As we close out the year, we wanted to take a look back at the progress made since @POTUS and @VP took office.
From Day One, our administration has taken on historic challenges, and almost three years in, we have a record of delivering for the American people. pic.twitter.com/1KhVHTal3R
— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) December 21, 2023
One way and another, we Democrats actually did the work to make it a pretty good year!
.@CapehartJ: “There were many top moments in 2023; the one I found most significant happened on April 7. That is when @VP made a surprise visit to Nashville, TN to stand in solidarity with the Tennessee 3..to rebuke a stunning attack on free speech and stand up for democracy.” pic.twitter.com/Ir58Ej7jXz
— Kirsten Allen (@KirstenAllen46) December 23, 2023
Across the aisle…
Hey Chip Roy – Here’s what you guys did:
– Sham Biden impeachment inquiry
– Sham Hunter Biden investigation
– Blocked military promotions
– Took credit for Biden achievements after voting against them
– Played chicken with govt. shutdown
Should I continue?pic.twitter.com/sW8zTrbIwO— Piyush Mittal ???????????? (@piyushmittal) December 19, 2023
When it came to the politics of retribution and revenge, however, the House had a historically productive year. https://t.co/EKRAsvCcv7
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) December 20, 2023
Hey, we didn’t want anything useful to happen, and by that metric the GOP did just fine! Annie Karni, at the NYTimes — (GOP) “House Dysfunction by the Numbers: 724 Votes, Only 27 Laws Enacted” [gift link]:
Representative Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, had a positive spin on the five days and record-breaking 15 voting rounds it took him to win the gavel in January. “Because it took this long,” he said after the ordeal, “now we learned how to govern.”
But as the first year of the 118th Congress draws to a close, the numbers tell a different story — one that doesn’t involve much governing at all…
That is more voting and less lawmaking than at any other time in the last decade, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a far less productive record than that of last year, when Democrats had unified control of Congress. The House held 549 votes in 2022, according to the House clerk, and passed 248 bills that were signed into law, according to records kept by the Library of Congress, including a bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the first bipartisan gun safety bill in decades.
The list of this year’s accomplishments is less ambitious and more bare minimum, such as legislation to suspend the debt ceiling and set federal spending limits that helped pull the nation back from the brink of economic catastrophe. The tally also includes two temporary spending measures to avoid government shutdowns…
The numbers reflect the challenges that have plagued Republicans all year and are likely to continue, and maybe even get worse, in 2024: a tiny majority that requires near unanimity to get anything done; deep party divisions that make unanimity all but impossible; and a right wing whose priority is reining in government, not passing new laws to broaden its reach…
“Democrats as a party are much more interested in having government do things,” Ms. Reynolds said. “A lot of what Republicans are motivated by is the pursuit of ideological purity. The ideological difference around the role of government makes it harder to imagine the sets of things on which the Republican House, especially with its divisions, would get together with a Democrat-led Senate and a Democrat president.”
Despite the low number of bills signed into law, the House saw a frenzy of activity on the floor. That included numerous votes for numerous speaker candidates (19 across two historic speaker elections), multiple attempts to expel Representative George Santos of New York from Congress (three), failed and successful votes on censuring Democratic lawmakers (six) and dozens of votes on hard-right amendments to appropriations bills that ultimately did not pass, or proved to be non-starters in the Senate because they were laden with conservative policy priorities.
The mismatch between the number of votes taken and the number of laws passed is something far-right House Republicans might consider a win. One of the demands the faction made of Mr. McCarthy in January as they were withholding their support to make him speaker was to open up the legislative process and allow more votes on the floor…
Winners and Losers 2023 (Gift Link):
Epic Congressional dysfunction made for a great year for bankers, railroads, pharma, tech, Putin and Chinahttps://t.co/I8yLh1sUNj— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) December 20, 2023
The Big Bidniz take, from Steven Dennis at Bloomberg:
Any Washington lobbyist worth their salt knows defeat or delay of new legislation is often the most lucrative outcome for corporate clients.
