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Joined 5 months ago
Cake day: February 8th, 2025
  • mienshao@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What, if anything, are the Democrats doing to stop Trump and his cronies?English
    525·
    21 days ago

    Earnest answer: they have made the argument that they lost the presidency and both houses of Congress, therefore, whatever happens is not on them. They are taking the stance that since they don’t have the legal power, they’re doing their part by raising awareness, going to committee meetings to verbally oppose trump’s regime, and voting against bills when they can. In the Senate, Dems have been almost united in voting against trump’s nominees (looking at you, Fetterman). But they (Dem leadership) have been very straightforward that they don’t have the power. Their strategy is that republicans will fail so hard that the rest of the country will be running back to democrats by the midterms. I’ll let you decide how effective they’ve been.

    To their credit, it’s true that they have almost no legal power. The House votes by simple majority, so there’s next to nothing House Dems can do. In the Senate, Dem Senators can filibuster some bills. It’s super important to remember that a lot of bills, like budget bills or judicial nominations, cannot be filibustered. Add on top of that, republicans are disorganized as hell and have barely submitted any legislation for a vote that could be filibustered even if the Dems wanted to. So there’s really very little Dem Senators can do on the Senate floor.

    So, the answer is, barely nothing because legally, they truly don’t have the power. That all said, they are basically sitting on their hands. There’s SO MUCH they could be doing. For instance, imagine the POWER and HISTORY that Dems could’ve made had they one-by-one stood up and walked out of trump’s state of the union address. Dems could stand on the Capitol step EVERY DAY to protest, demand media attention, and use their platform. They aren’t. They’re letting us burn because most of them are playing politics.

    Good luck to them, you, me, and everybody else…

  • mienshao@lemm.eetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•where are worker rights parades? why are we focusing on very limited issues?English
    2·
    24 days ago

    Disagree that it’s “5% of the population max” — I’ve seen estimates that around 10% of the population are lgbtq… but even assuming it’s 5%, in a country of 340 mil, that comes out to 17 million people. And a bunch of people at pride are straight, so it’s no wonder why they draw in such huge numbers each year.

    Regardless… what does gay pride have to do with workers rights? Why does that make you mad — they’re not preventing anyone else from organizing? And from my experience, lgbtq folks are very vocal about workers rights specifically (given the discrimination they face in the workplace for being gay/trans/etc)

    And unlike some other movements, there is a very rooted history of public demonstration by the gay/trans community given laws specifically preventing them from gathering in public. In many ways, pride parades represent gay/trans people reaffirming their rights to literally just be in public together without being arrested.

    So yeah… I get that there should be more public demonstrations — I’m all for that. But leave gay/trans rights alone please lol