Political Ideas

Stage 1: Media debate between Republicans in power and what the people and the Democrats want.

Stage 2: The people give the Democrats complete control.

Stage 3: Media debate between the hideous proposals of the Democrats and the powerless Republicans.

Stage 4: A debate between the proposals of those in power and what we the people demand begins to percolate up through the internet and grassroots organizing.

Stage 5: We take control or lose it completely.

More below.

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

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

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

By David Swanson

Answer: They get around the pesky will of the majority of the American people.

Here’s a lovely post from the DailyKos praising the president of the AFL-CIO for encouraging the president of the United States to appoint officials during a recess in order to get around the Senate.

We’ve grown used to hearing “progressives” urge Obama to make laws with signing statements and executive orders. The treaty he’s using to occupy Iraq never went to the Senate read more

Excerpt from an Email promoting an upcoming conference:

Imagine stripping this out of the context of partisan thinking. Imagine supporting Reagan to be a brilliant intellectual. Imagine supporting the military to teach nonviolence. Shall we try supporting Wall Street to solve the housing crisis? We could support thieves to protect our stuff while we’re out supporting hurricanes to provide gentle breezes.

Will anyone at this conference perhaps ask whether opposing everything we oppose read more

Nothing Lawrence Lessig says here is false exactly. But if Congress is the problem and the problem is the money, how can there never — in anybody’s predictable articles on this topic — be any mention of the fact that the president takes more money than any congress member, and power to do most things has been handed over by Congress to the president? How can these two points be avoided?