Saw this on Twitter. I'd say it illustrates the current mindset of the GQP:
Saw this on Twitter. I'd say it illustrates the current mindset of the GQP:
Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!
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Fair question. One thing would be to look at major party line votes.
Collins voted against ACB.
Murkowski voted against Kavanaugh.
One illustrative vote was about judicial filibusters.
In 2013, most Democrats voted for the filibusters to not apply for judicial nominees (with the exception of the Supreme Court.) The nays were Carl Levin of Michigan (since retired), Mark Pryor of Arkansas (lost reelection to Tom Cotton) and Joe Manchin of Virginia (who remains one of the five most valuable Democrats in Congress for the party.)
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/...-option-100199
In 2017, when Democrats filibustered Gorsuch, all of the Republicans voted for a filibuster exception for Supreme Court nominees. Although Manchin joined the Democrats on that one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...orsuch/522156/
I also looked at a tally of how Republicans voted on senate-confirmed positions in the Trump administration.
https://ballotpedia.org/How_senators...nominees,_2017
Murkowski voted against 3. McCain, Collins and Rand Paul voted against 2.
I'm still not clear what this looks like. Are you saying that the consequence Biden should try against Manchin is a talking to?
Last edited by Mister Mets; 06-28-2022 at 04:40 AM.
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
Original join date: 11/23/2004
Eclectic Connoisseur of all things written, drawn, or imaginatively created.
It's bizarre to me that people think the Dems could 'punish' Manchin into doing what they want.
Especially when the ultimate response could be change party affiliation and caucus with the Republicans. And with it goes any appointment Biden tries to make, and even with budget reconciliation McConnell would then be deciding the agenda. Biden would only get to decide whether or not to veto it.
Dark does not mean deep.
An interesting point about how philanthropy can lead to polarization when you have advocacy without representation.
I want to come back in a moment to your suggestions for how philanthropy can help build cross-ideological coalitions. But let me just push a bit on the question of philanthropy’s role in fostering polarization. I agree that there are other, more important drivers here. But it’s also true that since the 1960s, philanthropy has underwritten a vast complex of ideologically driven nonprofits that have played a significant role in shaping public debates. So while 60 or 70 years ago, leading civil society organizations were largely membership-based groups, today, civil society is much more dominated by professional nonprofit leaders bankrolled by foundations and major donors. So my question is this: When we talk about how philanthropy can reduce polarization, don’t we also need to talk about ways it might change to stop driving this trend in the first place?
There’s no question that the growth of what Theda Skocpol has called “associations without members'' has grown in the last half-century, and mass membership organizations have shrunk. Before the 1960s, if you were an idealistic person who wanted to drive social change in some way, you really didn’t have much choice to either build a mass membership organization or work within one. But things really did change in the 1960s. Foundations like Ford and Rockefeller began to fund a huge network of organizations in law, civil rights, feminism, consumerism and the environment, a process I examined as the backdrop to my book “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.” Suddenly, if you were that idealistic person, you could skip over the step of building a mass movement and put out your shingle and start suing, lobbying and publishing. That model — a professionally staffed organization based in D.C., no members, funded primarily by foundations — came to be the dominant one on the center-left.
That helped generate some of the characteristic features of contemporary elite polarization. You've got what I’ve called “advocacy” rather than representation, in which groups claim to speak for constituencies that they don’t actually have any organic structures of accountability to. I think that has had some important impacts on both the left and right. On the left, it has simultaneously encouraged an embrace of positions on social issues that are not widely supported by the actual people being advocated for, but also a kind of piecemeal, bite-sized economic policy that flows out of the fact that they are not trying to organize mass constituencies. On the right, I think it encouraged an economic policy that was at odds with the actual preferences of conservative voters (but aligned with conservative donors, whose preferences ran strongly libertarian on economics) on things like entitlements and trade. One way to think about the politics of the last few decades is that we’ve had an ideological conflict on both social and economic issues as a consequence of the incentives of the organizations competing for attention; that has left broad swathes of what the public actually cares about relatively unorganized. So in that sense, I think it probably does make sense to say that philanthropy has had an impact on polarization in shaping what we think it is we are supposed to be fighting about.
