Month: April 2015

Berniemania!

by digby

Sanders is in:

VPR News has learned from several sources that Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday.

Sanders will release a short statement on that day and then hold a major campaign kickoff in Vermont in several weeks.

Sanders’ entry into the Democratic race ensures that Hillary Clinton will face a challenge to win the support of the liberal wing of the party.

Sanders’ basic message will be that the middle class in America has been decimated in the past two decades while wealthy people and corporations have flourished.

This is excellent news. Sanders being in the race will give voice to many of the left wing concerns that might otherwise never come up or would be dismissed without airing by the media. And who knows, Berniemania could sweep the nation!

(Don’t tell anyone but Sanders is a real live socialist. This is going to be fun if only to watch wingnut heads explode when he admits to it in public. It’s beyond their comprehension — they think socialism is some kind of totalitarian left wing ideology that will send them all to FEMA camps.)

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Schumer & Reid Support Patrick Murphy over Alan Grayson for U.S. Senate

by Gaius Publius

Ex-Republican (now “Democrat”) Patrick Murphy is, like Alan Grayson, a member of the House from Florida. Murphy has indicated he wants to run for Marco Rubio’s Senate seat, and Grayson is looking at it seriously as well. (You can support the Draft Grayson campaign here.)

So, who in this “Warren wing” moment is the DSCC’s preferred candidate? Murphy. Even Harry Reid, who I was assured is “more progressive than anyone realizes,” is on board with Murphy over Grayson. So much for Harry Reid; he’s opposed to TPP (or so I hear), but he clearly has his limits — the other thing I’ve been told about Harry Reid.

Howie Klein:

Chuck Schumer … is using every bit of pressure he can bring to bear to force Alan Grayson out of the race for the open Senate seat in Florida. Schumer and Reid– and therefore the embarrassing Tester– are firmly behind the candidate Wall Street is demanding, Patrick Murphy (who has played ball with them from his position on the House Financial Services Committee and who they say can help balance Elizabeth Warren’s and Sherrod Brown’s anti-bankster sentiments).

Does Harry Reid think Elizabeth Warren’s anti-banking sentiments need balancing? Apparently so.

More about Schumer and Murphy from the same piece:

But just as Schumer was wrong when he recruited Morrison in 2006, he’s even more wrong for having recruited Murphy today. Murphy is an entirely unaccomplished lightweight who was a Republican for his entire life and gave maximum contributions to Charlie Crist (when he was still a Republican) and to Mitt Romney. Worse, Murphy has publicly talked about compromising away the benefits of seniors who depend on Social Security and Medicare. Schumer doesn’t want to be Minority Leader; he wants to be Majority Leader. Recruiting someone who goes on CNN and talks about cutting Social Security– in Florida– isn’t likely to advance that goal. 

What does Schumer have against Alan Grayson? Much, apparently:

Schumer has been running around like a chicken without a head trying to get prominent Democrats to get Grayson to back off. He’s even claimed he can get Elizabeth Warren to call Grayson and urge him to not run, despite the fact that Murphy has opposed every one of her initiatives to rein in Wall Street. We’ll let you know if that happens… meanwhile, you can signal Grayson you’re not in the Schumer camp– right here.

Schumer must be very eager to give away the rest of the store to Wall Street, something Grayson would join Warren and Brown in opposing. There’s more in Klein’s piece, including a stunning bit of irony (or hypocrisy) regarding new DSCC Chair Jon Tester’s role in this. For more on the despicable Patrick Murphy, start here.

It’s clearly important to put people like Alan Grayson into the Senate. I also think it’s necessary to remove people like Chuck Schumer (and once-“progressive” Jon Tester) from ever holding office again as a Democrat.

But one mission at a time. Want to tell Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Jon Tester to pound privatizing neo-liberal sand? Support Alan Grayson for the U.S. Senate. That will send a message.

GP

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“The law has always been used against them”

by digby

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.Ta-Nehisi Coates-2015

I wrote about Baltimore this morning for Salon. I discussed President Obama’s words yesterday, and then take a deeper look:

For a historical contrast, look to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s 1978 biography of Robert F. Kennedy, in which Schlesinger recalls a dispute between Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower, first reported in the New York Post in 1965, over riots that had broken out in Los Angeles.

