Smart cars had to pass US crash test standards and have the appropriate safety equipment. The kei trucks that you can currently import and use are 25+ years old and wouldn’t have even passed US standards back then. Your legs are the crumple zone in these things.

I assume that new ones would have a chance, but it’d be expensive for a manufacturer to modify and certify for the US market. Small cars haven’t sold well here, and the profit margins are slim.

Maybe with the recent size and price increases in autos here, well see some movement. I’d love a modern Honda kei to go with my element.

Probably, but for other reasons. Neither of those are owned by the US, are they?

Unfortunately, republicans will quite likely take the senate in the next cycle. With Manchin retiring, WV is essentially a republican lock. More broadly, Democrats are defending 20 seats to 11 for republicans, and the lowest hanging fruit for democratic pickups would be Rick Scott (FL) or Ted Cruz (TX), and as much as they both suck, that’s still going to be tough.

So, just to retain their slim margin, they’d have to defend all of their other seats and knock off one of those two.

If she only had a record to check… oh, wait, she does:

Haley has consistently supported bills that give rights to an unborn baby and restrict abortion, except when the mother’s life is at risk. In 2006, as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Haley voted for the Penalties for Harming an Unborn Child/Fetus law, which asserted that an act of violence against a fetus is akin to a criminal act against the mother. She has also re-signed a new state law that bans abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy.[38]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Nikki_Haley

Haley is opposed to Jail or Death Penalty for women who have abortions.[41][42][43]

Is that the moderate republican position?

The difference is that Manchin, for all of his many flaws, is probably the only Democratic senator that we’re likely to see from WV in the foreseeable future. So, the option isn’t “Manchin or a better Democrat”, it “Manchin or a hard right-wing republican”. WV is one of the reddest of states and it’s almost shocking that a Democrat won there at all and it’s easy to understand why he bucks the party.

Sinema has no excuse aside from her seeming delusions of importance and dreams of cushy corporate cash once she’s out.

This assumes that the mass shootings are a problem that they’d want to solve, but it’s not since mass shootings are useful to them. They’re flashy, get lots of media coverage, and feed a sense of chaos and societal breakdown. With that, they make the case the current system can’t keep you safe, and we need an authoritarian to bring order, which they’re happy to provide.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the Founding Fathers structured everything in such a way that this should have never been an issue at all. It was originally designed for all parties to vote on a speaker. Whether or not there were two parties, three parties, or 27 parties is irrelevant. The speaker was intended to be someone that all parties could agree on, not just the majority party.

How so? The structure has ‘majority wins’ and there’s nothing to compel the majority to vote for a candidate that ‘all parties agree on’, nor would that even make sense.

It only got this way because tribal politics has taken over our entire political system, devolving into tribal warfare and an “us vs them” mentality…

This may not be your intent, but this reads like a very elaborate "both sides’ argument, when it’s really clear that the pathological behavior here isn’t evenly distributed between the ‘tribes’.

If the roles were reversed, I’d be shocked if Democrats didn’t compromise and put in place a power-sharing agreement to allow the House to function.