Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[johnu]

Perhaps now the dam will break...

Maybe there will be a split from the Republican party with the new branch forming under the #ISP label, Insurrection and Sedition Party.

[johnu]

The Insurrection and Sedition Party (AKA Republican Party) has reached depths only possible when your members are all sociopaths

 

GOP Refuses To Follow New Capitol Safety Rules In Aftermath Of Riot

 

A group of lawmakers then formed at the metal detectors outside the floor, consistently setting the machines off and needing to be inspected by Capitol Police. Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) yelled that he was “physically restrained” from entering the floor, while Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) told police that he believes the metal detectors are unconstitutional.

 

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who has bragged before about wanting to carry a firearm at the Capitol, was in a standoff with Capitol Police over her bag setting off the metal detector, according to CNN’s Ryan Nobles. Boebert refused let Capitol Police search her bag even when they told her she could not be let onto the House floor until she did so. She was eventually let into the chamber, but Nobles could not confirm if Capitol Police ended up searching her bag beforehand.

 

Needless to say, there may be more than a few "sleeper" Domestic Terrorists who are members of Congress who may be activated at any time.

[kenberg]

The Insurrection and Sedition Party (AKA Republican Party) has reached depths only possible when your members are all sociopaths

 

GOP Refuses To Follow New Capitol Safety Rules In Aftermath Of Riot

 

 

 

Needless to say, there may be more than a few "sleeper" Domestic Terrorists who are members of Congress who may be activated at any time.

 

I hope our representatives that are intelligent, responsible and serious. It is dismaying find out that not being brain dead stupid is beyond the reach of some. Maybe Georgia isn't the only state that needed to have a special election to move forward.

[y66]

We are less than a week from Inauguration Day, which means that — strange as it seems — we are drawing closer to the inevitable moment when Donald Trump will be fondly remembered by liberals as an avatar of a saner brand of conservative politics.

 

A joke, of course, but not really. In a great essay written a while back, the historian Cory Robin documented Philip Roth’s continual re-writing of his own recollections — Nixon was the absolute worst in 1974, but by the Reagan Era he was fondly remembered in contrast to the Gipper. It was Bush’s tenure in office that prompted The Plot Against America as allegory, but then by 2017 he was complaining that neither Nixon nor Bush “was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

 

I don’t know exactly what drives this perennially retrocasting of past iterations of conservatism as reasonable, but I was reminded of Robin’s essay when I read Ezra Klein and Tim Alberta commiserating on the idea that “there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.”

 

You should read this whole piece by @TimAlberta. One thing it makes clear: It's not just that "the fringe" no longer exists. It's that what was recently seen as the fringe is now the majority of, at least, the House Republican Conference.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/07/jan-6-was-9-weeks-and-4-years-in-the-making-455797

As a description of the present this is absolutely correct. Conservative thought exists on a spectrum between Q Anon lunatics putting on horns and storming the capital and guys with PhDs arguing that in the long-run corporate tax cuts raise wages. But there is no firewall between these groups. The Covid cranks and the distinguished Federalist Society legal scholars not only sit side-by-side at the Hudson Institute, they are sometimes the same person.

 

But while I obviously understand the rhetorical potency of claiming that the bad actors in today’s politics are not just bad but uniquely so, I don’t think the claim holds up to analytic scrutiny. Right from the start the conservative movement was a stew of highbrow policy objections to the New Deal Consensus (some of which were even correct!) with paranoid conspiracy theories about communist control of the government and with hard-core white nationalism. Mediating between the respectable and less-respectable faces of conservatism is often a group of grifters, largely because the whole premise of the enterprise is that pitching the long-term benefits of regressive tax policy is not an electoral winner. So different notions ranging from Ike being a Communist to Obama being a Kenyan to the idea that Bill & Hillary Clinton have been assassinating political enemies for decades come and go according to the whims of the moment.

The relationship between the racist and conspiratorial fringe and mainstream conservatism has always been fluid, and there has never been a group of “grown ups” who keep the kooks in check. But what does keep them in check is a desire to win elections. In the modern day, thanks to polarization, the electoral penalty for kookery or extremism has fallen; and thanks to unfair maps, the Republicans don’t need electoral majorities to win and govern. The combination has allowed kooks to be elevated to the highest ranks of power, and ensures that Senate Republicans put a much higher premium on preserving party unity than on checking even Trump’s most unpopular or inappropriate actions.

