Mr. Trump Goes to Washington

[dpareja]

Thanks to Gerrymandering, the Democrats will never have 67.  Never.  It just won't happen.

Ironbite-best they can get is 60 and hope 5 Republicans jump.

The Senate, not the House. What blocks them in the Senate is voter suppression legislation (and apathy/disenchantment in the Democratic base), not gerrymandered maps.

Personally I'm keeping a close eye on places like NE-2nd.

What is the Senate but Gerrymandering based on states? It is Gerrymandering that just happens to be approved by the Constitution. Fucking Wyoming gets the same number of Senators as Cali-fucking-fornia. Playing the "it's voter suppression not gerrymandering" is a weak argument when the whole Senate map is, to a degree, arbitrarily drawn.

Oh, sure. But it's far, far easier to get the House maps redrawn than either to a) redraw state boundaries or b) alter the vote weighting in the Senate. Far more practical to try to entrench the right to vote rather than change the structure of the Senate (since the latter requires unanimous consent from every state, while the former could for federal elections be done by Congress, per Oregon v. Mitchell, or for all elections by a regular amendment.

I did look once at what the American people thought about which party should control the Senate, on two bases:

1. Senators have votes proportional to their states' populations. Under this framework Democrats would have controlled the Senate continuously for over 30 years.

2. Just looking at a rolling total of votes cast in general elections for Senate (the previous three, since those elections determine the Senate almost in its entirety). Republicans did lead on this basis a few times in recent history (post-WWII, since that's when Wikipedia started having vote totals, the GOP had a vote lead after 1946, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1996, 1998, and 2002), but otherwise it's been Democrats getting more votes.

And anyway on general principle I'd look to entrench the right to vote.

[Id82]

So Justice Kennedy is retiring, which means Trump will pretty much own all of Washington after he puts another extremely conservative judge in his place. If Ruth retires the supreme court will be fucked for a long long time.
I'm being really cynical here but I for some reason don't see the Dems taking back the house this fall and definitely not the Senate. The US is fucked.

[Lana Reverse]

Personally, I think the overall views of Generation Z will be a huge deciding factor in the coming years. And I've read conflicting things about them.

[Kanzenkankaku]

We wouldn't be facing any Trump nominations (let alone 2 so far, including the upcoming one with Kennedy leaving) if the DNC were more competent at PR and less corrupt. If they listened to people better their wouldn't be any dissaffected voters saying she'd be just as bad. That isn't the problem, it's just a symptom of Hillary and her camp being out of touch with their constituents and easily bought by the highest bidders.

[Cloud3514]

Oh come the fuck on. So now it's Clinton's fault that the Republicans and Fox news spent 20 years smearing her? Because that's the biggest reason why people hated her.

[dpareja]

Oh come the fuck on. So now it's Clinton's fault that the Republicans and Fox news spent 20 years smearing her? Because that's the biggest reason why people hated her.

Yes. It can't be that she pushed DOMA (and then didn't support same-sex marriage until 2013), voted for the Iraq War, pushed Obama to renege on the deal with Libya, or voted to ban flag-burning that people on the left thought she was a bad candidate.

[Cloud3514]

While all of those are things to criticize, don't give me this shit about it being the reason she was so hated. How much time did Republicans waste with Benghazi and her fucking e-mails? How long were they smearing her and calling her a corrupt corporate shill? Those stances didn't help, but they aren't why she was so unlikable as a candidate. Remember, even Obama had some lousy policies including how he handled whistleblowers and his policies on undocumented immigrants (which, granted, was most likely an attempt to appease Republicans, but seeing as they didn't fucking CARE what he did...). No one is going to tell you that Clinton was a perfect candidate and the Democrats treating her becoming President as a foregone conclusion was just as detrimental as anything she actually did, but don't fucking ignore that Republicans have had it out for her for literal decades.

[dpareja]

...that people on the left thought she was a bad candidate.

I was specifically talking about those on the left. (And I would note that a higher percentage of Sanders primary voters then voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton primary voters did for Obama in 2008.) I did not deny anything about the utter bullshit the GOP and FOX had been spewing about her for decades.

