The GOP’s once sure-fire odds to retain their Senate majority in the midterms are looking bleaker every day, but according to a new report from Politico, some in the party are plotting a “coup” that could save them from a complete wipeout: flipping John Fetterman, the increasingly ostracized Democratic senator. Fetterman was first elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania in 2022, besting the Trump-backed Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz and helping Democrats defy the odds and grow their majority in the chamber. Initially styling himself as a working-class progressive champion, he has since made a major shift away from his own party, voicing support for various initiatives and nominees from President Donald Trump and breaking the Democratic minority on several key votes.
What’s there to flip? He’s already voting Republican.
Flip Fetteman? They can have him. Garbage politician that only won his seat because he was against Dr.Oz.
He put on a pretty good front up until his stroke right before the primary. It’s debatable whether what he has become since is who he was all along, but he definitely won for more reasons than merely not being Oz, the carpetbagger.
This implies Shitterman needs to be flipped.
The flip part has to do with who is senate leader, and all the powers that come with it.
all the powers that come with it
Arguing over who gets to own the “Send more money to Israel” committee chairmanship
Let’s get real. The power in the Senate isn’t with the individual Senators, any more than the power in F-1 is with the drivers.
Individual Senators do have power when their peers are trying to pass something or prevent something.
That’s how Senator Lisa Murkowski ®, from Alaska, was able to get her state special concessions negotiated in order to pass the unfavorable OBB bill which was anything but beautiful.
The senate majority leader has a lot of procedural power.
Significantly less than the House Speaker, as a point of comparison. Also, the Majority Leader tends to be the Senator with the largest lifetime fundraising haul. When a Senator (like Cruz or Paul or Lee or Sanders) doesn’t need the money to win reelection, they can get out-of-pocket very quickly.
Individual Committee Chairmen have significant power. And Majority Leader gets to nominate the Chairmen. But the future prospective Chairmen back the Majority Leader in exchange for the nominations. So it’s a Chicken-Egg situation, where the real pull comes from electing more Senators to back you, not strong-arming them with procedure once everyone is sworn in.
One consequence of the Platner primary win in Maine is that he’s personally at-odds with Schumer out of the gate. By contrast, both Schumer and Fetterman are nakedly Zionist. Platner is more of a threat to Schumer’s future reclamation of Majority Leader than Fetterman, as a result.
He does if republicans have less than 51…
Like, that’s how we decide which party gets actual leadership positions with power, and which party gets empty suits with no real duties.
If Fettermann caucus with Dems or Republicans, that really really fucking matters…
And it’s depressing no one understands, like, this should just be shit everyone knows before they graduate highschool…
You’re right, and I am aware of that. I was just using the opportunity to express disdain for Fetterman. The cynical part of me doesn’t mind the omission because regardless of whoever is the leader the Republicans always seem to manage to get what they want these days. Although that’s probably just a bias based on my frustrations and fixation on the bad they’ve managed to do, in no small part because of Perle like Fetterman.
That is more complex to express than fuck Shitterman though, so I went the lazy route.
All it took for him to align with MAGA was brain damage.
There was a guy I knew back in high school, he was an idiot, and he knew it, he was one of the rare idiots who would actually listen to someone smarter than him if you tried to explain things to him. He leaned fairly conservative to begin with, but when he said some stupid bullshit you could get him to change his mind if you explained why it was stupid.
At some point I heard that he died, turns out that was exaggerated a bit, but he did get a pretty bad head injury, spent some time in a coma, etc. but he is mostly ok
But the next time I ran into him I noticed that he’s just not as willing to hear things out and change his mind anymore, and I can’t help but think that’s the brain damage.
Start pattern matching people with obvious facial indications of fetal alcohol syndrome; they’re typically on an extreme and can’t be reasoned with.
On par with every other republican.
It’s not flipping. It’s making it publicly official.
This matters for leadership as Fetterman still caucuses with the Democrats.
