2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

we are the dishonest truthtellers! goodnight bowling green!

If anything I feel like congress is giving political cover to Obama for when shit falls through bc then he can blame them

Obama saying he will sign this bipartisan deal = yeah you are probably right

blech

although I kinda doubt that was Corker's intention lol

But if they get a deal and Dems had backed O, this is what he had wanted constitutionally, without needing Congressional approval

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/10/executive-agreements-and-senate-disagreements/

treaties serve as a tiny fraction of international agreements. From the vantage of the White House, this makes perfect sense: Achieving a 2/3 vote authorizing ratification has become increasingly implausible no matter what treaty is under discussion. ....

more than 18,500 executive agreements have been entered into since 1789: more than 17,000 of them from 1939 on. By the mid-1920s, the number of executive agreements had started to outpace the number of treaties, a trend vastly accelerated by World War II; between 1953 and 1972, more than three-quarters of significant military commitments abroad were conducted via executive agreement rather than by treaty. These included, in the mid-1960s, major commitments to the defense of such nations as Ethiopia, Thailand and Spain. In the last case, the U.S. pledged to protect Spain (which did not join NATO until 1982) against attack in exchange for the right to use Spanish soil for military bases.

iran agreeing to reduce threats to israel isn't the same thing as agreeing to recognize israel

what is the 'reduced threat to israel' going to mean anyway, beyond curtailing the nuclear program itself? like, that's what the whole thing is for. reducing support for assad? or hamas? why not demand they bring the shah back while we're at it.

if you want to get a deal in place it's probably better to not mention israel at all. the iranians won't even admit the program is for war anyway, right? or if they want nuclear power, it's purely defensive? demanding they say 'israel is a legitimate state' is not only a few bridges too far it seems kind of pointless.

shakey otm, an attempt to include language of recognition is an attempt to torpedo the whole thing.

frankly i don't see why hawks aren't ok with putting some dumb deal in place; given what they think of the iranians, it won't take long before they are found breaking the deal and then presto, we have a more legit casus belli (because they are fanatics and paranoids is why not)

oh my god

http://hillaryis44.com/

this blog is still going

and it is REALLY going

motherfucker is just flying right now

a quote from a Hillary hating article from a Hillary Hater at the Hillary Hating All White Republic:

so much hatin

Inspired by Clinton’s “pragmatic centrism”

lol I can't think of many things less inspiring than the phrase "pragmatic centrism"

dogmatic censusism

"George W. Bush"

"18-1/2 months more of this shit"

don't expect an improvement in month 19

my historical memory is shorter than others, or maybe it's experiencing more of this thru twitter this time around, but i feel like the level of already-sick-of-this-shit cynicism is remarkable

don't u feel like already-sick-of-this-shit cynicism is an eternal condition?

hey guys, the cynics are the ppl putting on the fucking circus.

The right wingnuts have a few wingnut-pandering candidates to excite them. Everyone to the left of the right wingnuts has a big bowl of lukewarm gruel to look forward to.

i suspect that historically we [the public], and more of us, probably have more input into the political process than almost any other time in history. maybe there's a relationship between a low level of participation in politics and cynicism - bc if you have no participation, there's no reason to get hopeful in the first place. but a little bit is enough for you to believe politics should be serving you, and become cynical + disappointed when it doesn't. or maybe historically political cynicism always existed. "death & taxes" dates at least back to 18th century and has a bit of that cynical resigned tone in it.

all i really know is that hagar the horrible complains about his local governance a lot

The Kochs just spend lots of money

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vGJpg3cZfmI/VS6J4O0zZYI/AAAAAAAAYXM/TA9je2owoL4/s1600/Screenshot%2B2015-04-15%2Bat%2B8.52.38%2BAM.png

sliiiiiiightly ambiguous coming from the GOP.

they didn't even try to rephrase or delete it either

A dismal letter: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/letter-dismal-allies-us-left?CMP=share_btn_fb

"Believe me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now"

Solnit wrote that back in 2012--is it going around again in response to the seeming inevitability of the Clinton nomination?

