If he's such an existential threat (and he is), why the fuck are they not forcing the geriatric incompetent running on their ticket to drop out? They're sleepwalking into fascism and it's terrifying.
My semi-secret conspiracy theory adjacent theory is it's intentional. That not all, but many, of the Democratic national party is in bed with the same big businesses paying off Republicans, and they're prepared to pull a Hindenburg and install the very fascists they claim to resist once they can no longer hide their betrayal.
I also do think it's primarily a money issue. Some of it might be those donors wanting the two parties to do different things, by basically leading the democrats into their graves.
I stand that Kamala's best chance is to hold the ship steady as is, and then ask Biden to resign in December or January.
There's a lot of racists out there. I feel like if she's at the top of the ticket, she's gonna get dragged down. Biden truly is serving as an effective shield for her. Either way, Kamala is the implicit vote if anything wrong happens to Biden (which I admit is increasingly likely given his age).
It makes no sense for Kamala to rush to the top of the ticket given her position.
Wasn't this always the angle, even when people called his age out last election? The argument was that Kamala Harris would step up, and that Biden didn't want a second term.
Given Harris' recent comments in the press regarding stuff she'd fix "if given power", I wonder if she's even on the VP card this time around? IMO, AOC might be a smarter choice for VP, since the left love her and the right loathe her. She'd bring a lot of younger disenfranchised people back around, and that might be enough.
Biden never any public or official statement about only serving 1-term, in fact when that story started circulating, the official response from his campaign was to say that they were not ruling it out.
There's a lot of racists out there. I feel like if she's at the top of the ticket, she's gonna get dragged down.
This is just preemptive cope to avoid having to reflect on whether the Democratic leadership and its preferred candidates are actually the thing that needs change, and she's not even an actual candidate yet. Kamala's biggest problem is not that she isn't white. Obama was a Black man, but he had heaps of charisma. Kamala has all the charisma of a plate of lutefisk,and people flat out do not like her. She is also irrevocably tied to Biden and his legacy, likely to her detriment amongst the crowds you would most worry about not voting for her because of her not being white.
Most polls put her on par with Biden. Dataforprogress.org has her leading when “fitness” and “strength” are brought into question, but that’s the only poll I’ve seen where she has any lead at all.
If he’s such an existential threat (and he is), why the fuck are they not forcing the geriatric incompetent running on their ticket to drop out?
Because their rank-and-file voters who voted in the primary voted for him. This primary and last primary. And if you want people to leave your party in a big exodus, invalidating their primary vote is how you do that. They learned that in Bernie's race. I voted for Biden, he wasn't the only person to run in the primary, I'll be damned if the "party elite" select some other candidate anyways, why even vote in the primaries at that point? May as well register for the R primary since they at least had more candidates and (so far) appear to respect their primary process so my vote would actually mean something.
One thing you'll notice is that the venn diagram for people who complain about only having "two choices" and the people who don't participate in primaries is nearly a perfect circle. You get an overwhelming amount of choices if you vote in every primary and every election.If you only vote once every 2 or 4 years and skip the primaries, yeah, you get two choices.
No one considers this primary a real vote, or that a vote from four years ago indicates current preferences. If it did, 50% of Democrats who watched the debate wouldn't want him to step aside.
50% of people who watched the debate didn't participate in the primaries. Most people don't vote, and of those who do vote, most don't participate in primaries. Nobody of consequence ran. Literally anybody could have run. They didn't. It's not the fault of "DNC leadership" that nobody stepped up to the plate to run.
FWIW some people did run, Biden wasn't literally the only candidate. I had more than one candidate on my primary ballot and I voted for Biden because he had the best chance of winning the general. In fact, Biden lost the primary in American Samoa. If you swap Biden for somebody else, you've invalidated my primary vote. That's just as much a threat to democracy as anything else.
Nobody of consequence ran. Literally anybody could have run. They didn’t.
Yes, exactly. That's why no one considers their vote in the 2024 primary to be a real indication of preference. If you think your vote for a forgone conclusion was some solemn compact, that's a you issue. Votes without meaningful choice aren't meaningful votes.
