Our constitution is too impotent against these monsters.

[triron]

[SHRED]

1. Civics is dead in school apparently

No one knows what the Constitution is I guess?

[elleng]

2. Sounds like it.

[RockRaven]

3. The founders assumed the majority of individuals in federal elected office would act in good faith

and behave honorably vis-a-vis their oath of office, but that is not what these GOP Congresspersons do.

[struggle4progress]

4. No. The founders assumed we would be informed by the press and would fight back

[Jake Stern]

5. Indeed

1. As far as constitutions go, ours is very short and ambiguous. Some constitutions have articles with the same word count as our entire one.

2. Republicans have become quite adept at exploiting that ambiguity. They will take one sentence out of the document and craft a legal challenge from it. They do the same thing with legislation: flunkies pore over the text of a bill in an effort to find ANY crack big enough to shove a lawsuit through. Republicans file a dozen lawsuits for every one filed by a Dem.

That is the real secret to their success. It doesn't help that the courts are packed to the rafters with RW judges, our SCOTUS is firmly in reactionary hands and the media is, in large part, under the control of hard right media corporations.

[Garrett78]

6. Republicans have been fighting a procedural war. Democrats have been fighting a policy war.

As I've posted before: https://www.vox.com/2018/5/1/17258866/democratic-party-republicans-trump-election

David Faris
...my point is that no policy platform is going to win three or four consecutive national elections for Democrats because we know policy isn’t what decides elections; that’s not how most voters make decisions.

So there are no policy changes that are going to reverse the overall trajectory that this society is on right now. We have to address some of the structural barriers to progressive power in this country, and we need to take those things as seriously as we do the policy fights within the party.

Sean Illing
I definitely want to get into some of these structural barriers, but let’s be clear about this point you’re making. A lot of people still think there’s some meaningful connection between policy outcomes and voter decisions, but there’s a good bit of political science research to suggest that’s just a fantasy.

David Faris
Right. People just don’t seem to make the connection between policies and the party in power.

So, for example, the Democrats passed Obamacare and gave millions of people heath care, and yet tons of people who benefited from it have no idea what it is or how they benefited. And it’s like that with a lot of policies — voters simply don’t connect the dots, and so they reward or punish the wrong party.

I think the idea that we’re going to deliver these benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you Jesus, thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things for people, but we’ve got to be serious about how elections are won. And they’re not being won on the basis of policy proposals or policy wins.