February 2010

By David Swanson

I’ve followed the struggles of progressives within the California Democratic Party from the opposite coast and admired their achievements but wondered about their limitations. They’re the first to pass resolutions opposing wars, but for the most part their members in Congress vote to fund the wars just the same. I’d rather have a party that “supported” wars but didn’t fund them, if that option were available. I’d rather have a brand read more

By David Swanson

I’m not a big fan of post-partisan America, a notion that seems to amount to running the government through two political parties but taking care that one of them not perform in any significant way better than the other one. But I am a fan of the idea, which nobody ever seems to consider, of actually disempowering parties.

That idea has a precedent in the first dozen years or so of our republic whose Constitution never planned for party rule, although nonpartisanship would read more

Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico has put an honest description of the antidemocratic filibuster rule on his website.

According to Jon Walker at FireDogLake Udall plans to call a point of order at the start of the next Congress to eliminate the filibuster rule.

This is the real solution that we need (although not all experts agree it has to wait for the start of a session), not asking the Vice President pretty please to declare the rule unconstitutional as Thomas Geoghegan suggests read more