Schlesinger writes:

In August 1965 violence broke out in Watts, the black ghetto in Los Angeles. Beating, looting, burning, sniping, bombing, went on for six days, leaving 34 people dead, more than 1,000 injured. The Watts riot, said Dwight D. Eisenhower sternly, “did not occur in a vacuum. I believe the U.S. as a whole has been becoming atmosphered, you might say, in a policy of lawlessness.” The former President’s solution was “greater respect for the law.” Kennedy lashed back. “There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law,” he said. “To many Negroes the law is the enemy. In Harlem, In Bedford-Stuyvesant it has almost always been used against them.”

Rick Perlstein mentioned that RFK quote in this fine piece in In These Times last September, in which he did a historical survey of the urban upheaval “from Watts to Ferguson.” Leaving aside for a moment the antiquated and cringeworthy language, it’s nonetheless hard to imagine a Democratic leader, much less a senator and former attorney general, making such a pointed statement about injustice to black Americans today. Such clear observations are left for writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, while liberal politicians twist themselves into pretzels trying to be supportive of police while still finding a way to explain such eruptions of anger from African-Americans.

Lest anyone think that such comments by RFK 50 years ago were the commonly held views of the liberal mainstream, note this editorial about the Watts riots from Life magazine, which could sadly almost pass for something written yesterday:

To many, the Los Angeles violence seems strangely timed, so soon after the great Negro achievement of the voting bill. But it is the nature of revolutions (and Negro equality is a revolution) to discover new demands after the the first ones are achieved. The remaining grievances of the Negro are social and personal and will be satisfied only by personal conquest, in black and white individuals and neighborhoods, of suspicion, fear and hate. White people do not bridge this gap by treating Negroes as an undifferentiated and underprivileged mass, nor yet by indulging them like children out of a misplaced sense of inherited guilt.

It was an irresponsible Negro who said to a rally that led to 22 arrests in Hartford last week, “Every cop is your enemy whether he’s black or white.” But it is a former US Attorney General who allowed his sympathy with slum-dwellers problems to lead him to say something almost as mischievous.”There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes, the law is the enemy,” said Senator Robert F. Kennedy…

Then, as now, everyone seemed to miss the point RFK was making. Of course poverty and alienation and all the rest are problems that must be addressed. But the Watts riots started with an altercation at a traffic stop in a community that had been brutalized for decades by the police. As Perlstein pointed out in his In These Times piece:

Los Angeles cops were led by William H. Parker, who coined the phrase “thin blue line”—as in, the cops were a thin blue line between chaos and civilization. Parker liked to recruit white officers from the Mississippi Delta. Parker explained the origin of the Watts riots to an investigating commission: “One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” His patrolmen, meanwhile, would begin tours of the ghetto with a ritual cry taken from a cigarette commercial, “LSMFT”—“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.” Only, for them, the letters stood for “Let’s Shoot a Motherfucker Tonight.”

Perlstein gives a number of examples showing that this blatant racist violence was characteristic of many big-city police departments across the nation. This was not about African-American poverty or lack of education. It was about the police.

More at the link.

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Dignity matters

Dignity played a prominent part in the Obergefell v. Hodges oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. The funny thing about dignity is who deserves it depends on who is making the argument.

To borrow climate change deniers’ popular formulation, I’m not a scientist lawyer, but I’d be embarrassed to be making the arguments Michigan’s former solicitor general presented against marriage equality before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. John J. Bursch, representing Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, argued right out of the gate that recognizing same-sex marriage will harm the state’s interest in regulating procreation.

Regulation and Big Gummint are blasphemies in red states such as Kentucky and Tennessee. Arguing on their behalf for preserving states’ interest in regulating procreation might have been enough to call the rest of Bursch’s presentation on account of Godwin’s Law or him being a communist. But no one blinked. Bursch persisted:

The first sign of trouble for the states came in a dog that did not bark: Kennedy, whose respect for federalism is oceanic, seemed uninterested in the question of a state’s sovereign prerogative to exclude same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. But the tide of argument truly seemed to turn when Bursch tried to give shape to the phantom menace posed by same-sex marriage; the only real danger he could point to was that fewer straight couples would marry or stay married, which would lead to more children not being raised by their biological parents. “The out-of-wedlock birth rate in this country has gone from 10 percent to 40 percent from 1970 to today,” he said.

