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Post by the Scribe on Sept 2, 2020 23:12:01 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 28, 2021 21:58:31 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 9, 2021 12:09:14 GMT
The Senate Is Split 50-50, But Democrats Represent 41 Million More People. Republicans Often Control Many More U.S. House Seats Than Their Overall Vote ShareHow Democratic Is American Democracy? Key Pillars Face Stress Testswww.npr.org/2021/06/09/1002593823/how-democratic-is-american-democracy-key-pillars-face-stress-tests June 9, 20215:00 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition MARA LIASSON
6-Minute Listen ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2021/06/20210609_me_how_democratic_is_american_democracy_key_pillars_face_stress_tests.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1014&d=419&p=3&story=1002593823&dl=1&siteplayer=true&size=6715813&dl=1
The U.S. Capitol is seen on the morning of April 29. Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images
The American political tradition enshrines majority rule, with rights for the minority. But some wonder whether the United States is sliding toward minority rule.
More and more Democrats are saying the system is out of whack.
Twice in the last 20 years, their presidential candidate got more votes but lost the election. And now that the 2022 redistricting cycle is beginning, Republicans in many states will be able to get fewer votes but end up with a majority of seats.
In the Senate, many Democrats say a system designed to protect the rights of smaller states has turned into partisan minority rule. According to the Constitution, every state — no matter if it has 1 million people, or 30 million — gets two senators.
But Sen. Brian Schatz, from the small state of Hawaii, says that disparity is growing.
"The way this is starting to work is that elected representatives who collectively have gathered 10 million, maybe 12 million, maybe by the year 2030 30 million fewer votes are going to stack the judiciary and entrench minority rule," Schatz, a Democrat, said during last year's debate about confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. "And so something has to give."
Right now, the Senate is split evenly in half, but the 50 Democratic senators represent 41.5 million more people than the 50 Republican senators.
By 2040, if population trends continue, 70% of Americans will be represented by just 30 senators, and 30% of Americans by 70 senators.
That has lots of implications, like for the Senate filibuster, where a party that represents a shrinking minority of voters can block almost all major legislation. www.npr.org/2021/03/29/981364153/why-possibly-changing-the-filibuster-brings-threats-of-political-nuclear-war
But it also has implications for the Supreme Court, says Jesse Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President.
"You have this sort of turbocharged minority rule," he said. "You have a counter-majoritarian institution chosen by people who were picked by a minority of the citizens. That's not a sustainable model for a representative democracy."
Conservative Republican Brad Smith, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, disagrees. He says the system has worked pretty well because when the framers designed the Senate, they understood that a small state like Rhode Island would never have as much clout as a big state like New York.
"These are the kinds of reasons why at the Constitutional Convention there was the Great Compromise of having one chamber by population and one chamber elected by states," he said. "You know, under that system we've become like a really rich, powerful, wealthy, free country."
And Smith says it's really hard to change because the Senate is enshrined in the Constitution.
But Wegman says this is not what the framers had in mind. For one thing, when they wrote the Constitution, they thought only white men with property could vote. And they certainly couldn't have imagined how the population would grow and sort itself out.
"At the time of the founding, the biggest state was 13 times the size of the smallest state. Today, the biggest state is 70 times the size of the smallest state," he said. "So a few hundred thousand people in Wyoming have as much power as tens of millions of people in California or New York. And I think that violation of majority rule is going to continue to haunt us through the Senate, which is not really alterable in any meaningful way other than by just adding more states."
Democrats don't currently have the votes to grant statehood to Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C., or the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The role of gerrymandering
Then there's the House of Representatives and statehouses around the country, where representation is supposed to be based on population.
But Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University says partisan gerrymandering hasn't just created safe seats for Democrats and Republicans. In many cases, he says, it allows one party to draw district lines that secure its grip on the state legislature — like Wisconsin.
"The map there was drawn by Republicans so that under any reasonable election scenario, they win a majority of the seats," Li said. "So even if they win, say, 47 or 48% percent of the vote statewide, they are likely to get about 60% of the seats. And that's something that's deeply undemocratic."
