volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@Tertle950 Oh well the key is to elect somebody who is not a numbskull.

So I hereby announce my candidacy for whatever office we're talking about 🙂

(But seriously my main point here is, can we stop electing the same people? Even if we are electing people at random, if we stop electing the idiots, then we will randomly get better people)

@niclas

@chrisgeidner I mean the two are not incompatible.

You can take a little criticism even while pointing out how abysmal it is.

@bigheadtales any senator can walk to the floor and propose a privileged motion that would basically set the calendar aside and immediately take up the motion to approve a nominee.

And it has nothing to do with majority leader.

The calendar is respected by consensus. Senators are free at any moment to ignore the calendar and move on to different business.

@janef0421 I don't think it's that simple, I think (and now I'm going to talk about individuals) we tend to have different talents and different interests.

The guy who is really interested in playing football and being athletic might not be so eager to be reassigned to sit at a desk and work on engineering schematics. And vice versa.

And even if they were interested, they might not be good at it.

Some people are really good at math and some people are much better making art.

So I just don't think it's so easy to move people around like that. People in general just aren't so easy to pop into different jobs like identical cogs in the machine.

@Tertle950 The problem is that BlueSky and ActivityPub are fundamentally different in ways that would make them kind of hard to integrate.

BS focuses more on users while AP is more about instances.

So it's kind of hard to put them together, kind of like trying to meld a car with a rocket ship (just off the top of my head). They are kind of different and incompatible in their approaches.

@bigheadtales again that's not factually true, because that's not how the process works.

But it seems like you keep circling back to that one false statement.

@bigheadtales Speaker? Are you thinking of the other chamber again?

But no, any time the Senate is in session any senator can walk to the floor, motion to approve a nominee, and with a simple majority it can be done.

All rules of the Senate are based on simple majority consensus. That's a core part of the philosophy of that chamber, the idea that since there are only 100 of them they will be able to work things out personally.

Every once in a while you will see this happen on c-span if you watch the raw video. But obviously senators would rather pretend they don't have this ability so they try to pass the buck to majority and minority leaders.

We need to refuse to let them escape accountability like that.

@bigheadtales I place responsibility on all of us who voted for these senators, for all of us that keep re-electing these idiots.

They serve at our pleasure.

And as far as I can tell most of them are morons, but we keep reelecting them, so I emphatically say we should stop doing that.

But if we're going to keep reelecting morons then this is the government we get.

So, we elected a president that failed to secure consent from the senators that we also elected to fill vacancies in his government.

I don't care one bit what letter is in front of a politician's name. What I care about is that we elected all of these people, we elected a president who couldn't work with Congress and we elected a Congress that wasn't interested in the nominees proposed by the president.

If you don't like it fine. Let's talk about not continuing to re-elect the same type of politicians.

But here we are.

I definitely don't want to let the politicians off the hook by letting them scapegoat the Senate majority leader, though. That's not how the Senate works and it lets our elected people off the hook for their decisions if we pretend that it is.

@Willow@stranger.social I think people don't understand that the general public treated him like this mythic character until finally he just gave up and accepted that role, and he turned it into a platform for trolling everybody.

To be clear I'm not saying that's a good thing, and maybe I'm even agreeing that there's something wrong with him.

But the best way to think about him these days is as a troll not to be taken seriously, and we would all be better off if we just ignored him.

As the old internet line says, don't feed the trolls. Unfortunately we keep promoting his behavior by continuing to give him attention.

@angiebaby I mean they would be impeached.

@janef0421 I don't think it's focusing on individuals since they are talking about thousands.

But anyway, as a person working in science, there are an awful lot of problems that we could be addressing with more eyes, with better eyes even.

There are a lot of questions that we have about reality, and only so many hours in the day to try to figure them out.

More hands would help us resolve some of our practical questions, or even just better hands.
Some more Einsteins would be nice.

@stevencudahy ha, that sounds like a funny marketing campaign for some unfortunate merger between FedEx and a pie company 🙂

@bigheadtales It has absolutely nothing to do with the House

Any senator can make a motion by walking down to the floor and proposing it, as per Senate rules.

@bigheadtales as a constitutional scholar (ha) I know that Senate rules are not constitutional issues 🙂

The Senate makes its own rules.

And on one hand, you're missing that the Senate is free to bypass that process with a simple majority vote.

And on the other hand, even if it wasn't, you're describing the process for granting consent per tradition.

So you're really just painting yourself into corners here.

@bigheadtales and the Senate was not prevented from the mechanism to give consent.

That is just not factually what happened.

At any point, had our elected senators wanted to approve the nominee, they could have motioned on the floor, and gotten it over with.

The mechanism was always available to consent.

They just weren't in to the president's nominee, so they didn't motion to move forward, and that's up to the president, the requirement that he get consent, for the stability of the constitutional system.

And again if you don't understand how the constitutional system works maybe that's why you think it's so fragile. These sorts of things are critical to the foundation of the US government, but if you're not familiar with them then you might not understand the structures that provide such durability.

If you're not familiar with how this works then you might be misunderstanding it and seeing it as fragile, because you don't appreciate the structure that makes it so strong.

@bigheadtales apologist? Where in the world do you get that?

I'm emphasizing the blame that presidents with open vacancies hold and I am quite frustrated that presidents aren't held accountable for those failures.

Apologist? No! I am as fired up with blame as I could possibly be!

As for McConnell, under Senate rules the majority leader can be overridden at any moment so I hate to see McConnell scapegoated like that.

If the Senate wanted to approve a nominee it could regardless of what the majority leader thought about it. But unfortunately the stories out there play into that mythos about the all-powerful leader when in reality the Senate in general simply isn't interested in passing the nominee.

The Senate just wasn't in to the nominee.

The Senate just wasn't consenting to what the president wanted.

@stevencudahy Well when the pie is in the wrong place maybe that is a failure inherent to the pie.

Like if I don't have pie but my piece is located 1,000 miles away I really don't have pie and maybe I can describe the distance as being somewhat inherent to the pie.

@europesays I mean, let's talk about both.

And let's demand better candidates.

@bigheadtales actually I think you really put your finger on it when you phrase it as blocking the consent portion.

Yes! This really does make me think of really toxic behaviors where a person might blame another for not wanting to give them attention, as if they were owed it.

It really is about consent, exactly. The president is required to get the consent of the Senate, and it's not that the people we elected blocked the consent, it's that they just didn't consent because what the president had to offer wasn't good enough.

Yes it really is a matter of consent.

It's not that consent is blocked. Is that consent has to be earned, and sometimes presidents don't do the right thing and earn that consent.

@bigheadtales and I choose to frame it as it is factually, that it's not about blocking but about approval 🙂

You talk about the GOP blocking the consent, but that's PART OF the consent, if you want to put it that way.

If the president proposes a nominee that doesn't have enough votes for approval then the nominee is not being blocked, it's just that the nominee isn't a good enough nominee and the president is required to propose a better one.

The process was not stopped at all. This is the process.

The president is required to put forward a nominee that can get Senate approval.

Republicans did not prevent the vote. The president failed to propose a nominee good enough to get a vote.