Short answer. All the people who say these things to me in the media are the ones that called Bush literally Hitler. McCain literally Hitler. And Romney not quite Hitler. And their parents said Reagan and Bush would get us all killed.
Long rambling version, and then I think I am done with this topic for a while.
For instance the Ukraine scandal is a good one to look at.
Years ago Biden is bragging about holding back a billion in aid to a country. Holding it back to stop an investigation into a company that his son worked for in a golden job. An investigation that the new regime appeared prepared to open up again. Iām not surprised Trump asked about it.
Then somehow asking for an investigation into corruption gets turned into corruption.
Most of the issues start with the assumption of guilt and the āI know what he is really doingā evidence.
As for NATO, we are carrying the lionās weight there. All of Europe has leaned on the US for defense and enjoyed the peace dividends. Itās about time they started paying up.
I stopped thinking there was a difference between the Democrat party and the press about 20 years ago. Its too easy to see the bias simply in the words used to describe simple actions. The same people that tell me Trump is such a shitbag told me the Obama era was scandal free.
And no, I donāt take any of this personally. Trump is not my personal messiah or anything. Iām not so invested in him that I donāt see your point of view, I just donāt take the word of people that started talking impeachment the day after the election.
I wish I could say that maybe Congress will tale some of its power back from the Executive branch because right now the scales are tipped, but its easier to get reelected if you donāt make waves.
I had hope when Obama was elected that things would be different and it was SSDD. I think itās the same thing with Biden and Iām not even starting off with hope. Biden and his actual officially accepted history display the morals of a cat in heat.
You and I may not see eye to eye on politics like, ever. But this is one thing I agree on. Congress is supposed to act as a check on the Presidentās power, not an enabler.
Its the department if this and that that they gave up the power to. .
For example the ACA defers to the secretary of HHS something lile 300 times. Congress didnāt write a law so much as give the power to someone else to write jt while they just worked on the punishment and funding.
That phrase and concept does not actually appear in our constitution. The legislative was always expected to be the dominant branch. Perhaps unrealistically in retrospect.
Even if they were in theory equal. The Legislative Branch is the one thatās supposed to do new things while the Judicial pumps the brakes on stuff thatās questionable and the Executive enacts them.
Each has other duties as well, but Congress has handed their main job to the other two branches.
Your representative should be an important choice and because of how the parties run funding all that really matters is the letter by their name.
Because we need to repeal the 17th and remove the cap on the house.
2,000 seems like a good number of reps. Wonāt have people dumping tens of millions into an election then. Maybe even 3,500.
We had a fairly conservative woman run for the House here. There was no way O could vote for her since as a freshman member she would vote with her party on everything her vote mattered on. But if our districts were smaller we could hold her feet to the fire. And since the group would be so big they wouldnāt meet and the rep could stay with their constituents all year round.
Remote voting and parliamentary procedures would need to be worked out. But better representation for the people. At first this sounds like Iām in favor of giving large states more powerā¦ But this would also mean red areas in blue states and blue areas in red states could be represented at the federal level.
Iām having trouble thinking of any situation that could be remedied by an increase of politicians. And if youāre unhappy with the taxes youāre paying now, wait until you have to support two or three times the representatives you currently have.
Yeah, but at least the F-35 will do what it was built to do. I just donāt see paying extra to have more representatives just so I have someone more localized to yell at as a solution.
Adding more cats wonāt make them any easier to herd.
I get this perspective, butā¦ Our system demonstrably has not scaled well. As a structural change, increasing the number of representatives would have several effects, perhaps the biggest being to make the individual members much less important. So many things end up coming down to personal quirks and weirdness and parties end up supporting people they really would rather not simply because they need every single voteāor at least to deny it to their opponents.
They arenāt supposed to be herded. Thatās the issue now is that the party whips control so much funding for reelection that they can tell someone to toe the line or not get reelected. Progressive causes donāt own democrats, Nancy Pelosi does through her fundraising ability. Republicans do this to but I canāt remember who the fundraising person is.
And apparently the F-35 fights against the average jet out there like itās from an alien invader. Last year they did dog fights and the F-35s were wiping last generations top fighters off the board before they were even in range. Turns out one F-35 will do the same for older fighters its squaded with.
The rest of the world has fighters that can compete om paper but not enough of them. Hell, most of europe canāt get their planes in the air.
Maybe. Iād still like them to actually accomplish some stuff with what they have before throwing a bunch more people into a system that is evidently calcified to the point of immobility. I would expect it to just become confusing as well as stuck.
We make elections publicly funded. Each candidate for a particular office gets the same finite amount of money. If they drop out of the race and thereās money left, it goes back to the government. We shorten the election cycle so that people arenāt campaigning for a year or two (the latter mostly in the case of POTUS), thus removing the need to spend billions. Also we ban lobbying and quit letting corporations and super PACs essentially write legislation for the per Congresspeople to rubber stamp. Iām not a lawyer so I donāt know exactly how weād do that but Iām sure thereās a way. Also term limits for the legislative and judicial branches. You get six terms in the House or two in the Senate. And thatās total. You canāt run for the other one once youāre termed out of the first. That way people donāt spend 30-40 years getting entrenched in Congress and having outsized power and influence like Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi. SCOTUS appointments last 15 years or so and are staggered so there will be one appointment per presidential term unless someone dies or retires. Not sure why such an important job is a lifetime appointment. Get the money out of politics and remove being a legislator as being a potential lifetime job and that would go a long way toward fixing things IMO.
This one I do understand, the original intention was to help ensure that the judges wouldnāt be beholden to partisan politics in order to land their ānext jobā and could be objective.
That might have worked when people were appointed to the court at 50 and died at 60. Amy Comey Barret is 48 and we live a lot longer now. Sheāll be there for 30-40 years easily.
