Kavanaugh SCOTUS Senate Judicial Hearing

[ivwshane]

Not naive at all. I know they would have, the Democrats just beat them to it.

And how did that work out for them? A big part of that decision was the arrogance in believing that the inpenetrable blue wall would make the filibuster irrelevant. Mitch McConnell broke the Senate, but he wasn’t the one that paved the road.

Fuck you, you fucking liar.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4527993/sen-reid-questioned-consequences-filibuster-rules-change

 

[Josephus312]

Don't blame Shumer. Confirmation of those nominees was inevitable. All he could do was slow them down & prevent his own guys from campaigning at the same time. He made the best of a bad situation.

Oh shut the FUCK up, with your loyalty to the people who through lobbyism and convenience have failed their duty you are no better than the fucking Trumpists.

I am loyal to NO party and NO politician and until the Warren bill is favoured in any one party that is my stance. If it ever gets to that point I will have found my party but there is no such party in the US today.

What do you think Obama would have to say about the practise if you were completely honest with yourself? How about Biden? Or do you not regard them as loyal enough these days and only the bough and paid for people are deserving of loyalty these days?

 

[ivwshane]

The Democrats started the nasty state of affairs in regard to the Supreme Court with Bork, they then continued it with the high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas

"And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas

It so disgusted some of the more reasonable members of the old Democratic Party that he was confirmed, even after the filthy attack. So stop the fcking bullshit about how the Democrats are on the high road in the Supreme Court fight, you assholes suck.

No they didn't and I've already cited and explained to you and others, multiple times, that what Democrats did was not unprecedented.

Sorry the facts don't match with your alternate reality.

 

[Josephus312]

Fuck you, you fucking liar.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4527993/sen-reid-questioned-consequences-filibuster-rules-change

I've watched the wretched corpse of a once liberal politician called Reid but have you?

Because Starbuck's assessment is completely correct.

I'm a liberal, i have no loyalty to anything but individual freedom and the free market regulated as appropriate to remain free and it is my assessment that you are blind to the problems on your side of the fascist isle.

 

[fskimospy]

Not naive at all. I know they would have, the Democrats just beat them to it.

And how did that work out for them? A big part of that decision was the arrogance in believing that the inpenetrable blue wall would make the filibuster irrelevant. Mitch McConnell broke the Senate, but he wasn’t the one that paved the road.

It worked out just fine for them? They confirmed some judges they wouldn’t have confirmed otherwise and since we both agree it did nothing to change McConnell’s behavior it was all upside and zero downside.

 

[UberNeuman]

ah, the Russian troll factory is hard at work punching these little posters out of the CONCERN molds. lol.

 

[ivwshane]

I've watched the wretched corpse of a once liberal politician called Reid but have you?

Because Starbuck's assessment is completely correct.

I'm a liberal, i have no loyalty to anything but individual freedom and the free market regulated as appropriate to remain free and it is my assessment that you are blind to the problems on your side of the fascist isle.

Lol. I'm not a liberal and I don't have loyalty to anything but facts and logic.

I usually agree with a lot of your posts but when you start throwing the term fascist around to describe a party's response to an unwinnable situation, you've lost all credibility.

There is no doubt that Democrats have been timid and ineffective against Republican political tactics but that's because they prefer to play by the rules and norms. Republicans simply use that to their advantage. You prefer to blame the victims while ignoring the party that's doing everything they can to gain and maintain power.

 

[imported_tajmahal]

No they didn't and I've already cited and explained to you and others, multiple times, that what Democrats did was not unprecedented.

Sorry the facts don't match with your alternate reality.

We agree, the high tech attempted lynching of Clarence Thomas by the Democrats wasn't unprecedented by them.

 

[ivwshane]

We agree, the high tech attempted lynching of Clarence Thomas by the Democrats wasn't unprecedented by them.

High tech? The guy sexually harassed a woman. I'm sorry you think people shouldn't face the consequences of their actions.

 

[imported_tajmahal]

High tech? The guy sexually harassed a woman. I'm sorry you think people shouldn't face the consequences of their actions.

Except he never did, it was just a vile smear job by the Democrats.

 

[Starbuck1975]

Fuck you, you fucking liar.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4527993/sen-reid-questioned-consequences-filibuster-rules-change

LOL, you are so predictable. Back you into a corner and you start with the childish triggered nonsense.

