I’ve been wondering for a bit why during the time the Democrats controlled the legislature, executive, and judicial branches during Obama’s first term in 2008 more wasn’t accomplished. Shouldn’t that have been the opportunity to make Row V Way law and fix the electoral college? I understand the recession was going on but outside of Obamacare getting passed which didnt go far enough it seems like they didn’t really do much with all that power. Are there other important accomplishments from this time that didn’t get the news they deserved? It seems like the voters have done their job in the past to elect people to fix things and yet we are still here begging people to vote to fix issues like abortion rights.
Routine abuse of the filibuster rules by Republicans was a big part of it. Not the only reason, but a fairly major one as I recall.
And while I am a Democrat and I vote that way, I very readily admit the Democrats often bring a book to a gun fight when it comes to politics. They have good intentions but then they get steamrollered on things like SCOTUS appointments…
Democrats have been playing by the rules and norms for far too long. Norms only matter if both teams follow them. Same thing with the rules. If Republicans will change the rules so that they win Democrats have to follow suit or make it illegal. When one side plays dirty, the other can either play dirty or lose. Moral high ground gains us nothing.
The main difference is:
Republicans do stuff then Democrats challenge it thru the courts.
Dems challenge their own stuff first, and if they think it’s right after a year or two, they start talking about if they should do it. And Republicans will still challenge it thru the courts.
You can argue over which path is morally the right one.
But no one has a legitimate argument that says republicans aren’t more effective.
They’re skipping steps that take us years to complete.
I mean, Biden talked about all types of shit he would do when elected. And his first day he said he’d start looking into if he was allowed to do any of it.
trump ain’t waiting to ask anyone if he can do something. He’s just going to do shit, and we’re going to have to try and fight a bunch of battles at once, all the while his policies are in effect.
It’s not that they’re fighting dirty and we’re fighting clean.
It’s that when the gun goes off to start the race, we start stretching so we won’t cramp up.
Doesn’t matter how slow Republicans are if we give them a 10 minute head start on a 100m sprint.
This is it. Trump didn’t give a flying shit at all if anything he did was legal, he just went for it, and it worked.
And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
-Karl Rove
This is it. Trump didn’t give a flying shit at all if anything he did was legal, he just went for it, and it worked.
The law is slow, but powerful.
Though if I recall correctly, filibuster rule can be removed with 51% majority but obviously Democrats are too nice to remove that.
Less nice, more realizing that would remove their ability to stop the Republicans when the political winds inevitability shift the other way
Oh did Democrats stop the Republicans when the winds shifted?
Oh no they didn’t. They went along with them.
Oh did Democrats stop the Republicans when the winds shifted?
Oh no they didn’t. They went along with them.
What the hell are you talking about? Your comment is entirely divorced from reality. There were 175 cloture votes to break a filibuster on nominees during the Obama administration and 314 during Trump. Nearly doubled in half the time.
When Schumer was minority leader, he vigorously used the filibuster to do just that. Under his leadership, Democrats used the filibuster to block funding for construction of Trump’s border wall in 2019. They used it not once, but twice to impede passage of the Cares Act — forcing Republicans to agree to changes including a $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement. They used it in September and October to stop Republicans from passing further coronavirus relief before the November election. They used it to halt Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) police reform legislation so Republicans could not claim credit for forging a bipartisan response to the concerns of racial justice protesters. They used it to block legislation to force “sanctuary cities” to cooperate with federal officials, and to stop a prohibition on taxpayer funding of abortion, bans on abortions once the unborn child is capable of feeling pain, and protections for the lives of babies born alive after botched abortions. - Washington Post
Right, which is why I’ve been saying that the Democrats should restore the filibuster. What they have now is not a filibuster, in practice, it’s more akin to an administrative hold. One Senator indicates an intent to filibuster via email, and they move on to other business.
Make 'em do it. Pick a popular issue, and lean into it. Make the Republicans actually stand up there at the podium and talk for hours. Get them on camera on the news every night as obstructionists, blocking the will of the people. Yes, it will waste Senate session time; that’s a perfect opportunity for all of the Democrats to roast them non-stop to reporters. It’ll be painful for a while, but at least has a chance of breaking the log jam. (And if the GQP doesn’t take the bait, hey, popular thing gets passed!)
It’s an easy rotating villain they can pull out at their convenience
While I disagree with it, there is a valid argument that getting rid of the filibuster would become an absolute disaster once Republicans gain the majority.
Democrats had the ability to change procedural rules and prevent filibustering - they chose not to.
Unfortunately, the lack of progress when Dems controlled all three branches is because conservative democrats didn’t want that progress. While Democrats controlled all three branches liberals did not.
