The president is not a very bright man.
President Trump on Tuesday called on the Senate to end the legislative filibuster after the collapse of the Republican healthcare plan.
“The Senate must go to a 51 vote majority instead of current 60 votes. Even parts of full Repeal need 60. 8 Dems control Senate. Crazy!” Trump tweeted.
This is stupid on a number of levels. First, Trump’s health care plan just failed at the 51 (or 50+1) vote threshold. By using budget reconciliation rules, the Republican leadership in the Senate had already bypassed the legislative filibuster that necessitates a 60-vote majority.
Second, it appears that Trump did not realize that a full repeal of Obamacare would require a 60-vote majority until after he demanded a vote. This is because the regulatory structure of the Affordable Care Act cannot be touched under budget reconciliation rules. This is vitally key information that the president should have understood when he was still a candidate crafting his campaign proposals.
Third, it appears that someone has finally explained all of this to Trump as a reason why the Republicans will not just go ahead and pass the same Obamacare repeal act that they passed in 2015. If they repeal the revenues from Obamacare but not the regulations, the entire insurance market will collapse. Trump just demanded that the Republican Party do this, and now he’s discovered why they will not.
Which gets him back to the legislative filibuster. If only it didn’t exist then the whole budget reconciliation gambit would not have been necessary in the first place. But he signed on to this strategy not only for Obamacare repeal but for tax reform.
And, yet, he’s never understood the obstacles or the math involved.
He’s so clueless and unself-aware that he doesn’t even have any shame about letting us all see how rampantly idiotic he is and how badly he’s been leading his party.
No one should be angrier about this than Republican lawmakers who must be shaking their collective heads in disbelief.
Obviously, Trump needs to fire Mich McConnell! Carter Page would be a good replacement.
No one should be angrier about this than Republican lawmakers who must be shaking their collective heads in disbelief.
Fuck ’em. If they’re “shaking their heads in disbelief” now, then for the last two years they were completely oblivious to his ignorance and his unwillingness (or inability) to learn anything about the requirements of the job he sought.
GOP moron voters did that. Most of the GOP Congress wanted a new Kleptocracy under Jeb! not Trump. They saw Trump’s unexpected victory as a windfall since it gives the GOP power over all three branches of government. But, now they’re in power and forced to govern, only they haven’t a clue how to do that and are now in a circular firing squad getting angrier and angrier at each other as they continue to shoot themselves in the face repeatedly.
At which point Reagan’s 11th Commandment gets invoked and the lemmings all march together again.
Not a very bright man? Then I’ve been seriously mislead. He says he is number two in IQ and I understand he is at 156 on the scale, a freaking genius no less.
No clearer case that IQ measures acculturation.
why, given his record, would anyone in their right mind do something as foolish as that?
The man has something of an obsession with his IQ and his belief in the corresponding low IQ of others like Mika Brzezinski you may recall. But of course he tells us his cabinet all has high IQ. Newsweek recently posted an article about it and Snopes said he does not have a 156 IQ. But they did say that he graduated from Wharton and that could get him an IQ up to 149 but then that is current and he never took the SATs. So maybe he is an idiot? He sure behaves like it.
Clueless, yes. By choice. A part of him recognizes his inabilities and how to protect himself from them. But he is also vindictive, particularly when challenged and today’s comments to the press that he refused to own the failures of the Obamacare WHEN it failed, translated to me that we’re about to see his vindictive side. He will do what he can to withhold the subsidies, he will make it his mission to destroy the ACA because he wants to see not just Dems but his own Party come begging to him. That he will oversee the deaths, pain and suffering of countless Americans is simply not important to him.
I think you are right, sadly.
He is all about revenge against anything Obama did, first, then he will support anything Bannon suggests as the next priority. He is deeply ignorant and so just feeds on Fox. Really bad news.
Looks like Addison McC has a vindictive side as well, haha.
The lemmings follow him blindly since Jan 2009 and at the first quiver of disobedience he aims the bazooka at ’em!
The prime directive must be obeyed: “Party over country, always!” “Jawohl!”
This stuff is not difficult, he’s not exposing his (very real and dangerous) ignorance in the least.
It’s called misdirection. He’s an effective con man and all this gambit has to work with are the deplorables. These people are born suckers and Trump knows it very well.
The measure of what he does is not: is this true, is it plausible, is there any element of common sense to it?
The measure is: are the rubes believing it, is it working with the Faux News crowd, etc?
Based on his approval ratings with the Republican cult, the answer is ‘Yes, it’s working quite well.’
I couldn’t be more tired of these “crazy like a fox” arguments that Trump is actually some kind of clever Svengali-type figure, shrewdly allowing the other hand to do the dirty work while he provides “misdirection.” It’s just so obvious (especially at this point) that it’s not the case.
You’ll need to re-read what I write without your filters.
No where do I write he’s crazy like a fox,
He’s a grifter, a con man, with the knowledge of his marks and the ability to exploit them. Nobody thinks a used car salesman is a genius just because he closes a lot of sales.
You do, however, need to recognize what he is doing. When he’s talking gibberish, virtually 100% of the time, he’s having a conversation with the marks, not the country at large.
