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Avoiding constituents is peak cowardice—if you can't face voters, you shouldn't hold office.
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
This is good to highlight how the cons are hiding out from their constituents.
My Democratic rep has had two town halls, huge feisty crowds for both.
Great. Now the Democrats can have everything lined up to take over during the midterms and...change nothing.
Last time we had a filibuster proof majority was in 2009 for two different periods of two months each.
Essentially Republicans have either been in power or had enough power to stop Democrats for the entire voting lives of most people on this sub.
Last time we had a filibuster proof majority was in 2009 for two different periods of two months each.
Any time during which democrats possessed a simple majority, they could have done away with the filibuster forever. Stop making excuses.
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
….said the 90 million people that stayed home in November.
I bet the Democrats are using the momentum to send a stern message. And the press will proudly feature articles of how the Democrats SLAMMED the white house!! And the White house will barely notice, and go on doing what they are doing.
Good. Yell at them, too
We need people telling at them, and we need people politely approaching them with the same policies.
A game of good constituent/bad constituent, if you will.
People probably won't need to yell at them if the Democrats actually are listening to and engaging with the voters.
If democrats think that auction paddles are gonna solve this, they still need to be yelled at.
If they engaged with their voters, we wouldn’t have any democratic representatives over age of 65. Anything past that is just posturing and self enrichment
Edit: wow I left a generally agreeable comment and fucked off for the day and apparently a lot of people want representatives older than 65? Yet no one can say why that’s a good thing they only bring up Bernie who’s an independent and not a democrat. Some of you don’t know what you want other than to shit on people online and it’s laughable
So… Bernie Sanders is posturing and out of touch?
If they engaged with their voters, we wouldn’t have any democratic representatives over age of 65.
Bernie Sanders is not a democrat.
Cricket cricket
What's with the ageism? I want Democratic representatives of any age, as long as they have the right policies and they are of sound mind. People over the age of 65 will be just fine with me, thanks.
You gotta draw the line somewhere. Retirement age seems like as good a place as any.
Why do you have to draw the line somewhere?
I feel like a broken record here, but the huge uptick in ageism I see in relation to politics seems like it's not going to, ahem, age well given the amount of things I keep seeing about slowing down/reversing aging...
I mean, yeah, it sounds kind of silly until it doesn't. I remember reading about/thinking about things like AI (even if it's not AGI - things like LLMs are here and disrupting the shit out of things). Same with self-driving cars. And yeah, neither of these things are perfect, but they are having an effect on society - people I know mostly got very smug and dismissive about these notions just 20 years ago. They are rather quiet about them now. I think the same thing is true about aging. Even if the breakthroughs are extremely mild and stay that way for decades, maybe even forever, suppose average healthspan is increased even 5 years. That will make (upper) age limits look very myopic and dated.
So you’d be fine with a child holding the role? After all why draw a line. Age relates to capability on both ends.
It's not about how long you live so much as getting stuck in your ways. Old people don't learn new things and adapt the way young people do. Humans solidify the way they do things in their 20s, make some fine tuning in their 30s/40s, and then pretty much stick to those habits for the rest of their life. With the way technology is progressing we can't have stagnant people leading an evolving society.
There are exceptions to every rule but that doesn't mean statistics aren't valuable information to base decisions on. Do you want people stuck in the past making laws about the future?
Democrats do not listen to or engage with voters. The last time we told them to listen. their response was 'I'm speaking.'
This is the opportunity for democrats running in the mid-terms to start their own town halls.
Elected dems do hold town halls like this article talks about. If you are referring to dems not in office, they're starting to do stuff like that. For instance:
Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R) refuses to hold a town hall in NJ-07. So next Thursday March 13 in Summit, NJ former Rep. Tom Malinowski will hold a town hall meeting to discuss the current moment and what citizens can do to protect democracy. RSVP link here (or use the QR code): https://forms.gle/RcSVhWpsrLCfT9w67
https://bsky.app/profile/njindivisible.bsky.social/post/3ljww6godzc23
Bold of you to assume we’ll be allowed to have mid-terms
Edit: that’s just me being snarky. Keep fighting the good fight. Vote in every fucking election that you can, at every level you can - federal, state, and local (and, if you’re an investor, shareholder - that, I think, is an under emphasized vector here). Be an activist in every way you can, through every path available to you.
Elections are run at the state level including for federal offices. There have already been >48 state and local elections this year since January alone. Elections are way more than just the midterms and they are still happening. See https://ballotpedia.org/Elections_calendar
Normalizing the idea that elections wouldn’t happen is just playing directly into Trump and Musk’s hands
They want us to be so cynical we stop fighting back. They want us not to vote. They want us to not protest. They want us to not boycott. They want us too tired to fight
Don’t give in, we can still win these fights
Oh, I’m not giving in. I was just being snarky. All I’m trying to do with comments like that is to get more people to take the situation more seriously. I know we’re not cooked yet, but the hot plate is getting pretty fucking toasty.
Comments like that unfortunately do the opposite - they make people defeatest which makes people stop paying attention to the situation at all
Fair point.
I admit I’ve been feeling pretty fucking bleak about things lately. I also admit I sometimes use this space as a pressure-release valve for myself. It’s fair and correct to point out that the vibe I’m introducing is counterproductive. I shall try to do better. Cheers, friend.
Wait, wait you can have productive discussions like this on the internet? (Thank you for being receptive - we need more people like you)
Same comment to both of you guys so you both see it. I can't say it made me happy, but this thread did make me feel a little bit better. Thanks for being a decent human, even if just for these few comments.
Honestly, I’ve had a lot more interactions like this on lemmy since I joined a couple years ago than I ever had on Reddit. It’s one of the reasons I actually kinda like this place.
Good faith discussions are a helluva drug.
Same comment to both of you guys so you both see it. I can't say it made me happy, but this thread did make me feel a little bit better. Thanks for being a decent human, even if just for these few comments.
@Sunshine Hopefully they will turn out as much at the voting booth
Hopefully they'll have something worth turning out for. Let's see if you become hostile to the suggestion that democrats need to become better in order to appeal to voters.