Republicans in Congress will try to pass a stopgap spending bill this week to avert a partial government shutdown and keep the government running through September, though they’ll need Democrats’ help to do it.
The 99-page stopgap spending bill, which House Republicans released over the weekend, is required since lawmakers haven’t made any progress conferencing the dozen annual government funding bills that were supposed to become law by Oct. 1.
The continuing resolution, the third since October, would fund the federal government for the rest of fiscal year 2025 — marking the first time since fiscal 2013 that Congress has leaned on stopgap spending bills for the entire year, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
Dems should shut it down … but won’t. They could force Republicans to sign whatever legislation they want, they just need 2 voted to win … but the Dems are weak. We need a better class of liberal politicians.
Democratic representatives make more money in donations when there are more Republicans around making noise …
We need to fix the way we donate money to candidates 
Honestly it should not even be legal to donate to politicians at all. There should only be publicly funded elections. Earn enough signatures to end up on a ballot, you get a budget that goes to helping you campaign, audited to ensure that it only gets used for purposes directly related to campaigning.
Well, all i am saying is that i can take a tax free gift of 100,000 USD per year, but i still have to inform the IRS who gave it to me and when. If I have to do that as a private citizen, politicians should have to do something similar with campaign donations, so i agree
Yes, but … the people that would make these changes are the ones that benefit from how they work now. We need another branch of government, one with no power over normal citizens, but able to investigate corruption in politicians.
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I think your concerns are valid assuming you stop there, but there’s definitely a lot more that can be done on top of campaign finance reform to make politics more egalitarian and protected from corporate interests.
Once upon a time in the US, the FCC enforced the Fairness Doctrine, which required any radio or TV broadcaster to represent bipartisan or nonpartisan views on given topics if they wanted to discuss politics. Not to say that it didn’t come with its own set of problems, but Reagan did away with that in the 80’s and we’ve seen a right-leaning slant in radio and TV ever since.
Just spitballing here, but a similar model with campaign finance in mind could do a lot to level the playing field. First, do away with corporate personhood. Then make it so that if a broadcaster or advertiser wants to show political ads, they must obtain a special designation which comes with its own stipulations: limit the quantity/duration of ads any one campaign can purchase, require that they distribute any qualifying candidate’s ads without bias, charge a flat rate for ads for all candidates, and all political ads must be divided up along regular intervals throughout the day.
Despite corporate personhood, it is possible—common, even—for corporations to be limited in what they can or cannot say. Limiting corporate speech for public good (HIPAA in the US, for example) shouldn’t be something objectionable.
Probably not perfect, but also probably much much better than how things are today with so much corporate-controlled politics.
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Yeah, definitely an additional dimension that would need some sort of out of the box thinking to address, and I don’t think it could ever be done perfectly given that the internet is an international community not beholden to any single country’s laws.
In one sense though I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue of people posting whatever opinions and endorsements on social media, but more to do with the algorithm. No idea what could be done about that, but can’t say I’d be against some sweeping reforms hitting social media platforms anyways to address user privacy, which might at least address the algorithm problem somewhat.
That, or, we hope decentralized social media like this catches on at a larger scale, haha.
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Cap them at 2k. Best of luck.
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Well it sucks cause capping donations really just means its reserved for the rich in the society we built. We have all these problems that feed one another that its one big tangled mat of misery.
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Corruption
That’s called “leftist.”
No, we need democrats that move to the center but avoid the billionaires. Which is basically impossible.
Correct – to the left of where they are now.
Seriously: the Democrats are indeed liberal, which is a right-wing economic philosophy, and that’s a big part of the problem. The whole debate over “woke” (social “liberalism”) is nothing but a fucking distraction; the real reason the Democrats are losing is that they refuse to address wealth inequality.
Liberals are such a boogieman for lemmy Ill never get it. They should be your partner in this but all i see from “leftists” is attempts to sow division
Yeah, they should be! But they’re not, because they’ve decided to learn all the wrong lessons from Harris’ loss and try to appease/collaborate with the fascists instead.
Meanwhile, the left keeps lining up to kick Liberal Lucy’s football every single time, because in a first-past-the-post two-party system, WTF else are us blockheads gonna do?
There are two possible responses to this, depending on exactly what you mean by “sow division:”
If you’re just talking about the tankies and “punish the Democrats and help Trump win because single-issue Gaza” types: you know damn well those aren’t real leftists; you even put in the scare quotes yourself.
If you’re speaking more broadly than that (e.g. if you’re including what I’m saying in this thread) you need to get your head adjusted and learn to recognize that legitimate criticism of Democrats is a thing. You are not entitled to call people making arguments like mine “divisive” when the Jeffries et al. do fuck-all to meaningfully resist fascism and we rightfully complain about it!
I mean, holy shit, I just got an asinine DNC fundraising email talking about Trump “cutting programs” for his “tax cuts for the rich” and how “the DNC is also working tirelessly to flip the House and the Senate in the next election so we can have a check on Trump in Congress,” as if that fucking even slightly matters compared to the fact that Trump is systematically dismantling America’s democracy itself and there isn’t even going to be a Congress with any meaningful power or a free and fair election for Democratic candidates to even win by then!
The message is basically “hey rube, send us $50 so we can piss it away on Dog knows what while sitting around bewilderedly asking “what leverage do we have,” unanimously confirming Marco fucking Rubio, and ten of us even stooping to censure Al Green for daring to show even the tiniest amount of resistance.”
If somebody thinks I’m “divisive” for criticizing that, they’re just not living in factual reality anymore and that’s their malfunction, not mine.
The censure on Green was a total shit maneuver. Those dems should lose their seats. MTG sat in a weird fur coat screaming at Biden and they didn’t bat an eye.
Democrats need to go pure anticapitalist, but they won’t because of money … Super PACs.
At this point there is no way to get the billionaires out of government besides an uprising of some form.
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Unfortunately, we have the results of “vote blue no matter who” instead.
The flip side is that if the Dems shut it down, the republicans will use that as a scapegoat for all their failures and, truth be damned, their base will eat it up. It’s not an enviable position.
Republicans have the majority. It’s Republicans who are blocking the spending bill. This has nothing to do with Democrats other than attempt by the mainstream media to make it seem like it will be Democrats fault.
The average voter won’t know that. They will see the upcoming recession and they will be told it was caused by Biden and dems government shutdown so that is what they will believe.
And the GOP will have a scapegoat for their recession and be able to continue crashing the economy without getting any blame.
So it doesn’t matter either way. If recession is avoided they will say it was because of Trump, if recession happens they will say it was because of Democrats.
There’s absolutely no reason to help Republicans.
If recession happens without democrats shutting down the government then republicans can’t use that as a scapegoat and more people blame republicans for the recession.
Government shutdowns make the people that cause them unpopular with voters.
If you’re fucked for agreeing, and equally fucked amongst the same populace for disagreeing, there’s not a lot of downsides going for the “shut it down” plan.
Wait a sec. We know the GqP doesn’t care if the government burns, because that just hurts the poors, but the rest of government has things to do and provides essential services.
You want the Dems to burn it too, like some brinkmanship?
Maybe it would actually make lazy americans do something about the coup