Senator Chis Van Hollen said to MSNBC today that “we are using all of our powers in the Senate to slow down this trainwreck, to work to stop this trainwreck, and we will continue to do that.” It’s worth watching the video because hearing it doesn’t make this sound any more convincing.
This is a lie. Lie lie lie lie lie. As big of a bald-faced lie as any that Donald Trump has told, and you can see his soul rattling out of his body as he tries to tell it. The Democrats are lying to you. They are not doing everything they can to slow things down in the Senate. They are going home at the end of the week like they always do, granting unanimous consent for their hard-earned three-day weekend last week while Elon Musk rummaged around inside the government.
The reason we can call this an objective lie is thanks to this rule they used to help give themselves a long weekend. The Senate’s entire essence is an entity designed to halt any kind of progress and slow everything down to near-unworkability, and this translates to a set of arcane rules to govern it that like, three people in American history have truly understood. One way to avoid these arcane rules is for everyone to unanimously consent to agreeing that they are dumb and stupid, and no one needs to follow them. It’s how the Senate keeps things moving and gets everyone home for the weekend, which is the primary goal of every lawmaker in each party.
But sometimes, people come along and say that they actually like these dumb and stupid rules, and they object to the unanimous consent of the other Senators and stop everything from moving forward. This is one of the key powers that Senators can use to slow down something they believe to be a trainwreck, and it only takes one person in a seat of power like Chis Van Hollen’s! It’s been done by many Republicans before, and if you want to spend an hour watching Democrats struggle to figure out Tommy Tuberville more than any SEC offense ever did, this is what blocking unanimous consent in the Senate looks like. It’s not hard.
Look at that jackass! This is the greatest defense that Tuberville has ever played and all he had to do was be his own ignorant and obstinate self. We know the Democrats are lying to us because they are not employing a minority tactic that they soiled their senior diapers over throughout the last two years, proving they are not “using all of our powers in the Senate to slow down this trainwreck.”
This is not just all on Sen. Van Hollen, who will have a moment of redemption in few paragraphs, as this incoherent dual message of “we’re trying our best!” and “what can we do?!” is ubiquitous throughout this rudderless party. Senator Dick Durbin is kindly asking his GOP allies to “pause” the nomination of Kash Patel to head the FBI when he knows he could work to try to delay it himself. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is making excuses and saying, “what leverage do we have?” while Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who voted for four of Trump’s nominees, is out in public posting shit like this like we can’t see what he’s doing in Congress.
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— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (@whitehouse.senate.gov) February 10, 2025 at 11:50 AM
Maybe people think Democrats “have no coherent message” because people like Sen. Whitehouse say Trump is a grave threat to the rule of law and when Trump proves them right, they vote for his nominees anyway. No one in their right mind would think that Democrats are doing everything within their limited scope of powers to slow this trainwreck down, and Jeffries whining about it this early before really using any of the levers he and Schumer have at their disposal is a signal of the true intent of leadership here: to do what they always do and pass the buck and then fundraise off of it.
Senate Minority “Leader” Chuck Schumer has laid out a strategy to “fight back on behalf of American families as Republicans look the other way in obedience to Donald Trump,” and the phrase “unanimous consent” does not appear in it. This is not some obscure thing with little impact. Progressive organizer Aaron Regunberg called the denial of it “perhaps the most significant tool Democratic senators could use to throw sand in the gears” of Trump’s criminal rampage. This thread from a former Senate staffer details the myriad effective ways it can muck up Trump’s agenda and force him to take months to do what he is currently doing in minutes. It was a central part of what Mitch McConnell did to slow down Barack Obama’s presidency. Hell, Democrats have even employed it in small doses with some of Trump’s nominees and made a big show of dragging out Project 2025 author Russell Vought’s nomination overnight. Any Senate Democrat who says they are doing everything they can is a lying liar who lies, and they know it for a fact. They are tapping the gas pedal, taking their foot off of it and then telling you they are driving the car.
Another way you know the Democrats are lying to your face about doing everything they can to stop Trump is that every single one of them has voted for at least one of Trump’s cabinet appointments (Marco Rubio), while just ten out of the forty-seven members of the Democratic Senate bloc voted against every other Trump nominee: Tammy Duckworth, Mazie Hirono, Ed Markey, Chris Murphy, Patty Murray, Jack Reed, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden.
If you did not see your Senators’ name there, call them. That means they voted for someone like climate denier Doug Collins for VA Secretary, or puppy murderer Kristi Noem for the Department of Homeland Security, or oil executive Chris Wright to head the EPA, or even Trump’s own personal fucking lawyer for Attorney General (to be fair, only one Democrat voted for Pam Bondi, and it’s exactly the weasel you think it is–future Fox News host John Fetterman has seeded one of the most inevitable well-funded primary challenges I’ve ever seen).
The Democrats are liars. They are as big of liars as the climate deniers many of them vote for. They are not doing everything they can to slow things down in Congress, they are joining in unanimous consent to speed everything up. In fact, some of them resent you for telling them to do more. Per a “senior House Democrat” from a new Axios rage-bait report, “people are pissed” about the avalanche of phone calls they have received from their voters. Hakeem Jeffries is reportedly “very frustrated” at activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible who are encouraging people to get involved in politics.
Leadership in the Democratic Party is an oxymoron. Mankind has never seen a group of people less qualified to lead others than the gerontocracy and its allies who are choking the life out of the Democrats. There is plenty of Democratic enthusiasm and will to stand up to this evisceration of the constitution in a more aggressive posture, as Chris freaking Coons has demonstrated, along with America’s Democratic governors whose Attorney Generals are putting in work, but none exists atop the national party who history will remember as one of history’s greatest group of failures.
Until they stop agreeing to unanimous consent and rise to the vaunted level of Tommy Tuberville, Senate Democrats are not doing everything they can to slow down Trump’s agenda. Not even remotely close. They are actually doing the opposite and consciously voting for it to fly through the Senate like normal, while fast-tracking themselves to three-day weekends. Primary these liars out of politics forever.
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