The Bluesky thread on the midnight session where Johnson tried to ram through a 5 year approval with significant revisions no one had seen is gobsmacking. Most transparent, only if you are looking for most transparently corrupt and evil administration ever. This is such a vile thing to do to a democracy.
https://bsky.app/profile/lizagoitein.bsky.social/post/3mjpar...
America's greatest digital senator (by country miles) has also ongoingly been posting up a storm about how the current usage of FISA has more Bush era secret interpretations they won't tell us, that is authorizing them to spy broadly on Americans. One of many examples:
https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov/post/3mjkquz34uc2a
This is actually an issue where almost anyone calling their electeds in the House and Senate will probably reach someone where the is a tiny, marginal effect.
And regardless of your feelings on his political positions, in his extremely lengthy time in the House and Senate, he has only gotten three bills he sponsored passed - two renaming post offices, and a VA benefit increase.
Despite having a position of power for a very long time, he has been completely ineffective at wielding that power to achieve any of his goals.
If he was not able to change policy in any way as a Senator, how would he be able to do so as a President?
He can veto a bill then get it overridden. He has already proven 100% he lets the more conservative parts of Congress walk all over him - he can have the best ideas in the world but that won't change a thing.
If you want someone to make people discuss ideas - great, you can be at a think tank. The point of electing someone to political office is to get bills passed, so that things actually change.
Your claim is his acting as a voice for America abroad has not benefited the US?
"Walk all over..." when he is clearly out numbered not just in Congress but by voters. You want him to show up with a flamethrower and show what he's really made of?
You're not at all engaged in a sincere discussion. Coming off like an intentional astroturfer just out to propagate Bernie hate
Don't get me wrong I am not a Bernie Bro. Just aware there is a world outside him working against him this whole time too.
He can do that without being an elected congressman.
If you are elected to congress, your job is to get bills passed.
If you like his politics, there are other people like Elizabeth Warren that have remarkably similar political positions, yet are some of the most highly effective politicians in the sense of enacting policy.
Oh, but she is a woman. So better support Bernie instead.
The conspiracy of people who hate the left are the ones who prop of Bernie, because he is a joke. The more the left supports Bernie, the more people like Warren struggle to get elected, and the authoritarian likes that because Warren is actually a formidable foe, so they want to prop up ineffective people like Bernie instead.
> If you are elected to congress, your job is to get bills passed.
This is a vast oversimplification. Your job is to represent your consistuents. In many cases, this means your job is to stop bills from getting passed, especially in the current political situation.
> The more the left supports Bernie, the more people like Warren struggle to get elected
This is a very strange take. Sanders and Warren are mostly close allies and rarely compete. Both are successfully elected Senators, from separate states. Warren declined to run for President in 2016 and appeared to be supporting Sanders. In 2020 they both ran for President, but guess what, neither one of them won the Democratic nomination. In any case, it's important to recognize that elections are popularity contests and not competency tests, as should be obvious from our current President.
The issue is not even "the left." Sanders is more popular than Warren, indeed more popular than almost any politician of any party (including male politicians, if you insist on making this about gender), among political independents. Because of his popularity among independents, he's the most popular politician in the US and would have a better chance of winning the Presidency than any Democrat (of any gender), but the Democrats nonetheless refuse to nominate him. If Warren were equally popular among independents, then Democrats should nominate her, but she's not. Of course this lack of popularity among independents is not specific to Warren: most non-Democrats dislike Democrats.
In 2016, Sanders put up an unexpectedly stiff challenge to Clinton, who was considered an overwhelming frontrunner at the beginning of the race. The natural next step for the left would be to build on that momentum and push Sanders over the top in 2020. In my opinion, it's quite delusional to expect that the left would for some bizarre reason abandon Sanders in 2020 and throw their support behind Warren instead. That would make little sense. Why start over from scratch? In any case, I doubt that Warren would have fared better. The establishment doesn't want a leftist, no matter who, and they quickly conspired to consolidate around Biden, who didn't even pick Warren as his running mate.
