The current chapter of The Narrative, says Eugene Robinson, is “Democrats are doomed.” Democrats’ fate in 2022 (and beyond, perhaps) depends on being able to deliver on the Biden agenda. What The Narrative lacks, as it usually does, is perspective.
Biden is barely into his four-year term. Arbitrary deadlines for passage are just that. Robinson reminds readers that the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, a midterm election year (Washington Post):
Of course, Obamacare did produce the tea party backlash and huge midterm gains for Republicans. But here’s where The Narrative gets confusing: Is it supposed to be worse for Democrats if they actually accomplish their goals, and thereby risk energizing the opposition? Or if they get nothing done and look like failures?
The context that’s missing is that the Democratic Party, for better or worse, has to represent the entirety of the sane political spectrum, from Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) on the right to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Squad on the left. That’s because the GOP has left the building.
Failure is far from inevitable, Robinson argues. “Thus far, on votes that really matter, Democrats have shown remarkable unity.” Painful compromise could be ahead, but not likely abject failure. Take The Narrative with a healthy grain of salt. Also when The Narrartive changes to “Biden is back.”
A wild card unaccounted for by The Narrative is how many conservatives have rejected the Trump Kool-aid but not democracy.
Max Boot, former Republican, argues that the fate of Biden’s legislative agenda won’t change how he votes (Washington Post):
I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats — as I have done in every election since 2016 — until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom.
How many non-Democrats perceive that threat may not be captured by standard polling questions about likeability or policy matters. Boot has set aside his views on those. “We agree on something more foundational — democracy,” Miles Taylor and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman wrote on Monday on behalf of at least 100 former Republican officials. And Max Boot.
Benjamin Franklin posed the famous Liberty or Safety proposition. How many Americans would choose autocracy over democracy if polling questions managed to tease out that opinion? I have no idea. A minority, likely. But that minority seems more and more inclined to put guns before votes.
There’s only so much you can do. And so much that needs to be done. And so many activists focused on too few things.
That’s why I work on teaching get-out-the-vote (GOTV) mechanics and logistics, particularly in under-resourced, red places Democrats generally ignore because, out there, they get their butts kicked. (Chicken or egg?) No one else wants the job. It’s not sexy. It’s not cutting-edge. There’s no money in it. There’s no promising career path for budding, young activists dreaming of a White House job. It’s not popular.
The upside, I joke, is that makes me, like the late Professor Irwin Corey, the nation’s foremost authority. I’ve practically got the field to myself.
Something Dan Pfeiffer writes this morning in his Substack got me thinking about this. HIs topic is discussion sparked by Ezra Klein’s New York Times conversation with strategist David Shor about mistakes of the Clinton era, the bleeding of minority support, and advocating “popularism,” essentially, Democrats not talking much about what’s unpopular. (I wrote about Klein’s interview on Friday.) Jamelle Bouie replied, also in the Times, that Shor is more diagnosis than prescription. “Perhaps there is a way to stop the bleeding with non-college whites and Hispanics without pandering to the worst forms of racial conservatism,” Bouie wrote, but if popularism is not the “Third Way” of Bill Clinton, “then they should say what it is.”
The movement of working-class voters towards the Republican Party puts Democrats at a massive disadvantage in the Senate and Electoral College. According to Shor’s analytic model, if the Democratic presidential nominee wins 51 percent of the vote in 2024, Democrats will lose seven Senate seats. A hole like that could take us a decade or more to climb out of.
The salience of immigration, race, “wokeness,” and other cultural issues pushed many of these voters into the Republican Party. The Democratic problem is about more than working-class White voters. According to Shor, Defund the Police caused some working-class Black and Latino voters to support Trump in 2020.
There is a massive disconnect between the largely progressive, young, very online donors, activists, and operatives that dominate the party and the voters we need to win.
To address this challenge, Democrats must talk about popular things and stop talking about unpopular things. In practice, this means more populist economic issues and less race and immigration.
The model to follow is Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, which relentlessly focused on the economy and ran up huge margins with Black and Latino voters and persuaded enough white working-class voters to get the job done.
