Why the Senate doesn't work anymore
Interesting read:
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To many observers, those limited opportunities underscore the need for Democrats to improve their competitive positive in at least a few more states. It's telling that the Senate seats they flipped in 2020 came not in states they had bombarded with late television advertising, but in Arizona and Georgia -- states where they had invested for years in grassroots organizing that also lifted Biden to victory. North Carolina is a plausible next target for Democrats to add a Senate seat in 2022 with that strategy, but after that the options, particularly Florida and Texas in the Sun Belt or Ohio and Iowa in the Rust Belt, look more daunting.
The other implication of these dynamics for Democrats is the increasing pressure in the party to end the filibuster so that they can govern during the periods when they squeeze out a narrow Senate majority.
"There's no real room to build coalitions that give really any chance of overcoming a routine requirement of 60 votes to get anything done," notes Mann. Even Breaux, a centrist who built his Senate career on finding deals with Republicans, thinks Democrats need to end the filibuster for what he calls "constitutional issues" such as voting and abortion rights. The filibuster, he says, can encourage cooperation "when you have an aggressive middle on both sides, and you don't have that now." As a result, he believes "in getting rid of [the filibuster] for constitutional issues, like voting rights. We've done it for the Supreme Court and federal judges, so I guess you could do a limited carve-out for constitutional issues. That at least would help get some things done."
One final ingredient makes the operation of the modern Senate even more combustible. Because Republicans now so thoroughly dominate the less-populated, heavily rural, predominantly White states across the Plains and Mountain West, the GOP can exercise enormous power in the Senate even while representing many fewer people than Democrats do. If you assign half of each state's population to each senator, Democrats now represent 56% of the country and Republicans 44% -- even though each side holds 50 Senate seats.
As population continues to concentrate in the largest states, this partisan imbalance will likely widen. Without a change in the filibuster, that would allow states representing an ever-shrinking share of the national population to block legislative action supported by senators representing a clear majority of the country.
"The dynamic is that a smaller and smaller segment of the American electorate will control more and more seats in the Senate," says Mann. "So that there will be, in my view, a distortion that is so great it puts into question the entire legitimacy of the Senate as a governing body."
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https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/05/politics/senate-broken-biden-agenda/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
We are seeing it play out right before Our Eyes at this very moment.
Manchin and Sinema.
Make no mistake - We are in a CLASS WAR right now. We workers can win, but only if we continue to spread the Truth, and have allies in the upper reaches of the Legislature, Judiciary, and Executive who understand what the 1% are trying to do.
Sad thing is, if the 1% wins today the Earth itself will probably become inimical to Human Life within 100 years...their selfish greed is going to destroy the species. It will be a pyric victory at best.
