5 ms·
"People that disagree with my beliefs must be doing it out of bad faith", an argument that never dies.
by prottog 3y ago
"People that disagree with my beliefs must be doing it out of bad faith", an argument that never dies.
- ethanbond 3y ago[flagged]
- prottog 3y agoI was referring to GP's claim that they "hate government". Believing that the federal government has evolved beyond what the Constitution legally permits and working to make it smaller isn't the same thing as hatefully burning it all down, which was the implication I took out of their comment.
- Arainach 3y agoConveniently, Republicans aren't "working to make it smaller" and are "hatefully burning it all down" as seen in their constant debt limit antics, their lack of any cohesive platform, Grover Norquist's comments about drowning the government in a bathtub, their abuse of the filibuster to block anything at all from passing rather than working on compromise, and many more examples.
- ethanbond 3y agoHate is maybe too emotional a word but your entire comment is just another way of saying “they don’t like and wish to dismantle some parts of government,” which is not substantially different in practice. The thrust of GP’s claim is: you elect people who wish to dismantle government and you get a dysfunctional government.
- rayiner 3y agoWhen did republicans succeed in doing any of those things? The filibuster prevents any of these things from being more than rhetoric.
- roflyear 3y agoThey succeeded in preventing judges from being appointed. Trump weakened regulatory authorities more than any other president.
- rayiner 3y agoObama appointed more federal judges than Bush: https://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/barack-obama-george-w-bush-judge-confirmations-105388 https://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/barack-obama-george-w... (As of April 2014: “Over the course of his presidency so far, Obama has nominated 301 judges and gotten 237 confirmed. By this point in his presidency, Bush had nominated 267 judges and had 234 of them confirmed.”). Remember that Democrats controlled the Senate for all but the last two years of the Obama presidency. Republicans weren’t in much of a position to block his judicial appointments. There is of course Garland, a rare show of GOP competence. But even for the Supreme Court judicial appointments are contentious. Kennedy was Reagan’s third pick for that seat. He went on to be a liberal squish that voted to uphold Roe, etc.
- ethanbond 3y agoI would bet that if the filibuster could be depended on to prevent movement on these issues, you wouldn’t see close to $15 billion going into federal election campaigns. Anyway, McConnell successfully blocked pretty much all Obama lower court judge appointments, causing huge huge backlogs in the justice system nationwide and allowing GOP to later install people who are e.g. trying to make the abortion pill illegal. Our government HAS been changing pretty radically deep down in the bureaucracy. The justice system and election boards are extremely ripe for non-filibuster-able overhaul.
- rayiner 3y agoYou don’t have to make things up. You can just look at agency budgets to see if any GOP president was able to make meaningful cuts in the federal bureaucracy. Remember that democrats controlled the House through Reagan’s entire presidency. The GOP did succeed in overturning Roe. Overturning a precedent that was baseless to begin with and which by the end Democrats wouldn’t even defend on the merits isn’t exactly what I’d call a major victory.