And the same thing has happened when Republican legislatures draw congressional district lines. "In North Carolina, for example, the map that was drawn gave Republicans 10 out of the state's 13 congressional districts," Li said.
And that's in a state where Democrats get way more than three out of every 13 votes.
Republicans say Democrats partisan gerrymander too. And they say if Democrats were able to win control of more statehouses — something they failed miserably at in 2010 and 2020 — they would be doing the exact same thing.
There are reforms to partisan gerrymandering. Some states have adopted nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Others give the opposition party more input.
Another idea: Congress could add more seats to the House of Representatives. The 435-seat limit was set way back in 1929 when the U.S. population was much smaller. Now, almost every congressional district represents about 760,000 people. A fairer system, reformers say, would be to make more districts, creating more representation.
But Republican Smith thinks all the reforms that Democrats would like to make to the rules governing representation could have unintended consequences because, he says, politics can change very quickly as well.
"It's well within my memory that West Virginia was a lock state for Democrats in presidential elections and Senate elections," he said. "There might be a reason for making these changes. But the reason for making these changes is not the short-term political advantage of the Democratic or Republican Party."
In the past, however, short-term political advantage was generally the main reason changes in the rules have been made. And right now many people in both main parties, for different reasons, think the system isn't fair to them.
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 20, 2021 8:28:55 GMT
Pizza-eating racists hurl anti-Asian slurs at Ramen Lab Eatery after being asked to leave
NextShark Tips 9 subscribers Ramen Lab Eatery's owner, Louis Grayson, sent NextShark the full recorded encounter he and his staff had when confronting the racists.
Ramen Lab Eatery, in Delray Beach, Fla., was trying to close at 11:45 p.m. on Thursday when three white men allegedly showed up and began unstacking chairs, bought pizza from another business and then ate on the property.
The group reportedly started spewing profanities and racial slurs at a female employee and the staff she after “politely” asked them to leave.
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On Sunday, Grayson went to the Delray Beach Police Department to ensure that they had a report and his video evidence. “I wanted to make sure we were taking the right legal actions. [The police] said the best thing to do was put it on the internet since they could not do much with verbal abuse,” he told NextShark.
Grayson said police have assured him that they have the case. As of this writing, one of the interlopers has been identified by an anonymous tipster who saw the video, he said.
Grayson said that while the Asian American community has always faced hate and discrimination, it’s become “more prevalent” with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The difference is that now, with technology and social media, we are able to record and post instantaneously. Hate in the Asian American community has always been an issue and will continue be an issue, and just because it’s not being recorded and shared doesn’t mean it isn’t happening,” he told NextShark. “I want to thank everyone who has shown their support and spread awareness — let’s continue to end hate.”
Read the full article: nextshark.com/ramen-restaurant-pizza-anti-asian-slurs-florida/
Ramen Lab Eatery's original IG post:
http://instagram.com/p/CRYFj9zti8X
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 24, 2021 22:06:14 GMT
Idaho Statesman ‘Tyranny of the minority’: Idaho Supreme Court rules voter initiative law unconstitutionalwww.yahoo.com/news/tyranny-minority-idaho-supreme-court-232848871.html Hayat Norimine Mon, August 23, 2021, 4:28 PM
Idaho Supreme Court justices on Monday unanimously ruled the state’s new law on citizen-led ballot initiatives to be unconstitutional and said it infringed on the public’s right to enact laws outside of the Idaho Legislature. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article252446433.html
The opinion ruled in favor of Reclaim Idaho, the organization that spearheaded the successful Medicaid expansion initiative in 2018 and sued the Idaho Legislature in May. The Committee to Protect and Preserve the Idaho Constitution, a coalition of mostly Idaho attorneys, also joined Reclaim Idaho’s lawsuit.
