Mueller: “I can’t do it. Congress should handle it.”

Congress: “We can’t do it. The Court should handle it.”

Supreme Court: “Nah.”

Imagine how powerful leftist grassroots organizations would be if folks like you would dedicate the same amount of time and energy to voter engagement and activism that you devote to ranting and raving on political message boards. This country would be completely transformed in a matter of months.

Edit: Seriously, 6,800 comments over a 12 month period is almost 19 comments every single day of the year. That’s borderline obsession, and it can’t possibly be good for your mental health.

You’ve offered no proof that it is, despite my asking several times. From what I can tell that’s just your opinion, which is fine but carries significantly less weight.

So his delegates are not pledged to Harris, they aren’t required to support Harris, her name isn’t on a single ballot in the country, Biden’s name isn’t on a single ballot in the country, and no one has officially been nominated. You’ve offered no proof to the contrary.

Whether you think a change is likely before ballots are finalized was not my question, merely whether or not you had proof that it’s impossible.

As you suggest it’s a regulatory problem. There was a recent kerfuffle involving the Ohio ballot, which was solved by putting Biden/Harris on the ballot before they are officially nominated. So any changes made at the Democratic convention will come too late to change the Ohio ballot.

…nnnnno. That’s not what’s happening in Ohio. From your article:

President Joe Biden will be formally nominated as the Democratic presidential nominee through a virtual roll call ahead of the party’s official convention in Chicago in August

The Democratic National Convention, where the president would otherwise be formally nominated, comes after Ohio’s ballot deadline of Aug. 7. The party’s convention is scheduled for Aug. 19-22.

I really hate to repeat myself because it seems like you’re engaging sincerely and at least trying to support your argument, but there are currently no ballots that have been formalized in the entire country. Biden and Harris have not been put on the ballot before they’re nominated, they’re being nominated before the ballot access deadline in Ohio. So quite simply, as long as the Democrats nominate any US-born person older than 35, that person’s name will appear on the Ohio ballot. You have it quite literally backwards.

partly because her name can’t be taken off the general ballot in multiple states

Again, where is your proof of this? Ballots haven’t been finalized anywhere in the country, as Biden isn’t even officially the nominee yet. You keep saying these things as if they’re set in stone, but from what I can tell they’re not. Do you have proof that ballots have been printed before the convention, or that states have closed the registration window for running mates before closing the registration window for candidates?

Note: I agree with the rest of what you said, for the most part.

And sadly, the campaign response to this sentiment is not inspiring a lot of faith in their judgment. This after the NYT Editorial Board called on him to step aside:

“The last time Joe Biden lost the New York Times editorial board’s endorsement it turned out pretty well for him,” Biden campaign co-chair Cedric L. Richmond said in a statement.

Does he think that “LOL! Fuck you!” is the correct response here? The chorus of people in every corner of the country calling for him to step aside is deafening, and all he can muster is a Trump-style clapback?

Furthermore, at this point I’m having a hard time envisioning a scenario where asking the incumbent to drop out would be more justified. Like, how bad would it actually have to get for the party to admit, “hey guys, this isn’t fixable, time for Plan B”? Incumbency advantage is huge, but it’s certainly not all-powerful.

The subtext here is just as important as the main story. The reason the EPA has had to try desperately to stretch their interpretations of statutory authority into gray areas that are vulnerable to judicial review, is that Congress has utterly failed to pass any truly meaningful environmental protection laws for decades. The Clean Water Act, for example, has only been meaningfully amended once since it was passed 50 years ago, and that resulted in a huge (albeit slow) improvement in stormwater management in urbanizing areas. The last time we had a bipartisan interest in curtailing the excesses of industry, the Cuyahoga River was routinely catching fire and places like Love Canal had children playing in actual toxic sludge.

There have been very few times that the EPA has been granted any kind of legal authority since the 1970s, and most of them were intentionally ambiguous. Bush II’s Clean Skies Act, for example, was a direct result of the Kyoto fiasco and actually weakened a lot of environmental regulations from the 1970s. In contrast, things like Obama’s Clean Power Plan were simply agency-level policies devised to get around the fact that Congress hadn’t amended the Clean Air Act since 1990. Since they were policies and not laws, they could be subsequently gutted by future administrations (i.e. Trump) and the courts. Policies and rules have no staying power.

Congress has done fuck all for the environment since Nixon, and that lay at the feet of the Reaganite neoliberal coalition wedded to the free market which had champions in both parties for several decades. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is a fucking awful ruling because it’ll take away the few powers the EPA tried to devise in the absence of Congressional action, but it’s actually overdue because Congress should have dealt with these problems long before now.

In the end, voters are left with a choice. Start giving enough of a shit to vote for politicians that will pass environmental laws, or live in the regulatory world that stopped evolving before the personal computer was invented. We’ve been able to eke out a meager existence because things like Superfund and NPDES exist, but as we can see from the Flint and GenX disasters, we’ve taken clean water, soil, and air for granted for far too long. It’s not the job of the EPA to devise creative ways to get around the shitty, intansigent Congress we keep sending to DC. It’s our job to send better politicians to DC to help them keep us safe.