Take away your tribalistic rationalizations and my points stand. I am capable of condemning McConnell and Reid and Kennedy and McCain and Trump and Clinton and Biden and whoever I damn well please because I take intent at face value, and hold people accountable for THEIR actions.

You reap what you sow.

 

[umbrella39]

Lol. I'm not a liberal and I don't have loyalty to anything but facts and logic.

I usually agree with a lot of your posts but when you start throwing the term fascist around to describe a party's response to an unwinnable situation, you've lost all credibility.

There is no doubt that Democrats have been timid and ineffective against Republican political tactics but that's because they prefer to play by the rules and norms. Republicans simply use that to their advantage. You prefer to blame the victims while ignoring the party that's doing everything they can to gain and maintain power.

You're arguing with a Russian with poor English skills... He needs to 'practise' more and hand the keyboard over...

 

[ivwshane]

LOL, you are so predictable. Back you into a corner and you start with the childish triggered nonsense.

Take away your tribalistic rationalizations and my points stand. I am capable of condemning McConnell and Reid and Kennedy and McCain and Trump and Clinton and Biden and whoever I damn well please because I take intent at face value, and hold people accountable for THEIR actions.

You reap what you sow.

Once again, a denial of facts. I'm not even sure how your response applies to the post of yours I was responding to. What does the arrogance of thinking a blue waive would happen have to do with intent and actions? Nothing.

Anyone remember when Starbuck didn't say stupid shit? I certainly don't.

 

[1prophet]

Lol. I'm not a liberal and I don't have loyalty to anything but facts and logic.

I usually agree with a lot of your posts but when you start throwing the term fascist around to describe a party's response to an unwinnable situation, you've lost all credibility.

There is no doubt that Democrats have been timid and ineffective against Republican political tactics but that's because they prefer to play by the rules and norms. Republicans simply use that to their advantage. You prefer to blame the victims while ignoring the party that's doing everything they can to gain and maintain power.

That's a fairy tale, the cowardly Democrats abandoned the middle class and labor for identity politics, celebrities, and rich liberals and taking corporate money on the side while paying lip service to their core voters.

They reaped what they sowed.
http://inthesetimes.com/features/listen-liberal-thomas-frank-democratic-party-elites-inequality.html

According to Frank, popular explanations which blame corporate lobby groups and the growing power of money in politics are insufficient. Frank instead points to a decision by Democratic Party elites in the 1970s to marginalize labor unions and transform from the party of the working class to the party of the professional class. In so doing, the Democratic Party radically changed the way it understood social problems and how to solve them, trading in the principle of solidarity for the principle of competitive individualism and meritocracy.

The end result is that the party which created the New Deal and helped create the middle class has now become “the party of mass inequality.” In These Times spoke with Frank recently about the book via telephone.

The first piece of evidence is what’s happened since the financial crisis. This is the great story of our time. Inequality has actually gotten worse since then, which is a remarkable thing. This is under a Democratic president who we were assured (or warned) was the most liberal or radical president we would ever see. Yet inequality has gotten worse, and the gains since the financial crisis, since the recovery began, have gone entirely to the top 10 percent of the income distribution.


Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books,
320 pages

This is not only because of those evil Republicans, but because Obama played it the way he wanted to. Even when he had a majority in both houses of Congress and could choose whoever he wanted to be in his administration, he consistently made policies that favored the top 10 percent over everybody else. He helped out Wall Street in an enormous way when they were entirely at his mercy.

He could have done anything he wanted with them, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did in the ’30s. But he chose not to.

Why is that? This is supposed to be the Democratic Party, the party that’s interested in working people, average Americans. Why would they react to a financial crisis in this way? Once you start digging into this story, it goes very deep. You find that there was a transition in the Democratic Party in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s where they convinced themselves that they needed to abandon working people in order to serve a different constituency: a constituency essentially of white-collar professionals.

That’s the most important group in their coalition. That’s who they won over in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. That’s who they serve, and that’s where they draw from. The leaders of the Democratic Party are always from this particular stratum of society.

A lot of progressives that I talk to are pretty familiar with the idea that the Democratic Party is no longer protecting the interests of workers, but it’s pretty common for us to blame it on mainly the power of money in politics. But you start the book in chapter one by arguing there’s actually something much deeper going on. Can you say something about that?

