Starting with today’s Dad Joke: Q: What do you get when you’re inundated with bras? A: A boob-bonnet plague! Chris Hayes couldn’t have said it better in yesterday’s Ezra Klein Show: Democrats spent an entire year trying every which way to get “leverage” over Joe Manchin, when the simple truth is that no such thing ever existed.
What are you thoughts on McConnells response to Bidens speech about pushing through voting reform? Do you think that the GOP has found a viable alternative truth argument about who is REALLY supporting democracy? Does he make a point that voting reform should be bipartisan? And if it’s not it’s really a power grab? Or is congress just so politically toxic that nothing besides military spending and infrastructure will be bipartisan?
His response was shocking, illogical but scary to those who actually support democracy and voting rights.
1. McConnell is a really terrible orator. And his speechwriters should be disbarred from speechwriting lol.
2. He’s also cynical AF. There’s just enough specificity to make a point, but he basically hides and lies about the actual details.
3. I’m kind of split on what I think about bipartisanship. There’s my knee-jerk opinion, which is “fuck bipartisanship, she was never all that pretty anyways”. And then the truth is somewhere over to the side, beaten and abused, but most people are probably going to ignore it, so what’s the use anyways?
Terrible oratory yes, but he’s smart as a fox. His ability to give two fucks about substance while killing it at the cynical politicking is a sight to behold. Don’t get me wrong he’s not a good person, but a decent tactician.
So normally I’m with you on the squishyness of bipartisanship but on voting rights, the optics need to be seen as wholly policy and zero political. If he’s able to push a political veneer onto the voting rights debate he’s won. The conservative charge to make voting harder for everyone will just be seen and the otherside of the voting rights coin compared to the increased access the democrats want.
Really all the politicians on both sides need to stop posturing and tell it like it is and consequences be damned.
Here’s the thing though: conservatives already made voting political. It’s never not been political. I think what you’re getting at is that they just whine about it more often right now, and pretend that they were always right about how they framed the issue.
So liberals and conservatives both approach voting from with two viewpoints, one a civic minded belief in the goodness of our system and one a political calculation. No ones perfectly pure in their claims to support democracy, just so happens that one party’s civic beliefs line up a whole lot more with morality and voting policies.
Liberals want increased access, make voting registration automatic, make it a holiday, extended hour, felon enfranchisement. Voting is a right as an American. Liberals also know that the groups that are impacted by voting restrictions now would be more likely to vote liberal.
For conservatives, voting rights is more about “accuracy” than access. Voting shouldn’t be too easy. Voter ID, purged voter rolls, limited times and locations, and other actions make it harder for some to vote. This signals to some people that the “integrity” of the vote is being maintained, and even though it’s hard for other people to vote that’s because they don’t care enough. This voting policy has the benefit of disenfranchisement of voters, while looking to support voting.
What depresses me most is that "voting rights" probably isn't even the right debate to be having. Even if the maximally-liberal national legislation passed, it wouldn't stop the threat the GOP currently poses to democracy.
Fixing the ECA would be a good start, but really, liberals should be spending all their time fixing the voting systems -- IE ranked choice, top-two, etc. They can't necessarily fix every single red state, but what they CAN do is fix the state-level GOPs in the blue states.
For instance, let's say that most of the Northeast, plus Illinois and the West Coast, all adopts RCV and open primaries for most elections in the next couple years. As they do, each state's GOP starts responding to the changed electoral incentive: it's easier for a Republican to plot a path through the primary by getting center-left votes, so fewer of them are beholden to Trumpism and The Big Lie. Illinois might still have plenty of Trump supporters downstate, but conservative districts in the Chicago suburbs might start sending Never-Trumper or Glenn Youngkin types to Congress instead of narrowly electing either a Trumper nutjob or some random squishy Dem.
As blue-state Republicans change, the tenor in the national party changes. What has, up to now, been a winner-take-all intraparty battle, with the Trumpists dominating since 2016, is now an actual open question. The Liz Cheneys of the world are not so rare anymore.
The main problem with this is that it challenges Democrats' position of power in their strongholds. Democrats would obviously rather have states where they're crushing Republicans and making up for their national disadvantage with sheer numbers. But the thing is, Republicans have shown they can keep playing this game for a LONG time. They could probably keep gerrymandering up for the next 2-3 decades, and the party will just get crazier and crazier, if it doesn't just outright crack and seize power. The only play that actually fixes the GOP is the one that involves risking Democrats' power.
