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Our Common Cause

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 25, 2025

What did you do to fight fascism, Nana?

No one is coming to save you.

Certainly not Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). The House minority leader appeared Monday night on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. Maddow noted that people are desperate for Democrats to “fight harder, to not be nice, to break protocol,” get arrested even. To lead the resistance. She tried but couldn’t draw a flicker of passion from the technocratic Jeffries. Quizzed on what Democrats are doing to fight the Musk-Trump cabal, Jeffries presented as if guest-hosting “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

“It’s all hands on deck in the Congress. It’s all hands on deck in the courts. And it’s certainly all hands on deck in communities across the country,” Jeffries, 54, insisted in a tone that was anything but insistent.

Like many older Democrats in his caucus who learned their politics decades ago (and stopped learning), Jeffries brings the wrong skill set to the job of fighting Musk-Trump’s efforts to cut up the republic like a stolen car in a chop-shop.

The growing resistance is very grassroots, Maddow observed, very organic and bottom-up.

“But what they are trying to push up and push forward is you and your colleagues,” she prodded, “to try to further empower you and further inspire you … to find new tactics, to find new avenues, to find new leverage.” Jeffries’s reply was flatter than Peter Cook’s homily on “Mawwage.”

Jeffries posted the video to YouTube as though proud of it.

“Democrats in Congress are growing rattled by the historic flood of calls from their grassroots supporters demanding they do more to combat the Trump administration,” Axios reports:

What we’re hearing: At a closed-door meeting of House Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee on Monday, members voiced frustration with activist groups like MoveOn and Indivisible that have facilitated thousands of calls to members’ offices, according to several lawmakers who were present.

  • “There were a lot of people who were like, ‘We’ve got to stop the groups from doing this’ … people are concerned that they’re saying we’re not doing enough, but we’re not in the majority,” said one member.
  • “People are pissed,” said a senior House Democrat who was also at the meeting, adding that Jeffries himself is “very frustrated.”
  • A Jeffries spokesperson disputed that characterization and noted to Axios that their office regularly engages with dozens of stakeholder groups, including MoveOn and Indivisible, including as recently as Monday

No one is coming to save you.

Common Cause writes this morning that if you couldn’t get through to your representatives in Congress recently, it’s because the phone lines are jammed (that’s why my fallback is an efax). Common Cause has this ask:

Together, we’re asking our leaders: What are you going to do to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump from stripping our government for parts?

Republicans are, unsurprisingly, going along with their heist – though if you ask them what they think when a camera isn’t rolling, many aren’t 100% bought in. But unfortunately, Democrats aren’t doing enough either – and while some are waking up, we’re in a full-blown crisis, and it’s time they started acting like it.

That’s why Common Cause has launched our Fire Elon Musk campaign – because every day lawmakers wait to act is another day these billionaires get closer to putting a “Going Out of Business” sign on our democracy so they can sell it off to the highest bidder.

And our pressure is clearly working. Earlier this month, you helped force the Trump Administration to walk back their draconian freeze on federal aid – Trump’s first major political defeat of his second term.

Make no mistake, Tom: Elon Musk failed. Donald Trump failed. And you won. Their tyrannical playbook is no match for YOU, and for the people powered movement we’re building together.

[…]

The first and most important thing to remember is that no matter how our opponents want to pretend they are kings, or corporate executives whose only duty is to increase their profits – we’re still a democracy, end of story.

So, we won’t accept Congress rubber stamping Trump’s nominees and his divisive agenda while he lets Elon Musk turn our federal government into his personal playground.

You can join the fight or be political roadkill.

No one is coming to save you.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink

Yes, Sir! How Low?

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 25, 2025

“Message received”

MSNBC’s new network president, Rebecca Kutler, saluted He Who Would Be King last week and said, “Yes, Sir! How low?” Kutler offered in sacrifice a half-dozen of its anchors (and their production teams). The network plans to relocate some to new ensemble-format shows.

Former Obama administration official, Brandon Friedman, posted an image of ousted anchors (above) and remarked, “Seen together, hoo boy. Message received.”

Timothy Snyder warned us. And warned us again. And again. “Do Not Obey in Advance.”