The state’s highest court ruled that the law would have infringed on a fundamental right for a citizen-led initiative. The Legislature and Secretary of State’s Office “failed to present a compelling state interest for limiting that right,” the Supreme Court wrote.
“Ultimately, the effect of SB 1110 is to prevent a perceived, yet unsubstantiated fear of the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ by replacing it with an actual ‘tyranny of the minority,’ ” the Supreme Court wrote in its opinion, adding that the law conflicts with “the democratic ideals that form the bedrock of the constitutional republic created by the Idaho Constitution.”
The new law is now void. The Idaho Legislature will have to pay Reclaim Idaho and the committee their attorney fees for the lawsuit, on top of the fees paid its own attorney to defend the law. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article251748183.html
Senate President Pro Tem Chuck Winder, R-Boise, said he was surprised and disappointed by the ruling.
“The Idaho Constitution says that the Idaho Legislature shall control the initiative process, and now it would appear that the Supreme Court is saying the constitution says something different than that,” Winder told the Statesman.
Idaho law would have made initiatives more challenging
Republican lawmakers in April approved a law that would have required citizen-led initiatives to gather signatures from 6% of registered voters from each of Idaho’s 35 legislative districts. Prior to the change, the state required that signatures come from 6% of voters in at least 18 districts, and 6% of voters statewide. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article250498889.html www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article249369235.html
Reclaim Idaho is gathering signatures for enhanced K-12 education funding. Other Idaho groups are also trying to gather enough signatures for an initiative to legalize medical marijuana. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article249819173.html
In the past 10 years, only two citizen-led initiatives have made it on Idaho’s general election ballot. That’s two out of the 14 voter petitions that circulated, the Supreme Court justices wrote. Deborah Ferguson, an attorney who represented Reclaim Idaho, had argued a 90% failure rate shows the process “is already near impossible.”
Reclaim Idaho was also sponsoring a measure that would have repealed the state’s 18-district requirement. Luke Mayville, co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, told the Statesman on Monday that the organization will instead pivot to focus entirely on its education initiative after the court ruling.
Republican Gov. Brad Little signed the law in April but expressed concerns about its constitutionality. Little vetoed a similar law that would have made citizen-led initiatives more challenging in 2019. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article228888829.html
Little said in an emailed statement Monday that he signed this year’s bill because it presented a much closer call and “gave rural Idaho a greater voice in the initiative and referendum process.”
“In considering future legislation, I encourage the Idaho Legislature to ensure that the rights secured by the constitution remain accessible to the people while also securing that each initiative and referendum have an appropriate level of statewide support,” Little said.
Mayville said in a news release that thousands of Idaho residents are “breathing sighs of relief today” and that the court fulfilled its obligation to protect citizens against an “assault” on their rights by the Legislature.
“Nearly every time in our history that our Legislature attempted to eliminate the initiative process, either the governor or the courts stepped up to protect the rights of the people,” Mayville said. “Today’s decision adds a new chapter to that history, and future generations of Idahoans will look back on the court’s decision with gratitude.”
Jim Jones, co-founder of the Committee to Protect and Preserve the Idaho Constitution, and a former Idaho Supreme Court justice and attorney general, told the Statesman that he believes the opinion is a landmark ruling that could set a precedent for other states facing lawsuits over citizen-led initiatives.
“It is an absolute slam dunk for the right of the initiative and the referendum,” Jones said.
William Myers, an attorney representing the Idaho Legislature, had tried to paint Reclaim Idaho’s argument as a “false dichotomy” of the people versus the Legislature. Myers pointed out that the people elect state legislators to represent them. Myers said the public’s available recourse is to vote their legislators out of office. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article251748183.html
But Ferguson argued that the bill was intended to snuff out a constitutional right in the state under the guise that it would help rural voters. www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article249369235.html
House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, said in a statement Monday that House leaders believed the new law would have increased voter involvement in the ballot initiative process, “especially in the corners of the state too often forgotten by some.”
“We believe that all the 35 legislative districts, every part of Idaho, should be included in this important process,” Bedke said. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court apparently disagrees.”
