#republican obstruction

[socialjusticeinamerica]

Americans Could Save $2 Billion — And Republicans Are Trying Really Hard To Stop It

After gas companies gutted the nation’s new green building codes, industry groups representing homebuilders are trying to salt the earth.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[rejectingrepublicans]

[republicansaretheproblem]

Again for those who missed it.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[worldofwardcraft]

How Bork became a verb.

February 7, 2022

With the announced retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer and a SCOTUS opening imminent, it's once again time for Republicans to dust off one of their favorite fables: the torture and crucifixion of make-believe great American jurist Robert Bork (pictured above calling down brimstone on godless liberals).

To hear Republicans tell it, when Justice Lewis Powell retired from the court in 1987 and St. Ronnie nominated Bork to fill the vacancy, the evil Democrats viciously attacked him and unfairly torpedoed the confirmation of a preeminent legal scholar. As with most of the fairy tales the right tells itself, this one is nowhere near being true.

Those supposedly meritless attacks on Bork that conservatives love to fume about were really just accurate citations of his public record. For instance, the progressive advocacy group, People for the America Way, ran a TV ad at the time correctly pointing out,

He defended poll taxes and literacy tests. He doesn't believe the Constitution protects your right to privacy. And he thinks that freedom of speech does not apply to literature and art and music.

And in 2001, The Washington Post had this to say.

For years Bork had thundered from the right that a stupid, lawless high court had driven an entire legal culture out of joint. Just as Congress was considering the landmark public accommodations law that became part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Bork weighed in against its wisdom as well as its constitutionality.

But perhaps an even bigger impediment than his far-right radicalism was Bork's involvement 14 years earlier in Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, during which both the attorney general and assistant AG were ousted for refusing Nixon's order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Which left solicitor general Bork as the third-ranking Justice Department official. Bork, it seems, was only too happy to do the bidding of a crooked president who disgraced his party.

So when Bork's nomination reached the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was voted down on a bipartisan vote of 9-5. Bork, however, insisted on a floor vote by the full senate and was again rebuffed 42-58 with bipartisan opposition. Sadly, the sort of Republicans who’d have the integrity to vote against someone like him are long gone.

While centrist Merrick Garland was denied a hearing and a vote, the extremist Bork was provided both. Plus, in a Democratic-led senate, his nomination wasn't even filibustered. Yet, in the GOP fantasy universe Bork's rejection was the sin that justifies all their abuses of the confirmation process. And their commitment to "bork" every future Democratic nominee.

[filosofablogger]

The Danger of Collective Amnesia

The Danger of Collective Amnesia

Nearly five months after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th of this year, Republicans continue to downplay and naysay the attack.  Time seems to have diminished their memories of that fateful day, and they claim it was nothing more than a few ‘tourists’ or ‘patriots’ having a good time.  Never mind that five people were killed and 140 police officers injured, and never mind that if the…

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[garudabluffs]

The Republican Party has demonstrated that it intends to control the government in the future, no matter what most Americans want.

May 7, 2021 Letters From An American Heather Cox Richardson

"Trump is systematically going after leading members of the Republican Party, determined to remake it into his own organization. Several former senior White House officials told Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post that “[t]he defeated ex-president is propelled primarily by a thirst for retribution, an insatiable quest for the spotlight and a desire to establish and maintain total dominance and control over the Republican base.” Republican strategist Brendan Buck noted that Trump seems to relish fighting, rather than victory to achieve an end. “Usually,” Buck said, “a fight is the means to an end, but in this case fighting is the end.”

"The story of how Republican leaders embraced voter suppression and gerrymandering starts back in the 1980s, though the mechanics of overturning a presidential election are new to 2020. Still, their undermining of our democratic system begs the question: Why are leading Republicans surrendering their party, and our nation, to a budding autocrat?"

""... but Republicans insist that the federal $300 weekly unemployment checks included in the law are keeping people from going back to work."

"Citing help wanted ads, Republican governors in South Carolina, Montana, and Arkansas are ending the unemployment benefit in their own states to get people back to work. Other Republican-led states are suing the administration to force it to let them use the money provided in the American Rescue Plan not to offer help to workers, but to subsidize tax cuts. Meanwhile, still others at home are touting the benefits of the American Rescue Plan to their constituents without mentioning that they voted against it."

READ MORE https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-7-2021

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