The Sins of Minority Party Rule (w/ Update)

It should be noted that a majority of Americans do not support trump and his lackeys on their horrific child kidnapping plan along the U.S. border. And yet, Congress is dragging its collective feet on the matter because both the House and the Senate are under Republican control, and the Republicans are profiting from this overt racism.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans do not support massive tax cuts for the rich, yet the Republicans controlling Congress passed a massive tax cut bill last year that only profits the rich and has done NOTHING for our nation's middle-income and working classes. Worse, they are poised to pass another deep tax cut bill for the upcoming 2019 budget.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans want affordable health care, yet the Republican Party in charge of everything keeps pursuing a Kill Obamacare agenda that hurts everyone but plays to their Obama-hating voting base.

It should be noted that a majority of Americans are Independent voters but tend to (barely) vote Democratic. But the Republicans control much of the federal government and a majority of state legislatures/governors, meaning that much of the legislation being passed aren't what the majority of voters wants or needs.

To take notes from Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog:

ONCE AGAIN, IT'S REPUBLICANS WHO ARE OUT OF STEP WITH THE REST OF AMERICA

CNN:
Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump administration's practice of taking undocumented immigrant children from their families and putting them in government facilities on US borders, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Only 28% approve. But among Republicans, there is majority support for the policy....

Quinnipiac:
American voters oppose 66 - 27 percent the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.
Republican voters support the separation policy 55 - 35 percent, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support it...

I say this all the time: America is not primarily a conservative heartland that's besieged by a left-leaning minority living on the coasts and using elite status to tyrannize the majority. The major fault line in this country is between Republicans and everyone else in America. I'm not saying that this is a liberal country (although it is on a number of issues), but it is not a conservative country. Republican dominance of our government at the federal and state levels is largely an artifact of electoral gamesmanship and a highly effective conservative propaganda machine that successfully demonizes Democrats; it doesn't reflect majority support for Republican policies...

What's happening here is what's called Minority Party Rule. It's not about political rule of an ethnic or religious minority - although in some nations like Syria and Iraq it worked out that way - it's about political rule by a group that does not reflect the political will of the majority.

John Cole over at Balloon Juice once brought up a desire to talk about Minority Party Rule in America, although I haven't seen a thorough article posted yet. It's a complex argument to make and hard to stay focused on because the rage of the idiocy of it all takes over and you have to step away for an hour before continuing (this has been a blog post months in the writing)

Minority Party Rule in the United States is a headache because our electoral system is based on Winner-Take-All: whoever gets the most votes - even if it's not a majority of votes - just wins that seat. As a result in certain elections where a spoiler third candidate runs - Perot in 1992 and 1996 for the Presidency, the gubernatorial elections that left Maine with unpopular LePage - a candidate the majority of voters didn't want can end up winning.

The Presidential election process takes on an extra layer of the Electoral College where it's not who wins the overall popular votes but who wins enough states (with their Electoral values). This was how trump - garnering only 42 percent of the popular vote below Hillary Clinton's 45 percent - stole the presidency (well that and Russian sabotage, but that's a separate rage point).

If we witness Minority Party Rule overseas, it's usually in the form of dictatorships where the ethnic or religious minority had been granted undue control of the nation or had played factions among the majority against themselves. Those nations tend to have bad histories of human rights abuses and civil wars because the majority population flares up against the minority that rules through force and corruption.

Minority Party Rule itself isn't always a problem: Most parliamentary systems are multi-party and rarely does a majority party gain enough seats to rule without hassle. Most elections won by a plurality forces the large parties to form coalitions to create a government stable enough to rule until the next set election (some coalitions do fall apart over certain issues, in which case the government falls and emergency elections kick in). The system still is responsive enough to react to crises that should force the right leadership into making the right coalitions to keep things working.