True. Maybe Ro Khanna/Massie. Honestly those good tickets have minimal support. People don't pay attention enough. Will get more establishment figures. Probably Rubio vs Newsom. No reason to vote then.
If you think the democrats and the republicans are equivalent you are purposefully ignorant.
We are getting what would be admin ending scandals every other day for over a year and actual Americans are being killed because of their poor governance.
Goddamned Americans had it too easy for too long an forgot how much infrastructure and planning goes into running a superpower.
It is not possible to eye roll hard enough at this.
In the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK), you vote for whichever you believe to be the least bad candidate, or tactically for whoever will keep whoever you believe to be the most bad candidate out of office.
It is exceptionally uncommon that you get to vote for someone rather than against.
IMO voting tactically makes about as much sense as choosing lottery numbers tactically. Perhaps it makes less sense, because people do actually win the lottery. Unless you are a Supreme Court Justice, the odds that your vote will change the election outcome are practically nil.
It's a bit odd to believe that you can't change who the candidates are, but you can nonetheless change which candidate wins. In fact, you can't do either. Collectively, we determine both, but each voter is only a grain of sand in the collective heap.
Tactical voting is far more important in the UK, where there are typically more than two candidates to vote for in any given seat, the government is not directly elected and most candidates are not selected in primaries.
It's _incredibly_ common there to vote to unseat the current government, or avoid splitting the vote on one side of the spectrum or the other. For example, I personally voted for a candidate I had almost no agreement with because they were most likely to unseat someone who supported Brexit. And it worked.
> I personally voted for a candidate I had almost no agreement with because they were most likely to unseat someone who supported Brexit. And it worked.
Are you attributing the electoral result to your individual action?
Yes - and to action the other thousand or so who made the difference between a win and a lose.
Of course, I understand what your are clumsily and nihilistically trying to suggest, so here’s at least one example of an election won and lost by a single vote [1]. This is not the only one, naturally.
> and to action the other thousand or so who made the difference between a win and a lose.
That's my point. You have no control over those other thousand people. Even if you hadn't voted, or had voted the opposite, it wouldn't have changed the outcome.
I would love to be able to make a difference, or perhaps just to believe that I could make a difference. Unfortunately, I've learned the hard way that I can't.
It's crucial to note, moreover, that determining the winner of an election is not the same as determining the winner's behavior in office. There's no evidence that the voters want FISA extended. But the military-industrial complex does, and it has the money to buy whoever happens to win. Somehow the damn thing keeps getting extended no matter who is in power.
> here’s at least one example of an election won and lost by a single vote
I don't deny that occasionally a small, local election is determined by a single vote. However, the topic of this submission is the US Congress. I found no Congressional elections decided by one vote over the past 100 years. That circumstance was more common (though still unlikely) in the distant past when the population was much smaller.
In 1974, the US Senate election in New Hampshire (one of the smallest states by poulation) had a margin of 2 votes after the second recount, though the initial count was 355 and the first recount 10. This election was disputed and was eventually decided by a subsequent special election, with a margin of 27,000.
In 1984, the US House election in Indiana's 8th District also had multiple recounts, the latest—controversial, partisan, dubious—having a margin of only 4 votes.
In 2020, the US House election in Iowa's 2nd District again had multiple recounts, the latest having a margin of only 6 votes. This result was contested on claims of counting errors, but the contest was denied.
As with the 2000 US Presidential election, whenever the count is very close, the results are usually decided politically (e.g., Bush v. Gore) rather than by the voters. Perhaps they can count votes more accurately in the UK.
> However, the topic of this submission is the US Congress.
The topic of the comment was about not voting because you think it makes no difference. If everyone develops that mentality, no-one will vote and elections will be decided only by the most extreme people. For those who do not believe tactical voting is not a thing in the US or is "stupid", look no further than the recent Texas Democratic primary, where selecting the best _candidate_ (rather than the person who might be closer to the ideals of many voters when in office) was achieved via exactly that means.
> Perhaps they can count votes more accurately in the UK.
There are no voting machines, everything is done by hand, under the strict observance of the campaign teams for each candidate. Every non-obvious vote is presented to all candidates teams with a proposed disposition. There are, to a first approximation, never allegations of process issues, because they would be so absurd on their face.