We badly need:
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Term limits
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A recall process for all elected officials
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To abolish the senate
Or we abolish the senate and expand the house to the several thousand representatives it should actually be. Term limits on legislators in a small legislature just makes the party even more powerful because nobody will have name recognition except the party. It also highly encourages working with lobbyists who promise to get you a cushy landing spot after your term. For what most people have an issue with, an age cap with a good retirement would work.
Why abolish the senate?
Or, just get people to vote the way the GOPs do.
Look up Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. Jerry was a televangelist who grabbed the GOP by the grassroots.
He used his extensive mailing list to find the small local GOP clubs that decide who is going to be the next sheriff or country clerk. If there’d been twenty people at the last meeting, Jerry’s folks would show up with fifty.
That’s kind of smart. Find elections that are so volatile, you can easily amass a small group to tip the tides. Win that election, and use your newfound influence to snowball the effect into larger and larger wins over time.
Only problem is that it’s predatory on small town folk who have a working, albeit delicate, political system. It’s using their delicate platform as a stepping stone for self-promotion, denying them a voice on their own platform in the process.
Only other problem is that it apparently works, if people are fucking doing it.
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He wasn’t already flipped? This is news… how?
Fetterman is a big fat phony who hit his head one too many times. Brain damage and MAGA go together like flies on shit.
Guys always been a disaster. His stunts as mayor were ridiculous.
35 Senate seats are up for election this year, Fetterman is not one of them. Currently the Senate is 53 Republican, 45 Democratic, 2 Independent.
I’d LOVE to see BOTH the House and Senate flip, but if you go race by race, most of these are super safe either D or R. These are state wide elections so gerrymandering does not apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elections
Interim elections:
Florida - Ashley Moody Safe Republican (filling Marco Rubio’s seat)
Ohio - Jon Husted Safe Republican (filling JD Vance’s seat)General elections:
Alabama - Tommy Tuberville Safe Republican
Alaska - Dan Sullivan Safe Republican
Arkansas - Tom Cotton Safe Republican
Idaho - Jim Risch Safe Republican
Iowa - Joni Ernst Safe Republican
Kansas - Roger Marshall Safe Republican
Kentucky - Mitch McConnell Safe Republican
Louisiana - Bill Cassidy Safe Republican
Mississippi - Cindy Hyde-Smith Safe Republican
Montana - Steve Daines Safe Republican
Nebraska - Pete Ricketts Safe Republican
North Carolina - Thom Tillis Safe Republican
Oklahoma - Alan S. Armstrong Safe Republican
South Carolina - Lindsey Graham Safe Republican
South Dakota - Mike Rounds Safe Republican
Tennesseee - Bill Hagerty Safe Republican
Texas - John Cornyn Safe Republican
West Virginia - Shelley Moore Capito Safe Republican
Wyoming - Cynthia Lummis Safe RepublicanColorado - Dan Hickenlooper Safe Democratic
Delaware - Chris Coons Safe Democratic
Illinois - Dick Durbin Safe Democratic
Massachusetts - Ed Markey Safe Democratic
Minnesota - Tina Smith Safe Democratic
New Hampshire - Jeanne Shaheen Safe Democratic
New Jersey - Corey Booker Safe Democratic
New Mexico - Ben Ray Luján Safe Democratic
Oregon - Jeff Merkley Safe Democratic
Rhode Island - Jack Reed Safe Democratic
Virginia - Mark Warner Safe DemocraticGeorgia - Jon Ossoff - Likely Flip D->R
Maine - Susan Collins - Likely Flip R->DMichigan - Gary Peters Democratic Toss Up
I’d love to see No Kings get out the vote and flip Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.
That would flip the Senate from 53R:45D:2I to 51D:2I:47R. But realistically, looking at the voting history in those states? Aint never gonna happen.
Georgia and Maine flip 1:1, and the best case scenario is the Democrats hold Michigan and nothing changes: 53:45:2. Worst case? 54:44:2 and still nothing changes.
