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Post by yorak on May 22, 2019 14:18:40 GMT -5
Trump walks out of meeting with dems today, takes ball and goes home.
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Post by schellis on May 22, 2019 14:41:07 GMT -5
Trump walks out of meeting with dems today, takes ball and goes home. Dems have proven time and time again that they aren't willing to bend on even the smallest things. Its a two way street, has to be some give and take.
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Post by yorak on May 22, 2019 15:47:26 GMT -5
Heard he was only there for a couple minutes though, said he wouldn't work with anyone on infrastructure or prescription drug pricing until all investigations against him were dropped.
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Post by schellis on May 22, 2019 15:51:28 GMT -5
Heard he was only there for a couple minutes though, said he wouldn't work with anyone on infrastructure or prescription drug pricing until all investigations against him were dropped. Don't blame him, that's getting to be a joke.
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Post by breakerslim on May 24, 2019 10:01:21 GMT -5
"extremely stable genius"... lmao
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Post by Lark11 on May 26, 2019 11:54:34 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-republican-war-on-democracy.html?searchResultPosition=2Opinion The Republican War on DemocracyIf you can’t win playing by the rules, you change them. By Jamelle Bouie Opinion Columnist April 27, 2019 New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, discussing the citizenship question on the census, which critics see as an attempt to buoy Republicans’ electoral prospects.CreditCreditShannon Stapleton/ReutersThe demographic changes coming over the next few decades — the continuing rise of a more diverse electorate, with more liberal views than previous generations — won’t destroy the Republican Party or make it electorally insolvent. But it may make right-wing conservatism a rump ideology, backed primarily by a declining minority of older rural and exurban white voters. You can already see this taking shape. Among the youngest Republicans, 52 percent say the government should be “doing more” to solve problems, as opposed to 23 percent of Republican baby boomers. In this environment, the only way to preserve right-wing conservatism in American government is to rig the system against this new electorate. You tilt the field in favor of constituencies that still back traditional Republican conservatism in order to build a foundation for durable minority rule by those groups. In just the last week, we’ve gotten a glimpse of what this rigging looks like in practice. Let’s start with the census dispute that’s now before the Supreme Court. The Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, asking Americans to declare their status in order to participate. The government asks a similar question in the American Community Survey, a more frequently performed survey that is given to a sampling of households. But it hasn’t asked all households the citizenship question on a decennial census since 1950. Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, wants to bring it back. He has the authority to do so. The problem is that he circumvented the official process. The case before the Supreme Court deals with whether the question can stand, given Mr. Ross’s decision to, as a federal judge put it, upend the rules that govern adding a question to the census. The citizenship question is likely to make the census less accurate, to put it mildly. In the face of the harsh anti-immigrant policies sponsored by the Trump administration, as well as uncertainty about their own status, immigrants may not want to reveal their legal status to the government. According an analysis from the Census Bureau itself, 5.8 percent of households with a noncitizen — or about 6.5 million people — would not respond to a census with that question on it. There’s some evidence that this outcome is the point. Kris Kobach, a Trump ally who pushed anti-immigrant policies when he was secretary of state for Kansas, was a proponent of adding the citizenship question to the census. This matters because the census determines congressional apportionment as well as the distribution of Electoral College votes. If millions of immigrants decline to answer the census, then the areas they live in will be undercounted relative to places with fewer noncitizens, which means political power and representation will probably shift as well. A move of just a few Electoral College votes from immigrant-heavy blue states to more white and rural red states could help Republicans win the White House while yet again while running behind in the popular vote. (As it stands, Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.) The Republican Party can maintain a hold on power without changing its priorities or making a fundamentally different appeal to the public. That said, this is an almost subtle way to rig the architecture of democracy, comparatively speaking. More recent efforts by Republican-held state legislatures to erect large barriers to voting are more explicit. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee, for example, are pushing broad new restrictions on large-scale voter-registration drives, including civil penalties for groups that unintentionally file incomplete voter-registration forms and criminal punishment for those that don’t attend state-mandated training sessions, according to the Tennessean. It’s not as if Tennessee has a particular problem with registering voters. What it does have are organizing groups that successfully brought a greater number of black Americans and other people of color to the polls in 2018. In that context, this bill is a form of electoral intimidation — a direct attempt to hinder those groups and their ability to make similar gains in 2020 and on into the future. Last November, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to end felon disenfranchisement. Unable to stop the change, Republicans chose to put barriers to its implementation. On Wednesday, the Florida House of Representatives passed legislation that would require former felons to pay fines as part of their criminal sentence before they can vote again. It’s a poll tax. And like those under Jim Crow, it is an ostensibly neutral policy that falls hardest on black communities, which have a higher share of former felons. Each of these moves works in concert with the others. Pre-existing malapportionment helps Republicans capture the presidency despite losing a majority of voters. This allows them to build a