By that measure, 2023 was a success, as Congress passed few new laws amid months-long battles over raising the US debt limit and avoiding a government shutdown. All that inaction translated into wins for Wall Street banks, tech giants, and pharmaceutical companies, whose profits were spared the pinch of additional regulation.
Just 22 new laws had been enacted as of Tuesday, according to the US Federal Register, versus 281 last year, when Democrats controlled Washington. Some provisions tucked into laws that did pass boosted businesses, including a well-connected pipeline…
Punishing their own but passing few laws, a Congress in chaos leaves much to do in 2024 https://t.co/5jBQv4pTYw
— The Associated Press (@AP) December 22, 2023
Per the Associated Press, “Punishing their own but passing few laws, a Congress in chaos leaves much to do in 2024”:
This Congress started with showy bluster, a bitter 15-round, multi-day spectacle to elect a House speaker, a Republican who vowed to “never quit,” and then did just that.
House lawmakers proceeded not only to oust the GOP speaker, they also punished their own colleagues with censures and expulsion, launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and were barely able to conduct the basics of governing by keeping federal offices from shuttering.
While this first year of the 118th Congress was a historic one, thanks to the dizzying turmoil coming from the Republicans on the House side of the Capitol, next year is headed toward more of the same. With just 27 bills and resolutions signed into law, not counting a few board appointments, it’s among the most do-nothing sessions of Congress in recent times.
“This fall has been a very actively stupid political environment,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, the bow-tie-wearing Republican from North Carolina, who emerged as a voice of reason as the interim House speaker leading the chamber during the upheaval.
While Americans typically give low marks to Congress, as the branch of government closest to the people, it’s still the main venue the U.S. relies on, at times more so than the presidency or the courts, to work out the nation’s problems and challenges.
The need for a functioning Congress — what one scholar calls “the place” where it all happens — is even more apparent heading into a tumultuous presidential election year and with hot wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East…
Heading into 2024, new House Speaker Mike Johnson will start the year under the same pressure to pass legislation to keep the government funded, starting Jan. 19, that led to then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ouster after he brokered a budget-cutting debt deal with Biden…
It’s a shift from Nancy Pelosi’s run as speaker, when the powerful gavel wielded political fear and discipline, but also legislative results. The last Congress, among the most productive in decades, passed more than 300 pieces of legislation over two years, including major infrastructure and climate change bills.
By year’s end, it wasn’t just the ousted McCarthy calling it quits, but dozens of lawmakers heading for the exits.
After his stint as interim speaker, McHenry, a powerful committee chairman with allies across Congress, promptly announced he, too, would be retiring at the end of his term, as his far-right colleagues claim increasing power.
“We need people to be realists, not just blind ideologues,” he said.
If I had the cash to spare, I’d put up some billboards in the Beltway commuter corridors with a big photo of Nancy Pelosi and the words Miss Me Yet?…
Baud
Buried in the article, but holy crap, you just don’t expect to see that sort of journalism anymore.
Ramona
I dream of a few more GOP retirements from the House in the next few months and Jeffries becoming Speaker in 2024…
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
The aristocrats!
NotMax
Interesting enough watch in spite of it being determined to remain on the fence: AI and schools.
gene108
I don’t buy this. Republicans have no real core principles and their positions can easily be cajoled by right-wing media, billionaire sugar daddies, and whatever Trump wants, like high tariffs and trade wars versus free trade.
They are dysfunctional because the party is made up of greedy self-centered politicians, who do not want to do the actual work of governing and unlike Republican controlled state legislatures, Congress doesn’t have industry or religious conservative lobbyists write their legislation for them.
OzarkHillbilly
Sounds pretty good to those on the right.
Betty
@gene108: Pretty sure they have lobbyists to write the tax laws.
geg6
@Betty:
💯%
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty: And laws to gut the powers of regulatory agencies.
Shalimar
@gene108: Republican voters don’t believe government should work. They have been indoctrinated for 45 years to believe government is a destructive force stealing their money. They ignore all the things they personally get for their tax money.
Lymie
How can Boebert just change districts, don’t you have to live in the district you run from?
Mousebumples
@Lymie: I think she is planning to move. However, I think eligibility in that regard varies by state.
