Right-wing lawmakers are proving increasingly willing to force potentially divisive votes.

  • Zander@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    Impeaching Biden over nothing while at the same time censuring Schiff for impeaching Trump. Wow

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      He has a D next to his name, which in itself is an impeachable offense to half the House.

      It’s being led by Lauren Boebert which is really all you need to know about it, but the reason given:

      The resolution charges Biden with abuse of power and dereliction of duty over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border.

      • blazix@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Every year I think that the shenanigans R’s pull will make them suffer in the next election. Still, with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the “if they go low, we stay high” attitude we have, the election ends up becoming a coin toss.

      • cybersandwich@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Lololol. The border situation that is objectively better than last year even with Title 42 ending and trending downward?

        Also, these are encounters/apprehensions, which by the very definition of those terms means we are interdicting illegal crossers. So if you want to play the game of “record apprehensions!” Then, great. Kudos to the Biden administration for stopping the most people ever. More than Trump! More than Obama! More than Bush!

        This is a waste of time and resources. For the party that throws “witch hunt” around, I can’t think of a better term to describe this type of BS.

        Fixing our immigration issues requires nuance and compromise. Neither of those things are an earmark of our current Congress or political climate.

      • HubertManne@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They should be required to compare all previous presidents for the particular reason and judge if any of them would be impeached on the same standard because that one is super vague and applicable to all previous presidents.

    • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      For the “crime” of not being a far right Republican and for the “crime” of Trump having been impeached twice. Those are the only “crimes” that these extremists care about. They also don’t care that, even if they convince 50%+1 Representatives to vote to impeach, this will die in the Senate. They’ll impeach Biden three times just so Trump isn’t the most impeached President and they’ll claim that their purely political impeachments somehow prove that the impeachments of Trump were purely political as well

      • admiralteal@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Notably, Biden was not involved in either impeachment. Just as he’s not involved in the current investigations (remember those special councils)? With the exception of the ones Garland is running, he has no influence… and garland is treating trump with ultimate kiddie gloves so far.

    • scarabic@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      What for?

      To turn it into a thing that just happens every time, so that Trump’s two impeachments lose meaning while also getting some form of “revenge.”

    • mustyOrange@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      According to the article, it’s for dereliction of duty over the southern border.

      It’s a bunch of bs lol

    • JunkMilesDavis@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It makes sense if you run with the assumption that a chunk of people serving in Congress genuinely treat the whole job as a competitive game or roleplaying scenario. It was all good for a while, but now they have drawn in the weird kids who play too aggressively, and there’s little they can do to bring everything back on track without giving up and breaking character.

    • aegisgfx877@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Im not sure impeaching Biden is a good idea even if they had grounds and could accomplish it, impeachments typically raise a presidents numbers and thats not what they want

  • Calcharger@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Dereliction of Duty due to the border.

    My God. What can we realistically do to return sanity to our Government? I’m at a loss. Dereliction of duty??

    • sockinacock@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      What can we realistically do to return sanity to our Government?

      Start providing mandatory 150th+ trimester abortions to fascists?

  • BurnTheRight@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Nothing good in the history of mankind has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.

    Conservatism is destructive and deadly and should be openly identified as such.

  • Hellsadvocate@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    What a fucking circus the republican party is. Everyone from the supreme court justices to these turds in office are nothing but clowns willing to sell the rights of everyone and their own mother to the highest corporate bidder. Even the “old school republicans” turned out to be facist shits. I guess they always were.

    • BurnTheRight@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Fascists rely on deception and confusion to appear to be legitimate thought leaders. In reality, conservatism is all about controlling others. That’s it. That’s all it’s ever been.

  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    A pox upon both houses. Both sides are hypocritical as hell. And both sides fucking suck.
    Unfortunately the American electorate is too afraid of change to do anything about it, and/or too lazy to vote in primaries in significant numbers, and/or the opposing party puts forward stupid candidates that have no change.
    Thus Congress has like a 18% approval rating, but a 80+% re-election rate.

    And in most cases, I’d argue that’s because candidates insist on pushing stupid wedge issues. The Democrat down south is going to go anti-gun which makes them unelectable. The Republican up north is going to go anti-abortion or anti-LGBT which makes them unelectable in a blue state. And rather than set those wedge issues aside and recognize that there’s FAR more important things at stake, we keep squabbling over bullshit rather than actually making progress.

    • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I agree that both sides do shitty things, but they’re no where near equivocal.

      • Democrats impeached Trump for withholding aid to Ukraine in an attempt to blackmail his political opponent, and then again for inciting an insurrection when he lost the election.
      • Republicans are trying to impeach Biden because he’s a Democratic, while they’re trying to normalize impeachment to downplay how serious it is so Trump’s previous impeachments don’t look so bad for the next election.

