Month: March 2021

Scorched Earth

Filibuster ScorchedEarth
 
The main point being missed in the senate filibuster discussion is the distinction between refusing to yield the floor and a majority vote.
 
Majority vote is being morphed into the word “Filibuster”. The motive is to undermine majority rule disguised as a conversation about the merits of ‘unlimited speech’, aka: the filibuster.
 
The rationale to preserve the filibuster is characterized as protecting those defeated in the vote, some say. So those with less votes win. Let that sink in. We have a winner take all system where we let the losers of the vote prevail. Then we wonder why we can’t get things done.
 
On one hand, the narrative implies that we need a 60 vote majority to avoid an unending debate. “Oh no, we better concede” senators say, and legislation is defeated.
 
On the other hand, they are protecting that same extended speech, they say, pretending that means we must sacrifice majority rule.
 
The current filibuster is a double shot of deception. The truth is debates always end and the majority vote prevails, by law, is the intention.
 
Very few pundits seem to clarify the difference and use the word filibuster to describe a procedure that is incompatible with majority vote, when it’s not. Losing one means losing the other, is implied, which is not true. The filibuster is compatible with the majority vote.
 
The filibuster is a sequence of “what-ifs?” that if actually occurred, still wouldn’t prevent a majority vote. That’s why it never gets explained properly by the pros because what is implied cannot even happen. The filibuster, if actually executed, would not prevent a majority vote.
 
Rule 22 allows a “cloture” vote to end debate, with 60 votes. You can’t get to a cloture vote to end debate unless you first have that debate, and you never do. Because if you did, the filibusters would eventually end and the senators would proceed to a vote where the majority would prevail, as the rules intend.
 
Majority vote would prevail, filibustered or not, if the senate debates. If the senate doesn’t debate, there’s no path to cloture, so there’s no 60 vote threshold to consider as a parliamentary maneuver. It takes sixty votes to close debate, so have the debate, or you lose.
 
Them’s the rules.
 
The filibuster is being misused to require that 60% of members agree to begin debate. It’s a senate rule that violates the majority rule intention of the constitution.
 
The super-minority in the senate led by the minority turtle are threatening a scorched-earth strategy to obstruct the majority. If the majority removes the filibuster the minority turtle is gonna pull out some rules, he says, like you have never seen.
 
He’s going to further utilize the power of the rules to obstruct democracy. He knows some rules that you can’t even imagine. The implied ‘scorched-earth’ threat though, is real. The minority will claim veto authority, unless..
 
VP Harris should take the chair and dictate her interpretation of the rules to the senators. Her legal advisors say that she’s in charge. They believe she has the authority to control the chamber, as the presiding officer, and execute the rules to a more favorable interpretation, if necessary, to get things done.
 
New Rule – Interpret the rules correctly.
 
Legislation passes by majority vote and it takes 3/5th’s to obstruct proceeding to anything. That’s how it’s done. That’s what it says in the rules and the rules should be declared as enacted and enforced as necessary, from now on.
 
Joe should order up some extra presidential signing pens.
 
Resistance to the ‘For the People’ agenda should be reason enough for expulsion from the senate. Kamala should be securing the votes and applying pressure as necessary for a majority vote
 
A new voting rights act is so important right now, for the public. Failure could be horrifying. Failure would be unforgivable, imo, but almost predictable. I’ve been doing that here for a long time.
 
My fear is that success for voting rights will disguise the fine print failure. Like for profit health insurance, it’s not a good idea but we do it.
 
If history is any guide, and it is, democracy is one of those things you don’t get back after you lose it. It’s like big money buying the only left-wing talk-radio station in town, you know it ain’t coming back.
 
The filibuster has been a scam perpetrated against the public for decades. It’s time to declare it for what it is. It’s a political crime.
 
I just a did a review of the Wikipedia page. This is how they explain majority vote being changed from 50% to 60%. This is what it says;
 
“The minority then felt politically safer in threatening filibusters more regularly, which became normalized over time to the point that 60 votes are now required to end debate on nearly every controversial legislative item.”
 
As if that is an adequate explanation?
 
How does threatening a filibuster change the majority from 51 to 60 votes? It doesn’t. And notice how that sentence ends, confusing the cloture vote with the vote to pass legislation. The words end debate should not be in that sentence because a filibuster threat prevents the debate from ever starting.
 
Sixty votes to end a debate makes sense, otherwise a simple majority could prevent the debate. The senate, by current interpretation of the rules, allows any senator to prevent the debate by objecting to it.
 
Requiring sixty votes to pass legislation is a violation of the constitution, and the senate rules. The misinterpretation that makes it possible is implausible, and antidemocratic.
 
The filibuster theory is a scam. It is based on the fraudulent belief that a senate debate can theoretically have no end without even beginning.
 