Alabama voted in Doug Jones, likely a fluke that we won’t be able to repeat, but there is a very thin sliver of hope.
IIRC Doug Jones was running against an active sex offender so it was a little different. The moment he was against a “normal” candidate, he was out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_States_Senate_special_election_in_Alabama
Followed by:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Senate_election_in_Alabama
This isn’t a normal cycle tho…
The “fight everywhere” plan is paying off huge, state parties are operating at campaign levels and have been for over a year.
“Knock on wood” and all that, but the next two midterms are gonna be blood bath, simply be cause some of these seats are seeing their first serious and well funded challenger in decades.
They’re seats neoliberals handed to Republicans to prevent an actual majority of Dems and them having to do anything.
I’m usually right about this shit, we’re gonna see record breaking turnouts and a blue wVe. Everyone will take the wrong lesson from this too.
The gains are because this is what happens when neoliberals don’t have the reigns to the DNC, and that’s all it’s ever taken.
The gains will be because enough of the low information voters who put Trump back in office will remember that he hasn’t made their daily lives better.
I’d LOVE for that to happen, but in the Senate I don’t believe it will. The HOUSE races will be a bloodbath of epic proportions though!
Yeah, it’s a long progress and will take a couple cycles.
The only way we fuck it up is if a neoliberal wins the presidential primary due to depressed turnout.
If that happens, they’ll likely still win the general,but then they’ll hand the party to a neoliberal who will go back to fixing primaries.
That’s why there’s already a big push against the DNC by billionaire owned media.
Like, imagine the type of DNC chair someone like AOC would nominate (officially there’s a performative vote).
The way to get that tho, is getting someone like AOC thru the Dem primary, not around it.
Ironically enough, it’s the plan for actual Marxist-Lenism
Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism–Leninism
We just have to make sure we don’t hand the keys to the bus to someone like Stalin at that point in the game…
The Party needs a lot of power to keep the capitalists from making a comeback. They will inevitably abuse that to keep their in-party enemies (e.g., Trotskyists) from getting any power. And eventually they will realize that it’s hard to get absurdly rich on communist labor alone, so they’ll allow capitalism back while maintaining one-party rule and political repression of the masses.
Source: Russia, China, Vietnam
DONT worry! I’m SURE
Protecting Pedophiles!Protecting Billionaires!Starting Multiple Wars!Making it IMPOSSIBLE to Afford to Live!Eliminating VA Benefits!Defunding our Troops!Killing American Citizens in the Street!Kidnapping Children at the Request of the Federal Government!will Convince Republican voters to NOT vote Republican!If we fucking show up we can take Texas. Talarico is polling at or above the Republican candidates and they’re still fighting it out while Talarico builds his base.
Switching parties is not unheard of and certainly not a coup. Not like he was voting against the GOP much to begin with, so leaving him out of the Dem count won’t change much anyway. Just like Manchin and Sinema, they take the DNC money and resources but don’t agree with any of the party platform or priorities once the election ends.
Calling it a coup removes meaning from the word “coup” and then we won’t be able to describe what’s happening when it actually happens.
quietly
Bro, he was on FOX News just last week. The anchorman was just shy of openly fellating him.
… implying he doesn’t already go along with their bullshit as it is? Cute. Stupid, wrong, but cute.
What, they’re not betting it all on cheating this time or something?
https://lemmy.world/post/44104254
that post identifies that there are a number of politicians who don’t reason, think, or debate Netanyahu’s “Israel”.
Their explanation for it is kompromat: blackmail.
Their argument is convincing.
Please see that Fetterman is described, in there, in a way which does suggest either ideological-possession or kompromat.
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He won the primary?!?!
WTF PA!!!
Not only did he win, he got more than twice the votes as the second place guy. He won literally every county, and not by small margins.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/results/pennsylvania/democratic-primaries/senate