Shor may be right, at face value, says Pfeiffer. “Talking about popular things more and unpopular things less is a good idea,” whatever popular means. The problem is not that Democrats are not saying popular things. The problem is voters are not hearing them:
First, the Right-Wing media ecosystem, defined by Fox and powered by Facebook, consistently drowns out Democratic messaging. The Right-Wing defines the four corners of the political conversation. There are fair critiques of the messaging decisions of Hillary Clinton’s 2020 campaign, but I do not think it was possible for them to center the entire election around the economy — as Obama did in 2012 — with Donald Trump making outrageous racist statements about immigrants. Outrage-inducing cultural issues — especially ones that touch on identity — drive online traffic and cable ratings. Facebook traffic is a major economic driver for most media outlets. If a topic gains traction via the Facebook algorithm, the press will give it even more coverage. In the past, what led the news trended online, but now the opposite is true. The tail is wagging the dog.
The second problem is this: while Republicans spent decades building a massive media operation to deliver their messaging directly to their voters, Democrats continue to rely on the traditional media as the primary means of distribution. This is a real problem as David Roberts, the author of the Volts newsletter, pointed out on Twitter:
The mainstream media with or without Bothsidesism spins Democrats’ message. The party’s reliance on traditional media is the problem. Meanwhile, the right (not the Republican Party, per se; here I disagree with Pfeiffer) has assembled a massive infrastructure devoted to spreading and relentlessly repeating its message.
Democrats are talking about the popular details of Biden’s plan, but the messaging is not reaching the people we need it to reach because the people carrying the message do not share our interests. This was the problem in 2016. It was the problem in 2020. It will be the problem until the Democratic Party, its donors, politicians, and activists commit to building a progressive media infrastructure to compete with the massive MAGA megaphone dominating politics.
Pfeiffer does not have a real prescription, either. But for all the edge Democrats once had in campaign tech, they are behind the times in communications. Partly, that’s lack of right-fringe billionaires, but partly just being stuck in the past. Which is why I have my field to myself.
Underlying much of Democrats’ training is an outdated precinct-focus. “Precinct organization is the foundation of the party” is rote catechism from an age in which elections were a one-day, 14-hour marathon. Yes, precincts still play an important role in party organization and in election administration. But the days when precinct captains were vital to turning out the vote on Election Day are long gone. Most states today have some form of early voting. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the vote is already cast by Election Day and at early voting sites not confined to individual precinct captains’ turf.
Turning out the early vote, recruiting, scheduling, supplying and training electioneers for every hour of early voting countywide does not fall under precinct organization. Yet, precinct-based voter turnout remains the assumption underlying Democrats’ training programs. There is none for county leaders whose charge it is now to do everything I just listed. The other faulty assumption is that by the time someone is in charge of running a county committee, they’ve picked up all that by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. Bad assumption.
I get the message focus, and the pitfalls Pfeiffer mentions. But depending so much on message is like taking your sports visualization training to the Olympics and expecting to be competitive when you arrive with no conditioning and no skills. Execution matters, especially out in places where the big campaigns don’t go.
Training in GOTV mechanics and logistics is not sexy, but before activists become foremost authorities on messaging, they might first want to learn how to put their pants on one leg at a time and to tie their shoelaces. Preferably, in that order.
This story on the mishandling of all the gifts foreign leaders gave to Trump is really wild:
The Saudi royal family showered Donald J. Trump and his entourage on his first trip abroad as president with dozens of presents, including three robes made with white tiger and cheetah fur, and a dagger with a handle that appeared to be ivory.
Little that followed went right.
A White House lawyer determined that possession of the furs and dagger most likely violated the Endangered Species Act, but the Trump administration held onto them and failed to disclose them as gifts received from a foreign government.
On the last full day of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the White House handed them over to the General Services Administration — the wrong agency — rather than the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which seized the gifts this summer.
At that point, there was a surprise.
The furs, from an oil-rich family worth billions of dollars, were fake.
“Wildlife inspectors and special agents determined the linings of the robes were dyed to mimic tiger and cheetah patterns and were not comprised of protected species,” said Tyler Cherry, a spokesman for the Interior Department, which oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
The tale of the furs is but one example of how gift exchanges between the United States and foreign leaders — a highly regulated process intended to shield administrations from questions of impropriety — devolved into sometimes risible shambles during the Trump administration.
