Time for taxpayers to quit paying the GOP in Congress

First let me say I appreciate the fact you ventured into a political thread to engage with us.

I understand the need to put the brakes on to stop the political parties from going too far to the left or going too far to the right.

But to claim that is the main reason folks keep voting for Republicans while they are ignoring their extracurricular activities is like throwing gasoline on a fire expecting to put it out.

You were disappointed because I used Marjorie Taylor Greene as my example of what the Republicans in Congress are doing legislation wise.  But the simple fact is she and her co-harts represent the new GOP.

Just like AOC & Secretary Pete IMO represent the future of the Democratic Party. Yes sometimes I think AOC is a royal pain in the ass and while I disagree with her, she is being honest about what she believes in.

Honesty is a trait that is in short supply with the current GOP.

Let’s recap..

*  Over a year after the 2020 Presidential election and to this day there are members in Congress who will not answer the question “Do you believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election.”  Keep in mind there is absolutely no verifiable 
proof of any mass voter fraud and this after audit after audit has been done. You ok with that?

*  A year after the Capital was stormed by a mob with the intention of stopping the final certification of an election of which the results had already been certified by the individual states.  In which audits and recounts were done in several of the states.  The Republicans are calling “tourists just wandering through the Capital doing touristy things” or the latest from the RNC who called it a “legitimate political discourse”.  You do understand that if that mob had found Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence they would have killed them don’t you.  And yet the Republicans in Congress are acting what happened on January 6 was no big deal.  You ok with this?

*  The red states have been busy passing laws making it harder for certain people to vote.  There is no massive voter fraud to justify this, they just want to make it harder for what they see as the wrong kind of people to vote.  You ok with this?

*  The newest from the new GOP is the modern version of book burning.  Their reasoning for “whitewashing “ our history is they don’t want to make school age white kids uncomfortable.   You ok with this?

I’m not quite sure what you mean by shifting culture.  If it’s what I think it is, it’s not a shifting culture, it’s this country evolving and there isn’t anything the Republicans can do to stop it.  They may slow it down but they can’t stop it.  

As to your comment about not flying an American Flag if you are selling your house and folks feel upset by it.

Imagine if you are a person of color or a member of the gay/transgender community  and you know there a a fairly large part of the population who feels it’s their right to discriminate against you not because something you said or did but because of who you are. 

So I personally can’t get upset because a veteran may be unhappy that he/she is advised not to fly an American Flag if they put their house on the market.  But I can and did get upset when our veterans were treated like shit when they came home from Vietnam.  And I do get upset when people are discriminated against for the simple reason of who they are.  

Finally, when you talk about too far left policies what are they?  I ask because when the Republicans rail against socialist policies they very rarely specific and offer no alternative.  So I’m curious what Democratic policies are too far left?
I’m not a fan of a couple but by and large understand the need of addressing issues just the matter of the best way of doing it.

To conclude this mini novel.  I happen to believe in two strong political parties keeping each other in check while working to making lives of the people and the country a bit better.  Unfortunately we seem to have one party more interested in overturning the government instead of working with the other political party to make this a better place.

IMO the only way this can be fixed is if those who vote for Republicans vote this crowd out and replace them with conservatives who actually want to govern and will to work with the Democrats to get things done.

Until that happens this country, IMO, will continue to spiral downwards to what I have no idea other then it won’t be good.

Yeah good luck with that thought.  It’s what should be done but you have too many voters voting against a “far left agenda” that many probably don’t understand what it includes and the actual benefits it would provide.

And here is yet another reason why the taxpayers should stop paying the Republican members in Congress.

They have no legitimate reason to oppose her appointment so they make things up.

I get why voters on the right vote against far left policies that I doubt very much they know specifically what they are, but it would appear these voters lack a moral compass and the ability to know the difference between what is right and what is wrong.  The behavior of these Republicans Senators was wrong.

“Opinion: Republicans’ buffoonish, disingenuous attacks on an Innocence Project attorney”

By Radley Balko
Columnist

This week, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee lined up to pummel Innocence Project attorney Nina Morrison, President Biden’s nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Morrison has helped free about 30 innocent people from prison in her career and would bring desperately needed balance to a federal judiciary loaded with ex-prosecutors.

