>> The fundamental barrier to government reform is in Congress, nowhere else.
The most salient point here.
I had a huge conversation with a friend of mine last night at a Christmas party our mutual couple friends have every year. We both agreed on this and one thing we both understood was the fact that Republicans talk about smaller government, but at no time, either when they've had the presidency or been in control of congress have they ever reduced spending.
If you want to really reign in government, you either have to raise taxes to account for all the social program spending, or you have to reduce spending. Both are political suicide and no candidate ever wants to be on record saying they'll do either.
As an independent, I see both sides making the situation worse, but only one side saying they want smaller government, but then doing nothing to stand behind that principle.
When Republicans talk about "small government" what they mean is less social safety net and more privatization and they have been very successful at this.
They created the current "student loan" system for college, burdened USPS with the pension funding changes, and have held multiple states out of Obamacare expansion, they will definitely continue down that path and they might kill a lot more during this presidency.
So you'll definitely get smaller government, just might not be what you think it should be.
The people that voted for them expect that social security and medicare will only end for the "others", not for them, that's why they voted. They want to see their "enemies" suffer.
Replacing class war with culture war was the smartest move conservatives ever made, by the time these folks that voted against their best interests notice the mistake, they will go down the drain with everyone else, it will be too late to change course.
I never claimed to know what crazy cultists believe. I know they fear whatever they're told to. They won't notice, they'll blame others even when the guns turn on them and they're sent to die.
I’m still pissed they ripped out my local usps blue box during the Trump administration and never put one back on the spot after Biden got in. Now its probably never happening. Taking trips all the way to the post office sucks compared to walking it to the bin. Apartment so no way to do outgoing mail with the flag on a mailbox like a home.
>As an independent, I see both sides making the situation worse, but only one side saying they want smaller government, but then doing nothing to stand behind that principle.
it sounds like you're saying the side that consistently lies about something is slightly better because at least they're saying what you want to hear?
It's political doublespeak, meant to appeal to people's preferences.
If you take 100 random Trumpers, and ask them the below, you'd likely get yes for each one. but you can obviously see how they contradict each other. so you end up keeping everything the same, and re-allocating funds from one small thing to another.
"Do you want smaller government?"
"Do you want our military to be strong?"
"Do you want to take care of our veterans?"
"Do you want seniors to have their social security and medicare?"
Trump said he won't touch medicare or medicaid. Said he wants to increase military spending and not touch social security. That accounts for around 70% of the budget.
How do you make the massive changes he thinks DOGE needs to make out of the last 30% of the budget?
We're going to have to come up creative ways to get there like means testing for social security. If you're hell bent on "rich people paying their fair share." then how about we means test those rich folks and roll THEIR Social Security benefits down to people who actually need it?
> then how about we means test those rich folks and roll THEIR Social Security benefits down to people who actually need it?
Best way to get otherwise reasonable people to stop supporting social nets. Making a welfare system designed to support only the least well-off is the first step to removing it.
>Best way to get otherwise reasonable people to stop supporting social nets. Making a welfare system designed to support only the least well-off is the first step to removing it.
Isn't that what it already does? I live in a very rich very blue state and even here the qualification criteria for just about any state program more or less exclude any poor household that's trying to get ahead (single mom with a full time job, two employed parents multiple kids or elderly dependents, etc). I know the adjacent less rich less blue states are even worse.
The myth is that social security is a retirement program, not a welfare program. The fear is that if you start means testing it, is no longer an entitlement, and people will perceive it as a welfare program instead of a retirement program, and that will be the beginning of the end.
> Trump said he won't touch medicare or medicaid. Said he wants to increase military spending and not touch social security.
Whenever you see a definitive-sounding Trump quote, take a moment to see if he's also said the exact opposite before you make any conclusions. Here's a good overview of this particular topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/donald-trump-m.... He's said he definitely won't cut entitlements, but also that he might, and he tried to make cuts when he was in office but didn't try that hard.
If you're trying to predict what he's going to do you can look at past actions, or what personnel he has put in place. Just reading what he says is useless.
>If you're trying to predict what he's going to do you can look at past actions, or what personnel he has put in place. Just reading what he says is useless.
I'd just like to reflect on how absolutely batshit crazy America is to have voted this guy into the most powerful political position in the world, again!
The whole thing is actually very impressive. Nobody actually knows what he stands for, other than he claims he's the best at it. Even after he did none of it when he was in the same position before!
> We both agreed on this and one thing we both understood was the fact that Republicans talk about smaller government, but at no time, either when they've had the presidency or been in control of congress have they ever reduced spending.
Absolutely. If Republicans were what they said they were, I’d still hate their rhetoric and a lot of their preferred social policies but I could put all of that aside if it meant reigning in the size, scope, budget (zeroing out the deficit and chopping away at the debt to bring it down over time rather than explosively growing it) of the Federal government and call myself a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. But that’s not the case, and I don’t really want to be associated with either of them in any way, shape or form.
