volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@josh

Well the case of that is understanding that the federal government doesn't incur debts all on a single day.
Every single day throughout the year the federal government buys things, and bills are created by that buying process that happens on a daily basis.

There has been a lot of misinformation based on the idea that the federal government creates bills all at once, but that's just not how it works.

So these bills have not yet been accumulated. It's not a question of I won't pay the bills we have already accumulated, because those bills don't actually exist yet.

Unfortunately the administration is trying to accumulate power based on that claim, and we really need to call them out on it being just plain false.

@MugsysRapSheet @potus

@farbel

Not only is the debt ceiling constitutional, but it is constitutionally mandated.

The Constitution assigns to Congress responsibility for borrowing on the nation's credit, which makes sense because if generations might be on the hook to pay the money back, it makes sense to be sure that the representatives of the people really are on board with committing the people to that debt.

The debt ceiling is merely the shorthand we use to refer to what Congress has decided to borrow.

Far from irrelevant, the debt ceiling is a critical part of the operation of the US system of government.

@OyVeidt

"The Congress shall have Power [..] To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;"

Article I section 8
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

@JohnShirley2023

The excuses that NPR has been putting out have been particularly silly.

It just always strikes me that, if the government funding is so miniscule then the journalistic organization should stop accepting it just to kill that as a controversy.

But I guess the contributions must not be so minuscule since they keep accepting the controversy to take the money.

@mimarek1

I don't know what makes her think lower court judges weren't constrained or that Supreme Court wasn't constrained. It clearly is.

What in the world is this person talking about?

@Annaeus

It's funny that you would call for the abolition of the Senate since that is the chamber not subject to gerrymandering.

But no, our democracy is not dysfunctional. Our population is dysfunctional. Throughout the country we have serious disagreements in the population. The representative Congress is just representing the people and showing the very real disagreements that the people have.

Congress is working perfectly, in a way, really representing that people have very strong and honest disagreements.

It would be a malfunction if given the disagreements in the population somehow Congress was all in the same side. In that case it would not be representing the people.

@JohnShirley2023

No!

Well I'm slightly joking, but this is part of my point here, being specific about what science is. I say that science is a process, not any sort of concrete thing. It doesn't correct itself; it is the thing that does the correction.

It would be like saying sanding wood correct itself.
No, sanding wood is not the thing that is being corrected, it is the process by which wood is smoothed.

It's sort of like saying science is a verb, not a noun.

Science, as I promote the term, is a way of uncovering wrong ideas about how the world works. Science is not corrected. It is the thing promoting correction.

@johnbessa @luckytran

@dcjohnson

That wouldn't resolve the crisis because no matter what the tax rates are a year from now the president is still demanding to borrow more money today.

Also, mathematically, it wouldn't raise that much money compared to the total deficit.

@Annaeus

Again you're overlooking the democracy part of the system.

Voters are very polarized, so we elect polarized representatives to represent our polarization.

There is not consensus throughout the country that any justice has misbehaved to the point of needing to be removed, so the democratic process reflects that by declining to impeach.

But no, we cannot treat justices like federal employees in other branches of government without violating the judicial independence of the Supreme Court.

Once the legislative and executive branches are allowed to punish a justice the justices become beholden to the other branches, which is exactly what is not supposed to happen in our system of government.

@Annaeus

Why skip the democratic process of the impeachment vote?

Impeachment is there specifically to hold officials like justices accountable.

It's the only way to enforce accountability without sacrificing judicial independence.

@Ruthie@mstdn.social

People are really off the rails talking as if the president has a choice about whether or not to abide by constitutional requirements like the 14th Amendment.

No, the president MUST apply the 14th Amendment and service debts, or else he should face impeachment for intentionally shirking his constitutional duty.

@GreenFire @jawarajabbi

@johnbessa

Yep, that's exactly my point. Science is only one out of many tools in our toolbox, and that's part of why it's useful to be specific about what science is.
@JohnShirley2023 @luckytran

@Ruthie@mstdn.social

No, I mean I would ask Jeffries to support his claim.

That math doesn't seem to work, so I'd want to see how he arrived at this claim.

@kbsez

Right, but you go a step farther when you say the other orgs get nothing back.

Well, they definitely do, and understanding that is key to seeing why the situation is like it is, and it's key to working with them to bring them over here.

Knowing what they get out of the other system is key to competing against it for their efforts.

@stanstallman

It's the opposite.

Defaulting is defined as not paying at all.

Trying to pay with Monopoly money is more analogous to the mint the coin proposal: it's offering payment that's legally dubious.

@JohnShirley2023

One way to think about it is that science--the application of the scientific method--is only one part of what a scientist does in practice, the same way that sawing is only one task of many that a woodworker engages in.

So for example, collecting data outside of a hypothesis is an important task, but since it's not direct application of the scientific method, I wouldn't call it "doing science".

In the same way, science can tell a researcher that this chemical has fatal effects, but it's not science that tells him whether he should expose his enemy to it.

We put up a firewall between science and morality so that each of them does its job as well as possible, science telling us what is possible and morality telling us whether to actually do it.

@johnbessa @luckytran

@ylove

Don't forget the role of voters, though.

If a candidate had no chance to appeal to voters then nobody would write them checks in the first place.

We elect these people. We actively go out and pull the level to vote for them.

If we would stop voting for bad people, the money for bad people would dry up as they would be bad investments.

So long as we can be relied on to hand these people power they will keep running, keep fundraising, and keep getting into office as we empower them.