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
On this date in 2015, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profile of David Schultheis, a former Colorado State Senator who over the course of a decade, continuously proved himself to be an example of the GOP’s most cruel and heartless elected officials. In 2006, he responded to news of a fatal car accident that killed three Hispanic citizens by demanding that their citizenship should be checked (which, y’know, would have shown a lack of empathy even if they had survived). In 2009, during debate on a bill that would have provided HIV testing for all pregnant women, he cast the lone vote against it, arguing that “HIV stems from promiscuity” and he didn’t feel the legislature should “remove the negative consequences that take place from poor behavior and unacceptable behavior”. As if an issue position of hoping babies get AIDS to punish their mothers wasn’t revolting enough, later on in 2009 he compared President Obama’s economic policies to the terrorists who hijacked Flight 93 on 9/11, and declared “Let’s Roll” the last message of the people on board who stormed the cockpit rather than be aimed at another government building. Since leaving office in 2010, Schultheis remerged once in 2013 to say that the openly gay Speaker of the Colorado House adopting a child amounted to “deliberate child abuse”, so he’s a homophobic ***hole as well. Schultheis has been silent now going on six years consecutitvely, and it the time of this posting, is 76, so a political comeback seems unlikely.
In 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” presented profiles of the sitting U.S. House Representative from Texas’ 36th Congressional District, Brian Babin, a dentist by trade who made his first run for Congress two decades ago, failing to be elected in 1996, and making news for being caught in a campaign finance scandal, where he was found to have tried circumventing the rules for maximum donations from one donor by having intermediaries deliver the large sums in smaller pieces. He was caught, and fined $20,000 by the normally toothless FEC. Two years later, in 1998, that scandal may not have been what stood in the way of a Babin victory, as much as the story of his campaign manager simultaneously coming out of the closet, and resigning, saying that Babin had said numerous disparaging things about homosexuals in private meetings.
Babin denied this, but the tabloid-like nature of the story, combined with his earlier scandal was enough to sink his chances again.
Well, Texas' 36th District has never been shy about taking on controversial candidates, considering they elected Rep. Steve Stockman back in 2012, nearly two decades after he crazied his way out of office.
By 2014, Rep. Stockman had shown he hadn't changed much, so the district elected Babin, another embarrassing throwback to two decades earlier. During the 2014 election season, Brian Babin revealed a variety of mind-numbingly stupid ideas, like his belief that the Affordable Care Act would bankrupt America, his desire to do away with the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, and of course, his desire to build a border wall along the U.S./Mexico border (beating Donald Trump to the punch on this stupid, stupid idea).
Since hitting Washington, D.C. in his late sixties, he has followed up on his campaign platform, showing outrage whenever possible. Perhaps the best example is his response to the Supreme Court's King vs. Burwell ruling, where he introduced legislation that would force all nine of the Supreme Court Justices to enroll in healthcare through the Affordable Care Act (rather than the insurance plans they already have) to show them what they were relegating the American people to. Seriously, this was his patronizing quote:
A few months later, his xenophobia hit a fever pitch. While most Republicans freaked out about the Syrian refugee program AFTER the terror attacks in Paris by ISIS sympathizers from France and Belgium (i.e. not carried out by any Syrian refugees), On September 17th, 2015, Brian Babin went on Facebook to call for a complete suspension of the entire Refugee Resettlement Program, writing:
Two months later in November of 2015, Babin took to Breitbart Radio to be interviewed by Steve Bannon himself, and talk about legislation he filed to defund the Refugee resettlement program. While Babin acknowledged that Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus were refugee, this was different because, “Jesus and Mary didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them.”
Babin also has tried squaring his overall Islamophobic stance because he believes that "No-Go Zones" set up by Muslim communities are actually a thing happening in Michigan and Tennessee, and we should stop bringing in Muslims before more of them pop up. Hint for sane people: These “no-go zones” are not happening. All the way up into the last weeks of the Obama administration, Babin was fear-mongering about the refugee resettlement program, claiming it was a “Trojan Horse” to allow terrorists into the country.
Once Donald Trump took office and instituted his unconstitutional Muslim ban, it was Rep. Babin who sent out an e-mail to his constituents, with a survey asking if they supported the measure or not, and within it, claimed several Muslim countries as “terrorism hot spots” that have not produced a terrorist attacker in Europe or the United States within this century.
Now, as you might expect with his hate of Muslim refugees, and a desire to build a border wall, Brian Babin ended up firmly in the corner of Donald Trump in the fall of 2016. So much so, in fact, that he defended Trump for calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during one of the presidential debates as she handed Trump his ass. Babin’s logic? “I think sometimes a lady needs to be told when she's being nasty. I do.”
