Comment by leptons
> And no, it's not just one party that does this
There's some very heavy lifting you have to do to make the parties look at all close. If the Democrats had a supermajority for long enough, you would see some real change for the better, because we can actually protest Democrats to get them to do things, while the Republicans will just silence any dissent using US military against its citizens. Unfortunately a Democratic supermajority is unlikely to ever happen again the way things are going now. And this is 100% because how people voted, or didn't vote at all.
Yeah, that's just not true.
The Democratic Party is absolutely complicit in everything going on. The term used is "controlled opposition". With the current government shutdown, I think it's taken the Republicans by surprise that the Democrats have (thus far) actually stood up for something and they really don't know what to do because it so rarely happens.
Like why wasn't this happening with the last debt ceiling increase earlier this year? Particularly because there was a fairly awful amendment in the last CR that ended Congress's ability to end the state of emergency the president could declare to use extraordinary powers. That seems like worth standing up to.
Go back to 2012 or so when Bush's tax cuts were expiring. Harry Reid had the Senate Republicans over a barrel until... Joe Biden got involved and just capitulated for absolutely no reason. And got nothing in return.
The last Senate supermarjority was in Obama's first term. It was fairly brief actually (less than a month) due to people taking sick and Republicans using a frivolous court case to stop Al Franken taking his seat. But there still was one.
Obama's signature legislative accomplishment was the ACA and what did it do? It was a massive giveaway to insurance companies. There was even a proposal to allow people to enrol in Medicare at 55 (instead of 65) which was derailed by Joe Lieberman. Why? United Health Care was an employer in his state (Connecticut).
But here's the dirty little secret. Democrats love nothing more than using the filibuster as an excuse to do nothing. If that fails, use "institutionalism". The filibuster is not a constitutional construct. It is part of the rules of the Senate. Originally you had to stand up and speak for so many hours to filibuster. Now you just raise your hand and say "filibuster".
If you have a majority in the House and Senate and a president in the White House, you can pass whatever you want.
And let's not forget we just had an election cycle where the Democratic Party openly and intentionally chose to materially support a genocide (that they could've stopped at any point with a phone call) rather than win an election at a time they were (rightly) calling their opponent a fascist.