(Although, given her donor profile, I did not like her links to big corporations.)

[The_Queen]

Oh come the fuck on. So now it's Clinton's fault that the Republicans and Fox news spent 20 years smearing her? Because that's the biggest reason why people hated her.

Yes. It can't be that she pushed DOMA (and then didn't support same-sex marriage until 2013), voted for the Iraq War, pushed Obama to renege on the deal with Libya, or voted to ban flag-burning that people on the left thought she was a bad candidate.

Bernie opposed same sex marriage up until 2006 at the latest, voted in favor of the largest Wall Street deregulation in our nation’s history (which directly lead to the financial crisis), and has 25 years of problematic votes on gerns.

But, I don’t see the same Don Quixote quest for ideological purity. And for the record, I think these are blips on an otherwise impressive public service resume (much like I see those examples for Clinton). I said Bernie and Hillary voted the same 93% of the time, and while a testament to Hillary’s liberal credentials, it also serves as a defense of Bernie—they agree 93% of the time. I wish you, and others who have since quieted down (Lizard-man) didn’t selectively require such ideological purity. And yeah, that is why we lost 25 years of Supreme Court precedence.

[Cloud3514]

Ignoring that I never said anything about Sanders supporters defecting (which, by the way, while it is true that fewer Sanders supporters defected, 2016 was a much higher stakes election and had a lower turnout than 2008, so that's stuff to consider, as well), I would almost wager that a good number of the people who stayed home, defected to Trump, voted third party, wrote in Sanders, etc. did so because of Republican smear. I mean, people argue that Comey sabotaged the election with his "we found more e-mails" a week before election day. Again, the big reason Clinton was so unpalatable to so many people in the first place, regardless of political affiliation or views was Republican smear. Obama was also heavily supported by corporations, as is virtually every major politician (obviously with Sanders as a major exception), to say nothing of being upset at a Democrat being a corporate shill when the Republican party exists.

[niam2023]

Whenever a Justice Democrat needs to feel better about his or her position, out come the donor lists and shouts of "CORPORATE WHOOOOOORE!" and "YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PROGRESSIVE!!"

[Askold]

I'm just going to point out that Clinton got as many votes as Obama did in 2012.

The claims that a lot of people hate her seem like exaggerations and part of the highly divisive type of politics in USA. Her loss was more about the silly way USA gives more voting power to people in specific states.

[dpareja]

Whenever a Justice Democrat needs to feel better about his or her position, out come the donor lists and shouts of "CORPORATE WHOOOOOORE!" and "YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PROGRESSIVE!!"

And their voting records.

But opposing money in politics is a popular position: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/center-for-public-integrity-2017-08-31

Also:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00189

To correct myself on something: the one time the Flag Desecration Amendment came to a vote in the Senate while Hillary Clinton was a member of that body, she voted against it (and it was within one vote of passage). I retract my remark about her voting to ban flag burning; however all else I have said stands.

[Kanzenkankaku]

the Democrats treating her becoming President as a foregone conclusion was just as detrimental as anything she actually did.

This is exactly the mistake I dislike about them the most. We probably agree a lot more than we disagree about what Clinton and the Democrats problems were. They thought that she was a shoe-in in the general and so they got cocky and started treating Bernie Sanders and his supporters like garbage because they'd basically been taken over by Hillary Clinton fanatics (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774)

They managed to beat The Bern out with this technique but underestimated how rabid and excitable the Trump base was, among other mistakes.

But what they did to Sanders was basically an even worse and more intense version of the "Obama Boys" thing the Clinton people were pushing back then (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774) and so instead of looking more organic like it used to, it and the emails thing [the real email thing, not the dumb pizzagate thing about her emails] made it obvious that there was a lot of undue astroturfing on her camps part similar to what the Koch's fund the republicans to say about democratic opposition to them.

[The_Queen]

Well, glad your principals and delusions are there for you; cause SCOTUS certainly won’t be.