Over the weekend, Bernie unveiled his plan to end all corporate giving in federal elections. It should come as a surprise, since he's been talking about it for years and put as much of it as possible into effect in his own campaign.
Legislating Legislation by Nancy Ohanianby Skip Kaltenheuser In Washington, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Except when they get worse. The recent Democratic Party Presidential Debates had me thinking on the enclosed essay on campaign finance, fished out of the wayback machine, that appeared in Barron’s. Way back, over two decades.
Back in the day, Ventura Republican congressman Elton Gallegly was a regular-- albeit minor-- character here at DWT... a crooked little shit and a worthless backbencher. He was like a barnacle on the ass of more outrageously crooked colleagues like Buck McKeon, especially when it came to the Countrywide bribery scandal.
One of the questions everyone was asking after the redacted Mueller report came out Thursday was why didn't Mueller charge Junior and Kushner-in-law.
In his 2018 TV ad (above) "ex"-Republican candidate-- and multimillion dollar lottery winner-- now-Congressman Gil Cisneros said specifically "I won't take corporate PAC money... because leading by example is how we fix Washington." This invitation comes from his DC fundraiser Amy Strathdee, but please notice on the bottom who's paying for it. Also notice that the hosts are sleaze bag lobbyists. Mercado works for the American Petroleum Institute and Duran and Pino work for Walmart and Comcast.
Jim McGovern (D-MA) is one of the most progressive members of Congress. His D+9 central Massachusetts district-- which includes Worcester, Northampton, Amherst and Uxbridge-- gave Trump just 36.8% of its vote. Last year McGovern beat Republican Tracy Lovvorn two to one-- 191,332 (67.2%) to 93,391 (32.8%). In the 2 decades between 1998 and 2018, the Republicans had only fielded candidates against him in 2004 (28%) and 2010 (39.2%). He has a safe seat and his 96.7 ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote score is in the top 10 in Congress.
Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice website published a post by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Netflix for Democracy. Change frightens politicians and the kind of profound change Torres-Spelliscy wrote about has the political establishments of both parties petrified. It would scramble the power dynamic in Washington.
I got that invitation above the other day and said to myself, "self, didn't Katie Hill say she wasn't going to take PAC money?" Maybe not; maybe I was thinking of almost every other freshman. Or maybe there was some Philadelphia lawyer language in the statement about not taking-- let alone soliciting-- which this invitation clearly is. So I tweeted it. A top Hill chief of staff write to me immediately: "I saw your tweet.
Is there anything the new Congress can do is a question many people are asking. As we saw earlier today, potential— if absurd— presidential candidate, putatively as a Democrat, Howard Schultz, the Starbucks guy, is worried that the Democratic Party is wandering too far left. He’s an idiot. Norman Solomon, in an essay for TruthOut, is far more on the mark.
