An article posted on CNN’s website demonstrates why CNN is losing viewers and why it deserves to lose more. The piece by someone called Chris Cillizza, CNN’s editor at large is called, ‘Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand how the Senate works’.
Straight away the headline hints at the snide, presumptive, arrogant and unoriginal content in the article. If one wanted to read the kind of arrogant drivel of a kid at school who didn’t learn the lessons of the schoolyard beatings he almost certainly received, I would encourage you to read it.
The article is structured around lambasting the following, totally reasonable and straight-forward Tweet
The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy. Dems would do it, no doubt!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017
Here, Trump is complaining about how the Senate has a unique mechanism called ‘filibuster’ where a bill can essentially be ‘talked to death’, requiring a three-fifths super-majority to end the filibuster and force a vote.
Trump is correct. The filibuster is a rather outdated apparatus. Inversely CNN is wrong, eliminating the filibuster, something which many including many Democrats have proposed over the years, would not make the Senate just like the House of Representatives as the article erroneously claims.
The primary difference between the two Houses of the US Congress is that the House is comprised on the basis of districts which reflect local population centres throughout the country. The Senate is made up of two Senators for every state, irrespective of the populations or for that matter the wealth of each state.
Until 1913, Senators were appointed directly by state legislatures but since the so-called progressive era of Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt and Democrats like Woodrow Wilson, the citizens of each state elect both of their Senators every six years.
As it stands, most Senate votes are done via a simple majority vote, just like the House of Representatives.
The CNN article is not only misleading, but it is deeply arrogant. Many people throughout history, including many on the progressive left have argued for a simplification of Senate rules. Such people claim correctly that they are not undermining the Senate because the key difference between the Senate and House is its composition and term length rather than its procedural rules.
CNN insults the intelligence of Donald Trump and the American people by suggesting otherwise, but this is what CNN has become. CNN revels in an elitist attitude where they think they ‘know better than Trump’.
In no way is Donald Trump a paragon of supreme genius (who is?) but he certainly is not stupid and he is certainly not intentionally misleading as CNN is.
CNN operates on a holier than thou basis which might sell among the girly men and android like women of New York and San Francisco who hide behind obscure pseudo-intellectual arguments in order to justify their salaries, but the reality for most Americans is far more straight forward.
Most Americans, like most people everywhere, want an effective, efficient democracy that is concerned more with getting the job done than endlessly minutiae driven arguments about the process of getting things done.
CNN belongs not only to another time but to another place. They are the kids who didn’t learn the important lessons from the schoolyard that when you can’t put up, you really ought to shut up.
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