The Next President is...

[SurelySerious]

Just a final round-up to respond and then I'll let it rest from my end at least.
BLUF wall of text, feel free to keep on scrolling. 
Ending the Filibuster in the Senate
Ending the filibuster in the Senate is not a recently-held view of mine, and it's derived from the inability of the majority to govern, which to me is anti-democratic (small d democratic). Both parties (or any party or political group!), when being freely and fairly elected by a majority of voters, should have the ability to govern and deliver on the platforms they ran on.
As a basic principle, a majority of voters should translate to a majority of elected officials should translate to the power to govern; the U.S. has a variety of systems that thwart that basic premise and I think most of them should change.

• If I could wave a magic wand I would make the Senate proportionally representative like the House or dramatically reduce its power, I would uncap the size of the House of Representatives, do away with the electoral college, and end lifetime appointment to SCOTUS in favor of 18 year terms that rotate on a predictable and fixed timetable. I would also make voter registration automatic and generally implement measures that make it easier for eligible voters to exercise that right. I'd experiment with with multi-member districts, state-wide proportional representation rather than geographic districts, preference voting and/or ranked choice voting, etc. All the the end of making our political system more small-d democratic and responsive to the voters.
• Little of that is probably ever gonna happen, but that's where I stand - small d democratic reforms are both good and necessary.

Why Would Any Legislator Vote Against Their Party?
There absolutely is incentive for the majority party to get minority party members on board. This is observable in many other countries and in previous political eras here at home. Going with regular majority rule also allows more elected leaders to vote their conscious and the will of their constituents rather than getting shoehorned into always feeling pressured to support the national party and powerful leaders legislative leaders like the Speaker and Majority Leader.

• Few people want to be the deciding vote to kill something the majority of their party supports (a la McCain or Manchin), but if the dam has already broken and the bill is passing anyways, you paradoxically see less strident partisanship and more crossover voting. "Selling" your potential yes vote, even if the majority doesn't strictly need it, for specific policy concessions often works! Even large majorities want to be bigger and more robust and to look more bipartisan.
• You see this today mostly on federal judicial appointments precisely because the majority rules and the filibuster isn't in play - opposition members will vote to confirm even if they would not have picked that person because they are going to get confirmed anyways. Legislators like to 
  as the good Colonel says.
  • Gorsuch got three Dem votes despite the Dems really believing that seat was stolen due to Garland not getting a hearing...because he was getting confirmed anyways. If that vote was subject to a filibuster (and it was at first!) Gorsuch was not getting 60 votes, and even after McConnell changed the rules for SCOTUS to seat him, three Democrats still voted to confirm him! True bipartisanship at work!
  • Collins voted against Coney Barrett because her vote was not deciding one way or the other, freeing her up to exhibit a bit of bipartisanship that's important to her image (or vote her conscious depending on how cynical you are).
  • Sotomayor got nine GOP votes and Kagan got five, because they were clearly getting confirmed by the large Dem majorities anyways.

Other Random Issues
The House of Lords in the UK is pretty complicated but only a small number of its current members (~12%) are hereditary peers. The biggest change took place in 1999 under Blair and more reforms are ongoing. Learn about it here.
I can confirm I have read some of the Federalist Papers and subsequent scholarship about them and our primary founding documents. Social science major in college so that was kind of a requirement. Big fan overall with some caveats. At the time I 100% would have been a Federalist compared to what their political opponents wanted to enact. That being said, political systems are not set in stone nor should they be. Modern problems require modern solutions.
I'm also probably not as "radical left liberal" as some of y'all probably imagine. I'm more of a neoliberal third-way person that can be convinced to support more leftward policies depending on the details. I believe a strong national defense is paramount (plus it puts food on my table haha!), capitalism is great and the best human system we've come up with so far for advancing technology and eliminating poverty, and I'm frustrated by some of the uber-woke folks on the left pushing losing narratives and policies. I go to church, own gun, send my kid to a private (religious) school and I kill people for a living.
If anyone wants to talk big-picture political systems or reform I'd love to offline sometime - I enjoy that more than the horserace and/or the discourse on cable/twitter the older I get.
Cheers 

So you would like to go directly against the constitution and the deliberate balance of a not-proportional chamber. Noted.

