Lets keep our eye on the ballWriting yesterday for Vanity Fair, David Drucker: reported that GOP insiders consider the House already lost. "Inside the swamp," he wrote, "Republican operatives have already made their peace with losing the House. But the coming Democratic wave won’t affect all Republicans equally, purging moderates and leaving only Trump loyalists behind. The result could be a divided Congress in which Trump, ironically, is more powerful than ever." For Republicans, widely viewed as Trump enablers and rubber-stamps, the wave "could be especially savage this year, given the sharp dissatisfaction with Trump in America’s usually Republican-leaning suburbs... Said one GOP lobbyist: 'Downtown, there is a sense that the House is already lost for Republicans. There is a hiring spree for plugged-in House Democrats who want to lobby. So, downtown is already planning on the Democratic takeover; the bets are on how big the flip will be.'"Let's hope they scoop up lots of congressional New Dems who have been just waiting for the opportunity. I could easily see Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), Anthony Brown (MD), Darren Soto (FL), Vicente Gonzalez (TX) and Gregory Meeks (NY)-- all headed nowhere in Congress-- carefully considering a career that fits them better. The House Democratic caucus would be better off without any of them.On Monday, David Sirota, writing for The Guardian had some words for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. He reported that "insurgent progressives are not limiting themselves to dethroning Republicans: they are taking aim at corporate-friendly Democrats within their own party, too. Amid an upsurge of populist energy that has alarmed the Democratic establishment, a new wave of left-leaning insurgents have been using Democratic primaries to wage a fierce war on the party’s corporate wing. And, as in past presidential primary battles, many Democratic consultants, politicians and pundits have insisted that the party must prioritize unity and resist grassroots pressure to support a more forceful progressive agenda."Today is our last federal primary-- in Rhode Island-- where there are no contested primaries. Tomorrow New York has a boatload of progressives challenging vile conservatives from top to bottom in state races. But after that, what happens? Will Democrats draw together to defeat Trump and his enablers? I hope so. Trump is too much of an existential threat to take on the Republican wing of the Democratic Party now. I hate picking between the lesser of two evils and I usually refuse to. But now... Trump. I'm prepared to hold my nose and back anyone (except Kyrsten Sinema, a dangerous sociopath, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has a progressive independent opponent, Tim Canova, running against her) with a "D" next to their name. I may vomit in the process.But will the establishment back progressives who won their primaries? The DCCC says it wants unity and asks progressive voters to back its shit conservative candidates like Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ), Jason Crow (New Dem-CO), Ann Kirkpatrick (New Dem-AZ) and Anthony Brindisi (NY). Meanwhile the DCCC is still undermining progressives who won their primaries, like J.D. Scholten (IA), James Thompson (KS), Ammar Campa-Najjar (CA)... the list of the ones endorsed by Blue America is available by tapping on this year's Abandoned By The DCCC ActBlue thermometer on the right. Unity is a two-way street, isn't it? I can understand why Sirota wrote that "Dislodging those corporate Democrats, then, is not some counterproductive distraction-- it is a critical front in the effort to actually make America great again." He pointed out that "liberal America’s pattern of electing corporate Democrats-- rather than progressives-- has been a big part of the problem that led to Trump and that continues to make America’s economic and political system a neo-feudal dystopia.""[L]iberal America," he wrote, "has often produced something much different and less appealing: Democratic politicians who constantly echo courageous populist themes in speeches, news releases and election ads, and then often uses the party’s governmental power to protect the status quo and serve corporate donors in their interminable class war." He's right.
Less than a decade ago, with Democratic majorities controlling both the House and Senate, it was the administration led by Obama and Emanuel that bailed out Wall Street, enshrined a too-big-to-jail doctrine for megabanks and-- by its own admission-- designed the Affordable Care Act to preclude Medicare for All. Obama’s administration did this while Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. It was Democratic lawmakers’ like Delaware’s Tom Carper and Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman who helped insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists make sure the ACA also excluded any public healthcare option that could compete with private insurers.Today, it is House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, from deeply liberal San Francisco, insisting that Medicare for All will not be any kind of litmus test for her party and promising that budget-cutting austerity will govern Democrats’ legislative agenda should they retake Congress.It is 16 Senate Democrats voting to help Wall Street lobbyists gut post-financial-crisis banking regulations. Those include blue-staters like Colorado’s Michael Bennet and Delaware’s Chris Coons, the latter of which then went on to make national headlines slamming progressives for supposedly pushing the party too far to the left.It is 13 Senate Democrats, including 2020 presidential prospect Cory Booker of Democratic New Jersey, beholding skyrocketing drug prices--and then voting to help pharmaceutical lobbyists defeat Bernie Sanders’ initiative to let Americans purchase lower-priced medicine from Canada.It is most of the Democratic Senate caucus recently voting to confirm 15 of Trump’s judicial appointees, and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, from Democratic New York, vowing there will be no punishment for Democratic lawmakers who vote to confirm Trump’s supreme court nominees.Recounting this sordid record is not to dispute Democrats’ occasional successes. Some blue locales continue to periodically pass progressive initiatives, most recently on climate change, net neutrality and minimum wages. These are undoubtedly important, but they have for the most part been incremental at a time when the economic and ecological crises we face demand far more radical action.The current iteration of the Democratic party has proven time and again that it is not merely uninterested in that kind of radicalism, but actively opposed to it. Party powerbrokers and multimillion-dollar MSNBC pundits would prefer an election focused exclusively on the palace dramas surrounding Trump’s boorish outbursts and outrageous personal behavior. They don’t want an election focused on the bipartisan neoliberalism that has wrought the desperation and mayhem unfolding outside the palace walls....[P]rogressive challengers and others like them have each run unique campaigns, but all have embodied the core belief that anti-Trump rhetoric alone is not an adequate response to the emergencies at hand. Democrats’ record in liberal states and liberal cities over the last decade makes a strong case that they are correct-- and so now the revolution is on.That may bewilder the Democrats’ permanent political class that has gotten used to steamrolling the public, losing elections and still remaining in charge of the party-- but, really, the only confusing thing about this uprising is that it took this long to finally ignite.
Back to that unity thing one more time. Henry Cuellar is a very, very right wing Blue Dog in a very blue Texas district (from Laredo and the McAllen suburbs up to San Antonio). Hillary beat Trump in his district 58.3% to 38.5% and Obama won it both times he ran. The PVI is D+9. But Cuellar consistently votes with the Republicans in Congress and sports an "F" from ProgressivePunch. It gets worse. With control of the House in play... Cuellar invited his supporters to a breakfast fundraiser for vulnerable Texas Republican John Carter yesterday in San Antonio. The invitation links to a "John Carter Conservative for Congress" contribution page with donor levels up to $2,700. I called the DCCC to ask about this-- since they have endorsed M.J. Hegar, the conservative Democrat running against Carter-- but couldn't get any kind of response. Of course.