The Decline and Fall of the US Senate
Jun 16, 2022 21:38:42 #
The Decline and Fall of the US Senate
JEFF SCHECHTMAN 06/16/22
Almost all of the policy crises we face today — a******n, guns, c*****e c****e, the integrity of our e******ns — have been blocked from consideration by the US Senate. How did that happen? How did what some have called the “world’s greatest deliberative body” come to a standstill?
The answer, according to Ira Shapiro, our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast – is Mitch McConnell. Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) has put these highly critical issues on ice.
Shapiro is a 45-year veteran of Washington, a former Senate staffer, a former official in the Clinton administration, and the author of three books about the US Senate, including his latest, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America.
Shapiro details what happened after McConnell became minority leader, and how it led, in his view, to a “dark place in history.”
He talks about McConnell’s real and imagined sk**ls, his patience, and his unique ability to “surf the madness” of his party. Above all, Shapiro shines a light on McConnell’s unbridled focus on the courts, the federal bench, and particularly the Supreme Court, and shows how it all started from his early work in the Justice Department with Antonin Scalia.
Shapiro details McConnell’s shamelessness, and shows his repeated actions that put partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country. Actions that, particularly during the 2008-2009 financial crises, Shapiro calls unpatriotic acts. McConnell, he says, has been not a Senate leader — but a partisan leader.
According to Shaprio, the customs and norms of the US Senate may never recover from McConnell, and by contagion, our democracy will be all the worse for it.
iTunes Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Google Podcasts RSS RSS MP3 MP3
Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast, I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. All of the key issues, crises really, that we’re facing today are blocked for consideration by the US Senate. A******n, guns, c*****e c****e, and the integrity of our e******ns themselves all are frozen in what was once called the greatest deliberative body. In our lifetime, and in the 246-year history of the Republic, there was a time when great men walked to stride the US Senate. It was once the crucible of democracy, a cooling saucer to modulate the nation’s passions, and it now fails on all counts.
Today, it’s filled with small-minded men and women whose desire for power, ree******n, money, and partisan advancement over the interests of the people rule the day. And while there may be more crazies and corruption on one side of the aisle, the other side has proven itself to be mostly weak, feckless, and lacking in imagination. Certainly, the how we got here is a complicated story. There’s plenty of blame to go around. However, since 2006, when he became minority leader, Mitch McConnell has sucked dry any moral compass the Senate might have had. McConnell’s actions during the Obama and Trump presidency have single-handedly packed the court and refused to let the Senate do its intended job.
All of this may mark the end of the Senate as our founders knew it, but some argue that it also marks the end of democracy as we know it. We’re going to talk about this today with my guest Ira Shapiro. Ira has had a 45-year Washington career focused on American politics and international trade. He served for 12 years in senior staff positions in the US Senate where he worked for some of the greats. He served in the Office of the US Trade Representative during the Clinton administration and is the author of two previous books about the Senate. His articles have appeared in numerous publications.
And it is my pleasure to welcome Ira Shapiro to talk about his new work, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America. Ira Shapiro, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Ira Shapiro: Jeff, it’s wonderful to be with you. I am worried though that I’m not going to be able to improve on your summary. The way you described Senator McConnell’s effect on the Senate I think is quite accurate.
Jeff: Thank you for that. Both the respect for and the functionality of the United States Senate seems to have been on a downward spiral for some time now. Talk a little bit about if there was an inflection point that you can see when that started to happen.
Ira: One of the things about my work on the Senate convinced me that a relatively long decline of the Senate turned into a deep downward spiral precisely when McConnell became leader. And much of what has happened, while there are other disappointing people and feckless people without principle, I think McConnell has written a large page in political history, and unfortunately, it’s a very dark page.
Jeff: I guess the question is whether McConnell is this brilliant political mind, this brilliant legislator, or he just happened to catch the wave of what was going on in the Senate, in the politics of the country, and he understood that.
