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Trump exempts himself from ethics pledge as watchdogs sound alarms
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Liberals never actually fix what conservatives screw up. We never closed Gitmo and we still have troops based in Iraq. We never actually ended the War on Drugs (which has left Republicans a loophole to ban contraceptives by listing them as controlled substances). We never truly repealed Jim Crow and much of the country still relies on forced labor even in liberal bastions like California or New York.
Trump's just pulling back the curtain on how much has rotted.
Clinton fucking balanced the budget.
The real problem is Republican spend 4-8 years screwing everything up. Over the next 4 years, with the slimmest of margins, Democrats roll back 80% of it. Then you come in and say "both sides".
If we want things to stop racheting to the right, we have to elect Dems more than half the time.
For what? A few months? And largely by balancing off the SS Trust, a trick you can only do once (as Bush Jr discovered when he was too far in debt to privatize it).
Half the Democratic Party was along for the ride on the Bush agenda. Kennedy embraced NCLB, Clinton and Kerry fully endorsed the AUMF, Joe Biden authored much of the Patriot Act Hell, Graham-Leech-Biley was signed under Clinton, queuing up the financial crash of 2008.
This isn't just Republicans. The problem is broadly bipartisan.
They do, it's just they mostly concern themselves with the economic screw ups, less-so the rights ones.
Think 'gay people can marry and have kids to give us more economic slaves' vs. 'gay people can't marry, can't have kids, and we're going to use them as a scapegoat for our issues.'
Liberals (which I'm taking to mean Democrats) didn't "fix" gay marriage. Right up until the Iowa Supreme Court decision, in the early 2000's, the argument in Democratic circles was that gay-rights organizations should pipe down, settle for civil unions, and stop making gay marriage an issue. They were afraid of handing the Republicans a weapon. It was the gay-rights organizations that pushed it through the courts, and prominent Democratic politicians like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden "evolved" their positions to support it. I mean no criticism by the use of quotes. Kudos to them for changing their minds, but it wasn't liberals that made it happen.
I'd say it was liberals that made it happen once there was overwhelming public support, which again, is performative, but drastically different from actively suppressing it. Someone has to pass the things into laws, and in the US it's either Republicans or Democrats, and across the board any services those poor people do have was introduced through Democrats.
Again, under duress, I don't argue otherwise. Up here in Canada it was the Liberals being forced to put Healthcare as a 'universal'* right by the NDP (our Left wing party), then the NDP again to force Liberals to put Dental care through. But they actually did it, and the Conservatives don't.
Gay marriage was legalized under a majority conservative court system way back in 2003. When it went to a poplar vote in the bright blue State of California in 2008, Prop 8's plan to kill it passed by a healthy margin
This was the same year Obama was tiptoeing around full legalization of gay marriage for fear of pissing off too many swing voters in the Midwest.
Gay marriage wasn't fully legalized into 2015, again by the conservative courts. Efforts to legislate civil rights for LGBT people have largely failed even when the Pres and Leg were fully in Dem control.
Again, under a Liberal government. And I keep saying over and over -- I know they phone it in and constantly give bigot 'swing voters' things they want. I've never said anything against that. It had a 60% approval by the public in 2015 when it was fully legalized. So again, for like the fifth goddamn time -- Liberal governments can be forced to do these things by popular will. Conservatives won't (I'm sure there's like two examples someone will bring up, again, exception proves the rule.)
To sum: Liberals have to be forced to allow LGBT rights by popular opinion. Conservatives do this.
The Republicans controlled every branch of government in 2003, as well as a majority of state legislatures and governorships.
What broke for gay marriage in 2003 was a libertarian strain of conservatism defecting from the mainstream. Liberals accepted the change with the same passivity as they accepted the status quo.
Again by a majority conservative court. The Obama legislature dragged its heels.
They can be forced to do things by powerful socio-economic interests. In this case, a big chunk of the legal community broke for gay marriage and Obama didn't try to get in the way.
But they didn't do anything. They just let the change happen.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/3758652-here-are-the-gop-senators-who-voted-against-the-same-sex-marriage-bill/
https://newrepublic.com/post/169392/full-list-republicans-vote-against-same-sex-marriage
https://www.cpr.org/2020/02/14/why-4-colorado-republicans-tried-and-failed-to-ban-gay-marriage-in-2020/
and here's some anti LGBT-youth stuff https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb20-1144
You'll notice that in each and every case, the anti LGBT stuff is all Conservative, because Conservatives have that 'call to the past' or whatever; where 'the way things were' in the past is always better, and in the past women didn't have rights, LGBT people couldn't marry, etc.
Liberals don't actively fight against rights unless it's an overall popular voter opinion. Conservatives do regardless.
I say this as someone who's about as far left as one can go. I think you're A. grossly underestimating how useful 'letting change happen' is when it comes to popular opinion on rights, and grossly underestimating how much damage Conservatives clawing and gnashing at allowing rights for more people is.