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According to several reports, Republicans reportedly threatened to wield the filibuster against Biden’s cabinet nominees and legislative agenda if Democrats called witnesses in the impeachment trial. The reasoning goes that Biden and the Democrats want to get something accomplished, so they caved to the threat of the Republicans to immobilize the government.
That’s probably true, but I still don’t think that is the real reason the Democrats didn’t call witnesses. If they had called witnesses, they would have destroyed the GOP. The tendrils in this were not just between Trump and his mob. The tendrils also connected to about 10 people we know of for certain in Congress who were not just complicit, but collaborative in this attempted overthrow of the government. There were also tendrils into the Capitol police, and possibly the Pentagon and the National Guard. But we know for sure Congress and the police. The damage the GOP would have sustained from eyewitnesses and participants would have driven a fatal wedge between the Corporate/Business wing of the party and its fascist QAnon/MAGA populist wing. And that would have finished off the political power of the right. The consequence of that would have been that the the progressive wing of the Democrat party would have filled that power vacuum, and the Democrats prefer Republicans to the progressives. They’ve made that abundantly clear over the past decade. We have all seen that the Democrats punch left, and negotiate right. And destroying the Republican party would have inevitably led to all kinds of things: Green New Deal (a real one, too), Wall St reform, Medicare for All, increased wages and benefits for workers, stronger unions, less imperialism abroad, reduced police state, all kinds of things that the financiers of the Democrat party do not want to see happen. The Democrats NEED the Republicans so that THEY can be the leftward edge of the economic and political spectrums.
That’s my view as well, Zooey. Well said.
The Dems also need the GOP so they can play their “Not as bad as the Republicans” game. I don’t think it’s a winning strategy, but they seem convinced that it is. I think if they hadn’t gone that route, we never would have seen the rise of the new right in America. No Reagan, Bush, Tea Party or Trump. The Dems could have stopped all of that from even starting if they had stuck with FDR-style governance at least, updated to suit circumstances as they unfolded.
To short-cut all of this, if they had been the party of AOCs, from the 1960s on, the right never could have mustered a majority to push through Thatcherism, the Chicago School and so on from there. It’s really in the absence of proactive, progressive governance that the far-right can and often does take hold.
Capitalism atomizes society. Turns us into competing monads of flailing desires. Which means, without a strong public sector, actively trying to improve lives, far too many Americans feel left out, alone, on their own, and in eternal competition with their fellow Americans and the rest of the world. Capitalism creates a dog eat dog world on purpose, cuz it profits off of that. It won’t survive if we all wake up and work collectively to better our conditions and society.
The role of the two parties is to keep us separated, while gaslighting us into thinking we’re a part of something bigger.
I wonder how many Dems or Republicans, at the individual level, know this is happening, promote it, go along with it, or fight against it.
I don’t pin my hopes on either major party doing the right thing regarding the environment. I know they won’t. To me, this is all about a comparison between the GOP and the Dems, not between what’s being done and what needs to be done.
Relatively speaking, the Dems are better on the environment, by a significant degree, if we judge just the two.
Not “good.” Not close to good.
But better. Enough to save lives and forestall End Times.
And until we get actual ecosocialists in power, that’s the best we can do, IMO. Better, not good.
I know to take everything written about the two parties with a grain of salt, but this is what the Guardian has to say so far about Biden’s enviro record/plans:
Republicans, on the other hand, are sticking with Trump no matter the consequences because they simply can’t imagine a world in which they have to appeal to anything beyond white identity to win elections.
Another point of interest here is that the Democrats aren’t calling in witnesses. The GOP was shitting itself at the prospect, and my guess is that is because witnesses would have testified about who knew what and when, exposing the complicity (or outright support) of the Capitol police and several GOP congressmen, both in the House and Senate. It would have ripped the GOP in half, and decimated the party. But they would not have gone down without taking as many Democrats as possible down with them by bringing up ANYTHING they had on them, no matter how irrelevant to the Jan. 6 incident. I suspect the Dems caved on this in order to preserve “stability.” But that’s just armchair speculation. They have certainly been very careful to confine the case to Trump alone, however, and even tried to make the case that the GOP is not responsible as a whole.
I think the Dems did an excellent job overall with their presentation, but witnesses likely would have made it better. You make good points by saying they may have feared some sort of general exposure of non-germane issues. Who knows?
But my earlier take has only been solidified. Trump should have been arrested on January 6th, along with Nosferatu, Gosar, Cawthorne, Taylor-Greene, Boebert, Gohmert and anyone who worked for/with Trump to foment the coup. In fact, it’s appalling to me still that he’s able to walk about as if he didn’t use violence to cling to power. He did. And there’s not a shadow of doubt about that for me.
Whether folks despise Biden, see him as “meh,” or support him, is irrelevant. This is about Trump’s endless criminality and sociopathic actions. Not throwing him in jail for what he’s done just sets the table for a smarter, more clever, more “subtle” coup leader in the future, and that’s going to come from the far-right again.
That means POCs and “the left” will be in even more (existential) danger next time.
Well, after two days of mulling it over, I still think what I said on the 28th is brilliant. It’s in the stratosphere above all other sports commentary on the Rams. I mean it’s as if I were . . . um . . . well, divinely inspired, or something.
But I’ll add this, too. This all should have been handled “in house,” and we shouldn’t know about any of it, until after a trade or trades. It’s just not professional to blab this all over the place, though I’m not sure who said what to whom.
I’m also wondering, in connection with the threads about coaching losses, if the real issue is that McVay/Snead don’t seem to like hiring from within all that much. That can tend to kill morale too. Zooey might be onto something about staff not particularly liking to work for McVay/Snead, but I’m hoping it’s just the lack of insider hiring. That can be fixed.
Who knows? Has the hype gone to ‘ees ‘ed? As some British bloke likely never said. Or is this all just an upstart mountain within a much older mountain range?
Anyway, I think we’ll learn a hell of a lot more during the Combine and FA.
Hope all is well with youze guys.