Democratic leaders issued a statement applauding the court for its decision. All Democrats in the House and Senate voted against the bill.
House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, said Republicans never should have passed the law.
“Elected representatives should be working to protect the people’s constitutional rights, not take those rights away, as the Idaho GOP did here,” Rubel said. “I am very proud that every Democrat voted against this bill because we recognize the importance of citizens’ rights, and we’ll continue to fight for them.”
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 28, 2021 21:32:28 GMT
a gathering of complete idiots
Jordan Klepper Fingers The Pulse - Into The MAGAverse: Full Special | The Daily Show 1,118,252 viewsAug 22, 2021
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah 9.35M subscribers Jordan Klepper revisits his surreal year on the 2020 campaign trail, remembering the best moments, sharing never-before-seen footage and conducting all-new interviews with the people he met along the way. #DailyShow #Klepper
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 30, 2021 22:06:45 GMT
This is what the American CONservative movement has come to. American Taliban crybullies.
Anti-Mask Subway Bully Verbally Abuses Elderly Rider 391,213 viewsAug 17, 2021
A man was caught on video verbally accosting an elderly woman on the subway for her decision to wear a mask.
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Post by the Scribe on Aug 31, 2021 18:19:47 GMT
Everyone knows whether they admit it or not that Hillary Clinton WON the 2016 election. The GOP in ReDeplorable swing states put their typical election shenanigans into action to win the electoral college. Now they are the deplorable party of Trump. Serves them right.Hillary Clinton's 'deplorables' speech shocked voters five years ago - but some feel it was prescientwww.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clintons-deplorables-speech-shocked-144426533.html
1 / 2 Hillary Clinton's 'deplorables' speech shocked voters five years ago - but some feel it was prescient Roxanne Roberts Tue, August 31, 2021, 7:44 AM
Let's start with the obvious: "Basket of deplorables" is a weird turn of phrase. There are baskets and there are deplorable people, but pairing the two is the oddest of linguistic odd couples.
Hillary Clinton said those three words in the final months of her 2016 presidential campaign, making rhetorical and political history. There were two kinds of Donald Trump supporters, she explained: Voters who feel abandoned and desperate, who she placed in one metaphorical basket, and those she called "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic" - her "basket of deplorables."
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Trump - the same man who announced his candidacy by calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" - clutched his proverbial pearls, aghast that his opponent had uttered such a shocking slander. His campaign turned that insult into an asset; supporters wore hats and shirts proudly declaring themselves deplorable. Pundits seized on the phrase, debating who does and doesn't deserve to be called that. Five years later, many believe "deplorables" - figuratively and literally - are here to stay.
This is not a cautionary tale: Clinton probably didn't lose the White House because of a figure of speech. But it's a lesson in how politicians make unforced errors. And, in a nation where half the country thinks the other half is wrong and possibly even deplorable, it's about how we talk about each other.
Related video: How Trump has mocked the health of his political opponents Scroll back up to restore default view. - - -
On Sept. 9, 2016, Clinton was the opening act for Barbra Streisand at a glitzy fundraiser in New York City. A group of LGBTQ supporters were gathered at Cipriani restaurant, and the Democratic candidate had one job: to fire up her donors.
"I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse," Clinton told the cheering crowd. She launched into all the things she found "deplorable" about Trump: He threatened marriage equality, cozied up to white supremacists, made racist and sexist remarks - all things she found "so personally offensive."
She warned there were two months left in the race and no one should assume he wouldn't be elected anyway. "Just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?" There was laughter and applause.
The people in this basket, emboldened by Trump's tweets, were "irredeemable," she said. But there was another basket: Trump supporters who just felt the government had let them down and wanted change - and Democrats had to empathize to win these voters.
"Basket of deplorables" was not in Clinton's prepared remarks. She often improvised in speeches. Reporters jumped on it, as did the Trump campaign, which immediately slammed Clinton for not running "a positive campaign."
