Voting rights, climate, guns, education, infrastructure, child care, family leave, healthcare, Medicare expansion, immigration, tax reform, jobs — take your pick; save for reconciliation shelter, legislative inertia drenching everything, because of the filibuster.
It's "not in the U.S. Constitution, nor is it in a law, nor set in stone through some Supreme Court precedent," remarks the Washington Post. And yet it rules the land.
With Democratic disunity on the seemingly imponderable question of whether they should be allowed to do what they were elected to do, the Dems could wind up doing virtually nothing, for which voters would blame them, thus they could easily lose their majority and, worse, be forced to forego getting shit done.
If the minority Gang of 50 can decide to kill a commission to investigate the origins of a movement designed to kill them, it certainly will have no problem with brushing away needy children, insecure elders and everyone else but Trump.
That is all too comprehensible. But what is absolutely stupefying is that Marty Feldman Democrats are stupefied about what should be done. Next month, as just one example, with the filibuster intact the Senate minority will annihilate a federal voting rights bill and thereby enhance the freedom of states to barricade Dems' very own voters from the polls. And Democratic senators will stand around, scratching their butts and wiping their foreheads and bellowing — My Gawd! how can this be? Unfuckingbelievable.
"Some Democratic senators … insist that bipartisanship is not dead," relates the Post, somehow with no audible laughter. "Indeed, skepticism about flatly eliminating the filibuster goes deeper in the Democratic ranks than the much-noted opposition of [Sens. Joe Manchin and Jeanne Shaheen]." There are at least eight others, says a Senate Dem aide. But why go vocal with their mossback notions when Manchin is "taking all the arrows for them"?
Says a former Harry Reid aide and author of Kill Switch — a self-explanatory title — "I 100 percent believe that the fate of the Democrat[ic] Party in the foreseeable future is in the balance." And I 100 percent believe that Mr. Jentleson is 100 percent correct, especially since the minority Gang of 50's warlord has said that "100 percent of my focus is on stopping this administration."