No doubt he’s an exception, but where is evidence for the rule that would justify punishing the exception? When I think of out of touch Congress members, all the first names that come to mind are almost all among the youngest in Congress. Even Pelosi would never be on my short list if she wasn’t in leadership. (She is definitely out of touch, but she has some fierce competition). Also, all the older ones that I think of were just as bad or worse when they were younger.
Then demonstrate the trend to me. I’ve given you an undeniable counter example. I agree that Congress is out of touch. Are the older Congress members more out of touch than MTG or the psycho tradwife Katie Britt? I don’t think so.
Oh, we should definitely get rid of Pelosi, but not because she aged out. The Pelosi of 30 years ago was just as worthy of dismissal.
A ceiling on net worth for representatives is certainly an interesting concept, but not really relevant to the conversation.
It gets hard to show a correlation with time in service to detachment from reality when one of the longest serving members is the most grounded, and many of the youngest and most recent members are absolutely insane.
Even Pelosi is pretty progressive relative to the rest of the Democratic representation, and certainly of Congress as a whole. (Very feint praise given the field). She is certainly out of touch, but she was that way when she was far younger as well.
Yes, but there is also Bernie. He is far more attached to reality than any young Republican in the Senate (or Democrat).
You would think that the Democrat’s consistent record of utter failure would count for something, but I think it has the opposite effect. The worse things get, the more insecure people feel. Insecurity makes voters risk-averse. Republicans capitalize on that with calls for a return to an American that never really existed. Democrats capitalize on it by making Democratic voters scared of new leadership.
I try to explain it with AIDS as an example. AIDS is a horrible disease, but it doesn’t kill you. It just sets you up to die from another opportunistic infection like pneumonia. The fascists are pneumonia, and the neoliberals are AIDS. It’s the fascism that kills you, but it’s the neoliberalism that was the underlying cause that should have been dealt with.
Her corruption caused unspeakable death and destruction in lives in the US and all around the world. That healthcare CEO who was shot wasn’t 1/10 as deserving as Pelosi, and I’m glad he’s dead.
Yes, we could benefit greatly from having Pelosi in our coalition. The problem is that we don’t and never have. Most recently, she was responsible for blocking AOC from leading the Democrats in the House oversight committee and gave us an elderly cancer patient with zero media savvy in her place. The one position in the House that has some ability to push back, and Pelosi pissed it away out of spite. With friends like that, who needs enemies.
It’s been absolutely obvious that the Democrats have been leading us to where we are now for at least 20 years, if not 50. I can’t even begin to count the number of massive failures Pelosi herself was personally responsible for in that time. After so many years of calling her shit out to deaf ears, I’m not interested in lectures on civility.
Trump is an opportunistic infection destroying America from within, and establishment neoliberals are the AIDS that set us up for it. I’m not looking to them for help.