Ira: Oh, I think that’s a great question. And I think to some extent, probably the answer is both. I have said and I believe that McConnell is an exceptionally sk**led political strategist and tactician and very patient. He waited actually 22 years in the Senate before he became a Republican leader, and then another eight before he became majority leader. So he’s very able politically and very focused. And he certainly deserves grudging admiration for surfing the madness of the Republican Party, right? If we look at the House Republicans, one leader after another has found himself thrown on the side of the road along the way.
We remember Paul Ryan or John Boehner or Tom DeLay, one after another. McConnell has surfed the madness and stayed in control. So he is very sk**lful, but to some extent, he has understood the times, and to another extent, he has made, in my view, some serious mistakes, particularly with respect to Trump, but he has stayed focused on the things that mattered to him, namely and most specifically, the court.
Jeff: What has been the single greatest sk**l that he has brought to the job?
Ira: I think the greatest sk**l he has brought to the job is a single-minded focus on his priorities, and that specifically involves moving the federal courts, and most particularly the Supreme Court, in an extreme right-wing direction. And the other sk**l that he brings to the job if I can name two, he is a master of keeping the support of his caucus. And look, you could bring him down with five or six people, but he has kept the Republican caucus because they respect his ability and appreciate that he has made them, in the past, the majority, and they understand that he has no fear at handling the donor base and exploiting the donor base and rewarding the donor base.
Jeff: How did the courts become a priority for him?
Ira: Well, he would say that he has a long interest in the court. In fact, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the dying years of the Ford administration. And he shared an office interestingly with a young right-wing lawyer named Antonin Scalia. So he would say he has a long interest in the court. And I think that there’s some t***h in that, but he also grasped two things. One, that the court, the Supreme Court, meant a great deal to a part of the Republican coalition and a part of the Republican coalition that was skeptical of Donald Trump, namely the Christian right. So that’s part number one. And number two though, he had said e******ns come, e******ns go, majorities shift. If you want to have a lasting impact on the country, courts are where you do it.
Jeff: Certainly one of the other sk**ls, and I don’t know if we consider this a sk**l, that he brings to it is a sense of utter shamelessness. Talk about that.
Ira: Well, I think that [laughs], I absolutely believe that. I do think he is shameless. He is shameless in his willingness to shred the customs and norms of the Senate in a way that goes far beyond policy differences; just unprecedented breaks with customs and norms. The most famous of which, of course, was his decision not to take up a nomination by President Obama to fill the Scalia vacancy, but that’s only one of any number of breaks with the norms and customs of the Senate. But the shamelessness goes a little beyond that because he will routinely celebrate his victories whenever he has them and then mischaracterize and rewrite the history as well.
So in other words, it’s not just that he stacked the Supreme Court, it’s that the Supreme Court wars started with the Democrats – he has to do that. And so he’s pretty shameless. And I would say since you’ve invited me, news on that word, I think we have seen in the Senate Republicans a combination of the shamelessness of Mitch McConnell and by and large Lindsey Graham in recent years, coupled with the shamefulness of a lot of other senators who knew better and abandoned America, particularly in the crisis year of 2020.
Jeff: Go back a little further, talk a little bit about his comments after Obama’s e******n where he said categorically, “My goal is to make him a one-term president.” Talk about where that came from.
Ira: Well, I think that comment is noted a lot of times, and he would say that’s, “Of course, I’m a Republican. I wanted Obama to be a one-term president.” I have always focused more on what he did in the weeks that Obama became president, at a time when our country could have slipped into a second Great Depression. If we recall 2008-2009, the financial crisis of September and October of 2008, had morphed and extended from Wall Street to Main Street. So all of a sudden, we lost 750,000 jobs in one month, [and] we were in a very serious economic position. And yet McConnell decided even before Obama took the oath of office, that he was going to oppose Obama’s economic stimulus.
When only an economic stimulus could have prevented a very serious recession and even a depression. And yet, he opposed it. And the reason he opposed it is because he didn’t really care about what was happening to people around the country, including in Kentucky. What he cared about was a Democratic president was coming into office with high approval ratings, and that couldn’t be allowed. So I regarded that as not just shameless, but unpatriotic. I can’t envision another Senate leader behaving that way.
