Doc Avid Mornington

That’s how you talk?

I get what you’re saying, here. That’s why I specifically disclaimed making any judgement about whether it would be moral, or wise. But consider the other side of that same coin: the court did this specifically to overthrow democracy and allow Trump, or any other president who will carry out Project-2025 to use this power to maintain an effective dictatorship. There’s no other explanation for this ruling. Would using this absurd power once, now, to restore a court that is loyal to the Constitution and People of America, be worse than letting Trump get in, assassinate any and all opposition, and end democracy? Could we trust it to end there? Would Biden install justices that would immediately reverse the ruling and bring things back to normal, or just install his own loyalists? I dunno, it’s complicated.

Ultimately, it’s also all just theoretical, anyhow. I find it almost inconceivable that Biden would do this.

Is that an act of an insane person? It’s apparently legal, now. Do you broadly think that using violence against tyranny is insane? Our founders committed their lives and fortunes to the violent overthrow of tyranny. It would be much easier, sitting in the oval office, with legal authority granted to him by the very people he would be targeting, to authorize the extrajudicial execution of a few traitors. Do you think that extrajudicial execution is insane? Then you’ll have to admit that most presidents in the last few decades were insane, especially Obama. Is it only insane when the target is white people in power, rather than brown-skinned people overseas?

I’m not commenting, at this time, on whether it would be moral, or wise, but insane? I can’t see how.

Oh, they can read, they know exactly what they are doing. The Republic has had enemies within from the start, and now they control the most powerful branch of government.

But who, who is “you” in this scenario? Who do you think can just tell the court “no”? Let’s be specific.

What? Your colleague sounds like they may be struggling with some serious cognitive issues, they may want to see a doctor about that. As for me, I’ve been living with my brain my entire life, and have kept several different sleep schedules in that time, for one reason or another, including rigid adherence to a schedule you would certainly approve of, and at no time has the basic fact that my brain works better later in the day ever changed. Some people never learn that their own circumstances and experience are not universal. Maybe try not to be one of those people.

I am definitely not at my most productive at the start of the day.

Between fascist Republicans and liberals pretending to be libertarians, I think it’s a pretty clear choice. We vote to live another day.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/popular-information/

I never heard of it, either, but sounds reliable.

Your comment was, as I stated, nearly non-sequitur because you only responded to one word of the first sentence of givesomefucks’ comment:

I wish the Dem party compromised as much with Dem voters as they did with trump supporters.

You responded to the word “compromised”. You responded as if you were responding to a general senseless rant against the very idea of compromise at all, a position which is not even present in that first sentence, and has nothing to do with the rest of their comment, or the overall point they were making about the belligerent and dismissive attitude Biden takes toward Democratic voters, and what different approach would actually win elections - I’ll quote the rest so you don’t have to scroll back:

That’s the best way to get Biden the votes necessary to prevent Trump.

Not the current strategy of:

Fuck you, you’ll vote for me or get the fascist again

Like, this should be an easy victory for any halfway decent candidate. Instead we get an 82 year old that won’t stop shit talking his party’s voter base for not wanting to fund a genocide rather than social services.

In my comment, I attempted to clarify and expound on what would work, what they are actually doing, and the great gulf between these, trying to bring it back to givesomefucks’ actual comment, rather than what you imagined to respond to. Instead, you’ve responded, again, to a comment not actually made - accusing me of somehow “demanding” something. Where did I demand anything?

And yeah, the filibuster isn’t real. A simple majority of the Senate can pass anything they want. They can drop the filibuster as a rule; they can carve out a general exception; they can even just choose to suspend it for that single piece of legislation. If a simple majority can pass any legislation they want, given that they actually choose to, then the filibuster is absolutely not real. It’s smoke and mirrors so they can blame the other guys. In fact, it’s probably not even constitutional - there’s no constitutional support for it, and the founders were explicitly against including any kind of supermajority requirement.

This is nearly a complete non-sequitur to the comment you are responding to. If Biden laid it out like you have, said “look we’re in a bad position here, we need to compromise with the fascists even though they are wrong”, if he presented a strong platform with goals people could get excited about, and make it clear who and what are the obstacles voters have to overcome to get there, he could bring out the voters to get those overwhelming and consistent majorities. The same goes for every Democratic president you named. Instead, Biden is absolutely obstinate about it. He acts like the fascists are decent and reasonable people, like the only hope the left can have is to slow down the slide to the right, and like we’re the problem - not the Republicans, not the right-wing Democrats, no, the only problem is that some of us would like less murder and more food, housing, healthcare and education. That’s exactly why the Democrats have only had control for four of the last twenty-four years.

And the filibuster isn’t real. It’s literally just a made up rule they all agree to pretend matters. It can be ended at any time by a simple majority. Doing so at the beginning of a session would look more legitimate, but frankly, the so-called “nuclear option” is far more legitimate in itself than the routine abusive use of the filibuster. They choose to let it restrain them specifically so that they can blame inaction on it.

Shilling for the status quo? I’ve got a whole laundry list of changes I’d love to make, some much more significant than term limits, to make legislatures more responsive to democratic oversight. Please see my response to Zaktor for just a few.

There’s this claim, probably kinda BS, that it takes ten years of practice to get really good at something. I’m always suspicious of nice neat numbers like that. But I think it gets repeated a lot because, ultimately, anybody who has become an expert at something kinda squints at it and says “yeah that sounds maybe right” - because it’s close enough, it’s on the right order of magnitude. Expertise takes time. Laws are complicated. If you have a twelve year term limit, and become an expert at year ten, you get two years to do something about it - but only a small fraction of the legislative body left has your level of expertise to work with you.

