• Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Biden has been the most progressive president since Kennedy.

    LBJ was more progressive than Biden, and he took office after whom?

    • MartianRecon@lemmus.org
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      5 months ago

      That’s up for debate. For me, he’s the most liberal since Kennedy but if you think it’s LBJ instead, that’s fine too!

      • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Oh, he’s certainly the most liberal since Kennedy. But he’s not progressive except in the slogans of centrists.

        • MartianRecon@lemmus.org
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          5 months ago

          I think that’s a no true Scotsman kind of thing. Biden has done plenty of progressive policies. He’s forgiven billions in student loan debt (and wanted to forgive more but R courts are political), he’s passed infrastructure, and he’s also passed some bills to keep the cost of medicine down.

          Could he do more? Sure. If voters showed up at the midterms and gave him a D house, he could have done more. But they didn’t.

          Way too often, people let perfect be the enemy of good. Biden is good, not perfect.

          • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            He’s forgiven billions in student loan debt

            Using a program signed into law by George W Bush. Does that mean Bush was also a progressive?

            • MartianRecon@lemmus.org
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              5 months ago

              Biden passed comprehensive student loan forgiveness, and it was struck down by the supreme court for bullshit reasons. He’s using the mechanisms of government that he can control.

              Or did you forget that part?

              • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Or did you forget that part?

                No I didn’t forget. But that’s not what you were talking about. You were talking about the student loans forgiven during Biden’s term. That’s being done under the PSLF program signed into law by G.W. Bush in 2007.

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Service_Loan_Forgiveness

                If forgiving loans under this program is one reason to call Biden a progressive then the same would apply to Bush.

                So I’ll ask you again, was Bush also a progressive?

                • MartianRecon@lemmus.org
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                  5 months ago

                  And you ignored my part of the conversation. He DID pass comprehensive student loan debt relief. Republicans used lawfare to halt the program.

                  Does that not count?

                  • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    He’s forgiven billions in student loan debt

                    This was part of your conversation. You’re just deflecting because you had no idea what the PSLF program was or how it came to be.

                    And no I don’t give participation trophies to presidents. Especially when I suspect they wanted it to fail in the first place.

          • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Sure. If voters showed up at the midterms and gave him a D house, he could have done more. But they didn’t.

            If Democrats had used the majorities we gave them during his first two years instead of getting in their own way, this would be a convincing argument.

            • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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              5 months ago

              They did use them as best they could. They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators (Sinema and Manchin) who refused to support getting rid of it, making killing the proposition of killing the filibuster DOA. As a result, their only choice to pass legislation was budget reconciliation, which aren’t subject to filibuster. The issue is that reconciliation has several big limits:

              1. The bill has to be related to government spending, revenue, and the debt ceiling. You can’t toss in things like minimum wage increases or voting rights legislation.

              2. You can only pass one of these bills per year (theoretically you can do more, but additional reconciliation bills have to go through the budgrt committee and with a 50/50 senate the GOP can just skip those meetings to deny quorum and keep it stuck)

              3. Whatever passes still has to get at least 50 votes, which means either appeasing Manchin/Sinema or getting Republican votes (which ain’t gonna happen)

              And despite that, we still got the CHIPS act, an infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which–even with Manchinema throwing as many grenades in the process as they could get away with–was the biggest climate change bill in our country’s history. Not perfect, no, but a sizable step in the right direction, for once.

              • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                They were hamstrung by a filibustering Senate, and two conservative Democrat senators

                That’s what I mean by getting in their own way.

            • MartianRecon@lemmus.org
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              5 months ago

              Biden had numerous accomplishments from his first 2 years, lol.

              That’s completely disingenuous.