The State Department’s inspector general is investigating allegations that Mr. Trump’s political appointees walked off with gift bags worth thousands of dollars that were meant for foreign leaders at the Group of 7 summit planned for Camp David in 2020, which was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The bags contained dozens of items purchased with government funds, including leather portfolios, pewter trays and marble trinket boxes emblazoned with the presidential seal or the signatures of Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump.
The inspector general continues to pursue the whereabouts of a $5,800 bottle of Japanese whiskey given to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — Mr. Pompeo said he never received it — and a 22-karat gold coin given to another State Department official.
There is also a question about whether the former second lady, Karen Pence, wrongly took two gold-toned place card holders from the prime minister of Singapore without paying for them.
In addition, the Trump administration never disclosed that Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser, received two swords and a dagger from the Saudis, although he paid $47,920 for them along with three other gifts in February, after he left office.
To be sure, Mr. Trump’s handling of foreign gifts is not at the top of his critics’ list of administration offenses. And there is no evidence that he or Mrs. Trump took any gifts to which they were not entitled.
But ethics experts said the problems reflected larger issues with the Trump presidency.
“Whether this was indifference, sloppiness or the Great Train Robbery, it shows such a cavalier attitude to the law and the regular process of government,” said Stanley M. Brand, a criminal defense lawyer, ethics expert and former top lawyer for the House of Representatives.
There are many more details at the link including stuff like this:
As Trump political appointees in the State Department’s protocol office packed up their belongings in January, career officers saw their departing colleagues leave with the gift bags meant for foreign leaders at the G7 summit the previous year, the inspector general has learned. The bags had been in storage in a large room at the State Department known as the vault.
Once the Biden administration took over, career officials began to examine the accounting of foreign gifts without Trump officials looking over their shoulders.
At that point, career officials discovered that many of the gift bags were missing, as were more than a dozen additional presents given to Trump officials. The number was unusual: Government documents from the Obama and George W. Bush administrations show no unaccounted gifts given to White House officials, cabinet members or members of the first families.
Today, Trump toadie lawyer John Eastman’s employers at the Claremont Institute issued an asinine defense of his outrageous conduct insisting that ups is down and black is white. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake breaks it down:
“Contrary to almost universally false news accounts, which have done great damage, John did not ask the Vice President, who was presiding over the Joint Session of Congress where electoral votes were to be counted on January 6, to ‘overturn’ the election or to decide the validity of electoral votes,” its statement says.
It adds that “John advised the Vice President that, despite credible legal arguments to the contrary, the Vice President should regard Congress, not the Vice President, as having the authority to choose between the two slates.”
The defense is among the most carefully worded straw-man arguments in modern political history.
Essentially, the statement isn’t disputing that Eastman provided a ready-made procedure for Trump and Pence to get the election overturned — he clearly and unambiguously did so — it’s that he didn’t explicitly say Pence should overturn it himself.
This, though, is a distinction without much of a difference. And it ignores the weightier issues that have led some groups to distance themselves from the Claremont Institute. (The group’s statement says the Federalist Society has “refused to allow John … to discuss essential constitutional questions,” despite his 20 years of involvement with it.)
In the memo, which was revealed recently in a new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Eastman lays out his step-by-step plan for getting Trump reinstalled:Pence defers on counting electors for several states that Joe Biden won, saying there are multiple slates of electors in them.
When the counting is finished, Pence declares the total number of electors is 454 — rather than 538 — at which point Trump has a majority.
When Democrats complain that one needs a majority of 538 instead of 454, Pence relents and says that, since no candidate has a majority, the House will decide the winner, as per the Constitution.
(In Eastman’s own words:) “Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.”
According to the Claremont Institute, though, this is not tantamount to asking Pence to overturn the election. And that could be construed as true, only in the most literal and generous of legal readings. What Eastman was doing was providing a procedure by which Pence could simply facilitate the expected result of Congress overturning the election. But at least he wouldn’t ask Pence to try to do this himself, I guess.