The logic is unsustainable. It’s like saying, “You have to pay me time and a half or I’m gonna work overtime.” Makes sense, right?
 
It’s an empty threat that dictates our democratic failure. Our leaders bow down on bended knee and concede to the empty threat of a filibuster.
 
 

 

The Big Lie – The Filibuster

To summarize the big lie, our government is intentionally dysfunctional for the public because it is controlled by special interests.
 
From the right-wing to the left, the professionals rationalize for you that the lack of their legislative success is by rule and government design, not them. It’s not their fault. It’s not their special interests, or their employers, or their investments that are to blame for your stuggle. They say this is how the framers designed our system, for our own good.
 
Wrong! The design was for majority rule.
 
Turns out our democratic failure is a bipartisan conspiracy by special interests to prevent democratic reforms from being passed, for the public. The public loses even when the democrats win.
 
Fail by Misinterpretation
 
The filibuster equals minority rule. That’s what it is. It allows the few to overrule the many. The constitution mandates majority rule so the filibuster, as practiced, is unconstitutional.
 
That’s the big lie, or at least one of them. The government is an antidemocratic conspiracy preventing political solutions for the public by misinterpreting the law for special interests.
 
Those who say Trump won the election don’t care about democracy or the minimum wage, or the truth. They are a cult of self-serving bias. As far as I can tell their motive is supremacy with the freedom to exploit others. Of course they will claim victory and call fraud. Their blatant disregard for reality is a military tactic, imo, they are using against you, to disorient you from the truth, in their assault on our democracy.
 
What’s being called the big lie is itself a lie. They always lie so their claims of election fraud are just more lies on a long list of lies, that we all knew were lies and have since been proven to be lies.
 
Democracy and lying are ethically incompatible. So is voter suppression. The political opposition is openly legislating voter suppression and lying about their motives.
 
We need a secure citizens network to measure public consensus to tanscend this nonsense. Instead, the government has delegated censorship to the social media companies, who can now decide what is true, for the government, as well as filter what is false, from us.
 
Claims of election fraud are a perfect invitation to upgrade our democracy, technologically, for credibility and verifiability, as is necessary. But we won’t. The invitation will remain unopened while the democrats work overtime thanking each other for their efforts.
 
The video starts out with Maddow contradicting the constitution, followed by Joe Biden explaining the purpose of the Vice President is to serve the President. Which is also wrong. That might be how they do it in party town but the constitution says the Vice President is the president of the senate, which means the vp is the presiding officer of the senate, which means the vp controls the senate and the parliamentarian procedures, including debate, as well as the tie-breaking authority.
 
The intention of the constitution is to check the power of the president with separate and distinct interests as reflected by the distinct ballots cast by the state electors, for the vice-president, as is mandated in the constitution. I’ve noticed we don’t do that.
 
It’s the partisan party paradigm that forces Joe to preach his submissive assistant theory. He argues that his logic is opposed to the unitary executive theory, while it actually supports exactly that, by relegating the vp to the executive, exclusively.
 
Intentionally or not, the law is misinterpreted to prevent popular legislation from being passed that would benefit the public. Everybody’s in on it, whether they know it or not, and whether they admit it or not, the results have been the same for decades. It’s what we do.
 
The Public Loses
 
The republicans represent business. They rarely and barely pretend to represent the public. The democrats do, that’s the problem. They pretend that they represent the public, but they don’t.
 
The election fraud conspiracy theory that triggered the insurrection is being referred to by democrats as the big lie. Which it is, but there’s a lot of lying going on now days. What’s true?
 
Our democracy is dysfunctional in many ways, but to believe that there was an organized conspiracy amongst the hyper-partisan states to miscount the votes for Joe, is a conspiracy too far. That’s Q-crazy. If that big lie was true, something or someone credible would come forward with evidence to expose it and prove an assertion of some kind that they could call true. But they don’t which is proof enough to say shut up and sit down. Call out their scam for what it is.
 
The Big Lie

 
The big lie though is not the vote count, as antiquated as it obviously is. The big lie reference is more appropriately prescribed, imo, to the actual representation the democrats arguably provide to the public when they do get elected.
 
That’s the big lie. It’s a constrained and betrayed constituency. So, even though the vote count was valid, the representation is not. The results don’t reflect the expectations of public. That’s because we don’t elect public servants we elect corporate shills. Of course there are exceptions to that rule, but the political results are in. The democrats serve large corporations first, not the public.
 
Do the math on the coming stimulus. Taxpayers will get back only a small fraction of the money that has been extracted from them through public debt schemes and inflation scams. The public will borrow the money from the future to spend it on corporate products now, which will fuel investors and speculative bubbles, that will require taxpayer bailouts and more public debt.
 
Reconciling the extraction scam is done by increasing inequality and decreasing public revenue, which inevitably forces the public to borrow more money from the future, again.
 
Rinse and repeat.
 