 

This is a genuinely dangerous situation, and nostalgia for the alleged guardrails of the past is not the answer.

 

https://www.slowboring.com/p/chemtrails-over-the-country-club/comments

[y66]

My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson, seeing Republicans turning against Trump Tuesday afternoon, said on Twitter that “This feels like it might — might — be the first time in more than a decade that significant numbers of GOPers turn *away* from extremism instead of *toward* it. Might.” On the other hand, political scientist Dan Drezner published a Washington Post column Tuesday evening in which he wondered whether the Republican Party was turning into Hezbollah. Both of them sound plausible to me.

[shyams]

There is a football (soccer to you Americans) chant used by fans of one club in particular --- which goes "No one likes us, we don't care"

 

I am invoking this tangential reference for a reason.

 

While it is true that some fans of this club were very much into violence, they were not representative of the club's fanbase as a whole. However, as the club kept getting called out as the main (sole?) culprit every time the media talked about football hooliganism, it created an unexpected reaction within the fanbase. It established almost a siege mentality amongst ordinary, law-abiding fans; so much so that the chant ("no one likes us") became enshrined in the culture of this club.

 

The incidents of hooliganism reduced sharply within a few years. But even today, 20-30 years later, the club seems unable to rid this tarnished image. In reality, all those years when this club had hooliganism, it was also rife elsewhere in the UK with numerous other clubs having a chunk of hooligan fans. No other club was reviled the way this particular one; others always seemed to get off lighter.

 

The situation is similar to what is happening with the GOP voter base in the US today. No doubt some are horrible people but all Republicans are being tarnished & made to feel like the dregs of society. No wonder the siege mentality within the GOP base is growing. {Many are now convinced that Democrats will not stop until they have converted them into saying "

" at the end of each prayer. OK, that's a joke!}

 

Be careful what you wish for.

[Winstonm]

There is a football (soccer to you Americans) chant used by fans of one club in particular --- which goes "No one likes us, we don't care"

 

I am invoking this tangential reference for a reason.

 

While it is true that some fans of this club were very much into violence, they were not representative of the club's fanbase as a whole. However, as the club kept getting called out as the main (sole?) culprit every time the media talked about football hooliganism, it created an unexpected reaction within the fanbase. It established almost a siege mentality amongst ordinary, law-abiding fans; so much so that the chant ("no one likes us") became enshrined in the culture of this club.

 

The incidents of hooliganism reduced sharply within a few years. But even today, 20-30 years later, the club seems unable to rid this tarnished image. In reality, all those years when this club had hooliganism, it was also rife elsewhere in the UK with numerous other clubs having a chunk of hooligan fans. No other club was reviled the way this particular one; others always seemed to get off lighter.

 

The situation is similar to what is happening with the GOP voter base in the US today. No doubt some are horrible people but all Republicans are being tarnished & made to feel like the dregs of society. No wonder the siege mentality within the GOP base is growing. {Many are now convinced that Democrats will not stop until they have converted them into saying "

" at the end of each prayer. OK, that's a joke!}

 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

Did 74 million people fans vote for the hooligans?

[y66]

WASHINGTON — For Vice President Mike Pence, the moment of truth had arrived. After three years and 11 months of navigating the treacherous waters of President Trump’s ego, after all the tongue-biting, pride-swallowing moments where he employed strategic silence or florid flattery to stay in his boss’s good graces, there he was being cursed by the president.

 

Mr. Trump was enraged that Mr. Pence was refusing to try to overturn the election. In a series of meetings, the president had pressed relentlessly, alternately cajoling and browbeating him. Finally, just before Mr. Pence headed to the Capitol to oversee the electoral vote count last Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the vice president’s residence to push one last time.

