Didn't "The Left" have a super-majority during Obama's initial term and all they could achieve then was a watered-down plan for healthcare?
I'll be real, if you want things to get better you gotta get rid of first-past-the-post voting.
I'll be real, if you want things to get better you gotta get rid of first-past-the-post voting.
Keep in mind that somehow, it’s fascism for democrats to ignore republican input, but when republicans steal Supreme Court appointments, it’s just “how the government works”.
At that point, democrats were still very much playing “if we take the high road, people will see republicans for what they are”, but the problem is that this didn’t happen at all, and it fact, all it took was reinvigorating public displays of racism to fire up their base.
Party is an abstract to these people, it's all about interests. In Lieberman's case, one of his interests was to protect the health insurance industry which contributed more than $1M to his campaigns over the years. [1]
[0]https://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/27/health.care/inde...
[1]https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2009/1211/Healthcare-holdouts-...
And they only had that for 6 months in latter half of 2009.
The days of Democrats being progressive are over if they existed like we pretend. The President that was most left in this country was FDR and he pulled us out of the Great Depression and set us up for an era of excellence. Democrats ran on left-adjacent policies and held Congress for decades.
Modern Democrats, 1970s forward really, keep rushing to the "center" that doesn't exist to capture imaginary voters as a result of Right-Wing propaganda (Intentional Overton-Window shifting, Two Santa Claus Theory, PR games).
Republicans, and most other morons, think that Democrats had a functional majority starting in 2009. However, Republicans intentionally held up the 60th seat for months. Then Kennedy died not long after Al Frankin was seated. That broke the supermajority.
Democrats have several conservative members (who I think should be expelled from the party but whatever) which resulted in us getting right wing healthcare policy and nothing meaningful being done. You can tell the people who fell for the RNC/Fox News PR campaign as they think Democrats had a supermajority for years rather than weeks.
- $3.4 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), which would affect 49 states and has the potential to reduce electricity use by more than 4% by 2033
- The recovery act included more than $70 billion in tax credits and direct spending for programs involving clean energy and transportation.
- The launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) project under the Department of Energy
- New efficiency standards for home appliances
- Extending the investment tax credit for solar energy
- Extending the production tax credit for wind energy,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_Barack_Ob...
This year is the first year I’ve personally been impacted by wildfires (4000+ hectare fire on the edge of my town), and it made climate change 10x more real for me than it was before, and I was fully on board before! How long can the right stay on the wrong side of history with respect to climate change when they are losing their homes and farms and dealing with one thing after another?
In other words, I wouldn't hold my breath.
The Democrats did mess up by not taking that 3-4 month window more seriously, but they thought they had Massachusetts in the bag.
See the part at the end about Krugman "tearing his head out", and also
> It was also obvious to me, although apparently not to Obama officials, that they had only one shot at getting it right — that if the plan failed to produce a vigorous recovery, Republicans would say, “See, stimulus doesn’t work,” and nothing more would be done.