[Waingro]

1 hour ago, SurelySerious said:

So you would like to go directly against the constitution and the deliberate balance of a not-proportional chamber. Noted.

If only the founding fathers had created a mechanism in which we could continually redefine what was considered constitutional...

Also, if you think there's some sacred etched-in-stone tradition regarding balance and proportionality, I recommend you read up on the Apportionment Act(s). Here's a good place to start. I doubt the founder fathers mean for a Wyoming vote to have more weight than a California vote. Or for wild gerrymandering from anyone. But here we are. 

[HeloDude]

1 minute ago, Waingro said:

I doubt the founder fathers mean for a Wyoming vote to have more weight than a California vote. Or for wild gerrymandering from anyone. But here we are. 

Are you referring to the fact that each state gets two senators regardless of its state’s population and/or that each state gets the number of electoral votes equating to their number of senators and representatives?

[Waingro]

30 minutes ago, HeloDude said:

Are you referring to the fact that each state gets two senators regardless of its state’s population and/or that each state gets the number of electoral votes equating to their number of senators and representatives?

Neither - that the number of representatives in each state, and thus electors, was historically a function of population. The apportionment act capped that number at 435, and a state has to have at least 1. If California or New York still had representatives, and thus electors, at the same proportion as Wyoming, there wouldn't be many close presidential elections. And we'd need a much bigger Capitol building!

[ClearedHot]

2 hours ago, nsplayr said:

Just a final round-up to respond and then I'll let it rest from my end at least.

BLUF wall of text, feel free to keep on scrolling. 🇺🇸

Ending the Filibuster in the Senate

Ending the filibuster in the Senate is not a recently-held view of mine, and it's derived from the inability of the majority to govern, which to me is anti-democratic (small d democratic). Both parties (or any party or political group!), when being freely and fairly elected by a majority of voters, should have the ability to govern and deliver on the platforms they ran on.

As a basic principle, a majority of voters should translate to a majority of elected officials should translate to the power to govern; the U.S. has a variety of systems that thwart that basic premise and I think most of them should change.

• If I could wave a magic wand I would make the Senate proportionally representative like the House or dramatically reduce its power, I would uncap the size of the House of Representatives, do away with the electoral college, and end lifetime appointment to SCOTUS in favor of 18 year terms that rotate on a predictable and fixed timetable. I would also make voter registration automatic and generally implement measures that make it easier for eligible voters to exercise that right. I'd experiment with with multi-member districts, state-wide proportional representation rather than geographic districts, preference voting and/or ranked choice voting, etc. All the the end of making our political system more small-d democratic and responsive to the voters.
• Little of that is probably ever gonna happen, but that's where I stand - small d democratic reforms are both good and necessary.

Why Would Any Legislator Vote Against Their Party?

There absolutely is incentive for the majority party to get minority party members on board. This is observable in many other countries and in previous political eras here at home. Going with regular majority rule also allows more elected leaders to vote their conscious and the will of their constituents rather than getting shoehorned into always feeling pressured to support the national party and powerful leaders legislative leaders like the Speaker and Majority Leader.