And here the trouble began. “Under your view, it would be difficult for same-sex couples to adopt some of these children,” Kennedy said. “I think the argument cuts quite against you.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy was not done. As Dahlia Lithwick notes with a grin, Kennedy is “the dignity-whisperer“:

So there is a rather extraordinary moment Tuesday morning, as the Supreme Court hears historic arguments in the marriage equality cases grouped under Obergefell v. Hodges, when Kennedy finds himself in an argument with John Bursch, Michigan’s special assistant attorney general, about whether marriage is a dignity-conferring enterprise, or not. Bursh, defending his state’s ban on same-sex marriage, is explaining that the purpose of marriage is not to confer dignity but to keep parents bonded to their biological children.

Justice Kennedy—who opened argument Tuesday morning with the observation that this whole case is about an institution whose definition has gone unchanged for millennia—looks rather shocked. The author of the majority decision outlawing sodomy bans in Lawrence v. Texas (“Adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons”) and the decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor (“It seems fair to conclude that, until recent years, many citizens had not even considered the possibility that two persons of the same sex might aspire to occupy the same status and dignity as that of a man and woman in lawful marriage”) did not want to hear this. Indeed, it seems like Kennedy wanted it to be perfectly clear that he is the guy who gets to say that if marriage is nothing else, it is a dignity-stamper.

“You know, dignity may have grown up around marriage as a cultural thing,” Bursch argued, “but the State has no interest in bestowing or taking away dignity from anyone …” Which brings me back to why “dignity” jumped out at me.

Bursch’s view of dignity — Kentucky’s, Michigan’s, Ohio’s, and Tennessee’s view — contrasts sharply with marriage equality opponent Rep. Paul Ryan’s view. The Wisconsin Republican believes, “Promoting the natural rights and the inherent dignity of the individual must be the central focus of all government policy.” That would seem to align Ryan with Kennedy. Except for Ryan it depends on which natural rights and whose inherent dignity we’re talking about. As Ryan explained in a Reagan-esque, four-Pinocchios anecdote delivered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in March, feeding poor schoolchildren lunch is counterproductive:

“What the left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul…People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity…”

Yet that’s just what the conservative hero Ryan and too many states refuse to LGBT couples. We’ll have to wait until June to see how many other Supreme Court justices share Kennedy’s interest in dignity.

It’s not the neighborhood dysfunction it’s the police dysfunction

by digby

Juan Williams says we’re asking police to do thing they’re not trained to do:

WILLIAMS: What you have here is a situation where, I think, you have poor people, who feel that they have a grievance — a difficult situation across our country in terms of how police deal with the dysfunction that is in this neighborhood, but deal with it in every community in America. We are asking our police to go in and to deal with people who are extremely violent, disorganized, families in chaos, and say to the police, you’re our front lines. And when the police fail in handling the situation, then we say, it’s a matter of police brutality. I think it’s a matter of society, often times, asking police to do things they’re not trained to do.

They’re not trained to take prisoners to jail? Because that’s what the Freddie Gray case is about.

Freddie Gray was taken into custody after a chase but without a fight. And while in custody his spine was evidently somehow severed in the back of a police van. What in the world does any of that have to do with violence and chaos in the neighborhood? Were the police traumatized by their daily grind and couldn’t handle the stress so they took him on a wild ride to blow off steam and severed his spine? If so, is that supposed to be ok? Because violence and chaos?

Police are professionals who are given tremendous power over individuals. I know they have a hard job. That’s why they get very generous pensions, benefits and medical care. (And also why they are so often given the benefit of the doubt before a jury.) But police brutality cannot be a “perk” or a compensation for the stress of their tough job, it just can’t. Neither can it be a reasonable explanation for beating, tasering and killing unarmed suspects. That’s turning the law and the constitution on its head.

