WTF are the republicans doing? Elizabeth Warren.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I know several people involved with the Brand New Congress campaign personally and it's very much designed to try and accomplish their stated goals.

Whether or not it will, is of course another story.

Every True Believer is a Useful Idiot to somebody.

[Iamwhomiam]

Ok, I'll buy it as being genuine. Crazy money will be necessary, though there are certainly ample numbers of disgruntled voters on both sides willing to support it. We will see what comes to be.

I want to believe!

[seemslikeadream]

I just got back from the best get together EVER...more people there than I could count..everyone volunteering to do something..social media, you tube video channel ...dogging representatives...planning our own town hall meetings and inviting reps to come if they want..because those fuckers won't hold a town hall ....one was held the other day and this is how he did it...one person at a time escorted by a uniformed police officer in to talk to him. PEOPLE ARE PISSED just like that Chaffetz video

We are the INDIVISIBLES

It was really nice to be with such a great bunch of real people

https://www.indivisibleguide.com

[km artlu]

...her soft voice will be most unreasonably taken by men as a weakness, which is far from being true.

Please...must you do that?

I'm a man and I'm far from alone among my gender in feeling a faint flutter of hope with each encounter of news about Tulsi. The quote above is simply inaccurate. It could be made less so through replacing "by men" with a more nuanced phrase.

[seemslikeadream]

fucking racist and misogynistic all rapped up in one fucking piece of shit trumpty dumpty

Trump Resurrects ‘Pocahontas’ Dig Against Elizabeth Warren
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tru ... a129eb6400

and this place RI has never been and never will be censored ...get over it

[seemslikeadream]

What Happened to Elizabeth Warren Has Roots in Racism
By JAMES GRIMMELMANN and JAN ELLEN LEWISFEB. 10, 2017


This week, the Senate voted 49 to 43 to silence one of its own members. Whether the Republicans who forced Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, to sit down knew it or not, they added another chapter to a long and infamous tradition of manipulating congressional rules to prevent an open discussion of race.

The move came as Senator Warren was participating in Democratic senators’ all-night speak-a-thon against confirming Jeff Sessions as attorney general. She had quoted a letter Coretta Scott King wrote in 1986 detailing Mr. Sessions’ history of voter suppression against African-Americans. A few minutes later, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, objected that Ms. Warren had violated Senate Rule XIX, which says that no senator may “impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” Although Rule XIX sounds like it’s about preventing personal attacks, Mr. McConnell used it to shut down debate on the qualifications of a nominee for a crucial cabinet position.

The closest precedent for this kind of censorious misuse of congressional rules was the House of Representatives’ use of the so-called Gag Rule, between 1836 and 1844. The Gag Rule was the House’s response to a rising tide of antislavery petitions. It adopted a rule in 1836 that the petitions would be automatically tabled. Any discussion of them was prohibited.

This was a brute show of political strength by proslavery representatives, who considered it a grave insult to let abolitionists speak.

President John Quincy Adams, then a member of the House representing Massachusetts, became an outspoken critic of the Gag Rule. He thought it made a mockery of the First Amendment right to petition the government. He argued that all petitions“should be received, whether they come from the wealthiest individuals in the land, or whether they come from the poorest or lowest in character,” and he challenged the Gag Rule at every opportunity for years.

In one famous incident, he inquired whether the Gag Rule would prohibit him from presenting a petition by slaves. His colleagues from the South were outraged, calling for Adams to be censured or expelled for “gross contempt” of the House, and threatened to stage a walkout and “go home to their constituents.” They satisfied themselves with a resolution that slaves had no First Amendment rights to petition the government.

The Gag Rule’s opponents finally mustered the votes to repeal it in 1844. Ironically, it had contributed to the rising antislavery sentiment in the North. The lash of an antislavery petition or a floor speech is nothing compared with the lash of the whip. So the spectacle of proslavery representatives falling over themselves with outrage at even discussing slavery helped convince many in the North that the South really did have something to be ashamed and defensive about. The Gag Rule, and the blustering attempts to enforce it, made slaveowners look pathetic and malevolent.