"Can you imagine how far the civil rights movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? "

O_o

That guy hangs out with the wrong people. There are lots of part-time amateur activists out there who are working toward practical goals. They tend to cluster around local issues more than national ones, so maybe he doesn't notice them or maybe he doesn't care, but imo complaining about the complainers doesn't exactly constitute a step ahead.

this whole tpp thing is shady as fuck

http://www.thenation.com/blog/204569/now-congress-fast-tracking-tpp-fast-track

Im actually shocked schumer is opposing fast track

It must be for the wrong reasons.

Looks like O and the business types may be able to win over Schumer, and they're trying to win over other dems

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/business/obama-trade-legislation-fast-track-authority-trans-pacific-partnership.html

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat, said he will demand the inclusion of legislation to combat the manipulation of currency values, especially by China. “China is the most rapacious of our trading partners, and the stated goal of this deal is to lure these other countries away from China,” Mr. Schumer said. “It’s not at all contradictory to finally do something with China’s awful trade practices.”

But Mr. Obama’s enthusiasm was tempered by the rancor the bill elicited from some of his strongest allies. To win over the key Democrat, Mr. Wyden, the Republicans agreed to stringent requirements for the deal, including a human rights negotiating objective that has never existed on trade agreements.

And the Loretta Lynch nomination looks like will get a vote, thanks to a compromise that looks like more shadowplay:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-leaders-clear-way-for-vote-on-loretta-lynch-as-attorney-general-1429627789

human rights addition sounds good, I wonder if it really has any teeth tho

I don't fully understand the details of the TPP but if it's like NAFTA etc (and I don't see any indication that it's not) then I'm just against it in principle

i'm not sure that anyone fully understands the details of TPP at this point

so wait, prosperity didn't trickle down in kansas? did they just not cut taxes hard enough?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/21/vwelfap/?tid=sm_tw

Hillvetica is now a font

http://www.gofundme.com/rvtcu8

@ggreenwald
Pro-NSA liberals have a great new ally: Mitch McConnell, who wants to extend Patriot Act's Sec 215 by 5 more years

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mcconnell-introduces-bill-to-extend-nsa-surveillance/2015/04/21/fa4b66aa-e89d-11e4-aae1-d642717d8afa_story.html

what a charmer:

Letting opponents choose which side to take was one of his patented pieces of debate brinkmanship. His “flourish,” according to Scott Angstreich, a former teammate, would be to crumple up a piece of paper of the side not taken. In reality, the page remaining in his other hand had both the pro and con arguments written on opposite sides.

“Nobody was better at setting traps,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, a Yale debater who became a leading economist for President Obama. He recalled Mr. Cruz’s attempts to control debates with carefully constructed arguments that always seemed to anticipate his opponents’ rebuttals.

But Mr. Goolsbee and other top debaters on the circuit who frequently beat Mr. Cruz discovered it was easy to get under his skin, especially with humor. “It would unravel him,” Mr. Goolsbee said.

In one round, Mr. Goolsbee pointed out that the story of Mr. Cruz’s father coming to America, as compelling as it sounded, was not entirely relevant to, say, the federal deficit.

“How dare you insult my father!” Mr. Cruz replied.

Mr. Cruz’s own attempts at humor sometimes missed the mark. In one debate, he proposed a method to detect infidelity, in which God should “give women a hymen that grows back every time she has intercourse with a different guy, because that will be a ‘visible sign’ of the breach of trust,” according to a recollection by David Kennedy published in a Harvard debate team reunion booklet in 2001.

can't believe God didn't think of that first

Can't believe Cruz has ever seen 1 (one) hymen.

leestrasberg.jpeg

would shake my head ruefully about Kansas but WA's dumbfuck legislature seems to have no interest in fixing our most-regressive-tax-structure-in-the-country this session

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-2016-obamacare-states

There are many Democrats who believe that, in political terms, the joke will be on Republicans if the Supreme Court adopts the preposterous claim of the plaintiffs who say that Obamacare subsidies in states without state exchanges violate the law. This is because millions of middle- and lower middle-class people who had a benefit suddenly will have it taken away. I feel like I've been to this rodeo enough times to know Republicans have a really high capacity to stick with unpopular policies if doing otherwise would cut against key ideological priorities. In functional terms, the complaints of a few hundred thousand of what Sen. Johnson and his interviewer called "sad sacks" who lose their insurance cuts a lot less than the base's ideological commitment to opposing Obamacare by any means necessary. But the calculus may be different in some key states - states that did not set up exchanges but are generally blue or purple in presidential elections.

