Jeff Merkley of Oregon gave address to make case that president is ‘violating the law’ through authoritarianism
Oregon’s Jeff Merkley gave a marathon, nearly 23-hour speech on the Senate floor that began on Tuesday and ended late Wednesday, pressing the case that Donald Trump is acting as an authoritarian by prosecuting political enemies and deploying the military into Merkley’s home town of Portland.
The 68-year-old senator began speaking around 6.20pm on Tuesday evening and continued until just after 5pm on Wednesday. Standing continuously on the Senate floor alongside placards that read “authoritarianism is here now!” and “Trump is violating the law”, Merkley paused only to take questions from fellow Democratic senators who joined him in the chamber to make their own points about the president’s conduct.
“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the civil war. President Trump is shredding our constitution,” Merkley said as he began his speech.
People: Vote Democrats out of power at all levels of government.
People: “Why won’t the Democrats do anything?”
Democrats: Do literally the only thing they can do given the people voted them out of power.
People: “Empty gesture.”
People suck.
If this was “literally the only thing they can do”, then it would be the only thing Republicans have been doing, too.
I’m about done here, but I’ll take the bait this once. Republicans didn’t do shit until we stupidly voted them back into power. Trump was on his way to jail until millions of people who voted for Biden found some dumb ass reason not to vote for Harris. Every horrible thing the Supreme Court has done for the past 10 years would have gone the other way if the “But her emails” crowd had held their noses and voted for the admittedly horrible Hillary in 2016. If 1 percent of Florida Nader fans in 2000 had voted for Gore, we could have had someone who wrote a book about environmental issues instead of someone who got rich exploiting oil and gas. Obama wasn’t perfect of course but he did get healthcare access for millions of people who didn’t have it before and was working on other things that would have made things better until the 2010 “shellacking” swept democrats out of power and neutralized the rest of his presidency, just like what happened to the very flawed but better than republicans Bill Clinton in 1994.
I’m farther left than ANY of the democrats I’ve mentioned and it sucks we have to settle. But the things some people insist don’t matter baffles me. Truly, what would you have Senator Merkely do? Go nuclear and shut down the government to stop benefit cuts? Done. It’s not accomplishing anything either, because trump is a lawless president and the republicans in congress refuse to stop him. He just keeps paying ICE and uses the so called shut down to defund things he doesn’t like. This is possible because we voted republicans back into power.
The problem is always republicans. The only way to stop it is unity. Instead we splinter. Nice.
I’ll happily support Democrats fighting.
I don’t believe they have the courage.
Republicans successfully prevented Biden from accomplishing a single one of his campaign promises.
Where is the stonewalling from the Democrats that should have stopped the BBB and all the appointments of loyalists? A ton of dems even approved those appointments!
There’s no unity to be had with people who’s actions show them being complicit in the fascism. Controlled opposition is a very real tactic.
Yeah except dems also behave this way when they have power.
At a certain point you have to accept you have been duped and start looking at their actions instead of their intentions.
Republicans somehow get way more done and block way more shit when they are supposed to be impotent.
Because they fucking got elected by the fucking stupid American fucking electorate.
There have only been a handful of years when the Republicans haven’t had the elected numbers to block things over the last three Democratic presidents.
Vote for progressives in the primaries if you want things to get better.
I’ve always wondered how people like you explain the last 30 years of democrat inaction
Oh boy! This is fun. So in 2008 the Republicans refused to swear in Al Franken. After 8 months of battling Republicans in court and politically, Franken was sworn in July 2009. This gave Dems 60 votes in the Senate. This is when they past the ACA, Dodd Frank, Job Creation Act which extended unemployment benefits. After the 111th Congress the house flipped back to Republican majority.
More recently. Biden was implementing a new approach to monopoly capitalism with the appointment of Lina Khan to the FTC. We also had Elizabeth Warren start the CFPB prior to that.
I will also say Dems have been much better on renewable energy and electrification infrastructure investment. But that is my field and most of those details come across in small bits and pieces through market news emails.
These all sound great in theory but when you underfund these programs and leave them half implemented, hoping to get re-elected or “hoping” have the next guy gets around to it, functionally all they do is appease liberals who don’t pay attention and nothing else.
You know where democrats actually take action? Anything the republicans ask for. Obama left the supreme court stacked “against” them and gave corporations full control of American society (ok this is one is mostly because they helped him get elected, not because republicans asked for it, but it still ended up favoring the reds), Biden gave ICE 3.4 billion dollars just in case the next guy needed it, and the list goes on and on. Every single thing Donald Trump is happy to take the blame for was carefully set up by Democrats
You don’t know any people like me.
That’s the exact response I expected. Would love to hear an explanation if you thought of one though
nobody is unique. there’s always somebody out there just like you
Yeah but nobody’s more exactly like everyone else than me.
This one has me scratching my head haha