{"id":857,"date":"2005-04-14T15:04:41","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T19:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=857"},"modified":"2005-04-14T15:04:41","modified_gmt":"2005-04-14T19:04:41","slug":"overstating-usefullness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=857","title":{"rendered":"Overstating Usefullness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James Taranto in yesterday<\/a>‘s Best of the Web Today<\/em> praised Matthew Yglesias’ suggestion<\/a> to Democrats who are fretting over the nuclear option:<\/p>\n

“Democrats should counter loose talk of going nuclear with a proposal of their own: The Senate as a whole could vote, through proper procedures, to end filibusters on votes of all kind, allowing passage of any bill (or nominee) that can secure a majority vote.”<\/p>\n

I heartily agree. End these laments<\/a> about tyranny of the majority and crocodile tears for democratic debate. It’s all so tedious. But I can only fully endorse Mr. Yglesias’ idea if taken to its logical conclusion.<\/p>\n

In times like these, when one party controls the House, Senate, and Executive Suite, and said Congress is good for little more than rubber-stamping whatever dictum the head office passes down no matter how terminal to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, dismiss that useless body of pelicans entirely untill such time the “opposition” controls at least one branch. It might even spur the generation of a real opposition.<\/p>\n

George can assume his obvious place as King and taxpayers would be saved so much money, not only on salaries for the penguins, but for the mountains of propaganda they bury us under and the gifts they bequeath their sponsors. There would be far fewer favours to repay.<\/p>\n

I disagree with Taranto’s characterisation of Yglesias as a person of the left, though. Since Howard Dean’s election to party chairman has he encouraged Dean to put forward his well-documented case for Instant Runoff Voting<\/a>? That would be a move left that could never be confused with pandering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Taranto in yesterday‘s Best of the Web Today praised Matthew Yglesias’ suggestion to Democrats who are fretting over the nuclear option: “Democrats should counter loose talk of going nuclear with a proposal of their own: The Senate as a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-dP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}