 

“You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Mr. Trump told him, according to two people briefed on the conversation, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”

 

The blowup between the nation’s two highest elected officials then played out in dramatic fashion as the president publicly excoriated the vice president at an incendiary rally and sent agitated supporters to the Capitol where they stormed the building — some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”

 

Evacuated to the basement, Mr. Pence huddled for hours while Mr. Trump tweeted out an attack on him rather than call to check on his safety.

 

It was an extraordinary rupture of a partnership that had survived too many challenges to count.

 

The loyal lieutenant who had almost never diverged from the president, who had finessed every other possible fracture, finally came to a decision point he could not avoid. He would uphold the election despite the president and despite the mob. And he would pay the price with the political base he once hoped to harness for his own run for the White House.

 

“Pence had a choice between his constitutional duty and his political future, and he did the right thing,” said John Yoo, a legal scholar consulted by Mr. Pence’s office. “I think he was the man of the hour in many ways — for both Democrats and Republicans. He did his duty even though he must have known, when he did it, that that probably meant he could never become president.”

On Thursday, the day after the siege, Mr. Pence stayed away from the White House, avoiding Mr. Trump. The next day, he went in, but spent most of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, where he held a farewell party for his staff.

 

But aides said Mr. Pence did not want to become a long-term nemesis of a vindictive president, and by Monday he was back in the West Wing.

 

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence plans to attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, then expects to divide time between Washington and Indiana, possibly starting a leadership political committee, writing a book and campaigning for congressional Republicans.

 

But no matter what comes next, he will always be remembered for one moment. “We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac,” said Joe Grogan, Mr. Trump’s domestic policy adviser until last year. “In many ways, I think it vindicates the decision of Mike Pence to hang in there this long.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/mike-pence-trump.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

“We’re very lucky that the vice president isn’t a maniac"? This is what passes for exceptionalism these days.

[Winstonm]

What should be done about this?

Weeks before a mob of President Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, right-wing activist Ali Alexander told his followers he was planning something big for Jan. 6.

 

Alexander, who organized the "Stop the Steal" movement, said he hatched the plan — coinciding with Congress's vote to certify the electoral college votes — alongside three GOP lawmakers: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), all hard-line Trump supporters.

 

"We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit. The plan, he said, was to "change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside."

 

my emphasis

 

[shyams]

Did 74 million people fans vote for the hooligans?

In the event I wasn't very clear in my analogy,

.... The club fanbase = The GOP voting bloc (i.e. 45+% of your nation's population)

.... The hooligans = The lunatic fringe within the GOP voting bloc (be it MAGA maniacs, QAnons, whatever else)

 

The equivalence of the English soccer club in the NFL context is the Philadelphia Eagles! Most Eagles fans normal people, yet I'm sure there is prevailing reputation in the USA that Eagles fans are hardcore nutcases.

[Zelandakh]

If the 25th Amendment was invoked, the Manchurian President could be removed in a matter of hours.

This is actually factually untrue. I have heard that there is an appeals procedure built into the 25th Amendment so DJT would get to fight it before removal happened. He would only be removed in hours in the very unlikely event that he did not challenge it.

[Zelandakh]

The equivalence of the English soccer club in the NFL context is the Philadelphia Eagles! Most Eagles fans normal people, yet I'm sure there is prevailing reputation in the USA that Eagles fans are hardcore nutcases.

Funny, having watched the NFL since the early 80s, I would have said the Browns fans were the crazies. Eagles fans are the worst - they turn on their own team in an instant rather than supporting the team when they really need them - but I do not remember seeing anything like the old Dog Pound in pictures from Philly.

[Winstonm]

This is actually factually untrue. I have heard that there is an appeals procedure built into the 25th Amendment so DJT would get to fight it before removal happened. He would only be removed in hours in the very unlikely event that he did not challenge it.

 

He could effectively be removed by the 25th Amendment - the whole process takes around 28 days to actually remove him.

[Winstonm]

In the event I wasn't very clear in my analogy,

.... The club fanbase = The GOP voting bloc (i.e. 45+% of your nation's population)

.... The hooligans = The lunatic fringe within the GOP voting bloc (be it MAGA maniacs, QAnons, whatever else)

 

The equivalence of the English soccer club in the NFL context is the Philadelphia Eagles! Most Eagles fans normal people, yet I'm sure there is prevailing reputation in the USA that Eagles fans are hardcore nutcases.

