Mastodawn

The GOP expected Democrats to relent on the shutdown by now. That isn't happening.

https://lemmy.world/post/37791296

The GOP expected Democrats to relent on the shutdown by now. That isn't happening. - Lemmy.World

Democrats have only hardened their position as the government shutdown enters its 23rd day, leaving Republican majorities in Congress with few answers — and many criticisms. For the 12th time, Senate Democrats blocked the Republican Party’s government funding legislation this week without a single senator switching his or her vote. Just three Democratic caucus members voted for the bill: John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; and Angus King, I-Maine. That means Republicans are still five votes short of the 60-vote threshold to ensure passage of the bill, just as they have been since before the government shut down 23 days ago. Democratic voters had pressured their party to take a more confrontational posture toward Trump in the shutdown battle. The new stance may be paying off with the party’s base.

From this start it seemed likely to me that they would hold out until Heath Insurance rate letters stated going out.

Boomer Humor Doomergod Oct 24

I’m gonna have to vote for Fetterman in three years, aren’t I.

That depends on whether someone in PA can assemble the resources needed to primary him.

ToastedRavioli Oct 24

I honestly dont expect him to run for reelection. The guy seems to absolutely hate being a senator after having his stroke. He also seems to not really have much awareness of things going on around him in general anymore. He really should not be in such a stressful position in his current state of health, and I doubt he wants to be. Pride is probably the sole thing keeping him from stepping down. It definitely isnt his love for being in the role, that is for sure

TachyonTele Oct 24

He’s a shitty town mayor. He got some TV time back then for his ‘crazy antics’. You might be right the national spotlight is hopefully too much for him.

But you also don’t need to work a real job while you’re elected. That could be a bigger draw.

Pride is probably the sole thing keeping him from stepping down.

I think that sums up so many of the Democratic Party’s problems…

Or if he just decides to call himself a republican like he acts anyway.

jacksilver Oct 24

Who likes him?

Boomer Humor Doomergod Oct 24

People who drive Equinoxes

anon6789 Oct 24

Oct 16 - Daily Beast

Top-ranking Democratic Party officials in Pennsylvania are gearing up to run against Sen. John Fetterman in a 2028 primary contest, according to a report.

Big names in the state who could well run against the increasingly embattled incumbent include House Representatives Brendan Boyle and Chris Deluzio, along with former Congressman Conor Lamb, Axios reports, citing multiple inside sources.

Axios added it was not clear whether Fetterman, who is understood to have ambitions of running for the White House, plans to run again for the Senate or the presidency in 2028.

Fetterman texted Axios saying, “enjoy your clickbait!” and requested “please do not contact” in response to follow-up questions. He also shared an article citing him as one of “the least Trump-aligned Democratic lawmakers in the state.”

Dems Plot to Bring Down Fetterman With Bombshell Challenge

The Pennsylvania senator could be forced to face off against a rival in 2028 amid a rift with his party.

The Daily Beast

RubberElectrons Oct 24

Lmao at that last sentence…

anon6789 Oct 24

Yeah, I got Brian Fitzpatrick as my rep, the “#1 Most Bipartisan Member of Congress” for however many years now. Still votes with Trump 51% of the time, and it’s only on money things he’ll break with Republicans on, very rarely ever is it a moral thing.

Meanwhile Fetterman is polling better with Republicans (around 60% favorable) compared to with the Dems (around 50% favorable).

Want to come up with a compromise on farm aid or disaster recovery? Go right ahead. Compromising on genocide and using the military on US soil? You better not reach across the aisle on that if you want my support. Fetterman deserves to be judged by the company he keeps.

I still can’t tell how much of this is sarcasm. I literally chortled out loud about half way through reading the quote, I think around where it said run for White House. Then the rest I didn’t know if I was supposed to be taking seriously.

anon6789 Oct 24

Lol who knows? I mean, I’m sure he’s still better than we would have got with Oz, but that presidential run thing made me laugh too. You already lost half the people that voted for you, and as we’ve seen playing across the aisle isn’t getting anyone anywhere.

“Please do not contact”?!? Dude, you’re a senator and that’s the press. You’re in the wrong job if you want to be able to ask to not be bothered by the press.

anon6789 Oct 24

More of these guys want to keep the “official” post while dropping the “public” part…

TrackinDaKraken Oct 24

If we don’t hold the line now, everything gets much worse.

Oisteink Oct 24

They have balls?

Well, it doesn’t take balls to do nothing—buuuut, yes hold the line.

JoeBigelow Oct 24

Fuck me Angus, et tu!?

