volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@Karen5Lund sure it would be nice if the USPS could digitally deliver this Christmas sweater to my mom, but that's just not realistic 🙂

There's been so much misinformation about the USPS and DeJoy personally, and it's pretty unfortunate.

@guacamayan

@bigheadtales turns out they don't want to vote forward nominees that aren't compelling!

Like I don't know why you think that's weird. Turns out people don't want to vote for things they don't want to vote for, so they don't.

That's just how the Senate works.

When the president proposes a nominee that people don't want to vote for then people don't vote for them.

It makes perfect sense.

@bigheadtales I know for a fact that no processes were impeded since the process that you think was impeded played out exactly as it was designed.

Again this was about seeking consent. Consent was not given even though the elected senators had every chance to give consent had the president nominated a compelling candidate.

The president did not do his duty to nominate a compelling candidate. And so the senators we elected didn't bother giving their consent.

It's like you're yelling about the lady at the bar that didn't consent to going home with you. Yeah she obstructed you. She didn't comply with your wishes. No, that's not how that works, you just should have showered before you showed up and tried to pick up a date.

The president was required to put forward a nominee that could get the consent of the Senate, and he failed to do his job.

You can talk all day long about why the Senate didn't grant that consent, but at the end of the day, the simple fact is that the president didn't do his job to get consent to fill the vacancy.

Personally I even consider that an impeachable offense. It's one of the primary jobs that the president has to do. And if the president is so unable to work with Congress then I would have liked him booted out and replaced with another president who was willing to do the job. But that's just me.

But no, with the design of the US government it is ridiculous to say that Republicans blocked consent just as it would be ridiculous to say that the lady at the bar blocked your advances.

She just wasn't that into you. And the Senate we elected just wasn't into the president's nominee.

It is rightly called out as toxic behavior to blame the one not giving consent when consent is so important.

@Tertle950

Well it's a little bit off topic but I feel like bringing up: :)

I think one element of representative democracy that is under appreciated is the idea that we effectively hire people to spend their time studying issues so that the rest of us don't have to.

So I would never want to promote truly random citizen election (forcing people to leave their daily lives to go deal with policy decisions), but gosh, it's fun for me to think about random selection of people who volunteered to be considered for the positions.

It amuses me to consider a system where if none of the people on the ballot get 50% or maybe even more of the vote, then one person on the ballot is chosen at random.

But.... That's just a silly flight of fancy

@niclas

@bigheadtales except, again, that's factually not what happened, and given the processes behind a pointing judges, it could not have been what happened, because no such authority exists in the federal government.

I don't know how to put that any simpler.

You are mistating events, and not only are you mistating them, but what you claim happened would be impossible given the rules of government.

That's simply not how the federal government works, it is not in line with the rules of the Senate and it is not in line with the constitutional rules of appointing a federal judge.

You might as well be saying that Bigfoot showed up and along with the Loch Ness monster prevented the confirmation of the judges, and oh hey it was really easy for them to get together seeing as the earth is flat and we might as well throw in some alien stuff while we're at it.

No, what you're describing did not and could not have happened, but you keep circling back to it, despite basic civics knowledge of how the federal government works.

@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.