JHB
JHB's JournalWashington Post Front Page, Sept. 30, 2020 (Debate coverage)
Hey, remember when the Republican Party spent 8 years obsessing over a $35,000 land deal?
"Happy Holidays"? He's even trolling his own cultists
Also, it's an odd way to celebrate an election that by Christmas he will have lost.
Meidas Touch - Joe Knows How
Priorities USA - Not For Us
Political Cartoonists' Tributes to Ruth Bader Ginsberg
As for John Lewis, I've collected political cartoonists' memorials to RBG, and will update is as more come in.
If you want to fight back, don't frame it they way they do
For starters, the guy who compiled that page is a conservative, and he kitchen-sink categorizes everything even halfway-related as "Welfare" because that's what conservatives have always done: gloss over the details to produce big scary numbers they can "sound the alarm" about.
Now, let's break down those number, shall we?
Social Security and Medicare take up the lion's share, but the only people who consider those "public assistance" are conservative/libertarian zealots bent on destroying them. But they'll happily blur the lines between those and more direct assistance in order to produce big scary numbers and create the impression that there's an army of layabouts sponging off the rest of us (and those eeeevilllll sooooooocialist Democrats who let them).
Medicaid also has a lot of users who aren't generally considered "on welfare." I'm thinking of the use of Medicaid to pay for nursing home/hospice care.
Unemployment is a sliver. Housing and Families & Children assistance, the stereotypical "welfare", are a fraction of the "TTTTRRRillions" and would be even smaller if wages hadn't effectively been stagnant for several decades.
David Corn: To Honor Ginsburg, Democrats Have One Choice: Go Nuclear
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/ruth-bader-ginsburg-death-democrats-whats-next-mcconnell-trump/Its a popular sentiment on the left: Dont mourn, organize. But with the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that wont be enough. Ginsburg, a hero of female empowerment and of the Supreme Court, deserves much mourning. But Democrats and progressives can waste no time prepping for the battle royal that lies ahead. After all, it took Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell mere minutes after the news of RBGs passing to declare that the GOP-controlled Senate will vote on whoever Donald Trump sends its way to fill the Supreme Court vacancya direct eff-you to the Democrats after McConnell in 2016 refused to consider President Barack Obamas SCOTUS nominee Merrick Garland with the phony-baloney argument that the Senate should not consider new justices during an election year. So yes, Dems will have to organize, but they must do more: They have to get ready to rumble.
What is coming, at least as the Republicans see it, is a grand political clash. They have been hellbent on reshaping the entire federal judiciary and especially drool over the prospect of locking the highest court into a right-wing course that will last decades and counter demographic trends that favor Democrats. This is their Holy Grail. After all, nothing galvanizes conservative evangelical voters more than the courts. For political consultants, it has long been conventional wisdom that right-wingers obsess over the composition of the courts and the Supreme Court far more than progressives. So Ginsburgs departure is a gift for Trump. If there has been any erosion occurring on the edges of his conservative and evangelical base, his effort to shove another anti-choice, pro-corporate conservative on to the highest court could certainly shore up that ground for him. Heres something Trump can campaign on for the next six and a half weeks, without breaking a sweat or fielding a tough question. Its his lifeline. A cure for his coronavirus problem.
***
The win-over-reasonable-Republicans-with-reason strategy is weak sauce. That leaves the Democrats with one other choice: total political warfare. The Senates Democratic leader, Chuck Schumerwith the backing of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosineeds to threaten massive retaliation. Should McConnell try to ram a Trump nominee through, Schumer ought to vow that the Democrats, if they win back the Senate and Biden is elected president, will demolish the filibuster, which will allow the Senate to proceed to make Washington, DC, a state (two more senators, who are likely to be Democrats!) and that they will move to add two or four more seats to the Supreme Court. (There is nothing in the Constitution that limits the courts size to the current nine justices.) In other words: They will implement a Republican nightmare (which, as it happens, can be justified on arguments of equity and fairness).
Schumer should utter this declaration publicly to lock the Democrats in. Of course, this could further propel Republicans to the polls. But it might do the same with Democrats. (The stakes in this election are now higher than they already were.) Crucially, there would need to be buy-in from Biden. The veteran Washington player will have to put aside his somewhat admirable (if misguided) desire to return to the older and more genteel means of legislating and compromising in the nations capital. But with conservative voters fired up by the dream of replacing Ginsburg with a thirtysomething right-wing firebrand, the Dems will have to counter with more than a this-isnt-fair argument. Bring a gun to a knife fight? They will need a bazooka. Sorry if that sounds violent. But, as one sage person likes to say, we are in a fight for the nations soul. And sometimes you dont get to choose the weapons or levels of intensity.
It needs to be made crystal clear...
If Mitch (via Trump) tries to fill RGB's seat, in direct opposition to everything he claimed about filling Scalia's, it will guarantee expansion of the court. Better yet, courts. Plural.
Ep 562: Whoops! Trump Took His Mouth on the Campaign Trail
Coming to you live from the Cornfield Resistance, where we plan to vote only once, and get everybody else to do the same, it's The Professional Left with Driftglass and Blue Gal
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