Seems like he thinks the shutdown is actually better for Trump-

…cuny.edu/…/the-ten-democrats-who-voted-to-avert-…

The Ten Democrats Who Voted to Avert a Federal Government Shutdown | Tony's Thoughts

JoeBigelow Oct 24

I read his comments on the vote there, and I just don’t agree with him. Somehow if the government isn’t shutdown the Democrats will grow a spine? Idk, it just seems like his reasoning being they can cause chaos,…‘gestures broadly’… Seems like we already have chaos

Dogiedog64 Oct 24

Microtonal_Banana Oct 24

There is no negotiating to be had on the issue. Remove the cuts to healthcare or fuck off.

ameancow Oct 24

Sadly, most Americans have very short attention spans and will soon forget what the shutdown was about and will be more concerned with a short term crisis than long term health care worries. My worry is the Republicans know this, after all they manufactured this nation’s eroded attention span and used it to gain power already.

Guy Ingonito Oct 24

The last shutdown ended after 35 days when LaGuardia was shutdown due to protests ftom airport workers who weren’t getting payed.

My prediction is a similar thing will happen.

Frozengyro Oct 24

They are about to miss a full paycheck this weekend, and it’s the end of the month, bills are about due. Things are about to start hurting.

kbobabob Oct 25

If only we had an extra 40 billion…

BrianTheeBiscuiteer Oct 25

Man. It would royally suck if some government flights stayed grounded because air traffic control refused to work. 😐

RagingRobot Oct 25

Maybe they can hold out until Thanksgiving

WoodScientist Oct 24

Nah. That type of voter is also the type to just blame everything on the party in power.

ameancow Oct 24

You are describing the overwhelming majority of American voters.

Marthirial Oct 24

That’s a messaging shortcoming, not the public’s fault. If I have shirt attention span it is mostly because shit is stacking faster than I can cope.

ameancow Oct 24

While being manipulated is not your fault as a member of the public, it is certainly the public’s fault for not being informed or taking the time to learn about and understand politics and allowing the kind of “why you gotta make everything political” anti-engagement sentiment to influence you.

Somewhere along the way we started allowing someone’s poor understanding of how the world works and how the country operates to be a respectable and protected identity, rather than a sign of massive failure from top to bottom of the system.

phutatorius Oct 27

When I rewrite the 10 commandments, one is going to be “Thou shalt not be a mark.”

ScoffingLizard Oct 25

That was part of the plan, too. I think they put it in Project 2025.

Dragonstaff Oct 26

Every single newspaper acts like only the Democrats have any agency.

ameancow Oct 26

We don’t have another opposition group in politics who have any power or political capital at all, so we’re pressing on them to do their job for once. They are doing the right thing by holding out so the GOP doesn’t gut social services, I wish they could have held out stronger in many other standoffs. People like Schumer have let us down over and over by making concessions and ignoring what people want.

Dragonstaff Oct 26

Yeah, I’m actually happy with the Dem response here, and I don’t really compliment them often.

I’m annoyed that the press, as always, is completely in Republicans’ pockets. Notice how the whole article is practically waiting with bated breath for the Democrats to give in and open the government? They bury any talk of the ACA a few paragraphs in. The possibility that the Republicans could reopen the government by agreeing to extend healthcare subsidies is not really contemplated.

I’ve seen many articles across different papers, and this is a theme. Their narrative is that the Dems have shut down the government. Republicans defunding healthcare is always a foregone conclusion, and the story is always about the competition, never about the substance of the fight.

One reason people treat politics like a team sport is because that’s how it’s always covered.

theparadox Oct 24

It’s actually worse. With the pocket recision that has already been used, the administration has literally demonstrated that they will rescind any deal they don’t want to pay for. Frankly, the only way to negotiate in good faith would be some legal measure passed and tested by the courts (because the pocket recision used to be illegal until this SCOTUS ruled in favor of it), guaranteeing that the administration will fund what Congress has appropriated funds for.

I was just telling my best friend that I think this shutdown is going to go on for six to eight months. Possibly to the point where the pot boils over and the government gets thrown away because it was closed for so long.

At least, one can dream that after months of bitter pain and suffering, we might possibly get people who care about others running a government. But that’s a whole hell of a serving of pain and suffering before we get there.

Fuck it, let’s general strike this place. Medicare for all with the govt reopen and all those critical services back or nothing ever happens again.

falseWhite Oct 24

the government gets thrown away because it was closed for so long.

Is that a real possibility? How does that actually work? Is there a new election triggered automatically if the government was shut down for 6-8 months?

If not, you will most likely be waiting and hoping forever, all the while things just keep getting worse.

Governments are the product of the people. There is no divine or natural laws that triggers “an election”. A government is simply created from thin air when a group of people (any group of people) get together and say: fuck the old system, we are putting that in the trash and signing a new social contract.

Of course, there’s virtually never unanimity of agreement over this social contract in one geographic area, so that social contract is only as binding as the force used to put it in effect.

