#democrats in disarray

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Working class Dems who campaign on economics beat Trumpists in elections

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me FRIDAY NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The Democratic Party Pizzaburger Theory of Electioneering is: half the electorate wants a pizza, the other half wants a burger, so we'll give them all a pizzaburger and make them all equally dissatisfied, thus winning the election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

But no one wants a pizzaburger. The Biden administration's approach of letting the Warren/Sanders wing pick the antitrust enforcers while keeping judicial appointments in the Manchin-Synematic universe is a catastrophe in which progressive Dem regulators (who serve one term) are thwarted by corporatist Dem judges (who serve for life):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

The Democrats – like all parties in two-party systems – are a coalition; in this case, a "progressive" liberal-left coalition with liberals serving as senior partners, steering the party and setting its policies. These corporate dems like to color themselves as "neutral" technocrats with "realistic, apolitical" policies that represent what's best for the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

This sets up the left wing of the party as the starry-eyed, unrealistic radicals whose policies are unpopular and will lose elections. But for a decade, grassroots-funded primary challenges have made it possible to test this theory, by putting leftist politicians on the ballot in front of voters, especially in tight races with far-right Republicans (that is, exactly the kinds of races that the corporate wing of the party says we can't afford to take chances on).

The 2022 midterms included enough races to start testing these theories – and, unlike traditional midterms, these races enjoyed high voter turnout, thanks to the unpopularity of GOP positions like abortion bans, book bans and anti-trans laws. Jacobin teamed up with the Center for Working-Class Politics, Yougov and the Center for Work and Democracy at ASU and analyzed those races:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/11134429/CWCP-Report-2024.pdf

Their conclusion: candidates from working-class backgrounds who campaigned on economic policies like high-quality jobs, higher minimum wages, a jobs guarantee, ending offshoring and outsourcing, building infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back to the US won with a 50% share of the vote in rural and working-class districts. Dems who didn't lost with a 35% share of the vote:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-03-18-how-actually-existing-democrats-run-for-office/

In other words, in the kinds of districts where Trumpist politicians are beating Democrats, running on "left populist" policies beats Trumpist politicians.

That's the good news: if Dems recruit leftist, working class politicians and put them up for office on policies that address the material reality of voters' lives, they can beat fascist GOP candidates.

Now for the bad news: the Democratic establishment has no interest in getting these candidates onto the ballot. Working-class candidates, by definition, lack the networks of deep-pocketed cronies who can fund their primary campaigns. Only 2.3% of Dem candidates come from blue-collar backgrounds (if you include "pink-collar" professions like nursing and teaching, the number goes up to 5.9%):

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-populists-working-class-voters

All of this confirms the findings of Trump's Kryoptonite, an earlier Jacobin/CWCP research project that polled working-class voters on preferences for hypothetical candidates, finding that working-class candidates with economically progressive policies handily beat out Republicans, including MAGA Republicans:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/08125102/TrumpsKryptonite_Final_June2023.pdf

Since the Clinton-Blair years, "progressives" have abandoned economic populism ("It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money" -T. Blair) and pursued a "third way" that seeks to replace half the world's of supply white, male oligarchs with diverse oligarchs from a variety of backgrounds and genders. We were told that this was done in the name of winning elections with "modern" policies that replaced old-fashioned ideas about decent pay, decent jobs, and worker power.

These policies have delivered a genocide-riven world on the brink of several kinds of existential catastrophe. They're a failure. The pizzaburger party didn't deliver safety, nor prosperity – and it also can't deliver elections.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/20/actual-material-conditions/#bread-and-butter

#pluralistic #elections #political science #democrats #democrats in disarray #class #class war #us politics #pizzaburger

[qqueenofhades]

i can only imagine what the coverage would be like if 20 progressives were doing this to dems

I mean, if you elected 20 of your average Online Leftists as members of Congress, this is basically what you'd get, since it’s their equivalent but on the right-wing.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #and yes they would be EATEN ALIVE #DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY headlines from now until the end of time #yet we still have a chunk of the media currently insinuating that it is the democrats' fault for not Helping The Poor Wittle Republicans #incredible

[tomorrowusa]

Gym Jordan's attempt to become House Speaker ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

The Republican conference on Friday voted to no longer back House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as its Speaker nominee. The secret ballot vote came hours after Jordan’s third failed ballot on the House floor. He had lost GOP support with each successive vote. Friday marks the latest drama in the more than two-week saga since eight House Republicans joined with Democrats to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Oct. 3. Jordan was the GOP’s second shot at Speaker replacement. It had first narrowly nominated House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) for the post, but resistance to his candidacy — mostly from Jordan supporters — forced him to withdraw a day later.

Scalise said after the Jordan vote on Friday he would not mount another bid for Speaker.

Don't expect a Speaker until Tuesday at the very earliest. Republicans only hurry when they're trying to regulate women's bodies, suppress voter turnout, or persecute the LGBTQ+ community.

If you hear anybody shooting off their mouth and spewing bothsiderism about the House fiasco, remind them that House Democrats have offered to work with those Republicans who are more interested in governing than conducting a freak show on Capitol Hill. So far there have been no takers.

There isn't much we can do right now regarding the House. But there's an election next year and we can help elect a Democratic majority

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

If you live in a US House district carried by Joe Biden in 2020 but currently represented by a Republican, contact your state or county Democratic Party to see what you can do about replacing that Republican with a Democrat next year. Here's a list of those 18 districts.