Supreme Court majority that rules in their favor on key questions of ballot access, voter participation and campaign finance. Republican lawmakers in the states use the legal leeway from rulings like Shelby County v. Holder to erect new barriers to voting, while Republicans in Washington look for new ways to embed their partisan interests in the electoral system. At the same time, their wealthy allies take advantage of campaign finance loopholes to spend huge sums on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative causes. And on the chance that Democrats overcome these obstacles and win political power — after the election of Barack Obama, for example — Republicans break the norms of politics to keep them from actually governing the way they want to. Mitch McConnell’s leadership in the Senate during the years he had a majority — and in particular, his “blockade” of Obama’s judicial nominations, including the Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, is a paradigmatic example of the latter strategy. But Republican lawmakers in several states have gone even further, using legislative majorities to strip constitutional authority from newly elected Democratic executives. Republicans in Kansas introduced legislation earlier this week that would strip the recently elected Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, of her power to fill vacancies in top state offices. They cite fairness as a reason to support this proposal, although a leading Democratic critic called it “morally wrong” and an example of legislating for narrow partisan gain. Wisconsin Republicans attempted something similar after Tony Evers, a Democrat, unseated the Republican governor, Scott Walker. They advanced bills to restrict his ability to run public benefits programs and to curb his authority to set rules on implementation of state laws. They also established a new legislative power to intervene in litigation challenging state laws and wrested the right to decide on legal action against the Affordable Care Act from the attorney general’s office, placing it with the heavily gerrymandered legislature’s budget committee. A judge eventually blocked these efforts, but Republican state leaders have appealed the ruling. And Republicans in Michigan made a similar push to rein in executive power after Democrats won all three statewide races, in an attempt to keep Democrats from overturning Republican actions once they took office. It’s clear, then, that from the White House and its allies on the Supreme Court down to individual state lawmakers, conservative Republicans have decided that their agenda cannot survive fair competition on equal ground. They reject efforts at electoral expansion — early voting, automatic registration and mail-in balloting — and embrace strategies that put the burden on voters themselves. Americans have long struggled over the scope of voting and representation. Democracy is — and always will be — a fight. And the lines of this particular conflict are clear. Rather than try to expand our democracy or even preserve it as it stands, Republicans are fighting for a smaller, narrower one that favors their voters over all others so that their power and the interests they serve become untouchable.
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Post by bonscott on May 27, 2019 12:03:34 GMT -5
I'm new here so I know I gotta be careful so here goes
People here talking about Republican corruption while ignoring democrat corruption is crazy
A few examples
Democrats got CNN to post pics of immigrant children in cages that Trump put there.A 3rd news source quickly figured out that these pics were from 2014
HRC receiving questions to a debate before it started
Dems paid some hag to make up lies about a supreme court nominee
The Obama Administration secretly tried to give Tehran access to the US financial system to convert billions of dollars in assets into Euros as part of the Iran nuclear deal.
A new study suggests that President Obama's campaign systematically pursued foreign contributions to fuel his run for the presidency, a violation of law
They tried to blame Russian interference- complete failure
If the democrats would work with the president instead of dreaming up new things to try to blame him for how great would this country be
As far as the corrupt republicans I'm gonna use an old saying which starts "People in glass houses" you know the rest
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Post by Lark11 on May 27, 2019 13:04:19 GMT -5
I'm new here so I know I gotta be careful so here goes People here talking about Republican corruption while ignoring democrat corruption is crazy A few examples Democrats got CNN to post pics of immigrant children in cages that Trump put there.A 3rd news source quickly figured out that these pics were from 2014 HRC receiving questions to a debate before it started Dems paid some hag to make up lies about a supreme court nominee The Obama Administration secretly tried to give Tehran access to the US financial system to convert billions of dollars in assets into Euros as part of the Iran nuclear deal. A new study suggests that President Obama's campaign systematically pursued foreign contributions to fuel his run for the presidency, a violation of law They tried to blame Russian interference- complete failure If the democrats would work with the president instead of dreaming up new things to try to blame him for how great would this country be As far as the corrupt republicans I'm gonna use an old saying which starts "People in glass houses" you know the rest You don't have to be careful, you aren't going to be banned for expressing your political views. I'm sure your stated views are probably the majority views on this board. That said, this thread is about the abuse of power. It's about the Republican party wielding its legislative and executive authority in improper ways to entrench its power. This discussion is about democracy and its proper functioning. It should properly exist on a level above mere partisan issues. I don't have any particular interest in refuting or disproving false equivalencies, whatabout-isms, strawman arguments, unfounded conspiracy theories, or purely partisan disputes. For me, the issue is whether the Republican party is acting in ways that directly attack our system of government. Personally, I think it is and, if you read the two articles posted in this thread, I find it difficult to find an argument that it isn't. Once again, if you take the name of the political party (or parties) out of it and take the discussion up to a more general level, then I think these are the relevant issues: - Do you support voter suppression laws that disenfranchise citizens?
