Democrats have only hardened their position as the government shutdown enters its 23rd day, leaving Republican majorities in Congress with few answers — and many criticisms.
For the 12th time, Senate Democrats blocked the Republican Party’s government funding legislation this week without a single senator switching his or her vote.
Just three Democratic caucus members voted for the bill: John Fetterman, D-Pa.; Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.; and Angus King, I-Maine. That means Republicans are still five votes short of the 60-vote threshold to ensure passage of the bill, just as they have been since before the government shut down 23 days ago.
Democratic voters had pressured their party to take a more confrontational posture toward Trump in the shutdown battle. The new stance may be paying off with the party’s base.
I was just telling my best friend that I think this shutdown is going to go on for six to eight months. Possibly to the point where the pot boils over and the government gets thrown away because it was closed for so long.
At least, one can dream that after months of bitter pain and suffering, we might possibly get people who care about others running a government. But that’s a whole hell of a serving of pain and suffering before we get there.
Fuck it, let’s general strike this place. Medicare for all with the govt reopen and all those critical services back or nothing ever happens again.
I feel like a dramatic dissolution should be a possibility considered, but I don’t really expect us to come out of it with a new people-focused government. Likely if the budget never gets passed Trump decides he doesn’t need Congress and just starts spending money as he wishes. He’ll even start with funding something the people want, then once it’s established that he can just spend money and no one will stop him, he’ll move on to the instruments of oppression. When the military is directly being paid by the president, we’ll see how much of their oath is really to the Constitution.
Is that a real possibility? How does that actually work? Is there a new election triggered automatically if the government was shut down for 6-8 months?
If not, you will most likely be waiting and hoping forever, all the while things just keep getting worse.
Governments are the product of the people. There is no divine or natural laws that triggers “an election”. A government is simply created from thin air when a group of people (any group of people) get together and say: fuck the old system, we are putting that in the trash and signing a new social contract.
Of course, there’s virtually never unanimity of agreement over this social contract in one geographic area, so that social contract is only as binding as the force used to put it in effect.
Realistically, 6 months+ of government shutdown in the US will likely cause a collapse of the USA as a single unified federal entity, since the federal government effectively rots. At that point, all bets are off. A fracture of the US is very possible.
I assumed they asked because in many countries, it would legally trigger an election.
In parliamentary democracies the budget is automatically a vote of confidence. If the government can’t pass it, an election occurs. Nothing shuts down because the system is still operating on the existing budget that was already passed.
Is that written into laws? No. But you know who made the original government? People who decided to make their own shit.
We have more information and better access to new decisions. We can simply decide to start over collectively and start once again. We don’t have to do things because that’s the way they have always been (in our individual lifetime).
These are the vibes I’m getting
I will accept literally any other ideology before fascism. A monarch, a communist dictatorship, a tyranny of the majority, pre-fascist crony capitalism, futarchist prediction markets, primitivist tribes, machine rule, you name it. Go nuts. The bad ideas we haven’t tried might not end up with secret police disappearing people.
Communist dictatorship is off the table, too. I mean, there is China’s communism that probably isn’t quiet as bad. Damn, we’ve seriously lost ground here. Anyways, markets, communism, etc, are all based on trading labor for resources. We’re quickly approaching a world where robots are doing much of the labor. Humans who are not rich, selling sex, or some other service not acheivable with robotics are going to be very fucked.
IMHO at least the communists want something good, that sometimes results in fascism and sometimes gets crushed. The fascists just want something bad and often succeed.
I get it, I just don’t think leveling the building full of asbestos is the best plan of action. If that metaphor makes sense.
Edit: gah I couldn’t extend that in a way that wasn’t absurd. Nice metaphor bro.
No, that’s not a thing that happens.
No, there are far, far too many people who are not just ready and willing to seize on any power vacuum, no matter how small, but are actively trying to create those opportunities.
There is nobody in charge above a nation. There is nobody going to come turn out the lights and clean the place up if we can’t manage this. The will of the people has eroded, and unless we all get VERY organized, and I don’t mean protests with funny signs, we’re stuck with this.