But in the system we have - a Federal Republic (not an actual democracy) of checks and balances -
it's harder to hold a government accountable when ONE party holds the key to ALL branches of government the way the Republicans currently control the Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary. Especially when that control came not due to the majority supporting it but due to rigging and gaming the electoral process.

When you look at the current leadership in DC, you'll see a Republican Party led by the likes of Ryan, McConnell and trump who all know they do NOT need to answer to the majority - they need to placate their minority base - and so they govern as they please, even in the face of polling numbers that mark them as some of the most unpopular life forms in modern memory. All they have to do is stoke their base to turnout for the midterms, all they have to do is keep their deep-pocket funders rolling in their tax-free profits, and let gerrymandering and voter suppression do the rest.

The only thing holding a Minority Rule Party like that accountable is The Reality-Based World. Bad governance leads to mistakes, which leads to disasters, which leads to outrage and angry majority voters who finally get sick of it all and try their best to flip the bad actors out of power.

Sad thing about that is, by the time those disasters take place - think the Iraqi Occupation, think Katrina, think the CDO Housing Subprime Bubble - the damage has been done. Innocent people have suffered, honest lives lost.

And then, damn us all, the SOBs responsible for all that avoid criminal accountability and regain the chance to lie and bully and steal their way back into power again.

Which is why we're facing a new round of disasters - Say hello to the Republicans trying to gut healthcare and Social Security! Say hello to trump's Baby Jails for immigrant toddlers! Say hello to trade wars against Canada and our FORMER Euro allies! - that will consume this nation in darkness, debt, and despair.

We can't keep playing this back-and-forth of sane Democratic MAJORITY leadership and insane Republican MINORITY misrule.

We really can't.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. Fight back against gerrymandering. Get everyone you know registered to vote and balloting this midterms. It matters. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, OUR NATION AND OUR CHILDREN MATTER.

(Update 6/30/18): I still seem to be writing this out ahead of the Beltway curve. Dana Milbank at Washington Post is thinking along the same lines:

Republicans have been defying gravity for some time. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait reminds us in a smart piece, they lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. Electoral college models show Republicans could plausibly continue to win the White House without popular majorities.

Because of partisan gerrymandering and other factors, Democrats could win by eight percentage points and still not gain control of the House, one study found. And the two-senators-per-state system (which awards people in Republican Wyoming 70 times more voting power than people in Democratic California) gives a big advantage to rural, Republican states...

The backlash is coming. It is the deserved consequence of minority-rule government protecting the rich over everybody else, corporations over workers, whites over nonwhites and despots over democracies. It will explode, God willing, at the ballot box and not in the streets...

I dread it will explode, not from the majority fighting to take their power back but from the minority of Angry White Guys terrified of losing power they don't deserve.

The Far Right Wants the Glory, Never the Blame

What happens when you get a political party that obsesses with image over action, that wants to win all the time and ignore every loss? What happens when you get a Congress that wants to destroy everything the federal government stands for in order to fulfill their Randian/Racist Utopian dreams?

You get a bunch of idiots ready to rev up their chainsaws but finding out they have neither the gas to rev them nor the trees they'd like to cut down.

Just to note what Brian Beutler is saying over at New Republic:

For seven years now, the mantra “repeal Obamacare” has been both a spasm of revanchist rage and a cynical ploy to keep a segment of the electorate motivated to vote for Republicans. It was also frequently deployed in the belief that the GOP would not be unexpectedly thrust into a position where their voters could expect them to make good on the promise.

But Donald Trump’s Republican Congress convened only three days ago, and members are already finding that eliminating Obamacare will be far messier, politically, than devising and implementing it was for Democrats.

As Republicans hurry to repeal the law, “they’re not even close to agreement about what comes next - or even when the repeal should take effect,” Politico reported late Wednesday. “Republicans are reckoning with the reality that dismantling a nearly seven-year-old law that reshaped a $3 trillion health sector and covers millions of Americans is more daunting than simply campaigning against it.”