Yes, but his marks aren’t anything like a majority. They’re about 30% of the population. In every election about 10% of wishy-washy ‘low information” voters decide the election. In 2016 they switched in just enough numbers from Obama to Trump to swing the election. Only Trump and the GOP are losing these people because of course, nothing is going to get better under Trump. He, it turns out, is NOT the “maybe the right man for the job” to quote why one Trump voter told me he voted for Trump.
The only problem for the Democrats is that they have no agenda. They need a contract for America, but they haven’t bothered to create one.
“This is stupid on a number of levels.”
Seems to be a fitting narrative for our times. The clusterf*ck of the Republican congressional cohort is in full swing and yet I sense we have only heard the overture so far. This is going to be a grand operatic experience to rival the Der Ring des Nibelungen in length, fury and casting. Except the opera house itself might go up in flames along with our vanities and other light combustibles.
Say what you will about Trump his independently conceived and produced reality-TV series, “The Administration of the Idiot King” is a tremendous hit in terms of audience and suspense. I’m a fan; wouldn’t miss an episode.
Any standard except perhaps ‘success’, the apparently elusive one.
You will note that the only votes that matter, that are worth counting, are the Republican ones; the Democrats don’t figure into it at all for our god-emperor, other than as disloyal vassals who refuse to kowtow.
That’s just because of the Republican decision to govern entirely without Democratic votes for anything. But, in order to do that they would have to have unanimity in their caucus and they don’t. We’ve been talking for years about the lemming like way in which GOP Congress-cretins march in lock step, even if it’s off a cliff.
Only, now when push comes to shove it appears they only have discipline enough to scream “No! No!” to anything Democrats want, but they can’t get it together to actually do anything themselves. They can’t govern because their entire party isn’t organized around governing principles. It’s ANTI-government and their instinct is always to burn it down.
Only, it turns out that is NOT what even their imbecilic voters want. What the Merkins want is “government hand outs for me, but not for anybody else!” And there’s no practical way to take health care away from “the illegals”, the “libtards”, the “uppity women’s libbers” and the “Muslim Terrorists” without taking it away from everybody – including themselves. And suddenly, that’s not popular at all. “Get your big government hands off my Medicaid!”
Good times, good times.
Everything Trump is doing becomes clear once you understand one thing.
He is out to break both parties. Bannon is running him.
Bannon, 2013:
After that?
Rampant, uncontrolled capitalism. Read about Bannon to understand Trump. And please stop calling Trump stupid. He’s a front man…a very good one…and so far he’s been quite successful with his intended audience. He has fought the concerted mass media to a near-standstill, and as a result any serious effort to dethrone him would have millions of Americans up in arms.
Dangerous times.
AG
Shame?! It’s his badge of power. He is powerful enough to not have to have shame. Whaddyagonnadoboutit?
When folks call him authoritarian in outlook, this is one of the signs. He’s so powerful he is not obligated to exercise power well or aesthetically or even with class.
As has been remarked ad nauseum, Der Trumper is a person of below average IQ possessing a very inadequate knowledge base which is a struggle for him to expand in the slightest. He is the product of a lifetime of nauseating sycophancy and abject toadyism. He has the brain of an incompetent demagogue who thought he had been elected CEO of FailedNation, Inc. and that is what the “conservative” turds who have chosen to work with him must deal with. Of course the Dear Leader doesn’t understand the simplest aspects of the legislative process (let alone the filbuster) and he makes that hilariously clear every time he addresses the subject.
But the fate of the filibuster will be quite interesting. One would hope that the lackluster and hapless Schumer would be able to direct his caucus to exhibit the same level of obstruction to Repub “legislation” (including these serial reconciliation scams) as Addison McC pulled on Obama. If so, that means there will be no legislation short of tax cuts and whatever can be thrown into the abuse of “reconciliation” rules for the next 2 years.
I had thought that as soon as Addison had a Repub prez, the filibuster was gone, because he was not going to allow the Dems to pull the same shit as he pulled on Obama. That seems clearly to have been wrong. It would now seem that Der Trumper and Repubs will wait until the senate Dems are annihilated in 2018 and see if they can get to the magic 60, whereby they can then cram anything through the corrupt Congress. If they fail to reach that threshold, they simply will have to abolish the filibuster or largely waste their (latest) electoral college prez.
The Repub agenda is still simply tax cuts, military bloat, de facto deregulation and ruination of the environment. They have added oppression of illegal aliens by an American gestapo as a popular new program—indeed that is what the incompetent white electorate seems most excited by. That and the Trumper asset bubble is what they will run on.
Trumper seems to think he can make hay of Dem “obstruction”, however much he is misusing that term. Yes, indeed, it is “obstruction” for Dems not to be on board with repealing the signal accomplishment of their last 2 term prez! Trumper and his toads have seen how abysmally stupid the American electorate is, but “Dem obstruction!!” really takes the cake, haha. Can the hapless Dems get the complicit corporate media to actually report on the recent history of “obstruction” in DC if the Alcoholic Daddy Party is the one railing against it? Who knows…
engraved on Trump’s tombstone.
Unless maybe it’s too understated.