If all 18 of those Republicans lose in 2024 then Dems would have 230 seats – 12 above the number needed for a majority in the 119th Congress.

#gym jordan #oh-04 #speaker of the house #us house of representatives #republicans #republicans in disarray #republicans can't govern #democratic congressional campaign committee #election 2024

[rosielindy]

Indiana is ready to turn blue, this guy is out of control. What a stooge! It’s not a Biden policy decision FFS! And there’s nothing to unleash. Who elects these idiots?

Tom McDermott is a much better choice to represent Hoosiers.

Shocking, gas companies raising prices right before a major holiday expecting more travel than 2019 pre-pandemic. SMH

https://twitter.com/_carlos_2020_/status/1565103567685517312?s=21&t=H5MNl9Ky0jmxTQbcpqQZPg

#indiana politics #todd young #midterms 2022 #2022 midterms #voter turnout #voter participation #Tom McDermott #Fire Todd Young #Republicans in disarray #Democrats in array #bluewave2022 #vote like your life depends on it

[wilwheaton]

The most generous analysis — the kind you might hope to see in mainstream media coverage — would focus on a Republican Party in disarray on a level conservatives have long falsely accused Democrats of but which no party has exhibited to this degree since before WWII. By comparison, the Democrats of 1968 look like they were cast for that iconic Coke commercial of the era. The Republican field sans Trump couldn’t agree on Trump, the Constitution, Jan. 6, Ukraine, climate change, or — unbelievably — abortion. Kumbaya. And yet that still doesn’t fully capture the dysfunction and self-delusion that the GOP exhibited last night. It’s not riven by factionalism or dueling power bases vying for supremacy. Chris Christie, Asa Hutchison, and Doug Burgum represent no one and had no place being on the debate stage. Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott represent the last vestiges of the former GOP, and their anemic response to Trump even now exemplifies how the Republican Party got itself into this mess to begin with. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are explicit about wanting to be the next Trump and are soulless enough to pull it off but lack his skills and appeal. Ramaswamy was particularly horrifying to watch, a know-nothing who will say anything and do so convincingly. If this debate had an iconic moment it was the halting raising of hands captured in the photo above when the candidates were asked if they would support Trump as GOP nominee even if he were a convicted felon by then. All but Christie and Hutchison were down for Trump 2.0. No winners in this debate. Just losers.

The Most Unsettling Presidential Debate Spectacle Ever

[ardourie]

and obv i wasn’t alive during that time i only have historical accounts and family that lived during it but ppl rlly don’t get the full gravity of how these civil rights leaders were truly uniting people, fred hampton was creating such a mass of movement and love and community that he had ppl in the police force putting down their guns and white people coming down to black neighborhoods just to hear him speak, they shot him to death at his the of 21 while he slept bc, and im quoting the literal fbi files “we feared a black messiah unifying people” if u want to know why so many of our communities r in disarray it’s because they wiped out an entire generation of men and women by jailing or drugs or regular murder for fighting back, these things are not coincidental, theses groups didn’t randomly disband, both parties republican and democrat saw us and anyone who supported our liberation as a threat, theirs a reason why the places where we are highest in population are gerrymandered to all hell, and theirs a reason democrats go to these places preaching how they’ll help and then turn around to institutionalize us even more when they take office

[mariacallous]

Political insiders like U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips have been expressing doubts about Joe Biden for years. Yet Biden just keeps winning. Voters have elected him to national office three times in four elections. Those voters also gave him the biggest midterm win for a Democratic president in 60 years. Biden has earned those votes by delivering the strongest domestic leadership since LBJ, and the strongest international leadership since JFK. He is the best candidate we have in 2024, and the only thing holding him back is the doubters in his own party.

The very fact that Biden was able to beat Donald Trump and be sworn into office in a peaceful transfer of power met an important test. Peaceful, you ask? Certainly former President Trump's actions, and those of his mob, were not peaceful. But Biden sailed through all of the calamity with apparent calm, acting as though there was never any question that the Constitution and the rule of law would prevail. He was always confident in us.

The immediate task of the new president was grappling with a nation divided over COVID and the need to provide economic support to families struggling through the pandemic. The American Rescue Plan put billions of dollars into the hands of working-class Americans. The economy boomed, driven by demand from workers and families spending money on necessities. Child poverty dropped by 40%, and American families have seen wages rise at levels not seen since the 1960s. Today, the strength of the American economy is pulling the rest of the world forward, despite the global struggle with inflation.

It is easy already to forget the size and scope of the Biden infrastructure bill, which will modernize American communities and our economy for a generation and more. Roads, bridges, transit, the electrical grid, water infrastructure, broadband — the whole platform for growth in the nation will be built out and create millions of American jobs.

Perhaps most significantly, Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act will transform our energy economy and enable America to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. This will put us in the driver's seat for pushing other nations to meet their goals. There is no larger threat to our nation and the global economy than rising global temperatures, increased severe weather and the loss of a precious ecological and cultural heritage. The pandemic was a light breeze compared to the impending storm of global climate destruction, and the Inflation Reduction Act was a strategic move to allow us to lead in stopping it.

The Inflation Reduction Act could also be called the Chinese Divestment Act. Not only does the energy policy address our need to transition to renewable energy, but it creates enormous incentives for companies to invest in technology and manufacturing in North America. No other president in our lifetime would offer an American working family $7,000 to buy an electric car made in America. The Inflation Reduction Act is exactly the industrial policy this country has needed for so long.