Claremont’s defense in large part relies upon a fuller, six-page memo beyond the two-pager initially reported. Eastman provided CNN with a copy of the longer memo when the whole situation blew up last month, saying the initial two-pager was merely a preliminary draft.
The six-pager lays out a fuller legal case and a potentially lengthier process by which this could happen, while allowing for less of a predetermined outcome — one in which states might be allowed some time to determine whether to appoint alternate electors and then Congress might even decide in Biden’s favor. The Claremont Institute says Eastman’s advice to Pence regarded what would happen when “the state legislatures had found sufficient illegal conduct to have altered the results, and as a result submitted a second slate of electors.”
But the initially reported memo makes clear what the goal was here, without bothering with those meddlesome details. And even if we only had the longer one, there’s no secret what this was intended to do: get Pence to take steps that could predictably give control over who wins the presidency to Republicans. The shorter memo suggests Pence might declare Trump the winner with 454 electoral votes, but even it acknowledges that wouldn’t fly and that this would be thrown to Congress.
And the ultimate, hopeful result would be the same. Even Eastman in the longer memo concedes how brazen the plot was.
“But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules, therefore,” Eastman wrote.
[…]
One of the oldest tricks in politics, when facing a damning set of facts, is to mischaracterize or hyperbolize the argument made and then rebut that version of it. But it’s a lot like if you knew someone wanted to rob a bank and you gave them the blueprints to that particular bank branch. Did you tell them to rob that bank? Of course not. Did you give them the means to accomplish what you knew they wanted to do? Yes. You were an accessory.
What the Claremont Institute should really be responding to is whether it’s comfortable with its employee explicitly seeking to help overturn an American election based upon claims that were routinely debunked and rejected in court. That’s the issue here — not whether Eastman actually said Pence should attempt it unilaterally.
It’s pathetic, but then this institute which has long been considered a flagship intellectual center for the conservative movement, has actually been a phony baloney partisan outfit for a very long time. They honored Rush Limbaugh with their “statesmanship Award” back in 2007:
Here is a little piece of the speech the racist creep gave at the “Churchill Dinner” where he accepted a bust of old Winnie himself:
How many of you yesterday happened to see any pictures at all of the opening ceremonies of the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor? (Laughter) How many hands do I see? Okay. I don’t see too many hands and I’m not surprised. Let me tell you, I watched it. Not because I wanted to. I watched it for you.
I watched it, my friends, because it’s my business to do this. The Clinton library opening ceremonies epitomized, if you will, exactly where the left in this country is today. First, where was it? It was in a red state. They hate red states. In fact, the media in this country, the — what I call them, the liberal spin machine — I don’t like to use the word “mainstream press” anymore.
The liberal spin machine was there. They were all excited. But they’re thinking about sending foreign correspondents to the red states to find out what people — and to the red counties of California — to find out what Americans are really like.
These people were waiting for Trump for a very long time.
Michael Tomasky of the New Republic has had it with Sinema’s antics:
There are Democrats I admire tremendously, like my own Congressman Jamie Raskin, and there are Democrats I’m not crazy about. But there’s only one Democrat for whom I wish future defeat, scandal, and humiliation, and I bet you can guess who that is.
Enough, Kyrsten Sinema. Enough of this self-infatuated preening. Enough of helping to drive down President Biden’s poll numbers. Enough of derailing what should have been—what still can and I believe will be, although thanks to the Arizona senator and some others, not on quite the level it could have been—a great moment in this country’s history. Enough, enough, enough. Liberal America, Democratic America, indeed sensible America transcending ideology and party, is sick of you.
It’s hard to say which is worse. The former is certainly more hypocritical, given her background and the paeans to addressing climate change she’s served up repeatedly over the years, and it’s a more existential matter.
But derailing the prescription drug proposal is more corrupt and malevolent. As ever, she says nothing publicly about what her concerns are. There does exist, in all such cases, a smidgeon of a chance that the dissenter has legitimate policy concerns. Senator Joe Manchin, for example, wants stricter means-testing on certain aspects of the bill so the benefits are more directly targeted at working-class people. One can agree or disagree with that, but it’s a position.