...Here are the states without market places that seem to me in reasonable contention in 2016. As you'll see, this list reads like a list of key swing states.

Florida (1,479,439)

Maine (66,616)

Missouri (222,559)

New Jersey (211,158)

North Carolina (512,975)

Ohio (196,714)

Pennsylvania (379,607)

Virginia (320,525)

Wisconsin (184,822)

In parantheses, I've listed the number of individuals in each state currently enrolled with an Obamacare policy and receiving a subsidy.

i keep thinking about the assumption among left-leaning people that a supreme court decision that eliminating subsidies would outrage people who lost them, who would then blame republicans for it and vote for the democratic candidate instead.

i think that assumption is wrong, or at the very least not clear. admittedly my opinion leans heavily on a really cynical view of how much information voters have, the poor quality of the news they choose to pay attention to, and how much independent research they're willing to do. but if you're a low-information voter in a state that's either purple or red, surrounded by conservatives and assholes at work who have been mass-forwarding obamacare conspiracy emails for the past 5 years, and suddenly your subsidies are taken away, wouldn't your first response be to blame obamacare itself, and by extension the democratic party? all you know is that this big obamacare thing that everyone hates is taking your subsidies away because the supreme court said something in obamacare was illegal, and democrats were the one that pushed it on you. in order to place the blame on the republicans, you'd have to check at least one or two of these boxes:

- understand that the right-wing of the supreme court voted in favor of it, overruling the democrat-appointed justices
- understand that the case itself was pushed by conservative groups trying to undercut obama's signature achievement
- understand that there's an easy way for congress to fix the entire issue (by amending the law so the language regarding whether or not states that choose not to build exchanges are allowed to receive subsidies), and it will never happen because of the republicans
- understand that states could have avoided the entire issue, as ridiculous as "the issue" is, if they would have built their own exchanges, which is one assume that states led by conservatives who hate the federal government and preach States Rights at every opportunity would want to do in the first place

i think it's easy to assume that if the worst-case scenario happens and the supreme court eliminates the subsidies, everyone will immediately make the connections and blame the obvious culprit. but in order to assign that blame you have to know at least a LITTLE bit about the process, and that's a big assumption.

it's the old thing where the truth is way more complicated than a lie. assume you know nothing and believe everything. your subsidies are taken away. the political ads start becoming more and more frequent.

Republican Ad: the Democrats pushed Obamacare on you, no one likes it, we tried to stop it but were defeated, and now look at how it's FALLING APART. the highest court in the land just declared that a major section of Obamacare is illegal. Vote for republicans - we hate washington.

Democratic Ad: when we were passing obamacare, there was one little section regarding subsidies that was slightly ambiguous on paper, but the intent was very clear to everyone. republicans took that ambiguity and exploited it, and somehow a case based off of the ambiguity rose all the way to the supreme court, which is so baldly partisan and terrible that they managed to AGREE with this absurd plaintiff. there's a way to easily amend the law so that everyone can keep their subsidies, but republicans are blocking it because they don't like anything that involves the federal government helping people. vote for democrats - we'll fix this somehow and the republicans are mean! don't you see it? they're evil!

otm

i'm inclined to agree on principle but "WE gave you something, THEY took it away" is pretty clear, and also true.

"I used to be able to get insurance coverage for my diabetes. Now I can't." Wring the pathos. Dems are stupid though.

at every stage of the ACA fight I feel like a lot of liberals engaged in very silly silver lining arguments, e.g. "if the ACA gets repealed then we can just pass single payer instead!"

"i'm inclined to agree on principle but "WE gave you something, THEY took it away" is pretty clear, and also true."

who is THEY, though? if you've been paying attention, it's the republicans. if you haven't been paying attention, it got taken away because it was illegal.

um people don't give a shit about whether things are legal

people give a shit about being able to go to the doctor