> The topic of the comment was about not voting because you think it makes no difference.
Not exactly. The "No reason to vote then" commenter was referring to a hypothetical Rubio vs. Newsom contest, whereas they expressed some enthusiasm for Ro Khanna and/or Thomas Massie. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809316
In other words, the commenter wants to vote for someone they perceive as good, not for someone they perceive as only the lesser of two evils.
And I believe this attitude is not at all tactical. They aren't saying, "I'll only vote for Khanna to prevent him from losing by one vote." The margin doesn't even matter if there's someone good to vote for.
> If everyone develops that mentality, no-one will vote and elections will be decided only by the most extreme people.
If everyone develops the mentality of not voting for the lesser evil, then evil candidates will receive no votes, which would be a good outcome.
> For those who do not believe tactical voting is not a thing in the US or is "stupid"
What do you mean by "not a thing"? Of course people vote tactically. People say they vote tactically, and I believe them. What I dispute is the effectiveness of it.
I wouldn't say that tactical voting is "stupid" per se. What I think is that tactical voting is not somehow mandatory or uniquely rational. I wouldn't chastise people for voting their conscience and refusing to give in to "lesser evil" calculations.
Let me put it this way: if, as some argue, the only rational choice is to vote for a duopolist candidate, no matter how bad, as long as one dupolist is less bad than the other, then we are doomed to the same duopoly until humanity becomes extinct (which I would say is sooner with the duopoly in place), and the duopolists are destined to get worse, more evil over time, because there is no incentive for politicians not to be evil in a lesser evil voting situation.
The vote to extend it for years failed. Then they voted to extend it for days in order to negotiate further. The 10 day extension was by voice vote (basically, they all shout at the same time), so there's no record of that.
when will the dems learn that the dnc is just republican lite
we need completely new thought to unseat "both" sides of the US government and return it to washington's ideal of "political parties fucking suck" (paraphrased)
> when will the dems learn that the dnc is just republican lite
When will "when will the dems learn that the dnc is just republican lite" enjoyers learn that there's an ocean of difference between dems and republicans, and that most Americans aren't going to throw that away over votes on issues that they're either fine with or, at best, indifferent to? Like it or not, this is unlikely to rank in most people's top five most important issues come November.
> When will "when will the dems learn that the dnc is just republican lite" enjoyers learn
On the bright side, these folks tend to be civically and electoral uninvolved. So they aren’t having any net effect on policy, other than slightly endorsing the status quo.
Eh, while I do think you should go out and vote I'm not sure you can exactly say they're endorsing the status quo.
Take 2024 vs 2020 where turnout dropped 4% [1] and compare it to the 2025 NYC mayoral race where more people in 2025 voted for Mamdani [2] then voted in 2021 at all [3]. IMO, the horrendous turnout is a reflection of the horrendous candidates that run.
> not sure you can exactly say they're endorsing the status quo
That's not the intent. But de facto, they either have no or that effect. Particularly in primaries.
There is also a huge messaging difference between casting a blank ballot and not showing up at all. The presumption is you can safely ignore someone who doesn't vote for several cycles because they tend to keep not voting for novel–but consistently exculpatory–excuses each time around. You have to still pay attention to intermittent voters if you don't want to get caught wrong-footed by a wave.
when the people who endorse the "status quo" (which is itself rapidly shifting if you track the US political sphere before the modern day) number in the millions, it's a bit more than slightly
normalize supporting a proper civics test before the right to vote is granted. you don't have to agree with any political topics, but you have to understand how politics actually work before you can cast a vote
I've voted in New York and Wyoming. In a general election, my Presidential vote does not practically count. As a result, I can typically throw it for a third party as a messaging vote. (If New York or Wyoming are turning out to be contested, the fight was won elesewhere.)