Always demand more democracy, never less.

So I did some digging… USTL is one of several shady, fake-grass-roots organizations operated by Howard Rich, a wealthy libertarian, and funded by his collection of wealthy libertarian friends, who clearly want to reduce the effectiveness of government, and make it more susceptible to their influence. The lobbyists investigated the lobbyists and found that they don’t support the thing they are saying you should support.

If you look deeper at the specific bills highlighted in that article, neither one is about term-limits versus no-term-limits. They’re both about restructuring existing term limits. We had a similar ballot measure where I live. It’s a fairly complicated issue, and not a good example.

Perhaps the most famous term limit in the US is the Presidential one, imposed because FDR was doing too many good things. By actually doing things to help people, he had become insanely popular, and won a fourth term - democratically, because the voting citizens approved of his actions, as it’s supposed to work. That’s when the corrupt capitalist wing of Congress decided to put a limit on democracy, and honestly, that might be one of the most significant “beginning of the downfall” moments we can point to in US history.

Another big supporter of term limits is the Heritage Foundation. If you can judge somebody by the friends they keep, how about legislation? It’s always the right pushing for this idea.

There’s a lot, and I mean a whole lot, we should be doing to reduce the influence of money on politics. Fully publicly funded elections; banning many current shady lobbying practices; improving our electoral systems to be more democratic; making it illegal for legislators to take bribes, no matter how subtle. Lots. But taking the choice away from the voters is not a good option. It’s a generally good rule of thumb: if your solution to a problem is to reduce democracy, you’ve got the wrong solution.

EDIT to add: https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-term-limits-turn-legislatures-6b2

Characterizing the voters as “lazy” is really failing to understand how bad legislators stay in office. We need to reform our electoral systems to make legislators more accountable to democratic oversight, not impose arbitrary limits that take the power away from the voters.

With term limits, the Congress would lose institutional knowledge. When a new member of Congress came in, they would only have lobbyists to give them introductions, teach them the ropes. Legislation is a difficult job that requires professionals, not just a bunch of newbies. We would be absolutely signing over the Congress to complete corporate control.

More democracy is better.

Less democracy is worse.

I think you’re underestimating the extent to which they really want these things, or their donors do. These issues aren’t new, and many of them either trace back to before the founding of the country, or are proxies for other issues which do. They’re just feeling bold these days.

I agree, it is a very bad sign, but the idea that we are either a “failed state” on the way to oblivion, or doing great, and there’s nothing in between, is silly. We’re a lot better now than we were when only landowners could vote, right? Or before the civil war and the second founding? Or before women gained suffrage? Or in the leadup to our entry in WWII, when it looked like we might just join the Axis powers? Or the nineteen forties, when “separate but equal” was basically unchallenged? Or in the nineteen fifties, when a woman was a housewife or nothing? Or the nineteen nineties, when “don’t ask don’t tell” was actually considered a victory for LGBTQ+ rights? Or the twenty-aughts when people were noy allowed to marry based on gender? We’re trying to decide, right now, if a former president can be tried for crimes - it seems wild that this should even be a question, but when it was Nixon, Johnson pardoned him, and that was it - we might be on the verge of a huge step forward, in even just going ahead with the trial, no matter the outcome. Does all this mean everything is awesome now? Oh, oh, HELLS NO! It’s a mess, but it doesn’t mean we are a “failed state”, it just means we aren’t there yet, and we gotta keep struggling.

I dunno why people are downvoting this. You’re absolutely right. Biden doesn’t give as good speech as Obama or Clinton did, but he is pretty charming when he turns it on. He should definitely be in front of cameras, and crowds, more often, especially as we get closer to the election. He’s not perfect, and his tepid stance toward Palestine is saddening, but on domestic policy, he’s been far better as president than I personally expected - probably the most progressive president since LBJ. He’s done more with less political capital than past Democratic presidents, yet a lot of people don’t really realize that, because he’s not talking directly to the populace as much as he could and, I think, really should.

I’m not sure they can realistically run out that clock. But they can absolutely just ignore a past ruling, if they want. Also, Biden just wouldn’t do that. He’s a shit, in a lot of ways, but not that kind of shit. Buuut the important point is that this argument is effective, accurate or not. Scare the MAGAts about what Biden, or, say, a future President Alexandria Ocasio Cortez might do. It doesn’t have to be a realistic threat, just play into their existing narrative.

I mean, Jeffrey Epstein springs immediately to mind. But they definitely have a plan for the future, anyhow.

The pardon power should be eliminated, and that’s been clear since Nixon was pardoned. Sure, just about every president has a feel-good set of pardons, people who were railroaded by bad laws and bad court practices, but those corrections are only a tiny fraction of the outrageous injustices committed by our system, and their existence is used to justify the injustice in the first place - “oh but surely there will be a pardon for people who really need it” - as if depending on a single King-figure at the top to make good decisions, instead of improving systems, was ever a good idea. But in the meantime, just about every president also has a list of political pardons they trade for favors, or use for people who committed crimes on behalf of the president, or the party. Why the fuck does it make any sense at all to say “hey, this person was elected head of the executive branch, they should be able to just shield people from the rule of law”, if the rule of law is an important basis of a free democracy? It’s weird, when you think about it. End the pardon.