- Do you support outgoing, lame-duck state legislatures and executives of one party trying to drastically change the state laws to prevent the incoming party from governing?
- Do you support hyper-gerrymandering by a party to increase its political power over and above what the popular vote would reflect?
- Do you support a party refusing to hold a confirmation hearing on a lawfully nominated Supreme Court justice until after the results of a distant future election?
This are the issues that must be faced head-on and the questions that everyone needs to answer for themselves, regardless of which party or parties are engaging in the activity. So, far, schellis has been the only one willing to (somewhat) answer those questions, which should be fairly straightforward and a clear point of common ground for all Americans. The fact that they are not is a large part of the problem in this country. Party is before country for too many people.
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Post by bonscott on May 27, 2019 13:48:36 GMT -5
I'm new here so I know I gotta be careful so here goes People here talking about Republican corruption while ignoring democrat corruption is crazy A few examples Democrats got CNN to post pics of immigrant children in cages that Trump put there.A 3rd news source quickly figured out that these pics were from 2014 HRC receiving questions to a debate before it started Dems paid some hag to make up lies about a supreme court nominee The Obama Administration secretly tried to give Tehran access to the US financial system to convert billions of dollars in assets into Euros as part of the Iran nuclear deal. A new study suggests that President Obama's campaign systematically pursued foreign contributions to fuel his run for the presidency, a violation of law They tried to blame Russian interference- complete failure If the democrats would work with the president instead of dreaming up new things to try to blame him for how great would this country be As far as the corrupt republicans I'm gonna use an old saying which starts "People in glass houses" you know the rest You don't have to be careful, you aren't going to be banned for expressing your political views. I'm sure your stated views are probably the majority views on this board. That said, this thread is about the abuse of power. It's about the Republican party wielding its legislative and executive authority in improper ways to entrench its power. This discussion is about democracy and its proper functioning. It should properly exist on a level above mere partisan issues. I don't have any particular interest in refuting or disproving false equivalencies, whatabout-isms, strawman arguments, unfounded conspiracy theories, or purely partisan disputes. For me, the issue is whether the Republican party is acting in ways that directly attack our system of government. Personally, I think it is and, if you read the two articles posted in this thread, I find it difficult to find an argument that it isn't. Once again, if you take the name of the political party (or parties) out of it and take the discussion up to a more general level, then I think these are the relevant issues: - Do you support voter suppression laws that disenfranchise citizens?
- Do you support outgoing, lame-duck state legislatures and executives of one party trying to drastically change the state laws to prevent the incoming party from governing?
- Do you support hyper-gerrymandering by a party to increase its political power over and above what the popular vote would reflect?
- Do you support a party refusing to hold a confirmation hearing on a lawfully nominated Supreme Court justice until after the results of a distant future election?
This are the issues that must be faced head-on and the questions that everyone needs to answer for themselves, regardless of which party or parties are engaging in the activity. So, far, schellis has been the only one willing to (somewhat) answer those questions, which should be fairly straightforward and a clear point of common ground for all Americans. The fact that they are not is a large part of the problem in this country. Party is before country for too many people. Unfortunately I don't believe anything from that publication can be taken seriously as they are democrat lovers like CNN and like Fox news is republican lovers The non neutral news sites like those 3 cannot be believed.If this story was was put out by a neutral one it would be different Both parties are corrupt to the core and neither one is better than the other
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Post by yorak on May 30, 2019 9:14:14 GMT -5
Mueller report pretty damning. Surprised more republicans aren't speaking out against Trump and his teams behavior.
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Post by breakerslim on May 31, 2019 13:07:18 GMT -5
Don't Forget !!!!!