Good morning, everyone!
sab
@Lymie: She has to be a resident of Colorado but not of her district.
Geminid
@Lymie: You just have to live in the state, not the district.
Boebert says she’s moving to the 4th CD. If she does it will likely be a short-term rental, because when she loses the primary on June 25 she’ll want a new place to live..
Kay
Well, if you ignore womens agency and autonomy and ability to get medical care – perhaps that’s what Republicans say – but there’s no reason to let them get away with saying it when it obviously isn’t true.
OzarkHillbilly
Michael Cohen continues to show that he is not a reliable witness:
Ooooooppps…
I’ll give him this, he’s perfected the art of falling on his sword.
Thor Heyerdahl
Chip Roy – now there’s a person who is the perfect mouth on two legs mascot for this do nothing congress
TriassicSands
If I were going to emphasize anything about the Pelosi years, it certainly wouldn’t be “political fear.” Yes, there was discipline, but what was most apparent to me was competence. I would guess that the main element of fear, if it existed, was in the Republican’s realizing that Pelosi knew what she was doing and, also unlike the Republicans, she had positive things she wanted to do for the American people. And she did them.
The Republicans want to make headlines, and they did:
They want to cause trouble for Democrats and the country, which they always do:
However, since they don’t control the Senate and White House, they couldn’t do what they love most — further enrich the wealthy and punish the poor.
And they set some modern records.
If they had any pride at all, they would turn the leadership over to the Democrats, but that could mean positive accomplishments, which must be avoided at all costs.
TriassicSands
@Kay:
That reminds me of Haley’s speech the other day about the Civil War and “freedom.” She emphasized that government needs to stay out of people’s lives, but completely ignored Big Brother in the Womb. Not to mention the government (Ken Paxton) trying to identify and punish women who leave Texas for abortions.
Another Scott
@gene108: I think that the GQP has factions that want to do things, as always, but have tied themselves in knots with the Hastert/Boehner “rule” and with letting the bomb throwing 10-15-20% in the HFC take control. They can’t do much of anything with a handful of votes majority margin under those circumstances, and their demand for purity means that compromise is like cutting off their own nose.
They’re a brittle party that cannot adapt, and just about everyone sees it now.
Electoral-Vote.com has an interesting answer in their Q&A on why the 14th Amendment doesn’t explicitly include the President and Vice President – it’s to keep Confederates from removing candidates supported by voters in other states. True? Seems plausible…
Cheers,
Scott.
H.E.Wolf
Whoever is quoted there is disregarding the right wing’s governmental reach into reproductive coercion. It’s as if that writer thinks all people are male.
Both the overreach, and the ignoring of women as not just unimportant but nonexistent, are going to tilt the balance in our favor in Nov. 2024.
…If we do the work to make it so. And I think we will.
Eolirin
👋 All
H.E.Wolf
@Another Scott:
Always happy to meet another Electoral Vote blog fan!
I’m headed over to their site now, to read their weekly Q & A post.
H.E.Wolf
@Kay:
Thank you for saying it earlier and more concisely than I did! And thank you for keeping this topic front and center in our awareness.
Another Scott
@H.E.Wolf: Your excellent comments on it made me check it out more often. 😁
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@TriassicSands:
It’s not even correct in the context of the Civil War. Conservatives didn’t want the government “out” of slavery. They demanded the government enforce the property rights of slaveholders outside slave states. They had a whole set of laws to do that and they used state power and apparatus to re-capture enslaved people who escaped. They wanted the government to designate MORE states as slave states.
Haley has a degree in accounting and finance. Apparently she didn’t take a lot of history courses in the expensive private high school she attended either, so we can’t blame public schools for her ignorance.
OzarkHillbilly
@H.E.Wolf: Of course they are. They want a govt that will allow them to do anything they want while at the same time it allows them to inhibit the ability of others to do as they want.
Steeplejack
@Eolirin:
Hey! 🪔
TriassicSands
@Kay:
I’m reading a book right now that details the threats to democracy that have occurred over the years in the U.S. There is a lot about the role of southern Democrats leading up to the Civil War. As you point out, clearly not a government-out-of-people’s-lives bunch of libertarians. All about government control.
