This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/PyroIsSpai on 2024-09-20 21:07:26+00:00.
Original Title: A quick high level US government primer for those of us who are not American, or don't follow it: how current American politics influenced the next version of the UAPDA not advancing. It was basically just bad luck from the 2022-2024 election scenarios.
Some days I hate that I grew up around strident political nerds and some days I'm glad because I can actually understand this stuff (usually!) and follow what in the hell people are saying on things like CSPAN and MSNBC.
Couple of disclaimers up front:
- I can't explain this without delving a bit into politics.
- I am in American terms a left-leaning person.
- I'm keeping my personal/ideological views out of here as much as possible and sticking to the facts.
- What happened in 2023 with the "Mikes" neutering the original UAPDA was very different from this cycle, unless the Pentagon and CIA et al somehow managed to manipulate the entire timeline of American politics to this conclusion from back in 2016. I don't think they did.
This is going to be VERY high level*. Google and Wikipedia are your friends for the fine details.
*= as ridiculous as this "high level" disclaimer is, believe me... I'm still up in the ionosphere here.
How the United States House works (high level)
Short: this is your backstory--"Previously, on American political news..."
The US House is controlled by whichever party holds the most seats.
Elections are in November of years like 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, bi-annual. So if you win your November 2024 election to the House, your next term runs January 2025 to January 2027, and you need to win the November 2026 election to stay in Congress. The Senate is similar but their terms are six years and staggered. Every House member faces re-election every two years always.
The majority House party is currently the Republicans. It was Democrats before. It can go back and forth and in modern terms (post 1990s) no party has held the House continuously more than a few cycles. Whichever party wins the Presidency tends to win the House in the same election, and then lose the House the next midterm.
Example:
Biden won in 2020 and Democrats took the House convincingly.
In the 2022 midterms, Republicans won the House and took it back. 2022 was itself an outlier, because normally whenever Republicans win back the House in a mid-term from Democrats... they crush it historically. I don't mean by a little, I mean by "ass beating" numbers. That historic trend broke and Republicans barely took the House this time. This itself was astonishing, because that does not happen. Republicans with a Democratic President always take the House with vigor in the next mid-term.
That they barely took it by like... 6, 8 seats itself is (objectively) them taking a pounding in political terms in the mid-terms. In raw voting math, Republicans were dominant/ascendent in all Congressional elections in 2016 (Trump 45)--recall Clinton won the Popular vote, but Trump won the Electoral, which is a very very long story you can Google, but it needs mentioning for contextual reasons. In 2018, 2020 and 2022, the math has been not in favor of Republicans, for a litany of reasons you can Google as well. That's beyond the scope of this discussion and gets into hard politics discussion.
I'm talking raw math.
The House Speaker
Short: third in line for the Presidency; a House member chosen by the current majority party to run the show; decides what gets voted on and when.
If you google "House Speaker elections 2022" you will get weeks of reading and stuff to learn. The current House term, 2022-2024, is by every historic hard metric (hard evidence, math) the least productive and most dysfunctional US House term since I think either just before the Great Depression or the Civil War. It's bad. The Republican party factions have been fighting tooth and nail for control, because they barely took the House, which gave everyone more political collateral to influence things intra-party within the Republicans. I've never seen anything like this myself.
For instance, I don't think in my lifetime it ever took more than 2, maybe 3 House speaker elections to pick House Speaker (#3 in the US line of succession behind the President and Vice-President). It took Republicans weeks and something like nearly 20 (!) votes this time. Then they sacked that Speaker, had a bunch more elections, and picked a new Speaker, who astonishingly at the end of the House term is facing more no-confidence re-vote type threats. It's a long story but it is possible that we may not have a Speaker as the term ends. Not to be try and make a joke here, but think the Monty Python bit where "the editor has been sacked... the new editor has been sacked..."
Because of all this (and believe me, all this is the short version)... this term saw the fewest number of votes cast and bills passed. This has, for reasons I still don't understand, sent us careening toward another funding showdown. The US Government relies on something like 3-6 annual spending bills to be passed to keep the government running. It used to be a smaller number but IIRC, Democrats changed it at some point be +1 and then Republicans +2, making it more granular.
Unfortunately, this made it more political still, and that's why you have this:
See how the frequency increases over time?
That's the setup coming into the UAPDA for 2024. The lack of overall single-faction or coalition control in the House got us here. Narrow margins of control lead to more volatile politics.
What the fuck happened to the UAPDA this time?
Short: elections and politics; the UAPDA was caught in the cross fire this time, not targeted directly like last time.
Anyway, where this leaves us is that between the EXTREMELY contentious 2024 Presidential election--the most heated one I have ever seen---and all the usual DC chaos, plus the intra-party stuff going now within Republican circles, plus the chaos around the UAPDA push/pull amongst the factions like the military, intel community and so on...
There was a huge number of needed laws and bills that simply died because there is no time this late in the cycle, coming into the elections, to deal with, on TOP of the government shutdown threat looming for October 1st. If not for that shutdown threat, the UAPDA and those other laws probably get a proper shot this cycle.
Believe me: regardless of whatever anyone tries to sell you, Democrat or Republican or Independent, pundit or genius or layman... anyone, anyone who tries to tell you Republicans in this scenario want a government shutdown, truly want it for the "political gains" is:
- Stupid
- Idiotic
- Has no idea that there is a thing called "tomorrow" that comes after "today"
A particularly contenious Federal government shutdown JUST as voting begins in the USA is figuratively the equivalent of the controlling House party walking up to the edge of the Grand Canyon, and one by one leaping to their destruction. Nobody likes a shutdown once it begins. Nobody. They are always unpopular. Every Federal anything that is not military, intel community, FEMA, Social Security payments, and (I think) Medicare/Medicaid payments close down. No Federal employees (we have 2~ million, which is light as a ratio for a country of our size relative to other nations per capita) get paid EXCEPT active military, POTUS/VPOTUS and Congress. Not even judges. They get the money paid back in full AFTER the shutdown. National Parks close, etc. And yes, all those employees temporarily work "free".
Basically, it's not awesome for your election odds to cause a shutdown as the election begins.
So, why's it happening?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can the UAPDA pass now in 2024?
Short: extreme long shot Maybe. Very very long shot. Black swan stuff.
They won't, and that's it. Maybe, maybe something compelling comes out in the November pair of hearings and we get a stand-alone UAPDA vote, but I think the reason they wanted it two years in a row so bad in the NDAA and the AARO legislation prior to that, is that it gets less press. I don't think before 2024 the Congress was truly ready to have this conversation.
Unless we get something mind-blowing in the November hearings to motivate some kind of extra amendment or do-over, it won't happen until the 2025-2026 legislative session begins. If they attach the full UADPA to the NDAA that gets passed in 2025, that means the UAPDA fully goes live I think December 20-25, 2025.
So what if the UAPDA passes in 2025, then?
Short: 2027 <--- hey, there's that number again.
With the 90-day binding legal deadline to seat the UAP Board between the President and Senate, the earliest we get Senate confirmation hearings is likely February 2026. The full UAPDA board process I think legally takes up to nearly one year--the government 90 days to have the data ready to go concurrently for the board. That's why they made the government and National Archives start collecting stuff in January 2024. Best case the Board starts work end of March 2025, add 300-350 days for the full process to run, and guess where that leaves us?
The beginning of 2027.
Now... where did that year come up before...?