      Implying that both sides suck equally is dangerous. It’d be like a kid saying “My parents made me eat my vegetables, they suck. Also the guy that broke into my house and tried to stab my family sucks. All adults suck.”

    • DarkGamer@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      A pox upon both houses. Both sides are hypocritical as hell. And both sides fucking suck.

      I find it hard to look at the behavior of both American political parties and see them as equally objectionable. Our Overton window has shifted wildly in the last decade. By international standards, Democrats are conservative left and Republicans have become dangerously radical right. American Republicans have abandoned the rule of law. They oppose democracy and attempted a coup when they didn’t like the results. They openly lie and gaslight. They scapegoat vulnerable minorities. They force women to give birth against their will. They induce violence via stochastic terrorism. I can’t look at this situation and muster comparable ire for both sides.

      Congress has like a 18% approval rating, but a 80+% re-election rate.

      That’s congress as a whole, most Americans have a positive view of their own representatives.

      rather than set those wedge issues aside and recognize that there’s FAR more important things at stake, we keep squabbling over bullshit rather than actually making progress.

      In a 2-party system there’s little incentive to. I posit that voters are motivated to vote more by fear of the other party than enthusiasm about their own. This is a consequence of Duverger’s Law. If we want to fix the system and encourage cooperation, the best way is ranked choice voting, which encourages candidates to reach out to all voters even on the other side because they might be their 2nd or 3rd choice. When they implemented it in SF, some candidates running against each other started campaigning together, cooperating for mutual advantage.

    • slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Boy do I love whether I’m allowed to exist being seen as a “stupid wedge issue.” Totally agree, we should comprise and only shoot half the LGBT people! /s

      • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Real-talk, the solution here is to encourage more gays/queers/trans folk to run for elected positions of power to better represent their minority.

        • slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Agreed. I also remember that Nebraska was making headlines recently because one of the representatives’ daughter was trans, so she was refusing to pass any bills that could hurt her child.

          • HubertManne@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            this just annoys me that much more. There have been so many cases of direct experience like with relatives moving their opinion (or at least their actions) so its like they can’t adequately evaluate things in the theoretical or just with general compassion and empathy.

      • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Didn’t mean to imply that LGBT is not an important issue. Not at all. Just that it’s something that one side feels more strongly about than the other.

        To an Evangelical (usually conservative), persecuting LGBT people is good policy and good for the country. To a Liberal (and to many like myself, FWIW), persecuting LGBT people is a civil rights violation that makes a person unelectable.

        To a Liberal, gun control is good policy that will save lives. To a gun owner (usually conservative) gun control is a civil rights violation, an unconstitutional violation of the Bill of Rights that makes a person unelectable just as much as if they suggested needing a license to exercise free speech.

        So what I’m suggesting-- if the GOP stopped trying to persecute LGBT folks, or the Democrats gave up gun control, either one of them would GREATLY increase their appeal especially to moderates and people on the other side of the aisle but who are fed up with their own party.

        Put differently— if a bunch of politicians came to you and said ‘we’ll stop trying to take away LGBT rights, but in exchange you stop trying to take away gun rights’, would you agree to that?

        • CileTheSane@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If I understand you correctly, your suggesting the politicians should say “We’ll stop trying to deny people the right to live and exist, in exchange for not trying to stop unstable people from easily murdering random civilians”?

          • HubertManne@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            also I have never seen an outright ban on guns proposed in the legislature. Limitations on ownership (drug use, mental health issues, requirement to take a course) and type/options (clips size, rate of fire, concealability, etc.)

            • admiralteal@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Even if an outright ban were the goal for some incremental policy changes wouldn’t ever get there.

              We already nearly all agree on and have weapons controls. There are weapons a private citizen simply cannot legally own.

              We’re debating where to draw the line on who and what and when. And at this stage, all we’re asking for is to move the line a couple of inches to try and prevent the worst of the frequent, common, and unacceptable tragedies.

              The gun nuts act like there’s an absolute position you can hold with no exceptions. The only way that can be true is if you believe every citizen has the right to walk into the local pharmacy and buy a yellowcake bomb and jar of weaponized smallpox any time they feel like it, and if you believe that, you are insane.

              There’s no absolute position. It’s a negotiation. The conservatives refuse to engage in any negotiation whatsoever because they do not have any sincere principle they are defending on the issue.

              • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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                1 year ago

                With respect I think you haven’t spent much time listening to pro-gun people.

                Different people have different opinions. Sure, there are some absolutists. But that’s not everybody.

                The ‘line in the sand’ that almost ALL pro-gun people will get behind, is semi-automatic small arms- pistols and rifles and shotguns and the like, as we know them today. Not machineguns or rocket launchers or cannons. Do you see people rallying on the steps of capitol buildings demanding machineguns and rocket launchers be re-legalized? I don’t.