Jeff: And yes, he got other senators to go along with him in that action.
Ira: Ah, that’s a beautiful point. And that’s why I regard some of them as shameless and most of them are shameful. Why would they have all gone along with that? Well, he’s successful in holding his caucus together. And if three people – as I recall it was Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe (then in the Senate from Maine, also), and Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania. If those three people hadn’t v**ed with the Democrats, we might still be in the Great Recession.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the damage that he’s done, in your view, to the Senate as an institution.
Ira: I think it’s done enormous damage to the Senate as an institution. And the way I would describe it is that there are factors in our politics that made it harder to make the Senate work for a long time. And by that, I mean, genuine differences between the parties and the parties further apart than they were before. No more moderate to liberal Republicans from the Northeast of the Midwest, no more conservative Democrats in the South. So the parties were realigning, right, along regional lines, along racial lines, along ideological lines. So it’s going to be more difficult to make the Senate work. But that’s what senators are supposed to be able to try to overcome.
And that’s particularly the responsibility of Senate leaders to try to bring people together and bridge differences. And McConnell, after the first two years as leader, I think, you can’t draw too many conclusions from, but starting in the third year, when Obama becomes president, McConnell abandons the role of a Senate Leader and becomes an opposition leader and just a sheer partisan in a way that I don’t believe any of the modern Senate leaders have done. So I think that was a key change. So it’s two parts, right? There are some genuine factors that make the country more divided. And then there are political bad actors, starting, in my view, with the two largest of them, Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, who make the situation worse.
Jeff: Certainly one of the things about McConnell is that while he has had his causes, and of course, the court is one and being an opposition leader defeating whether it was the Affordable Care Act or whether it was the bailout in 2008-2009, that McConnell is ideologically free except for his own agenda.
Ira: Well, yes. He would say that he has a right-of-center view and he opposes left-of-center views. He used to like to say, “America isn’t France, we’re a right-of-center country.” By that when he says “America isn’t France,” he means he’s against health care for people; basically, he doesn’t believe in that kind of thing. So he has a right-of-center view. But I think over time, as the Republican Party has become increasingly radicalized, he has moved and normalized that radicalization. Now, he would say, if I was in dialogue, he would say, “Well, actually, you know I’ve tried to defeat some of the people who were looking for Republican nominations to the Senate.”
And he has at some point tried to do that, the extreme ones, but he didn’t do it for ideological reasons. He did it because he didn’t think they’d win the e******n. So he’s been very focused on gaining the majority and trying to hold the majority.
Jeff: The other problem with some of those crazies, it’s not only that he didn’t think they would win the e******n, I think his greater fear is if they won the e******n, he couldn’t control them.
Ira: I think that’s true, Jeff, but I think that was his second fear – he would worry about that after they won the e******n. He just didn’t think they’d win the e******n. And remember – I shouldn’t say remember, I’m the only one that fixates on this sort of thing – in 2012, when Obama was trying to be reelected and he was in a tight race with Romney, McConnell was virtually measuring the drapes in the Majority Leader’s office. He thought this was his time, he made it quite clear he thought he was going to become majority leader.
JEFF SCHECHTMAN 06/16/22
Almost all of the policy crises we face today — a******n, guns, c*****e c****e, the integrity of our e******ns — have been blocked from consideration by the US Senate. How did that happen? How did what some have called the “world’s greatest deliberative body” come to a standstill?
The answer, according to Ira Shapiro, our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast – is Mitch McConnell. Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) has put these highly critical issues on ice.
Shapiro is a 45-year veteran of Washington, a former Senate staffer, a former official in the Clinton administration, and the author of three books about the US Senate, including his latest, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America.
Shapiro details what happened after McConnell became minority leader, and how it led, in his view, to a “dark place in history.”
