Bailout / Stimulus Discussion (Hints Missed & Shartz Fired)

Can you show us your list?

This sounds awfully confident, but it’s not based on anything besides conjecture about likely voting behavior. In the scenario where you’re wrong, not having reached a compromise deal with the Republicans (apparently anywhere from $1T to $1.5T really was in the cards) in the meantime is a massive loss that means eviction, homelessness, infection, death for a lot of people.

O F C O U R S E, in some macro sense the whole problem is the Republican Party’s fault, but knowing who to blame isn’t going to bring back the dead. “Fuck you, pass the HEROES Act” is emotional invective, not a negotiation strategy. Most law school 1Ls doing a mock negotiation could have achieved a better result here than Pelosi and Schumer, and I still haven’t seen anything like a coherent explanation of the electoral strategy for which this utter failure at politics is supposed to provide cover.

I guess you guys are imagining Biden scolding Trump for it at the debate, then a working-class Michigan voter looks up from drowning their sorrows in Jim Beam and says, “Damn, he’s right. Nancy and Chuck really tried to help me but meanyhead Moscow Mitch wouldn’t let them. I’m voting for a different senile rapist now.”

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You seem to be missing at least part of the point. The Republicans will have to change how they negotiate if the Dems don’t cave on everything. That has beneficial long term implications as well.

This may be true, but if nothing else, people can’t really blame Biden (other than the 35% that will blame him, Jimmy Carter, George Soros, JFK and the Easter Bunny). People are more likely to vote Trump out and seek change.

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The GOP had enough votes to pass their bill, but didn’t have enough to break the filibuster. The GOP knew they would need at least 8 Democratic votes to advance the bill, a condition they’ve known since March. The earlier bills passed the Senate unanimously so not vote would have to be taken to protect his vulnerable Senators from saying no because they’re dumb.

Mitch knew he couldn’t pass anything without the minimum 8 Democractic votes, so he told the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate to negotiate directly with the WH. He said he would get the votes to pass anything the Dems and WH agreed upon. He bluffed, is a terrible bluffer, and got called for something like the first time in 6 years. He thought the WH would break, which would cause cover for his vulnerable Senators because as he’s known since March, he can’t pass any relief bill without at least 7 Democratic Senators and usually a minimum of 8.

Once talks broke down toward the end of July, he began working on a $1 trillion bill. His caucus flat out said they would not support it meaning he could get no ‘we had enough to pass it’ optics. The Romney Rubio wing is responsible for a $500 billion bill that was planned to be introduced to the floor as it carved out a bunch of Mitch’s $1 trillion stuff. This was also a terrible bill.

What was ultimately introduced was essentially a $300 billion bill with an additional amount (can’t remember it was $365 billion, but might have been) that was taken from unused PPP funds to get it up to its final level. For the bill that was introduced, there were no negotiations with Democrats, meaning they knew it would never pass and, guess what? That’s right, they don’t care. The GOP is happy with nothing passing. Max death, yeehaw!

The bad news for the Dems was Mitch got his 52 votes needed to pass the lackluster bill, so now he can take the optics to the press that he had enough votes to ‘help’ the American people. The vast majority of the U.S. population has no idea what cloture even is. This was a procedural hurdle that Mitch knew he would never overcome. He could have put in that each person would have received a free unicorn. He knew there was zero chance of it making it out of the filibuster. That means the American people also won’t understand that even though Mitch knew he needed Democratic support, he didn’t try to negotiate with them at all.

The Dems can go out and say Mitch had no intention of passing a bill. The uninformed American people will watch Mitch say, ‘I had enough votes to pass it’ and he wouldn’t be lying. It’s a complete misrepresentation of the situation, but it’s reality. I can’t overemphasize enough that the House has zero power to finish legislation. They’re the start, and the Senate always shreds every single bill they pass, because they’re Senators (big important people) and the House is the garbage body to represent blech, ‘the people’.

On something like this, optics is absolutely everything because there’s no way the complicated process will be understood by the vast majority of the public. All they’ll see is they’re not getting help. One side says they had a big bill, the other side said they had the votes but the Democrats blocked it. Every person who’s ever bought anything knows there are things that can be negotiated and things that can’t. The Senate only rubber stamps anything when it’s unanimous and when they know the optics are so bad in not doing so. See the CARES Act for that.

Nancy going in and passing the USPS legislation without doing anything for the American people is atrocious optics no matter how much impact that bill may have had on a large amount of people. A ton of Democrats in the House got this was a problem, but Nancy didn’t care. Just yesterday after the bill failed, she likened wanting to have a bill when they go back to their districts to putting out after a ‘cheap date’. She wants the Dems to buy lobster before putting out for the GOP. The optics on that are unreal. She’s a disaster. She keeps saying the things the GOP is accusing her of doing. She is insanely out of touch with the needs of the vulnerable people who are being crushed by this inaction.

You can keep saying what you want about this until you’re blue in the face, but you’re thinking about this like someone who knows what’s going on vs. someone who doesn’t (almost everyone in this country). And the way it’s being thought of here is Ivory Tower style with nothing going on right now having any current impact on anyone pushing back on what I’m saying. Almost everyone pushing back on me is out of touch with the situation. I want them to own that. They refuse to. They think they’re doing the moral thing when them thinking that is absolutely laughable to me.