Kay
@TriassicSands:
They want the government out of white mens lives. No one can make any laws restricting or restraining them! But everyone else is fair game.
Kay
More small government conservatism. Here’s a new government funded employment program for religious fundamentalists.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to send low income mothers diaper coupons directly rather than employing thousands of GOP activists to hand them out? You could buy a lot of diapers with 250 million if we cut out the anti abortion middlemen skimming paychecks off the top.
Suzanne
@H.E.Wolf:
The lack of cognitive empathy just blows my mind.
I read a few years back that reading novels is linked with increased empathy, and also that men read many fewer novels than women over their lifetimes (on average…. yes I know, #notallmen). I feel like most dudes really just cannot empathize with the physical demands that having a female/AFAB body puts on a person. Even John has been snarking about Joelle needing a lot of bathroom breaks on their road trip. HAHAHA hilarious, women have to pee so much!
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
OzarkHillbilly
Over at OTB, Steven Taylor makes a well articulated argument for the enforcement of The 14th Amendment, Section 3:
More at the link.
I want to add what commenter a country lawyer had to say:
Ksmiami
@Kay: to me, the abortion issue runs a direct parallel with slavery. Either women in America are full citizens, or not and the pending travel bans and interstate creep that guys like Abbot want reminds me of Bleeding Kansas… I fully expect that New Mexico will have to fight off abortion patrols from Texas at some point.
jonas
@OzarkHillbilly: There was a great video a while back by Devin Stone aka Legal Eagle on YouTube breaking down a case in NYC earlier this year where a lawyer tried to file a motion using a bunch of fake case citations ginned up by some AI chatbot. The judge, as they say, was not amused.
I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this kind of stuff in the future.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
matt
McCarthy’s excuse for his party’s dysfunction is that they ‘learned how to govern’? This is the US government, not model UN.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s a good post there.
Of course, this Court will ignore all of that. I just don’t know what to do with the fact that so many Americans hate one another and actively want to harm racial minorities, anyone who went to college, women, etc.
Thor Heyerdahl
@matt: McCarthy’s party still wants a reward from mommy and daddy for being able to poop on the potty too.
jonas
This is why I think, ultimately, Wall Street and big corps want Trump back — sure it guarantees everything in the federal government will be a complete shitshow and that has its drawbacks, but on the other hand 1. taxes won’t go up and 2. complete shitshow is just another term for gridlock, which, as we see here, is another word for “ka-ching!” in corporate boardrooms.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
artem1s
@OzarkHillbilly:
the mental gymnastics I look forward to is the Roberts court explaining why preclearance is required for states regulating their elections in this case but not when they are regulating who and who doesn’t get to vote. According to Roberts, unless and until Congress passes a States Voting Rights act that limits or contains CO’s powers to regulate state’s elections they should be free to proceed as they have always done to regulate their election as they see fit. Trump should have to wait until AFTER the election to make his case that the state of CO election regulation has harmed them with their regulation JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER CITIZEN who has to comply with state election regulations in order to cast their votes.
Suzanne
@jonas: They also want a recession because it makes people more willing to work for terrible wages and it allows them to buy up assets at low prices.
Kay
@Ksmiami:
One of the things that bothers me the most about it is that the US is so far back now, internationally. There are almost no countries that deny abortions for the health/life of the mother.
And if it’s true in any state then it’s true in the United States. No one would argue the US banned slavery if the slave states still permitted slavery, yet people make this “well, women have agency and autonomy in blue states…” argument all the time.
El Salvador, Poland, and Nicaragua. And the United States. Poland may actually be leaving this small club shortly. Then it will be the US and two other countries. Saudi Arabia has much more liberal abortion laws than the US.
mrmoshpotato
Even the FTFNYT can’t ignore the Rethuglican asshattery. Well done, GOP!
Kay
@Ksmiami:
In 2023 the (GOP) US House passed a law mandating certain treatment for “late abortions”. I read it. It would directly impact the ability of physicians to save the life or health of the mother in an emergency situation where delivery goes terribly wrong. They could pass that law if they had a GOP Senate and President. It won’t matter if you live in a blue state- it’s a federal law.
