Senate The US Politics 2.0 Discussion Thread

Article IV (which is the article dealing specifically with States, including admitting new States), Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution says that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government". I'm not totally sure how that applies to the choice of governor, but I'm certain a hereditary monarchy would at least be challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court under that clause.

 

Good to know there's at least something.

However, as Republicans like to slyly remind everyone, Republic is not the same as Democracy.

 

This could go in the covid thread but I think the poll results are interesting.

DeSantis job approval

--DeSantis drew just 44% of Florida voters saying they approve of the job he is doing, while 49% said they do not approve of his job performance. The rest were unsure.--

Amazing that it's still nearly half.

--For Democrats, 74% said they do not approve of his job performance and 19% said they do. For Republicans, 71% said they approve, while 22% said they do not.

Independent voters broke against him, with 39% saying they approve of his job performance, and 51% saying they do not approve.--

Who the hell are the 19% of Democrats who approve? I mean what in the world can you see in this guy that is on the opposite side of your political spectrum that you would approve of his job on covid?

 

Hmm... didn't we have someone who thought that approval polling was a very big sign that a candidate was bad and clearly everything they've done was wrong? Surely that would apply to DeSantis now that his approval rating is in the negative at 44-49, and not, say, a positive approval rating like 53-43 which was still too low, would it not?

 

44% of FL voters would probably vote for the virus to be governor at this point.

 

Don’t worry, SCOTUS will save them.

I’m surprised by this, actually. Biden has now directly confronted the Court. I didn’t think he had the stones to do it, especially given that a majority of the legal scholars he consulted beforehand said the new ban will likely not survive the Nine.

We’ll see how it plays out.

A majority of Florida voters already have.

EDIT: Guess who got pardoned?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/03/politics/mark-mccloskey-patricia-mccloskey-pardon/index.html

 

Hilarious that landlords don't seem angry with red states deliberately tying up billions of Federal money for rent relief.

Meanwhile, DeSantis is apparently panicking because the news media is all abuzz about a single poll that has Charlie Crist barely above him. So he leapt into action to... go after Ben and Jerry's.

 

Devin Nunes is suing Rachael Maddow claiming she defamed him.

I bet that goes about as over as him suing the DevinNunesCow twitter account.

 

I herd about this. Lots of Twitter jokes about how Maddow would be cowed by Nunes and his threats.

Most think she would enjoy the discovery portion that this opens Nunes up to. This could backfire spectacularly on him- as with all his other lawsuits.

 

So, without reading the article, please remember -- this may not be the end game.

THIS IS THE END GAME: https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentar...sed-to-weaken-libel-protections-for-the-press

 

They would need to prove what she said is libel. That means Discovery. I don’t think that will go well for him. Ergo, the case likely gets dropped before it can even reach the Supreme Court.

 

The Atlantic - THE TIME TAX
Why is so much American bureaucracy left to average citizens?

It's nice to have a social safety net in theory and to expand it. It's another thing to actually use it since it's been turned into an endurance test and knowledge test.

Biden called on the states yesterday to stop screwing around. Perhaps if the feds didn't have to turn over that 45 billion to all the states and elsewhere to incompetently and maliciously not manage it directly there would be less problem but HUD in its current form can't do it itself.

 

The question is how urgently does the Supreme Court want to throw? The wheels of justice roll more slowly than congress. Even slower when the court puts on the breaks.

I could see SCOTUS waiting to hear this until after the crisis has passed so they are effectively making a ruling for future situations and not effecting the current crisis.

 

I have a mental image of Sotomayer and Kagan gagging and tying Kavanaugh up and dragging him into a closet while Breyer holds the door open and Roberts acts as the look out.

 

Yeah that’s what they did with Lincoln in regards to suspending habeas corpus and the Roosevelt administration in Korematsu.

 

“If we’ve learned anything about right-wing politics in the Age of Trump, it’s that what once seemed impossible becomes plausible — and then morphs into a new reality. We’ve seen it with the refusal to accept the outcome of a democratic election. We’ve seen it with attacks on face masks and vaccines. And now we may be seeing it with libel law.”

Opening paragraph encapsulates the degradation of the GOP quite well.

 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202...I_ITTGF4Hkagjqy6TKfHTssOfJHjP7L0dwzv1KZ8WCzCY

 

It would be helpful to make some quotations here and there, but I'll bookmark this to read later.

Thanks.

 

Thank goodness.

 

Basically Tucker Carlson is spending the week and transmitting from Hungary, where a bullyish government has been set up and it is a Trump supporters utopia. From the article:

"Orban’s corruption of a former democracy occurred step by step. He gerrymandered the electoral map to give his supporters an overwhelming advantage, stacked the judiciary with supporters, leveraged state power to force large businesses to support his party, and installed supporters in charge of the country’s largest media organs. (Think about Trump’s efforts to bully Jeff Bezos into putting a leash on the Washington Post by denying Amazon a lucrative Pentagon contract, and you have a picture of the methods Orban has used, with more success.)

Hungary’s democratic backsliding was slow and gradual, without a single dramatic moment when its character flipped from democracy to dictatorship. Even now, it retains the surface trappings of a democracy without the liberal characteristics that make those processes meaningful. If America ceases to be a democracy, it will likely follow a path similar to Orban’s."

So now we know where to send the Trumpers: Hungary.

 

How Fox news spread right wing groups' efforts to undermine the 2020 election

What is the legality here? Is this sedition?