Republicans got themselves into this mess at least in part because of a broad, conservative failure to treat Obamacare on its true terms rather than as an evil abstraction conjured by a political foe. In an important sense, there is no Obamacare anymore; there’s just the health care system Republicans are inheriting, and the one they will leave behind.

When Democrats controlled the government in 2009, they could have theoretically passed legislation that opened an existing public insurance system like Medicare or Medicaid to working-age people. But that would have unspooled existing insurance markets, creating significant disruption for consumers and relentless opposition from carriers and other powerful interests.

Democrats instead struck bargains with stakeholders across the health industry, which created political and economic space for a major coverage expansion but left most existing arrangements untouched. They subjected insurers to more regulation, but guaranteed them millions of new customers; they cut reimbursement rates to hospitals, but with the understanding that a spike in insured patients would help them recoup lost revenues. Most of those patients were expected to be poor people who would be added to state Medicaid rolls, in an expansion paid for almost entirely by the federal government.

The political downsides to this approach were fairly obvious at the time, and have become more clear as the law’s been implemented. It’s complex and inequitable; it doesn’t cover everyone; it turns people into customers in an amoral and unpopular market, rather than into users of a simple public utility. But the upside was that it could be slowly blended into the existing fabric of the health system without rending the whole thing and starting over. It’s not a single patch in a strange patchwork. Removing the stitching won’t just re-create a hole, but leave the rest of the quilt more tattered than it was before.

Eliminating a program that covers 20 million people will create a backlash on obvious humanitarian grounds, but that’s far from the only challenge Republicans now face. Repealing the Medicaid expansion will confront hospitals with an uncompensated care crisis; repealing private insurance subsidies will collapse the individual marketplaces; repealing the coverage guarantee will allow insurers to again discriminate against sick people. Delaying these repeal measures with no promise that they will be replaced with an alternative that makes providers and patients whole, will create major disruptions in the health care system anyhow. This is a stickier wicket than many strident Republicans in Washington realized, and the ones who did know were cynical enough to over-promise anyhow.

See, it was all fun and games using Obamacare as a dartboard to take shots at. Now that the Republicans have to, you know, live up to their threat of killing off Obamacare they're realizing this shit is real for 20-30 million Americans, that any hit to the health care system will cost jobs, and people who otherwise are angry at the Dirty Librul Dems could turn around and get angry at the Evil Greedhead Rethugs.

It doesn't help that a lot of professional organizations and businesses reliant on Obamacare are in a position to punch back:

The American Medical Association (a powerful doctors association), and the even more powerful hospital lobby have warned Republicans not to repeal Obamacare unless an alternative is enacted in tandem. When GOP repeal plans are described to them, Trump-supporting Obamacare beneficiaries in key swing states are rightly horrified. This week, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNBC, “we don’t want anyone who currently has insurance to not have insurance,” but according to Politico, “Republicans are now realizing how hard it will be to replace the law, and many of them have plainly settled on the fact that they will never be able to craft a plan to insure as many people as Obamacare does.”

I mentioned this before back in 2015:

Which leads me to wonder about how much of this Obama knew about ahead of time when he pushed for the ACA "Obamacare" package in the first place all those years ago. True, by 2009 our Health Care system was facing utter collapse without any substantive reforms. With a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, Obama could have pushed for a more liberal - read: single-payer - package. But he insisted on pushing an agenda modeled on the conservative reform alternative that the Republicans offered and never followed up on back in 1993 to oppose Clinton's ultimately doomed plan.

At the time, it looked like Obama jumped out too early for a compromise package in an attempt to secure Republican votes for a bipartisan "victory" bill. It seemingly backfired because the Republicans decided in toto to deny Obama any "victory" at all, sticking to an obstructionist position that painted themselves into a corner...

