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Notes -
Is there even any mechanism to punish the president or any relevant legislatures if they keep repeatedly enacting something already shown to be unconstitutional?
No. It used to be that you got punished for violating norms by getting banned from the club; having to cry alone in your mansion instead of drinking cocktails at the gala style thing.
That boat sailed with Grover and Gingrich and finally Mcconnell proving positively that norms aren't real and rules that require a majority vote are just loyalty checks.
Just like conservatives are picking up some lib tactics in the culture war; libs are finally waking up to the fact that political compromise is fucking stupid and you can just lie to your opponents and it will never actually come back to you.
Ah, but there are consequences to being unable to make any deals with the opposition. Each day Democrats further retroactively justify Republican obstructionism during the second term of the Obama administration.
Your causal arrows are backwards. Watching Obama get cucked over and over by the legislature (even when he had a majority!) managed to finally penetrate the thick ridge of bone the average congress critter uses to protect the part of their brain that turns sense data into long term memory.
I think the trauma of loosing two seats on the unelected unaccountable high priest council finally traumatized regular dems into realizing that the reps aren't playing the same game as them.
Nah, it's as someone else once said - Republicans defected on a game show, Democrats burned down the set.
Republican obstructionism is not even in the same ballpark as, "Literally every institution in the country must discriminate by race, based on my racial revenge fantasy, without any evidence that this will work, forever. By the way, I'm going to post in major medical journals about how your race should be 'eliminated'."
In my view, as a response it's completely unhinged. I'm closer to thinking the party should be legally dissolved at this point to force a reboot of their coalition than I would like.
I'm prepared to give the Republicans almost anything they want, because "merit is white supremacist" is incompatible with industrial civilization in a way banning abortion is not.
This view is irrational. You are treating your tribal positions as the default.
Until recently, AA with the majority opinion. As in, more than 50% of all people said "yes, good". It is therefore rational in a democracy to implement it. The republicans didn't even give much of a shit about AA because their donor class still could (and still can) just buy seats at whatever table they want.
That is changing now; but only over the last 4-6 years, long after conservative obstructionism hit full swing.
Conservatives deciding to make governance impossible against all norms wasn't some sort of principled stand against the bugbear of AA; it was a realpolitik move to consolidate power.
When team R does X and it works, you can't be surprised when team D does X right back.
You misread the post as referring only to elite college admissions, when actually it refers to incidents like race-based medical rationing based on a "white" vs "everyone else" system which is scientific racism much less sophisticated than conventional race science, major outlets referring to the existence of asians in engineering departments as a "problem", and explicitly race-based debt relief that had to be shut down by the courts. These are all mainstream, center/left-of-center sources.
This is just what ideas like "white privilege" theory and "race conscious" policy mean.
It is true that Republicans were opposed to Democrats in 2010, but this change, kicking off around 2014, is wildly disproportionate to what the Republican Party actually did.
The Democrats are a party of irrational, tribalistic, collective, intergenerational ethnic grievance, as seen by use of terms like "BIPOC" that make no sense as a scientific category. Their proposed interventions have no beneficial effects, and they have abandoned the modest evidence for modest success they used to have for their previous policy set in 2010.
This makes me immensely more comfortable with the manipulation of procedural outcomes to prevent the Democratic Party from gaining more power and resources than I was in 2010. Republicans playing hardball with the Supreme Court was apparently necessary for me to keep my human rights, as seen by the recent rolling back of "corrective" racial discrimination programs.
The Democrats could simply have some frank conversations to break their coalitional interest deadlock instead of doing this weird racialist nonsense that has even less backing than conventional scientific racism. They're not obligated to be, somehow, as inconceivable as it was from 2008, literally color supremacist.
29 days late to the party, I can't even remember what we were talking about lol.
Quick overview: I find your examples to be bad (in the sense that they are bad things to have happened) but totally irrelevant to the argument and your conclusion to be wrong.
basically: Mutually assured obstructionism is bad but inevitable once republicans proved they can break the rules as much as they want and as long as their donor class doesn't get twitchy it doesn't matter.
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Impeachment if you can manage it. Otherwise, revolution.
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The student loan decision did not say that loan cancellation was unconstitutional, but only that the specific statute relied upon by the DOE did not empower them to cancel loans. There is nothing illegitimate in an administration trying to find a legal way to accomplish a goal.
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