Democratic Filibuster of Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee

Procedure matters quite a lot to making deliberative bodies function in a stable and consistent way and I would not discount the importance of even arcane details. But, super majorities make little sense. The separation of powers tests the ability to hold together factional coalitions well enough without creating holdup opportunities that will be often abused.

The filibuster over the last ten years became a means by which the neoliberal faction dominating the Democratic Party escaped responsibility for their feckless service to their donors instead of their voters. Good riddance.

What this mess tells me is that republicans know how to use power. When Obama and Reid had the chance to drop the hammer they ran away like Nancy boys. I guess the question is why?

By the way, the Dick Smothers character in the great film ‘Casino’ is base on Mr. Reid. He doesn’t come too well.

Take care, all.

Chris Bowers reported on a historical analysis on the old OpenLeft site that concluded that filibusters help conservative/republicans much more so than progressives/Democrats. As there will always be more conservaDems/”moderate” Dems who will defect than “liberal” Republicans, it effectively only takes 54 Republicans to override a filibuster promoted by progressives, while it takes 73 “Democrats” to override one mounted by conservatives.

So if the Republicans do nuke the filibuster, good riddance. They’d be smarter to forgo this victory.

This is not important – it is a pseudo-. The is no actual limit on judges.

Civil War is inevitable now in the US. Fuck it, we deserve it.

*sigh* I can haz edit feechur, plz? 🙄

Here it is again, talk of an inevitable civil war in the U.S. How serious is this talk? How can one prepare for such a thing? It sounds like indulging in disaster fantasy, but it worries me.

The filibuster as practiced over the last few decades is simple corruption. There is an argument that a deliberative body should allow members to speak to a topic as long as they claim to have something to say, subject to a super-majority closure. Like any other procedural rule, this opportunity to persuade at length can be used for other legislative purposes, and that use was called “filibuster”.

But our pampered, accountability-dodging senators decided that even pretending to speak was just too onerous for them, so they’d simply change a defensible procedure into an anti-democratic requirement for a super-majority. No speaking, no attempts at persuasion, no deliberation, merely super-majority headcount. And that, in a democracy is corruption. There is no honest argument whatsoever for the current cutesy “filibuster”.

Keith in Modesto said: “Here it is again, talk of an inevitable civil war in the U.S. How serious is this talk? How can one prepare for such a thing? It sounds like indulging in disaster fantasy, but it worries me.”

I wouldn’t worry too much, because, I wouldn’t worry about a bunch of fat, lazy, opioid addicted, armchair warrior white dudes suddenly finding the motivation to do much more than beat their wives and “virtue signal” their lost masculinity.

I live in N. Idaho in the center of the “Redoubt” movement. I work with a tinfoil hat wearing “Oathkeeper.” He’s a fat little urbanite that moved here to be with his “people.” Loves to run his mouth and talk about how it’ll all be over for us “liberals” once the shooting starts. He owns a bunch of guns, but can’t shoot his way out of wet paper bag. Like most urbanites, he’d be dead inside of two weeks if the shit ever really hit the fan. Seriously, all the shooting talk is just the “virtue signaling” opposite of a liberal buying a Tesla.

@webstir
And now you too, can become somebody (maybe even a real man?), regardless of how fat drunk and stupid you really are. Buy your manly-man freedumb kit today. Comes complete with guns and freedomjesus tee shirts. Besides, what’s in the other guys kit? A pink kwanzaa sweater and an incomprehensible economic book telling you that your job is going away for the best?

I don’t find the idea that it’s only a “bunch of fat, lazy, opioid addicted, armchair warrior white dudes” talking about civil war a bit reassuring. Maybe such people are the only one’s “talking tough” (maybe, maybe not), but that doesn’t mean that other less stupid and lazy people might be thinking about it. And you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that U.S. society offers nothing but more pain and punishment for ordinary people, and that neither mainstream party is on our side.

I’m worried that our elites might be either a) too stupid to give working people reason to keep working in the system [as in an “American Dream” that works again for working people again] or b) are so confident in the new technologies of surveillance [AI crawling social media and financial records, an “internet of thing” decked out with sensors listening in on everyone] and repression [armed drones, more capable robotic weapons platforms] that they think rebellion is no longer possible, so no reason to throw the proles any crumbs anymore.

For a real civil war, we would need a sharp geographic divide with forced points of contact. We do not have either, at least not within the U.S. itself.

The mainstream elite promotes globalism, which means a mainstream culture and economic system permeates not just the U.S., but much of the world.

We are witnessing a rising tide of political violence in the U.S., a trend I would expect to continue at least thru 2020. And, many large parts of the world system centered on the U.S. are under unbearable financial stress: the Eurozone & China most notably though India or South America might also spin off into economic chaos. That stress at the periphery means artificially increased stability at the center . . . until it doesn’t.

Rather than civil war in the U.S. per se, I would look for some kind of imperial collapse on the periphery. Jeff Sachs is calling for U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. Britain is feeling war fever over Gibralter, while the whole of the Czech Republic wants revenge today for a death of a Czech ex-pat in London, which has gone unpunished by law. The turmoil in China continues to build and Italy’s banks stumble toward collapse.