So when Senator McConnell said of Senator Warren, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” his words had an ugly echo. John Quincy Adams was warned and given explanations, but he persisted too. His point — and Ms. Warren’s — wasn’t that they didn’t know the rules, but that the rules were unjust and antidemocratic.

In a historical coincidence, like Adams, Ms. Warren represents the state of Massachusetts. She occupies the same seat as Charles Sumner, who was nearly clubbed to death on the Senate floor in 1856 by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who was offended to the point of murderous violence by one of Sumner’s antislavery speeches. And Rule XIX itself was created in its current form in 1902 after the virulently racist Senator Benjamin Tillman assaulted his fellow South Carolinian Senator John McLaurin for saying that Tillman had uttered “a willful, malicious and deliberate lie.”

This is the legacy that the 49 Republicans who voted to silence Senator Warren embraced. It is a legacy that regarded the sensitive feelings of thin-skinned congressmen as more important than good government or the voices of the people — especially the voices of women and minorities. Adams was gagged for presenting antislavery petitions from women and blacks, Senator Warren for reading the words of a female civil rights icon. This is a legacy no one should want to preserve.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/opin ... acism.html

[Iamwhomiam]

...her soft voice will be most unreasonably taken by men as a weakness, which is far from being true.

Please...must you do that?

I'm a man and I'm far from alone among my gender in feeling a faint flutter of hope with each encounter of news about Tulsi. The quote above is simply inaccurate. It could be made less so through replacing "by men" with a more nuanced phrase.

Edited context for the pleasure of km artlu:

Wombaticus Rex » Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:36 pm wrote:
I did not appreciate the fact the progressive, true believer wing of MoveOn has turned on their masters -- long overdue and quite interesting.

But have they? Or is this effort from its inception is designed to fail in order to reestablish the dominance of the Democratic Party?

Strange how different heads are now wearing the Vote Them Out hats.

As The Consul points out, Warren will be too old, and of those Rex mentioned, soft-spoken Gillibrand has staying power and old guard blessings, along with the progressive voting record, (perhaps more so than any other present member), so she's a keeper, and Kiobuchar has a most promising future, so she's worth following. Oh, and I wouldn't discount Tulsi Gabbard overcoming opposers and becoming the Democratic Party's candidate for President in 2020. While Gillibrand owns the progressive brand, her soft voice will be most unreasonably taken by men many as a weakness, which is far from being true.

I surely hope you understand I do not feel that way and would never judge anyone's competency for holding higher office upon the quality of their speaking voice or their sex, or their appearance. I've never heard Tulsi speak and I referred directly to Gillibrand being soft-spoken, not Tulsi. However, If Tulsi's voice is similarly soft as Gillibrand's, I would make the same claim about her being seen as weak by many. It kinda goes hand in hand with our misogynistic patriarchy, unfortunately.

Please allow those flutters of hope your heart has been feeling continue. Hope is a wonderful thing, but a fluttering heart kinda tickles.

[JackRiddler]

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82_28, to answer your OP question: It's time to stop thinking of what is happening in conventional terms of what looks good or PR strategy or chess games. The game of the new Republican regime is maximum bully, tackle, run over, pillage, plunder and burn. Why would they censure Warren? Because they can. Because they like it, they can, and they will take every opportunity to make overt authoritarian moves. If it blows up in their face, they will go back to it anyway. They will do everything they can, they will not stop, they will not compromise, they might think only of what appeals to their base, they want everything they want and nothing less, and the only thing that slows the motherfuckers down is whatever resistance can be mobilized and effectively deployed. They don't fucking care what you think, unless you can get millions of people shutting shit down. They don't fucking care how unpopular they look, they figure lies + money + crisis + voter suppression will work to win the next election too. It's worth a gamble, they've got total power for at least 2 years, and they will fucking use it and not miss opportunities to bully and humiliate their favorite targets. In the executive, it's a claque of NYNJ gangsters (literally: business models are all scams by legal definition), billionaire pirate-plunderers, and Christianist fanatics in the Prince mold. In the legislature, it's the Tea Party Congress. All they have learned in the last 8 years is that their aggressive, hateful, no-compromise, utterly contemptuous-of-truth bullshit WORKS. They do not stop, they have no interest in being reasoned with, they can only be defeated.

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