@Cassiodorus really just amounts to the Ds are not perfect, far from it. Agree. Maybe, overall, they do 60% good, 40% bad. That's still considerably better than the alternative party's 5% good to 95% bad, on the domestic issues. Let's leave aside issues like censorship where both parties seem in agreement to operate counter to the 1A.

Yes on some of the specific issues you raise, Grand Bargain, TPP and a few others. But re defending some other issues or promoting them -- healthcare reform, even if by a small step forward in ObamaCare, protecting SS/Medicare/Medicaid, voting rights, abortion, gun laws -- there's no question only the badly flawed DP is backing those, or has traditionally, while the GOP sternly opposes, or tries to hide opposition behind a phony "reform" fig leaf, such as with ideas to "reform" SS/Medicare or "improve" voting.

Some of your assertions are wildly optimistic or close to utopian, such as Why didn't the Ds vote to pack the Supreme Ct when they had a majority. Sure, a very slim majority for most of recent times, in a party that included Manchin, DiFi, Lieberman and a dozen similarly-inclined center/center-right types, all institutional conservaDems inclined to preserve the status quo and hostile to major reform.

Unfortunately, unlike the Civil Rights Era when Ds could count on a number of moderate Rs to come along on important legislation, in the modern era no such Rs are to be found, the GOP having years ago purged itself of its moderate-liberal wing. With nothing close to a working progressive or even moderately-liberal majority in Congress, what results is what is to be expected with such numbers -- gridlock or thin-gruel legislation that advances the ball only a few yards at best (ObamaCare being the most prominent example).

As to holding accountable or resisting, as I note a lot of damage can be done by the GOP holding all power until the next election brings back some small measure of sanity wielded by very flawed pols. It's too great a risk, and I'm sure with all the power in their hands the GOP would while in the majority try to arrange it, by devious means, to make it doubly difficult for any opposition party to win. Strong voter suppression laws is one way and a rather effective one.

#4

A GOP landslide

is a swell solution if you're ok with considerable backsliding on a whole host of domestic issues -- abortion, SS/Medicare/Medicaid, ObamaCare, guns, voting rights among others.

Sorry but Democrats don't defend "domestic issues." What they do is wage public relations initiatives, while behind our backs they support things like Obama's Grand Bargain and Trans-Pacific Partnership, which were stopped merely due to Republican obstructionism. If Obama's Grand Bargain had passed, we'd have all that nice stuff in theory but the Federal government would simply say "sorry, no money to pay for it." And the TPP would have made any sort of human rights gain impossible.

And, as long as we're going over the idea that Democrats actually defend anything, let's do a short trip down memory lane, to that golden age of Obama when the Democrats ceded 900+ seats in state legislatures to the Republican Party not to mention all branches of the Federal government.

On DP, the current 6-3/5-4 GOP Supreme Ct gives us a glimpse of what would happen if the GOP controlled not just Scotus but all the branches of govt.

So when the Dems had control of both houses of Congress, they could have 1) codified Roe v. Wade into law and 2) expanded the size of the Supreme Court. But Joe said no, and convenient villains or something. Like I said, the Dems don't defend us. The Dems defend rich people. Currently they're busy destroying the US standing in the world, the basic support for our current standard of living, and producing great heaps of dead bodies in the process with more to come, so they can make Raytheon executives happy.

And how exactly would the GOP be "held accountable" and how long would that take?

The easiest and usual method is for the voters to elect the "other guys." It worked in 2018, when they kicked the Republican majority out of Congress. The hard way would be to create a party which actually opposed the Republicans, which we don't have. The first place to start would be with the not-sold-out unions. But it's really telling that I'm being asked how to resist here, as if that weren't common knowledge. "You mean we can actually oppose the system? No kidding!" Anarchists can tell you how to resist, if you can find them. Or ask Jewish Voices for Peace; they might know a thing or two.

such that if Ds get elected post-2024, the majority of its political energy would go towards getting back to at least some of the pre-2024 status quo.

Is that where the energy goes? In actual fact, the energy goes toward encoding money and handing it to rich people. Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner:

This new electoral structure is related to the rise of a new regime of accumulation: let us call it political capitalism. Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’. These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s cares Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and chips Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act. All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

Enjoy the genocide as long as we're all paying for it.

@wokkamile

on those steps, crack his head, and become comatose.
Unless the DNC pulls out another blooper, will it be Camel
vs. Clown? Our future is not looking too bright.

#5 to agree on the constitutional convention -- so many of our problems can be traced back to fundamental outdated institutional problems and getting just a single issue con amendment passed is so difficult. But I fear the much better organized Right and what mischief it could achieve at such a convention -- more imposed religion and religious tests in our lives, loyalty oaths to hold office, guns etc.

And I think before we see such an unprecedented CC (it would take 2/3 of state legislatures to call for one, a heavy lift, and an even heavier one for the convention's amendments to be approved (3/4 of the states), before that we will see another Civil War.

Especially dicey is the upcoming election situation. The most obvious scenarios that could cause everything to unravel in chaos: 1) Trump is denied ballot access in enough states to deny him the presidency. 2) Trump is on the ballot but loses again and forcefully claims Election Fraud! 3) Trump is convicted just before the election and is vulnerable to being sentenced to a 5-15 stretch in Rykers, mostly skewing voting against him.