Money in politics is a big part of the story, but social class goes deeper than that. The Democrats have basically made their commitment [to white-collar professionals] already before money and politics became such a big deal. It worked out well for them because of money in politics. So when they chose essentially the top 10 percent of the income distribution as their most important constituents, that is the story of money.

It wasn’t apparent at the time in the ’70s and ’80s when they made that choice. But over the years, it has become clear that that was a smart choice in terms of their ability to raise money. Organized labor, of course, is no slouch in terms of money. They have a lot of clout in dollar terms. However, they contribute and contribute to the Democrats and they almost never get their way—they don’t get, say, the Employee Free Choice Act, or Bill Clinton passes NAFTA. They do have a lot of money, but their money doesn’t count.

All of this happened because of the civil war within the Democratic Party. They fought with each other all the time in the ’70s and the ’80s. One side hadn’t completely captured the party until Bill Clinton came along in the ’90s. That was a moment of victory for them.

ill Clinton’s presidency is what progressives usually cite as the time when things went bad. But there’s a trend that goes back to the ’70s, right?

Historians always cite the ’68 election as the turning point. The party was torn apart by the controversy over the Vietnam war, protesters were in the streets in Chicago and the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey went on to lose. Democrats thought this was terrible, and it was. So they set up a commission to reorganize the party, the McGovern Commission.

The McGovern Commission basically set up our modern system of primaries. Before the commission, we didn’t have these long primary contests in state after state after state. Primaries are a good thing, as were most things the McGovern Commission did.

But they also removed organized labor from its structural position of power in the Democratic Party. There was a lot of resentment towards labor during the Vietnam War. A lot of unions took President Johnson’s side on Vietnam. There was also this sense—which I think was correct at the time—that labor was a dinosaur, that it was out of touch and undemocratic and very white.

There were a lot of reasonable objections to organized labor at the time. The problem is, when you get rid of labor in your party, you also get rid of issues that matter to working people. That’s the basic mistake that Democrats made in the ’70s. Of course, labor still is a big part of the Democratic coalition—it gives them their money, it helps out at election time in a huge way. But unions no longer have the presence in party councils that they used to. That disappeared.

One of the most shocking quotes in the book is from Alfred Kahn, an advisor to Jimmy Carter, who said, “I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.” He then basically says that unionized workers are exploiting other workers.

Isn’t that amazing? He’s describing a situation in the 1970s. There was all this controversy in the 1970s about labor versus management—this was the last decade where those fights were front and center in our national politics. And he’s coming down squarely on the side of management in those fights.

And remember, Kahn was a very important figure in the Carter administration. The way that he describes unions is incorrect—he’s actually describing professionals. Professionals are a protected class that you can’t do anything about—they’re protected by the laws of every state that dictate who can practice in these fields. It’s funny that he projects that onto organized labor and holds them responsible for the sins of another group.

This is a Democrat in an administration that is actually not very liberal. This is the administration that carried out the first of the big deregulations. This is the administration that had the great big capital gains tax cuts, that carried out the austerity plan that saw the Federal Reserve jack its interest rates sky high. They clubbed the economy to the ground in order to stop “wage inflation,” in which workers, if they have enough power, can keep demanding higher wages. It was incredible.

What’s the content of the ideology of the professional class and how does it hurt working people? What are their guiding principles?

The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be. With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.

If you look at the last few Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Obama, and Hillary Clinton as well, their lives are a tale of educational achievement. This is what opened up the doors of the world to them. It’s a party of who people who have gotten where they are by dint of educational accomplishment.

This produces a set of related ideas. When the Democrats, the party of the professionals, look at the economic problems of working-class people, they always see an educational problem, because they look at working class people and say, “Those people didn’t do what I did”: go and get advanced degrees, go to the right college, get the high SAT scores and study STEM or whatever.

There’s another interesting part of this ideology: this endless search for consensus. Washington is a city of professionals with advanced degrees, and Democrats look around them there and say, “We’re all intelligent people. We all went to good schools. We know what the problems are and we know what the answers are, and politics just get in the way.”

