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Elon Musk reportedly on top of Dems’ list to investigate after midterms (www.the-independent.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 1 day ago (2 children)

But the contrarian view is that’s all they can do.

Congress has been dysfunctional for decades and the republicans have stood together against any bipartisan work. Even with a majority, there’s not much democrats can pass without a supermajority (or congressional reform).

The huge thing that has been missing has been constitutional checks and balances. I don’t know if they can do that without supermajority but they need to try

Given our dysfunctional Congress and the goal to put the brakes on abuses of power, is there anything they can do?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    there’s not much democrats can pass without a supermajority (or congressional reform).

    Absurd.

    The super majority vote is a parliamentary rule and not law. They can skip the super majority with a simple majority vote (as they can with all parliamentary rules).

    They skip it all the time... they bypass the "super majority" with regularity. Over 180x the last time I checked.

    They could have passed minimum wage increase with a simple majority. Instead, they tied it to a massive budget package.

    They never even tried a standalone bill. They performed the bare minimum because it works, people fall for it. It's an open secret and a bit of a joke, really.

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  • [–] 2 points 16 hours ago

    The filibuster rule is a parliamentary thing that could be changed/ignored, but the veto is very much unavoidable. Without 2/3rds they cannot pass a thing Trump would object to, and without 2/3rds they can't remove him.

    So it was a bit of a bullshit thing when a party has house, senate, and president and still can't vote things through due to the filibuster, but at least for now the democrats are still stuck with the veto.

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