Because by going for a "compromise" bill like the ACA - based on market-based reforms that Republicans themselves argued for in 1993 - Obama took away the one real alternative Republicans today could offer. They've got nothing else, other than basically eliminating the reforms altogether... which basically brings back the out-of-control costs and lack of health care for far too many Americans. Republicans keep saying they can "Replace" Obamacare after the "Repeal", but when pressed on what the replacement can be the Republicans can't offer a legitimate plan.

This is 2017, two years later. The Republicans practically had six-seven years to come up with an alternative plan, an honest-to-God Replacement package to placate the medical/health care industry and the nation as a whole. SIX YEARS. They still can't, because Obamacare WAS the plan they had.

The Republicans are reportedly still arguing among themselves about what to do, and the Replace part hasn't gotten any specifics confirmed. This is insane. You'd think after SIX YEARS and fifty-odd REPEAL votes that they'd HAVE a REPLACE plan figured out. But they never put their asses on the line to come up with one (either they were never really serious about it when they knew Obama would stop them, or they didn't want to offer something that would outrage the wingnuts).

All we have for the LAST SIX YEARS is that Republicans hate it. They hate it because it doesn't have their name on it. But they can't get rid of it because they don't have anything else that works. 

Back to Beutler:

Republicans must now choose between walking onto what they acknowledge is a political minefield and reneging on the political promise that has defined them—that became their organizing principle as an opposition party—during the Obama years. In a more sane environment, they would accept Democrats’ offer to improve Obamacare in ways that Trump voters say they want, and then claim victory in the repeal fight...

What's really at play here is that the Republicans want the Democrats to jump in with a Replacement package for them, or somehow give them some political cover from the fallout that's bound to happen. If there's any good news right now for the Progressive Left, it's that Obama and the Democratic Senate Leadership isn't giving the Republicans any safety nets (via Washington Post):

The president, who was accompanied by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) as he entered the Capitol, took no questions from reporters before or after the nearly two-hour meeting. But participants said he told members of his party that they did not have to “rescue” Republicans and that they should “stay strong” as the GOP strives to replace the law...

Schumer and other Democrats echoed Obama, saying they did not feel any responsibility to craft a substitute health-care bill...

The Democrats' position should be this: Obamacare works to cover most Americans. Obamacare works to improve access to health care to most Americans. Obamacare works. And stick to that message.

The Democrats need to remember that the Republicans sold a fearmongering campaign, demonizing the health care reforms even as those reforms kicked into gear and made our nation's existing health care system function at better value (lower costs, more coverage for people who NEEDED it). Now that the Republicans can't campaign on that fear anymore - now that THEY are the ones responsible for what happens to our nation's health care - it's their own damn fault that too many people believe the wrong things about it.

David Frum wrote about this years ago when he called Obamacare the Republicans' Waterloo. It wasn't going to doom Obama or the Democrats, he noted, it was going to doom a Republican party whose reflexive opposition to ANYTHING was going to leave them unable to lead or fix this issue any time soon (and that time is NOW):

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

The Republicans in Congress are now flailing with few sound options. They WANT to kill Obamacare but can't completely because 1) the legislative rules can only allow them to kill portions of it, 2) there ARE popular parts of Obamacare that even the wingnuts would be stupid to kill off, and 3) there are signs that ANY tampering with Obamacare will kill jobs and hurt an economy already doomed by a slash-and-burn Republican budget guaranteed to raise deficits and the national debt.

There's no glory in what the Republicans realize the position they've put themselves into.

Screw them. They asked for this.

They got 62 million Americans to buy their bullsh-t. Now the bill's come due, and nobody else should be forced to pay it.

Republicans Don't Give a Rat's Ass About the Constitution Anymore

(Update: Thank you Batocchio for the link on Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! To everyone visiting, hello again. Please stay and check out my other rants about Gods help us everything about this election cycle. And please, sign up for NaNoWriMo and write your damn novels next November!)

You lost me, McCain, a long time ago, but this just really hurts:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) suggested Monday that the Republican party’s months-long refusal to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court could extend into the next administration if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

"I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up," McCain said on WPHT Philadelphia radio in an interview first flagged by CNN. "I promise you. This is where we need the majority.”

