Republicans are grappling with public polls showing the public places more blame on them, rather than the Democrats, for the shutdown, even as they argue they have the moral high ground in the shutdown fight.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Republicans stress that they put no partisan poison pills in a GOP-crafted, House-passed stopgap to fund the government through Nov. 21. Democrats in the Senate have repeatedly blocked that bill as they demand that Republicans first negotiate with them on health care issues, particularly on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expiring at the end of the year.
Poll after poll finds that slightly more Americans think Republicans are to blame for the shutdown than who think Democrats are at fault.
The system wasn’t supposed to be perfect or eternal. The founders explicitly said that they expected each successive generation to essentially rewrite the constitution. It’s not their fault that we only made minor tweaks over 250 years.
The threshold for passing reform is too damn high. There should’ve been some mandatory period to make the change happen more often and easily to keep with the times. Now we’re stuck with an antiquated system that still mentions slavery in its founding documents and its loopholes are so well known that someone’s using it to turn this country into an autocracy.
I don’t know that the threshold is the problem. I think the problem is that about 35% of humans are complete pieces of shit. I don’t know how you account for that effectively. Expecting the rest of society to counter them seems about as reasonable of a solution as you’re likely to find and that’s essentially what we have now.
Shoulda made the revamp of the constitution an enforced, time-boxed process then. Currently the approximate timeframe of getting an amendment through is what, 60 years or so?