• Few people want to be the deciding vote to kill something the majority of their party supports (a la McCain or Manchin), but if the dam has already broken and the bill is passing anyways, you paradoxically see less strident partisanship and more crossover voting. "Selling" your potential yes vote, even if the majority doesn't strictly need it, for specific policy concessions often works! Even large majorities want to be bigger and more robust and to look more bipartisan.
• You see this today mostly on federal judicial appointments precisely because the majority rules and the filibuster isn't in play - opposition members will vote to confirm even if they would not have picked that person because they are going to get confirmed anyways. Legislators like to jump on the team and come on in for the big win as the good Colonel says.
  • Gorsuch got three Dem votes despite the Dems really believing that seat was stolen due to Garland not getting a hearing...because he was getting confirmed anyways. If that vote was subject to a filibuster (and it was at first!) Gorsuch was not getting 60 votes, and even after McConnell changed the rules for SCOTUS to seat him, three Democrats still voted to confirm him! True bipartisanship at work!
  • Collins voted against Coney Barrett because her vote was not deciding one way or the other, freeing her up to exhibit a bit of bipartisanship that's important to her image (or vote her conscious depending on how cynical you are).
  • Sotomayor got nine GOP votes and Kagan got five, because they were clearly getting confirmed by the large Dem majorities anyways.

Other Random Issues

The House of Lords in the UK is pretty complicated but only a small number of its current members (~12%) are hereditary peers. The biggest change took place in 1999 under Blair and more reforms are ongoing. Learn about it here.

I can confirm I have read some of the Federalist Papers and subsequent scholarship about them and our primary founding documents. Social science major in college so that was kind of a requirement. Big fan overall with some caveats. At the time I 100% would have been a Federalist compared to what their political opponents wanted to enact. That being said, political systems are not set in stone nor should they be. Modern problems require modern solutions.

I'm also probably not as "radical left liberal" as some of y'all probably imagine. I'm more of a neoliberal third-way person that can be convinced to support more leftward policies depending on the details. I believe a strong national defense is paramount (plus it puts food on my table haha!), capitalism is great and the best human system we've come up with so far for advancing technology and eliminating poverty, and I'm frustrated by some of the uber-woke folks on the left pushing losing narratives and policies. I go to church, own gun, send my kid to a private (religious) school and I kill people for a living.

If anyone wants to talk big-picture political systems or reform I'd love to offline sometime - I enjoy that more than the horserace and/or the discourse on cable/twitter the older I get.

Cheers 🍻

So in summary, we meet in the middle on somethings...just like the framers intended.

[Day Man]

On 1/30/2022 at 11:40 AM, ClearedHot said:

13 dead Marines and a hand waive of both responsibility and compassion by some on this forum.  Whatever you think about staying or leave Afghanistan what happened was an absolute abortion and lays squarely at the feet of the Commander in Chief.

honest question: is the CINC involved in any of the planning around an op like this?

[ClearedHot]

15 minutes ago, Day Man said:

honest question: is the CINC involved in any of the planning around an op like this?

Do I know if he directed or gave approval to close Bagram...nope.  Do I suspect he forced them to close the base...yup.  

Do I know if he was briefed on every part of the plan...nope.  Do I suspect he and his political minions had their hands in it, of course, every administration does.

Did he say we wouldn't leave Americans behind then lie and set the conditions and timeline for an expedited withdraw...Yup

He is the Commander in Chief...not a SINGLE Person has been fired or held accountable for the loss of those 13 Marines. 

[Lawman]

Do I know if he directed or gave approval to close Bagram...nope.  Do I suspect he forced them to close the base...yup.  
Do I know if he was briefed on every part of the plan...nope.  Do I suspect he and his political minions had their hands in it, of course, every administration does.
Did he say we wouldn't leave Americans behind then lie and set the conditions and timeline for an expedited withdraw...Yup
He is the Commander in Chief...not a SINGLE Person has been fired or held accountable for the loss of those 13 Marines. 

“Most successful airlift in history” Bro.

Get with the narrative.

Also the 3rd time in History we’ve used the CRAF. And don’t forget every well thought out plan involves activating the Global Reaction Brigade as a primary plan of action. That’s not State getting in over it’s head and hitting the, “F it! DOD activate!” Button because they dropped the ball.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Lord Ratner]

3 hours ago, nsplayr said:

which to me is anti-democratic (small d democratic). Both parties (or any party or political group!), when being freely and fairly elected by a majority of voters, should have the ability to govern and deliver on the platforms they ran on.