This is a very typical way of thinking for the professional class: reaching for consensus, because politics is this ugly thing that you don’t really need. You see this in Obama’s endless efforts to negotiate a grand bargain with Republicans because everybody in Washington knows the answers to the problems—we just have to get together, sit down and make an agreement. The same with Obamacare: He spent so many months trying to get Republicans to sign on, even just one or two, so that he could say it was bipartisan. It was an act of consensus. And the Republicans really played him, because they knew that’s what he’d do.

To go back to your point about education: At one point you quote Arne Duncan, who was Obama’s secretary of education, saying that the only way to end poverty is through education. Why can’t that work?

The big overarching problem of our time is inequality. If you look at historical charts of productivity and wage growth, these two things went hand in hand for decades after World War II, which we think of as a prosperous, middle-class time when even people with a high school degree, blue-collar workers, could lead a middle class life. And then everything went wrong in the 1970s. Productivity continued to go up and wage growth stopped. Wage growth has basically been flat ever since then. But productivity goes up by leaps and bounds all the time. We have all of these wonderful technological advances. Workers are more productive than ever but they haven’t benefited from it. That’s the core problem of inequality.

Now, if the problem was that workers weren’t educated enough, weren’t smart enough, productivity would not be going up. But that productivity line is still going up. So we can see that education is not the issue.

It’s important that people get an education, of course. I spent 25 years of my life getting an education. It’s basic to me. It’s a fundamental human right that people should have the right to pursue whatever they want to the maximum extent of their individual potential. But the idea that this is what is holding them back is simply incorrect as a matter of fact. What’s holding them back is that they don’t have the power to demand higher wages.

If we talk about the problem as one of education rather than power, then the blame goes back to these workers. They just didn’t go out and work hard and do their homework and get a gold star from their teacher. If you take the education explanation for inequality, ultimately you’re blaming the victims themselves.

Unfortunately, that is the Democratic view. That’s why Democrats have essentially become the party of mass inequality. They don’t really have a problem with it.

So really, the solution would have to be solidarity and organized power.

That was an essential point that I try to make in Listen Liberal: that there is no solidarity in a meritocracy. A meritocracy really is every man for himself.

Don’t get me wrong. People at the top of the meritocracy, professionals, obviously have enormous respect for one another. That is the nature of professional meritocracy. They have enormous respect for the people at the top, but they feel very little solidarity for people beneath them who don’t rise in the meritocracy.

Look at the white-collar workplace. If some professional gets fired, the other professionals don’t rally around and go on strike or protest or something like that. They just don’t do that. They feel no solidarity because everything goes back to you and whether or not you’ve made the grade. If somebody gets fired, they must’ve deserved it somehow.

I have my own personal experience. Look at academia over the last 20 years. They’re cranking out these Ph.D.s in the humanities who can’t get jobs on tenure track and instead have to work as adjuncts for very low pay, no benefits. One of the fascinating parts about this is that, with a few exceptions, the people who do have tenure-track jobs and are at the top of their fields, do very little about what’s happened to their colleagues who work as adjuncts. Essentially this is the Uberizing of higher education. The professionals who are in a position of authority have done almost nothing about it. There are academics here and there who feel bad about what’s happened to adjuncts and do say things about it, but by and large, overall, there is no solidarity in that meritocracy. They just don’t care.

Do you think there’s a connection between the fact that the Democratic Party has turned against workers and the rise of Donald Trump?

Yes. Because if you look at the polling, Trump is winning the votes of a lot of people who used to be Democrats. These white, working-class people are his main base of support. As a group, these people were once Democrats all over the country. These are Franklin Roosevelt’s people. These are the people that the Democrats essentially decided to turn their backs on back in the 1970s. They call them the legatees of the New Deal. They were done with these guys, and now look what’s happened—they’ve gone with Donald Trump. That’s frightening and horrifying.

But Trump talks about their issues in a way that they find compelling, especially the trade issue. When he talks about trade, they believe him. Ironically, he’s saying the same things that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are saying about trade, but for whatever reason people find him more believable on this subject than they do Hillary Clinton.

Do you think that the rise of the Bernie campaign could herald a new era in the history of the Democratic Party?

I hope so. Both Trump and Bernie are turning their respective parties upside down. What Bernie is doing is very impressive. I interviewed him a few years ago and have always admired him. I think he’s a great man. To think that he could beat a Clinton in a Democratic primary anywhere in this country, let alone many primaries, was unthinkable a short time ago. And he’s done it without any Wall Street or big-business backing. That is extraordinary. It shows the kind of desperation that’s out there.

