“Look, it takes a very developed political mind to understand that Democrats are spineless cowards that wouldn’t do much as take a piss unless they found an opinion poll that told them voters approved of it.”
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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No, they act based on donor approval, or Roe would have been codified long ago.
There’s plenty of dem donors that are pro-choice though. If anything, I think it’s because abortion access being in a precarious place created a narrative to keep the donations coming in.
it's a useful wedge issue for them to pretend to care about so they can beg for money. As long as it remains in limbo they can keep using it to beat that drum forever.
"...unless they found an opinion poll saying rubes would vote for them if they pinky promise to do it this tine for real"
Large number of Dem pols are still squeamish or soft on abortion, which is why voting for them does nothing for abortion rights.
How's this for an outcome?...
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Trump gets convicted in NY and then in DC.
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Trump finally blows a head gasket and goes totally apeshit. He tells his hogs to vote for him and only for him because republicans aren't "loyal" to him. Nobody can figure out what he means exactly and he only vomits up word salad about it when asked.
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Biden wins, the dems take the house, and they increase their lead in the senate by a few votes. Libs praise Biden for winning and voters for showing up for democracy. In truth many races were razor thin and there's a one word reason the dems did as well as they did. And that's the unsurprising word "Trump".
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Biden promises to codify Roe but he says "We've got a lot of other work to do." He keeps promising to codify Roe. And he promises again. And again. And yet again. he says "Hold your horses!"
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Finally Biden makes vague promises that the dems might kinda-sorta codify Roe in early-mid 2022 so "voters remember who to vote for".
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It's 5 months before the election and the senate votes on a Roe law. It's expected to pass but it fails 49-51. An elderly senator had fallen and broke their hip. They promised to still make it in person to vote. Alas - due to medical complications because they are older than fuck they had to stay in the hospital.
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Biden then tells the nation "There's not enough time for a new vote. Look, we had a setback. A serious setback. But setback's happen. The next opportunity is after the election. So - you know what that means! What you gotta do is vote!..."
Not even that. They won't even try to advance legislation because they'll say any law they pass would be killed by SCOTUS.
If you had control over all 3 houses or whatever, what prevents you from slamming through every legislation you want other than your own cowardice?
They were squeamish
What if our laws became too codified?
Ratchet effect
There's always 1 or 2 Democrats who smell things like "human rights" and then vote against the unambiguous interests of their constituents.
The dumbass filibuster. Basically you need 60 votes in the senate to tell someone to shut up, so in the old days minority parties could indefinitely stall legislation by just blabbing on and on indefinitely and never allowing for a vote. Now they dont do that anymore, but have the same effect by just saying they filibuster.
Now passing the budget is obviously important because the government shuts down without it, so they made a rule that budget legislation can’t be filibustered. This is how whatever they tried to pass that got killed by the parliamentarian, they tried to argue that bc whatever it was (I don’t remember) affected the budget so therefore couldn’t be filibustered but the parliamentarian said they couldn’t do that, essentially killing the bill. This is dumb bc the parliamentarian can be fired and reappointed but gotta be bipartisan.
This is why the public healthcare option got killed by Lieberman voting no even though the dems had a 60 seat majority.
TLDR 51 seats isn’t enough you need 60 and even then you have to get everyone on board
They really should make them go all Mr. Smith Goes to Washington still
The worst part is they can get rid of it if they want to, like they did for judicial appointments during Obama I believe, they just choose not to bc of “norms”
Dog brained shit.
"We only had a decade, and most of us didn't give a shit for most of that time. All this criticism is very unfair and uncivil."
You can’t blame the Dems for not doing this because you see sweaty it’s because they didn’t want to
😔
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Joe Biden once voted for a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v Wade btw.
Ds have only controlled the govt for 6 yrs
Then why didn't they do something in those 6 years?
abortion rights and others were hesitant and squeamish in their support.
Oh, because dems don't care about our rights. You could have just admitted that first, and saved everyone the time.
Dems favorite trick: complicating simple matters
ideological goals that don't have anything to do with abortion rights
liberals treat the word 'ideology' like a fucking truncheon, nah there's actually a DIRECT FUCKING RELATIONSHIP between an ideology, or lets call it "worldview" for these simpletons---and how people feel about individual 'issues'
not content to atomize and compartmentalize social relations, labor, government services, the neoliberal strives to shatter the very notion of coherence and relationship in politics. everything is just these little floating bubbles in a frictionless void with nothing to do with anything else 
i mean shit this is basically where you have to arrive if you're trying to negate intersectional theory
I love how he says any criticism about the dems doing nothing for 50 years is an "attack" on them.
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He's also 100% pro-Israel. But I guess he's careful not to phrases like "attacks on Biden" about because that would be set himself up for ridicule. The Israelis attack without mercy and they're also using the lack water, the lack of food, the lack of healthcare, etc to kill for them too.
Ah that clears it up, they didn't do anything about abortion rights over the last 50 years because they didn't want to.
so you're confirming that it's functionally useless to vote for democrats over republicans?
aight
Sorry sweaty the senate parliamentarian said no
Well dems didn't support abortion rights back then!
Sure the dems controlled the government in 2009-2011 and 2021-2023 but uhhhhhhh
I still don't support them, but I used to not support them too
In a speech Obama gave to Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007, the then-presidential candidate said, “The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” He referenced it again in 2008, on the 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Obama:
Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s — that’s where I’m going to focus.
most people have probably read the first part of his response but the second bit is extra fucked
I mean "the Dems didn't support abortion rights a couple months ago" isn't inaccurate.
squeamish in their support
I'd rather let innocent people suffer or die than confront my internal biases and be momentarily uncomfortable
No hate like Christian love
So they had at least three opportunities to do exactly the thing they're being criticized for not doing, you say? They're a bunch of absolute fucking morons and ghouls who never cared about abortion rights or anything but their own status and prestige? Good to know!
93-95, 
and 21-23
Ok. So 50 years ago people were more conservative. What's their excuse for not doing anything in recent years when they controlled the government, again?
I mean you could argue that people were much less conservative about Row v Wade in the ~50 years it was law than today
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take...
How is the criticism wrong then? Democrats have been in charge multiple times over the past 50 years. They didn't codify Roe because they didn't want to. They just took 1 tweet and stretched it into 3?
I think yves smith of naked capitalism once said something along the lines of "democrats want to fight, not to win, because it'll keep the donations coming in"
have we asked Angela and Strawberry about their opinion