We need to understand that there’s a strong conservative presence in the DNC or else we’ll be blindsided by this issue again. The lack of progress was on Democrats - we can’t shift the blame to Republicans (though they’re definitely more shitty).
because those are conservative democrats who thought there was still a sensible republican party “to work with”
most of Obamas “accomplishments” were republican sourced ideas.
the democrats haven’t acted progressively in many decades. Obama was a lame duck from day 1
but outside of Obamacare getting passed which didnt go far enough
You’re way underestimating and underemphasizing Obamacare, and the impact it took to get it into law.
Obamacare was a huge get for the Democrats, and while it wasn’t Medicare for all that we all wanted, especially with the Republicans fighting tooth and nail to deny him, that was a huge win.
It took a lot of effort in time to get Obamacare, which took all the oxygen out of the room for doing other things.
adding license to comments is nice touch but i don’t think scrapper is gonna care
Still going to poison the results and be embarrassing when the LLM starts putting creative commons licensing in its output.
😂 but I think 🤔 they have some cleaning process, I don’t know exactly what is called but they remove all anomalies like this 😔. 👍 If this works
Yeah. Seems like a waste of effort to me. If they’re scraping movies and books illegally then you aren’t gonna stop em with a link at the bottom of a comment.
Yeah. Seems like a waste of effort to me. If they’re scraping movies and books illegally then you aren’t gonna stop em with a link at the bottom of a comment.
Best not to derail this topic. It’s been discussed to death already.
adding license to comments is nice touch but i don’t think scrapper is gonna care
Best not to derail this topic. It’s been discussed to death already.
Yea, but propublica has money to hire lawyers and can actually take companies to court over it.
Are you prepared to shell out potentially 10’s of thousands of dollars to actually defend your license? That’s my biggest question in this, because if not it really is a waste of time and effort.
Are you prepared to shell out potentially 10’s of thousands of dollars to actually defend your license? That’s my biggest question in this, because if not it really is a waste of time and effort.
Well if the license is flagrantly ignored I’m sure Creative Commons would probably have something to say about it.
Having said that, I meant for you to also go to the top of that link conversation to read everything that’s been discussed, including my answer to the question you just asked.
Also, we’re really derailing the topic of the post.
I did, but you never really answer the question, are you financially prepared and willing to actually defend your license in court?
And also your link has become incredibly obnoxious, you don’t need all those “~”
Look, it makes them happy, it’s free, and it doesn’t cost you anything. It just kinda doesn’t seem like a big deal.
I did, but you never really answer the question, are you financially prepared and willing to actually defend your license in court?
I did, both in the link that I originally gave you, as well as replying to your comment directly.
And also your link has become incredibly obnoxious, you don’t need all those “~”
That’s a problem with your mobile client, you’ll need to speak to the devs of your client about that.
It’s not supporting subscript and superscript fonts correctly, per Lemmy’s help page on formatting comments. Also discussed in that original link I gave you.
If we could stop derailing the current topic?
I think that is really the core of it.
I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.
I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP’s - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party’s resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.
Between the time that Obama was sworn in and the ACA getting passed Congress had passed 161 other substantial bills. The major one that was shelved being the freedom of choice act which had already been written and waiting in a vote since 2003.
Congress had passed 161 other substantial bills
[citation required] (bolded part)
Also, it was all over the news and online and in papers that the ACA and trying to get it passed over the finish line was a lot of hard work, that took a lot of time and effort, that it ‘sucked up all the oxygen in the room’ for other stuff.
So, I don’t think there’s a good single answer to this question.
Obama isn’t and wasn’t as progressive as he was (and sometimes is, mostly by Republicans) framed. The democrats only had a filibuster-proof majority for a few months, and even then, Joe Lieberman gummed up the works big time on getting the ACA through. Somebody mentioned that they wasted a lot of time trying to get bipartisan support for the ACA, and it’s true. They spent months negotiating against themselves with the republicans, whose answer was always “no”, and by the time they were done, the ACA was a shell of what it could have been. After the ACA, which I must add is basically comprised of all the non-insane (read: mostly pointless) reforms the Republicans were proposing as well as some more rational reforms, the right-wing hype machine started red-lining (as in tachometers, not the racist housing policy, though I guess that could also work since they really didn’t want that black man living in that house) and you’d have thought we had an actual communist overthrow of the government on our hands. The democrats absolutely bungled the PR (the more things change, the more they stay the same, huh) and pissed off everyone outside the party and made everyone inside the party facepalm. After the supermajority disappeared, the republicans started cynically abusing the filibuster and turned the rest of Obama’s presidency into anything from a lame duck to just one (republican caused) crisis after another.
Tl;Dr a lot of the democrats aren’t progressives, and we had a lot more of the old cold war blue dog crowd that Biden is from than we do now, mixed with absolutely bunglefucking both the political strategy and PR around the ACA and not being able to get past the filibuster once the supermajority disappeared.
P.S. it’s worth noting that, at the time, Roe was considered settled law. From what I recall, nobody was too anxious about the SCOTUS citing 400 year old witch hunters and overturning pretty well settled and accepted case law. The republicans were generally seeking to overturn Roe via the federal legislature/executive at the time.