Just a few years ago, Chinese economic power coupled with Russian weapons of war appeared to be a genuine threat to the American-led international order. Autocrats were rising while traditional Western democratic institutions were in disarray. Some people were comparing America to Weimar Germany and seeing similarities to the weakness of democratic nations in the face of fascism.

Russia's illegal and inhumane invasion of Ukraine came at exactly the wrong time — for Russia and China. Putin threw down an enormous challenge in front of the American-led alliance. We advanced as one against him. Biden worked with Europe to accept major economic pain as a price of confronting Russian aggression. The Biden response to Russian aggression simultaneously revived the democracies' power in the world and reminded us that autocracies are always fundamentally weak.

In just three years, Joe Biden's leadership has revived democracy, defeated a pandemic, raised millions of Americans out of poverty, revitalized American infrastructure, addressed global warming and weakened authoritarian nations. He also keeps winning elections and confounding all his critics. Congressman Phillips: What more do you want?

Ryan Winkler, of Golden Valley, is the former DFL majority leader of the Minnesota House.

[deadpresidents]

A Statement from 13 Presidential Centers: The unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, are principles that bind us together as Americans. They have enabled the United States to strive toward a more perfect union, even when we have not always lived up to those ideals. As a diverse nation of people with different backgrounds and beliefs, democracy holds us together. We are a country rooted in the rule of law, where the protection of the rights of all people is paramount. At the same time, we live among our fellow citizens, underscoring the importance of compassion, tolerance, pluralism, and respect for others. We, the undersigned, represent a wide range of views across a breadth of issues. We recognize that these views can exist peaceably side by side when rooted in the principles of democracy. Debate and disagreement are central features in a healthy democracy. Civility and respect in political discourse, whether in an election year or otherwise, are essential. Americans have a strong interest in supporting democratic movements and respect for human rights around the world because free societies elsewhere contribute to our own security and prosperity here at home. But that interest is undermined when others see our own house in disarray. The world will not wait for us to address our problems, so we must both continue to strive toward a more perfect union and help those abroad looking for U.S. leadership. Each of us has a role to play and responsibilities to uphold. Our elected officials must lead by example and govern effectively in ways that deliver for the American people. This, in turn, will help to restore trust in public service. The rest of us must engage in civil dialogue; respect democratic institutions and rights; uphold safe, secure, and accessible elections; and contribute to local, state, or national improvement. By signing this statement, we reaffirm our commitment to the principles of democracy undergirding this great nation, protecting our freedom, and respecting our fellow citizens. When united by these convictions, America is stronger as a country and an inspiration for others. Obama Foundation George W. Bush Presidential Center Clinton Foundation George & Barbara Bush Foundation The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute The Carter Center Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Richard Nixon Foundation LBJ Foundation John F. Kennedy Library Foundation Truman Library Institute Roosevelt Institute Hoover Presidential Foundation

#History #Presidents #Presidential Libraries #Presidential Centers #Presidential Foundations #Presidency #Democracy #National Archives #NARA #Presidential Library System

[schraubd]

Media Alt-Centrists in Disarray

  When I first saw this Tweet (Xeet?), my eye was drawn to "Dems should pursue working-class voters of all races." It's a great example of something that is simultaneously (a) alt-center conventional wisdom and (b) utterly inane. What are the sorts of policies Dems should pursue to working-class voters of all races? Answer: the ones they're already supporting!  The difference between talking and delivering. pic.twitter.com/mb6bp65eKV — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 31, 2023 Price negotiations for prescription drugs is a great, obvious example of a policy that's geared to the interest of working-class voters of all races. Standing with the incipient wave of labor mobilization is another. The infrastructure bill was yet another. All of these are centerpiece items of the Democratic Party's economic agenda. But the alt-center punditry acts as if they don't exist. The "advice" on offer is "do what you're already doing, but make me pay attention to it." And one cannot help but think that the price the pundits have put on "make me pay attention to it" is "stop distracting me by also supporting policies that are distinctively to the benefit of specific historically marginalized communities." At the same time, there is a separate vapidity in the "advice" that Biden shouldn't run for reelection. Again, as advice this is just terrible: Biden has a proven electoral track record and has already beaten Trump once. There's no universe where a chaotic primary free-for-all would actually be healthy for the Democratic Party or the broader prospect of ensuring that Trump or any of his lackeys stay out of the White House. The desire for "a real primary" is just thinly-disguised thirst for the good old days of "Dems in disarray" and the chaotic intraparty knife fights that aren't happening on the GOP side because virtually all of Trump's "challengers" can't help but cozy up to him (with a not-so-subtle wink to the various factions within the Democratic Party whose definition of a "real primary" excludes any primary where their preferred candidate doesn't march to victory). Finally, "faculty lounge" politics is also a meaningless phrase. If it's meant to refer to the notion that Democratic party politics take their cues from whatever petition is currently being passed around the Wesleyan anthropology department email list, it's delusional. If it's meant to be a general referent to so-called "culture war" politics, then it's horribly outdated -- we are long past the days where the main "culture" wedge issues favored Republicans over Democrats. Republicans are getting absolutely blitzed on reproductive rights as their radical campaigns to imprison, maim, and murder women are predictably reviled. And their anti-LGBTQ agenda doesn't fare much better. Democrats have a lot of room to punish Republicans for their extremism here, and absolutely should. Biden should run for reelection, and in the process will no doubt trounce token primary opposition. He should promote his policies which will improve the lives of working class voters of all races, and he should absolutely torch Republicans for their unabashed extremism in desiring to take American "culture" back to the 19th century. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/zVgUnOJ

#abortion #class #Democrats #economy #Election 2024 #Joe Biden #reproductive rights

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conservatives are fringe outliers - and leftists could learn from them

The Republican Party, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas (Red Scare obsessed cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent, noisy radical wing, who are obsessed with policies that are completely irrelevant to the majority of Americans.