Sinema, however, says nothing. Actually, in the prescription drug case, we do have a rare statement from her comms guy, a fellow carrying the apt name of John LaBombard: “As she committed, Kyrsten is working directly in good faith with her colleagues and President Biden on the proposed budget reconciliation package. Given the size and scope of the proposal, while those discussions are ongoing, we are not offering detailed comment on any one proposed piece of the package.”
Is this service to the voters and taxpayers of Arizona? They are paying her salary. They are paying Johnnie’s salary. Actually, all American taxpayers are. She absolutely and affirmatively owes us—but Arizonans in particular—an explanation of what the blazes she’s up to.
Without any stated rationale on her part, with such prodigious contempt for the people she allegedly serves, we have every right to assume the worst: that Sinema is just selling herself out to Big Pharma. It’s despicable. Lowering prescription drug prices has been a top-tier Democratic agenda item since Bill Clinton’s presidency. So much so that it even became a punch line: When all else fails, pundits would write, Democrats talk prescription drug prices.
It polls through the roof. And substantively, the prices Americans pay are a moral abomination. Insulin, for example, could easily be free. That’s right. Free. The cost to the government would be peanuts—$10 billion a year. Or, charge people $10 a dose and cut the cost to taxpayers significantly. But I’ve always thought that Democrats should just make insulin, specifically, free. It’s clear and unambiguous and unforgettable; the federal policy equivalent of a governor lowering a bridge toll, say. It would be the first thing that would come to the mind of the average voter. “Biden? Well, there’s good and bad, I reckon, but by cracky, he made insulin free!”
They won’t do that I guess, but here they are, after 25 years, finally on the cusp of lowering prescription drug prices. And Sinema and a few others may kill it. If the Democrats don’t manage to include prescription drug price reform in this bill, I hope every one of the Democrats who derailed it gets a primary and loses. This is that fundamental an issue.
The other thing about Sinema that’s gotten really old is all this guessing about what motivates her. Who cares? I think Michelle Goldberg got it right last week. Sinema has “come to believe in bipartisanship for its own sake, divorced from any underlying policy goals.” But really, I don’t give a crap what drives her. I care only about her actions, and what she’s doing here is inexcusable.
[…]
One of the best historic indicators of midterm election results is the president’s approval rating at the time. Biden has sunk to the mid- to low 40s, and while most of it is probably Delta variant–related, some of it surely has to do with the fact that he hasn’t had a W since March (the Covid relief bill). If Democrats had avoided this shitshow and passed these two bills right after Labor Day, as they should have, Biden would be up around 50 and people would be talking very differently about his and his party’s posture heading into the midterms. Yes, there’s still time, but this entire mess was avoidable, and it has done damage that can’t be undone.
The only silver lining is that it’s damaged Sinema, too. She’s gone from 48-35 approval in Arizona earlier this year to 42-42. She’s lost 21 points among Democrats, and she’s now underwater with independents by five points.
So yes, there are admirable Democrats and dubious Democrats. And then there’s Sinema. She’s in a category of her own. She seriously thinks she’s like John McCain? When McCain bucked his party—on Obamacare, and on campaign finance reform, the one thing Mitch McConnell hates more than anything else—he was taking on special interests. Sinema is bucking her party by serving those interests. I don’t expect her to see the difference, but I sure hope Arizonans do.
She is ridiculous. Manchin is too, of course but he’s from a state that went for Trump by 40 points so there is at least some logic in his behavior. He still should do the right thing, of course. And it’s maddening that either one of these people think they have the right to dictate to the entire party — the entire country!
I’ll just say again that the Senate is an undemocratic institution that should be banned, as should the electoral college. In this polarized atmosphere, with a corrupt minority party these foolish anachronisms are enabling this sort of individual preening even more than usual and will likely usher in a very dangerous minoritarian rule. It’s too late for all that, of course. So it’s going to be nip and tuck for a while. The least Sinema and Manchin could do is hold themselves back from hastening our demise.
Roy Edroso reminds us today that Trumpism was on the rise before Trump. And I had forgotten that there was quite a bit of chatter after 2012 that the Democrats had “stolen” the election and the pollsters had “skewed” the polls.