Roe was never considered settled law, which is why there has been numerous bills written to codify it into law. The longest standing one has been Barbara Boxers Freedom of choice act written in 2003 which kept getting shelved by Pelosi every year it was introduced, including 2009 when Obama promised he would sign it his first day in office
Thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that. All of my experience around Roe was seeing republicans wanting it dealt with in the legislature/executive.
Gotta love Pelosi, just when the Democrats are in danger of not spilling the spaghetti, she reliably shows up to make a disaster of it. She’s got, like, the anti-McConnel*.
*McConnel is, imo, one of the most talented statesmen of my lifetime. It’s a goddamn shame he’s used his talents for evil. It’s a little bewildering to imagine how different a place the US could be if he’d been on the side of the people. It’s also a powerful statement of what a wreck the GOP has become that Mitch couldn’t control the MAGA/freedom caucus members anymore. I hope the whole thing just implodes on itself and we get something new and less horrible.
Because while “Democrats” controlled everything, liberals didn’t. It’s extremely likely that if we get another chance at this the same thing will happen - progressive democrats will push for voting reform and better social safety nets while conservative democrats will block those efforts.
We need to make sure to primary shitty democrats.
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This falsehood has been a right-wing talking point all the way back since 2013.
When Obama had “Total Control” of Congress
Lies are easy to get away with if they are repeated often enough and given voice by many different people. Repeat a lie often enough and that lie often becomes conventional wisdom. Repeating a lie doesn’t change the lie into the truth, it changes the people hearing the repeated lie. They begin to accept the lie as truth. One huge example: ‘Iraq has WMD.’
…
The truth…then…is this: Democrats had “total control” of the House of Representatives from 2009-2011, 2 full years. Democrats, and therefore, Obama, had “total control” of the Senate from September 24, 2009 until February 4, 2010. A grand total of 4 months.
Did President Obama have “total control” of Congress? Yes, for 4 entire months. And it was during that very small time window that Obamacare was passed in the Senate with 60 all-Democratic votes.
Did President Obama have "total control’ of Congress during his first two years as president? Absolutely not and any assertions to the contrary…as you can plainly see in the above chronology…is a lie.
EDIT:
This is the archive of the original chronology link.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130307230207/http://www.thepragmaticpundit.com:80/2011/12/obama-did-not-control-congress-for-two.htmlThe question still stands, this just reframes it. He had a majority, just not a filibusterer proof one, so why are the Republicans so willing to remove the filibusterer when it gets in there way and the Democrats not?
“Why is the political party that actively wants to destroy our institutions ok with destroying our institutions?”
That’s your question, reframed.
If you want a real answer, it’s because Roe v. Wade “was” settled law & the Democrats are a “big tent” party with a lot of disparate views that always don’t mesh together. They should be 3 parties working as a collation, but our stupid FPtP election system won’t allow that.
Following that, note which party has made RCV illegal in 5 states.
Post-2016 politics is a different animal.
I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here’s a list of major legislation.
- Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
- The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
- The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
- Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
- School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
- Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
- Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.
That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.
Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).
Because “control” doesn’t mean much in the Senate unless you have 60 votes to break a filibuster.
Regarding roe, this pretty much explains it:
The first thing I’ll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BdrOrwmk78Y
Im pro choice https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzdkAbu8dY
Not my highest priority https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RxiDZejZFjg
parody… No https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1z4uhxpOnN0
Because in a two party system both parties are just sides of the same coin.
Because the democratic party didn’t really tow the party line as well as republicans. They’ve gotten better at it, but still behind. When the R voted NO in unison on most things championed by Obama, D couldn’t be relied upon to counter with YES from every representative.
American politicians mostly argue over issues as a way to earn votes. It’s like the story of the young priest.
Every week he listens to the old priest talk about the church’s roof and how badly it needs repairs and has been for years. He asks the congregation to give generously as the quotes to repair it have been quite high. The young priest decides to call around and eventually finds a religious contractor who agrees to repair the roof at a steep discount! The young priest walks into church one morning to see the old priest outside in shock that the roof has been fixed. The young priest proudly explains how he was finally able to fix the bad roof that had been a pain for years. The old priest says “You idiot! Now how will I get people to donate!?”
Like it or not, the United States are of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.
Now I totally disagree with Republicans on almost everything especially since 2014 but one thing I like about them is, how to pass the actual laws, and how to put justices in supreme court.
No matter how wrong are they, or who paid (directly or indirectly) to pass the laws… when they have majority, they just steamrolls.
Democrats on the other hand are just talks.
Edit: Though, on a larger scale, I think Democracy is a failed experiment. But that’s entirely a different debate.
Look at just one example:
In Europe, Apple was told accept outside payments. Apple made mockery of the wish of the people they are making money from… and made it more expensive to use outside payment system.
Now take a guess, if it was China asked Apple to implement something serious… do you think Apple would be able to make mockery of Chinese government and still survive in China?