McCain essentially promised that the Republicans in the Senate will not uphold their oath of office to the Constitution.

He promised to put party partisanship ahead of the needs of the United States to have judicial offices filled in order to ensure our legal system is working.

He promised to ignore the constitutional powers of the President to nominate people to fill vacancies in the court system. He promised to ignore the reality that a President Clinton would win election with a sizable number of American voters.

He promised that if Hillary Clinton wins with lets say 60 million votes to lets say 50 million Trump votes, he and his fellow Republicans will tell those 60 million voters that their vote did not ever count, that their choice wasn't legitimate, that they will never listen to or respect those voters.

He promised to continue the obstruction that this current Republican-controlled Senate has been carrying on for almost a year now, refusing to even LISTEN to Supreme Court nominee Garland, operating on a laughable and possibly illegal argument that the Senate should "hold off" on allowing a lame-duck President during his last year in office from filling any vacancies: That the Senate should "respect the wishes of the voters during an election year." Yet if those voters go with Clinton, well they'll just ignore THIS YEAR'S promise and move on to this new promise of NEVER advising and consenting to a Democratic nominee ever again.

That's what this promise is about: McCain is laying out in public the truth that the Republican Party will never accept any Democratic President as legitimate, no matter how many people vote for that Democrat, no matter how the Constitution requires them to at least respect the Office of the Presidency.

This is absolute partisanship. McCain and his fellow Republican Senators are kicking their Constitution duties into the dumpster. It won't matter if Hillary wins by three percent or double-digits. The Republicans in Congress will obstruct her for as long as they possibly can.

THIS is why I've been screaming for the last 8-10 years to never vote Republican. Doesn't matter the office, if it's Dog Catcher or State legislator or US Congress or the Senate or President. This is the attitude of the entire GOP: THEY must rule or else everything will be in ruins.

THIS is why it's just as important for people to get out the vote to kick every Republican out of every elected office. It's not just the Presidency at stake, America: EVERY office needs purging of obstructionist Republicans who WILL NOT DO THEIR JOBS.

Every Republican Senator up for election this cycle needs to lose. Every Republican Congresscritter up for election this 2016 needs to lose, to hell with their gerrymandered safe zones. If the GOP retains majority control of the Senate, we will never see ANY vacancy - not on the Courts, not in the Cabinet - filled as required by the Constitution. If the GOP retains majority control of the House, we will never see ANY sane federal budget and will likely see series of government shutdowns by a Far Right Congress insisting on their godless tax cuts for the super-rich.

You wanna know why government's not working? JUST LISTEN TO THE REPUBLICANS. They will tell you: THEY DON'T WANT IT TO WORK. They would rather let it rust away, block every fix, block every qualified candidate. They would rather let the nation suffer for their self-serving needs than compromise or do their jobs.

For the LOVE OF GOD, stop voting Republican. They sure as hell have not earned your vote.

I'll Say It Again. WORST CONGRESS EVER

You know, at some point you kinda have to stop saying "Worst Congress Ever" because the downward spiral has to end and genuine competent leadership somehow earns its way behind the driver's seat of the national bus.

But not this week.

And this was a special kind of stupid on display: the Bipartisan version where both parties in Congress committed a collective brain fart. Granted, I'm going to end up yelling at the Republicans more BECAUSE THEY'RE THE IDIOTS IN CHARGE OF THE WHOLE CAPITOL BUILDING but still, credit where credit's due the Democrats were a bunch of morons about this too...

What exactly is getting my last nerve frazzled?

This (per the Atlantic):

The enactment on Wednesday of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act should have been a triumphant moment for Republican leaders in Congress. They had succeeded, after years of trying, in overriding a presidential veto for the first time and forcing a bill into law over the strenuous objections of Barack Obama.

Just remember, Obama objected to the bill.

