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.
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