Five House Democrats led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wrote to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to demand a federal investigation of the conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, over his acceptance of undeclared gifts from billionaire rightwing donors.

“We write to urge the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into … Clarence Thomas for consistently failing to report significant gifts he received from Harlan Crow and other billionaires for nearly two decades in defiance of his duty under federal law,” the Democrats said.

  • duderium [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Kennedy died several months after Obama took office. What were Democrats doing during this time, aside from bailing out bankers and dronestriking weddings?

    • Jordan Lund@lemmy.one
      ·
      11 months ago

      Kennedy died in August of 2009, in those 8 months they (and Obama) kind of saved the American economy?

      You have to remember, when Obama took office, we were losing 700,000 jobs a month and the stock market had PLUMMETTED TO $6,500.

      They managed to get the Recovery act passed in February, fought by the Republicans every inch of the way:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009

      Which enabled the Tea Party movement and set the stage for the losses in 2010.

      Followed by the "Cash For Clunkers" act in July to prop up the American auto industry, an industry many Republicans (including Mitt Romney) at the time said we should just let die.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

      https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html

      Then Kennedy died, we lost the 60 vote majority, and Republicans proceeded to use the filibuster more times than all the other Presidential terms combined.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        11 months ago

        saving the economy by throwing poor homeowners under the bus. smdh why can't leftists just appreciate how much Obama saved the bankers economy

          • silent_water [she/her]
            ·
            11 months ago

            https://jacobin.com/2017/12/obama-foreclosure-crisis-wealth-inequality

            • Jordan Lund@lemmy.one
              ·
              11 months ago

              "The Making Home Affordable initiative of the Secretary of the Treasury, as authorized under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008"

              Hmmm... who was President in 2008? 🤔

              Now, if you want to argue Obama should have stopped it, well, yeah, there's a lot of things he should have stopped...

              • silent_water [she/her]
                ·
                11 months ago

                objecting to one line in a rather long article isn't actually the defense you think it is

              • JohnBrownsDream [he/him, comrade/them]
                ·
                11 months ago

                That's not a quote that's even in the article. How about:

                Given these differences in wealth portfolios, bailing out financial assets after 2008 while allowing homeowners to drown directly concentrated the national wealth into the hands of the richest white families.

      • duderium [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Kennedy died in August of 2009, in those 8 months they (and Obama) kind of saved the American economy?

        “The economy” meaning rich people’s yacht money?

        Which enabled the Tea Party movement and set the stage for the losses in 2010.

        You can tell that the Democrats made a massive positive difference in the way that voters threw their asses out of power within two years of Obama’s inauguration, replacing him six years later with a game show host. If that isn’t victory, I don’t know what is!

        Can you name a bill the Democrats have passed within the last fifty years that has made a positive difference in your material life as well as the material lives of the people around you? Without doing research?

        Why has Biden refused to use the defense production act to pass universal health care? Why hasn’t he packed the courts? Why is it so hard for him to do these things but so easy for him to send tens of billions of dollars to Nazis in Ukraine?

        • Jordan Lund@lemmy.one
          ·
          11 months ago

          "The Economy" being the 700,000 people a month losing their jobs under Bush.

          Jobs:

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_losses_caused_by_the_Great_Recession

          January 2009 – 818,000 jobs lost
          February 2009 – 724,000 jobs lost
          March 2009 – 799,000 jobs lost
          April 2009 – 692,000 jobs lost
          May 2009 – 361,000 jobs lost
          June 2009 – 482,000 jobs lost
          July 2009 – 339,000 jobs lost
          August 2009 – 222,000 jobs lost
          September 2009 – 199,000 jobs lost
          October 2009 – 202,000 jobs lost[3]
          November 2009 - 64,000 jobs created[4]
          December 2009 - 109,000 jobs lost[4]

          Vs Economy:

          https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/styles/report_580_high_dpi/public/atoms/files/6-6-19budf1.png?itok=XgpYU0CF

          • duderium [he/him]
            ·
            11 months ago

            If the Democrats were actually making things better, why did voters throw them out of congress within two years?