They do not understand that “abortion”, medically, doesn’t care about intent. It doesn’t matter if you “want” the baby. They are using a legal construct to direct medical care. It is always, always going to impact all pregnant women until they start thinking about this in a different way- the real way it works, not a legal fiction and not a religious directive. They will keep running into “the health/life of the mother” issues as long as they insist on siloing “abortion” when it isn’t siloed in real life or medical care.
mrmoshpotato
@Geminid:
Oh, BURN! Well played.
Baud
@Kay:
I agree. But for me too many people also fail to recognize the difference between blue states and red states, because the notion that the the parties are the same is the higher truth they cling to.
mrmoshpotato
@matt:
Kevin is a grownup – allegedly. Does he want a pat on the head? Deserve more of a hard slap across the face.
Nukular Biskits
@Kay:
I submit that it’s far worse. Many (most?) of the male “pro-life” “conservatives” (quotes intentional there) don’t understand female physiology or pregnancy.
OzarkHillbilly
Police killed Niani Finlayson seconds after responding to her 911 call, video shows
To serve and protect, my ass.
Xavier
@gene108: There are undoubtedly grifters and self servers in Congress, but there is no doubt in my mind that dysfunction is an intentional strategy to delegitimize the idea of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Eolirin
@Steeplejack: ❤️
lowtechcyclist
Dear FTFNYT, how about let’s try “a right wing whose priorities are weaponizing government against their enemies, but otherwise gutting it.”
catclub
@OzarkHillbilly: For some people, the law protects but does not bind. For others, the law binds but does not protect.
Harrison Wesley
@Suzanne: He’s not Old enough yet to understand that, eventually, the Urine Imperative recognizes no gender limitations.
catclub
@OzarkHillbilly: I would just note that I doubt many Confederate Generals were convicted in a court of law of insurrection. But they still did it.
Phylllis
@Kay: Her expensive private school is considered an academic joke in these parts.
Another Scott
@Kay: My mom had a spontaneous abortion sometime around 1970, probably due to Rubella (that we kids got) that was going around suburban Atlanta at the time. She went to the hospital and got the care she needed and fully recovered. The one thing that struck me as weird about it was she told me later that my dad had to sign some paperwork at the time stating that he was the father. (It was a bit awkward for both of them because they had divorced about 5 years earlier.) It was paternalistic, but not cruel, and we need to remember that in those enlightened times women couldn’t have credit in their own name and lots of other things either.
Men today would be outraged if they had to have their girlfriends/wives sign paperwork every time they had to have a prostate exam or pee in a cup for a PSA check or wanted a vasectomy or had to have some judge rule if they were worthy of having an infected bleeding wound treated…
None of these abortion laws make any sense from a medical standpoint. It’s not about medicine or protecting babies or any of that nonsense that they claim. It’s about control of women by religious nutjobs – full stop. Good people really, really need to hammer the over-reach of Dobbs and all the rest – they have no leg to stand on here.
Grr…,
Scott.
Brachiator
Keep in mind that conservatives view this as a good thing. Apart from tax cuts, a big military budget and laws which hurt designated people, the typical conservative does not want the federal government to do much of anything.
Still, on every measure that the GOP claims they care about, the economy, wages, GDP growth, the Dow, etc, the Biden administration has done an excellent job. They cannot claim that a more activist and pro worker policy is bad for the economy. And I would bet that corporate profits are up as well.
MomSense
The problem in a nutshell is that Democrats, who run the political spectrum from center right to left, all want to govern responsibly and provide citizens with the basics of a modern society (fair wages, access to affordable health care, bodily autonomy in medical decisions, quality education, housing, upward mobility, healthy environment, sensible gun violence prevention, etc). These are all things most people want. In order for the Republicans to block these basics they have to create conspiracy theories, villify Democrats, make up crazy shit, promote mysogyny, racism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, and xenophobia, intimidate anyone who disagrees, and LIE.
There will be endless drama as long as the Republican party exists. There is no saving the party, no reclaiming it from the corrupt and crazy. It is irredeemable.