Rather than recognize her qualifications, Republican after Republican beclowned themselves with misleading attacks and self-serving theater.
Start with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who solemnly told Morrison, “I will oppose you and anyone else the administration sends to us who do not understand the necessity of the rule of law.” Hawley’s emphasis on “the rule of law” was interesting, given that at that very moment, his campaign was hawking trinkets emblazoned with the senator’s fist-pumping efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) once represented a man who had been wrongly convicted and nearly executed, the late John Thompson. It’s one of the more decent things Cruz has done. So one might think Cruz would have some admiration for Morrison. But Cruz has never let his backbone inhibit his posturing. “The whole of your record is deeply disturbing,” he scolded. “Skyrocketing crime rates … are the direct result of the policies you’ve spent your entire lifetime advancing,” claimed Cruz, about a month after he begged forgiveness for once criticizing the lawless Capitol mob.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) berated Morrison for representing Ledell Lee, an Arkansas man who was executed in 2017. Four years after the execution, new testing found DNA on the murder weapon that belonged neither to Lee nor the victim, according to lawyers. Cotton seemed astounded that Morrison could still believe Lee might be innocent, given that Lee was convicted with eyewitness testimony. Morrison calmly pointed out that faulty eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.

Unchastened, Cotton demanded to know why Morrison thought “the courts somehow overlooked” Lee’s innocence for so long. But we’ve seen exonerations of people who served 20, 30, even 40 years, some after courts reviewed their cases a dozen or more times. Worse, in Cotton’s home state, once a prisoner exhausts his appeals, the state’s judicial system offers no way for him to get back in court even if he discovers compelling new evidence of his innocence.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) criticized an op-ed Morrison wrote for the New York Times about prosecutor misconduct, because Morrison didn’t emphasize that such misconduct is rare. But misconduct is documented only in a small percentage of cases. That’s likely because there’s little incentive for anyone — including defense attorneys — to report it. And Morrison’s essay criticized the fact that even when prosecutorial misconduct is reported and proved, the offending prosecutors are rarely punished. That’s the surest sign of a broken system.

It isn’t as if the Utah senator isn’t aware of perverse incentives. He has long decried their effect on welfare recipients. He just seems oddly uncurious about how they might affect prosecutors.

Finally, Republican senators tried to make hay of the fact that Morrison has advised progressive prosecutors such as Kim Gardner in St. Louis and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. In fact, there’s zero evidence of any link between crime rates and progressive prosecutors and their policies; murders are also soaring in cities with conservative or traditional prosecutors; and voters reelected both Krasner and Gardner by large margins. (Incidentally, murders and shootings fell significantly in St. Louis last year.) But even setting all that aside, the criticism is still nonsense. As Morrison pointed out, she advised those prosecutors only on conviction integrity units — the teams of attorneys who seek out and fix wrongful convictions.

If these Republicans truly cared about the rule of law, they would be heaping praise on attorneys such as Morrison. As with any other institution, we improve the criminal justice system by exposing and correcting its flaws, not by pretending those flaws don’t exist.

The policies people such as like Morrison recommend to uproot the causes of wrongful convictions — such as stronger rules ensuring prosecutors share all evidence with the defense, tighter controls on cognitive bias in forensics and restrictions on testimony from jailhouse informants — can also help apprehend and convict the real perpetrators before they strike again. When police and prosecutors can’t use quack experts and jailhouse snitches to confirm shaky theories — when they’re forced to remain open-minded to all possible suspects — they’re more likely to follow the evidence.

According to a 2021 Cato Institute study, former prosecutors and government attorneys outnumber former defense and civil rights attorneys on the federal bench by about seven to one. There hasn’t been anyone on the Supreme Court with significant criminal defense experience in 30 years. The Biden administration deserves praise, not scorn, for addressing that imbalance.

For senators such as Cruz, Cotton, Lee and Hawley, however, this is all mere sport. It really doesn’t matter that they’re wrong on the facts, or that they’ve mischaracterized Morrison’s career. For them, this is about sowing fear and anger to position themselves for the midterms and later runs for office.

But the people Morrison freed from prison have little time for politics as sport. Time is what was taken from them. Her nomination to the federal bench is validation that their suffering mattered — that should some wrongly convicted prisoner try to raise an innocence claim in the future, there would be at least one more voice on the federal bench willing to take them seriously. And it’s infuriating to watch these senators make a mockery of it all.”

Is this for real??  The right makes it so easy to make the case of not paying them with taxpayer dollars.