We're not a democracy, dude. We're a representative republic. You're advocating against the American system. That's fine, but you're advocating against the most successful system of government in the history of humanity in favor of a historically much less successful system. Evidence and history are not on your side.

 

Of course there is somewhere that direct democracy can and often is implemented... The local level. Again, it's not a quirk of our system, it's the whole damn point. Our system was never designed for uniformity across the states, if that is almost exactly what Democrats are arguing for. And they do so as you have, without acknowledging the reality that you are arguing directly against the intended and established system of this country.

 

Reading your post, it feels like you're explaining things as though we don't understand your perspective. But your perspective is centuries old. The people who started this country did so using a system that intentionally prevented exactly what your advocating for, because they had experienced exactly how catastrophic it can be.

 

There's nothing unique about the principals of governing in 2022. What's changed in the modern world is that even smaller groups of people can exert disproportional influence on the government and thus pervert the will of majorities. And you would make that worse.

 

Put simply, your advocating for rapid change while the founders did everything in their power to put a speed limit on change. 

[mp5g]

Bring back Congressional term limits. I happen to believe that if people weren’t so invested in protecting their cash cow job that serving in Congress has become for their entire adult lives, you’d see more compromise on issues. That’s just me. But I think we all know that dude or dudette who has stuck around in a job a little too long and refuses to change with the times because, dammit, that’s what they’ve always done. 
 

Periodically hitting refresh is not a bad thing, IMO. 

[SurelySerious]

If only the founding fathers had created a mechanism in which we could continually redefine what was considered constitutional...
Also, if you think there's some sacred etched-in-stone tradition regarding balance and proportionality, I recommend you read up on the Apportionment Act(s). Here's a good place to start. I doubt the founder fathers mean for a Wyoming vote to have more weight than a California vote. Or for wild gerrymandering from anyone. But here we are. 

They definitely meant for the more populous areas to not run roughshod over the less populous. That was literally the idea.

[Waingro]

1 hour ago, SurelySerious said:

They definitely meant for the more populous areas to not run roughshod over the less populous. That was literally the idea.

Sure, every state gets two senators. But this is about representatives. Can I take this to mean you support California having as many representatives per capita that Montana has then? 

If the founding fathers wanted a cap on representatives, why did it take until 1929 for the Apportionment Act to get signed into law?

[SurelySerious]

Sure, every state gets two senators. But this is about representatives. Can I take this to mean you support California having as many representatives per capita that Montana has then? 
If the founding fathers wanted a cap on representatives, why did it take until 1929 for the Apportionment Act to get signed into law?

Probably took us a while to figure out ~500 reps is a ton. Doubt the founders quite imagined the scale of 300M people to represent, to be quite honest. Quite the derail, but you keep on that Apportionment Crusade, bud. The PYB Thread for Constitutional Scholars is a few clicks over, though.

[Waingro]

16 minutes ago, SurelySerious said:

Probably took us a while to figure out ~500 reps is a ton. Doubt the founders quite imagined the scale of 300M people to represent, to be quite honest. Quite the derail, but you keep on that Apportionment Crusade, bud. The PYB Thread for Constitutional Scholars is a few clicks over, though.

Please don't say his name two more times, he might stop cyberstalking pawnman long enough to make an appearance here. 😂

 

My point, pal, is simply that anyone clinging to the sacred constitutionality of the process, needs to acknowledge that low-density states wield far more voting power than they did prior to 1929, and the founding fathers certainly didn't account for that.

[Prozac]

3 hours ago, mp5g said:

Bring back Congressional term limits. I happen to believe that if people weren’t so invested in protecting their cash cow job that serving in Congress has become for their entire adult lives, you’d see more compromise on issues. That’s just me. But I think we all know that dude or dudette who has stuck around in a job a little too long and refuses to change with the times because, dammit, that’s what they’ve always done. 
 

