Republicans are grappling with public polls showing the public places more blame on them, rather than the Democrats, for the shutdown, even as they argue they have the moral high ground in the shutdown fight.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Republicans stress that they put no partisan poison pills in a GOP-crafted, House-passed stopgap to fund the government through Nov. 21. Democrats in the Senate have repeatedly blocked that bill as they demand that Republicans first negotiate with them on health care issues, particularly on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expiring at the end of the year.

Poll after poll finds that slightly more Americans think Republicans are to blame for the shutdown than who think Democrats are at fault.

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[–] 210 points 1 year ago (45 children)

If you're in government it's your responsibility to keep the government running. In most other countries if the government can't pass a budget then it's a vote of no confidence and we call another election immediately.

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  • [–] 102 points 1 year ago (43 children)

    I think one of America's biggest fuckups was designing a system where elections can only be every four years

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Just add the way Athens dealt with this thousands of years ago. You vote twice for each representative: once to get him into office, and a second time at the end of the term to determine if he can stay or gets banished from the city.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Banishment should be making them live in Bakersfield. Nobody deserves such a wretched fate, deserved for a politician thought.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (32 children)

    For the presidency.

    House terms are 2 years, and Senators are 6 years.

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  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (31 children)

    Lack of term limits fir Supreme Court judges was another big fuckup

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Even the system of checks and balances were kind of a fuckup if you think about it - the whole system just presumes that most people are acting in good faith and bad faith actors are limited to a few positions or a single branch.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The system wasn't supposed to be perfect or eternal. The founders explicitly said that they expected each successive generation to essentially rewrite the constitution. It's not their fault that we only made minor tweaks over 250 years.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    The threshold for passing reform is too damn high. There should've been some mandatory period to make the change happen more often and easily to keep with the times. Now we're stuck with an antiquated system that still mentions slavery in its founding documents and its loopholes are so well known that someone's using it to turn this country into an autocracy.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I don't know that the threshold is the problem. I think the problem is that about 35% of humans are complete pieces of shit. I don't know how you account for that effectively. Expecting the rest of society to counter them seems about as reasonable of a solution as you're likely to find and that's essentially what we have now.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It actually assumes bad faith actors in all positions. The failure was allowing teams. That's why Washington hated them.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    Correct. They cannot be separate powers but coequal without the ability of enforcement. If the military is all subordinate to the president, and Congress or SCOTUS don’t have resources to enforce their oversight of the others, then they are not coequal. They are coequal in theory, never in practice.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    And for a mandated maximum age for politicians

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I think term limits would take care of this without v being discriminatory. You can win an office once and a reelection once. It doesn’t matter if you either that office at 25 or 70.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    How is age discriminatory? We don't debate the minimum age requirement, so what's so bad about an upper one?

    I mean I do think someone younger than 35 could easily be a good president.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    If you’re going to do term limits I think you have to get rid of all age restrictions

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's silly, even though the current president proves that the job is doable with the mental capacity of a toddler, it's good that there is a cut off for the youthful. By therefore also the elderly

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I'm not sure that would be a good idea because in the future, life expectancy could change. With advancement in medicine, there could be a time in the future when the average 80 year old is just as capable as the average 40 year old

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Could be, but it's rather speculative to legislate on that in the current.

    I think it's healthy for politics to have more youthful individuals in the mix. And I think it's also important that the elderly are protected from themselves (thinking about McConnell and Feinstein).

    If there's a minimum age, because of competence, there should be a maximum. It can then always debated about suspending that or raising the age if it's medically appropriate. But if rather see people retire in good health and spending time with their grandchildren.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, instead of having a lifetime appointment, or having a specific number of justices, they could just make it so that, at the beginning of the 4 year presidential term, the President gets to nominate a fixed number of Supreme Court justices, who serve for a fixed number of years.

    I heard somebody propose that system, and I can't help thinking that it would solve a lot of the problems with our Supreme Court.

    There are some laws tied to the lifetime of a person, like appointing certain judges, and copyright law, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that there is always a better solution.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    I think it would be better to divide up the US into four regions, with each its own president. That president gets to pick one national justice, and each region elects four justices independently of their president. Plus, the four regional presidents elect a figurehead president to represent the nation, who gets to pick an final justice. 21 national justices in total, five of them picked by their respective president. When a president is removed from office, their justice follows.

    This increases the separations of powers, and allows for the national court to have their pool of justices change relatively often. Keeping the minds of our judiciary fresh is important, otherwise they fall out of touch with the citizens they are supposed to serve.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Technically, I don't think supreme Court appointments are necessarily lifetime appointments. Appointments to the federal judiciary are lifetime appointments, but the constitution doesn't specify that federal judges can't be rotated in and out of the supreme Court. I could be remembering that wrong though, it's been a while since my last read through.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    While you are at it, add term limits to congress and senate seats as well.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Why no? You want to keep the 80+ guys who are firmly in some companies pocket sitting there?