He has shown the way, and whether he gets the nomination or not (he probably won’t), there’ll be another Bernie four years from now. And there’ll also be another Trump. The Republican Party is being turned on its head much more violently than the Democrats. Hillary will probably get the nomination. I live in Washington, D.C., and I spend time around Hillary-style Democrats. They really think that they’ve got this thing in the bag. And I don’t just mean her versus Bernie. I mean the Democratic Party winning the presidency for the rest of our lives. From here to eternity. They can choose whoever they want. They could nominate anybody and they would win. They think they’re in charge.

One of your villains from the ’70s is Frederick Dutton, who wrote a book about how the Democratic Party needed to realign itself. You have a quote from him saying, “Every major realignment in U.S. political history has been accompanied by the coming of a large new group into the electorate.” You’re very critical of how he uses that idea in the ‘70s. But if you look at the newer voters attached to the Bernie campaign, it looks like the Democratic Party is experiencing something like that now.

Yes, in both cases you’re talking about a generational shift. That’s what he meant in 1971. He was talking about the counterculture and the “Now Generation” and the idea that they would come into the electorate and demand a different kind of politics—specifically his kind of politics.

Everybody always sees this new group that’s coming in as supporting what they want. That’s what he thought. I have a certain amount of contempt for that. Many years ago I wrote a book about the counterculture and how it was used for this purpose—specifically by the advertising industry. But Bernie’s doing the same thing. He’s using it for his own purposes.

Millenials’ take on the world is fascinating. Just a few years ago, people thought of them as very different. But now they’re coming out of college with enormous student debt, and they’re discovering that the job market is casualized and Uberized. The work that they do is completely casual. The idea of having a middle-class lifestyle in that situation is completely off the table for them.

Every time I think about these people, it burns me up. It makes me so angry what we’ve done to them as a society. It really gives the lie to Democratic Party platitudes about the world an education will open up for you. That path just doesn’t work anymore. Millenials can see that in their own lives very plainly.

So I’m very excited that they’re pro-Bernie. They really are the future.

 

[Starbuck1975]

Apparently he thinks not holding hearings for Obama's SC appointees and slow walking lower court nominees beyond precedent is ok but damn those Democrats for loosening restrictions for lower court nominations. I guess a functional government is ok only when a single party controls all of it.

If you don’t have the votes and the minority party wants to play hardball, you take your case to the American people or negotiate a compromise. Reid and McConnell are perhaps the least inspired leaders to even guide the Senate.

He wants to look back at the cause of dysfunction in Congress but only as far back as when the cause points to being the Democrats fault.

The conversation on nuclear politics SCOTUS starts with Kennedy.

Why was garland not given a hearing? Its the Democrats fault of course, and the long standing Biden rule non rule.

Garland wasn’t given a hearing because the GOP was able to block it, citing logic first proposed by Biden. It was a dick move, and the GOP will pay the price for opening that particular Pandora’s Box.

Why do nominations only require a majority now?

Because Harry Reid was short sighted in his strategy

What started all this politicizing of the supreme court nominations? It was the Democrats fault of course, for not giving Regan consent to his nomination of Bork. Ignoring the fact that multiple supreme court picks were voted down previously in the two decades prior to Bork.

Kennedy launched his smear campaign within minutes of Reagan nominating Bork.

SC nominations had a 74 year history of being confirmed with only one rejection. That changed when Republicans and southern Democrats didn't like the decision of some of the most important rulings in our history. From the 60's on the supreme court has been a battle of ideology.

An ideological battle over legislating from the judiciary and expanding the role of the federal government. I don’t see conservative justices ever reversing the landmark decisions of the 60s. That is just alarmism to get people to the voting booth in November.

I do see conservative justices asserting a perspective when the government oversteps its Constitutional authority.

But those are facts and mr both sides doesn't do facts or context.

Facts and context back my assertions. I am sorry those facts and context don’t support your narrative.

It seems like mr water boy wants to absolve the Democrats of their blunders and hypocrisy.

Once again, a denial of facts. I'm not even sure how your response applies to the post of yours I was responding to. What does the arrogance of thinking a blue waive would happen have to do with intent and actions? Nothing.

