No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
The first bill filed in the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2020 election which resulted in the Democratic Party gaining nominal control of Congress and the White House was a bill to ban partisan gerrymandering, require independent redistricting committees, forbid states from imposing onerous voter registration or identification regulations, limit the influence of rich donors and wealthy PACs in federal elections, and generally just make the process of voting better for Americans.
This bill was called the Freedom to Vote Bill and was numbered H.R. 1 and S. 1 for the House and Senate versions, respectively. It passed the House of Representatives in 3 March 2021 and received unanimous support among the 50 Democratic senators when the Senate held its vote on 22 June 2021. The bill was blocked from advancing due to a Republican filibuster.
On 3 January 2022, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced plans to abolish the filibuster for legislation in order to allow this bill to advance. President Joe Biden had previously indicated he would sign the bill. Schumer made his move on 19 January 2022, moving to change the filibuster rule to require continuous talking, i.e. in order to filibuster a bill, someone must make a speech and keep talking for the duration of the filibuster, with the filibuster ending when they finish talking. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, members of the Democratic Party representing Arizona and West Virginia, respectively, got squeamish and voted against the change. All Republican senators voted against the change. This doomed the bill's passage through Congress as the filibuster could be maintained indefinitely by the Republicans.
The bill died when Congress was dissolved pending the November 2022 general election, in which Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Manchin and Sinema's terms with both expire when the new Congress is convened on 3 January 2025 following the November 2024 general election. Manchin did not seek re-election in yesterday's election and will retire at the expiration of his term. Sinema was forced out of the Democratic Party and originally planned to stand as an independent before deciding against it. She will retire at the end of her term.
Due to the innate malapportionment of the Senate, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Democratic Party will ever regain majority control of the Senate.
So I point my finger at these two idiots for sinking American democracy as we know it.
Even that doesn't address the mess that exists today. It's a great example of why they keep losing. They're going to make it impossible to gerrymander after the lines have already been redrawn to benefit the Republicans? Why? Why would they do that? They're essentially committing to always fighting an uphill battle for the rest of their days. I respect the principle, but not the approach. You cant lock a scale while it's broken and then expect it to measure correctly. They need to pull their heads out of their asses and start playing to win. To start recognizing the strategies which continually defeat them, and start countering with some equally aggressive strategies of their own, or their time is done.
I think I phrased my comment wrong on this. It doesn't ban the act of gerrymandering, it bans the results of gerrymandering. Gerrymandered maps would need to be redrawn had the bill been enacted.
This bill was no slouch. It directly abridged several states' voter suppression laws. Had the bill passed, the next phase would have been people being able to use the federal courts to strike back against these incompatible laws.
That being said, if you were the leader of the Democratic Party, what would you have done? Not intended as rhetorical snark, I'm just curious as to what other ideas there are.
Okay, then that sounds reasonable. Regarding your question, I suppose I would have held a primary and put someone on the final ballot who the people voted for. That would have required acknowledging before the primaries that Biden wasn't fit to continue, which from what I've read, they did have full knowledge of, but refused to act upon.
That's easier said than done though. Right? Like I'm not directly exposed to the corruption inherent in the system and the demands placed upon them in order to secure enough campaign funds to have a chance at all. Although I don't think sticking to the actual system as it was designed would cause the loss of donors.
Oh, and I'd get rid of the super delegates. In short, I'd stop trying to control who gets on the final ballot to push my party agenda, and instead let the people actually elect the leader they want. Again though, that's probably a lot easier said than done, and I'm an outsider not privy to the dealings that take place behind closed doors.
I have to agree with you there. I think the Democratic Party was scared of inviting infighting with a primary contest which Harris would probably win anyway, but you're right—Harris had no mandate from the party membership and even a lightning-round primary conducted online would have been better.