#John Nichols, "Democrats Inherit a Broken Senate," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "The 48 senators who opposed the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett in October represented 13.5 million more Americans than the 52 senators who voted to approve it." "Today, a senator from Wyoming elected in 2018 with just 136,210 votes cancels out the decision of a senator from California elected in the same year with 6,019,422 million votes."
"Democrats are too deferential to longtime Republican colleagues, imagining they can somehow find common ground." "Stepped-up oversight isn't just about pinning the blame on Trump's team; it's also putting pressure on Biden's administration to get things right."
#Jeet Heer, "The Unity Trap, The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "Upholding unity by itself paradoxically produces conflict, since it opens the door to competing ideas of union. The problem Biden has is that unity-as- comity, or democracy, are actually at odds with each other. Republicans have quickly and shrewdly figured this out, and realized that unity-as-comity offers them a language to sandbag Biden's agenda. After all, if the goal is to get the two parties working together, then all the Republicans have to say is that any effort to push a Democratic agenda forward is anathema to Biden's goal of unity."
"The consistent message from Republicans was [and is]: Unity means giving us everything we want."
#Alexis Grenell, "Back Talk," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. - "In the far more common scenario of a divided government, opposing parties have zero incentive to support the executive, since electoral success is directly linked to his or her popularity. As in the case of the previously Republican-controlled US Senate, impeachment was rendered useless by the sycophants who'd hitched their wagon to Donald Trump."
#Eric Alterman, "Sheldon Adelson," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. "Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, believe it or not, was once quite pro-Palestinian. He argued in 2005 that it was 'vital to our credibility in the entire Middle East that we insist on an end to Israeli expansionism,' and 'vital to our humanitarian duty to the Palestinian people at we protect the weaker party from the stronger power.' "
"Adelson spent more than a half-billion dollars on Republican candidates between 2012 and 2021. In doing so, he transformed our political discourse and essentially became the final authority on Donald Trump's Middle East policy."
#Elie Mystal, "End the Coward's Filibuster," The Nation, 2.22-3.1.2021. "Ending the filibuster is one way to make the Senate less beholden to a ruthless minority, and more responsive to the majority of its members." "The US Senate was a mistake. It's a fundamentally anti-democratic institution that gives political power to land instead of people, and it was structed that way at the request of slave owners worried about losing their 'right' to hold people in bondage."
"The filibuster refers generally to the ability of any senator to delay or block a vote on a bill. But when people talk about ending the filibuster, what they really mean is reforming the rules of cloture." "The use of the filibuster has skyrocketed, largely because it costs the members of the minority nothing."
ADDENDUMS:
*David Remick, "The Final Days," The New Yorker, January 18, 2021. - "From the podium [on January 6], he [Trump] said that the vote against him was 'a criminal enterprise.' He thanked his supporters for their 'extraordinary love,' and urged them to to march to the Capitol: 'I'll be there with you.' "
*Sen. Lindsey Graham said: "As the Republican Party, if you want to stop a socialist agenda, we need to work with President Trump."
*Conservative Texas state politicians blamed frozen wind turbines for power failures; however, Texas gets only a fraction of its power-generating capacity from wind turbines.
*Rudy Giuliani is not currently representing Trump 'in any legal matter.'
*Washington County, Pennsylvania Republican chairman David Bell said: "We did not send him [Sen. Patrick J. Toomay] there to do 'the right thing' or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us."
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