All the Internet surveillance will give any opposition a heads up on organizing.
There should be no reason to worry that they know if anyone is organizing, because it should be a plan that requires only numbers and expects only political change.
Where we need leadership and planning however is in getting ahead of the sabotage and dissonance that will plague such operations with or without the enemy knowing about them, the provocateurs, the bad-faith actors, and of course the expected problems we always face on the left, which is a vastly splintered and wildly diverse mess of groups, each fiercely principled and educated and ready to stand their ground and argue and debate superficial or distracting issues until nobody wants anything to do with any of it anymore.
We need populism, we need liberals, we need actual political leaders involved from the ground up. This is why we need to start right now by building communities. Pushing each other to be more social, to get to know the politics of where you live, who is running for what, what their views are, who they actually represent. If we made a more unified effort across the whole country to start pushing pride in our communities and our representatives, we could take it all back in just a few cycles, it IS doable, it’s happened in the past, it can happen again but we have to do hard things. Harder than just showing up with protest signs, but that’s a good start.
I like to remind people that Mussolini was not captured by a band of plucky rebels who managed to push people out into the streets. Mussolini was deposed and arrested by his own government and the king, then he handed to the people to do as they wanted. Sometimes we need support in high places, and all this starts with picking wise leadership unless you want to do it yourself.
Generally but not always with violence
Lovely notion, but realistically… who is going to do the “throwing away?” There’s no system above our government. We don’t have a deal with Britain that they’ll come back if we can’t manage our country. There’s no real such thing as law above a nation.
Instead we have thousands of aspiring political leaders on both sides who will see ANY vacancy of power as an opportunity. They’re jockeying right now like Mad Max behind the scenes, but instead of tricked out cars with spikes, it’s committees, delegations and policy wonkery to get prepared for the midterms which are still a year away.
I am only saying all this because you and your friend’s sentiment is common and needs to be adjusted… Nobody is coming.
Who would throw it away? Most likely the states, possibly the military, and least likely but possible, a popular movement of the people.
In the event of the collapse of the federal government the states still have their individual governments. It’d be painful everywhere and especially painful in most red states but we wouldn’t necessarily have a total political collapse.
I do agree that it’s extremely unlikely to happen.
The military certainly has no desire to try to run a country this large and complicated, that only works out in smaller, less developed nations and even then they usually hand it over as fast as possible to a new government. I don’t see a populist uprising on either side of politics actually forming any kind of movement with power either, people are too comfortable and too checked-out from politics broadly. Sure, we see huge no-kings type protests, but these are more like weekend activities than real action, a demonstration, not a revolution.
People want narratives more than they want to actually set fire to buildings and break a system that has been keeping them comfortable. They want to participate in something that they think will make their lives immediately better if they’re going to expend this kind of energy and risk their entire life and job.
More realistically, we will see a gradual increase in redistricting fights until representation in congress and senate becomes just for show and ceremony, meaning that if every state can just make up the value of their electorate maps, there’s no point in having federal representation and some states will gradually start to renegotiate what they’re contributing in federal taxes.
(This will lead to election reform, but not in a good way.)
From there, you will see states that make more money like California and New York start forming their own partnerships with neighboring states and negotiating international trade without the US government. These alliances will go on to start forming new agreements and documents between each other, designating regions by setting their own tax and trade rules, and eventually these regions or alliances of states will basically draft their own constitutions as they start to build their own military forces for defense and political capital, likely using existing local bases and forces which will be slowly re-incorporated into the new government systems.
These things happen painfully slow, or blessedly slow depending on how fast you want to see the states crumble.
You would almost certainly see some of the states refederalizing very quickly if that happened.
I guess you missed the whole last paragraph I mentioned where we can do a general strike and start helping ourselves. But sure, whatever you say bub.
But your entire last paragraph, on the practicality and realism spectrum, ranks just a bit lower than “worthless, idle wishful thinking”.
It’s no more or less serious than if you’d said we should all just join together in song and force aliens to show up to fix all our problems.