United States Politics Thread 46

[sangi39]

So, I speak from a UK perspective (as others here do), but with the House just 6 seats away from a Republican majority, the Senate elections already showing a Republican majority, and the President-elect being Donald Trump (I think some states allow for faithless electors, but still...), are there any real mechanisms in place that would actually stop the absolute madness that this result might actually bring?

Like, a chunk of Republican senators/reps going "no" to Trump stuff in Congress? Or the whole Project 2025 thing being blocked by people who can't just be replaced or superseded ?

I've seen some people say that this might be the USA "experimenting" with "proto-Fascism", rather than full on fascism... but what's stopping the slide


The current Democratic Party seems pretty content with chasing discontented "I voted Republican last time" voters over making any meaningful change, i.e. they're just stalling the drift to the right. So if the Democratic Party really is the main opposition... honestly, beyond "lesser of two evils", what is the point? When the "lesser of to evils" now occupies a very similar state to the "evil" of 20 to 40 years ago?

[zompist]

So, I speak from a UK perspective (as others here do), but with the House just 6 seats away from a Republican majority, the Senate elections already showing a Republican majority, and the President-elect being Donald Trump (I think some states allow for faithless electors, but still...), are there any real mechanisms in place that would actually stop the absolute madness that this result might actually bring?

Yes, though we don't know how strong those mechanisms will be. Our system, unlike the UK's, was built with multiple friction points.

One is the Senate filibuster. At any point the Senate could simply vote to throw it out. It hasn't been done, because it's the parliamentary nuclear option: obviously, once used against a party, the other one will do the same next time. With it, Congress is limited in how radical it can be-- basically it can only pass budget bills. (Look for mentions of "reconciliation.") There's a Senate Parliamentarian who has to approve whether a particular bill counts as budget-only or not. You can do an awful lot with a budget bill, but not (e.g.) banning abortion nationwide.

The Supreme Court is supposed to stop really bad shenanigans. With 6 of 9 judges in Trump's pocket, they're not going to stop him... but they need not fear either president or Congress, and they do not always rule the Republicans' way. We do still have a constitution, and the SC will find it hard to violate it outright.

Then there's the states. We have a weird system of dual sovereignty-- both states and the federal government have certain powers and also prohibitions. Trump's power will be less in blue states.

It looks like the Republicans will get a House majority, but a small one. They've embarrassed themselves before with leadership fights and the inability to pass major laws (they were famously unable to get rid of Obamacare). And these folks face elections every two years, so the ones with a razor-thin majority can't be totally reckless.

The current Democratic Party seems pretty content with chasing discontented "I voted Republican last time" voters over making any meaningful change, i.e. they're just stalling the drift to the right. So if the Democratic Party really is the main opposition... honestly, beyond "lesser of two evils", what is the point? When the "lesser of to evils" now occupies a very similar state to the "evil" of 20 to 40 years ago?

Hey, how's that "Labour Party" of yours going? Directly implementing socialism and reversing everything the Tories did, right?

More seriously, no, the Democrats are not the same as the Republicans of 1994. They've moved quite a bit left, not right.

Till the 1990s, both parties were strange chimeras, each with their liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. They resembled each other a lot more in 1976 than they do today. They've been ideologically sorting themselves every since, and it's not necessarily an improvement. You probably don't recall the conservative Democrats who derailed a lot of Obama's agenda. The last of these strange beasts was Joe Manchin, sometimes a thorn in Biden's side-- but losing his seat to the GOP, as just happened, will also not be an improvement.

[bradrn]

With it, Congress is limited in how radical it can be-- basically it can only pass budget bills.

I was under the impression that it couldn’t even do that.

[zompist]

With it, Congress is limited in how radical it can be-- basically it can only pass budget bills.

I was under the impression that it couldn’t even do that.

It can-- see this page for the deets.

[Ahzoh]

Yes, though we don't know how strong those mechanisms will be. Our system, unlike the UK's, was built with multiple friction points.

One is the Senate filibuster. At any point the Senate could simply vote to throw it out. It hasn't been done, because it's the parliamentary nuclear option: obviously, once used against a party, the other one will do the same next time. With it, Congress is limited in how radical it can be-- basically it can only pass budget bills. (Look for mentions of "reconciliation.") There's a Senate Parliamentarian who has to approve whether a particular bill counts as budget-only or not. You can do an awful lot with a budget bill, but not (e.g.) banning abortion nationwide.