I don’t know what we do about the millions of people who have succumbed to the Trump/Republican cult. We probably have to do something similar to what Germany established after WWII with respect to Nazism and its symbols, slogans, etc.
Jim Appleton
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d clarify that “conservative” today is a mostly racist fig leaf, decades in the making.
Real conservatism means caution in progress.
Today it’s power by any means, with a heaping side of FYIGM
ETA: Demographics, fuck yeah!
Nukular Biskits
@Jim Appleton:
BINGO!
That’s why I tend to put the word in quotes. What passes for conservatism these days bears little to no resemblance to what it originally meant.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Conservatives absolutely put babies above women. They also put religion above medicine.
Conservatives believe that a woman who becomes pregnant has an absolute obligation to give birth. And if giving birth would endanger her life or even the life of the baby, the woman must “leave it up to God.”
Conservatives would even endanger all other women by forcing doctors to lie about medical treatment and outcomes related to pregnancy.
Conservative policy fails even by conservative standards because it takes away women ‘s freedoms.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: We’re saying similar things, I think.
But they really don’t care about “protecting babies”. They don’t want to fund pre-natal care or give support to new mothers. The US has the highest infant mortality rate of rich countries.
The GQP doesn’t rank babies above women. They don’t care about either one – they care about control.
The South was “conservative” in 1970, but wasn’t totally insane about controlling women the way the GQP is now. Reactionary religious nutjobs have control of the party now.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chief Oshkosh
@gene108: Yep, totally agree. The “ideological purity” is just bullshit, lazy way to avoid calling out the Republicans for being exactly as you describe. They’re a bunch of mini-Trumps, with all that that implies.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Again, conservatives are focused solely on the idea that a woman cannot end the life of a fetus. What happens after that is her responsibility, and maybe the responsibility of a spouse if she gets married.
The state is not responsible for the well being of the baby either before or after it is born. If the woman can’t take care of a child, she should not have sex or get pregnant. Of course, conservatives also believe that heterosexual married couples have an obligation to be fruitful and multiply, so there is an obvious contradiction at play here.
Still, the right of a baby to be born is placed above any right that a woman or families might have. Quality of life of the baby is not a state interest.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: I find myself wondering these days just *why* our right-wing ideologue politicians appear to be so much more fucking insane and misogynist than *other* right-wing ideologue politicians around the globe. *Why* this obsession with abortion and denial of proper healthcare to women.
And yeah, I know about the roots of it – how the pols made a devil’s bargain with the fundies way back in the day, but *how* were they able to make it SUCH a big fucking thing that we are still wrestling with that hydra-headed monster? Why does it *persist*?
Sometimes I wonder whether other countries having had state-mandated religions for so long, and seeing what kind of damage they did to the body politic in the long run, made people more aware of their dangers. I dunno.
Kay
@Another Scott:
This is why Roe put the fence up around the nitty gritty medical issues. Because it will be impossible to regulate – we would have 10,000 word statutes that would have to allow for every possibility in a pregnancy (not just in an “abortion”).
That they refuse to recognize they made a profound categorical error – that they are searching for a bright line between “abortion” and “urgent medical care” that doesn’t exist – means they will continue to put the life/heath of the mother at risk.
This is where anti abortion laws have always failed, even in countries that are basically ruled by the Catholic Church. They changed abortion laws in Mexico and Ireland not because women wanted a right to choose but because the anti abortion laws were killing pregnant women. They fail not on “abortion” but on pregnancy. That’s why the Right is having so much trouble extricating themselves from this mess they made- the women testifying in Texas were not seeking an abortion. They were seeking a baby.
BellyCat
Truth.
I am also shocked that the victim was black. //
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Yeah it’s always helpful to remember that for all the claims that they were for States Rights™ and Letting-The-States-Decide etc., the Confederate Constitution actually prohibited Abolition. The Confederate States did NOT have the right to abolish Slavery if they wanted to. That’s their version of “freedom.”
Another Scott
@Brachiator:
No, they’re focused on control. Punishing healthcare providers, punishing women who need care, punishing companies that don’t toe the line, punishing other countries that don’t do what they demand, punishing public servants who try to do their jobs.