He talks about McConnell’s real and imagined sk**ls, his patience, and his unique ability to “surf the madness” of his party. Above all, Shapiro shines a light on McConnell’s unbridled focus on the courts, the federal bench, and particularly the Supreme Court, and shows how it all started from his early work in the Justice Department with Antonin Scalia.
Shapiro details McConnell’s shamelessness, and shows his repeated actions that put partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country. Actions that, particularly during the 2008-2009 financial crises, Shapiro calls unpatriotic acts. McConnell, he says, has been not a Senate leader — but a partisan leader.
According to Shaprio, the customs and norms of the US Senate may never recover from McConnell, and by contagion, our democracy will be all the worse for it.
iTunes Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Google Podcasts RSS RSS MP3 MP3
Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast, I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. All of the key issues, crises really, that we’re facing today are blocked for consideration by the US Senate. A******n, guns, c*****e c****e, and the integrity of our e******ns themselves all are frozen in what was once called the greatest deliberative body. In our lifetime, and in the 246-year history of the Republic, there was a time when great men walked to stride the US Senate. It was once the crucible of democracy, a cooling saucer to modulate the nation’s passions, and it now fails on all counts.
Today, it’s filled with small-minded men and women whose desire for power, ree******n, money, and partisan advancement over the interests of the people rule the day. And while there may be more crazies and corruption on one side of the aisle, the other side has proven itself to be mostly weak, feckless, and lacking in imagination. Certainly, the how we got here is a complicated story. There’s plenty of blame to go around. However, since 2006, when he became minority leader, Mitch McConnell has sucked dry any moral compass the Senate might have had. McConnell’s actions during the Obama and Trump presidency have single-handedly packed the court and refused to let the Senate do its intended job.
All of this may mark the end of the Senate as our founders knew it, but some argue that it also marks the end of democracy as we know it. We’re going to talk about this today with my guest Ira Shapiro. Ira has had a 45-year Washington career focused on American politics and international trade. He served for 12 years in senior staff positions in the US Senate where he worked for some of the greats. He served in the Office of the US Trade Representative during the Clinton administration and is the author of two previous books about the Senate. His articles have appeared in numerous publications.
And it is my pleasure to welcome Ira Shapiro to talk about his new work, The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America. Ira Shapiro, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Ira Shapiro: Jeff, it’s wonderful to be with you. I am worried though that I’m not going to be able to improve on your summary. The way you described Senator McConnell’s effect on the Senate I think is quite accurate.
Jeff: Thank you for that. Both the respect for and the functionality of the United States Senate seems to have been on a downward spiral for some time now. Talk a little bit about if there was an inflection point that you can see when that started to happen.
Ira: One of the things about my work on the Senate convinced me that a relatively long decline of the Senate turned into a deep downward spiral precisely when McConnell became leader. And much of what has happened, while there are other disappointing people and feckless people without principle, I think McConnell has written a large page in political history, and unfortunately, it’s a very dark page.
Jeff: I guess the question is whether McConnell is this brilliant political mind, this brilliant legislator, or he just happened to catch the wave of what was going on in the Senate, in the politics of the country, and he understood that.
Ira: Oh, I think that’s a great question. And I think to some extent, probably the answer is both. I have said and I believe that McConnell is an exceptionally sk**led political strategist and tactician and very patient. He waited actually 22 years in the Senate before he became a Republican leader, and then another eight before he became majority leader. So he’s very able politically and very focused. And he certainly deserves grudging admiration for surfing the madness of the Republican Party, right? If we look at the House Republicans, one leader after another has found himself thrown on the side of the road along the way.
We remember Paul Ryan or John Boehner or Tom DeLay, one after another. McConnell has surfed the madness and stayed in control. So he is very sk**lful, but to some extent, he has understood the times, and to another extent, he has made, in my view, some serious mistakes, particularly with respect to Trump, but he has stayed focused on the things that mattered to him, namely and most specifically, the court.
Jeff: What has been the single greatest sk**l that he has brought to the job?