Clinton apologized the next day in a very Clintonesque manner: "I regret saying 'half' - that was wrong," she said in a statement. What was the magic number? She didn't say. She did, however, double down on calling out Trump's bigotry and racism.
"It's very hard to say you have a message of civility and then turn around and talk about how essentially a quarter of the country is, in your view, a basket of deplorables," said Jonathan Allen, author of "Shattered," a study of Clinton's 2016 campaign. "That is a screeching conflict of her overall message, which is we have a civilized country and we need to be stronger together - that this should be a kinder, gentler, unified country."
It's easy to get careless at fundraisers: The crowd is pumped up, the mood hopeful. In April 2008, Barack Obama told a San Francisco donor audience that working-class voters in the Rust Belt "cling to guns or religion" as a way to express their frustrations. (Clinton, in the last days of her failed bid for the Democratic nomination, said she was "taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America. His remarks are elitist and out of touch.")
Mitt Romney got into trouble for his "47 percent" slip, which was secretly taped during a 2012 fundraiser that was closed to the media. The Republican nominee explained to wealthy donors that almost half of American voters would pick Obama because they were dependent on government handouts. "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," he told the crowd.
Clinton made the classic campaign mistake of playing pundit by explaining strategy to donors. She wasn't writing off all Trump supporters; those who were scared and jobless might be won over. It was a delicate rhetorical dance: Have compassion for some, be afraid of others.
Trump repeatedly mocked Clinton voters, but his fans never worried it would hurt him. In fact, they loved him for it, as well as his attacks on the media, the candidates in his own party, John McCain's war record and the judge in one of his lawsuits. "The more offensive and insulting he could be, the happier he was with it," Allen said.
That was Trump being Trump. Clinton's deplorables comment, Allen said, seemed to reveal a private thought that she had never dared state in public. In that way, it "ended up being symbolic of one of the things that her critics said they hated about her, which is that they believed that she's inauthentic. And oddly, I think that was a pretty authentic moment."
When asked about "deplorables," Nick Merrill, Clinton's spokesman, said she was never afraid to denounce racism - just two weeks earlier, she gave a significant speech deconstructing the alt-right and the "quest to preserve white maleness" in America. "The deplorable comment may have been politically less than ideal, but it has been proven right again and again over the last five years."
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More sophisticated than "disgusting," more biting than "unforgivable," "deplorable" carries judgment with a side of self-righteousness. It comes from Latin, then re-emerged in 17th-century France, where throwing shade is a national sport.
Clinton would use "deplorable" in statements when she was secretary of state, but as an adjective, not a noun. Washington jargon traditionally puts things in "buckets," Clinton shifted that to "baskets" in the month leading up to the Sept. 9 fundraiser.
She used "deplorables" the day before her speech, in an interview with Israeli TV: "You can take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets. There are what I would call the deplorables - you know, the racists and the haters."
"It's worth remembering that when Hillary Clinton comes up with a phrase she likes, she tends to repeat it a lot and she can be very biting and she can be quippy," Allen said. "It would have been different if she had said, 'Half the Trump voters are behaving deplorably.' It's a small thing, but it's a big thing."
In Slate, linguist Ben Zimmer speculated that "baskets of deplorables" was inspired by a "parade of horribles" - a legal term that Clinton would be familiar with, referring to the negative consequences of a judicial decision. Several weeks later, Clinton joked about it at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner: "I just want to put you all in a basket of adorables."
But the damage was done.
"I knew the first time I heard that phrase that she was very, very stupid for using it," Republican strategist Frank Luntz said. "It is as insulting as any word in the English language. To be deplorable means you have no excuse as a human being. If you're a deplorable person, it is saying that there is no redeeming quality to you whatsoever."
Luntz knew it would be an opportunity for Trump to galvanize his base. "I thought she had committed a potentially fatal error: Insult your opponent, attack your opponent, criticize your opponent, even condemn your opponent, but never, ever, ever condemn your opponent's supporters because you need their votes."