The good hegemon is dead.

Two or three, maybe even five or six years down the line, the U.S. will begin to feel the economic effects as the flow of tribute inflating the U.S. standard of living peters out and reverses. The premiums on ip and distribution commanded by U.S. corporate giants may begin eroding at an accelerated rate. The disinvestment that has fueled top income growth will run out.

The new era of economic nationalism has begun already, but the motivations for it will multiply.

With reality checker, I recommend the Sen. Whitehouse implosion on Morning Joe. The segment illustrates the difficulties of taking a principled stand when you don’t really stand for anything. So Whitehouse was going off on how rich powerful individuals had gotten the Republicans to stack the Court and won self-serving decisions like Citizens United that gave them the government when Scarborough pointed out that Hillary (and he could have said Chuck Schumer, D-Wall Street, as well) were about as in the bag to the rich as you could get. Much sputtering followed.

Just to be clear Gorsuch is a bought and paid for creep in a three-piece suit who like pretty much everyone else on the Court pretends that he will be fair and objective when, in fact, he will decide cases based on his ideology, which happens to be movement conservative, anti-abortion, anti-the little guy, and very corporatist. He will then cite whatever case law his clerks can dig up to support his biases. He will then, much like Roberts, mumble something about respecting stare decisis and then seek to overturn every precedent in sight. Everyone knows this. The Supreme Court has been a noxious nest of vipers in bath robes for the whole of the country’s history with the possible exception of the twenty years which comprised the Warren Court and its aftermath (or from Brown 1954 to Roe 1973).

The Senate itself is anti-democratic. The majority of Americans live in just 9 states and are represented by 18 Senators while the other slightly less than half have 82 Senators. So spare me all the big state/little state BS. This is so unrepresentative that it is more like a system of rotten boroughs.

BTW most of the business of the Senate occurs via suspensions of Senate rules, i.e. unanimous consents. And most of the time very few Senators are on the floor while the Senate is in sesssion. If you want to stop the business of the Senate, a handful of Senators could do so very easily simply by noting an absent of a quorum and objecting to all unanimous consents. And if you have a good parlementarian, you can raise points of order ad infinitum. You can also run real filibusters and/or bring up thousands of amendments to any legislation and/or call for role call votes on all votes. There are lots and lots of weapons if say the Democrats want to use them. If the Republicans went nuclear, the Democrats could respond. But this is where the kabuki nature of these proceedings comes in because the Democrats will only mount an opposition which they know they will lose.

Majority, Super-majority, filibuster (both meanings apropos here), etc.? Maybe the issue is that Democracy – like any political system – has shortcomings and weaknesses and when the polity has to engineer workarounds to deal with the faults, people get bent out of shape. Why? Because Democracy is promoted as if it were perfect and we don’t want to admit, much less face and deal with its imperfections.

And @Arthur – perhaps the ‘missed word’ Freudian slip?

@Web

Andre Vltcheck’s essay at CP on 2/10 ‘The West is Finished’ discusses why there will be no Left revolution or even civil war in the US. You seem to be responding to the warnings issued by individual citizens about the snowflakes and their minders attempts to undermine and even overthrow the Republic which has attracted warnings from Trump supporters and even some more liberal minded people.

You seem to be trying to stereotype anyone who gives stern warnings to snowflake coup plotters as being part of some white supremacist survivalist cult. I don’t know how much the Prepper movement has spread but it doesn’t have crazy leaders, it’s organized horizontally. Many of them have military training so they know useful tools from the garbage that you will probably lose money trying to sell to them. Some of the political conclusions made by some of these people seem to miss the mark. This is especially true when they confuse Clintonite centrists liberals with the Left or what’s left of it the US.

@Web

I live in New Mexico where we have a tricultural racist system with a good infusion of illegal aliens to bring our groups together at times. I’ve fished the Gila wilderness for the last 40 years and fought some fires around there but people who know of the Gila may not know it’s in Catron county. Catron county is where the Counties Movement began after some do-gooder environmentalists managed to stop logging in the Gila forest to save a spotted owl. This destroyed the local economy that was already weak and drove locals further into poverty or forced them to move. No real attempt was made to assist the locals beyond the paternalistic directive for them to become part of the tourism industry.

This was hailed as a huge environmental victory in the media when it happened and the locals were forgotten until some of the more extreme and vocal people started the movement. If you force frontier people from their jobs or threaten their livelihood and then ignore them they will react and even follow extremists. Facing real or imagined attacks from the government, scorn from the leisure class and media local citizens will follow people who attack those forces because they are alone.

I’d like to see and fish the River of No Return country but I can’t even walk anymore so I’ll just sit and bum fish while watching out for the burly woodsman snowflake of the north.

Note; the overgrown forest that was saved for the spotted owl was nearly completely burnt to the ground from the drought and extreme fires of the last decade. I drove through one twenty mile strip of this total destruction six years after the fire and there was no recovery.

Welll, the Rs killed the filibuster (at least for all judicial nominees). That part of blowing up the system is done. Now we have to get the Rs to blow it up for all legislation, to prevent the Ds from having the “Oh but we don’t have 60 votes excuse for inaction).