As Oliver Willis writes, the views of the radical right — which are also the policies of the GOP — are wildly out of step with the US political view:

https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/conservatives-arent-like-normal-americans

The press likes to frame American politics as “narrowly divided,” but the reality is that Republicans’ electoral victories are due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions (the Senate and Electoral College, etc), not popularity. Democrats consistently outperform the GOP in national races. Dems won majorities in 1992/6, and beat the GOP in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. The only presidential race the GOP won on popular votes since 1988 was 2004, when GW Bush eked out a plurality (not a majority).

But, as Willis says, Dems “act like it is 1984 and that they are outliers in a nation of Reagan voters,” echoing a stilted media narrative. The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority.

Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression.

Willis correctly points out that Dem leaders are basically “normal” center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights.”

The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies “woke” (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year).

But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that “Republicans and Big Business broke up”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-corporations-donations-pacs-9b5b202b

But America is a two-party system and there are plenty of people who’ll pull the lever for any Republican. This means that when the GOP comes under the control of its swivel-eyed loon wing, the swivel-eyed loons wield power far beyond the number of people who agree with them.

There’s an important lesson there for Dems, whose establishment is volubly proud of its independence from its voters. The Biden administration is a weirdly perfect illustration of this “independence.” The Biden admin is a kind of referee, doling out policies and appointments to its competing wings, without any coherence or consistency.

That’s how you get incredible appointments like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureat — the progressive wing of the party bargained for these key appointments and then played their cards very well, getting incredible, hard-charging, hyper-competent fighters in those roles.

Likewise, Jared Bernstein, finally confirmed as Council of Economic Advisers chair after an interminable wrangle:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-16-team-biden/

And Julie Su, acting labor secretary, who just delivered a six-year contract to west coast dockworkers with 8–10% raises in the first year, paid retroactively for the year they worked without a contract:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/14/statement-from-president-biden-on-labor-agreement-at-west-coast-ports/

But the Biden admin’s unwillingness to side with one wing of the party also produces catastrophic failures, like the martyrdom of Gigi Sohn, who was subjected to years of vicious personal attacks while awaiting confirmation to the FCC, undefended by the Biden admin, left to twist in the wind until she gave it up as a bad job:

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

It’s how we get key roles filled by do-nothing seatwarmers like Pete Buttigieg, who has the same sweeping powers that Lina Khan is wielding so deftly at the FTC, but who lacks either the will or the skill to wield those same powers at the Department of Transport:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

By refusing to stand for anything except a fair division of powers among different Democratic Party blocs, the Biden admin ends up undercutting itself. Take right to repair, a centerpiece of the administration’s agenda, subject of a historic executive order and FTC regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Right to Repair fights have been carried out at the state level for years, with the biggest victory coming in Massachusetts, where an automotive R2R ballot initiative won overwhelming support in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

But despite the massive support for automotive right to repair in the Bay State, Big Car has managed to delay the implementation of the new law for years, tying up the state in expensive, time-consuming litigation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But eventually, even the most expensive delaying tactic fails. Car manufacturers were set to come under the state right to repair rule this month, but they got a last minute reprieve, from Biden’s own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who sent urgent letters to every major car manufacturer, telling them to ignore the Massachusetts repair law:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bbkv/biden-administration-tells-car-companies-to-ignore-right-to-repair-law-people-overwhelmingly-voted-for

The NHTSA repeats the car lobby’s own scare stories about “cybersecurity” that they blitzed to Massachusetts voters in the runup to the ballot initiative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The idea that cybersecurity is best maintained by letting powerful corporations gouge you on service and parts is belied by independent experts, like SecuRepairs, who do important work countering the FUD thrown off by the industry (and parroted by Biden’s NHTSA):

https://securepairs.org/

Independent security experts are clear that letting owners of high-tech devices decide who fixes them, what software they run, etc, makes us safer:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2022/01/letter-to-the-us-senate-judiciary-committee-on-app-stores.html

But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn’t an administration, it’s a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision for a climate-ready, anti-Gilded Age America has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

Nowhere is this better explained than in Naomi Klein’s superb long-form article on RFK Jr’s presidential bid in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option

Don’t get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He’s an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.

But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:

a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world — inflamed on every level — that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr is campaigning against “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power,” against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.

As Klein says, despite RFK Jr’s willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he’s not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.” Rather, “public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers.”

We’ve been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a “rigged system” and promising to “make America great again?” Remember Clinton’s rejoinder that “America was already great?” It’s hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage — over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.

Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not “already great.”

The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party — at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.

But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can’t afford to look after its people.

In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize. In her memoir A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers’ votes and suppress others’ altogether. These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

But despite all this, labor organizers win union elections and strike votes, and they do so with stupendous majorities — 95% or higher. This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers’ strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families. What’s more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020’s Democratic Congressional majority.