                If you want to understand why there’s no negotiation, this comic explains the pro-gun position pretty well.
                To put that in perspective, you must understand that in the early 1900s, you could order a machinegun, a fully-automatic weapon (hold down the trigger and it will rapidly and repeatedly fire), through the mail, delivered to your doorstep with no background checks or other interference. And you’d order this from a hardware catalog. There were shooting competitions in school- kids brought guns to school all the way up to the 1970s or so because shooting was a competitive school sport.

                So follow the history, and it’s the same thing repeated over and over. Anti-gun people want to compromise, we’ll regulate this but not that. Wait a few years and it happens again. Go through a few iterations of that and guns are now one of the most highly regulated items you can (sometimes) buy. And yet there were no school shootings in 1920, even though you could buy a VERY effective firearm for such purpose in the mail.

                So I suggest instead of writing off anyone who takes a pro-gun position as a ‘gun nut’, you should try listening to those who disagree with you and try to figure out WHY they disagree.

                • admiralteal@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  Oh god fucking forbid we engage in the hard process of incremental policy based on changing circumstances. Cry me a goddamn river.

                  This isn’t a slippery slope. The argument to ban some classes of guns has to meet strict constitutional scrutiny, not just a rational basis. You have to successfully argue the harm justifies a limit on the right. Something our system is – or at least was – equipped to do. But nowadays, maybe it genuinely isn’t, with the way conservatives have spread like cancer through the court system and legislatures to fill it with stubborn no-compromise 2A rights nonsense that refuses to engage in any reform.

                  It is a factual reality that guns have become better machines over time. They’ve become cheaper, more available, and more dangerous. You bring up a 1900s machine gun as if this is an example of some incredibly dangerous weapon? It goddamn isn’t.
                  A 1900s machine gun is hardly any threat at all to modern civil society. It is large, stationary, and obvious. It is not reliable. It is not easy to use, contrary to your characterization. You cannot sneak it into a shopping mall. You cannot conceal or open carry it while out on errands. It’d be a pretty major effort to even reliably mount it in good working order to a vehicle. A modern “sport” semi-automatic rifle or even handgun offers a bigger threat than one of those things.

                  What an utterly ridiculous argument you make, saying there were no school shootings in the 1900s when there were likely no guns CAPABLE of that kind of thing at the time, and certainly none in regular circulation.

                  I did not write off anyone who takes a pro-gun position as a ‘gun nut’. You cannot “respectfully” mischaracterize what I wrote in such a disingenuous way. I wrote off anyone who takes a no-compromise position as one. Want to have lots of guns in society? Do what the Swiss do. Extensive and continuing training and licensing. Universal registration. Strict rules about safe handling. And couple it all with major poverty interventions, public education, and healthcare to get rid of violence and desperation at the source. Most progressives are down for that. But instead, the gun nuts try to do the literal opposite by passing things like Constitutional Carry.

            • mirror_slap@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              And the Dems are idiots about gun safety anyway. Let them have all the AR-15s they want, just don’t allow magazines- force hand reloading when the thing is empty. Don’t ban handguns, ban handguns with magazines. Slap insurance and license requirements on owners. Don’t take them away, just make them far less deadly and far more expensive. That side-steps the “take away your guns” crowd entirely and passes the court challenges too.

      • Entropywins@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I’d bet the person would care about you and your struggle if they met you but at a distance unfortunately they see your struggle as an obstacle to their agenda… I get careless a lot myself and say things without empathy or thought to what it might imply to others… sorry you ha e to deal with that

        • slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social
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          It’s ok, I get what you mean though. Considering how my parents ended up being tainted by all of this discourse though, without even being trump supporters or antivaxxers, I doubt meeting people like me in person would be able to change their minds.

  • Maeve@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m not a Biden fan. I’m not anti-Biden, but I edge close to it. That said, just more dumb three ring circus antics. As P.T. Barnum noted, “There’s a sucker burn every minute.”

    • private_ruffles@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      What about Biden don’t you like? Are you typically a left leaning voter?
      I hear a lot of people saying they don’t like him, and aside from some union decisions that I wish would have gone a little better, I think he’s doing a pretty good job overall.

      • RedditExodus@kbin.social
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        I’m not the person you’re replying to but I don’t like Biden’s push for gun control or his inability to do anything about Healthcare. I want universal health care and an AR-15 and I’m tired of having to choose one or the other. He also hasn’t made any effort to legalize weed, though I think the pardons he handed out to non-violent marijuana offenders was a great move. I like the idea of student debt relief but it doesn’t solve the root issue of rising tuition costs and exorbitant student loans. I like his stances on most issues except for firearms, but he seems to be ineffective at getting things done.