Showing posts with label filibuster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label filibuster. Show all posts

Thursday, January 13, 2022

"Sinema reiterates opposition to eliminating filibuster, probably dooming Democrats’ voting rights push."

WaPo reports.

And:
[T]he circumstances in which she reiterated it — as Senate Democratic leaders prepared to launch a decisive floor debate and less than an hour before President Biden was scheduled to arrive on Capitol Hill to deliver a final, forceful appeal for action — put an exclamation point on her party’s long and fruitless effort to counter restrictive Republican-passed state voting laws.

We're told that she wore "purple, a symbol of Washington bipartisanship." There's always interest in what this Senator is wearing. So here — you can look at her as she stands in the breach:

"You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’re just seeing, a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure, pure demagoguery."

"A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power." 


I didn't watch Biden's speech — I can read the transcript — but I did overhear it, and I said out loud, What is he yelling about? Why is he scolding us? He's using a ridiculous "tough guy" voice. 

You can criticize me for not attending to the substance, but he wasn't trying to use substance. He was using emotive sound effects. It was like a Trump rally — but no. A Trump rally would have humor and fun. 

And I don't think Trump ever relied on the argument that you're a racist if you don't agree with him. The anti-Trump rejoinder: Trump never called his opponents racists, because his between-the-lines message was always come all you racists and follow me.