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Post by Lark11 on Jun 2, 2019 15:10:04 GMT -5
www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/donald-trump-has-done-less-destroy-democratic-norms-mitch-mcconnell-ncna1011451?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_maDonald Trump has done less to destroy democratic norms than Mitch McConnellThe Senate majority leader has been around Washington long enough and is smart enough to know precisely what he’s doing to our country for his party. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., gets into an elevator as he leaves his office at the U.S. Capitol on March 25, 2019.Drew Angerer / Getty Images fileMay 29, 2019, 11:26 AM PDT By Robert Schlesinger No one should be surprised that Mitch McConnell has promised that any potential 2020 Trump Supreme Court nominee will not get the Merrick Garland treatment — i.e., be held up until after the presidential race is decided. While McConnell and his Republican colleagues have tried to frame their 2016 obstructionism on Garland's nomination and prospective 2020 decision in various forms of Senate tradition, he has, in this instance, been more-than-normally forthright: Supreme Court nominations are all about partisan politics, nothing more, nothing less. In that, McConnell is the living, breathing, calculating face of everything that is wrong with our current politics. To the extent to which our system has become dysfunctional, McConnell is the single chief architect of that sclerosis. President Donald Trump is a dangerous, blundering wrecking ball, but McConnell was undermining the system well before (and is likely to outlast) him. Nothing exemplifies McConnell’s role as norm-wrecking partisan warrior than the Garland affair: Almost as soon as word of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death emerged, McConnell had promised to block anyone President Barack Obama might nominate. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice,” the pious, pompous McConnell said then, noting that Obama was at the time a lame duck president. But the American people had had a voice in that selection when they elected Obama less than four years earlier to serve as president. The Senate hadn’t confirmed an election-year high court nominee “for the better part of a century,” McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley pointed out, ignoring the fact that the last time such a circumstance had arisen, more than a century earlier, the Senate did both vote, and voted to confirm. McConnell, it seems, is no longer so concerned with the wishes of “the American people” in advance of an election. In any case, asked Tuesday about a hypothetical 2020 Supreme Court nomination, McConnell was direct: “Oh, we’d fill it.” What’s changed? Per CNN: “David Popp, a spokesman for McConnell, said the difference between now and three years ago … is that at that time the White House was controlled by a Democrat and the Senate by Republicans. This time, both are controlled by the GOP.” Popp also pointed reporters to comments McConnell made in October: “The tradition going back to the 1880s has been if a vacancy occurs in a presidential election year, and there is a different party in control of the Senate than the presidency, it is not filled.” Here is the complete list of split-government, election year Supreme Court nominees in the last 130 years: Merrick Garland. That’s it. If you want to get expansive, here’s the entire list of election year, split-government, pre-election Supreme Court nominees: Merrick Garland in 2016 and Melville Fuller in 1888. Of course, if you listened to McConnell you might think that the Senate routinely refused to consider any election year nomination to the high court because of tradition. But between 1888 and 2016, it never came up. And, when it did come up in 1888, and Democratic President Grover Cleveland nominated Fuller to be chief justice, the Republican-controlled Senate … confirmed him overwhelmingly. (Fuller, a Democrat who had managed Stephen Douglas' losing presidential campaign in 1860 but avoided military service during the Civil War, went on to preside over a court that upheld the South's Jim Crow laws in Plessy v. Ferguson, threw out federal income tax law — a ruling rebuked by no less than the 16th Amendment — and made antitrust cases harder to prosecute. Garland would've done considerably better.) So if there’s any “tradition” to be drawn from history, it’s that, before McConnell came along, the Senate had no problem confirming a Supreme Court nominee from another party. That’s how the system is supposed to work: Partisanship is supposed to have its limits. The tradition which McConnell is actually upholding is fairly new, but one of which he is a tireless practitioner: The idea that securing power for one’s political party is the single most important goal, to be pursued regardless of cost to, say, institution, country or constituents. McConnell claims to be a Senate traditionalist and presumably self-identifies as a patriot. But given the opportunity to preserve Senate traditions or maximize partisan gain, there’s little evidence that McConnell even understands the question. The Garland power play was without precedent in history and whacked away at the kind of interparty cooperation necessary for our system to work. And he wasn’t done: Later on in 2016, he famously refused to cooperate in a joint government statement decrying Russian interference in our election. A foreign adversary was assaulting our system, and McConnell couldn’t see past his party affiliation because they were helping his side. Perhaps in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to wreck our system, McConnell saw a kindred spirit. McConnell, notably, was also in favor of filibuster abuse (when he was in the minority) before he was against it (in the majority); has praised gridlock; has gone along with the legislative terrorism of debt-ceiling showdowns and government shutdowns; and infamously said in 2010 that the “single most important” achievement the GOP could aim for was denying Obama re-election. (One supposes Garland was a back-door way of getting some of that.) The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank once wrote that McConnell’s tombstone should include the inscription: “He broke America.” He has been called the “gravedigger of American democracy,” “destroyer of norms” and “the true villain of some of the ugliest moments in this period of U.S. history.” And those are understatements. McConnell, at least, has been around long enough and is smart enough to know precisely what it is he’s doing. Trump seemingly doesn’t understand our system or a president's place in history beyond his desire to get his way. It's hard to see that as worse than McConnell's deliberate effort to destroy that which he cannot control.