Ira: I think the greatest sk**l he has brought to the job is a single-minded focus on his priorities, and that specifically involves moving the federal courts, and most particularly the Supreme Court, in an extreme right-wing direction. And the other sk**l that he brings to the job if I can name two, he is a master of keeping the support of his caucus. And look, you could bring him down with five or six people, but he has kept the Republican caucus because they respect his ability and appreciate that he has made them, in the past, the majority, and they understand that he has no fear at handling the donor base and exploiting the donor base and rewarding the donor base.
Jeff: How did the courts become a priority for him?
Ira: Well, he would say that he has a long interest in the court. In fact, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the dying years of the Ford administration. And he shared an office interestingly with a young right-wing lawyer named Antonin Scalia. So he would say he has a long interest in the court. And I think that there’s some t***h in that, but he also grasped two things. One, that the court, the Supreme Court, meant a great deal to a part of the Republican coalition and a part of the Republican coalition that was skeptical of Donald Trump, namely the Christian right. So that’s part number one. And number two though, he had said e******ns come, e******ns go, majorities shift. If you want to have a lasting impact on the country, courts are where you do it.
Jeff: Certainly one of the other sk**ls, and I don’t know if we consider this a sk**l, that he brings to it is a sense of utter shamelessness. Talk about that.
Ira: Well, I think that [laughs], I absolutely believe that. I do think he is shameless. He is shameless in his willingness to shred the customs and norms of the Senate in a way that goes far beyond policy differences; just unprecedented breaks with customs and norms. The most famous of which, of course, was his decision not to take up a nomination by President Obama to fill the Scalia vacancy, but that’s only one of any number of breaks with the norms and customs of the Senate. But the shamelessness goes a little beyond that because he will routinely celebrate his victories whenever he has them and then mischaracterize and rewrite the history as well.
So in other words, it’s not just that he stacked the Supreme Court, it’s that the Supreme Court wars started with the Democrats – he has to do that. And so he’s pretty shameless. And I would say since you’ve invited me, news on that word, I think we have seen in the Senate Republicans a combination of the shamelessness of Mitch McConnell and by and large Lindsey Graham in recent years, coupled with the shamefulness of a lot of other senators who knew better and abandoned America, particularly in the crisis year of 2020.
Jeff: Go back a little further, talk a little bit about his comments after Obama’s e******n where he said categorically, “My goal is to make him a one-term president.” Talk about where that came from.
Ira: Well, I think that comment is noted a lot of times, and he would say that’s, “Of course, I’m a Republican. I wanted Obama to be a one-term president.” I have always focused more on what he did in the weeks that Obama became president, at a time when our country could have slipped into a second Great Depression. If we recall 2008-2009, the financial crisis of September and October of 2008, had morphed and extended from Wall Street to Main Street. So all of a sudden, we lost 750,000 jobs in one month, [and] we were in a very serious economic position. And yet McConnell decided even before Obama took the oath of office, that he was going to oppose Obama’s economic stimulus.
When only an economic stimulus could have prevented a very serious recession and even a depression. And yet, he opposed it. And the reason he opposed it is because he didn’t really care about what was happening to people around the country, including in Kentucky. What he cared about was a Democratic president was coming into office with high approval ratings, and that couldn’t be allowed. So I regarded that as not just shameless, but unpatriotic. I can’t envision another Senate leader behaving that way.
Jeff: And yes, he got other senators to go along with him in that action.
Ira: Ah, that’s a beautiful point. And that’s why I regard some of them as shameless and most of them are shameful. Why would they have all gone along with that? Well, he’s successful in holding his caucus together. And if three people – as I recall it was Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe (then in the Senate from Maine, also), and Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania. If those three people hadn’t v**ed with the Democrats, we might still be in the Great Recession.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the damage that he’s done, in your view, to the Senate as an institution.
Ira: I think it’s done enormous damage to the Senate as an institution. And the way I would describe it is that there are factors in our politics that made it harder to make the Senate work for a long time. And by that, I mean, genuine differences between the parties and the parties further apart than they were before. No more moderate to liberal Republicans from the Northeast of the Midwest, no more conservative Democrats in the South. So the parties were realigning, right, along regional lines, along racial lines, along ideological lines. So it’s going to be more difficult to make the Senate work. But that’s what senators are supposed to be able to try to overcome.