As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey’s book:

For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters. Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.

It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads. That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.

What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.

If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

[Image ID: The title page of Richard Hofstadter's 'Paranoid Style in American Politics' from the November, 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. A John Birch Society pin reading 'This is REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY: let's keep it that way' sits atop the page, obscuring the introductory paragraph.]

#pluralistic #tgop #politics #centrism #centrism kills #qgop #democrats in disarray #trumpism #conservatives #robert f kennedy #Massachusetts #climate emergency #naomi klein #oliver willis #right to repair #pizzaburgers

[qqueenofhades]

So it looks like Sinema, having gotten her requisite pound of flesh for her billionaire hedge fund buddies (basically, they agreed to keep the carried-interest tax loophole and replace it with an excise tax on stock buybacks), has finally agreed to support the Inflation Reduction Act, otherwise known as the $740 billion "pretty much Build Back Better but we are calling it something different" bill that Manchin and Schumer came out with. If/when it passes, which could be as soon as this weekend, the Democrats will have achieved -- with a 50-50 Senate with two habitual Manchurian candidates, a four-seat House majority, a rampantly fascist opposing party, a Supreme Court openly bent on destroying democracy and personal liberty, and an active criminal investigation into the previous administration -- at least the following:

The American Rescue Plan, aka the first post-inauguration $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, which was the largest investment in the working class since the New Deal;

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is the first major structural and transportation modernization and systemic overhaul for the country since the 1970s;

The first significant gun safety legislation in 30 years and since at least the Clinton administration;

Multiple executive orders now signed on protecting abortion rights and access to reproductive care, including travel out of state if necessary;

A bill in the works to officially codify same-sex marriage and thus protect it from SCOTUS;

Reauthorization and improvement of the Violence Against Women Act, including strong new protections for LGBTQ+ and Native American victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault, including the ability for Native courts to prosecute non-Native offenders for sex crimes for the first time in history;

Finally (FINALLY) making lynching a federal hate crime;

The largest climate legislation ever passed in America (this bill), which also establishes a federal minimum 15% corporate tax rate and lowers healthcare costs, including for essential medications like insulin, by, like, a lot;

Passage of the PACT Act, aka expanding healthcare for disabled veterans exposed to burn pits, also the biggest expansion in this field for a generation despite Republicans briefly killing it in an outburst of pettiness;

Consistent big packages of support for Ukraine, rebuilding of foreign alliances, huge bipartisan support for including Sweden and Finland in NATO (hahahaha fuck you Josh Hawley);

The CHIPS act, which creates tech and manufacturing jobs in America and was made even sweeter by how thoroughly they fucked over McTurtle to do it (since oh boy does he deserve a taste of his own medicine);

Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on SCOTUS, and not an awful white supremacist stand-in like Clarence Thomas, but a genuinely progressive and thoughtful jurist;

Cancellation of almost $6 billion in student loans for the poorest and most defrauded borrowers, such as those who attended scam for-profit "colleges";

And so on and so forth!!!

So like. Please tell me more about how the Democrats are incompetent, their leadership is bad, they are in Disarray TM, you are a terrible person if you support Biden or give them any credit at all, and you're just not excited to vote because they haven't done anything. Like yes! There is a lot more to do! Despite them suddenly deciding to play ball on this particular occasion, Manchin and Sinema still need to be made irrelevant as soon as possible! But as I said, this is happening with the thinnest of imaginable Congressional control, as the other party is literally trying to destroy democracy in real time before our faces. That is not irrelevant.

Also: ruby-red Kansas curb-stomped an attempt to outlaw abortion rights, and approximately 77% of the entire country supports this current bill. The generic Congressional ballots have all shown major movement toward Democrats, and frankly, I have a feeling that we have only just started to see the full impact of post-Roe fallout. So if you get off your asses, quit whining, and put the work in, we could actually win the midterms and then do EVEN MORE!

So yeah. Uh. Food for thought.

#hilary for ts #politics for ts #'but biden didn't give me a pony!!!' #'sTudEnT lOaNs!!!' #oh like the ones you have not paid a single penny on since he took office #the legislative agenda enacted thus far represents progress in every single left wing issue #and in utterly terrible circumstances #so yeah if you are still saying this #please stfu forever

[tomorrowusa]

« In September 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to open the door to overturning the constitutional right to abortion granted by Roe v. Wade, which it ultimately did a year later.

But Republicans, for some reason, didn’t celebrate much. I reflected at the time on whether they were becoming the proverbial dog that catches the car — achieving a goal they had long sought (being able to severely restrict abortion) and having no idea how to handle it politically.

This past week is the moment they not only caught the car, but arguably had it back over them, courtesy of two state supreme courts. »

— Aaron Blake at the Washington Post.

Republicans pushing their 17th century policies to MAGA voters stubbornly clinging to the mid 20th century were bound to find themselves out of step with a majority of the electorate in the 2020s.

While the Florida abortion referendum in November won't, by itself, win Florida for Biden – it can't hurt. Most of the national mindset about Florida being a solid red state comes from the combination of extreme GOP gerrymandering and a chronically disorganized state Democratic Party.

But Trump won Florida by only 3.36% of the vote in 2020. The Obama-Biden ticket carried Florida in both 2008 and 2012. Ron DeSantis won his 2018 race for governor by a narrow 0.40%. So even the perception that the state is in play would help Democrats statewide. And Trump simply can't win this year without carrying Florida.

