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- cross-posted to:
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Republican Sen. James Lankford, who spent months negotiating the border provisions the GOP demanded, said he may vote against his own bill this week.
Senate Republicans on Monday signaled their plan to filibuster bipartisan legislation that paired tougher border policy with more U.S. aid to Ukraine, a stunning reversal less than 24 hours after the legislation had been unveiled.
With ex-president Donald Trump urging them to kill it, and many on the right up in arms about the proposal, top Senate Republicans emerged from a heated closed-door meeting and said they needed more time to review the agreement, suggesting that a scheduled Wednesday vote to advance the bill is all but doomed to fail.
But theres always room to give them the benefit of the doubt. Dems need to stop compromising with them, they’re not going to help you anyway, why water down your bills?
I think they benefit a lot from people assuming that they water their bills down for the GOP’s benefit when the reality is that the right wing of the Dem party is larger and further right than most people believe. It’s a party of Bidens and Clintons, not AOCs and Bernies.
Because they know how the media narrative will go now. Dems offer a compromise bill that the GOP says they’ll go with. The GOP then doesn’t go with it. The GOP now takes all the blame in the media.
This is doubly important because the border issue is the only one where they have any actual policy that less informed moderate voters might agree with. If it looks like the Dems were arguing in good faith and the GOP was not, then they’ll vote accordingly. Not all of them, but it doesn’t have to be all of them.
The election this year is teetering between a GOP technical victory (losing popular vote for the White House while winning the electoral college) and complete GOP electoral collapse up and down the whole ballot. Things like this make the second option more likely.
The real answer:
Democrats have largely the same policy positions as Republicans, and have for decades. They are all philosophically neo-liberal, with very small exception in the squad/ progressive left (maybe 3%?), and a growing maybe 30% of the Republican wing as full blown fascist. So things are changing but for most of recent history, they are politically indiscernible when it comes to applied policy, what they prioritize, and where they compromise. Obama is like the quintessential modern example of this. He ran as a leftist, but governed to the right of Bill Clinton.