The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Classic-Xer]

(02-05-2021, 08:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(02-05-2021, 09:55 AM)David Horn Wrote:

1. SCOTUS has no role in an impeachment, but may rule on the legitimacy of impeaching after a person leaves office.  On the merits: ruling that a political act is moot means the court believes it has a say in the matter.  I seriously doubt that interfering makes any sense to them-- any of them.
   
2. History will judge the recalcitrant GOP Senators harshly and the few who spoke-up very kindly.  By then, they will all be dead.  Short term: let's hope that sanity returns, and soon.   
   
3. The GOP is already coming apart at the seams.  If 2022 is a big Dem year, and that's certainly possible, then Katie bar the door.
   

1. This could be critical. The Supreme Court is almost never the first court to hear any case. It has never had to rule on a pattern of unconstitutional behavior by any elected official, Cabinet secretary, senior military officer, or director of an agency of law enforcement or intelligence. It will let Congress complete the task. 

2. One of the primary characteristics of Biden is that he likes things quiet. He has little use for political theater. People start to think, and the more that they think of the events of January 6, the more awful those events will look. Remember well that the insurrection used symbols and rhetoric in broad use at the time. Will the insurrection seem a logical conclusion of those symbols and rhetoric or will they seem to have been used by people who simply went too far? Time will tell. 

3. Ordinarily the midterm elections are disasters for the Party that wields the Presidency. The pattern that has held suggests that the GOP gains about twenty seats in the House and the majority... and six seats in the Senate. America would be ungovernable again, and Republicans would have a solid chance of winning the Presidency "back" with promises of jobs and tax cuts. There will be jobs, of course, but they will not be well remunerated. 

But -- this is late in a 4T. What is political wisdom going into a 4T often becomes nonsense. The Republican Party has taken a deep drive into Qraziness as one can expect the political culture to more reflect values of the majority of the Millennial Generation. Groups such as the Proud Boys (now deemed a terrorist group in Canada, and probably soon elsewhere -- I'm picking the European Union, Mexico, the UK, the Arab League, and Israel to do much the same soon) will become objects of derision. Political careers can end for picking the wrong side in the Insurrection.

This said, Donald Trump, never one to hold precedent or protocol in any higher regard than constraints on his sex life or sleazy practices in business, has demonstrated the necessity of character, precedent, and protocol. Practically all Democrats come out of this mess with no culpability.

We are at the apparent start of a new Skowronek cycle that comes after another enshrines a political ethos that at first gets some desirable and even necessary results at comparatively low costs but that toward its end gets diminishing returns. Toward the end of that cycle (and the recent neo-liberal one that begins with "Morning in America" and ends with the disgrace of Donald Trump) becomes stale or shows its bad side. The New Deal agenda became stale and lost its constituency due to old age; the neoliberal cycle increasingly showed its faults. If Reagan was able to get youth and industrial workers to lower their expectations in the names of efficiency and profit at the cost of human dignity, then Trump makes a nightmare out of it. 

If the Democratic Party has been slow to catch on to Millennial values, the Republican Party seems to have neglected those values completely. The Millennial Generation, as one can expect of a Civic generation, has tolerance of hierarchy and conformity only for such purposes as saving society from a clear and present danger such as the Confederacy, the Third Reich, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, or Stalinism. Civic generations do not stand for shaky injustice. Let us remember that the role of the GI generation in the demise of segregationist politics; African-Americans who had fought the Jew-baiting racists of the Third Reich could turn against the Klan, and by the mid-1960's, white GI's generally buckled to the calls for civil rights for Southern blacks. Millennial values do not include acquiescence to policies that have been tried and found to not serve their stated purpose.  "Trickle-down" economics have served only economic elites.

You have no dignity left at this point. I take that back, you have whatever dignity there is, whatever remains being associated with the Democratic party these days. Oh well, we'll get to see how much integrity and character that's left and how much of the Democratic party is worth saving, preserving and carrying onward vs letting go of and leaving behind to die along with most of the West.