United States Senate

[GreyhoundFan]

This would explain Lindsey's transformation from never-dumper to chief sycophant:

 

[fraurosena]

It's not always bad news from the Senate. 

I don't think Trump will upset is buddy Erdogan by siding with Americans on this issue though.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

It's time to overhaul your far from democratic election systems. One person, one direct vote. No intermediary stages of electoral colleges that can distort the actual majority of votes, or or districts or communities (or whatever they're called, I forget) that can be gerrymandered to distort the majority. Drawing up of new voting district boundaries must be done by a non-political entity and not by the party that happens to have majority rule. Automatic voter registration for every American citizen from the moment they reach the age of 18. No need to re-register for every damned election. No registration of party preference other than at the ballot box. 

I could go on, but you get my drift. 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is disgusting:

 

[WiseGirl]

Not a big surprise 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The cow is correct.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

There are so many things Marco doesn't comprehend. Irony is definitely one of them.

[JMarie]

FYI: Mark Kelly, Gabrielle Gifford's husband, is running for Senate and will likely be her Democrat opponont

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2020/01/16/sen-martha-mcsally-calls-cnn-reporter-liberal-hack-hallway-dustup-manu-raju/4488421002/

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Cotton seems to be trying to challenge Lindsey for chief sycophant in the senate:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

In case there was any doubt of Joni Ernst's stupidity and sycophancy:

You know what needs to change? Iowans need to vote her out.

[JMarie]

This has a list of all the Republican senators running for re-election.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/10/politics/senate-2020-map-election-congress/index.html

I would LOVE to see McConnell and Graham lose to an evil Democrat newcomer.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Rubio is such an ass:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I often disagree with Manchin, but I'm glad he smacked back at both Twitler and Capito: "Trump Lashes Out at Manchin, and He Pushes Back"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III votes with President Trump more than any other Democrat in the Senate. But his vote last week to convict Mr. Trump of impeachable offenses has eclipsed all of that, earning him the rage of a president who coveted a bipartisan acquittal.

In the days since Mr. Manchin, a West Virginian who was one of the few swing votes on impeachment, supported Mr. Trump’s removal, the president has laced into the senator with a zeal that is startling even by his standards.

He called Mr. Manchin a “puppet Democrat Senator” who was “weak & pathetic.” He gave the senator a new nickname: “Joe Munchkin.” He suggested that Mr. Manchin was too stupid to understand a transcript of his telephone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the central piece of evidence in the case. And to add insult to injury, he took credit for the senator’s signature legislative achievement: a bipartisan bill to secure miners’ pensions.

On Monday, Mr. Manchin made clear that he had had enough.

“The people of America and the people of West Virginia want some adults in the room,” he said in an interview, but he said that Mr. Trump was not behaving like one. Then, the senator — who at 6-foot-3 is roughly the same height as Mr. Trump, though considerably thinner — took his own shot.

“Munchkin means that you’re small, right?” he said. “I’m bigger than him — of course he has me by weight, now, he has more volume than I have by about 30 or 40 pounds. I’m far from being weak and pathetic, and I’m far from being a munchkin, and I still want him to succeed as president of the United States.”

Mr. Trump’s litany of insults reflects his dashed hopes of counting a Democratic defector among his supporters on impeachment, a crucial piece of the president’s claims that impeachment was a partisan “hoax” so extreme that it had no legitimacy. And it underscores his disappointment that Mr. Manchin, who has at times broken with his party to support parts of the president’s agenda, refused to back him during this particular fight. Given the politics of West Virginia, a state Mr. Trump won with 68 percent of the vote in 2016, Mr. Manchin was among a very small group of Democrats who were seen as possible votes to acquit.

But Mr. Manchin said he did not base his choice on electoral politics.

“I knew the politics of my state,” the senator said. “If I was going to make a political decision, I’d have voted to acquit.”

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the only Republican to vote to convict Mr. Trump, said much the same thing, and has been relegated to Mr. Trump’s enemies list as a result.

“The president is entitled to say whatever he thinks,” Mr. Romney said on Monday in a brief hallway interview in the Capitol. “I’m not going to try to direct what he says.”

Democrats accused Mr. Trump of abusing his oath of office and obstructing Congress by trying to get Ukraine to help him win re-election and then covering up his actions. Central to the case was the phone call in which he asked Mr. Zelensky to “do us a favor though” and investigate his political rivals, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Days before the final verdict in the impeachment trial, Mr. Manchin stood up in a closed-door lunch with his Democratic colleagues and delivered an impassioned speech about the dilemma he faced.

He was struggling, Mr. Manchin told his colleagues, and quoted from a statement made by Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who spent more than half a century in the Senate until his death in 2010. During President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, Mr. Byrd warned that the Senate might sink “further into the mire because of this partisanship.”

There was some applause and very little pushback, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Manchin, who has long prided himself on working across party lines, later repeated Mr. Byrd’s words on the Senate floor, warning that “there will be no winners on this vote.”

In that sense, he was right; the vote has certainly not been a winner for him.

“It has been incredibly hot,” said Hoppy Kercheval, a conservative West Virginia talk show host, describing the reaction to Mr. Manchin’s vote. “I got more texts about Manchin’s vote than anything I’ve talked about in a year — most of them angry and some of them unrepeatable.”

