@honk Threatening to try to try to impeach the president for putting forth a SC nominee is idiotic. POTUS isn’t doing anything illegal, he is absolutely within his rights. More broadly, if you can’t see that your political process is absolutely toxic to the core, I don’t know what to tell you. The amount of strife present in American political discourse just isn’t present in other Western democracies. Brinkmanship is par for the course and you guys need to heal this divide. Calling for civil war, or doing “whatever it takes” to score points back at the GOP isn’t going to do that. As shitty as the Republicans are right now, and as much as a Biden administration is almost certainly going to be an improvement (maybe they will pay attention to the environment), the lack of consensus will continue to spiral your country downwards.
I'm not disagreeing with your general assessment of the dysfunction of American politics, only your blame of both sides. I don't think this is a both-sides issue, and mischaracterizing the problem makes it harder to properly address it. The Democrats aren't perfect, but they make an effort of maintaining a semblance of ethical behavior and responsibility that goes far beyond the Republicans' relentless grasping at partisan gain at any price. Democrats aren't the ones weaponizing key functions of Congress as tools to bolster the administrations they favor and sabotage the ones they don't; Republicans are. Democrats aren't the ones aggressively courting and pandering to deranged conspiracy theorists and unsavory fringe figures who rightly should have no major presence in national politics; Republicans are. Democrats aren't the ones refusing the hold their members accountable in the face of allegations of sexual misconduct and other ethical breaches; Republicans are. Democrats aren't the one launching numerous frivolous congressional investigations on thin grounds to sabotage opposing politicians and presidential candidates; Republicans are. Democrats aren't the ones staffing their administrations with unqualified yes-men and hyperpartisan ideologues; Republicans are. And most importantly of all, Democrats aren't the ones who have united in near-unanimity behind the man in the Oval Office that any objective outside observer would quickly recognize as a malicious bully and an incompetent blowhard; Republicans are. Sometimes the enlightened centrist position isn't the correct one. Sometimes one side is just wrong and the other is right, or at least far "more right" than the other one.
a decision Democrats made in 2013 to cheat the nomination process ends up costing them two supreme court positions and quite likely it's going to cost them three...It's almost like there was a good reason why court appointments weren't simple majority in the first place.
You know that the 2013 Democrats
only used the nuclear option to require just 51 votes for Cabinet secretary and federal judge nominees? It was in 2017 that the nuclear option was used, by Republicans, to only require 51 votes for SC nominees. You can call it "extending" what the Democrats had done if you like, but using the nuclear option is using the nuclear option. They still had to vote to change the rules. It's not like it was only half a nuclear option and therefore only required half the effort or anything. It was a full-blown use of the nuclear option, and they could easily have done it even without the 2013 rule change. And it's no use saying that they wouldn't have thought of it without the Democrats doing it first, because the article I linked shows that Republicans had the idea back in 2003. But again, this is all of limited relevance, given that the current controversy is not focused on the number of votes needed. Obviously, there are countless things that had to happen first before this situation could happen, but that doesn't mean that they are "responsible" for what eventually happened in a direct, proximate sense.
Every hole the Republicans put in our political process will be used to the Democrats advantage and every hole the Democrats put in our political process will be used to the Republicans advantage. I think the key lesson that Congress needs to learn is to stop putting holes in our political process.
If that's your position, then why are you defending what the Republicans are doing? We're not simply witnessing the after-effects of a process already in motion or anything. Republicans are right now consciously choosing to hypocritically disregard a principle they demanded Democrats abide by for their own short-term partisan gain, with no better justification than the fact that they have the power to do it. That is itself introducing further dysfunction into the system, putting another hole in the political process that the Democrats will exploit and use against the Republicans as soon as the opportunity arises. You shouldn't be supporting it.