If Elon Musk can do what nobody else has and convince Congress to downsize the Federal government, good for him. You can’t even scale the mission creep of the Federal government next to anything else because it has so thoroughly mission crept itself so many times people can’t even imagine it being any other way. I’m not holding my breath though, and in anticipation of Trump being sworn in and taking the Oval Office for himself once again and all the “crazy” things Musk says he wants to do with DOGE, real or not, I think people have just kind of forgotten that during his first term, Trump was very much a “what have you done for me lately” kind of boss who would fire people who weren’t performing at the level he wanted at the drop of a hat and sometimes in very inglorious and humiliating ways that came out of nowhere, even people who had bent over backwards to prove their loyalty to him during their time working for him.
I don’t think Musk is immune to that either; he has a lot of money and that money can be leveraged into power, but the Office of the Presidency has real power that Trump doesn’t need to spend any of his own money or Musk’s money leveraging because it is paid for by taxpayers with the Executive power vested wholly in him post-Noon on January 20th 2025.
> It is structurally impossible to reform the government.
Not for the reasons you describe (and plenty of government reforms do happen – they may not be the one you want, but that's not because reform is structurally impossible.)
> The filibuster creates a one-way ratchet.
This is demonstrably false, and also Senate rules have to be readopted every Congress on a simple majority vote, so if it was actually this big of a problem, a newly elected Republican majority could just eliminate or reform the filibuster on a simple majority vote, and then proceed to do whatever it was preventing them from doing. (And we know this can be done in practice as well as in theory, because the filibuster has been reformed multiple times since created as a result of the elimination of the majority-vote-to-end-debate rule in 1806.)
Any reform that cuts or substantially restructures government is impossible with the filibuster.
The fact that republicans don’t eliminate the filibuster doesn’t change my point. It just means they have other reasons for wanting to maintain it. E.g. if republicans eliminated the filibuster to abolish the department of education, democrats would use that to pack the courts and impose nationwide affirmative action.
> Any reform that cuts or substantially restructures government is impossible with the filibuster.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (among other fundamental reforms of government) were proposed by when the filibuster was stronger (unlimited debate with no cloture available) than today. And, again, a simple majority of any incoming Senate can abolish or reform the filibuster to their taste – as they have, both creating it by abolishing majority-vote-to-end-debate in 1806, and then a century later by creating cloture, and then several times since by revising which matters are subject to filibuster and which are subject to debate limited by majority action.
> The fact that republicans don’t eliminate the filibuster doesn’t change my point.
The fact that they can by a simple majority vote proves that it is no obstacle, only at most an excuse, to them when they have a majority.
> E.g. if republicans eliminated the filibuster to abolish the department of education, democrats would use that to pack the courts and impose nationwide affirmative action.
Affirmative action was already established nation-wide, and the Senate already abolished the filibuster for nominees to the federal courts (Democrats did it for lower courts, Republicans for the Supreme Court.)
Which, again, demonstrates that the filibuster is not an obstacle to the majority.
If it’s just a matter of Senate rules, the Senate is empowered to effectively do anything they want under the Constitution.
The real issue is that once you set a new precedent, there’s no going back. The Democrats invoked the nuclear option for Federal judges below the level of the Supreme
Court, so the Republicans took that one step further.
Both parties understand that once they use the nuclear option or just adopt new rules at the beginning of the new session of Congress to disarm and disempower the minority because they have the majority, that that same precedent can be used against them the next time it is politically expedient to do so when they are in the minority position.
So the politics matter, because at the end of the day Senators still have to get along well enough with each other to get some Bills passed, most importantly the appropriations bills, not the biggest flashiest Acts of Congress they can muster and nobody or at least very few in the Senate truly want the filibuster gone.
If it were only about the rules, you are correct. If it’s about the politics, you might be correct on a long enough time scale, but it’s irrelevant in the short to medium term. Right now we’re in a holding pattern on the cloture rules because of promises of tick for tack escalation between both parties. It’s not as if one party is going to loosen them for themselves for one session of Congress and be able to reasonably expect that they will be tightened up to their benefit by their opponents once they’re a minority in the next session.
> Isn’t ending the filibuster a one-way trip also?
Given the history of Senate rules, probably not. We’ve gone from “simple majority to end debate” to “unlimited debate as long as any one Senator wants to continue”, to a 2/3 supermajority for cloture (which, in the time it has existed, has changed both how it is applied and which votes it applies to.) The change hasn’t been unidirectional, and any future change would have no special reason to be assumed to be. (OTOH, neither does the one-way ratchet rayiner initially described exist, so I guess the two are equally real.)
The most salient point here.
I had a huge conversation with a friend of mine last night at a Christmas party our mutual couple friends have every year. We both agreed on this and one thing we both understood was the fact that Republicans talk about smaller government, but at no time, either when they've had the presidency or been in control of congress have they ever reduced spending.
If you want to really reign in government, you either have to raise taxes to account for all the social program spending, or you have to reduce spending. Both are political suicide and no candidate ever wants to be on record saying they'll do either.
As an independent, I see both sides making the situation worse, but only one side saying they want smaller government, but then doing nothing to stand behind that principle.