Sen. Kyrsten Sinema censured by Arizona Democratic Party

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What about returning the filibuster to the rule that the senator has to actually stand up and talk for the duration?

I don't disagree, I just think I see a method to Sinema's madness and think she may be onto something given the political makeup of her state. Defying the party in such a flagrant manner and under so much pressure sends an extremely strong signal about her independence from them, which could give right leaning centrists the assurance they need to support her, knowing she won't flip flip the second Chuck Schumer demands her vote on something.

To use myself as an example here, I'm extremely jaded about Democrats who say "I respect the Second Amendment", as I know there's always a "but..." about to follow, and I've seen even Dems who were genuinely good on the issue flip flop when the national party twists their arms (see: Sanders, Bernie). What would a Democrat have to do to make me trust them on this issue? Maybe defy their entire party and hold up priority legislation that the national establishment desperately wants passed and refuse to back down under the pressure, maybe introduce a Second Amendment 2.0 along with the GOP that enshrines a clarification of "shall not be infringed", basically I would need to see burned bridges to convince me of their commitment, real pain and sacrifice rather than cheap words. Again, I can't claim to know, but I think she might be doing something like that here, making an irrevocable act of commitment.

That's the political equivalent of "just the tip", it won't end there.

To be fair, isn't that largely what both parties say about most issues these days?

Especially when the only real change would be the amount of personal effort the political representatives have to invest in using the filibuster. If it's too easy it's just like having a higher bar for what counts as a majority in a lot of cases, no?

I actually don't have a problem with that, I'd prefer some sort of super-majority threshold for most lawmaking, as I've never liked the idea that 51% of the people can trample over the other 49%, though I'm not sure where I'd set the threshold.

Obama had left Trump a program manned by virus experts to eradicate any future pandemics, but because it had been Obama who had established it, Trump for that reason alone did away with it. Had it still been in place, Covid might have been handled better at the start.

It's the sort of thing where ideally the threshold could vary depending on the exact nature of the issue, although I'm not sure what a workable solution for that would be. Ideally the interests of those actually impacted and the extent of the impact would add or reduce the volume of one's voice in those discussions.

Other tangent: It rarely works out as 49% vs. 51% because of how the electoral system skews things (this is true for either of our countries). A FPTP system does it, the shape and demographics of the ridings/districts does it and other problems of that sort distort things well before the elected representatives chosen by that system go to vote. In the US this mostly gives weight to sparsely populated rural states, in Canada it basically means elections can't be won without southern Ontario and Quebec.

I don't like the idea of 50%+1 vote being able to utterly dominate a minority but protections also can't allow <50% to dominate the majority regardless of the people's will. Constitutional law and established precedent can provide guidance but what about the hypothetical situation where they provide guidance that's misguided and wrong?

In a lot of ways liberal representative democracies are just slightly less centralized dictatorships and that whole previous conundrum might be one of the more obvious examples, essentially: would you prefer dictatorship by majority, dictatorship by minority and we'd better hope the checks and balances work to ensure things keep working as intended but also that the intentions were actually good instead of slowly adding in structural weaknesses that might eventually contribute to failure.

But he hasn't actually done anything and that bill, while not perfect, would have actually helped a lot people unlike all the garbage corporate handout bills that were passed by "reaching across the isle". It doesn't help when the media never talks about what's in a bill and just repeats the price tag over and over again with no qualification that it is over a ten year period.

Anyways, my belief on so called "moderates" is that they are not at all what they claim. They are the "socialism for the rich, austerity for the poor" shills that both conservatives and progressives hate. At least the conservative wing of the GOP is consistent and will oppose corporate bailouts as well as social spending. It's just funny how they never have quite enough votes, just like the progressives never have quite enough votes.

Looking at how things panned out over the rest of the world I don't think anything would have made it drastically better. The US was always bound to be particularly bad due to the extreme capitalist mindset of the country. People are going to come to work with covid and spread it to everyone else there if the alternative is not being able to to pay for rent or food.

She isn't under any real pressure from anyone but her donors. Demands made without actual material threats are meaningless in politics. She's the current rotating villain. Right leaning centrists who are socially liberal are a small voting block because the majority of the country isn't affluent. If people were so happy with the status quo in 2016 Trump wouldn't have happened.