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Post by DocDirk on Jun 3, 2019 10:46:58 GMT -5
Trump walks out of meeting with dems today, takes ball and goes home. Dems have proven time and time again that they aren't willing to bend on even the smallest things. Its a two way street, has to be some give and take. I would imagine you were celebrating when McConnell wouldn't even recognize the nomination of Merrick Garland though... Yes, both parties have problems, but R's spent 8 years during Obie's years stonewalling him, and then complain about 2 years of investigations (into a legitimate problem) that have produced what, almost 10 indictments at this point?
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searay
Bid McPhee
Posts: 1,122
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Post by searay on Jun 5, 2019 10:54:52 GMT -5
I'm new here so I know I gotta be careful so here goes People here talking about Republican corruption while ignoring democrat corruption is crazy A few examples Democrats got CNN to post pics of immigrant children in cages that Trump put there.A 3rd news source quickly figured out that these pics were from 2014 HRC receiving questions to a debate before it started Dems paid some hag to make up lies about a supreme court nominee The Obama Administration secretly tried to give Tehran access to the US financial system to convert billions of dollars in assets into Euros as part of the Iran nuclear deal. A new study suggests that President Obama's campaign systematically pursued foreign contributions to fuel his run for the presidency, a violation of law They tried to blame Russian interference- complete failure If the democrats would work with the president instead of dreaming up new things to try to blame him for how great would this country be As far as the corrupt republicans I'm gonna use an old saying which starts "People in glass houses" you know the rest You don't have to be careful, you aren't going to be banned for expressing your political views. I'm sure your stated views are probably the majority views on this board. That said, this thread is about the abuse of power. It's about the Republican party wielding its legislative and executive authority in improper ways to entrench its power. This discussion is about democracy and its proper functioning. It should properly exist on a level above mere partisan issues. I don't have any particular interest in refuting or disproving false equivalencies, whatabout-isms, strawman arguments, unfounded conspiracy theories, or purely partisan disputes. For me, the issue is whether the Republican party is acting in ways that directly attack our system of government. Personally, I think it is and, if you read the two articles posted in this thread, I find it difficult to find an argument that it isn't. Once again, if you take the name of the political party (or parties) out of it and take the discussion up to a more general level, then I think these are the relevant issues: - Do you support voter suppression laws that disenfranchise citizens?
- Do you support outgoing, lame-duck state legislatures and executives of one party trying to drastically change the state laws to prevent the incoming party from governing?
- Do you support hyper-gerrymandering by a party to increase its political power over and above what the popular vote would reflect?
- Do you support a party refusing to hold a confirmation hearing on a lawfully nominated Supreme Court justice until after the results of a distant future election?
This are the issues that must be faced head-on and the questions that everyone needs to answer for themselves, regardless of which party or parties are engaging in the activity. So, far, schellis has been the only one willing to (somewhat) answer those questions, which should be fairly straightforward and a clear point of common ground for all Americans. The fact that they are not is a large part of the problem in this country. Party is before country for too many people. That NY Times column is what it says...an "opinion". Asking for an ID before voting is not racist nor is it disenfranchising anyone. I've shown my /iD here in Ohio before voting for as long as I can remember. I'm not disenfranchised. Both parties use whatever power they have to achieve their goals. There's no Angel or Devil party
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searay
Bid McPhee
Posts: 1,122
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Post by searay on Jun 5, 2019 10:58:05 GMT -5
Dems have proven time and time again that they aren't willing to bend on even the smallest things. Its a two way street, has to be some give and take. I would imagine you were celebrating when McConnell wouldn't even recognize the nomination of Merrick Garland though... Yes, both parties have problems, but R's spent 8 years during Obie's years stonewalling him, and then complain about 2 years of investigations (into a legitimate problem) that have produced what, almost 10 indictments at this point? Those indictments pretty well fall into two categories: 1) Things that happened before Trump was a candidate 2) Things that happened after the investigation started. In other words the investigation "created" crimes. Neither of those things were what Mueller was tasked with doing.
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