Luntz tested "deplorable" in focus groups and found that it didn't make voters more pro-Trump. "But it hardened opposition to her instantly as someone who had no heart, who was too ideological and dismissive of people who disagreed with her."
A consultant to Clinton's campaign agreed. Writing in the Boston Globe shortly after the election, Diane Hessan said that she tracked undecided voters and their reaction to "deplorable" was stronger than the controversy over Clinton's emails or FBI Director James Comey's comments about them. "There was one moment when I saw more undecided voters shift to Trump than any other, when it all changed, when voters began to speak differently about their choice," she wrote.
In "What Happened," Clinton's memoir of the campaign, she acknowledged that generalizing was almost always unwise and wrote that she regretted handing Trump "a political gift" by insulting well-intentioned people. "But too many of Trump's core supporters do hold views that I find - there's no other word for it - deplorable."
Of course, voters are notoriously harder on female politicians, regardless of what they say. As Rebecca Traister stated in a 2017 New York magazine profile of Clinton, "A competent woman losing a job to an incompetent man is not an anomalous Election Day surprise; it is Tuesday in America. To acknowledge the role sexism played in 2016 is not to make excuses for the very real failings of Clinton and her campaign; it is to try to paint a more complete picture."
In hindsight, how did "deplorables" play into all this? "It is impossible to say, 'People reacted this way because of sexism,' " Traister said this week. "That's not how it works. But you also cannot take sexism out of the equation whenever you're talking about Hillary Clinton."
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And Trump? The Republican nominee, always looking for an applause line, said he was offended on behalf of all his supporters. "While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hard-working American patriots who love your country," he told his audience at an Iowa rally. The campaign rushed out an ad in battleground states: "You know what's deplorable? Hillary Clinton viciously demonizing hard working people like you."
Mike Pence jumped into the fray: "For Hillary Clinton to express such disdain for millions of Americans is one more reason that disqualifies her to serve in the highest office," he told reporters. During an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Pence condemned Clinton but, when pressed, declined to call any Trump supporter deplorable, even, say, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who endorsed Trump. "No," answered Pence. "I am not in the name-calling business, Wolf."
MAGA fans could buy official "deplorable" merchandise from Team Trump - and they did happily. The term was "so mean that the only way for them to respond was to actually embrace it," Luntz said. "And that's how I realized she was in real trouble: If your strongest attack against your opponent is embraced by your opponents, that removes the sting."
Five years later, you can purchase hats, T-shirts, hoodies and other gifts for the deplorables in your life. Patriot Depot, one of several online stores selling to Trump fans, offers a "Deplorables Club - Lifetime Member" cap for $19.95, The sales blurb explains: "Being a Deplorable is now a mark of pride among God-fearing, gun-loving, hard-working Americans."
Clinton's unusual turn of phrase foreshadowed an increasingly polarized America. We're not just divided along ideological lines - we don't even like each other very much.
The Pew Research Center found that from December 2016 to September 2019, the shares of both parties that viewed members of the other "somewhat" coldly or "very" coldly increased, as did the percentage that viewed them as "immoral."
Those assessments were undoubtedly influenced by the 2017 Charlottesville, Va., rally and have been hardened by pandemic restrictions, Black Lives Matter protests and the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
"I'm proud that Secretary Clinton called out racism and bigotry in 2016, especially when that wasn't the politically safe thing to do," campaign speechwriter Dan Schwerin said.
Now, many of her fans believe she was prescient about "half" of Trump's base.
"After four years of President Trump," Allen said. "I think that there are a lot of Democrats and some Republicans who would say that was an undercount."
