Detailed plans for how they will wreck the federal government

In the comment section of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Denise Oliver Velez posted (with protest) a few cartoons joking about Biden’s age. That’s a big topic now that he has announced another run for the presidency and a lot of stories are noting that Biden will be 86 at the end of his second term. Velez noted that these jokes and stories leave out that the nasty guy is only three years younger, so will be 83 in 2028. Also left out: Biden is healthy and of sound mind, while the nasty guy isn’t healthy and has been showing signs of dementia. And VP Harris will be in her early 60s during that second term. Not long after Tennessee Republicans expelled two black representatives who they felt disrespected them for speaking against their schemes of oppression and hit significant blowback, Republicans in another state want to do the same. This time the scene is Montana. It also has a Republican supermajority with plans for oppression. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported in this case it is transgender children. In defiant opposition is Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who is a transgender woman. Zephyr spoke against the bill, saying denying care means transgender children die. She hoped at the next invocation prayer “you see the blood on your hands.” Yeah, bigots trying to implement oppression do not like to be called out on their bigotry. They demanded Zephyr apologize. She refused. So on Thursday, April 20, they censured her. During debates on Thursday and Friday they would not recognize her to join the debate. On Monday a crowd of protesters gathered outside the Capitol chanting, “Let her speak!” An AP article posted on Kos reported after the rally outside the protest moved inside to the House gallery and the same chant brought House business to a halt. House leadership asked police to clear the gallery, and seven were arrested. They claimed an unacceptable attack on civil discourse, though nothing was damaged and no one was injured or even threatened. Tuesday’s floor session was canceled. Michel Martin of NPR spoke to Mara Silvers of the Montana Free Press. That Republican supermajority voted to bar Zephyr from the House floor for the rest of the session. She can vote, but not participate in debates. The reason for their action was they said Zephyr encouraged the protests in the gallery by holding a microphone in the air. While the anti-transgender bill will easily pass, the governor’s signature is no longer guaranteed. That’s because David Gianforte, child of the governor, has publicly come out as nonbinary and has been lobbying their father, saying their own friends will be harmed by the bill. Einenkel also reported that these efforts of oppression are deeply unpopular. When a progressive policy is on the ballot it passes easily. So the Republican effort now is to make it harder to put progressive policies on the ballot. Ohio residents are working to get a constitutional amendment preserving abortions on the November ballot. So Republicans are working to get an amendment raising the level of votes needed to ratify an amendment onto the August primary ballot, when the turnout is lower. The Missouri legislature is also getting such an amendment onto the ballot, even without the threat of preserving abortion. Dartagnan of the Kos community reported Republicans have also noticed the youngest voters are going strongly for Democrats. So they’re increasing their efforts at suppression of college student voters. In a functioning democracy the politicians would modify their platform when they see what they propose is widely unpopular. But that’s not what America has. Instead of changing the platform they change who can vote, as they yell about the youth being radically indoctrinated. In the process they are turning off young voters – which could be a big deal because people tend to vote for the same party their entire lives. Shove them away when they’re young means shoving them away for a lifetime. Nick Anderson of RA News of Texas tweeted a cartoon in response to a new Texas law requiring the Jewish Christian Ten Commandments be posted in every school. The cartoon shows a man shoving a Ten Commandment tablet into a child’s mouth as the man says, “Repeat after me: Schools are for education, not indoctrination!” Meteor Blades of Kos wrote about the new Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise published by the Heritage Foundation. This 900 page manifesto details exactly what conservatives want to do to the federal government whenever they get the chance. The 30 chapters discuss what they want done with the presidency, each federal department, personnel agencies, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Federal Reserve, Export-Import Bank, Small Business Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Elections Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and a few more. Each chapter is written by a person who knows a bit about that department or agency – such as Ben Carson, former head of HUD writing about HUD. We can’t say we’ll hope for the best if Republicans are able to seize control. These people have detailed plans for how they will wreck the federal government, to make sure it can’t help the poor and those who need it. There will be no protection of the little guy from the big guy. Instead, what’s left of the government will be reworked to help the rich and punish those whom the rich want punished (which is everyone not rich). David Atkins, a member of the DNC from California, tweeted a thread that begins with a chart of the 2016 electorate (the 2020 data not available). It has dots representing voters, red for Republican, blue for Democrat. The dots are spread with economic liberals to the left and economic conservatives to the right. Also, social liberals are on the bottom and social conservatives are on top. The blue dots are mostly in the lower left quadrant. The red dots are mostly in the top half with the center of the large cluster a bit to the right of the balance between economic liberal and conservative. Atkins used the chart to explain Democrats are chasing the wrong thing. The quadrant of those who are economic conservative and socially liberal is mostly empty. And the social conservative and economic liberals, the people that love Social Security but hate LGBTQ people, aren’t going to vote for Dems. That means Democrats shouldn’t try to chase moderates, they should move even more liberal in both social and economic issues. There is no group they would lose if they did. When I can I end a post with something uplifting or witty. Alas, not today. Leah McElrath tweeted a link to an article in the New York Times (no paywall on this one) about the crime scene investigators and what they saw at the Sandy Hook school after the shooting. One of the milder things they dealt with was dumping out twenty uneaten lunches and mistakenly reading a love note from a mother to a child. You think we have to witness an event to preserve it? Go see what these people saw before answering that question. This isn’t an issue of public perception. Not seeing the horror is different from refusing to understand the horror. McElrath added:

There are three events over the past two decades that normalized mass death in ways that still send chills down my spine: • The 9/11 attacks • The Sandy Hook massacre • The COVID pandemic ... I am sharing it because we must remember the massacre of our innocent was once unthinkable. It is now not only thinkable but has been repeated many times on various scales. Our children now drill for these scenarios. ... Living in fear is NOT freedom.