He notes that the base was primed after years of disappointment and had already turned on the GOP leadership. (I would remind everyone that the second in command, Congressman Eric Cantor was taken out in a primary by a guy who ruthlessly demagogued immigration.)
He takes us back to 2016:
I believe the Republican base was then as impatient with the old fuck-the-poor GOP strategies as everyone else. That wasn’t because they didn’t want to fuck the poor; the base was, then as now, mostly made up of smallholders and the would-be rich, and they hated the poor and all the disenfranchised, and any hint of their empowerment, because they thought anything that benefited such people would cost them respect and revenue.
But the base was impatient because, after the 2008 financial collapse, which had so rattled the nation that it agreed to elect a black Democrat president, the justifications for fucking the poor that the Party had been dishing out for decades had become worn out, insulting and, above all, ineffective.
They didn’t blame the message, though; they blamed the messengers.
At least their avatars on the Internet and on TV did. They were mad at the Romney people who’d lost what they thought was a sure shot to take the White House in 2012, and blamed his milquetoast, temporizing manner — just as they had previously blamed John McCain for not ripping the bark off Obama in 2008.
You and I might see why McCain and Romney thought yelling at Obama was a bad political strategy. But imagine how the conservative base, accustomed as it was to successful, full-throated assertions of their righteousness and superiority, felt about all that pussyfooting.
It helps if you actually know any Republicans (apart from the country-club types who have cocktails with their Democratic friends and think it’s all a great game). They’re not like the Democrats who, in the face of the Reagan Revolution, sniffed the winds and embraced DLC neoliberalism (or, for that matter, the New Labour types in Britain who later embraced Tony Blair). Those Democrats had lost their mid-century hubris, and felt they had to meet the voters where they imagined them to be, and once in power see what they could get away with. (That usually turns out to be not much, which annoys their situational allies like me.)
But everything in the modern history and temperament of the GOP had taught them that all the sweetness of victory was in domination. And yet here were their alleged champions playing patty-cake with a man they considered a black communist black Muslim black.
And they knew in their guts that they weren’t going to do any better next time with a “revenue-neutral flex fund.”
They were even more mad at the media than usual, and at the leftists with which they considered it allied. Most of you remember how Obama’s rust-belt-jobs policies clinched Ohio and thus the election for him, and think Romney was lucky to get as close as he did. But you may have forgotten Karl Rove on Fox News on election night 2012, demanding the network’s analytics team prove that Obama had won Ohio. That was unprecedented and deeply weird — Rove making a stink and confronting the number-crunchers, who looked at him as if he were simple-minded and said, essentially, no my dude, we do this for a living.
Post-election, there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any of these states, and certainly nothing suggesting Obama’s wins in those four states depended on voter fraud. So Slate‘s Dave Weigel asked Chambers for evidence backing up his serious accusations. What followed was a collision between fact-based reporting and fact-free magical thinking:
“I’m getting credible information of evidence in those states that there [are] enough numbers that are questionable and could have swung the election,” he says. “I’m only putting good credible information on there, like the actual vote counts, reports, and mainstream publications reporting voter fraud. There’s a lot of chatter, though. There are articles people have sent me that don’t hold up. Crazy stuff.”
What’s not crazy? “Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes,” says Chambers. “Even Larry Sabato said that should be looked into.” (I’ve looked into this: 57 precincts gave McCain no votes in 2008)…
The main thrust of the piece is to take on the so-called “reformicons” like Ross Douthat who thought they could finesse their way out of the bigotry and authoritarianism of the modern GOP. As he points out, unlike Democrats who are constantly trying to recalibrate when they lose elections, almost to the point of obsession, the Republicans just don’t roll that way. The reformicon attempts were bound to fail. And let’s face it, they didn’t really believe it anyway…
Remember this the next time some wingnut uses the “stand your ground” defense:
Today supporters and family of Ashli Babbitt including her parents and husband held a “Texas Loves Ashli Babbitt” rally at a country club in Freeport, Texas, where they celebrated what would have been her 36th birthday and condemned her January 6 shooting death.