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Speaking for the id

by digby

Our great African American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 28, 2015

I know, I know. Shooting fish in a barrel. But I couldn’t bear to post any of the other truly hideous tweets I’ve read today…

Let’s just say I haven’t seen the right this excited and frankly, elated, in a long time.

On the other hand, there’s this, via Mother Jones:

Two days ago, when Orioles fans were briefly locked in Camden Yards during protests outside the stadium, sports broadcaster Brett Hollander decried the demonstrations as counterproductive and an inconvenience for fans. Team executive John Angelos, son of owner Peter Angelos, responded with a flurry of tweets, defending the people’s actions as a reaction to long-term economic hardship and dwindling protections of civil liberties.

Deadspin transcribed Angelos’ tweetstorm (emphasis added):

Brett, speaking only for myself, I agree with your point that the principle of peaceful, non-violent protest and the observance of the rule of law is of utmost importance in any society. MLK, Gandhi, Mandela and all great opposition leaders throughout history have always preached this precept. Further, it is critical that in any democracy, investigation must be completed and due process must be honored before any government or police members are judged responsible.

That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importances of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.

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QOTD: The Shrill One

by digby

Krugman say:

[I]n a polarized political environment, policy debates always involve more than just the specific issue on the table. They are also clashes of world views. Predictions of debt disaster, a debased dollar, and Obama death spirals reflect the same ideology, and the utter failure of these predictions should inspire major doubts about that ideology.

And there’s also a moral issue involved. Refusing to accept responsibility for past errors is a serious character flaw in one’s private life. It rises to the level of real wrongdoing when policies that affect millions of lives are at stake.

He’s referring here to the conservatives never ever being accountable for what they say. And there’s little doubt he’d make the same complaint about the centrist VSPs as well.

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Making voting opt-out instead of opt-in

by digb

California certainly has not been immune to the kind of racial disparities and frustration we see today in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. I’m sure it could happen here in LA again very easily. So, I’m not touting my state as being superior simply because it’s in Democratic hands. So is Maryland, after all.

But nonetheless, California is trying a few new things to increase participation in the system which seems like a step in the right direction:

A proposal to automatically register Californians to vote when they get a driver’s license was approved Monday by a state Assembly panel after Secretary of State Alex Padilla noted there are about 6.7 million state residents who are eligible but not registered.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) modeled her bill on a new law in Oregon and said it is needed after the 42% record-low turnout in the November statewide election.

“These concerning new lows are unacceptable,” Gonzalez told the Assembly Transportation Committee. “We cannot allow this trends to continue.”

Padilla said that 40,000 people went to his agency’s website for information on registering to vote after the deadline for signing up in the last election. Under the new law, people who get a driver’s license will be notified they have 21 days to object or they will be registered to vote if eligible.

Obviously, this doesn’t help people who don’t drive. But most people drive in California so hopefully it will sweep up busy some new voters who always “mean to register” but never quite get to it.

The Republicans are against it, of course.

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Marriage equality and “uncharted waters”

by digby

I wrote about the marriage equality case being argued before the Supreme Court today for Salon:

Today’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court marriage equality case may or may not be exciting, but the importance of the outcome cannot be overstated. We are witnessing before us one of the greatest expansions of civil rights in decades, and if the high court decides to be part of the future instead of the past, this advance will codify into law the basic human right of marriage for gays and lesbians throughout America. This country has come a long way very quickly and it’s inspiring to see it happen.

There is no guarantee, of course. There is still a cultural divide on the issue, as we saw in the recent “religious liberty” controversy in Indiana. Like the nation at large, the Court is divided too. It’s assumed that the four more liberal judges will vote in favor. If any of the the uber-conservative triumvirate of Scalia, Alito and Thomas were to vote with them, it would be a judicial curveball of historic proportions. (Translation: Don’t count on it.) This leaves Chief Justice John Roberts who has shown some propensity for consensus building, and could vote with the liberals; as well as, of course, Anthony Kennedy, the justice known mostly for majority-straddling (and right-leaning) position on the bench.

