What Will The Liberals And Progressives Do About This?
NOT A DAMN THING
The Doctor of Common Sense
What Will The Liberals And Progressives Do About This?
NOT A DAMN THING
You must understand that corruption is in full display. Listen to todays broadcast:
Shows Link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/commonsensenation/insane-double-standards-of-democrats-and
3 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
Why the GOP Congress will be the most unproductive in 164 years
Just six months ago, it looked like the Republican Party was about to go on a legislative blitzkrieg, shredding law after law passed by the Obama administration. ObamaCare would be vaporized and replaced with a nickel rattling inside an empty Mountain Dew can. Dodd-Frank was sure to be tossed aside for a transparent giveaway to Wall Street. And Republicans would pass their regressive tax reform, their perplexing border-adjustment tax, and so much more. The GOP hadn’t held total power in American politics since 2006, and the party had become much more conservative in the interim. And instead of George W. Bush, a man who recognized at least some theoretical limits on free market fundamentalism, the new Congress would work with a sub-literate tabula rasa named Donald Trump, a man who could probably be persuaded to inject himself with experimental medication if an important-seeming person whispered “do it” in his ear.
But a funny thing happened on the way to libertarian utopia. Indeed, it turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can’t seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War.
Now, okay, technically the Ryan-McConnell 115th Congress is so far actually a bit more active than recent Congresses, if you measure by the 43 laws that President Trump has adorned with his garish signature. Obama was at 40 at this point in 2009. George W. Bush had signed even fewer midway through 2001. But sheer number is not the best way to think about how much is being achieved. As The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump pointed out, a majority of the bills signed by Trump thus far have been one page long, meaning many are just symbolic or ceremonial.
Just six months ago, it looked like the Republican Party was about to go on a legislative blitzkrieg, shredding law after law passed by the Obama administration. ObamaCare would be vaporized and replaced with a nickel rattling inside an empty Mountain Dew can. Dodd-Frank was sure to be tossed aside for a transparent giveaway to Wall Street. And Republicans would pass their regressive tax reform, their perplexing border-adjustment tax, and so much more. The GOP hadn’t held total power in American politics since 2006, and the party had become much more conservative in the interim. And instead of George W. Bush, a man who recognized at least some theoretical limits on free market fundamentalism, the new Congress would work with a sub-literate tabula rasa named Donald Trump, a man who could probably be persuaded to inject himself with experimental medication if an important-seeming person whispered “do it” in his ear.
But a funny thing happened on the way to libertarian utopia. Indeed, it turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can’t seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War.
Now, okay, technically the Ryan-McConnell 115th Congress is so far actually a bit more active than recent Congresses, if you measure by the 43 laws that President Trump has adorned with his garish signature. Obama was at 40 at this point in 2009. George W. Bush had signed even fewer midway through 2001. But sheer number is not the best way to think about how much is being achieved. As The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump pointed out, a majority of the bills signed by Trump thus far have been one page long, meaning many are just symbolic or ceremonial.
But you would think that this sorting would make for more coherent ideological blocs more capable of making policy when one party controls Congress and the presidency, as Republicans do now. That was surely what Republican voters expected when they woke up triumphant on Nov. 9 last year. But the divide within the Republican Party is proving to be as problematic as polarization between the parties. The ideological distance between the Senate’s most liberal member (Maine’s Susan Collins) and the most hard-right senator (Utah’s Mike Lee) is the same as the chasm between a middle-of-the-pack Democrat like Maryland’s Ben Cardin and a conservative like Iowa’s Joni Ernst.
If you want to understand how much harder it is going to be for Republicans to get anything done than it was for the Democrats in 2009-2011, your best bet is to look at this intra-Republican distance. When Democrats were toiling away on what was to become the Affordable Care Act, the total distance between the most left-wing elected Democratic senator (Bernie Sanders) and the most right-wing (Nebraska’s Ben Nelson) was barely half the size of the canyon between Susan Collins and Mike Lee. Think about that for a second.
And it’s not like Collins is alone. She’s part of a cluster of three GOP senators, along with Lisa Murkowski and Shelly Moore Capito, who are much more liberal than the rest of the caucus. (By the way, it is not a coincidence that the GOP’s three most reasonable senators are women). Moreover, Mike Lee is part of a bloc of five far-right radicals — along with Jeff Flake, Rand Paul, Ben Sasse, and Ted Cruz — who are all substantially more conservative than anyone in the Senate during Barack Obama’s first two years in office. In a sane political system, there is a zero percent chance that Mike Lee and Susan Collins would be members of the same political party.
