Thursday, November 17, 2022
Liberal Republicans in the Senate and the House again betray the Republican base, work with Democrats to advance same-sex-marriage rights but delayed action to avoid election consequences
Same-sex marriage protections clear critical Senate hurdle
Twelve Republicans voted with all Democrats to move forward on the bill, after negotiators reached a bipartisan deal to include protections for religious liberty.
In a 62-37 vote, 12 Republicans voted with all Democrats to move forward on the bill, after negotiators reached a bipartisan deal to include protections for religious liberty. The vote on final passage could occur as soon as this week. ...
Wednesday’s vote showed Majority Leader Chuck Schumer might get what he hoped for when he delayed the bill to protect same-sex marriage rights from coming to the floor in September, agreeing to Republican requests that the chamber take it up after the election. ... negotiators bet that waiting would help solidify support and allow senators to vote without considering the midterms. ...
While the House passed its same-sex marriage bill in July with support from nearly 50 House Republicans, the process in the Senate has taken more time amid GOP concerns about religious liberty. If the Senate does pass its version, the legislation will need another vote of approval from the House to head to President Joe Biden’s desk. ...
It also would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act signed in 1996, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman under federal laws.
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
Republicans win the majority in the US House
The GOP has now won 218 seats after the Associated Press projected that Republican Mike Garcia will win reelection in California's 27th Congressional District.
Democrats, meanwhile, have secured 209 seats as vote counting continues more than a week after Election Day. Eight seats are still in play.
Monday, November 14, 2022
Sunday, November 13, 2022
Saturday, November 12, 2022
Salena Zito is obviously channeling Peggy Noonan: The women recommend just giving up on secure chain of custody voting
The weaker sex recommends you give in. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
That right there is the whole history of conservatism, from the advent of the Progressive Era 130 years ago until now.
Currently, Democrats are miles ahead of Republicans at targeting specific races and voters. Through mail balloting, they put those voters in the bank early. ... Republicans can complain about the current rules all they want, but what they need to do is wake up and start competing with the Democrats where they are. Otherwise, they're just leaving winnable races on the table.
Florida Republicans certainly have figured it out. In 2018 and 2020, the Democrats went into Election Day with more ballots cast than Republicans in early voting. This year, Florida Republicans flipped that on its head. Republicans in other states should take note.
-- Salena Zito, in her conclusion here
It is rude of Arizona and Nevada to keep the country waiting to know the composition of its Senate. Why, days after the election, don’t we know which party controls the House? Why can’t the late-reporting states get their act together on vote counting? It’s the increase in mail-in ballots? So what? You roll with life and adapt. Florida, which spans two time zones, reports its tallies with professionalism and dispatch.
-- Peggy Noonan, from her lede here
Four true words
Trump lacked the discipline.
Stated here.
That's still the fundamental problem, but that's been the case from the beginning.
Character counts. Trump has never had it and never will. I cut my losses with Trump in 2018 when he exposed himself as a phony on his chief plank, illegal immigration. He already did that in August 2016, so fool me once, shame on Trump. I am not ashamed to state it over and over again.
The rest of the party still hasn't come around, however, with so-called conservatives still yammering on about stuff like pOPuLiSm. But that's because opposition to illegal immigration was never a GOP value. The GOP would never be upset because he lied about that.
It's hard to imagine the GOP pointing to anything in particular which was a line too far. 121 voted in the House to object to the 2020 Arizona vote, 138 to the Pennsylvania vote. Not even three horrible elections in a row is proving to be decisive.
Meanwhile Democrats have exploited Trump's weakness, and therefore the GOP's, to consolidate power with extraordinary new depth. The new regime of mail-in voting everywhere changes everything. The chain of custody of ballots in voting precincts is broken forever.
It's the end run around representative government we only imagined the National Popular Vote Compact would be. It's the path to pure democracy. It's the end of legislatures, the end of republicanism, and makes the tyranny of the majority and the repression of the minority the new, terrible future.
A Supreme Court in principle deferring to the states on everything from election law to drugs, marriage, abortion, gender, etc. is no bulwark against what's coming, indeed, what's already here.
The people will decide by referendum.
The people be damned.
Friday, November 11, 2022
Clearly the interest rate beatings will have to continue until stock market morale improves
It's a small point, but the stock market cheerleaders, who are ubiquitous, consistently report year over year inflation as 7.7% when it's 7.8%.
Nothing must get in the way of the narrative, especially convention.
Meanwhile, the inflation regime is a giant wealth transfer scheme from you to them. But student loan forgiveness was the anesthetic to make young skulls full of mush forget on Tuesday.
Thursday, November 10, 2022
The end is near: The majority increasingly uses the referendum to get what it cannot get from a legislature, and now to vote itself largess out of the public treasury
Soon it will vote quite literally to redistribute wealth from those who have it to those who have it not.
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Michigan House, Senate, Governor's mansion, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Supreme Court all under Democrat control for first time since 1980s
This is what happens when you get 1.8 million votes by mail: a record turnout to surpass the 2018 record turnout.
For the first time in four decades, Democrats are waking up to a state in which their party controls the House and Senate – a feat not done since the early 1980s.
More.
It takes a special kind of stupid Republicanism to screw things up this bad: libertarian Republicanism, for which Michigan is famous.
The key: legislation by referendum of the people instead of by representative government; which yielded 1) easy voting by mail, instead of on election day, for which libertarians are all-in, as they are for abortion, immigration, and free-trade, same as Democrats; and 2) "nonpartisan" redistricting.
Michigan was never a conservative state, and is finished as a Republican state.
Michigan has been irretrievably Californicated in the span of four years.
Trump failed to deliver in 2018 and 2020, now his party fails to deliver in 2022
This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer. ... Trump didn’t play the net positive role he should have, and that might be the real takeaway. ... Objectively, it’s clear that DeSantis is the future of the GOP.
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Insurrectionists don't answer the phone, lol
Republicans this cycle are practicing the art of being ungovernable, and the progressives at The Daily Beast are frustrated as hell that no one can predict today's outcome from data:
Republicans seem less and less inclined to answer poll questions. ... It’s hard to get a truly random sample online the way you can with phone numbers. ... According to Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor at the Cook Political Report, the big problem is that “response rates suck. We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” he told The Daily Beast.
Monday, November 7, 2022
Meanwhile Joe Biden and the Democrats who cut and ran from Afghanistan fell far short of military recruitment even after cutting goals
The US Army was 25% short, while all the other branches had to dip into delayed-entry recruits to make their goals for this cycle.
Active duty military fell to 1.347m in 2020 from 1.388m in 2019.
In 2021 we're down to 1.195m, a year over year decline of 11.3% and 13.9% from 2019.
Look at this fearsome lot. These supposedly still meet US Army standards.
I'm sure our enemies tremble with fear.