Former President Trump spoke at the Ashli Babbitt birthday commemoration via pre-recorded video: “Her memory will live on in our hearts for all time.”
“There was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family,” Trump said.
“She went to Washington to help us see the light, like the millions that also heard the call” sang ‘Texas Loves Ashli Babbit’ organizer Al Manica.
“But the Democrats that took our love away, you know they shot her, they shot her down. Pelosi. Schumer. Harris. Buh buh buh Biden.”
“They squashed the movement that day,” said Ashli Babbitt’s mother, Micki Witthoeft.
“They killed my daughter, and they jailed patriots, and they said ‘look what happens when you question us.'”
“F*** off and die, Nancy Pelsoi!” she said to cheers.
“We will get justice for Ashli Babbitt, you daughter, our sister,” said Eric Braden, a Texas nationalist running for governor.
“We seek peace through non-violent actions,” he said.
“This man that did this deserves justice,” he said referring to USCP Lt. Michael Byrd.
“We ask you to anoint us with your holy spirit,” prayed Pastor Edward Smith at Ashli Babbitt rally.
“To stand our ground to be the lions and lionesses you ask us to be. No longer are we lambs. We’re lions and we are to stand and fight against a serpent and tell him ‘no more.'”
Congressman @DrPaulGosar appeared by video at the “Texas Loves Ashli Babbitt” birthday rally.
He says he continues to demand answers “as the family and indeed all Americans deserve full transparency and accountability surrounding the murder of Ashli.”
I asked Ashli Babbitt’s mother what she thinks justice for her daughter would look like.
She wants Capitol Police reform, while clarifying that she supports police but doesn’t view USCP as police.
Also changes in voting system; she still believes election was stolen from Trump.
The most astonishing thing about this is the fact that the former president filmed a special video for this strange occasion and asserted that “there was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day.” That’s really rich from the guy who told all 50 Governors that they needed to crack heads and shoot protesters — “dominate, dominate, dominate.” Of course he wasn’t talking about his own insurrectionists.
They’re going to do it. I’ve been writing about that Bush v Gore concurrence in which Rehnquist and Scalia proposed this theory. It has been taken up by the current Supreme Court wingnuts:
Indeed. The Eastman memo isn't an outlier: notice what Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch wrote about state legislatures in the 2020 PA & WI cases.
This has obviously been contemplated in wingnut circles for 20 years and they are poised to pull the trigger. The only question is whether they are crazy enough to do it for Donald Trump.
“Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war,” write Miles “Anonymous” Taylor and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman (still a Republican). The only way to save the party from “pro-Trump extremists,” they believe, is for like-minded Republicans to team up with Democrats in 2022.
With much of their party in thrall to conspiracy theories and the conspirator-in-chief, they plead for a return to sanity. They have considered forming a new, center-right party, but the history of such political start-ups makes that option a last resort. What they choose in the near-term is an alliance to save America. With moderate Democrats, at least.
It’s a strategy that has worked. Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden, a margin big enough to have made some difference in key swing states.
Even still, we don’t take this position lightly. Many of us have spent years battling the left over government’s role in society, and we will continue to have disagreements on fundamental issues like infrastructure spending, taxes and national security. Similarly, some Democrats will be wary of any pact with the political right.
But we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate the leaders of the G.O.P. — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose.
To that end, 150 conservative “former governors, senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, and party leaders” are calling for Republicans to support a “Renew America Movement” slate of “nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates” in 2022. They support Democrats such as Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, and will defend moderate Republicans such as such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger targeted by Trumpists in primaries.
With the withdrawal of Craig Snyder from the GOP gubernatorial primary, they will support centrist Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb over any of the Trumpists in the race.
For Democrats, this similarly means being open to conceding that there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledging that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.
But theirs is a primary strategy, not one for the general election. To “throw their lot in with a center-right candidate” presumably asks Democrats to give “renewers” financial support or to vote for Republicans in open primaries rather than to vote in Democratic ones. Much of the political calculus for that depends on the dynamics in both major parties and the results of congressional redistricting.