Brian Babin took the news of the GOP’s defeat in the 2018 elections about as well as most Republicans, which is not well. He’s still been hosted by the “alt right” (i.e. white nationalist) Breitbart News for interviews to claim that Democrats want “open borders” and otherwise fearmonger about immigrants in November of 2018, and only weeks into the new session of the House with Democrats in control, tried to block Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from leading a delegation to the West Bank, because of reasons that amount to trying to stir up Islamophobia. Even as recently as a few days ago, he was pandering to xenophobes by taking a visit down to the U.S/Mexico border in Arizona for photo-ops with border patrol agents, while claiming that the border wall was near completion and one of Trump’s “promises made, promises kept”. (Someone’s living in a fantasy world.)
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https://twitter.com/GreenPartyUS/sta...Ch7bWUq-MqAAAA
Green Party US tweets:
In 1974, then-Senator Joe Biden stated in regards to #RoeVsWade, "I don't like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far." He went on to say, "I don't think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body."
"In 1982, Senator Biden was 1 of only 2 Democratic lawmakers who supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass their own laws on abortion. 9 years later, Biden was largely to blame for the confirmation of anti-abortion Justice Clarence Thomas."
How the Democrats are culpable in the erosion of abortion rights
Biden deserves due criticism for a lot of things over his long career but the idea that he's 'to blame' for Clarence Thomas is typically stupid AF Green Party nonsense.
Texas’ 36th is one of the reddest of red districts in all the country, with a +26 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which helped Babin to coast to a third term in office with 74% of the vote. Back in Washington, Brian Babin’s stupidity continues:
- January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Babin voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
- January 27th, 2019: Brian Babin voted against HJR 30, which was meant to express disapproval of Donald Trump not acting against Russian Federation for attacking our democracy. You see, he’s fine with our nation being sublet to Vladimir Putin.
- June 4th, 2019: Babin votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.
- July 16th, 2019: Brian Babin votes against a resolution to condemn Donald Trump for his racist statements that four people of color in Congress should “go back where they came from”.
- October 17th, 2019: Rep. Babin is one of 60 Republicans who vote against HJ Res 77, which opposed Donald Trump’s disastrous decision to abandon Syrian Kurdish forces in Northeast Syria to the mercies of a Turkish invasion.
- October 23rd, 2019: Babin is one of 41 Republicans who, while staring down the possibility of Donald Trump being impeached, stage a ridiculous publicity stunt in response by crashing a classified impeachment inquiry hearing for a “protest”.
- December 3rd, 2019: Liz Cheney is one of 71 Republicans who votes against a resolution to disallow Russia from re-entering the G7 and makes it the G8 until it leaves Ukraine.
- December 18th, 2019: Rep. Babin ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
- May 15th, 2020: Babin votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
- October 2nd, 2020: Brian Babin votes against a resolution is presented in the House to condemn the Qanon conspiracy theory after its followers started to make death threats against Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski.
- December 10th, 2020: Babin signs his name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, begging them to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The same election that he won re-election in.
- January 6th, 2021: Brian Babin votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
- January 13th, 2021: Rep. Babin votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
- February 4th, 2021: Brian Babin votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted remarks and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
- February 25th, 2021: Babin votes against HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
- March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Babin votes against HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
- March 3rd, 2021: Brian Babin votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
- March 10th, 2021: Babin votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
- March 17th, 2021: Rep. Babin votes against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
- May 19th, 2021: Brian Babin votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.
- May 20th, 2021: Babin is one of 63 Republicans who vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act.
- November 5th, 2021: Brian Babin votes against HR 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
- March 31st, 2022: Babin votes against HR 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which would limit the cost that drug companies could list insulin at to $35 and make sure no diabetic was priced out of surviving their condition. Brian Babin would rather they be gouged by pharmaceutical giants and/or die.
- May 18th, 2022: Brian Babin is one of 192 Republicans who vote against HR 7790, to create supplemental funding for infant formula (while claiming to be pro- life).
- May 18th, 2022: Rep. Babin votes against HR 350, the Domestic Violence Prevention Act, because these days, a plank of the Republican Party is ostensibly domestic terror.
- May 19th, 2022: Babin votes against HR 7688, a bill which would help prevent gas companies from gouging customers on prices.
We will finish our update by reminding everyone of Brian Babin’s statement about the January 6th attack on the Capitol, where he lamented those who died, but defended his decision to not certify the election results, citing the non-existent “Election Fraud that undermines our freedoms”. Hey, he didn’t die, he has no regrets. Nor any desire to hold anyone accountable.
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