If you're in a swing state and you don't vote, you're about as important for the Presdiential general-election campaign you would not have voted for if you bothered to show up as an actual opposition voter. (Depressing turnout among unlikely voters who might vote for the other candidate is a real, precedented, cosultants-who-specialise-in-this-exclusively social-media-advertising turnout strategy.)
and if everyone who hates both the Rs and the Ds in the non-swing states voted third-party, and could manage to get behind the same party (that's the hard part), then suddenly the swing states would be much less important.
the point is, we need completely new thought in government to get out of the two-party duopoly that's currently eating the US from the inside. george washington hated political parties. we should strive to think like him a bit more
Hillary would've been an excellent president, and I say that with utter sincerity.
> My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.
– Hillary Clinton
That's the kind of person I want in the Oval Office.
Yeah right now the "clearly superior candidate" is (checking notes) crashing the global economy with a holy war against Iran to distract from his criminal conspiracy to hide his complicity in sex trafficking and abuse, posting AI images of himself as Jesus to spite the Pope, sending armed thugs into blue states to harass people and shoot them dead in the street, destroyed America's research and science infrastructure, his cabinet is full of conspiracy theorists, nazis and fascists, he's deranged, senile, definitely bought by Russia... and has in the space of a few months utterly ruined America's reputation and credibility throughout the world.
And yet people still insist Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were "the worst candidates ever," and that there was simply no choice. They want to turn all of the chaos and stupidity of the current administration into some kind of referendum on how bad the other side is, and they'll even claim that there would be absolutely no difference regardless of who was in charge. Yet even if that were the case, somehow, Trump is still better. For reasons I guess. Other than not being a woman.
Trump literally made a meme of himself lounging at the resort he planned to build on the ruins of Gaza but we couldn't vote for Kamala because she was the Zionist.
"far right" or "slightly left of far right" is a shitty choice, especially when "left vs right" is different comparing the US to the rest of the world
even the smallest-c conservative in the US is probably more right-wing than the furthest of the right in Europe (although they're trying really hard to prove that false)
the ocean you speak of is but a tiny puddle when you look at the whole of human political history
when is the dnc going to come out against genocide? oh, they're not? well then i don't care
i do agree, the complacency of US voters is the true root of the problem, one that the duopoly of politics strongly capitalizes on
i am not advocating violence, but i'm looking at history when i say that this is why revolutions happen
> when you look at the whole of human political history
When you look at the whole of human political history, the vast majority of politican systems have been authoritarian. Anybody who supports a system of government where average people get to vote (as both the Republicans and Democrats do) is part of the super ultra far left.
> "far right" or "slightly left of far right" is a shitty choice, especially when "left vs right" is different comparing the US to the rest of the world
> even the smallest-c conservative in the US is probably more right-wing than the furthest of the right in Europe (although they're trying really hard to prove that false)
This is just more of the same "Bernie would've been right of center in Europe" tripe that Reddit has been repeating since 2015 – it's a tired argument that doesn't take into account things like immigration policies, gender identity, racial justice, stances on abortion, and so on.
> when is the dnc going to come out against genocide? oh, they're not? well then i don't care
This is a non-sequitur. I'm not interested in debating Israel, Gaza and genocide on the internet, or watching you use them as a blanket justification for disengagement.
>This is just more of the same "Bernie would've been right of center in Europe" tripe that Reddit has been repeating since 2015 – it's a tired argument that doesn't take into account things like immigration policies, gender identity, racial justice, stances on abortion, and so on.
When you look at the actual negotiations and implementation of policies that have happened, the Democrats now have a much smaller gap between themselves and the Republicans on the world stage. There are a handful of distinct issues that they are polar opposites on, but in terms of actual governance the leadership of the two parties don't stray too far from the same direction compared to Western Europe and South America. While in relative terms they were very divergent from eachother in the 1920s and the 1960s, they've once again moved closer together and we have not yet hit another divergence point. There is a stagnation and regression that appear very similar because public sentiment has rapidly changed and progressed since 2012. It's very visible in the way many of the same Democrats are around now as in 2008 (and some from even 1996) and still act like they're from that era where we were at "the end of history", while the Republicans have many newer members that have jumped in since 2016 that act like they're from the earlier era of the 1950s and 1960s when concepts like civil rights and second wave feminism were still widely contentious. Regular Americans just sort of view the period from 1968 to 2001 as a relatively uniform era politically because there weren't events that up-ended entire hemispheres in a U.S.-centric way the way World War II, The Cuban Missile Crisis, and 9/11 had. Yet between 2001 and 2012 there were several up-ending events such as the 9/11, the '08 financial crisis, and the rapid adoption of the smartphone and thus instant global communication starting in 2010. Since the normal public have that view what has happened since 2012 makes the stances the Democrats have retained from before that monumental shift appear not only outdated, but harmfully backwards, especially as more people who were not alive during that "end of history" era come to be of voting age. That means the two major parties can seem to be the same face wearing two masks right now because neither have kept up with left wing public sentiment.