Just a few months ago candidate Biden was insisting Court Packing was a question of distraction, preferring to focus on the negatives of his opponent rather than consider longshot solutions for the public. Now that the democrats control the entire government and political solutions for the public are actually possible, that question, like many others will be forgotten, by the democrats, or quickly defeated, as usual.
 
HR What?
 
Democratic failure is intentional. An example is the senate parliamentarian chosen to decide if the minimum wage can be included within a reconciliation bill. It’s a perfect example of the democrats intentionally sabotaging their own campaign promises in service to the establishment, the republicans, and themselves.
 
False promises are election fraud.
 
The decision to include a minimum wage hike in the Save our Ass Relief bill being delegated to a parliamentarian is a strategy to keep the stain of democratic betrayal off of the VP’s shiny new shoes.
 
Cue up the scapegoat.
 
As if the scapegoat is in charge. The VP should dictate to the senate democrats and threaten their dissent with political retaliation, like republicans do. But, no. They know their failure will be forgiven because their constituents have no where to go.
 
The result of the senate filibuster rule is another good example of legislative self-sabotage by democrats. The sixty vote threshold is a violation of the constitutionally-mandated majority vote. The deviation from that legal intention allows a minority to prevail against the majority, as a rule. It’s an absurdity being reported as normal, when it’s not.
 
The constitution declares the president of the senate to be the tie-breaking vote. Any senate rule that deprives the vice president of that tie-breaking authority is a violation of the constitution. The intent is self-evident, even if the language isn’t explicit. The intention is.
 
The entire fiasco of the parliamentarian deciding anything is predicated on the senate rules that have deviated from majority vote, and from constitutional compliance.
 
The filibuster and the reconciliation process are both byproducts of allowing a senate rule that is unconstitutional.
 
If the senate respected the majority vote intent, the mutated filibuster theory and the need for a reconciliation process following the “Byrd Rules” would no longer even be relevant.
 
All of this procedural nonsense is based on ignoring the constitutional intention that law is made by majority vote. Imagine if the government started requiring more than majority votes to defeat incumbents in elections. It would be the same principle except with candidates instead of law. It’s outrageous, either way.
 
Violation of intention.
 
Why would you require more than a majority vote to pass a law? I’ll tell you why. It’s because those that write the law like things just the way they are, or serve people that do, so they “misinterpret” the law. And that is an antidemocratic conspiracy, whatever the motive.
 
The constitution supersedes codes and rules.
 
Again, there can only be a tie in the senate if the votes are 50 to 50. Every state has two senators so a tie is always possible. The idea the senate can set the count differently for certain votes, by rule, is a conspiracy of misinterpretation that violates the constitution and enables the twisted filibuster argument. In reality, the filibuster, as practiced, is an unconstitutional theory that changes the majority of 100 senators from 51 to 60, which aside from being indefensible, it removes the vice-presidents constitutional powers of tie-breaking.
 
Which is unconstitutional.
 
If they wanted, the senate could restore their rules to constitutional compliance by changing them back to the way they were, by removing the revisions to their previous rules, such as, restoring the move to previous question rule, which would allow senators to end debate with a simple majority, all valid filibusters aside. It’s the right thing to do. The democrats are a few votes shy of doing the right thing, as usual, so the faulty theory will likely be sustained.
 
The senators can’t declare their rules to supersede the constitution, or pretend they don’t when they do. Yet, that’s what they’re doing. They intentionally misinterpret their rules as compliant, when they’re not. Which is the same as violating them, for all practical purposes. The rule changes are unconstitutional and the reporters should be embarrassed to report otherwise. This intentionally dysfunctional and unconstitutional process should be ended.
 
And another thought about the minimum wage. Money is representation. Voting against the minimum wage is a vote against representation. It’s a vote for increasing inequality. The minimum wage is another inadequate bandaid law that distracts from the fundamental democratic reforms that are necessary to remedy the root problems preventing a civilized economy and society, for everybody.
 
The government needs to step in and provide jobs to anybody who wants one and establish a minimum baseline of compensation and security for everybody, or the public will pay an eternal price for the dysfunctional byproducts of the conflict-based economy.
 
Economic security needs to be a human right.
 
The Health based-economy as could be legislated by a representative government would change our society for the better for everybody. It is what the public needs now and into the future to prevent the conflict and social chaos from getting worse.
 
I hope to get much deeper into all that, time allowing. To visualize the destination for alternative comparisons.
 
And a quick heads up to Lawrence for the narration and the expertise. Some topics can be difficult, like the filibuster. Even though I assume we disagree on some interpretations, his expertise has been appreciated, by me, for many years.
 
They would say they don’t have the votes, but the democrats can fail because the public doesn’t have an adequate seat at the table to complain, except for the next election when they get to choose another big money campaign slogan.
 
Hope for Change