What are you thoughts on McConnells response to Bidens speech about pushing through voting reform? Do you think that the GOP has found a viable alternative truth argument about who is REALLY supporting democracy? Does he make a point that voting reform should be bipartisan? And if it’s not it’s really a power grab? Or is congress just so politically toxic that nothing besides military spending and infrastructure will be bipartisan?
His response was shocking, illogical but scary to those who actually support democracy and voting rights.
1. McConnell is a really terrible orator. And his speechwriters should be disbarred from speechwriting lol.
2. He’s also cynical AF. There’s just enough specificity to make a point, but he basically hides and lies about the actual details.
3. I’m kind of split on what I think about bipartisanship. There’s my knee-jerk opinion, which is “fuck bipartisanship, she was never all that pretty anyways”. And then the truth is somewhere over to the side, beaten and abused, but most people are probably going to ignore it, so what’s the use anyways?
Terrible oratory yes, but he’s smart as a fox. His ability to give two fucks about substance while killing it at the cynical politicking is a sight to behold. Don’t get me wrong he’s not a good person, but a decent tactician.
So normally I’m with you on the squishyness of bipartisanship but on voting rights, the optics need to be seen as wholly policy and zero political. If he’s able to push a political veneer onto the voting rights debate he’s won. The conservative charge to make voting harder for everyone will just be seen and the otherside of the voting rights coin compared to the increased access the democrats want.
Really all the politicians on both sides need to stop posturing and tell it like it is and consequences be damned.
Here’s the thing though: conservatives already made voting political. It’s never not been political. I think what you’re getting at is that they just whine about it more often right now, and pretend that they were always right about how they framed the issue.
So liberals and conservatives both approach voting from with two viewpoints, one a civic minded belief in the goodness of our system and one a political calculation. No ones perfectly pure in their claims to support democracy, just so happens that one party’s civic beliefs line up a whole lot more with morality and voting policies.
Liberals want increased access, make voting registration automatic, make it a holiday, extended hour, felon enfranchisement. Voting is a right as an American. Liberals also know that the groups that are impacted by voting restrictions now would be more likely to vote liberal.
For conservatives, voting rights is more about “accuracy” than access. Voting shouldn’t be too easy. Voter ID, purged voter rolls, limited times and locations, and other actions make it harder for some to vote. This signals to some people that the “integrity” of the vote is being maintained, and even though it’s hard for other people to vote that’s because they don’t care enough. This voting policy has the benefit of disenfranchisement of voters, while looking to support voting.
What depresses me most is that "voting rights" probably isn't even the right debate to be having. Even if the maximally-liberal national legislation passed, it wouldn't stop the threat the GOP currently poses to democracy.
Fixing the ECA would be a good start, but really, liberals should be spending all their time fixing the voting systems -- IE ranked choice, top-two, etc. They can't necessarily fix every single red state, but what they CAN do is fix the state-level GOPs in the blue states.
For instance, let's say that most of the Northeast, plus Illinois and the West Coast, all adopts RCV and open primaries for most elections in the next couple years. As they do, each state's GOP starts responding to the changed electoral incentive: it's easier for a Republican to plot a path through the primary by getting center-left votes, so fewer of them are beholden to Trumpism and The Big Lie. Illinois might still have plenty of Trump supporters downstate, but conservative districts in the Chicago suburbs might start sending Never-Trumper or Glenn Youngkin types to Congress instead of narrowly electing either a Trumper nutjob or some random squishy Dem.
As blue-state Republicans change, the tenor in the national party changes. What has, up to now, been a winner-take-all intraparty battle, with the Trumpists dominating since 2016, is now an actual open question. The Liz Cheneys of the world are not so rare anymore.
The main problem with this is that it challenges Democrats' position of power in their strongholds. Democrats would obviously rather have states where they're crushing Republicans and making up for their national disadvantage with sheer numbers. But the thing is, Republicans have shown they can keep playing this game for a LONG time. They could probably keep gerrymandering up for the next 2-3 decades, and the party will just get crazier and crazier, if it doesn't just outright crack and seize power. The only play that actually fixes the GOP is the one that involves risking Democrats' power.