To make matters worse, Republicans control only 52 seats in the Senate and as of yet seem unwilling to nuke the legislative filibuster (something they could do at any time by changing the rules of the Senate). Republicans no longer have conservative Democrats to lean on to get to 60 votes when their own most liberal members are beyond reach, because GOP behavior during the Obama years taught Democrats the electoral value of party unity. That means that even some very conservative pieces of legislation that have already passed the House, including the Financial CHOICE Act (H.R. 10), which guts Dodd-Frank, stand very little chance of becoming law. House leaders, including Speaker Ryan, either aren’t particularly interested in crafting bills that could actually get through the Senate or they have given up trying to forge the necessary compromises.
Or they are delusional.
The result, regardless, is that this Congress is going to be historically unproductive. How can I be so sure of this? One measure of what Congress is likely to do the rest of the year is to look at bills that have already passed the House but are awaiting action in the Senate. There are 238 of them. Amazingly, GovTrack gives only 13 a better than 50 percent chance of actually arriving on President Trump’s desk in their current form. If that holds up, Trump will have signed just 56 laws by the beginning of the 2018 congressional session. If this tortoise-like pace continues, he will preside over the least productive Congress since Millard Fillmore signed just 74 bills sent to him by the brink-of-war 32nd Congress between 1851 and 1853.
Maybe that will change. But if it doesn’t, the Republican Party’s problems are far bigger than Trump — and will probably get worse before they get better.
http://theweek.com/articles/711503/why-gop-congress-most-unproductive-164-years
Republicans resorted to the party-line 52-48 vote after weeks of wrangling over Gorsuch’s nomination in which Senate Democrats threatened the first partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee in American history. After the Democrats assembled the forty-one votes needed to prevent the end of debate under current rules, the constitutional option allowing cloture on a simple majority became the only remaining path to placing Gorsuch on the Court.
Vice-President Mike Pence, who would have been needed to break a tie should any two Republicans have voted to maintain the 60-vote cloture rule, was not present for the vote, indicating Republican confidence their entire caucus would agree to the change.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) moved for a point of order after his first attempt to invoke cloture failed with only 55 votes. From the podium, he cited the need to “restore Senate norms” in light of the Democrats’ “unprecedented partisan filibuster” of a Supreme Court nominee.
McConnell invoked the precedent of Senate Democrats’ own change to same simple majority cloture rule for all presidential nominees but those to the Supreme Court in 2013 in calling for an override of the Senate chair’s determination sixty votes were needed for cloture. That appeal passed on a party-line 52-48 vote.
Thursday’s historic move harmonized Senate rules, removing the possibility of minority filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. Given the reluctance, in the past, for either party to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee with majority support, the constitutional option restored, as a practical matter, traditional Senate custom in this area.
A successful cloture vote quickly followed the rule change. The 55-45 vote began a thirty hour countdown to a vote of the full Senate. Judge Gorsuch is, therefore, slated for the final vote on his confirmation no later than seven o’clock Friday evening. All 52 Republicans and three Democrats are expected to vote for his confirmation, allowing him to replace Antonin Scalia as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/06/critical-mass-gorsuch-nom-forces-historic-change-to-senate-rules/
What is the most popular thing Donald Trump has done as president? It actually came before entering the White House when, last December, President-elect Trump announced he had persuaded the Carrier Corporation to keep in Indiana hundreds of jobs that had been slated to move to Mexico. A short time later, Politico ran a story headlined, “Trump’s Carrier deal is wildly popular.” Imagine a headline like that about anything else the president has done.
Compared to the big economic picture, the Carrier matter involved a tiny number of jobs. And there was quibbling about Carrier’s intent. But Trump’s involvement sent a clear message: I was elected to fix the economy, to bring more and better jobs to Americans, and that is going to be my first priority as president.
Now, however, in the middle of his first 100 days in office, Trump has gotten bogged down in a complex, time-consuming, and unpopular fight over another issue — repealing and replacing Obamacare — that, while a key Republican priority and a Trump campaign promise, is not at the very top of the public’s concerns.
All across the capital, politicos are arguing about what House Republicans should do next in the Obamacare fight. Can they prevail in the Budget Committee? How much damage has the CBO report done? Can the Freedom Caucus be brought aboard? What about the moderates? And reconciliation? The three-step process?
Speaker Paul Ryan has made clear that Obamacare had to come first on the legislative calendar because of the requirements of reconciliation in the Senate, and because the Obamacare replacement’s changes to the tax code have to be taken up before the larger budget and tax reform. And, of course, Hill Republicans have promised to repeal and replace Obamacare for years. So the House has dived in.
