politics, especially in the US, are weird
like, before an election, parties and candidates and organizations run campaigns full of attack ads when they tell people "voting for this party will be the biggest mistake of your life" or "that candidate is a hypocrite who will only do terrible things for your country", but then the election is over, and all the politicians get back to work, including with those from the parties they spent the whole campaign ragging on about
and, like, we know that -- after all, most people who ever worked a job know at least some coworkers they despise, but have to keep some level of friendly relations with, in order to maintain a productive work relationship
i've been thinking about a CGP grey video about supreme court shenanigans in the US, where nominally, a president is allowed to temporarily appoint people if congress is on recess, but the congress solved that by not forming a recess and just doing a "pro-forma session" once every three days where the minimum required amount of congresspeople attend and just pretend there's a quorum because nobody's bothered to ask for one
and, like, you would think that, theoretically, it would be easy for one congressperson from the opposing party to show up and ruin the whole think by explicitly asking for a quorum, having it fail, and then letting a friendly president do the things they want to
but congresspeople like taking vacations, and i bet that anyone who actually tries blocking a pro-forma session like that will stop being merely a coworker or opponent and become actively hated by members from both parties, denied any support in the next election, and so on
i imagine that this is why there is a disconnect between how we expect politicians to act and how they act in reality -- they're rivals and sometimes enemies in the public arena, but when they actually need to do their job, they are still colleagues
this isn't corruption or a conspiracy, but just the end result of regular workplace dynamics, applied to a representative democracy
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