Mr. Manchin, a former governor, has long had a reputation for bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. According to the website FiveThirtyEight, Mr. Manchin has voted with Mr. Trump 53 percent of the time. His votes, though, are hard to predict.

At the outset of the administration, Mr. Trump courted Mr. Manchin and tried to persuade him to become a Republican. But Mr. Manchin stuck with Democrats in voting against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and against Mr. Trump’s tax bill. Then he crossed party lines to become the lone Democratic vote in favor of confirming Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Some Democrats said Mr. Manchin’s guilty vote on impeachment surprised them. He had floated the possibility of a censure in the days before the final vote. In the interview, he said he thought it might be a way to get some bipartisan consensus that Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Zelensky was hardly “perfect,” as the president had repeatedly said.

“I don’t think there was a person among those 100 senators who believed the president had a perfect phone call and didn’t do anything wrong. I believe they all know something was wrong,” he said. “I thought censure would be the way we could get a majority of the vote, and I couldn’t even get one Republican to sign on.”

Mike Plante, a Democratic strategist in West Virginia, said he took the talk of censure as an indication that Mr. Manchin was thinking of voting to acquit.

“People were pleasantly surprised and happy that he took this step,” Mr. Plante said, referring to Democrats. “He clearly recognized that this was more than politics as usual. This was history, and he did not miss that moment.”

But Nick Casey, the former chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party and a close Manchin ally, said he was not surprised. “Joe has never been shy about going into the belly of the beast if he does something that he is very comfortable with. And if people disagree with him, that’s their right. He got elected to make decisions, and he made one.”

His vote caused a bit of a dust-up between Mr. Manchin and the state’s other senator, Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican. In an interview on Fox News last week, she said the vote was “not being received well here at home” and said that Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, had probably “just pulled the noose a little tight and said, ‘Come on, everybody, we’re going to jump off this cliff together.’”

The suggestion rankled Mr. Manchin, who made his own appearance on Fox News the next day to push back. “Shelley knows me well enough that no one can pull my chain, tie a noose around me or any of that.”

In the Capitol on Monday, Ms. Capito — and many other Republicans — said they had no interest in getting in the middle of a dispute between Mr. Trump and Mr. Manchin.

“That’s between him and the president,” she said. “I don’t agree with Joe’s vote — he knows that — but everybody’s entitled to their opinion and I just think we need to move on.”

At 72, Mr. Manchin, who won re-election narrowly in 2018, has not said whether he will run again in 2024. Mr. Plante said his vote to convict the president could make it harder for him to do so. But Mr. Manchin says he is comfortable with his decision.

“I’ve only taken two oaths since I’ve been a senator,” he said. “One was to protect and defend the Constitution and the other was to do impartial justice, and I think I did. I can sleep on that.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Bobble-throated slapdick" is a good nickname for pretty much anyone with an R after their name.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I will be calling both my senators this afternoon to complain. I have little doubt, however, that they would be against this crap:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Marco has taken to posting pretentious videos and quotes about how Dems are ebil because Rs have a corner on morality and religion. Some of them make me think of Rick Arndt's car rides with his kidults. Stephen Colbert has a good retort:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I truly despise Lindsey:

 

[JMarie]

Guess who's up for reelection in November? (hint: his last name is a cracker used to make cheesecake crust)

[Audrey2]

3 hours ago, JMarie said:

Guess who's up for reelection in November? (hint: his last name is a cracker used to make cheesecake crust)

You know it would just make my whole year if Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell both lost their elections. I would love to add the orange menace to the list too, but I'm afraid to get too greedy... (And since world war II there has only been one time that one party has been in power for 4 years. The other presidents have either been two term, 8-year presidents, Johnson took over for Kennedy- 8 years of Democrats, Bush the first was defeated after 4 years, but that came right after the eight years of Reagan, but that was still 12 years of Republican rule. The only president that was President for just 4 years between 8 year terms of the other party was Democrat Jimmy Carter from 77 to 81. I hope this makes sense as it does in my head.) I would absolutely adore a change in the white house, but I'm not feeling very good about it looking at the historical data of the time since FDR.

[fraurosena]

50 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

You know it would just make my whole year if Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell both lost their elections. I would love to add the orange menace to the list too, but I'm afraid to get too greedy... (And since world war II there has only been one time that one party has been in power for 4 years. The other presidents have either been two term, 8-year presidents, Johnson took over for Kennedy- 8 years of Democrats, Bush the first was defeated after 4 years, but that came right after the eight years of Reagan, but that was still 12 years of Republican rule. The only president that was President for just 4 years between 8 year terms of the other party was Democrat Jimmy Carter from 77 to 81. I hope this makes sense as it does in my head.) I would absolutely adore a change in the white house, but I'm not feeling very good about it looking at the historical data of the time since FDR.

I would even go so far as to say that in order to win back democracy, America needs to get rid of McConnell more than they need to get rid of Trump.

McConnell has way too much power in his hands for such a malignant and corrupt traitor. To democracy’s detriment, he has already shown he knows how to wield it against a Dem president, and to keep Trump in office at all costs.

If you have to choose one or the other, purging McConnell’s influence from politics should be your preference. Trump can be contained (and removed!) by a Congress that takes its job seriously.

[JMarie]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/romney-may-vote-against-trump-again-—-this-time-with-some-bite/ar-BB10O3ty?ocid=spartanntp