And that’s particularly the responsibility of Senate leaders to try to bring people together and bridge differences. And McConnell, after the first two years as leader, I think, you can’t draw too many conclusions from, but starting in the third year, when Obama becomes president, McConnell abandons the role of a Senate Leader and becomes an opposition leader and just a sheer partisan in a way that I don’t believe any of the modern Senate leaders have done. So I think that was a key change. So it’s two parts, right? There are some genuine factors that make the country more divided. And then there are political bad actors, starting, in my view, with the two largest of them, Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, who make the situation worse.
Jeff: Certainly one of the things about McConnell is that while he has had his causes, and of course, the court is one and being an opposition leader defeating whether it was the Affordable Care Act or whether it was the bailout in 2008-2009, that McConnell is ideologically free except for his own agenda.
Ira: Well, yes. He would say that he has a right-of-center view and he opposes left-of-center views. He used to like to say, “America isn’t France, we’re a right-of-center country.” By that when he says “America isn’t France,” he means he’s against health care for people; basically, he doesn’t believe in that kind of thing. So he has a right-of-center view. But I think over time, as the Republican Party has become increasingly radicalized, he has moved and normalized that radicalization. Now, he would say, if I was in dialogue, he would say, “Well, actually, you know I’ve tried to defeat some of the people who were looking for Republican nominations to the Senate.”
And he has at some point tried to do that, the extreme ones, but he didn’t do it for ideological reasons. He did it because he didn’t think they’d win the e******n. So he’s been very focused on gaining the majority and trying to hold the majority.
Jeff: The other problem with some of those crazies, it’s not only that he didn’t think they would win the e******n, I think his greater fear is if they won the e******n, he couldn’t control them.
Ira: I think that’s true, Jeff, but I think that was his second fear – he would worry about that after they won the e******n. He just didn’t think they’d win the e******n. And remember – I shouldn’t say remember, I’m the only one that fixates on this sort of thing – in 2012, when Obama was trying to be reelected and he was in a tight race with Romney, McConnell was virtually measuring the drapes in the Majority Leader’s office. He thought this was his time, he made it quite clear he thought he was going to become majority leader.
Jun 16, 2022 22:05:44 #
Strycker
Loc: The middle of somewhere else.
As long as the people are split in their opinions then the Senate should accomplish very little to nothing. They represent all the people and they have no mandate to do otherwise.
Jun 16, 2022 22:07:04 #
Jun 16, 2022 23:00:51 #
Smedley_buzk**l wrote:
You actually believe this drivel. God in Heaven.
I did not even bother to read it.
Jun 16, 2022 23:16:52 #
Strycker wrote:
The Senate was destroyed when the 17th Amendment was ratified back in 1913.As long as the people are split in their opinions then the Senate should accomplish very little to nothing. They represent all the people and they have no mandate to do otherwise.
Jun 16, 2022 23:29:25 #
"Shapiro details McConnell’s shamelessness, and shows his repeated actions that put partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country."
I do think that Mitch McConnell is too shameless and that he puts partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country.
I do think that Mitch McConnell is too shameless and that he puts partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country.
Jun 17, 2022 00:18:29 #
LogicallyRight
Loc: Chicago
***The Decline and Fall of the US Senate
>>>Do you know how stupid that sounds. Especially with the article you post withit
Example. first line***Almost all of the policy crises we face today — a******n, guns, c*****e c****e, the integrity of our e******ns — have been blocked from consideration by the US Senate.
>>>Thank God for the filibuster and the republicans who are continually doing wh**ever they can to block the outrageous l*****t bull s**t put out by the democrat c*******t party. They are saving America with every bill they stop.