As Ian Millhiser wrote at Think Progress, Kennedy’s record on gay rights cases is something else:

Nearly every gay rights victory handed down by the Supreme Court has Justice Anthony Kennedy’s name on it. Kennedy authored the very first Supreme Court decision recognizing that anti-gay laws can violate the Constitution’s promise of equality, and he followed that up with decisions targeting sex bans and ending marriage discrimination by the federal government. In the likely event that the Court declares marriage discrimination unconstitutional throughout the nation this June, expect to find Justice Kennedy’s name on that decision as well.

The fact that the same justice repeatedly writes in the same issue area can be a sign that they find that area particularly interesting, but it is also true that closely divided cases are frequently assigned to the most on-the-fence member of the Court — on the theory that no one can tailor an opinion to their own idiosyncratic views better than themselves. Kennedy’s record supports the latter interpretation, as he’s fretted in the past about the “uncharted waters” facing the Court if it hands down a decision bringing marriage equality to the entire nation. Since then, however, the Court has allowed lower court decisions supporting marriage equality to take effect — a strong sign that Kennedy has made up his mind in favor of equality.

Nevertheless, Kennedy remains the justice to watch for the best sign of how the Court will shape its opinion.

And Kennedy may or may not take the necessary steps to insure that LGBT citizens are protected with this decision. There’s still work to be done even if the court affirms marriage equality as a constitutional right.

It is to be fervently hoped that the Supreme Court affirms the right of gay people to marry. It will be a happy day indeed. But it’s a mistake to be complacent about such things. As Millhiser said in his piece, there are many issues of discrimination against LGBT people still at stake. And even when the Supreme Court hands down a momentous decision acknowledging a basic human right, there’s no guarantee that it won’t continue to be litigated by the social conservatives for a long time to come. Just ask reproductive rights activists.

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Warren to Obama: Put Up or Shut Up on TPP

by Gaius Publius

The latest TPP news — your Open Rebellion Caucus is on the job, featuring Dem-on-Dem violence on trade. The press is enjoying this, of course, and those opposed to TPP appreciate that spotlight. Thanks are due also to President Obama for being so obvious about what he wants, and for not downplaying Sen. Warren’s fierce objections to this next-NAFTA job-killing “trade” deal.

The setup — President Obama has been unusually aggressive with members of his own party on trade and his eagerly sought TPP deal. My ongoing coverage of TPP is here; click if you’d like some background.

Now the latest, per Zach Carter at Huffington Post (my emphasis):

Elizabeth Warren Tells Obama To Put Up Or Shut Up On Trade

Progressive Democrats have been hoping to see a showdown between
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton for years. Instead, they’re getting
a public feud between the senator from Massachusetts and President
Barack Obama.

Obama accused
Warren and congressional Democrats on Friday of being “dishonest” and
spreading “misinformation” about the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a
trade pact the administration is negotiating among 12 nations. The
overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress oppose TPP, while
Republican leaders support it.

It was an unusually aggressive
attack for the president — accusing members of his own party not of
having misplaced priorities, but of actively working to deceive the
public. Obama is rarely so severe even with his Republican opponents.
Obama said that the Democratic criticism that “gets on [his] nerves the
most” is the notion that his TPP pact is “secret,” and went on to insist
that the terms of TPP will help American workers.

As many have recently discovered, perhaps to their surprise, when Obama really wants something, he really tries to get it. (Does this give the lie to progressive excuses, that the president wants more progressive policies than he settles for, but is too timid to negotiate for them? I’ll let you decide.)

The current battle is between President Obama and two Democrats, Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, the once-again leaders of “open rebellion” in the Senate — in-your-face rejection of pro-wealth policies pushed by Democratic Party leaders. Warren and Brown’s position? Mr. Obama, you say the TPP deal isn’t a “secret.” Put up or shut up — show the public the treaty before we vote on Fast Track. Or, as Huffington Post put it:

On Saturday, Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) responded with a
letter essentially telling Obama to put up or shut up. If the deal is so
great, Warren and Brown wrote, the administration should make the full
negotiation texts public before Congress votes on a “fast track” bill
that would strip the legislative branch of its authority to amend it.

