It presents a slight problem when the ones they’re bringing in to deal with the shitty politicians are the people who paid them to be shitty in the first place.
You mean like HR 1 For the People Act which passed the house twice but got filibustered and 30 years of campaign finance reform starting with a 1995 bill outlawing large donations (which was passed in 2002 but stricken down by the scotus 5:4 as the basis for Citizens United) that
*checks notes
Republicans refuse to pass?
This is a partisan issue, bothsidesing this is pure ignorance. Get 60 Dem senators and watch it get fixed.
Doesn’t matter. Everything is a conspiracy. Everything is the fault of some mysterious cabal.
Sir, excuse me, sir, pardon me you almost left behind this very important /s. These things are mandatory, wouldn’t want to lose it.
with a 1995 bill outlawing large donations (which was passed in 2002
That only went thru due to Enron crashing, and was a bipartisan effort from McCain and Feingold that was already in the works, they just didn’t have the numbers till Enron’s checks stopped…
And it directly led to PACs…
Two senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Russell Feingold, had a bill to ban soft money. When Enron collapsed in scandal in 2001, McCain and Feingold had enough support to make the bill law.
Feingold addressed the Senate just before the vote on final passage. “In this moment, we can show the American people that we are the Senate that they want us to be,” he said.
McCain-Feingold pushed soft money out of the national parties, and a lot of it landed in new bank accounts at small nonprofit groups. These were groups that couldn’t coordinate with candidates or party committees, but that shared the same partisan agenda.
https://www.npr.org/2009/12/25/121872329/decade-brought-change-to-campaign-finance
And the wealthy immediately struck back.
In 2004, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth crippled the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. And in 2008 groups challenged the integrity of both presidential contenders and plenty of congressional candidates. The attacks are meaner, but these groups — unlike the political parties — aren’t accountable to anyone.
That is widely recognized as when Republicans went off the deep end.
Get 60 Dem senators and watch it get fixed.
Don’t assume everyone with a D by their name is on your side just because at the national level these days everyone with an R is on the other side.
If we need 60 votes to fix this, and we have 60+, expect just as many to act like Manchin as needed to bring that number down to 59.
We need to treat primaries serious so that if the day comes and we have 60, it gets done.
Because if we have 60 and it doesn’t get done, it’ll crash turnout.
Just like it did when we were told Biden and 50 senators could get shit done.
It wasn’t exactly Bipartisan, it was every single Democrat and also 11 Republicans.
That is widely recognized as when Republicans went off the deep end.
Obviously it wasn’t an overnight switch, although my phrasing is more often used for a sudden change, it was a gradual one over decades so I should have used something else.
But Democrats being better than Republicans on average for decades doesn’t mean every Democrat is good now. And every Republican being shit now doesn’t mean that was always the case.
This was a riskily bad meme.
There is a truism as old as civilization itself. I subscribe to it.
If you want to know who is most responsible, you need only find the one who profited most.
There may be rare exceptions, but they are rare exceptions. Our elected officials are just the owner’s revolving door, well bribed middle managers. The vast majority of them never rise to the level of oligarch.
Been happening since Watergate and the right decided instead of running good politicians, they’d make a propaganda machine to convince their voters that down is really up.
This allowed them to dive even further into corruption, and take a bunch of dirty money that helped them in elections.
The wealthy elites quickly realized political bribes were so cheap, there was no reason to bribe only one of the only two options.
That brought the rise of neoliberalism, and both parties only caring about the wealthy and deregulating campaign finance and journalistic integrity because both allows them to take more bribes.
Kamala had a ~$1,500,000,000 campaign in like a month and a half.
There is zero reason a campaign (much less one against a candidate as bad as trump) should ever cost that much. The money and time of modern campaigns isn’t spent on getting votes, it’s spent on raising more donations from the rich. They never reach a point where they meet the fundraising goal, even after the election I was getting spam asking to donate to Kamala/DNC. Because the “victory fund” nonsense gets rolled over to the next candidate chosen by the party before primaries even start.
Whoever the party backs in 2028 will be able to use that to compete in the Dem primary.
The whole thing is completely fucked, and it’s a game we literally can’t win with the DNC if they just keep doubling down. Their chair election is in about a month. Depending on how they vote we’ll see if the party reinvents itself, or if it’s truly a lost cause and we need a new party. One who’s focus is on getting votes and not as much money as possible