The Supreme Court is supposed to stop really bad shenanigans. With 6 of 9 judges in Trump's pocket, they're not going to stop him... but they need not fear either president or Congress, and they do not always rule the Republicans' way. We do still have a constitution, and the SC will find it hard to violate it outright.

Then there's the states. We have a weird system of dual sovereignty-- both states and the federal government have certain powers and also prohibitions. Trump's power will be less in blue states.

It looks like the Republicans will get a House majority, but a small one. They've embarrassed themselves before with leadership fights and the inability to pass major laws (they were famously unable to get rid of Obamacare). And these folks face elections every two years, so the ones with a razor-thin majority can't be totally reckless.

All right, well hopefully the worst that happens is an ineffectual presidency that's more like a soap opera. Though I still think Palestinians, Ukraine, and immigrants will be fucked.

Zelensky will prolly be dead by the end of Trump's presidency, and the Palestinians will likely become a (home)landless diaspora like the Jews used to be.

[Nortaneous]

The thing is that Republicans push the idea that people are "equal" when they really are not, and that there is no need or that it is actually immoral to redress the actual inequality that Republicans deny. What you call "redlining" (which is a mockery of what redlining actually was) is simply directing attention to population groups that need more help than other groups to compensate for the actual underlying inequality between them.

Declining to provide life-saving medical care to politically disfavored races on the grounds that they don't really need the help is not a viable attitude for a political movement that has to interface with the voting public to take, especially if those races constitute a majority of the population. It's also completely indefensible. Vermont's policy of banning politically disfavored races from accessing a COVID vaccine for two weeks was insignificant enough as an intervention (while still being quite significant as a barometer of opinion, in multiple senses) that the burden of proof is on its supporters to explain how it could meaningfully accomplish any goals whatsoever. This does not, however, mean that its death toll can be presumed to be epsilon, and once the current realignment is settled enough for the new order to take up the task of explaining to the next generation its superiority over the old, a rigorous statistical estimate of the number of people who died of a preventable disease whose prevention they were prohibited by the state from acquiring due to their race or proxies thereof could certainly appear as a line item.

There is a widespread understanding in the business community that there are certain things you Do Not Do with ZIP codes. This understanding is notoriously unshared by Democratic administrations, which do not have proactive compliance departments, in a way that leads many among the voting public to consider as a bullet point in their risk analysis the possibility of future Democratic administations finding new applications of ZIP codes that would be obviously impermissible in private industry. This impedance mismatch likely has electoral consequences, especially since the actions of representative governments are often described using a (morally implicative in republics that take themselves seriously) first-person plural pronoun that is not used for private companies other than maybe one's employer. If someone whose line of work involves extensive interactions with financial compliance departments calls a policy of using ZIP codes as a proxy for immutable traits that state civil rights law prohibits them from using directly "redlining", I'm certainly not going to disagree with that assessment.

Additionally, any policy that holds that Barack Obama, Kanye West, and Oprah are prima facie disadvantaged is prima facie silly, and while some amount of silliness is unfortunately sometimes necessary in administration at scale, the bar here is high. This has been an ongoing point of contention with electoral consequences for some time now, and that it is a point of contention with electoral consequences should not surprise anyone - least of all the Harris campaign, which broke the post-1960s (or so; regardless of precise dating, it existed for longer than many voters have been alive) taboo against explicitly addressing white identity as an electoral demographic for reasons that they thought were convincing - but nonetheless does.

[zompist]

Though I still think Palestinians, Ukraine, and immigrants will be fucked.

Zelensky will prolly be dead by the end of Trump's presidency, and the Palestinians will likely become a (home)landless diaspora like the Jews used to be.

Why would the Russians suddenly become competent? Why would the Europeans suddenly kowtow to a US that rejects them?

A chart from Statista shows that total aid to Ukraine, through August 2024, amounts to $93 billion from the US, and $120 billion from the EU, Japan, and Canada. Also at that point, Ukraine had seized more Russian territory in 2024 than Russia had seized more Ukrainian territory.

[Linguoboy]

(A Chilean friend saw the large swing in Latino men to Trump and blamed "machismo", but (1) this shift has been in progress for a while

That doesn't rule out machismo as a factor, IMO.