“It appears as if there may be some unintended ramifications,” McConnell lamented at a press conference barely 24 hours after all but one senator voted to reject the president’s veto of the legislation, which would allow victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. court. On the other side of the Capitol, Ryan said that he hoped there could be a “fix” to the very law he allowed to pass through the House—one that would protect U.S. soldiers abroad from legal retribution that the Obama administration had warned for months would follow as a result of the law.

Just remember, Obama's administration warned for months there were legal ramifications that Congress - made up of lawmakers who are supposed to UNDERSTAND the law and its ramifications - needed to consider about this bill.

...How could a Congress plagued by gridlock pass legislation with overwhelming bipartisan majorities, initiate a rare veto override, and then immediately voice regret about the problems the new law might cause?

The answer is a mix of sensitive 9/11 politics, an unusually powerful bipartisan alliance, election-year timing, and a heavy dose of mistrust and miscommunication between two branches of government that rarely see eye to eye.

Also known as the Perfect Bullshit Storm.

For years, victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families have pushed for a change in the law that would exempt acts of terrorism on U.S. soil from the principle of sovereign immunity, which prevents lawsuits against foreign governments and officials in American court. The families want to sue the Saudi government for damages over its alleged ties to the 9/11 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi citizens. The Saudis have denied any involvement, and as CIA Director John Brennan made clear on Wednesday, the U.S. government has backed up their denial...

...The 9/11 families had two influential senators in their corner: Charles Schumer of New York, likely the next Democratic leader, and John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican. With their backing, a revised version of the bill cleared the Judiciary Committee in the spring and then passed the full Senate on a voice vote—a rarity for legislation that drew such vociferous opposition from the White House. Any senator could have objected, but then as now, none wanted to go on record against a proposal billed as “justice for 9/11 families.” 

Political Courage at its finest, across the board, which is why I'm none too happy with Democrats about this mess. Just for the record, Schumer should be barred from any leadership role with the Senate Democrats regardless of minority or majority seating, just on this craven stupidity alone.

...Yet because the legislation first passed the Senate without debate, many members only became aware of the administration’s concerns in the last several weeks after Congress returned from a long summer recess. The House passed the bill in similar fashion—without much debate—two weeks ago, and Obama returned it with a veto message last Friday.

“This is a bill that should have been given a greater airing,” Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland told me on Thursday. “It was not on my radar screen until after the train was leaving the station. The next thing I know, it’s on the president’s desk.” Cardin is no backbencher; he is the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and along with the panel’s chairman, Bob Corker of Tennessee, he spent the last several days scrambling to work out a compromise with the Obama administration that would have kept the bill, as written, from becoming law. Time ran out this week, however, as McConnell decided to bring up the veto-override vote just before lawmakers left to campaign for reelection.

This is where the sins of letting Congress set its own vacation schedule - itself an insane process where they take so many days off NOTHING REALLY GETS DONE - have come back to bite these morons on the ass.

Either way, neither Democrats nor Republicans objected to the vote, and the 97-1 tally was an overwhelming rebuke of the White House. Only Harry Reid, the retiring Democratic leader, supported the president’s veto. Vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine wasn’t in town to vote, but following the lead of Hillary Clinton, he said he would have gone against Obama and overturned the veto. Hours later, the House voted 348-77 to make the bill a law.

And why, exactly, was this override a bad thing?

Appearing at a CNN veterans forum Wednesday night, Obama called the override “a mistake” motivated by lawmakers’ understandable concerns about emotional 9/11 politics and the looming election. He reiterated the objections he outlined in his three-page veto message—that by overturning sovereign immunity even for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, Congress could be exposing U.S. personnel to lawsuits and other legal action all across the globe. Under current law, the U.S. government can exempt a country from sovereign immunity by having the State Department designate it as a state sponsor of terrorism (which it has not done for Saudi Arabia). “This is taking that out of our military and our intelligence and the hands of our national-security professionals and putting it into the courts,” Obama said. “And that’s a mistake.”