Democracy Now! spoke with Snyder back in December on how corporate America was “bending” to Donald Trump “following ABC News’s decision to settle a Trump defamation case by donating $15 million to his future presidential library.”

“There is a problem when the people who have the most money set the example of yielding to power first,” Snyder said. “It’s textbook anticipatory obedience.”

Lester Holt is exiting his slot as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” after a decade. Ayman Mohyeldin is losing his weekend evening show. Alex Wagner will surrender her 9 p.m. weekday show to Jen Psaki once Rachel Maddow completes her first 100 days of the Trump administration stint in that time slot, The Guardian reports:

Along with Mohyeldin’s weekend evening show, the network is also cancelling Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart’s shows.

The plan is for Capehart, like Mohyeldin, to host a new show, and Phang would continue as a legal correspondent. Wagner will stay with the network as a senior political analyst.

The cancellation of Joy Reid from her 7 p.m. weekday show — it ended Monday — was perhaps the most jarring. Enough that Rachel Maddow spoke out against the network’s decision during her show Monday night, with a focus on Reid’s firing.

“Personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door,” she said of Reid.

Maddow described it as “unnerving” and “indefensible” for the network’s only two non-white primetime hosts lose their shows. Meanwhile, dozens of producers and staffers are facing layoffs or being invited to reapply for new jobs, she said.

“That has never happened at this scale in this way before when it comes to programming changes – presumably because it’s not the right way to treat people,” she said. “This is a difficult time in the news business but it does not need to be this difficult.”

Oval Office Man reacted specifically to Reid’s firing:

“Lowlife Chairman of “Concast,” Brian Roberts, the owner of Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC, has finally gotten the nerve up to fire one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Based on her ratings, which were virtually non-existent, she should have been “canned” long ago, along with everyone else who works there.”

In “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Snyder warns, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then they offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Contrarywise, the Associated Press refused to join Bootlickers Anonymous in rebuffing Trump’s demand to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” What people call it is not important to him. What is important is that he can compel people’s obedience when he insists that up is down and the past is alterable. In real time, we are watching a Trumpian retread of “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Scott Nover opines on the hypocrisy of Big Hair Brother’s “language-policing demands” at Slate:

For Trump, Musk, and the team of billionaires—elected and unelected—running the government, the hypocrisy is the point. The real language police are inside the White House, and they’re running with a nouveau take on “alternative facts” all these years later. If the AP isn’t able to push back successfully when it’s extorted for narrative control, then we’re already entering something else altogether: a truly Orwellian time in American politics. When free speech is only what the government says it is, then we don’t really have free speech.

But Kutler heard Trump’s personal decision to ban the Associated Press from the White House Press Room loud and clear. MSNBC offered itself without being asked, as ABC did. Barely one month into the Trump 2.0 administration she reinforced for Donald Trump that other news outlets would cave to his will to maintain their access.

The waters between Texas and Florida have always been called the Gulf of America.

* * * * *

Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink

America Has Turned

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

The Financial Times is not known as a hysterical left wing rag:

Winston Churchill is credited with saying that America does the right thing after exhausting the alternatives. Donald Trump has turned that aphorism on its head. In the past 10 days, he has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership. Those who thought America was a friend or ally, notably Ukraine and Nato, are dropping once safe assumptions to cope with a world in which America is an unabashed predator. Countries that were treated by Washington as adversaries, notably Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are suddenly America’s friend.

There were hinge moments in history when the US displayed its character as global leader, such as Dwight Eisenhower’s repudiation of Anglo-French imperialism in the 1956 Suez crisis, or Ronald Reagan’s 1987 exhortation to the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall. They defined the world’s idea of America. Trump’s assertion this week that Ukraine “should have never started” the war is the dark version of those. His account of Russia being provoked to invade Ukraine came straight from Putin’s talking points. So too was JD Vance’s Valentine’s Day speech in Munich in which the US vice-president identified liberal democracy as Europe’s real threat from within.

These moments will live in infamy.

[…]

Trump is only getting started. His dismissal of Zelenskyy as “a dictator without elections” portends the disturbing outline of a peace settlement. Vance called Zelenskyy “disgraceful” for accusing Trump of living in a “disinformation bubble”. The idea that Ukraine has been under brutal assault and faces possible extinction is dismissed as liberal virtue signalling, like DEI or constitutional guardrails.

