It’s built around all these bizarre ideas like “consent of the governed” and such…can’t have notions like that getting out in the wild or people might actually start expecting their government to be representative of themselves.
One issue with this essay, I agree we need to find creative solutions because the status quo cannot stand, but invoking Lincoln and LBJ is misleading. Both had supermajorities (Lincoln mainly because the Southern states had no representatives in Congress anymore). Using the bully pulpit was enough because they could wrangle the votes they needed from within that large pool of votes.
Working with the thinnest of majorities is a completely different beast and there really doesn’t seem to be any straightforward way like “the bully pulpit” to get similar results when 1 or 2 members of your party can hold the whole process hostage to their own whims. It’s just a different ballgame, as much as we might wish it were synonymous.
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See? Creative solutions right there.
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Yes! And that notion also forgets that LBJ was working with an entirely different Republican Party, one in which many GOP senators supported civil rights and one that was willing to help impeach a Republican president a decade later. The current GOP wouldn’t impeach a president who incited and cheered on an insurrection.
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Obama? Sure they would.
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Always best to divorce before you Hate one another and you can’t agree over the kids…
Always best to divorce before you kill one another.
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No alimony payments with the other option…
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He also had a lot of goodwill after Kennedy. At least a couple years
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As the blue states of America pay the bills mostly, we’d probably be stuck paying some bills after the separation.
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Again, see above post.
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But also a whole bunch of people who didn’t trust him as far as they could throw him – including almost all of the Civil Rights leadership. (With plenty of good reasons.)
Say it with me all democrats
Voting Rights / Court reform
Court Reform / Voting Rights
Voting Right / Voting Rights
Cort Reform / Court Reform
Everything else is a waste of time if democracy burns in 2 / 4 years
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This is not to imagine a superhero president. It is, however, to demand a president who understands what Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson did, and who uses the bully pulpit of the presidency to command public attention and demand action.
Lincoln gave the Cooper Union speech and it helped make him President… I can’t think of any Johnson speech that was as much of a line-drawing exercise as that.
If Biden got up in front of the cameras and said that the Republican Party is determined “to rule or ruin in all events,” how would he follow up if Sinema and Manchin remained intransigent? The Republicans are not likely to repeat the Confederate mistake of calling home their Senators and Congresspeople.
Sadly I think we’re going to see the soft Biden when we need him to act ruthlessly.
I agree, we’ll see if time has passed him by.
A reasonable point. But, like, WHEN, then? It gets late early out there.
But The Walk Must Be As Aggressive As The Talk.
Jesse, you have any brilliant ideas?
The Marcellus shale is a 100 trillion-cubic-foot gas resource that has a lot to do with Manchin’s behavior. It provides the best hydrocarbon argument in the shift away from coal, but there is a real danger that gas demand and prices will fall in a decarbonizing future where the fossil fuels stay in the ground.
So far Manchin has been allowed to get away with conflating coal and gas, but they are different fuels. Blue hydrogen is not great, but assuring it a future in WV may be the answer, a least for a couple decades. That could then be piggybacked on to a green hydrogen agenda.
Very true.
But we should have went in on voting rights before the infrastructure headache.
I think it would have need easier to find a filibuster carveout on Voting rights before the bickering we have had
That would require buy-in from Manchin that voting rights really are on the table and need to be addressed and I’m not certain he’s invested in that. I think he’s much more likely to be moved on infrastructure (and he’s already being pretty dodgy on that topic).