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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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What?
We literally had it 2021-2023...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Congresses
And from 07 to 11....
What are you talk.ing about "a few months"?
They had control of the Presidency and the House of Representatives. I never said they didn't have that- I said they didn't have control of the Federal Government.
The Senate was tenuous. Just having 50 Dem Senators (well, that's not true either because you need to include Independents to get to 50) isn't good enough- you need 60 votes to have a filibuster-ptoof majority. The Dems just barely scraped that together in 2009, complicated in part by Ted Kennedy's seizure and eventual death and Al Franken delayed in getting seated due to recounts. They only had 60 votes (still including Independents) from September 24th 2009 - February 4th, 2010. 4 months of controlling the federal government.
That is why when the 2008 financial crisis happened and the Dems wanted to pas a stimulus package in 2009, they had to get Snowe, Collins, and Spectre (who would leater switch parties to get them to 60) from the Republican side in order to get that passed.
They absolutely did not have control of the Supreme Court at any point in the Biden administration and the Republican SCOTUS shut down a lot of what the Biden administration tried to do. I remember checking every day for months to see how they would rule on Student Loan forgiveness, for example.
This is why they have the perception of being powerless- because they've pretty much never had the power. The Republicans love people who say the Democrats are useless. They love saying Biden didn't do what he promised when he DID and the GOP-dominated Supreme Court reversed it. They love being able to stall Democrat legislation and blaming a Democrat president. Everything the Dems have done outside of those 4 months have required careful compromises and negotiation with the GOP to pass.
They also had 50 D senators and Harris as the tiebreaker...
They had the whole federal government for two years but didn't get shit done because suddenly the guy who campaigned on being a literal "senate whisper" who said he could get R votes wasn't able to get every D vote.
If you can't understand 2021-2023, stop trying to cover earlier too.
You're skipping the whole "fillibuster" thing. You need 60 to even have a vote on a lot of issues.
The filibuster that the Democrats always refuse to abolish. The fact that the filibuster still exists in 2025 is proof that they don't care about Americans.
We don't have a parliamentary system where a party can kick out an elected member for not supporting the party's agenda and replace them with someone else. Each member is individually elected to represent their state or district. For better or for worse, they get to decide what is best for their constituents and their constituents get to respond in the next election.
Joe Manchin was the major impediment in 2021-2023. He mostly supported the party's agenda but had some sticking points. He had to be onboard with whatever passed given the razor thin majority.
I saw all these screeds about how he should be kicked out of the party, but the objective reality is there is very little you can do to pressure a centrist Democrat from a state that voted for Trump by 50 points. The only option available was to placate him and come to a compromise (which he ultimately agreed to for major climate change reduction investment).
The reality is that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, it has some centrists who don't support some of the more ambitious goals of the party. If you want bigger action, you have to have a bigger majority. Slim majorities give small wings of the party outsized influence on policy.
That doesn't mean no pressure can be applied, if it does then Biden is a liar and ignorant of how our system works... Why didn't you speak up when he kept claiming he could apply pressure to get Republican votes? But regardless of if it could have worked, Biden refused to try public pressure
The fact that we can't kick them out of the party is why the new DNC is advocating to primary them out.