They point out that his blathering about Greenland and Gaza are not just trivialities to be ignored because they illustrate how he divides the world into “spheres of interest” which in his mind means whatever he wants it to mean.

And they point out that while some think his sucking up to Russia is a clever way of “luring” Russia away from China, it’s ridiculous:

But that is wishful thinking. Any such manoeuvre would make sense only in concert with America’s allies. While promising to lift sanctions on Russia, Trump is readying for a new transatlantic trade war. After three generations of US leadership, it is always tempting to believe that Trump does not mean what he says. Perhaps this is a feint in some grand art of the deal. But allies and erstwhile friends must banish those self-soothing thoughts. With Trump, what you see is what you get.

America has turned. 

Sadly, they are correct. And in Europe, despite the pandering we see with Macron’s visit today and probably Starmer’s later, nobody believes in this alliance anymore.

The new German center right leader has defied the entreaties of the US to make common cause with the new Nazis of the Afd party and instead is giving up on the United States:

Friedrich Merz did not even wait for the final results in Germany’s election before delivering what could well be a defining verdict on U.S. President Donald Trump, consigning Europe’s 80-year alliance with the United States to the past.

The Trump administration does not care about Europe and is aligning with Russia, said Merz, who is on course to become Germany’s new leader. The continent, he warned, must urgently strengthen its defenses and potentially even find a replacement for NATO — within months.Merz’s comments mark a historic watershed: They reveal how deeply Trump has shaken the political foundations of Europe, which has depended on American security guarantees since 1945.

If he follows through on his rhetoric after assembling a new government in the coming weeks, Merz will steer Europe in a radical new direction at a critical time for the security of Ukraine and the wider region.

“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting said. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump’s statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” 

Merz, a staunch Atlanticist who has spent much of his professional career as a lawyer working with and for American firms, didn’t stop there. Later this year, a NATO summit will be held — but he suggested Europe may need to devise a new defense structure to replace it.  “I am very curious to see how we are heading toward the NATO summit at the end of June,” he said. “Whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.”

Stunning. And in case you are wondering about the contours of this new European alliance, it’s not altogether a good thing:

On Friday, Merz suggested it was time to explore nuclear cooperation between France, the U.K. and Germany (and others) to replace the American nuclear umbrella that has guaranteed European safety from Russian attack. His speculation was anything but idle.

It makes perfect sense that Trump’s childlike obsession with corrupt “deals” (which always seem to benefit the other side) would end up initiating a new nuclear arms race. He makes the world more dangerous every time he opens his mouth.

Adventures In DOGEland

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

WTH is going on here?

The WSJ reports:

President Trump endorsed Elon Musk’s demand that federal workers summarize their weekly accomplishments or face termination, eliciting conflicting guidance from agency leaders over whether and how employees should respond. 

Trump said he thought the weekend email sent to more than two million federal workers under the subject line “What did you do last week?” was “great because we have people that don’t show up to work, and nobody even knows if they work for the government.”

“If you don’t answer, like you’re sort of semi-fired, or you’re fired because a lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist,” Trump said during an appearance at the Oval Office on Monday with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Trump and Musk spoke by phone about plans for the email before Musk posted about it Saturday on X, people familiar with the matter said. Trump said on Truth Social earlier on Saturday that he wanted Musk to “get more aggressive” in his role as a senior adviser and overseer of the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk and his allies within DOGE came up with the idea for the email. 

As of now, it appears that employees are not required to answer the email despite Trump endorsing it as recently as his press avail with Macron in the White House this afternoon.

That’s right. This batshit crazy nonsense came from the Department of Government Efficiency. It gets worse every single day.

60 Minutes did a couple of good segments last night on the chaos. The first is about what’s happened at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Here’s Trump on the subject:

Trump says he shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because he was getting calls from bankers and loan officers who were “almost crying” at how hard the bureau was fighting to protect American consumers

It’s not just Musk, though. This segment about what they are doing to the Department of Justice is even more chilling:

Both of these segments are well worth watching and sharing with non-political junkies who may not be following the day to day carnage that Musk is wreaking on our government. As one might expect, they do an excellent job of telling the story in a clear comprehensible way. I suspect that it may have shocked some people to see it. Good for 60 Minutes for not backing down.

