^^^Theme from West Wing plays softly in the background

You are also whatabouting the shit out of this, because you identify with Democrats, which is abundantly clear from your disdain for them, and Democrats are supposed to be better, right? So allow me to scratch the record and speak from a place of raw, sardonic cynicism:

There's a feckless party and there's an evil party and those are your choices. Anything anyone can do to get people to vote "feckless" means "evil" loses power, and the more energy that gets poured into "feckless" the less feckless it becomes.

I'm so old I remember when the Inflation Reduction Act was called the Green New Deal. It exists entirely because young angry democrats demanded something that doesn't come directly from the mind of Larry Summers. Are the socialists happy with it? No, they're not, because that's the game - the Republicans give no fucks about policy, their main animus right now is making fun of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, so if AOC likes it obviously it's bad for democracy.

For fuckin' 40 years, the Democratic refrain has been "if you want change, vote" and for fuckin' 40 years, young voters who show up have had the football yanked by a set of rich wax dummies out of Madame Taussaud's. Lately? Lately the Democrats have been primaried by a bunch of kids whose principle refrain is "what have you done for me lately?" where "lately" is defined as "in my parents' lifetimes." Likewise, higher ed has been a lie since 2001 and we have done very, very, very little about it because - wait for it - capitalism. It's a market problem, pay no attention to the vast oligarchy profiting from protectionist market doctrine.

So go ahead and wring your hands about "principles" from executive orders when the whole reason we got suckerpunched by Bill Barr is his philosophy is "the president is God." Go ahead and talk about precedent when Mitch McConnell has been leaning on the fuckin' Bork nomination as his justification for "fuck you I do what I want."

But beyond that, the people who "play the lotto and lose" are every bit the citizens as the people who got engineering degrees or whatever. Know what? If you racked up $100k in debt getting a degree from FIT, $10k or $25k isn't gonna solve your shit. If you racked up $8k or $20k or $25k not-quite-finishing that degree, though - hoo boy homey you just got a fucking concrete reason to vote blue in November. As if Alito in your uterus wasn't enough.

$10k? That's 1/8th of a Javelin missile. $10k for a millennial who has experienced two once-in-a-lifetime recessions and is told she can't buy a house because she eats too much avocado toast? $10k for a millennial who was shown in 2020 that her lack of healthcare and living wage is a policy choice not a limitation of the market? Look, man - if these people made some bad decisions and robbed a fucking bank 20 years ago they'd be out, off paper and living their lives. Instead they've racked up $50k in debt on a $12k principle that goes to private equity. You act as if all this money is going to people who weren't paying attention last Thursday rather than people in their 30s and 40s whose lifetime earnings potential was kicked in the nuts by 2001, 2008 and 2020.

And I know you don't think any of this? You're merely riffling through the filofax of NYT columnists and WaPo Pundits concern-trolling their way through Capitalism Lite. What Would Krugman Do? And they're fucking stupid, too. Two bits of news across my transom this week: (1) median age of first pregnancy crossed 30 (2) median cost of rearing a child to 18 crossed $300k. Do you think that's good for democracy? Or poor people? Or minorities? If only we could target some aid and largesse in their general direction. Hell, they might even vote for the party that helps them out.

So. Yeah. Executive authority bad. I think you should print out a bunch of bumper stickers that say "decrease executive authority" and see if it changes anything. Or, I dunno, give life-changing amounts of money to an educated demographic too poor to start families that has been betrayed by the political party that ostensibly supports them for their entire fucking lives.

I guarantee you - Bill Barr will be mad either way.