Hence the Congressional leaders' sudden outpouring of "Oh Crap" about the law they just confirmed. All of a sudden a lot of survivors from Iraq and Afghanistan are getting emails and faxes from lawyers up and down the National Geographic atlas.

This is what happens when you get a combination of partisan brinksmanship, localized pandering (Schumer playing to his voter base back in NYC), and outright ignorance of the consequences by those who should know better about the law they are supposed to craft.

And while I admit both parties are to blame, I'm still aiming most of my ire at the idiots among the Republican leadership. It's THEIR House and Senate they control, it's THEIR rules for getting bills passed, it's THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE DOING.

And of course, these damned Republican leaders, such profiles of leadership, are blaming Obama instead of themselves:

For their part, Republicans blamed the White House for waiting too long to warn lawmakers about the bill’s “potential consequences,” as McConnell put it. “That was, it seems to me, an example of a failure to communicate on a piece of legislation that was obviously very popular,” the Majority Leader told reporters.

I'm sorry, Mitch, but what part of those tidbits I highlighted - that the Obama administration had warned for months, and He reiterated the objections he outlined in his three-page veto message - did you NOT FUCKING NOTICE? Did you even READ Obama's veto notes? Aren't you required in your duty to, you know, get an inkling of what your political opponents are talking about just you can adequately rebuke them? Weren't you at all worried about the military and intel people - the ones who are actually part of a civil service that tries to remain nonpartisan - yelling at Congress "HOLY SHIT YOU MORONS DON'T PASS THIS BILL"?

YOU FAILED, MITCH, YOU FAILED TO DO YOUR OWN DAMN JOB. Blaming Obama for your own idiocy is no excuse.

Swear to God, every Congressional moron responsible for this shitshow should apologize to the nation on bended knee or resign, and yes I will say both sides. Starting with the morons at top - McConnell and Ryan - and work our way down to any intern caught abusing the vending snack machines. I don't care if that Milky Way bar is overpriced at $4.25 a pop, it's your damn fault you live in a metro with an excessively high cost-of-living.

/rage

New Book - Surviving the Age of Obstruction: Notes On the Obama Years

Well, you were warned:

I decided earlier this year to get some of my blogging articles here at Notice a Trend and put them into book format.

I had several reasons.

First, I was inspired by Molly Ivins. She had published many a newspaper and magazine column into well-received books one of which - Nothin' But Good Times Ahead - my Aunt Dot gifted me for Christmas back in the day.

It's a doable thing, one that I think more bloggers ought to look into. Not everybody reads off the Internet: there are people we could reach with our writings in book form that would never see our work online.

Second, I work at a library and I handle collection development in the Political Science and History shelves. And I am getting sick and tired of seeing a ton of anti-Obama drivel sitting on those shelves. It's like for every pro-Obama or progressive-leaning book, there's ten anti-Obama Far Right nonsense crowding out the space. So here's my contribution to balancing those shelves (if any libraries routinely order books via Ingram, one hopes).

The book contains selected essays from this blog focusing on the ongoing Republican obstructionism, the failures of Republican ideology, the rise of Barack Obama as a focus of Far Right ire, and the successes Obama achieved in spite of the obstruction.

I've included a handful of new essays that are not published on this blog, so there's that enticement.

Think of this as my Eagles Greatest Hits Volume One. Except for the lack of platinum awards or guitar riffs. I think my lyrics to "Dammit Republicans Stop Being Crazy" far outshines "Already Gone"... (granted, "One of These Nights" is too good IMHO)

If you do purchase a copy - THANK YOU - if you can do me a favor and leave a review on the site purchased from. If you like the book, please leave a good review. If you don't like the book... go ahead and be honest about it. I trust your judgment. If you notice any spelling or grammar errors... /shakes head ...just let it slide... Danke.

Link to the publisher bookstore
Link to Amazon.com page
Link to Barnes & Noble page