Realistically, 6 months+ of government shutdown in the US will likely cause a collapse of the USA as a single unified federal entity, since the federal government effectively rots. At that point, all bets are off. A fracture of the US is very possible.

I assumed they asked because in many countries, it would trigger an election.

TheLowestStone Oct 24

No, that’s not a thing that happens.

ameancow Oct 24

Is that a real possibility?

No, there are far, far too many people who are not just ready and willing to seize on any power vacuum, no matter how small, but are actively trying to create those opportunities.

There is nobody in charge above a nation. There is nobody going to come turn out the lights and clean the place up if we can’t manage this. The will of the people has eroded, and unless we all get VERY organized, and I don’t mean protests with funny signs, we’re stuck with this.

ScoffingLizard Oct 25

All the Internet surveillance will give any opposition a heads up on organizing.

ameancow Oct 26

There should be no reason to worry that they know if anyone is organizing, because it should be a plan that requires only numbers and expects only political change.

Where we need leadership and planning however is in getting ahead of the sabotage and dissonance that will plague such operations with or without the enemy knowing about them, the provocateurs, the bad-faith actors, and of course the expected problems we always face on the left, which is a vastly splintered and wildly diverse mess of groups, each fiercely principled and educated and ready to stand their ground and argue and debate superficial or distracting issues until nobody wants anything to do with any of it anymore.

We need populism, we need liberals, we need actual political leaders involved from the ground up. This is why we need to start right now by building communities. Pushing each other to be more social, to get to know the politics of where you live, who is running for what, what their views are, who they actually represent. If we made a more unified effort across the whole country to start pushing pride in our communities and our representatives, we could take it all back in just a few cycles, it IS doable, it’s happened in the past, it can happen again but we have to do hard things. Harder than just showing up with protest signs, but that’s a good start.

I like to remind people that Mussolini was not captured by a band of plucky rebels who managed to push people out into the streets. Mussolini was deposed and arrested by his own government and the king, then he handed to the people to do as they wanted. Sometimes we need support in high places, and all this starts with picking wise leadership unless you want to do it yourself.

ibelieveinthehousehippo Oct 24

In parliamentary democracies the budget is automatically a vote of confidence. If the government can’t pass it, an election occurs. Nothing shuts down because the system is still operating on the existing budget that was already passed.

Is that written into laws? No. But you know who made the original government? People who decided to make their own shit.

We have more information and better access to new decisions. We can simply decide to start over collectively and start once again. We don’t have to do things because that’s the way they have always been (in our individual lifetime).

Surely, my ideology will rise from the ashes!

These are the vibes I’m getting

explodicle Oct 25

I will accept literally any other ideology before fascism. A monarch, a communist dictatorship, a tyranny of the majority, pre-fascist crony capitalism, futarchist prediction markets, primitivist tribes, machine rule, you name it. Go nuts. The bad ideas we haven’t tried might not end up with secret police disappearing people.

I get it, I just don’t think leveling the building full of asbestos is the best plan of action. If that metaphor makes sense.

explodicle Oct 25

The Big Bad Wolf is coming to eat us, and we need every pig we can get to finish building any house that isn’t his stomach.

ScoffingLizard Oct 25

Communist dictatorship is off the table, too. I mean, there is China’s communism that probably isn’t quiet as bad. Damn, we’ve seriously lost ground here. Anyways, markets, communism, etc, are all based on trading labor for resources. We’re quickly approaching a world where robots are doing much of the labor. Humans who are not rich, selling sex, or some other service not acheivable with robotics are going to be very fucked.

explodicle Oct 25

IMHO at least the communists want something good, that sometimes results in fascism and sometimes gets crushed. The fascists just want something bad and often succeed.

Revan343 Oct 24

Is that a real possibility? How does that actually work

Generally but not always with violence

ameancow Oct 24

Possibly to the point where the pot boils over and the government gets thrown away because it was closed for so long.

Lovely notion, but realistically… who is going to do the “throwing away?” There’s no system above our government. We don’t have a deal with Britain that they’ll come back if we can’t manage our country. There’s no real such thing as law above a nation.

Instead we have thousands of aspiring political leaders on both sides who will see ANY vacancy of power as an opportunity. They’re jockeying right now like Mad Max behind the scenes, but instead of tricked out cars with spikes it’s committees, delegations and policy wonkery to get prepared for the midterms which are still a year away.

I am only saying all this because you and your friend’s sentiment is common and needs to be adjusted… Nobody is coming.

I guess you missed the whole last paragraph I mentioned where we can do a general strike and start helping ourselves. But sure, whatever you say bub.

hydrospanner Oct 24

But your entire last paragraph, on the practicality and realism spectrum, ranks just a bit lower than “worthless, idle wishful thinking”.

It’s no more or less serious than if you’d said we should all just join together in song and force aliens to show up to fix all our problems.