WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate has confirmed 48 of President Donald Trump’s nominees at once, voting for the first time under new rules to begin clearing a backlog of executive branch positions that had been delayed by Democrats.
Frustrated by the stalling tactics, Senate Republicans moved last week to make it easier to confirm large groups of lower-level, non-judicial nominations. Democrats had forced multiple votes on almost every one of Trump’s picks, infuriating the president and tying up the Senate floor.
The new rules allow Senate Republicans to move multiple nominees with a simple majority vote — a process that would have previously been blocked with just one objection. The rules don’t apply to judicial nominations or high-level Cabinet posts.
“Republicans have fixed a broken process,” Thune said ahead of the vote.
The Senate voted 51-47 to confirm the four dozen nominees. Thune said that those confirmed on Thursday had all received bipartisan votes in committee, including deputy secretaries for the Departments of Defense, Interior, Energy and others.
Among the confirmed are Jonathan Morrison, the new administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Guilfoyle is a former California prosecutor and television news personality who led the fundraising for Trump’s 2020 campaign and was once engaged to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
For not taking action when they had the majorities.
Seems like a fair criticism.
And electorally, their inaction cost them. FDR’s popularity rose because he did shit. There’s this view democrats have that they only have limited political capital and they have to choose where to ‘spend it’, but it just doesn’t work that way.
Yep. Republicans have the rabid following that they do because they accomplish tasks. Horrible, fucked up, stupid tasks that should never have even been tabled for discussion, but they get them done. 99% of Democrat messaging my entire lifetime has been “We’re gonna do [X]! Oh, wait, no, we can’t do [X] because we don’t have a supermajority. Shucks. Well, we’ll surely get 'em next time if you just vote for me again!” and people are, understandably, getting fucking tired of that. Especially when these same Dem voters watch every single conservative election cycle jam through abject bullshit without pushback. If they can get these things done then why can’t you? Why can Trump loot my 401k and Medicaid directly into his own pockets but Obama couldn’t enact universal health care? Why do we only ever ratchet toward the right?
Democrats have been chasing the mythical “centrist swing voter” for decades while voters have increasingly polarized into left vs right and the centrists have evaporated. Anyone who remains a centrist, now, isn’t even going to go vote because politics clearly do not play any part in their lives.
We now have the additional problem of the rabid MAGA crowd being so vehemently anti-Democrat that not only would they never vote blue no matter what they were promised, they’re statistically likely to go make attempts on the lives of Democratic officials or those running for office. So anyone who wants to run as a Democrat with an actual progressive platform are putting double the number of targets on themselves.
I think the only real way forward is a third party, one that can sidestep our red vs blue team sports mentality and say look, things are pretty bad for everyone right now. You don’t have to vote for a Democrat or a Republican to make things better. You can come vote for us instead, we’ll get this train back on track and you don’t have to go tell the boys that you voted for a Democrat
…But then our problem becomes making this third party actually electable, which has historically been a huge problem in America.
Honestly, the democratic brand is so tainted the the left really should embrace a strategy of running independents in solid red states. They’re receptive to a Bernie style message (tell them big Ag is trying to buy your farm, go big on right to repair so John Deere can’t screw you on parts, tell them that Medicare for all is actually good for small businesses that can’t compete on health care, etc), but after decades of right wing propaganda you can’t do anything under a democratic banner in those places (especially since the democratic party would put their thumb on the scale for the centrist guy in a primary).
I mean it’s 100% fair criticism, honestly. The part where it falls down for me is where the solution always seems to be “Don’t vote for Democrats!” (and then leaves the room, walking proudly)
Almost everyone in Washington is a piece of shit, although the Republicans are much worse. If you want to have another FDR, you have to have another several decades of labor movement before that, fighting for change from the bottom up. And then the political class is the last to come around, and they can lock in and extend some of the changes you fought for. “Democrats are POS” is mostly true. “Let’s get less engaged to politics / It doesn’t matter who wins the election” is a fucking horrifying reaction and plan to cope with that and make it better.
I’ve heard many people on Lemmy say that they’re not planning to engage with the electoral system until the Democrats get better on their own. All I can say to that strategy is, better start looking around for where to move to that’ll give you the best shot at having a pretty comfortable ICE facility to call home going forward. And if you identify as any kind of anarchist / Marxist / anything like that, if you are at all engaged with any kind of counterculture or activism and you’re still in the US, you should probably be making plans to leave, because for you it will probably be much much worse.
They expect Democrats to cater to people who don’t bother to vote because nothing is ever good enough.
“Bold strategy Cotton. We’ll see how it works out for them.”
Considering the Democrats are a minority in every single branch of government, I’d say its a bold strategy on their part to continually ignore their own base in favor of the Republican base.
The base that doesn’t vote for them?
Correct, the republican base does not and has never voted for a democratic candidate in meaningful numbers. However, trying to be republican-lite does a great job of decreasing turnout with your own base.
There’s that whole thing about everything in the US taking this horrifying downwards turn right around 1970, by all these different metrics, and there’s not really an obvious reason for it. I actually have one speculative theory on that: I think that in the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago cops beat the fuck out of a lot of the most passionate and engaged leftist activists the country had out in the street, and the lesson they took away from that (sorta reasonably, even though the Chicago cops certainly were not Democrats) was “fuck the whole political system then, I don’t care, I’m out and fuck you.” McGovern suffered his absolutely heartbreaking shutout in 1972, and the Democrats just stopped winning elections completely for the next 20 years, and eventually they learned their lesson and became Republicans. We went from JFK and LBJ to Clinton, and the new era of 1990s / 2000s horrors was born with no left representation anywhere in Washington.
So yeah, I agree with you. There’s not really any reason to think that anyone in Washington would react to the electoral disengagement of the left by moving any direction other than right, and I think there is a good argument for a strong precedent of them moving far right and the whole country getting fucked over a barrel up to and including the present day because of it.
Clinton only won in 92 because Ross Perot split the vote. Obama (and biden) won because people thought they were going to help them, and were further disaffected when they turned out to be republican-lite. You can’t pretend dems moving right does anything but further disaffect their base. You have to really really loath your base to lose against a party as malicious and incompetent as the republicans.
Never change guys
Never change
Fair, and pointless.
It’s not pointless. If we all complain when conservatives flush the rules down the toilet and kick open Pandora’s box, then do nothing when liberals lick their corporate donors’ toes while fretting over the propriety of the tiniest changes, then the Overton window keeps moving right and we’re all fucked.
The original complaint is absolutely pointless. It’s bitching about what happened literal decades ago.