Democracy doesn't guarantee you'll have good options, just that you have options. The time to express the greatest degree of preference is primaries. It's how the system works. You can be mad about that, but that's how it works. And it's fair, and it's democratic, and anybody can participate in it. And every four years, like clockwork, people come out of the woodwork to complain about how their vote doesn't matter and the two-party system is corrupt and yada yada who never even took the time to vote in the primary or downballot elections. It's equivalent to people who complain that the president isn't getting x done while not voting in mid-terms to secure a congress who can make sure those things actually can get done. Primaries and downballot elections are how to build a candidate's resume and experience to run in a presidential election. Luckily for primary voters, the party doesn't listen to these people, they respect the ballots cast by their primary voters. I don't think they should have run Hillary, but she got the most primary votes so that's who they ran. There is nobody to blame there but her primary voters.
The levers of power are available to people, we just have to consistently use them.
I'm not mad about it, that's usually how incumbent primaries go. No one believes single-contender votes are sacred expressions of democracy though. Maybe no one except you, but as previously stated, that's a you issue.
Biden and the DNC knew that if he was forced to actually debate in an open primary, he'd be weakened as a candidate and would eventually lose to Trump. So they rigged the primary, hoped they could sneak a senile old man through without us realizing, and now they got caught.
The people in power are perfectly content to lose the cycle and try again in 2028. Newsom, Whitmer, etc. are all lining up to run against Trump's VP next cycle since he's term limited. And the reason Biden hasn't been thrown overboard yet is that the other potential candidates haven't decided if they want to throw away their carefully laid plans for 2028 to take a gamble here in 2024.
The only people that truly believe Trump winning in 2024 means there won't be an election in 2028 are the most myopic hyper partisan Democrat voters, and they believe that because it's a useful fallacy for the Democratic elite to have them believe. Because fear is the only motivator they have left at this point. But their actions clearly show that they don't believe it themselves.
I have voted in every primary and general election since I turned 18 in 98, and not one of the candidates I have voted for in the primary has ever won. Sure we get "loads of candidates," and then the party picks the worst of the lot. Then of course there are states like KY and PA where I can't vote in the primary since you have to declare a party, and that's against my religion.
I've voted in every primary and local election since the year 2000 and had a Kucinich for President bumper sticker and I still complain about the choices because my preferred candidate has never won. Ever.
There's plenty that can be done about the Court. Just tell them no. They made a massive precedent-defying power grab overruling Chevron. If the climate is an existential problem, a constitutional crisis is warranted.
You don't need them to comply. All they can do is write words. If you tell them they're making a power grab and you're not going to just cede power to them, they don't have anything they can do but write more words.
Defying the Supreme Court would set an extraordinarily terrible precedent. This only works if the masses are doing the defying. And it's incredibly risky, as the Republicans would very quickly follow suit
Oh no! A bad precedent. Wouldn't want to have one of those. Surely precedent will protect us from having reproductive rights stolen, or declaring the president a king, or declaring the regulatory state invalid. The fascists are already on the march and have demonstrated they're willing to trash precedent without the Democrats making the first move.
But none of that matters. Is this an existential issue or not? If it is, a constitutional crisis is warranted to solve it. You can't say something is existential and then worry about not doing anything too extreme.
Its long overdue for the Democrats to take some extreme measures. Without the opposing forces we'll certainly not be a republic by November. I'm ready to protest en masse. Shit I'll help plan.
Starting collective action has always been the big stumbling block for the left-of-center in America. Europeans would riot for far less. We need more unions and unions willing to be political to help act as a nucleus for mass protests to say they can't just do whatever they want. People should believe they have power other than just voting or signing a petition.
The Supreme Court made bribery semi-legal, elevated allied presidents to kings, and dismantled the regulations that do most of the heavy lifting to keep our air and water clean. While I concur with many Democrats correct statements about how bad these rulings are, they should be leading people to the streets. Hell, the three dissenting judges should be going before the senate to explain how antithetical to American democracy the most recent ruling is. Stop pretending the system is working when it's in freefall with no correction in sight.
Congress could impeach Justices or increase the headcount to properly balance the Court. Those are the legitimate ways to challenge these rulings based on the checks and balances in our governmental design.
That would require Democrats to vote with high turnout for Senate and House elections.
What exactly is the risk when considering the very real danger the court is doing to the country?
Tolerating intolerance will only take the country in one direction.
They could be subpoenaed into a house select committee to undergo questioning explaining their actions . It would at least be a bold move and have them try and explain their reasoning to an equal institution under the republic?
There is no magic bullet, but you need to return some heat or else go under without a fight. It would also completely unhinge the conservative forces hell bent on a dictatorship.
The odds of anything turning blue in November other than maybe the Whitehouse seems slim. I have no numbers or proof and I am completely stating my opinion, but it seems the dems have targeted defective Republicans and centrists and not people on the left. I'd imagine Republicans that can't stomach Trump are still going to vote red everywhere but the Whitehouse. While the voters further to the left than both our conservative parties will just stay home.