Should a viable Republican from Henderson County, North Carolina challenge Rep. Madison Cawthorn in his home county, plenty of NC-11 Unafilliateds (the designation for independents in the state) would vote in the Republican primary to split the vote for a chance to knock Cawthorn out in the primary. How independents and Democrats would vote in the general is another matter. Should Cawthorn survive such a challenge, how many Republicans in the conservative district will vote for a left-of-center Democrat in the NC-11 general or for a Democrat for U.S. Senate over a Trumpist Republican? Tribalism is a tough nut.
Taylor and Whitman acknowledge that party animosities are an obstacle to their proposal.
To work, it will require trust-building between both camps, especially while fighting side-by-side in the toughest races around the country by learning to collaborate on voter outreach, sharing sensitive polling data, and synchronizing campaign messaging.
A compact between the center-right and the left may seem like an unnatural fit, but in the battle for the soul of America’s political system, we cannot retreat to our ideological corners.
We’ll see what happens after the primaries are over next year.
Donald Trump’s Iowa rally over the weekend stands out, Dean Obeidallah writes at CNN. The Republican Party has put behind the unpleasantness of Jan. 6 and slipped deeper into Trumpism. Multiple GOP pols who in January blamed Trump’s incitement for the assault on the Capitol attended the rally to make obeissance before their liege lord. Among Republicans in attendance were Iowa US Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Iowa Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson.
The most hypocritical of the bunch is Sen. Grassley, who on January 6 was escorted by his security detail to a secure location to protect him from the pro-Trump mob that had laid siege on the Capitol. Grassley, who voted to certify the 2020 election, made a veiled reference to Trump in his statement, noting that the lawsuits filed after the election had failed and that “politicians in Washington should not second guess the courts once they have ruled.”
Grassley issued a statement in February calling out Trump for trying to undermine certification of election results and to dispute the determination of multiple courts. Trump “belittled and harassed elected officials across the country to get his way,” Grassley said. “He encouraged his own, loyal vice president, Mike Pence, to take extraordinary and unconstitutional actions during the Electoral College count.” Trump along with the riotersbore responsibility for the Capitol attack.
But by Saturday, all was forgiven. Grassley was there to accept Trump’s endorsement as just good politics: “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91 percent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart.”
Hinson too had in January issued a statement placing responsibilty on Trump for both his actions and inaction that day. She was there nonetheless on Saturday.
Obeidallah continues:
You don’t need to be a historian to recognize the danger in a political party showing blind loyalty to one person. These GOP elected officials just several months ago rightly criticized Trump and his role in the false election claims that led to the January 6 attack. With their presence at his rally this weekend, it seems they’ve now changed their tune.
“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once told a staffer. It may be the only principle Republicans have left.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) reflected on what has become of the Republican Party on “Face the Nation” Sunday. Host Margaret Brennan asked about the Democrats’ efforts to advance legislation without cooperation from Republicans. Doesn’t that make it appear that “Washington’s not working again”?
WATCH: @RepAdamSchiff tells @margbrennan the Republican party is an "autocratic cult around Donald Trump" and is not "interested in governing" or "maintaining the solvency of the country." pic.twitter.com/f2doChgscP
Schiff responded that the Republican Party has become “an autocratic cult around Donald Trump … not interested in governing.”
“It’s not interested in even maintaining the solvency in the credit worthiness of the country. And we have to recognize that they’re not interested in governing. And so we’re going to govern, we’re going to have to do it. And if we have to do it with our own votes, we will do that.”
Democrats are tasked with demonstrating “that democracy delivers, that it can help people put food on the table, that it can address these huge disparities in income.” Democracy’s fragility means Democrats must not only deliver on that, but “also on voting rights and stop these efforts to disenfranchise people.”
More distressing is how the Republican Party “has made itself an anti-truth, anti-democratic cult of the former president,” Schiff said, “and the responsibility is on that party to once again become a party of ideas.”
He is being over-generous. Schiff admits that people he once respected because he believed they believed their own rhetoric “turned out not to believe it at all. That the only thing that they cared about was the maintenance of their power or position.”
Grassley, et al. demonstrated again on Saturday that flexibility is perhaps their only principle, and power their only interest.