“Members of Congress should be able to discuss the agreement with our
constituents and to participate in a robust public debate, instead of
being muzzled by classification rules,” Warren and Brown wrote in the
letter obtained by The Huffington Post. …

“Your Administration has deemed the draft text of the agreement classified
and kept it hidden from public view, thereby making it a secret deal,”
the letter reads. “It is currently illegal for the press, experts,
advocates, or the general public to review the text of this agreement.
And while you noted that Members of Congress may ‘walk over … and read
the text of the agreement’ — as we have done — you neglected to
mention that we are prohibited by law from discussing the specifics of
that text in public.”

Obama has been aggressive in defending this billionaires’ dream, perhaps because of this:

Regardless, the next move is his. If past is prologue, it will be coming soon. His robotic OFA forces (that’s not an unfair characterization on this issue, unfortunately) are out in number, throwing up Obama’s disingenuous defense of this treaty in many progressive forums. (For a prime instance, see comment threads like this at Daily Kos. There are many such examples of OFA pushback in progressive discussion spaces.)

A question for OFA defenders of TPP: You’ve shown your loyalty — it’s to Obama and his future earnings, not your own as progressives in the “Warren wing” of the Democratic Party. What will you do when Obama is off living his future, and you’re left behind to seek your own among the progressives you’re now disingenuously attacking? Do you think they’ll remember you the way Ro Khanna is remembered, for example?

Dem-on-Dem Violence: What Will Happen in the Senate?

Fast Track is coming to the Senate floor. Regardless of what Obama does, Democratic senators are going to have to show, once again, who they stand for — the richest of the rich, or American workers, small business, and, yes, national sovereignty. We’ve seen a lot of these opportunities for the Democratic Party to define itself. Fast Track is yet another.

Here are your corporate Democrats so far, based on their pro–Fast Track votes in the Senate Finance Committee:

• Ron Wyden — Ranking Member and lead perp
• Michael Bennet — Former head of DSCC
• Maria Cantwell
• Ben Cardin
• Tom Carper
• Bill Nelson
• Mark Warner

The current Senate holds 54 Republicans, 44 Democrats and 2 Independents (Sanders and King, the latter of whom often votes “corporate”). One Republican, Richard Burr (N.C.), voted No on Fast Track in committee. Let’s assume all remaining Republicans vote Yes, and Burr holds firm as a No. That makes 53 Republicans plus seven Democrats voting Yes — so, 60 votes for Fast Track on the floor. Enough to break a filibuster, with zero margin for error or defection.

Your questions of the remaining Democrats:

1. Who will join the filibuster and vote No on cloture, when the TV lights are off?
    
2. Who will vote No on the floor vote, when the TV lights are on?
    
3. Who will vote both ways — Yes to help end the filibuster, but No in a public-but-losing attempt to prevent the inevitable passage?

The real vote will be on cloture, a vote to end the Warren- and Brown-led filibuster. Any Democratic senator who votes to end the filibuster (where the threshold is 60 votes), yet votes No on the bill (where the threshold is 51 votes) … is not your progressive friend. A Yes to end the filibuster means a No on the floor vote is “for show.” Watch the voting, then make a list.

Watch also for Democrats voting with Republicans even when their votes aren’t needed to pass Fast Track. Those could be early applications for corporate funding in their own next election.

After this, the circus moves to the House, where the Paul Ryan–led Ways and Means Committee takes up the Fast Track bill. In the House, many Republicans are opposed. Will it pass? Stay tuned.

What About Wyden?

In my humble estimation, Wyden needs to be dealt with, whether TPP ultimately passes or not. Some votes are regrettable but forgivable, some are very regrettable but forgivable, and some, like this one, should never be forgiven. Similar to NAFTA, TPP will devastate American workers (and line CEO silk pockets) for the next 20 years, after your children have children.

Wyden’s seat is up in 2016. Many progressives in Oregon will not vote for Wyden, even in the general election. Others are actively looking to replace him in the primary. Care to tell Ron Wyden which side of either of those fences you’re on? Here where to send a message:

Be polite, but be honest. And if you’re from Oregon, tell him you vote.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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