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 11, 2021 0:15:20 GMT
Trump singled out election official. Hear the horrific voicemails he received 816,083 viewsSep 8, 2021
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 11, 2021 22:26:22 GMT
House Republicans Who Backed Infrastructure Bill Face Vicious Backlash www.yahoo.com/news/house-republicans-backed-infrastructure-bill-125747643.html Catie Edmondson Thu, November 11, 2021, 5:57 AM In this article: Donald Trump 45th President of the United States
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) speak at a news conference regarding the infrastructure bill, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 30, 2021. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — One caller instructed Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to slit his wrists and “rot in hell.” Another told Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska that they hoped he slipped and fell down a staircase. The office of Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York has been inundated with angry messages tagging her as a “traitor.”
Investing in the nation’s roads and bridges was once considered one of the last realms of bipartisanship in Congress, and President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill drew ample support over the summer from Republicans in the Senate. But in the days since 13 House Republicans broke with their party leaders and voted for the $1 trillion legislation last week, they have been flooded by menacing messages from voters — and even some of their own colleagues — who regard their votes as a betrayal.
The vicious reaction to the passage of the bill, which was negotiated by a group of Republicans and Democrats determined to deliver on a bipartisan priority, reflects how deeply polarization has seeped into the political discourse within the Republican Party, making even the most uncontroversial legislation a potentially toxic vote.
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The dynamic is a natural outgrowth of the slash-and-burn politics of former President Donald Trump, who savaged those in his party who backed the infrastructure bill as “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — who should be “ashamed of themselves.”
Trump’s frequent threats and insults directed at Republicans whom he considers insufficiently loyal have created powerful incentives for the party’s lawmakers to issue similarly bellicose statements. The former president’s approach has also encouraged an expectation among Republican base voters that their representatives will hew unswervingly to the party line.
Last week’s infrastructure vote has prompted intraparty warfare among Republicans, illustrating how just a few of the loudest voices in the party can — and will — direct a wall of ire at those who break with them even just occasionally.
“I regret that this good, bipartisan bill became a political football in recent weeks,” said Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, one of the 13 Republicans who backed the legislation. “Our country can’t afford this partisan dysfunction any longer.”
In the days following the vote, Upton’s phone lines were flooded with more than 1,000 angry and threatening calls, including multiple death threats to him and his family, according to his office.
The visceral nature of the backlash is particularly striking because House Republican leaders who lobbied their rank-and-file to vote against the measure have made few substantive policy arguments against the plan, which will send hundreds of billions of dollars in federal money into states and congressional districts around the country for badly needed infrastructure improvements.
Some of them even conceded publicly that they would have backed such a bill had the political circumstances been different, complaining that Democrats had poisoned the well by pushing a separate $1.85 trillion social safety net, climate and tax plan at the same time.
Biden “should have focused just on infrastructure,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the minority leader, said last month. “But what they want to do is restructure and transform America.”
“If they brought just an infrastructure bill by itself up, you would find, overwhelmingly, Republicans want to work with you and get one through,” he insisted.
But the Republicans who joined Democrats last week found themselves scapegoated almost immediately.
Hours after the 13 Republicans voted for the bill, explaining in statements that it would deliver badly needed money for transportation and other projects in their districts, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted the phone numbers of their Washington offices on her social media accounts.
In separate posts naming them on major social media platforms — Greene has nearly half a million followers on both Instagram and Twitter — she branded them as “traitors.”
While Greene trained her ire on her colleagues, the social media channels of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, blasted out the office phone numbers of the 19 Republican senators who voted for the infrastructure bill in August.
It appears their followers listened.
A vast majority of menacing phone calls to the offices of the 13 House Republicans have been made by voters outside the targeted lawmakers’ districts, according to several congressional aides who described the calls on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
And while Malliotakis’ Washington office has received a litany of insulting, angry phone calls, a majority of callers to her Staten Island district office have been supportive of her vote, a spokesperson said. (In an interview with CNN this week, Malliotakis credited Trump with laying the groundwork for passage of the bill, noting that the former president had often talked about the need for major public works legislation, but leaving unmentioned how he blew up several attempts to obtain a bipartisan deal on such a measure.)
