The problem comes in when this is exactly what the Republican Party has planned to exploit. They withheld the vote on obama’s nominee in order to get a Republican to install them. They also enacted project redmap before then, during obama’s first term, where they successfully took control of state houses and smaller offices throughout the country. And they fucked the maps to keep power. And all of that led to a right-stacked court that will lie to get the seat, take bribes when sitting in that seat, and then continually tow the party line with all of their insane fearmongering. They opened the door for abortion to be made illegal by the states they stacked in their favor and then changed the local laws to harm people.
You’re right, this is technically the way it’s supposed to work, but it doesn’t work anymore. Because there are no means of truly dealing with people exploiting the system and breaking it for their own gain except for toothless censures and other symbolic votes. And when those same broken systems made companies all the more powerful, they birthed FOX and MSNBC and made voting, not only really hard for specifically targeted communities that would act as a check on this type of shit, but also made it useless for the other people. Because they’re only doing exactly what the right wing mediasphere wants them to do.
They withheld the vote on obama’s nominee in order to get a Republican to install them.
Yup, because they had control of the Senate. They were voted in. I’m not denying that Republicans are immoral, unethical scumbags with the intent to power game the system, but we have no tools to fix that in our current system other than overwhelming it. It only gets worse the longer we wait.
There really aren’t a lot of other options for the citizenry. You can LARP at revolution or whatever, but I’m not volunteering first and I don’t see a lot of others doing so either. I, and a lot of other vulnerable people, are not going to come out on top, so I’ll pass on that solution.
Fact of the matter is, we could have elected Hillary in 2016. Sure, there was Republican meddling and Comey and yada yada, but it was fully within our abilities and we failed. The Supreme Court would look entirely different right now and we would still have medical rights. We did flip the senate, so it was fully in play before and then Mitch would not have been able to block the Garland appointment. Those are concrete outcomes from something that was fully possible for us to prevent. So I’m just not comfortable writing off voting as worthless at this stage, even with the acknowledged difficulties, gerrymandering, etc.
I wasn’t arguing for not voting. I was just making a point. Should’ve made that clearer, my b