Anyone pushing back hard on me saying they’re acting immoral and are not caring about loss of life/destruction of lives, anyone insulting my intelligence about the situation, and anyone liking any of said posts.

There’s even a poll in the thread when the ‘skinny bill’ could have been a thing before any devastating effects were felt that will show what side some people are on who haven’t commented. Some of the people who push hard on the other side of me refused to answer that poll question. My only ask in this thread was that people own their heartlessness in this situation, and they refuse, REFUSE, to think they’re being heartless.

nunn can you please just stop my god man

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As soon as you all do. As soon as you all are willing to admit you might be a little heartless in this thing. Every single person who’s doing this has treated actual people in this country like they live in a zoo as something to be mocked. It’s a level of desensitization and dehumanization of the opponent that has led to this. You don’t like it, but it’s reality.

List them or you are heartless.

LOL, I haven’t equivocated on this once. If they pushed back on me over asking for them to have just a little bit of morals and heart in this situation, or liked posts that pushed back on this, I believe they’re on the wrong side of history. The harder they push the worse it is. This ain’t the blacklist and they all know who they are. It’s very easy to determine who they are with just a little effort with your scroll wheel.

“Wrong side of history”

Lol wow.

There’s a difference between heartlessness and not letting emotions get in the way of trying to make good decisions.

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What’s it called when you completely remove the potential suffering of others in a decision making process?

That hasn’t happened here, you’re just too short-sighted to understand the logic involved.

You’re the one who has been trying to remove the potential suffering of others in the decision making process by saying that there are too many unknowns for us to consider what might happen beyond November.

The people who are disagree with you generally believe in minimizing suffering. They just believe in doing so over a longer timeframe and aren’t afraid to deal with uncertainty.

I’m not going to try too hard to dissuade you from your position because I can have empathy with it, even though I disagree, in the same way that I can understand why some people dissatisfied with Biden want to sit out the election.

What I want you to do is accept that a person of good will can disagree with you on this and not be heartless monsters. That doesn’t mean they’re right, but it means they are intelligent, well-meaning people who are trying their best.

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I’m afraid to like this and be put on Nunnehi’s list.

C’mon, join the club. We’ll get your membership card in the mail right away.

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They say this, but I don’t believe them. This is the difference. Why do I think this? Because it permeates every other part of their posting with how they think about people. They want their opponents to suffer. They don’t want to rise above causing people to suffer as long as it’s not the people on their side. But even if it is, they won’t say what that number is. When we get into millions being okay, there’s a big moral problem.

Republicans think ‘I got mine, f*** you’. The people here sound like, ‘I got mine, I know what’s best for you’. There’s not much difference between those lines. They cannot personally relate to this suffering. The one person who can relate to this suffering revels in making people suffer in his business life when they cross him. He’s approaching this calculus like his business, so it’s no shock it would be his stance.

A lot of these people remind me of the TV character Maude. I won’t go further than that. Telling someone to starve today so they can maybe save someone tomorrow won’t play well. They know it. I think they should go sell their plan on the streets and see how it’s reacted to, but we both know they won’t do that because it forces to see the consequences of what they think.

I believe there are a lot of those people who post on this site. They didn’t post in this thread and if they did they didn’t push back on what I’ve said about how this sounds gross even if they think it’s not. This whole thing came out of me saying that how detached people are treating this is gross. Them saying they weren’t detached, saying that long term this is better, and if we lose lives to save more later it’s fine. They kept ignoring, at the time, that what they were proposing was unnecessary loss of life and destruction of lives and advocating for it while having so much money none of this crisis is going to touch them for possibly years and certainly not before January. It’s too late to change course now to stop unnecessary loss of lives and destruction of lives, the question becomes how to mitigate it. Each day that’s now lost is more fuel on the fire. There was no trolley problem before August 1. There is now.

They also keep revising the facts on the ground to say something I never did. Doing nothing was catastrophic, we’re now very much looking like absolutely nothing will get done before the election, and it’s absolutely uncertain we will win the election due to how much planned cheating there will be. AKA, those three things create max carnage. Now, if they come up with a bill that basically does what Markey wants, says no one can be evicted for back rent incurred during the interim of something passing, then that reduces carnage a ton. As of now, we’re in the worst of the beginning stages of it. It’s up to the pandemic, employers, and landlords to mitigate that. These are not the things anyone should be wanting to depend on.

If we win in November, it absolutely will not be because of any of these inaction strategies, it will be in spite of that. I want everyone here to understand that crystal clearly. If these people would have just admitted they were thinking of this as an EV decision with no clear outcome, while also trying to score as many political points as possible, to the detriment of the most vulnerable being thrown away, there would have been no argument. The argument is over how them saying they’re doing this to save lives comes across.

I know you own how you feel about this situation, and I appreciate you for it. I don’t respect these others over how they’re treating it, especially with how dismissively they’ve treated me over actually caring about minimizing both short and long term suffering.

I don’t think you’d be on the list but I don’t remember everything you’ve said in the thread. You are probably one of the people who most applies to NotBruceZ’s post if you’re on that side.

Im on the fucking record being for passing a “skinny bill” as long as the main pillars of the HEROES Act weren’t stripped. I guess that makes me a monster.

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