 

In case I wasn't clear with my analogy: 74 million people voting for Trump after 4 years = 74 million who support crazies.

 

Speaking of crazies, the ex-Navy Seal who was part of the insurgency is crying now for mercy because "he's not a terrorist", yet previously he said he wanted to make legislatures to think about what they were doing and leave them "shaking in their boots".

 

What else is terrorism but intimidation? That this guy doesn't understand that he has committed domestic terror doesn't forgive him for his actions.

[PeterAlan]

This is actually factually untrue. I have heard that there is an appeals procedure built into the 25th Amendment so DJT would get to fight it before removal happened. He would only be removed in hours in the very unlikely event that he did not challenge it.

As I understand it:

 

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

 

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

It seems that the second paragraph is the one relevant here, but from the first it appears that the Vice President becomes Acting President as soon as the written declaration is "transmitted", and there is no pre-emption mechanism, however short it may be before the President invokes the terms of the second. In this event, I don't suppose that the full 4 days + 48 hours + 21 days would be taken to resolve the matter. It would seem that the Vice President would remain Acting President in the event that a second declaration was transmitted; what's not clear to me is who is in office in the period between the President declaring himself able and the transmission of that second declaration.

 

In the previous invocations of the 25th Amendment, when Reagan and Bush were in surgery, they resumed office almost immediately afterwards, but they had invoked section 3.

[johnu]

This is actually factually untrue. I have heard ...

I have heard ....

 

Just because you heard something doesn't make it true. It depends of the source. And the difference between appeal and contest.

[y66]

There are more US troops deployed on Capitol Hill now than in Iraq or Afghanistan. The 15,000 mobilized for Inauguration equals 3 times the number of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

[y66]

On January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral votes. This insurrection caused injury, death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.

 

Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

 

I will vote to impeach the President.

 

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000176-f8dc-d367-a17e-fefc40700000

[pilowsky]

TWICE! how about that...

[y66]

There’s a difference in our crazy people and their crazy people. Our crazy people have an excessive amount of arms. They have gun safes. They have grenades. They believe in the Second Amendment. They come here, and Trump’s made them think this is the Alamo.

[kenberg]

WaPo has been running an article where they puy in various updates.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/13/trump-impeachment-biden-transition-live-updates/

For the 4:11 Wednesday afternoon update they report that a lawmakwer and her husband were ushered to saety from the mob, but left because Republicans refused to wear masks. The husband picked up covid.

I have to ask.

Are the Republicans running some sort of contest to see who can be the most disgusting?

They force people to choose between a violent mob and a bunch of idiots who won't wear masks because their leader says so. When does the Kool-aid get passed around?

 

 

like most people, I have seen some weird things and some disgusting things. But never like this. Do these people go home and brag to their kids about how they really put it to those Dems? Choose Dens, mob or covid.

 

I like to think it takes quite a bit to get me to write someone off as scum. I have now reached that point.

[thepossum]

Sorry about the delay responding. The responses were lost in the ongoing Trump saga. But there was big news today and I finally managed to find my question and some replies

 

It's nothing more than Moscow Mitch McConnell being hypocritical. He doesn't want to enable $2000 payments, but the larger payments have wide public support, and majority Senate support. Section 230 is something the Democrats and a few Republicans are firmly against so by tying Section 230 to the $2000 payments in the same bill, he will sink the payments because enough Senators will vote against Section 230 even though that also means voting against the $2000 payments.

 

That way Moscow Mitch can say that he brought up a bill for the $2000 payments without mentioning that he put a poison pill provision into the bill that guaranteed that it would fail.

 

Thanks for the information John and relaying it without being obnoxious

 

Yeah there is absolutely no way to find out why Section 230 is tied to the $2000 payments, and what the motivations are for doing so. No way except to read the news. Absolutely no way to find out that McConnell inserted a poison pill because he didn't want the support payments to pass, but knows they are unpopular so he doesn't want to hold a vote on them. It's just so completely unknowable.

