Fucking Feinstein
Sheās not the only negatively useless dem fossil ofc.
Correct, but sheās the worst.
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Like seriously what needs to happen for her to retire. Itās just shocking how evil and shitty these people are
Lets play the āwhat would Mitch doā game.
We donāt even have to wonder, Elaine Chao has been grifting like a boss.
2 hours and zero Fine-stein jokes, Iām disappointed
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I was thinking how do you pressure her enablers? Like find out who works in her office and Admo them.
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There are useful ones (āDemocratic Partyā members - Iām not counting Bernie)?
Has anyone bought up taking her name off of a SF elementary school?
write down the date, everyone. Victor and I agree on something. That Chamath guy is truly terrible. And of course I now have a bunch of my āprogressiveā friends posting about him and saying how great he is. ugh.
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Yeah that thing about the Warriors was extremely obnoxious. But I still enjoy him sticking it to that CNBC anchor.
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turns out my silicon valley ceo is probably good friends with him and gonna stan for him. ugh. working in tech/vc really messes you up on taxes/education/regulation.
clowning an anchor is always welcome, but the contradiction is pretty apparent when he both praises free market for businesses and on the other hand wants regulators to take away ability to sell short.
just fucking admit you are betting on pieces of paper and not the economy, and once you have tres commas the advantage is structural. why does saying that hurt your masculinity?
Yeah heās just as full of shit as the anchor, which is what I like about it. Heās basically just doing the anchorās shtick right back at him. Clearly WSB is not doing rock-solid fundamental analysis, nor does GME have anything to do with fundamental analysis if they were. But then he goes into - itās a spectrum BS lol.
The only takeaway for me was calling out big hedge-fund short-sellers as being the company-wrecking predators they are. I hate vulture capitalists and I hate predatory short-sellers.
In all, 13 members sought waivers to serve on the Financial Services Committee, for ten open slots. Itās virtually without precedent on the other exclusive committees that members seek a waiver to serve elsewhere. Financial Services is supposed to be an important committee, but nearly all of the membership splits their duties.
Only two didnāt get the waiverāPorter and Wexton. The latter is serving on Appropriations, another exclusive committee. Only Porter didnāt serve on another exclusive committee, tried to stay on Financial Services, and was rebuffed.
In other words, itās easy to look at the committee makeup and conclude that Porter was singled out. You can supplement that with how Porter was treated when on the committee.
Porterās hard-charging style clearly rankled Waters, the committee chair. When Porter began to use visual aids like whiteboards and posters to make her points in hearings, Waters sided with Republicans on multiple occasions and forced her to stop. Later, when Porter played an audio clip at a hearing about debt collectors, Waters publicly admonished her: āWill the gentlelady please refrain from disrupting this committee?ā
More critically, a review of legislation from the last Congress shows that not a single bill Porter authored passed in the committee. Porter had an incredible impact through hearings, even stimulating changes in policy, but she was obviously frozen out of the lawmaking side of the committeeās work.
Watersās office did not respond to a request for comment about any of this. But the overriding conclusion from this analysis is that Waters isnāt interested in any deviation from her committee priorities. She has been careful to cultivate an image as the most progressive chair in Financial Services history. But the āAuntie Maxineā PR breaks down upon more careful inspection.
Waters stacks her committee with part-timers to more easily control the agenda. She pushes bipartisan legislation that wonāt rock the boat. After the 2018 midterms, a lack of interest in the committee allowed a handful of progressives to join it. But when one of them, a consumer protection expert with deep knowledge of financial regulation, someone who previously said that financial services āis my life,ā wanted to use the committeeās power to stand up for ordinary people and restructure financial markets to end the ripoffs? Well, Waters canāt have that.
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Maxine Waters is an enormous piece of shit and a classic mega-corrupt eDem.
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The filibuster itself has its roots in a seemingly sensical bit of parliamentary, āRobertās Rules of Orderā, procedure. Typically in any given governing body, someone makes a motion, thereās a second, and then thereās discussion about the motion. The motion is then voted up or down by simple majority.
However, it usually requires some sort of super-majority to end discussion on the motion. Otherwise, the majority could simply immediately vote to end discussion right after the motion is brought up, which is seen as anti-democratic.
If someone doesnāt want to the motion to pass, then they can continue endlessly ādiscussingā the motion and it never gets voted on. Now most functioning government bodies (like a school board), simply give the chair discretion to make a determination that the member is filibustering, and just call the question.
In the modern Senate, they donāt actually require anyone to engage in discussion. Procedurally they just cannot vote on the bill until there has been a vote to close discussion. If you cannot pass the motion to close discussion, then you cannot vote on the bill.
So this is yet another area that you can get around the Manchins and Sinemas in their hard line about ending the filibuster. You can simply āreformā the filibuster to require the senators to actually continue engaging in discussion, or give the parliamentarian discretion to say that the discussion is no longer relevant to the bill (i.e. reading Green Eggs & Ham).
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This works when people are generally reasonable and operating in good faith, but I donāt think it quite captures why Manchin types are opposed to nuking the filibuster: his objection isnāt about limiting discussion since he already knows that no votes will be changed that way. He merely thinks it should require 60 votesāan impossible hurdleāto pass anything that isnāt about keeping the lights on. And by keeping the lights on I mean keep essential govāt running, enriching corporations, and overfunding the military which are the only things both sides agree on.
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Put another way: the idea that an actual (small d) democratic party needs 60 votes to pass any legislation of consequence in a body as fundamentally rigged as the U.S. Senate is fucking preposterous. Thereās obvious asymmetry because the (small f) fascist, right-wing minority party theyāre up against is perfectly happy tabling anything voters want. Itās the linchpin in their self-fulfilling prophecy that BiG goVeRnMeNt DoEsNāt WoRk!!!1!.
Letās go back to 2018:
Dems: 53,085,728 votes (59.3%) - Result: Lost 2 seats
GOP: 34,987,109 votes (39.1%) - Result: Gained 2 seats
So try to imagine what a āsafeā 60 votes for legislation that is extremely popular with voters would look like. Even when Dems could briefly touch 60 votes they fucking folded because the Lierberman / Manchin / Sinema types are saboteurs-in-waiting. The actual price of the ticket is more than 60 and perhaps much higher than even people here might imagine. For example, 62 today takes care of Manchin, Sinema, and Feinstein, but it only gets us there if the gridlock calculus is static. If not, then it might mean we could get to 62, put up that bill for public option (not even single payer) only to find out Dick Durbin is a no.
Media will allow Manchin to keep playing his Manchin in the Middle character who talks about bipartisanship and not forcing agenda on the other side like heās not doing word salad performance art. Dems with a 50+1 Senate majority have an enormous fucking mandate from the American people to pass everything.
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