>>>Do you know how stupid that sounds. Especially with the article you post withit
Example. first line***Almost all of the policy crises we face today — a******n, guns, c*****e c****e, the integrity of our e******ns — have been blocked from consideration by the US Senate.
>>>Thank God for the filibuster and the republicans who are continually doing wh**ever they can to block the outrageous l*****t bull s**t put out by the democrat c*******t party. They are saving America with every bill they stop.
Jun 17, 2022 00:25:49 #
Strycker
Loc: The middle of somewhere else.
Blade_Runner wrote:
The Senate was destroyed when the 17th Amendment was ratified back in 1913.
I am not sure the Senate was destroyed, but, certainly States having representation and states rights were. That and the federal income tax did a lot of damage to the intended structure of our country.
Jun 17, 2022 00:40:25 #
Strycker wrote:
I'll be specific, the 17th amendment lowered the Senate's responsibilities as the "Higher House" to the same level as the HOR.I am not sure the Senate was destroyed, but, certainly States having representation and states rights were. That and the federal income tax did a lot of damage to the intended structure of our country.
Yes, states lost their representation and many states rights and now we have Mob Rule, as in the system of democracy our Founders summarily rejected and condemned.
Jun 17, 2022 07:34:33 #
Smedley_buzk**l wrote:
You actually believe this drivel. God in Heaven.
How can you not believe McConnell has
Become the opposition leader.
Nein ! Nein ! Nein !
Jun 17, 2022 07:35:34 #
Blade_Runner wrote:
I'll be specific, the 17th amendment lowered the Senate's responsibilities as the "Higher House" to the same level as the HOR.
Yes, states lost their representation and many states rights and now we have Mob Rule, as in the system of democracy our Founders summarily rejected and condemned.
Yes, states lost their representation and many states rights and now we have Mob Rule, as in the system of democracy our Founders summarily rejected and condemned.
Jefferson was a Democratic Republican .
As was his first party.
Jun 17, 2022 07:39:38 #
LogicallyRight wrote:
***The Decline and Fall of the US Senate br >&g... (show quote)
The Filibuster is the exact reason nothing gets done. Uf you want to talk about what is not in the Constitution, the Filibuster is not not in the Constitution. It was enacted to discourage updating S***ery Laws.
When power is given to one individual to hit the stop button against an overwhelming Majority you slide over into Dutch 2% Rule.
Whereby the Minority becomes the ruling power.
When was the last time a unanimous decision passed any bills ???
How can there be nothing whatsoever to agree on .
They couldn’t even agree on Baby Formula.
Or Randy Paul v****g No on aid to Ukraine.
A putin sympathizer.
The senate has become the whiney little b***h of politics.
Jun 17, 2022 07:45:03 #
robertv3 wrote:
….I do think that Mitch McConnell is too shameless and that he puts partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country.
….I do think that Mitch McConnell is too shameless and that he puts partisan consideration well ahead of what is good for the country.
That descibes our politicians not just McConnell
Jun 17, 2022 07:51:12 #
Rose42 wrote:
That descibes our politicians not just McConnell
McConnell has become the Spirithead for His Murcans.
Not the ordinary Americans.
The Rich and Ultimately Rich along with his dealings with Russian Oligarchs.
Fattening his own wallet at the expense of the Masses.
His wife is Also a shameful individual.
Jun 17, 2022 08:12:21 #
Milosia2 wrote:
McConnell has become the Spirithead for His Murcans.
Not the ordinary Americans.
The Rich and Ultimately Rich along with his dealings with Russian Oligarchs.
Fattening his own wallet at the expense of the Masses.
His wife is Also a shameful individual.
Not the ordinary Americans.
The Rich and Ultimately Rich along with his dealings with Russian Oligarchs.
Fattening his own wallet at the expense of the Masses.
His wife is Also a shameful individual.
Yawn. You have no idea who the oligarchs are. Our politicians are controlled by the rich - democrats included. They don’t care about parties and keep people distracted and divided. As you can see they’re doing a good job of that.
If you want to reply, then register here. Registration is free and your account is created instantly, so you can post right away.