Agreed. The entire House is up for election in November, along with 33 Senate seats.
My biggest concern is the down ballot effects of sizable Democratic abstentions. If Trump wins, he’ll likely have a Republican Congress supporting him.
The mental gymnastics it takes to say they are "insuring it", instead of blaming the DNC and the centrists that shoehorned in an obviously senile old man and refused to primary him when he was 4 years older. Actions have consequences.
And the consequences of forcing forward an inept candidate for your own personal gain causes the entire country to have an authoritarian criminal in the Whitehouse. Luckily you have a bunch of mindless knuckleheads on the internet who blame the people that do not accept the dystopia you put forth instead of blaming the selfish corpo twats that would rather have a Trump presidency than run anyone even slightly left of center. The bar was so low all they had to do is have someone that could speak a complete sentence and they couldn't even do that. They had to get as close to that bar as possible. Fuck the DNC and every sycophant that voted for him in the primaries. This is their fault that we are in this situation, not mine.
I will vote against Trump in November, but fuck this system. I am ready to watch it burn, which is where most of Trumps votes come from, people who are ready to watch it burn.
Unfortunately that burning is going to cause the loss of unfathomable amounts of lives, mostly historically marginalized communities, including women. Probably especially women.
The Constitution does not stipulate the number of Supreme Court Justices; the number is set instead by Congress. There have been as few as six, but since 1869 there have been nine Justices, including one Chief Justice.
Didn't Democrats control the House and Senate for the first few years of his presidency? Looks like they failed to use the time they had very effectively. Why reward lazy behavior with another term?
50 votes that includes Joe Manchin, Sinema, etc in the Senate is not control. The last time they had an actual fillibuster proof majority they passed the ACA, which would have included a public option if they had another vote. And that period where they had control lasted a few months, not years. The idea that Democrats don't pass legislation when they aren't being blocked by the domestic terror cell they have to work alongside is completely ahistorical.
50 votes that includes Joe Manchin, Sinema, etc in the Senate is not control.
With the majority they had, they had enough seats to do away with the filibuster forever.
The last time they had an actual fillibuster proof majority they passed the ACA, which would have included a public option if they had another vote.
Nonsense. They simply would have found a different senator to vote no. Ben Nelson was every bit as instrumental as Lieberman in killing the public option.
I've noticed this a lot on lemmy. People state things as an objective fact that are just completely wrong. They start with a false assumption and built their ideas on that. People seem to have virtually no understanding of how the civic process works.
I agree. It’s maddening. The way I challenge it is by citing sources to debunk the misinformation. Most people just block them, leading to unchecked misinformation for more passive users to read as facts.
That is the way to do it. Plenty of people parrot what they read. I am guilty of it because I can't research EVERYTHING EVER, but I can hear reliable information and spit it back out. If you take the time to post up receipts, people will vomit up your facts and you make the discourse better.
That said, Congress could have changed that during the first two years of Biden's presidency, but the Senate would need to change its rules to get rid of the filibuster to do so, and they didn't wanna.
the democrats had majority control and they still fucked it up by pretending they couldn't change the filibuster rules and they'll find some other way to fuck it up again if we do vote for them.
Treating an existential threat as existential requires the one thing that the Democratic coalition has increasingly struggled to do: prioritization. It means putting aside personal feelings, individual ambition, and subjective preferences in favor of a single goal: success. Otherwise, it’s just empty rhetoric.
As New York Timescolumnist Ezra Klein, who has been pushing the possibility of an open convention to replace Biden, said on his podcast after Thursday’s debate: “If the fate of American democracy is hinging on this election — as Democrats are always telling me it is and as I think there is a chance that it is — then you should do everything you can to win it.” That a strategy, any strategy, might make people or groups uncomfortable cannot be a reason not to pursue it in the face of an existential threat. Not if you believe what you’re saying.
Over a dozen paragraphs and no name brought up to replace Biden if he leaves. (Kamala? Kamala is team Biden)
Glad to see that the prioritization is to attack Biden before you even have a replacement lined up. Good job media, you're whipping the dumbasses into a frenzy and taking unnecessary risks.
Lets just say Biden is out. Start listing names. Serious contenders. If Kamala (effectively on Biden's team anyway) is your best shot, then it doesn't matter if she's VP or Top of the Ticket, if the plan is for Biden to resign after November anyway.
