What are we even doing here?

Yes I understand that the Maine primary is seven months away. Yes I’ve heard that the Progressive Oysterman (I think I had that album at one point) is some kind of Fettermanesque loose cannon with a Nazi tattoo (I haven’t actually paid any attention to any of this until about 48 hours ago so don’t taze me bro). Yes I acknowledge that ageism is bad.

Still:

Maine Gov. Janet Mills said Thursday she supports keeping the filibuster in place, breaking with most members of the Senate Democratic Caucus she hopes to join as she launches a campaign to oust GOP Sen. Susan Collins, herself a staunch defender of the Senate’s 60-vote requirement.

“I would certainly want to retain the filibuster,” Mills said, according to the Bangor Daily News. Mills made the comments while talking to reporters after accepting the endorsement of Dan Kleban, the co-founder of Maine Beer Co. who had been running for the Democratic nomination before Mills’ entrance into the race.

It gets better:

In her remarks, the 77-year-old Mills [she would be 79 on her first day in office] also appeared to mix up the status of the filibuster, suggesting retaining it could give senators a say over judges. The filibuster has not been in use for judicial nominations for over a decade.

“When it comes to Trump appointing 200 judges with very questionable qualifications, I would want to have a say in those judgeships, for instance,” Mills said.

Are you kidding me? This isn’t asking her when Everton last won the FA Cup.

People tend to forget that the 60-vote pseudo-law in the Senate is larded on top of the wildly unrepresentative nature of the Senate itself, which gives a bunch of horrible little states that send people like Susan Collins to the Senate a a crazy amount of power in this shambolic system which if you’ve been keeping up with current events has been completely falling apart. So yeah maybe keeping the filibuster polls well in Maine, although I guarantee you that not one in 20 voters there could even describe it halfway accurately. But there’s a much much bigger problem here, that goes way beyond one Senate race and one darling of the Democratic establishment. That problem is captured well by a couple of our commentators.

DTGstl314:

Nope. Nope. Nope. Supporting the maintenance of the filibuster is absolutely disqualifying for a Democratic U.S. senate candidate in 2025. Yes, this should definitely be a litmus test. If you want to maintain the filibuster, then you want to maintain the status quo, and Democrats will never get shit done this way. The filibuster MUST be abolished. I realize that Mills would probably not be the only impediment to nuking that abomination, but she’s not in the Senate yet. And if she plans to vote against abolition of the filibuster, she shouldn’t be there. If we send her there, that’s a Democratic vote we’ll not have to make the structural changes that need to be made, and we’re going to be stuck with her for six years. Let’s nip this in the bud – she either needs to get on board with filibuster abolition, or we need to find a different candidate.

Period.

We need a fucking Plan C, because neither Platner nor Mills are what the moment demands.

Take my Republic please Bathhawk:

Much like the NYC primary, we have a Democratic “establishment” of nursing home all-stars, academics, and professionally inbred consultants who can’t run a two-car parade and so can’t recruit normal people under 50 who are representative of their communities to run in these places.

The result is geriatrics, nepo babies, and/or the local transplant college professor vs randos who excite the Dem base on Tiktok before their skeletons come out. But while Mamdani will win anyway because it’s NYC and he has no effective competition (not that NYC is so liberal he couldn’t–the R machine just didn’t have time to recruit some Rubio-grade reactionary Hispanic with a mask of sanity and parade him around for the media to eat up), this is all just gonna hand Maine and most other real races to the Rs again.

Yes the Democratic establishment has managed to hold together after telling Trump that he can keep doing his fascisms as long as he gave them a cookie and he said fuck you, but things like this whole fiasco make me wonder what sort of thermonuclear device would have to be set off to clue them into what is happening here and now in this country.