You'll have to articulate what you believe those stances actually are. I think there are huge differences between the two parties: expanding immigration, availability of healthcare, widening the social safety nets, racial justice and DEI, fighting climate change, protecting the environment, protecting and restoring reproductive rights for women, trans rights, lgbtq+ rights – the list goes on. These are all things that republicans simply can't touch without getting canceled and primaried.
You're claiming that their governance has stagnated, but this is only evidence of hyperpartisan gridlock increasing since 2008, not evidence that they've become so similar the Dems have nothing left to do when they're in office. Our country's entire culture war is built on these differences, it's not a small gap or friendly disagreement between gentlemen.
The overlap comes in the form of militarization of the police (Republicans give police ridiculous equipment or powers that the Democrats refuse to limit or rescind because they don't want to appear "soft on crime"), the proliferation of punishment instead of prevention (Republicans push policy to criminalize various things which the Democrats then quietly use for the same reason as above), the expansion of the surveillance state (just look at these stupid device age verification laws) privatization of things that need to be public services because they have to run at a loss (many senior members of the Democrats are at odds with younger members over their support for the Republican initiated ideas of partial or full privatization of Amtrak and information services like NOAA), trying to wield the judicial branch against the executive (Republicans raise things to the Supreme Court to make precedent while Democrats try and keep things in the circuit courts and prevent appeals) and others. While their ideas of social reform, bodily autonomy, and worker protections have progressed, in terms of finances, judicial enforcement, and foreign policy the Democrats haven't meaningfully changed their stances since 2008. Much of this is the same as back then when both parties showed support for the ridiculous punishments for digital piracy, the PATRIOT Act, and the plans to replace the Post Office with something like DHL.
The main idea of this stagnation leading to complicity comes from the fact that most often when the Republicans break something or introduce new ways to harm a given group the Democrats never really do anything visibly to reverse that. That idea had been bubbling under the surface since Chuck Schumer became Senate Majority Leader in 2015, but gained a lot of traction after Biden's term because although most of the first Trump era's policies had been implemented by executive order or by appointed department heads most of those executive orders were not nullified. Of the 33% nullified about half of those were inconsequential such as EO14016 revoking EO13801 which was about apprenticeships, and those appointed department heads such as Mike DeJoy were not relieved of their posts despite demonstrable harm. There's a reason we have the joke that the only thing Biden did was make Juneteenth an official holiday and gave people two grand to buy gaming PCs.
There are a lot of things that Democrats have actually done beneath the surface such as strengthening marriage protections for LGBTQ+ people, the carbon tax credit, bodily autonomy, giving aid and leniency to migrants and refugees, and pushing for student loan forgiveness. But all of that was so visibly stripped away in a spectacle, and that makes it hard for people to believe the Democrats are actually doing anything because if they were wouldn't all of those be more robust and defensible? The primary example people point to is Roe V. Wade, where the Democrats had forty nine years to create several layers of legislation to protect what Roe V. Wade had initiated, and yet did nothing. With all of this it creates the perception that the Democrats never really do anything and are thus stagnant.
Left publication also has a scoop on the negotiations with Freedom caucus too that proceeded this; rather interesting: https://prospect.org/2026/04/17/mike-johnson-fisa-fiasco-sec...
America's greatest digital senator (by country miles) has also ongoingly been posting up a storm about how the current usage of FISA has more Bush era secret interpretations they won't tell us, that is authorizing them to spy broadly on Americans. One of many examples: https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov/post/3mjkquz34uc2a
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