 

It's also completely unknowable hwo McConnell can do so many unpopular things, and yet remain majority leader in the Senate. It's almost as if his party only needs 46% of the two-party vote to win the Senate. I mean, have there been any news stories about the Senate giving more weight to the votes of some citizens than others? I can't remember ever reading something about that.

 

Wish I could ever say the same for you Cherdano. Kindly never be obnoxious in any response to me again and learn to be respectful

Thanks for the information. I read it a few times to see if I was being oversenitive and imagining the offensive tone and to whom it was directed, me or the ridiculousness and complexity of the issue. sadly I felt it directed at me. But seriously, who has that much time to try and get to the bottom of detailed congressional and Whitehouse shenanigans and its possible massive impact on the whole world

 

Worth checking out Jack's (sorry Mr Dorsey's) thread on Twitter today Jack's thread

 

Seems our tech overlords are planning the future of our planet. WOndering if we have any say in it at all anymore

 

Sadly it seems that Greater Silicon valley (for want of a better term) are trying to control our whole world for quite some time and now they may even have the political backing in Washington, and elsewhere, to assert that control. I have suspected it for a long time that the seeming wonderful excitement and progressiveness of much of the old hippie West coast techs and their wonderful philosophy was just a big con. Seems tanatamount to fascism from what I can see these days

 

I'm starting to be a bit over what seems to me (not just this one issue) but countless massive issues and debates being raised all over the world, but especially in the USA - followed by internationally - in a rather phony and manipulative way. The whole corporate-government role and responsibility is certainly being played out in a big way globally and to me at least its rather fake and manipulative and dangerous the way it is happening. There are just so many overlapping issues of platforms, media etc and the (at leat to me) way they have been used to the extreme over recent years to manipulate and polarise us on so many issues.

 

But the issues faced by the world and the growth in control and overcentralisation of certain levels of control within a relatively few corporations has also led to seeming break down in the ability to actually find quality accurate information in a short time frame and not have to waste our time looking through endless low quality sites and conversations. Thats why I like to ask aroound in different forums, and kind of don't like the attitude of - you could have read it in the media

 

But I am seriously concerned at the overcentralisation of this power that to me actually challenges Jack Dorsey's model or ideas for a model of social media (and cryptocurrency). I believe it has fallen down on the whole gig-economy, the way platforms are working etc. To me there is an illusion of decentralisation while in fact massively centralising power in a few oligarchs. That power (in many different forms - capital, voice etc) has been sucked out of much of the world by a few huge entities (or at least one or two locales and groups of entities). I know that much of that capital is in the form of shares distributed around some subsets of the world. But its a bit like Bitcoin really. A few people have a lot of it. And the rest of those who use it have a few nanocoins and about that much power over what the entity does

 

Hope nobody thinks this is all irrelevant since it has been provoked like a lot of other stuff over the last 4-5 years.

[thepossum]

I'm curious about the extent of the sanction against President Trump and his family and assets and freedom of speech. To me, I am not Trump supporter or MAGA in any way at all, but it seems mass overreach of both corporate and various government organisations in a corrdinated attack against one eneity (albeit a powerful one), with huge ramifications for the whole world. We are all subject in some way to what happens in the USA over this Trump issue and other related issues. Is it all phony or what. It seems both maniuplative and dangerous in many ways. Why should we even have to doubt our future, the futuure of our own lives, businesses and freedoms. I dont think we should have to, but I am

[cherdano]

I have seen the following two takes offered by conservatives the last few days:

1. Calling the rioters "terrorists" is a drastic overreaction that only serves to further the divisions.
   
2. Many Republicans members of Congress were afraid for their and their families' lives if they voted for impeachment.
   

[pilowsky]

I have seen the following two takes offered by conservatives the last few days:

1. Calling the rioters "terrorists" is a drastic overreaction that only serves to further the divisions.
2. Many Republicans members of Congress were afraid for their and their families' lives if they voted for impeachment.

 

I've been watching Republicans offering a variety of explanations. The gyrations and sophisticated verbal gymnastics are a treat to watch.

Even Fox News is tearing itself apart.

 

It's like ancient Rome and the Colisseum in Conservativeworld at the moment.

Conversational bloodsport where the combatants whip each other with columns of smoke (to paraphrase Paul Keating).