I’m a big fan of Pelosi’s maxim – “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your values.” They value forcing others to do what they want. They don’t rank fetuses above women; they don’t care about either one.
YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.
suzanne
@Miss Bianca:
I’m not sure we’re more misogynist than other countries, but that’s to say that other places are also bad (there’s a great piece in The Atlantic about South Korea). Declining birth rate and women’s increased earning power are reducing men’s sexual and reproductive control over women. Many men will never marry or have children, or even “have sexual access” to women — which is the grossest phrasing ever. We are seeing the beginning of the backlash.
kindness
Those Big Money/Corporate types buy into the Leopards Eating Your Face Party notions. They completely don’t see that at some point a fascist government will come after every powerful entity for some delicious face snacking.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
If it makes you happy to see things in terms of control, knock yourself out. I think we agree that the outcome is the same.
To me, this is too vague to oppose effectively.
The anti-abortion zealots put up obstacles that prevent women from getting proper health care, and which endanger their lives.
These obstacles should be removed.
MomSense
@Another Scott:
Once the baby is born they don’t care. And by the time they are toddlers and and young children they don’t care if they have food or housing or preschool. Republicans hate children.
Ben Cisco
@MomSense: Carlin nailed this back in the day:
Same as it ever was.
Jinchi
That has great “Mayor Visits City” vibes.
Ruckus
@David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch:
Think what it would have been like if they had gotten done what they wanted to do…..
I’m going out on a very sturdy limb here and saying that if the extremely conservative side of the rethuglican party had their way, a significant portion of us would be very likely eating in non existent food lines. They don’t want better progress, they want all the money and control to create a fairy tale version of life. And yes it is a very shitty fairy tale.
Jinchi
That’s why I usually push back on the “party of small government” language.
Republicans are very aggressive at using the powers of government against women, immigrants, LGBT, BLM, students, Muslims, hippies, residents of Blue states, and even the occasional megacorporation that gets out of line.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Most humans have a concept of who they are, (many are likely very wrong BTW) and as men have been, up until historically recently, the authority side of humanity outside the family – and just wait till your father gets home inside of it. The world is learning that this is wrong and as always, societies learn slowly or violently. Our level of communications being wider and faster as days go by has changed a lot of that. As I’ve stated before, look what we are doing today, here, now.
Our armed forces has men and women doing the same jobs, 50 yrs ago when I was in that wasn’t even an idea in the military. I’d easily bet it’s made the military a better place to be, and a better military.
Jinchi
She was also implying that the millions of black men and women were not “people” with rights to be considered.
MomSense
@Ben Cisco:
Man, he was a prophet.
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
Rethuglicans want positive accomplishments, they just want them all ONLY for themselves.
Denali5
Timothy Snyder also has written an article supporting the idea that TFG is disqualified from running by the language of the 14th Amendment. It will be fun watching the Originalists wriggle their way out of that reality.
wjca
Wrongo! They put fetuses above women. Once the baby is born, they ccouldn’t care less.
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
Charge in – fix/fuckup the situation.
Might be just a bit better (and what used to be taught to law enforcement)- Enter, Assess the situation, Apply MINIMAL force necessary.
Don’t know about their training today, but #2 used to be the proper approach. The LASO often seems to think this is the wild west of 150 yrs ago and some of the sheriffs supposedly in charge seem to think that their title and badge makes them top of the pile, as in the old west of that 150 yrs ago. It’s been this way my entire life.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
As a prior corporation owner I can very honestly say that when the economy was good, my business was great. When it was less than great, business was OK. Strangely enough it was always great during a democratic president. Because a healthy economy is not just the rich fucks getting richer, it is most everyone doing better. Take out the racism in this country and a healthy economy is everyone doing better.
Ksmiami
@Kay: exactly- letting religious extremists make our laws in 2023 is the definition of insanity- adding insult to injury, Islam is actually more liberal on abortion than the fundamentalist Christians.
Mike in Pasadena
@Shalimar: keep government’s hands off my Medicare