Given the disarray abortion is causing Arizona Republicans, perhaps Democrats in DeSantis's back yard should adopt the slogan: Make Florida Arizona.

#abortion #republicans #out of step republicans #republicans in disarray #roe v. wade #us supreme court #a woman's right to choose #reproductive freedom #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #arizona #florida #make florida arizona #put florida in play #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who #aaron blake

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

John Deering, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 24, 2024 (Sunday)

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 25, 2024

The Senate passed the appropriations bill shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, and President Joe Biden signed it Saturday afternoon. In his statement after he signed the bill, Biden was clear: “Congress’s work isn’t finished,” he said. “The House must pass the bipartisan national security supplemental to advance our national security interests. And Congress must pass the bipartisan border security agreement—the toughest and fairest reforms in decades—to ensure we have the policies and funding needed to secure the border. It’s time to get this done.”

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to bring forward the national security supplemental bill to fund Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. He has also refused to bring forward the border security measure hammered out in the Senate after House Republicans demanded it and passed there on February 13. Johnson is doing the bidding of former president Trump, who opposes aid to Ukraine and border security measures. 

Congress is on break and will not return to Washington, D.C., until the second week in April. 

By then, political calculations may well have changed. 

MAGA Republicans appear to be in trouble.  

The House recessed on Friday for two weeks in utter disarray. On ABC News’s This Week, former representative Ken Buck (R-CO), who left Congress Friday, complained that House Republicans were focusing “on messaging bills that get us nowhere” rather than addressing the country’s problems. He called Congress “dysfunctional.” 

On Friday, NBC announced it was hiring former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. Today the main political story in the U.S. was the ferocious backlash to that decision. McDaniel not only defended Trump, attacked the press, and gaslit reporters, she also participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

In an interview with Kristen Welker this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press—Welker was quick to point out that the interview had been arranged long before she learned of the hiring— McDaniel explained away her support for Trump’s promise to pardon those convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by saying, “When you’re the RNC Chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”

That statement encapsulated Trump Republicans. In a democracy, the “team” is supposed to be the whole country. But Trump Republicans like McDaniel were willing to overthrow American democracy so long as it kept them in power.  

That position is increasingly unpopular. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote on social media: “Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure [Michigan] officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies & called 1/6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ That’s not ‘taking one for the team.’ It’s enabling criminality & depravity.”

McDaniel wants to be welcomed back into mainstream political discourse, but it appears that the window for such a makeover might have closed. 

In the wake of Trump’s takeover of the RNC, mainstream Republicans are backing away from the party. Today, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she could not “get behind Donald Trump” and expressed “regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” She did not rule out leaving the Republican Party.

In Politico today, a piece on Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, by Adam Wren also isolated Trump from the pre-2016 Republican Party. Pence appears to be trying to reclaim the mantle of that earlier incarnation of the party, backed as he is by right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow (who has funded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over the years) and the Koch network. Wren’s piece says Pence is focusing these days on “a nonprofit policy shop aimed at advancing conservative ideals.” Wren suggested that Pence’s public split from Trump is “the latest sign that Trumpism is now permanently and irrevocably divorced from its initial marriage of convenience with…Reaganism.” 

Trump appears to believe his power over his base means he doesn’t need the established Republicans. But that power came from Trump’s aura of invincibility, which is now in very real crisis thanks to Trump’s growing money troubles. Tomorrow is the deadline for him to produce either the cash or a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York in fines and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains for fraud. 

Trump does not appear to have the necessary cash and has been unable to get a bond. He claims a bond of such size is “unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine," and that "[t]he Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to.” But Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact corrected the record: it is not uncommon for companies in civil litigation cases to post bonds of more than $1 billion.

Trump made his political career on his image as a successful and fabulously wealthy businessman. Today, “Don Poorleone” trended on X (formerly Twitter). 

The backlash to McDaniel’s hiring at NBC also suggests a media shift against news designed to grab eyeballs, the sort of media that has fed the MAGA movement. According to Mike Allen of Axios, NBC executives unanimously supported hiring McDaniel. A memo from Carrie Budoff Brown, who is in charge of the political coverage at NBC News, said McDaniel would help the outlet examine “the diverse perspectives of American voters.” This appears to mean she would appeal to Trump voters, bringing more viewers to the platform.  

But former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd took a strong stand against adding McDaniel to a news organization, noting her “credibility issues” and that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting [and] character assassination.” 

This pushback against news media as entertainment recalls the 1890s, when American newspapers were highly partisan and gravitated toward more and more sensational headlines and exaggerated stories to increase sales. That publication model led to a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal that is widely—and almost certainly inaccurately—blamed for pushing the United States into war with Spain in 1898. 

More accurate, though, is that the sensationalism of what was known as “yellow journalism” created a backlash that gave rise to new investigative journalism designed to move away from partisanship and explain clearly to readers what was happening in American politics and economics. In 1893, McClure’s Magazine appeared, offering in-depth examinations of the workings of corporations and city governments and launching a new era of reform. 

Three years later, publisher Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times and put up New York City’s first electric sign to advertise, in nearly 2,700 individual lights of red, white, blue, and green, that it would push back against yellow journalism by publishing “ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT.” Ochs added that motto to the masthead. With his determination to provide nonpartisan news without sensationalism, in just under 40 years, Ochs took over the paper from just over 20,000 readers to more than 465,000, and turned the New York Times into a newspaper of record.

