volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@liquor_american nope!

This is about the future, preventing voters from voting their choices on future ballots, not about the past.

@chrisgeidner

@bigheadtales Oh yeah they absolutely can, and occasionally they do, again if you watch c-span you see this play out occasionally.

No it's not common because of how the Senate conducts itself, but it does happen every once in a while.

Any senator can rise for recognition, and the pro tempre (If not the president) will recognize the senator, who can then make their motion, get a second, and proceed with their business if they have the support of the rest of the chamber.

The parliamentary procedure continues from there.

The reason it's rare is because it would make such a mockery to rise with such a motion without guaranteed support from the rest of the chamber.

But yeah, it's definitely a thing. And we need to hold them accountable for how they use it, and for how the president uses it.

@stanstallman well I suppose I have two reactions to that.

On one hand these people have large megaphones and they are able to promote flat out false information to an awful lot of the public, and I think that is antisocial in its own.

On the other hand, I think a lot of comedians are really missing their real calling when they leave the neutral comedy behind to become political commentators.

So it's both the negative and the lack of the positive that these examples bring. They could be doing good but instead they are actually doing harm. We lose out coming and going.

But mainly I think it's worth, unfortunately, calling them out to at least try to debunk the harm that they would do.

@bigheadtales it's like you're complaining that nobody went home with you from the bar, and who decided that?

Who decided that you weren't worth a date?

Well nobody decided that. You just weren't worth the date. Nobody was into you. Sorry.

And so it was any time the president had a vacancy to fill but he didn't propose a person worth voting for.

Sorry, the Senate just wasn't into the nominee.

It could have voted for the nominee at any moment, but it just wasn't into that person.

It's really ridiculous to talk about the GOP blocking the nominee when it's just a matter of the nominee not being worth the time to vote.

Again, at any moment any single senator could have started the vote on the floor, and as per Senate rules the majority leader could not have stopped it if most of the senate wanted to move ahead with the vote.

The members of the Senate just weren't interested.

@stanstallman

Gosh Jimmy Kimmel is an example of a person where I just wish the comedians would stick to comedy, because when they stick their nose into anything substantial they just make fools of themselves.

He's been wrong so often, tragically wrong, and I can totally believe he would say something as foolish as this.

@chrisgeidner so much for democracy

@bigheadtales it's funny because I would criticize Fox News outlets and MAGA types for their own ignorance of how the government actually works.

You and they, you weren't so different.

No I'm just siding how the governmental processes work.

I'm sorry you're wrong about how they work. I'm sorry that you have been misled about what happened, but it's never too late to learn more about how the US government functions if you're interested in it.

And if you're concerned about it then it's especially important that you might learn more about how it operates, especially learning about the protections in place to guard against the things you sound worried about happening.

But most importantly to me, it's important to know how the government works so we can hold people in powerful positions accountable for their actions.

You've been misled about what actually happened in the government, and that's a shame, but that's why it's so important to call it out and correct the record.

@micchiato@mastodon.social it's like supporting unicorns racing.

It's not a real option, there's no option for that on the table, there's nothing to really support, but a whole bunch of people are getting excited about demanding something that is purely imaginary.

@bigheadtales The rules allowed a vote.

They would have voted if they wanted to.

But the president's nominee was not judged to be worth voting for so they didn't vote.

That's just how the senate works.

@bigheadtales except they weren't prevented from voting on the matter is that question.

Again senators could have walked to the floor at any point and voted.

The president didn't put forth a nominee that they cared to vote on.

How do we know? Because they didn't vote on the nominee even though they could have voted any day of the week, but they didn't, because the nominee wasn't worth voting for.

@bigheadtales again the Senate rules absolutely allow for overriding the majority leaders opinion no matter what it is.

Any senator can move to override anytime they want to.

And if you watch c-spin you will see this happen occasionally. It takes a simple motion and a simple majority vote and that's all it takes.

BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS.

Because the president is required to gain Senate consent no matter what the rules are.

I'm annoyed that you keep distracting me with Senate rules when they really don't matter 🙂

It doesn't matter what you or I think about the Senate rules. It doesn't matter what the rules are for getting consent. It's the president's job to get consent no matter what the senate rules may say.

So again you are completely wrong about Senate rules, but it doesn't even matter that you are wrong, you are completely wrong about Republicans blocking the process, they didn't, and they couldn't have, because they didn't have authority under the rules, but it doesn't even matter that you're wrong about that.

The president's job is to get consent.

He can complain all he wants about how hard it is to get consent but it doesn't matter, that's still his responsibility under the design of the US government, under the design of the checks and balances at the heart of making sure that we don't have to trust that any officials are operating in good faith.

It is a check on presidential power that he is required to get consent, and if a president doesn't get consent, he has failed to do his job.

And that's regardless of whatever you think the Senate rules are.

Which you are wrong about.

@realTuckFrumper oof feel called out?

(Personally I don't give a crap about Ted Cruz and I wish we would ignore him, but hey if you're going to promote him here, might as well dish some out)

@bigheadtales again, the Senate rules always allowed a vote.

Senators we elected just weren't into voting for these nominees.

@scottjenson FWIW I suspect that some of it was related to the amount of overhead that mesh networking involved.

Pure speculation, but at the time the network links were not that fast in the first place, and if half of the bandwidth was taken up by overhead related to managing the ad hoc nature of the mesh, that really ate into the benefits of the system.

And then there were legalities.

But yeah again just speculating, but it seems like at the time the technology wasn't fast enough for support it, and by the time the tech was fast enough there were other options so it became less interesting altogether.

@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.