It doesn't rule it out, but I've seen too many people argue that it was the deciding factor, as if no further analysis were necessary. I find that approach overly simplistic to say the very least.

and (b) the most pronounced swings--60 pts or more--were in counties on the border with Mexico. Are Tejanos more sexist? Or are they simply fed up with the government's response to the refugee crisis?)

Wait, are you saying that the Biden Administration should have gone all Trump on that issue?

Hey, y'all, I have a great idea for this board! How 'bout we don't put words in other people's mouths in our discussions? I think that'd be real keen.

What I'm saying is that the electorate was very clear about what their chief concerns were: By far the most important issue was the economy. Headline inflation is finally down to a reasonable level. This was a signature achievement of the Biden administration. However, the cost of most household goods is sticky so ordinary folks haven't seen a noticeable improvement in their standard of living. This is a major reason why his approval numbers were so dismal and Harris was tainted by association. It's really questionable whether any campaign could have overcome the strong anti-incumbency mood of the country right now.

Not far behind was immigration. There is a very visible immigration crisis in this country. It's obvious up here in Chicago, where refugee families peddling candy outside bars or begging on street corners have become a commonplace sight. It's orders of magnitude worse near their border; for instance, at its height the El Paso region was experiencing flows of 1,500 to 2000 migrants per day.

I'm not saying it's an easy issue to address and it's been complicated by Republican governors playing politics (e.g. DeSantis' flying migrants to Martha's Vineyard, Abbott busing them to Chicago in the middle of the night). But the Biden administration has struggled to solve it and Harris' association with it (she was tasked with completing a report, which the GOP was able to spin in her being the "Border Czar") became a millstone around her neck.

White folks tend to think that because they think of Latines as recent immigrants, Latines themselves do too and this makes them naturally sympathetic to bordercrossers. But they're just as susceptible to the "I'm over, pull the ladder up" mentality as anyone else in this country, plus the harder they've tried to assimilate, the more they resent getting lumped in with indigent newcomers. This is explains to me the shift in Latino votes much better than "it's just machismo".

[Raphael]

and (b) the most pronounced swings--60 pts or more--were in counties on the border with Mexico. Are Tejanos more sexist? Or are they simply fed up with the government's response to the refugee crisis?)

Wait, are you saying that the Biden Administration should have gone all Trump on that issue?

Hey, y'all, I have a great idea for this board! How 'bout we don't put words in other people's mouths in our discussions? I think that'd be real keen.

Sorry. I was fairly incredulous that you might actually mean to say that, which is why I phrased it as a question starting with "wait."

What I'm saying is that the electorate was very clear about what their chief concerns were: By far the most important issue was the economy. Headline inflation is finally down to a reasonable level. This was a signature achievement of the Biden administration. However, the cost of most household goods is sticky so ordinary folks haven't seen a noticeable improvement in their standard of living. This is a major reason why his approval numbers were so dismal and Harris was tainted by association. It's really questionable whether any campaign could have overcome the strong anti-incumbency mood of the country right now.

Not far behind was immigration. There is a very visible immigration crisis in this country. It's obvious up here in Chicago, where refugee families peddling candy outside bars or begging on street corners have become a commonplace sight. It's orders of magnitude worse near their border; for instance, at its height the El Paso region was experiencing flows of 1,500 to 2000 migrants per day.

I'm not saying it's an easy issue to address and it's been complicated by Republican governors playing politics (e.g. DeSantos' flying migrants to Martha's Vineyard, Abbott busing them to Chicago in the middle of the night). But the Biden administration has struggled to solve it and Harris' association with it (she was tasked with completing a report, which the GOP was able to spin in her being the "Border Czar") became a millstone around her neck.

White folks tend to think that because they think of Latines as recent immigrants, Latines themselves do too and this makes them naturally sympathetic to bordercrossers. But they're just as susceptible to the "I'm over, pull the ladder up" mentality as anyone else in this country, plus the harder they've tried to assimilate, the more they resent getting lumped in with indigent newcomers. This is explains to me the shift in Latino votes much better than "it's just machismo".

Thank you, that's all very interesting to know.

[Linguoboy]

Incidentally, I don't understand the whole "city people vs country people" side conversation going on here. The US population is over 80% urban. A third of all rural residents voted for Harris; 40% of urbanites voted for Trump. Harris also lost the suburbs (albeit narrowly). It wasn't the urban/rural divide that decided the election. That hasn't been the case for decades and won't be the case for the foreseeable.