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I don't know how you have so many upvotes when your statement is so wrong.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I could have been more precise and said presidential elections. It is a fact, presidential elections can only be every four years in the US. Unless there is a clause I'm unaware of that allows the possibility of them being more frequent. Whether it is a fuckup is a matter of opinion.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Well you also from context seem to be implicitly comparing a presidential system to a parliament system which had different design goals. The presidential system isn't good but the fatal flaw is treating the president like an elected king, not how often you can vote against them. The fatal flaw is not fixing the two party system. The fatal flaw was that it was designed by people doing their best to appease southern shitbags. The fatal flaw was they made the system too hard to change.

    Voting for our king every 4 years was the improvement, it was everything else that was regressive.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    So Democrats are the reason the House has been in session only 20 days in the last 4 months?

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    20 days? Wow. What is a typical number?

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago* (10 children)

    I wasn't sure so I went looking. It fluctuates, but 150 days a year is what I found. So that would be 50 days per 4 months. Or rather that they have shown up about 40% of the norm.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    So for them this isn't even much different than normal. And they're still getting paid. Not that many of them need their government salary with all the campaign donations and insider trading. And guaranteed lobbying jobs at triple the salary or more after they're done.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Id say it's more than a bit different. It would be like if you or I started going into work Monday and Tuesday, and skipping Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Except yeah, they still get paid the same. To bad we couldn't all have jobs like that.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The crazy thing is, with the productivity improvements recently in human history, and the amount of time wasted doing what amounts to fluffing people higher up the chain with busy work or literally just sitting there work, we could all probably work notably less than we do if that work was spread equally and not wasted on bullshit like ensuring poor people feel bad.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Agreed, I think with automation and technological improvements the only way forward is to supplement people's livings based off loss of work at a national level. 200 years ago, 70% of the U.S. were farmers. 1900, 38%. 1925, ~25%. 2025, less than 2%. Sure we can say about 10% of jobs surround agriculture in some way, but that is a drastic amount of work that has been offset. If we have offset 50% of the required work needed to keep our country fed, clothed and roofed, we need to develop ways to cut the workload by half for the people, and find other activities people can partake in that aren't just about making someone else money.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • Lol, guys an imbecile. Even if "millions were living in space somehow im 20 years it would have nothing but a bad effect on earth. Population growth has us set to be at 9.7 billion people in 2045 from 8.2 billion people now. So say you got 5,000,000 people in space, which we won't, you've got 1,495,000,000 more people using resources on earth, and us sending resources into space to build shit. The cost to mine resources and maintain life in space would be so much harder than doing so on Earth, yet we can't get Earth right. Terra-forming a planet is all but a myth to us at this point. We aren't making acute changes to a planet we have everything to do it with on currently. Yet they think they'll somehow convince people they can manipulate an entire planet/moon that has temperature fluctuations drastically more uninhabitable than earths. Everyone who moves to space will die, only an idiot would think otherwise. Why, because you can't make peace on earth. We are already trying to bring weapons to space. It takes one suicidal person to end their entire community in space. When have we ever known someone willing to sacrifice a life to serve a cause. Today, yesterday, the day before, for every year mankind has existed. If you don't create a peaceful utopia, it is certain death and a massive waste of resources.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    and find other activities people can partake in that aren't just about making someone else money.

    I can already think of a myuriad of things, though admittedly some would be surround eventually making money, but mostly because I want things to exist that don't exist.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)
  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Gotta put a space after the #

    like this

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    To what end? What will it change? Do you think Trump will actually be held accountable? Do you think it'll make him lose the election?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago*

    They're willing to commit many FBI agents to redacting Trump's name from the files, they're willing to blatantly put their own careers at risk to lie to congress about it, they're willing to shut down the government and keep it shut down over it, and they refuse to swear in a newly elected Democrat from Arizona over it

    Yeah, it may have some effect

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    They are doing it on purpose to keep Congress closed forever and Donald will HAVE to make all the decisions.

    This is another project 2025 power play to take rights away from Democrats and non fascists.

    I think it's time to go for a walk or something.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago

    All of this just to hide the Epstein files.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    Has polling ever shown a majority blaming dems for any shutdown? This has been a republican tactic for a while now and it doesn't substantially hurt them. Why would they give a shit?

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    Love the republican we are doing nothing and its their fault. Such a modest ask to.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    The more people are available to self-inform (spending cuts/layoffs) means the more they’re available for waking up. Brilliant strategy on the GOP’s part.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    For every other time Republicans withhold their vote, in order to make demands, Democrats always give them what they want...and everyone calls them weak because of it.

    Does it surprise anyone that Republicans don't want to look like Democrats?

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  • [+] -16 points 1 year ago

    Political. Theater. 2 sides of the same right wing coin

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