and don't want to change anything. They exist to be elected. That's why the few people like Tlaib, Omar, and Bush who actively acknowledge the status quo is bad are so deeply unpopular with the party
Less than a month into the term we’ve already seen like two separate discourse waves of pundits congratulating themselves for how magnanimous in victory they’ll be to regretful Trump supporters
I mean Obama and Biden both explicitly did this after taking over from unpopular corrupt Republicans, it’s not a possibility, it’s part of the platform lol
Makes it even funnier in retrospect that Biden had Merrick Garland investigate his son and charge him with a bunch of crimes and then he had to pardon him lmao
I wonder if Democrat pols actually want any policy wins. Since Obama came in with a huge wave, they didn't codify abortion. Didn't raise the minimum wage (same since 2009!). M4A seems dead despite a pandemic.
It seems they have no actual goals, so when they get power, they do nothing with it.
I'd buy the Libs incrementalism argument if they ever did anything other than the bare minimum, means test it all, and then shrug when some guy with a bad haircut says to cut it.
You can go back a lot further than that. The Democrats really showed that they abandoned their spines when they tolerated Ford's nakedly unconstitutional pardon of Nixon without so much as a court challenge.
Dems should have learned from the first O's admin. Still we read pieces here and there that, according to polls, some on the dem voter block want "bipartisanship "...I don't believe it for a second that's what the real dem base wants. Pundits or the consultants...they're not the base.
Tbf, it was also dumb as shit prior to 2020 when Obama stood by and watched Comey's FBI torched the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. Obama was a fucking weak president who failed all of us and led to this day.
Yep. Lawrence isn't doing it, and hasn't, but I am sick to death of establishment Dems and pundits acting shocked at every turn. We've been warning about this for over a year and a half (P25) and now we are living in it.
I'm lucky to live in Sara Jacobs' district so most of my calls to her office are things like "keep up the great work" but she's one in a veritable sea of assfacery
I like her a lot. She consistently says great things, with a lot of conviction and facts. I miss living in CA so much, and know my calls to the guy here in Georgia (who proposed seizing Greenland and naming it "Red White and Blueland") are immediately deleted.
I think we've learned that you should always use your levers of power to get court trials done before their term is over. I can't even believe it's possible that it took over 4 years.
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It will probably be seen as a political loser to every R senator up for reelection in '26 so it probably wouldn't work, but you never know.
"OH SO YOU SUPPORT AUTHORITARIANISM WHEN ITS YOUR SIDE!!!!!"
4 years of that let me know we are so deeply fucked when the people in charge of guarding the forest can't see it for the trees.
Do it earlier? Fine. Maybe. But they literally did it. You can’t charge someone with crimes “harder” or something and nothing woulda guaranteed the Supreme Court wouldn’t have been willing to delay things for any given amt of time
Jail is what happens PRE trial, prison is what happens POST trial.
Jail is what comes IMMEDIATELY after and often BEFORE come up with charges.
Trump could have been jailed while awaiting trial.
Or, if they genuinely believed he was a threat to democracy, have him murdered for the good of the nation. Omelettes and eggs, that's how it goes.
A competeny AG would have arrested him on day 1 and had the trial take place within 6 months while he was in jail, a thing they can do if someone
“It’s a 10 year term. Still has 6 years left.”
It looked dumb as dog shit back then too
and the dems know this, and it's an excuse, not a reason
But isn't that what we don't like for Republicans to do?
How does this make sense?
But, not just absent like "out of country" but absent like "up in the space station for 4 years". Oh crap, too soon? Damn...
Perhaps they could be aggressive and smart, while staying in the confines of the law?
That said, the ‘exercising power’ question is downstream from resistance anyhow—resisting Trump now points to how you’d govern in the future.
Because that's what the OP directly implies. Perhaps you misread it?
There was always going to be someone mad about something.
Are serious that you think using the tools available to those in power is illegal?
https://bsky.app/profile/garbagefriend.bsky.social/post/3limqcrpx4s2n
All votes will be cast electronically on terminals supplied by musk, and overseen by him
The next 4 years will see English rule of the americas seem like a cakewalk
No taxation without representation?
What i say goes...
The whole 1992-2000 era
The whole 1976-1980 era
Hmm I'm starting to think Democrats are actively choosing to not wield power
Talk with them? No.
Persuade them? No.
Threaten them politically? No.
But we can hold our stupid fucking quisling liberal officials’ feet to the fire.
Because if not that, the only tool left is rifles.
We yell at the owner of the rabid dog who was given an itemized list of everyone the dog would bite, and didn’t do a fuckin thing about it.
Should we survive this, I will be conducting mandatory seminars on The Paradox of Tolerance and "Tolerance is not a moral precept"
https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376
And nobody gave a shit, and here we are.
Your plan either needs to include how you bypass Joe Manchin or magically get him to agree with this stuff. It’s not Dems fault broadly that voters gave a crazy dipshit in WV veto power in the senate
Voters won't, and didn't, accept excuses. "Almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Not policy.
Using power builds power.
Any perceived overreach by Dems is punished by voters.
And could have run a candidate people actually wanted to vote for?
And had her say what people wanted to hear?
And start that process in 2015?
If you're referring to the current Supreme Court, well, voters screwed that up in 2000 and 2016. The latter was helped along by one Brihana Joy Grey, who told her boss's fans not to worry about the Supreme Court.
The 14th amendment is only as strong as the voters, who failed
Democrats punch left at every opportunity, looking for their own Sista Soulja moment, declaring that they want nothing to do with good things. The "third way" allowed Republicans to run to the right with Dems following not far behind.
The game became obvious in 09
https://bsky.app/profile/cameroncorduroy.bsky.social/post/3lin4bno5ec2m
It could also be the entire rest of their many powers.
And you know what?
Obeying the law is less important than stopping fascism. Because EVERYTHING is less important than that.
If your opponent is cheating and you can’t stop them, playing nice is a decision to lose.
Come on folks, you’re almost there, just keep going a little more.
No more words. We’re tired of you saying “stop or I’ll say stop again.”
Stop everything! Vote on nothing! Get into good trouble!! Flip tables get arrested
But no we get this shit from them
I understand the seeming necessity of meeting destructive forces on their own terms, but if we give up on the promise of mutually-selected and abided governance, what do we have left but an unstable dictatorship, destined to swing (as this one may) into permanent rule?
*exceptions for say, a young rep daring to challenge a gerontocrat with throat cancer for Oversight
Executive orders? Biden did that. Some were struck down by courts just as some of Trumps are.
Consultants. Pundits. Other rich donors.
The wealthy have DESTROYED this country, and the world along with it.
I don’t have a clear idea what you mean by that, so can’t agree or disagree
It's counterintuitive, but at a certain wealth level, it's possible to come out the other side *wealthier*. Like how billionaires benefit from recessions.
Yuck
They just want to blame someone instead of working for a better world
Then I got real mad because if Dems had done it, we wouldn't even be here right now.
How much you want to bet he nukes it for some reason in the next 2 years?
It seems they have no actual goals, so when they get power, they do nothing with it.
Though I did think of one: War. Damn, they really love war
Either the democrats are all stupid.
Or they are a controlled opposition party in a trench coat.
Or both, honestly there's no reason they cant be both.