“They found themselves stuck in this legislative quagmire in terms of the sequence of what has to happen,” notes a well-connected GOP strategist. “Since they have to do this through reconciliation, they have to do it before the budget, and have to do it before tax reform.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s jobs agenda will have to wait. Can anyone imagine candidate Donald Trump roaring to a raucous campaign rally that, ‘We’re going to bring your jobs back — big beautiful jobs” but then going on to explain, “Of course, we’ll have to accommodate the House schedule…”
Trump will sell tax reform as a jobs-creating measure. He will do the same for trade, and for an infrastructure measure, if one ever comes. But even though Republicans have long described Obamacare as a “job-killing” law, the fact is that voters do not see fixing the Democrats’ troubled health care scheme as a first-tier job creator.
“[Fixing Obamacare] can have a positive impact on cost of living for people, but it is still not jobs and the economy,” says the GOP politico. “People want it addressed, but the number-one thing is still the number-one thing.”
Every poll during the campaign, and then the election day exit polls, showed jobs and the economy to be the voters’ chief concern. Polls today say the same thing. And to the degree that voters place hope in Trump’s presidency, it is because they believe he can make the economy better.
The most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, like others, found that Trump’s job approval rating is historically low for a new president. But the pollsters also found that many Americans are optimistic about the years ahead. Fully 60 percent said they are hopeful and optimistic about the future, versus 40 percent who said they are fearful and pessimistic.
Forty-one percent of those surveyed told the Journal-NBC pollsters they believe the economy will improve in the coming year. That might not seem like a huge number, but — along with the 42 percent who said the same thing last month — it’s the highest in four years.
Among those who see the economy improving, a large majority believe it will be as a result of Trump’s economic policies.
Yes, Trump pledged to repeal Obamacare, although he went long stretches in the campaign without paying much attention to it. (Last August, after watching a week of Trump speeches in which he barely mentioned Obamacare, I wrote a story headlined, “Obamacare is failing. Why isn’t Donald Trump talking about it?”) But there is no doubt that during the campaign Trump’s first priority, and his most popular priority, was jobs and the economy.
There’s no doubt Trump has taken some important jobs-related actions. He got rid of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, approved pipeline projects, and has signed into law multiple bills that Hill Republicans have passed cutting Obama-era regulations.
But now, the CEO who promised to bring better jobs and higher wages is trying to tiptoe his way through House rules that most people outside the beltway — and many inside, too — don’t even understand.
Meanwhile, Washington is rife with intrigue over the Obamacare fight. It has brought back talk of the old tensions between Trump and the GOP establishment, especially Speaker Ryan. Every player in Republican politics or conservative media has some advice for the leadership. Trump loyalists worry that it is harming his brand. And House Republicans push ahead. “Failure is not an option,” GOP whip Rep. Steve Scalise told Sean Hannity Tuesday.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-congress-leads-trump-down-wrong-path/article/2617398
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51
Have you considered what the “Rule of Law” is? Do you know how important it is for America?
Basically it means that no one is above the law, that the same law governs all citizens, that no one in the government has so much power that he can act above the law. The World Justice Project’s definition of the Rule of Law is a system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:
1 The government and its officials and agents as well as individuals and private entities are accountable under the law.
2 The laws are clear, publicized, stable, and just; are applied evenly; and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property and certain core human rights.
3 The process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient.
4 Justice is delivered timely by competent, ethical, and independent representatives and neutrals who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.
Let’s take these one at a time.
1. Hillary Clinton is a racketeer with an extensive resume that documents one scandal after another, one crime after another, and yet our government has never held her accountable because they are bribed and intimidated by the Clinton machine. We have overwhelming evidence of her crimes – that anyone else has and would be imprisoned for – but she is running for the highest office in America.
2. Our laws are not clear and publicized (we have to pass the law to know what’s in the law); they are not stable and just (our federal courts can change and interpret anything to suit their activist agendas/ gays and muslims get special protections); and, they do not protect fundamental rights (our First Amendment rights as Christians are chiseled away every day, free speech is an illusion, the Second Amendment is under attack and the lost goes on). Hillary Clinton will destroy whatever remains of our liberties.
3. Laws are no longer enacted, administered and enforced fairly. Obama has used his pen for executive orders and has violated the constitution. Some people are in prison and their lives destroyed for less than what Clinton has done so we all know that enforcement depends entirely on what kind of DC political clout you have. One set of laws for politicians and another for us (just like they seem to live under a different economy).
4. Justice by ethical and independent representatives? Are you freaking kidding me? Comey, Lynch, Lerner and so on and so on… they are all in bed with the Clintons. Every damned one of them. Secret meetings on airplanes, bribes, quid quo pro deals, endless promises if they turn a blind eye. The monkeys are in charge of the zoo.
Justice Frankfurter wrote, “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.”
There is no Rule of Law in America and hasn’t been for a long time, even though it was written into the fabric of our country- more than islam ever was. If hairy-toed Hildabeast gets in office it will only get worse. First chaos and then tyranny.
Your Doctor of Common Sense,
ET Williams