Animating many of the irate calls, aides said, are various misunderstandings of what is in the infrastructure bill. In citing complaints about it, they say, an overwhelming majority of callers have taken issue with provisions contained in the separate social policy bill that Republicans have uniformly opposed — not the infrastructure bill.
Attempts by congressional aides to explain that the programs being criticized are not actually contained in the infrastructure bill have been shrugged off by the callers, whose main preoccupation appears to be their fury that any Republican had voted for a bill championed by Biden.
The exchanges have been particularly brutal for the young, low-level staff members who are tasked with processing constituent calls and have been called an array of unprintable epithets by angry callers, according to the aides. Such coarse, even violent language from callers has become more common for congressional offices in recent years, but it has been particularly jarring given the subject matter at hand: an infrastructure bill that will spread federal money around the country to repair aging roads, bridges and tunnels and expand high-speed internet access.
“To only get 13 votes from the House was very sad,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio, D-Ore., the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, referring to Republican support for the bill. “But to have those people attacked for doing the right thing for the United States of America and everybody’s constituents?”
The anger could have damaging political consequences for House Republicans, whose ranks include both hard-right lawmakers who demand the total obstruction of Biden’s agenda and those who are willing to accept bipartisan deals to benefit their constituents.
Many of the Republicans who supported the infrastructure bill hail from crucial swing districts where voters tend to reward bipartisan pragmatism and efforts to reach across the aisle — districts that the party must hold if it wants to reclaim the House in next year’s midterm elections. Some of those lawmakers, like Upton and Rep. John Katko of New York, have held onto their competitive seats in large part because of their reputations as sober-minded deal makers.
But there is little room for such figures in today’s Republican Party.
Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida argued Tuesday that voting against the infrastructure bill was as important a conservative litmus test as voting against impeaching Trump, and he essentially dared party leaders to strip the 13 lawmakers of their seats on congressional committees as retaliation.
Trump, who groused privately Monday night at a fundraiser in Tampa, Florida, about the Republicans who voted for the bill, weighed in publicly Tuesday, targeting Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader, for supporting the package.
“Why is it that old crow Mitch McConnell voted for a terrible Democrat socialist infrastructure plan, and induced others in his party to do likewise,” Trump asked in a statement, “when he was incapable of getting a great infrastructure plan wanting to be put forward by me and the Republican Party?”
Trump did not reference his own role in undercutting the effort to pass an infrastructure bill during his presidency when he torpedoed a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders in 2019, fuming that they could not investigate him and legislate with him at the same time.
On Tuesday, McConnell called the infrastructure bill a “godsend” for Kentucky at a news conference in his home state, according to a local television station.
“We have a lot of infrastructure needs,” McConnell said.
© 2021 The New York Times Company
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Post by the Scribe on Dec 9, 2021 6:41:35 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on May 6, 2022 14:23:49 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on May 14, 2022 14:24:57 GMT
Howard Stern - "How Much More of this Bull Sh*t Are We Going to Take?"
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 4, 2022 6:28:08 GMT
Heather Cox Richardson: U.S. Politics "A Tyranny of the Minority" | Amanpour and Company
211,206 views May 27, 2022 Heather Cox Richardson wrote this week that "America’s gun free-for-all is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority.” Her "Letters From an American" newsletter has gained a huge following, and she speaks with Michel Martin about the state of American democracy and the failure of attempts at gun control.
Originally aired on March 27, 2022
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 4, 2022 6:30:10 GMT
Heather Cox Richardson on "How the South Won the Civil War"
20,029 views Jul 13, 2020 While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system, which had sustained the defeated South, moved westward and there established a foothold. How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. Richardson seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.
Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College and the author of numerous books about American history and politics. A graduate of Harvard University’s Program in the History of American Civilization, she is the author of The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997), The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Harvard University Press, 2001), West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2007), Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic Books, 2010), To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books, 2014), and, most recently, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford University Press, 2020). Richardson writes widely for popular publications and is the author of the daily newsletter about the history behind today’s headlines, Letters from an American (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack... )
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