Periodically hitting refresh is not a bad thing, IMO. 

At the same time ban all of them from participating in the stock market for the duration of their terms. Radical reform of campaign finance rules while we’re at it. 

[ClearedHot]

On 1/31/2022 at 12:52 PM, Day Man said:

honest question: is the CINC involved in any of the planning around an op like this?

Leaked documents show the Biden administration was still discussing basic plans for mass civilian evacuation hours before the Taliban took Kabul

"Axios reported that leaked documents showed basic decisions hadn't been made as of August 14."

[dream big]

48 minutes ago, ClearedHot said:

Leaked documents show the Biden administration was still discussing basic plans for mass civilian evacuation hours before the Taliban took Kabul

"Axios reported that leaked documents showed basic decisions hadn't been made as of August 14."

Utterly shameful, more shameful is our joke of a senior defense staff (Miley, Austin).  Miley probably slow rolled the planning under Trump thinking Biden would reverse the decision.  By the time Biden had the cognitive mindset to address Afghanistan it was too late for anyone to come up with a cogent contingency plan for NEO.   Too busy focused on defending CRT and preferred pronouns. 

[ClearedHot]

I believe in being fair and giving credit when it is due. 

Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi is now dead I am proud President Biden had the stones to send our young men and women into harms way to get him. 

Today we can all celebrate that an evil son of a bitch no longer walks the earth.

Murica!

[kaputt]

 

[Tank]

[ClearedHot]

DoD lessons learned report is out and it is brutal, so ugly Biden rejected the findings during an interview on NBC last night.  At one point the top commander appealed to the White House to keep Bagram open, it took three days to get an answer and the answer was CLOSE BAGRAM.

Among the other findings:

The top U.S commander on the ground during the evacuation, Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, told Army investigators that service members would have been "much better prepared to conduct a more orderly" evacuation "if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground."

"The top Marine was not permitted to discuss the possibility of a mass-evacuation with anyone other than British officials the report noted."

Some State Department personnel were “intoxicated and cowering in rooms,” and others were “operating like it was day-to-day operations with absolutely no sense of urgency or recognition of the situation,” the officer said.

During an Aug. 6 meeting, a National Security Council official, who is not identified in the report, appeared to lack a sense of urgency and told others involved that if the United States had to execute an evacuation, it would signal “we have failed,” Sullivan recalled. “In my opinion, the NSC was not seriously planning for an evacuation,” he said.

The White House declined to comment.

 

[nsplayr]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/trump-records-classified/

“Some Trump records taken to Mar-a-Lago clearly marked as classified, including documents at ‘top secret’ level”

I look forward to a robust condemnation from my single-issue voters who passionately care about the Presidential Records Act, document retention and classified storage 🤣

I keed…but only a little bit.

Committing crimes is bad and folks should really try to avoid that.

Edited February 11, 2022 by nsplayr

[ClearedHot]

58 minutes ago, nsplayr said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/trump-records-classified/

“Some Trump records taken to Mar-a-Lago clearly marked as classified, including documents at ‘top secret’ level”

I look forward to a robust condemnation from my single-issue voters who passionately care about the Presidential Records Act, document retention and classified storage 🤣

I keed…but only a little bit.

Committing crimes is bad and folks should really try to avoid that.

100% agreed, if that happened it should be investigated and those responsible should be punished...regardless of political affiliation.  Do you share the same sentiment on the topic of the Hunter Biden Laptop or do you just hand waive like the liberal hate machine, the mainstream media and the tech oligarchs? 

[BashiChuni]

34 minutes ago, nsplayr said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/trump-records-classified/

“Some Trump records taken to Mar-a-Lago clearly marked as classified, including documents at ‘top secret’ level”

I look forward to a robust condemnation from my single-issue voters who passionately care about the Presidential Records Act, document retention and classified storage 🤣

I keed…but only a little bit.

Committing crimes is bad and folks should really try to avoid that.

Agree. Prosecute as required

[arg]