[Linguoboy]

Thank you, that's all very interesting to know.

Just to add to this, according to the NBC exit polls, Trump took a whopping 90% of voters who said immigration was the most important issue for them and 80% who said it was the economy. He also won three-quarters of those who said the most important characteristic for them in a president was that they could bring about needed change.

[Travis B.]

What I'm saying is that the electorate was very clear about what their chief concerns were: By far the most important issue was the economy. Headline inflation is finally down to a reasonable level. This was a signature achievement of the Biden administration. However, the cost of most household goods is sticky so ordinary folks haven't seen a noticeable improvement in their standard of living. This is a major reason why his approval numbers were so dismal and Harris was tainted by association. It's really questionable whether any campaign could have overcome the strong anti-incumbency mood of the country right now.

This is why I think that people will punish the Republicans at the midterms once they realize that things aren't any cheaper, in the very least, and may very well be even more expensive, particularly if Trump implements his plans for tariffs.

[Linguoboy]

This is why I think that people will punish the Republicans at the midterms once they realize that things aren't any cheaper, in the very least, and may very well be even more expensive, particularly if Trump implements his plans for tariffs.

I hope you're right, but I can't be confident given that the average USAmerican's understanding of economics is simply piss poor. They clearly don't understand how tariffs work, so will they be able to make the connexion between new tariffs and a return of inflation or a full-blown recession? Or will the GOP successfully find a way to scapegoat something totally unrelated for these developments?

[Travis B.]

This is why I think that people will punish the Republicans at the midterms once they realize that things aren't any cheaper, in the very least, and may very well be even more expensive, particularly if Trump implements his plans for tariffs.

I hope you're right, but I can't be confident given that the average USAmerican's understanding of economics is simply piss poor. They clearly don't understand how tariffs work, so will they be able to make the connexion between new tariffs and a return of inflation or a full-blown recession? Or will the GOP successfully find a way to scapegoat something totally unrelated for these developments?

People don't understand tariffs, but they don't need to to get that things are even more expensive.

[Raphael]

Incidentally, I don't understand the whole "city people vs country people" side conversation going on here. The US population is over 80% urban. A third of all rural residents voted for Harris; 40% of urbanites voted for Trump. Harris also lost the suburbs (albeit narrowly). It wasn't the urban/rural divide that decided the election. That hasn't been the case for decades and won't be the case for the foreseeable.

I guess it might look like purely an urban/rural thing depending on which standards you use for deciding how to paint your electoral maps.

[Ahzoh]

What I'm saying is that the electorate was very clear about what their chief concerns were: By far the most important issue was the economy. Headline inflation is finally down to a reasonable level. This was a signature achievement of the Biden administration. However, the cost of most household goods is sticky so ordinary folks haven't seen a noticeable improvement in their standard of living. This is a major reason why his approval numbers were so dismal and Harris was tainted by association. It's really questionable whether any campaign could have overcome the strong anti-incumbency mood of the country right now.

This is why I think that people will punish the Republicans at the midterms once they realize that things aren't any cheaper, in the very least, and may very well be even more expensive, particularly if Trump implements his plans for tariffs.

Provided the Republicans don't spend the next two years working hard to disenfranchise more and more voters and gerrymander. And now they won't have any restraints.

[Ahzoh]

It really be feeling like this lately.

[Linguoboy]

Why would the Russians suddenly become competent?

Maybe because they suddenly get an influx of classified intel from someone who has shown complete disregard for guarding US military secrets (if he isn't, in fact, simply passing them out in return for cash and influence or just because it makes him feel important)? After all, his previous term clearly demonstrated that there are no consequences of any sort for this type of behaviour.

[alice]

Provided the Republicans don't spend the next two years working hard to disenfranchise more and more voters and gerrymander. And now they won't have any restraints.

And provided there any elections left to vote in. The President-elect did after all say you wouldn't need to vote ever again.

[keenir]

Provided the Republicans don't spend the next two years working hard to disenfranchise more and more voters and gerrymander. And now they won't have any restraints.

And provided there any elections left to vote in. The President-elect did after all say you wouldn't need to vote ever again.

He only promised that to a group of Christian supporters (i'd not be surprised if they were mostly the Young Earth Creationists who were in attendance at the Madison Square Gardens incident)