No one except Trump's most ardent, die-hard fans ever believed U.S. troops on the southern border were anything more than a prop in Trump's shit show of a midterm campaign. Now he's running around-- with almost 40 less supporters in Congress-- clucking like a blind duck how his name wasn't on the ballot so that all those losses were anyone's fault but his own.
For the first time ever, Trump is doing something as so-called "president" that hurts his own business. The Trump family makes huge profits by leasing expensive apartments to wealthy pregnant women from China, Russia and other former Soviet states so that their children are born in the U.S. and become automatic citizens.
Jamie Raskin (D-MD), was one of the candidates elected to Congress in 2016. He has a very blue district Maryland district, where Jamie beat Republican Dan Cox 220,657) 60.6%) to 124,651 (34.2%. on the same day that Hillary eviscerated Trump 65.0% to 30.6%. The PVI is D+14 and this year the Republicans are represented by a vanity candidate, John Walsh, who hasn't raised the $5,000 that would trigger an FEC report.
GOP candidates rallying behind Trump read an ABC News headline yesterday. Some are, of course... and some aren't. The line that interested me most, though, was "Republicans appear far more comfortable touting Trump’s leadership than Democrats do arguing against it." Again, some are and some aren't-- on both ends of that statement.
The nonpartisan ethics watchdogs, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), was blunter than most when it came to defining the Trump/Ryan tax plan: it was designed lower Señor Trumpanzee's taxes. The Alternative Minimum Tax, which Ryan wants to eliminate entirely, cost Trump $31 million in 2005, the one year people got to examine part of Trump's returns. That tax was designed to get something out of crooked millionaires and billionaires who game the system to avoid taxes-- like Trump.
"The party of Big Money wants to eliminate all restraints on Big Money. No surprise there."-Alan Grayson
ProgressivePunch is an imperfect tool for evaluating how candidates perform, but it can be-- if not used as a blunt instrument-- a useful tool in putting together a comprehensive picture. And it's certainly better than any of the other systems I know of that evaluate and score congressional votes. We've mentioned several times that some of the Class of 2016 freshmen have turned out as dreadful as we expected them to.
-by Jeffrey HearnI finished writing the following post when there was about a week left in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign in Maryland’s Eighth congressional district. I was then working for Jamie Raskin, the progressive front-runner for the nomination whose chief rival throughout the primary had been Beltway insider Kathleen Matthews.
Even as he was assembling and deploying an American kakistocracy and calling it his administration, there were people of goodwill urging everyone to just wait and be open-minded and see if Trump didn't turn out to be an OK president. "After all," one of that tribe told me several times, "he was a liberal Democrat most of his life." Nah...
OinkAs you know by now, we started an Act Blue page to thank congressional resisters to Trumpism-- the courageous men and women who are refusing to attend his inauguration. Please visit to see the updated list. When we started there were only 6... now there are over 3 dozen!