Reid pulled his little stunt because Obama was a wildly popular President and there was no reason to believe the GOP had a chance in hell of taking the White House. It was a gambit based on a strategy of inevitability.

Anyone remember when Starbuck didn't say stupid shit? I certainly don't.

I remember a time when you could carry on a conversation without behaving like a water boy or reverting to petulance.

 

[Jhhnn]

Oh shut the FUCK up, with your loyalty to the people who through lobbyism and convenience have failed their duty you are no better than the fucking Trumpists.

I am loyal to NO party and NO politician and until the Warren bill is favoured in any one party that is my stance. If it ever gets to that point I will have found my party but there is no such party in the US today.

What do you think Obama would have to say about the practise if you were completely honest with yourself? How about Biden? Or do you not regard them as loyal enough these days and only the bough and paid for people are deserving of loyalty these days?

That's not very rational. Shumer's choice was to delay inevitable confirmations or give incumbent Dem Senators more time to campaign & try to win the Senate. Are you really arguing for the former? If so, why? What's to be gained by it?

The rest? Your bothsiderism is tedious. I'll just go with Bernie Sanders- any Dem is 100X better than any Republican.

 

[Indus]

Once again, a denial of facts. I'm not even sure how your response applies to the post of yours I was responding to. What does the arrogance of thinking a blue waive would happen have to do with intent and actions? Nothing.

Anyone remember when Starbuck didn't say stupid shit? I certainly don't.

They don't care about facts. They just want a Russian sponsored All White Country at all costs..

 

[dainthomas]

Except he never did, it was just a vile smear job by the Democrats.

Wrong.

 

[jackstar7]

LOL, you are so predictable. Back you into a corner and you start with the childish triggered nonsense.

Take away your tribalistic rationalizations and my points stand. I am capable of condemning McConnell and Reid and Kennedy and McCain and Trump and Clinton and Biden and whoever I damn well please because I take intent at face value, and hold people accountable for THEIR actions.

You reap what you sow.

Who do you support?

 

[Starbuck1975]

Who do you support?

Depends, but politicians I’ve admired are Eisenhower and Obama and Jerry Brown and Seth Moulton and Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan and Michael Bloomberg and Charlie Baker.

Don’t support one political party.

 

[jackstar7]

Depends, but politicians I’ve admired are Eisenhower and Obama and Jerry Brown and Seth Moulton and Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan and Michael Bloomberg and Charlie Baker.

Don’t support one political party.

Why do you support Moulton, Sanders and Baker? I don't consider the rest helpful examples due to their being obsolete, or outright dead.

 

[Jhhnn]

Depends, but politicians I’ve admired are Eisenhower and Obama and Jerry Brown and Seth Moulton and Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan and Michael Bloomberg and Charlie Baker.

Don’t support one political party.

Yeh, but you seem to support what McConnell is doing to the SCOTUS. If you didn't, you wouldn't be running your usual bothsiderism so hard.

 

[Starbuck1975]

Why do you support Moulton, Sanders and Baker? I don't consider the rest helpful examples due to their being obsolete, or outright dead.

Moulton - He represents a crop of veteran voices that is providing a much needed perspective to Democrats, and he is willing to challenge the entrenched party establishment.

Bernie Sanders - He represents the European model of democratic socialism, which I respect

Charlie Baker - What Republicans used to look and sound like. He represents my ideal scenario, a competent fiscal conservative that provides responsible governance and leadership.

Also, none of them seem beholden to monied interests, are willing to deviate from the group think dogma of their respective political parties and tend to advocate for the middle class.

 

[Starbuck1975]

Yeh, but you seem to support what McConnell is doing to the SCOTUS. If you didn't, you wouldn't be running your usual bothsiderism so hard.

I don’t support what he is doing. I am challenging the pearl clutching historical revisionism on the sequence of events that allows him to.

 

[Jhhnn]

I don’t support what he is doing. I am challenging the pearl clutching historical revisionism on the sequence of events that allows him to.

Yeh, as if going on about Bork, Thomas & Reid isn't you clutching your pearls. None of it really matters. McConnell & the GOP have a radical right agenda & are entirely eager to implement it any way they can. They impose that agenda on future generations with picks like Kavanaugh & Gorsuch.

What is that agenda other than ruthless top down class warfare against the rest of America hidden under every wedge issue they can find?