But they’re not “Biden/Harris delegates”. They’re Biden delegates, as he was the only name on the ballot. Are you just saying they’ll go with her out of deference?

If Biden decided to step down, his delegates are pledged to support Kamala Harris.

I’ve tried to verify that this is the case and can’t find evidence anywhere. Can you point me to a source? I was under the impression that they’d be expected to turn to her, but that they’re not required to.

Edit: After lengthy back and forth, it finally became clear that this is simply an opinion. User has absolutely no proof.

I’m sorry, but what universe are you living in? You don’t remember this exchange?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW1lY5jFNcQ?t=1h13m25s

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/06/27/joe-biden-sick-voice-presidential-debate/74240214007/

We’re going to have to start organizing at the grassroots level. Folks will need to develop a class consciousness that transcends cultural boundaries and harnesses the power of the internet. The major eras of civil rights expansion and reversal of the otherwise upward mobilization of wealth only came with significant grassroots organization, public protest, political activism, and sadly, bloodshed.

Rights aren’t granted. They’re taken.

Yes, and the rules were voted on by party members before the primary started. They’re now in place, and they’re obligated to respect them until this process plays out. Same thing happened in 2016. Say what you will about whether the rules were “fair” or not, they were agreed upon before Iowa, and they were respected through the Convention.

The way you use “kneecap progressives” tells me you’re conflating DNC primary rules and campaign finance. The two are not the same thing. They could do to Biden what they did to Bernie and blast the airwaves with damaging, misleading attacks, but none of that would fundamentally change the fact that the primary rules were agreed upon and are immutable until the Convention comes to a close.

And to reiterate, it’s not “principles” that are holding them back. It’s a contractual obligation whose violation would open them up to civil litigation. Voters picked delegates and they’re obligated to respect the voters who selected them. The DNC can’t just tell them to take a hike.

But Biden can.

edit: AP just put out a piece that confirms what I’ve been saying. They’d be sued into oblivion if they usurped the process right now. The ball is very much in Biden’s court.

In all honesty I think negotiating with Kamala for her to step into the AG role and open up the VP slot for Newsome or Buttigieg would be the game changer.

He absolutely can be replaced at this stage, and by nearly anyone.

Only if they can convince him to step aside and let someone else run. At this point the voters have selected 3,904 delegates who are contractually obligated to cast a vote for him at the Convention. If the delegates somehow simply ignored the primaries, they’d be quite literally ignoring the will of their voters and taking matters into their own hands. It’s alarming how many on the left (who presumably had a problem with the DNC’s treatment of Bernie in 2016) are cheering for the DNC to heavily influence the primary process again. I don’t necessarily disagree that something drastic needs to be negotiated, but the irony of this is really hard to ignore.

Dems will need to run the table on Senate races, in addition to keeping the White House, for that to happen. If not, Alito and Thomas get to pick their hard right replacements and all but the youngest of us will wither and die with a conservative SCOTUS supermajority.

Oh absolutely, and that AI part is already happening with local news outlets and some national sports outlets.

That’s all the media can do nowadays. It’s a bunch of journalism graduates twiddling their fingers while cranking out endless “Read the Tea Leaves!” type articles. Everything nowadays is “survey says this”, “polls say that”, “model says this”, “odds predict this or that”. It’s literally everywhere from sports to politics to the stock market, it requires zero thought or in-depth analysis, and it’s both a response to and a cause of the decline in mainstream and investigative journalism. It’s team-based tribalism through and through.

Part of your anger seems to stem from me saying that this whole thing isn’t moving forward fast enough and somehow you think that’s a critique of your personal work. I assure you that wasn’t my goal. But you have to admit that we are, globally, not moving fast enough.

No, the part that bothers me is you’re completely ignoring the point I’ve made multiple times, namely that this protest is counterproductive and doesn’t actually do anything to change the situation. It just pisses people off. It doesn’t promote climate action or change the amount that people care about it or want to do something about it.

The connection to the fight for racial equality is interesting but I’m not sure how well this applies. How do you suppose you can do anything equivalently “not accepting the rules we want to protest” in the context of climate change? Because before there was a big movement there were just a few people breaking the unfair rules. Which where likely talked similarly about as you are talking about these activists right now.

With the exception of the first, none of those sentences form a complete thought, and I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to say or if there’s a question buried in there somewhere.

some forms of activism that I deem valuable would have detrimental effects on the other form of activism if done under the same name.

WHY?

This is so far beyond the point of the article I’m just not sure why you keep falling back on this singular argument. Why is that relevant? This thread started because I said the people currently sitting in prison are being lazy because they painted a rock rather than doing something productive. You’ve now latched onto some weird scenario where they can do multiple kinds of protesting but can’t do it in one organization and have to form or join splinter groups to do multiple kinds of organizing? It like you’ve convinced yourself that what JSO is doing is fine because its members are doing something else less disruptive in another group, which is so disconnected and irrelevant as to be utterly meaningless. Not to mention it’s a thing which (as far as I can tell) is entirely made up on the spot!

So again, why is one detrimental to the other? So far you’ve only said it’s confusing, but you haven’t said why it’s confusing, and you also skipped over the part where painting a rock to protest oil is also confusing.