In that era that looks so much like our own, the national mood had changed.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#John Deering. #The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette #political cartoons #TFG #dysfunctional congress #history #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #yellow journalism #McDaniel #RNC gaslighting

[edwordsmyth]

"It has become clear during the past two months in the Gaza Strip that the Zionist entity is plenty capable of equaling the belligerence of the American frontier, an era of wholesale ethnic cleansing thought to be a feature of history.  (“It could never happen today,” people sometimes would foolishly declare.)  Colonial atrocities of the past—Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the Trail of Tears—are now everywhere in evidence.  The Zionist entity is carrying out a kind of primitive violence with modern technology.  This violence fills our computer and television screens. People around the world get minute-by-minute accounts of massive destruction and widespread murder. Certain images have become horrifyingly familiar: throngs of refugees queuing for bread; ambulances dodging tank and machine gun fire; hospitals in disarray; once-dense neighborhoods transformed by aerial bombardment into kilometers of rubble. We scroll through photos of men blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, lined up on the ground like antiquities in a museum courtyard. The scrolling continues into pictures of white body bags in shallow trenches and then into videos of little girls and boys screaming trauma into the ruins of their childhood. We are perhaps the first generation to witness genocide in real time. History books about the horrors of the past are written every time somebody opens social media.

The theory that bearing witness will curtail Israel’s ability to act on exterminationist fantasies no longer holds. Information and knowledge, it turns out, aren’t reliable bulwarks against genocide. Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval.

What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from all corners of the world? It tells us that people serious about Palestinian liberation were right to despise the so-called radicals who laundered Zionism through celebrity activism, academic credentialism, NGO astroturf, and the Democratic Party. An entire class of influencers arose from Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential campaigns. They populate hundreds of podcasts and livestreams. They wasted incalculable energy and resources promoting a man who would go on to repeatedly justify the bloody campaign in Gaza. Now they deplore Sanders after having extracted all the clout appended to his name and having ostracized the outliers who accurately tagged him as a fraud from the get-go. It was the most noteworthy example of a timeworn practice: pursuing access to microphones and New Yorker profiles by subsuming Palestinian liberation to institutions constitutionally hostile to revolutionary politics. It tells us that international governing bodies and legal institutions are at best useless. Despite some halfhearted hemming and hawing, the UN has been an accomplice to the Zionist entity’s genocide. The ICC will never see an American, Israeli, or EU war criminal on its docket. The Arab League pretends to care, but its performance is entirely unconvincing. Such institutions have been captured by imperialism since their inception. It tells us that “dialogue” was always a pathway to submission. The idea that Israelis and Palestinians should dialogue as a means to peace was always dubious if only because dialogue can’t work in situations of disparate power. But now, with Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of the genocide, it should be clear that Palestinians never had anyone to dialogue with in the first place. It tells us that Western academe was completely unprepared for the material demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand. Many among the intellectual class, including scholars of Fanon like Adam Shatz and Lewis Gordon, either disavow or diminish anticolonial resistance or ignore it altogether. Academe is where resistance goes for processing and beautification after it has been completed. It’s rarely a place for the organizing stage. It tells us that deterrence isn’t a game of strategy played by eggheads on the internet, but an onerous project conditional on guns and rockets. Academics generally are too scared to say it, or, in an object lesson on arrogance, don’t actually believe it, but a cache of weapons will always be more important than a conference panel. It tells us that electoralism is a sham. There is no meaningful ideological variance among U.S. politicians at the national level. In practice, they range from center-right to fascist. In the upcoming presidential election, for example, voters will get to decide between two scarcely-functional old farts with histories of sexual misconduct and a complete devotion to Zionist genocide. It tells us that racism isn’t simply an attitude, for its origin is social violence and eventually it will become physically violent in order to perform its civic mandate. In the framework of settler colonization, racism manifests as a yearning for cultural purification through displacement of the native. It tells us that capitalism makes death a valuable commodity. The Zionist entity isn’t merely an imperialist beachhead; it is a major player in the international weapons trade. It tests new munitions, chemicals, and surveillance technology on Palestinians. It arms reactionary forces throughout the Global South. It serves as a conduit and accomplice to U.S. policing. Because of Zionist occupation, corporations enjoy the use of human subjects as raw material for development and innovation.

It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without our extinction.

More than anything, it tells us that in the benighted West there is no democracy, no free speech, no legislative remedy, no human rights, no right even to be human. These are illusions people repeat in an effort to survive pervasive depravity, or myths they cynically invoke to gather the crumbs of deprivation. There is a ruling class and various iterations of the dispossessed and the dispossessed exist only to serve ruling class gluttony.

That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal devices without being able to stop it. We are not simply ineffectual in the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their depravity.

What can we do, then? It’s important to start by recognizing that the entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of empathy or relief. Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence. Upon this recognition, the possibilities become clearer, albeit less convenient. But in the spirit of urgency, we can keep it simple: whether it happens in darkness or light, on screen or off, the Zionist entity needs to become an archive we browse as a cautionary tale, or else our future on this planet will be history."

#steven salaita #palestine

[reading-writing-revolution]

"Lawrence’s powerful remarks reminds us that the disarray at the 1968 Democratic Convention contributed to our loss to Richard Nixon that year, the beginning of the crack up of FDR’s New Deal coalition and the onset of a generation of Southern Strategy-driven Republican dominance at the Presidential level."

#politics

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

“Spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries clearly won the day on Tuesday. He made history as the first Black House caucus leader; it was also the first time (to the best of my fact-checking ability) Brooklyn’s Biggie Smalls was quoted on the House floor. While Republicans savaged one another, Democrats spread love. Jubilant, they looked like they were in the majority, not (narrowly) outnumbered by Republicans. While it’s still extremely unlikely, Jeffries went to bed closer to being House Speaker than he was Tuesday morning. Let it be said that in all three roll calls, Jeffries got 212 votes, at least nine more than McCarthy, and only a few shy of what the next Speaker will need.

Debased House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is still not speaker, after three roll call votes in which he actually lost support. What happens when a man tries to sell his soul but finds no buyer? (A question for House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, too.) McCarthy gave the wing nuts virtually everything they asked for—the ability for only five members to force a vote to oust him as leader, key committee appointments, other rules changes, a gutted ethics committee, the ability to defund federal departments they don’t like. But they didn’t budge, and in fact their numbers climbed from an estimated five in the morning to 20 at 5 PM.

That’s when Representative Tom Cole moved to adjourn until noon on Wednesday. There had been talk that McCarthy and Co. wanted at least one more roll call vote, to “wear down” the opposition. But since the opposite was happening—the opposition was emboldened—most of the House did McCarthy a solid by voting to end his grueling day of trial by procedural combat.

Let it not be said, however, that the divided House GOP majority changed nothing. Shortly after noon on Tuesday, House security officials took down the weapon-detecting magnetometers, installed after January 6, that were intended to make sure no one entered the House chamber with a weapon. So there’s that.

There will be plenty of assessments of McCarthy’s plight after Tuesday, but I want to focus on Jeffries’s victory, even if it only lasts a day. It was also Nancy Pelosi’s: As she turned over her leadership post to Jeffries, she also bequeathed him a caucus schooled in sticking together, left, liberal, and center, when it matters most. I don’t think Beltway reporters addicted to a “Dems in disarray” story line ever understood what Pelosi accomplished, whether it was delivering her whole caucus for the Affordable Care Act in 2010, when the left was itching to bolt, to all the times she kept her members united under Donald Trump, to the selective defections she allowed—by the so-called Squad as well as centrists—as she pushed President Biden’s agenda in the past two years, knowing that certain members might need to go their own way given the proclivities of their districts.

So far, Jeffries hasn’t needed to grant any dispensation to Democrats to vote for someone else as Speaker. He won all Democratic votes, in a Speaker battle, for the first time since Pelosi did in 2007. That makes sense: Even though he is a liberal not unanimously beloved on the left, he won his caucus leader post by unanimous acclamation. Any reservations members had about him, whether from the left or the center, got subsumed by learned behavior: Being united has paid dividends for Democrats. Why stop now?

Midafternoon Tuesday, several reporters with GOP sources began floating the idea that Democrats might leave the floor, reducing the overall number of votes McCarthy would need to become Speaker. (The victor needs a majority of those present and voting for a named candidate, not of the entire House). I called bullshit at the time. It made no sense, given how Republicans were self-immolating. If there were a vital House Democratic center, maybe there would be people trying to cut deals with Republicans. (And while there isn’t, it’s still possible some incompetents are trying.)

Actually, a vital House Democratic center might be approaching Republicans in districts Joe Biden won to get them to vote for Jeffries. There are at least five: in Southern California, central New York, and southeastern Pennsylvania. Maybe Problem Solver Josh Gottheimer can work his magic? I doubt it. In fact, a much-gossipped-about photo capturing Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez chatting amiably with GOP psycho dentist Paul Gosar, who once produced a cartoon of himself killing the Bronx-Queens leader, turned out to show AOC gently disabusing Gosar of the notion that Democrats were ready to walk out and make it easier for McCarthy to win. “Dems in disarray,” d’oh! That message is strong.

It must be said that despite ideological fractures within the Democratic caucus, Jeffries had the unanimous support of the Congressional Black Caucus, and his historic leadership role, by most accounts, trumped policy differences. Progressives bristled last cycle when he joined with Gottheimer to thwart progressive Democratic challengers and refused “to bend the knee to democratic socialism,” as he put it. (As if anyone asked him to.) But when I heard Cori Bush cast her vote for Jeffries the first time, I knew he’d get all 212 Democrats. And he did. Three times.

After a brutal House GOP caucus meeting Tuesday morning, implacable McCarthy foe Matt Gaetz of Florida, who seems to have survived sex trafficking accusations, allegedly said, “I don’t care if we…elect Hakeem Jeffries.” I don’t believe that any more than I believe anything Gaetz says, but it’s still out there. Not counting on it, not betting on it, but whatever happens, Jeffries is in a hugely stronger position after this GOP multiple-vote shit show than he was even when Tuesday began. No matter who becomes Speaker, he’s going to be the most important House leader.

#us politics #news #2023 #the nation #op eds #118th congress #joan walsh #speaker of the house #rep. Hakeem Jeffries #rep. kevin mccarthy #rep. elise stefanik #rep. Tom Cole #rep. nancy pelosi #rep. alexandria ocasio cortez #rep. paul gosar #Congressional Black Caucus #Democrats #rep. matt gaetz #republicans #conservatives #progressives