This is anything but a comprehensive list of atrocities. There is so much more, all of it shocking and dangerous. The purge of the military is perhaps one of the most disturbing of all because Pete Hegseth is not only firing the Black and female leadership across the board, he fired the top JAG lawyers so there will be no obstacles to the wanton commission of war crimes (Hegseth’s special issue) and no one to ensure that the military understands the meaning of “illegal orders.” One can only assume that they plan to do both of those things which is not surprising considering the phony talk show host’s psychotic obsession with cartoon machismo.

I think the big question is going to be whether Trump and Hegseth will deploy the military for domestic political purposes as banana republic dictators do. It seems obvious to me that it’s at least on the menu whether we are talking about street protests or a full-blown military coup. Of course it is.

QOTD: Donald Trump

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

“I don’t want to explain it now, but it’s sort of self evident I think,” President Trump says in the Oval Office when asked about why the U.S. joined Russia to vote in voting against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Yes, yes it is self evident. The Trump administration is openly supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. America has now joined hands with Putin to steal Ukraine’s riches while Putin keeps the land its conquered and take a breather to rearm in order to take the rest.

Kaitlin Collins: Notable moment in the Oval Office where Trump says “Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine” and “they’re getting their money back” when Macron interrupted to say, “No, in fact, to be frank, we paid. We paid 60% of the total effort.”

Macron, with Trump scowling next to him, says “the aggressor is Russia.” Asked if he supports Ukraine compensating the US for aid — “I support the idea of Ukraine first being compensated, he said, adding that any reparations should be paid “not by Ukraine, but by Russia, because they were the ones to aggress.”

Macron corrects Trump after he claims “Europe is loaning the money to Ukraine. ” Trump does not like it.

He wants those minerals and he’s going to take them. From what we’re seeing, Ukraine is going to agree to it because they have no choice. I’m going to guess the deal they are all saying is imminent will not include everything that they originally demanded and instead will be closer to what Zelensky first offered back in September.

Trump will strut around like he’s Alexander The Great and pretend that he made the greatest deal since the Louisiana Purchase but everyone knows that Putin is going to end up the big winner,.

Here’s Zelensky:

It All Begins With “X”

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

I assume you’ve heard that Trump and Musk are planning to go to Ft Knox together to verify that the gold is actually there. Trump can’t stop talking about it. ( I know. It’s so damned stupid, but whatever.) If you’re wondering where this came from, it came from Elon reading something on twitter which is pretty much how our government is being run these days.

It sounds like just another ceremonial Trumpusk pageant. I’m sure the two greedheads would love to roll around naked in rooms full of gold bars. But I’m afraid this mind end up being a precursor to some crazy crypto move to “secure” the money supply or something. I know that sounds ridiculous but consider who we’re dealing with.

.

This Is The Disinformation We’re Dealing With

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

It’s a relatively small lie but an important one because it’s coming not from Trump whom everyone know is a pathological liar. This one’s from Russ Vought someone who is taken quite seriously even now by the MSM and political establishment”

They just make stuff up and the cult gobbles it up and swallows it.

Here’s a piece about DOGE’s lies, errors and disinformation. It’s already legion and they’re just getting started. From the left wing propaganda outfit known as the Wall St Journal (gift link):

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency touts cuts of $55 billion in federal spending, often citing canceled DEI and climate contracts. However, a Wall Street Journal analysis of government contract data showed a much different picture: “Woke” cuts were a tiny fraction of the total, and many claims of savings were overstated.

While DOGE hasn’t offered details about all of the stated savings, it has posted a list of more than 1,100 canceled contracts to its website. As of Friday, it said the savings from these contracts amounted to about $7 billion. 

The Journal analysis projects the actual savings could be closer to $2.6 billion over the next year if spending levels remained constant—and about 2% of the funds would have gone to contracts related to DEI.

Research-focused agencies were among the top targets for cuts, including the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, where DOGE terminated contracts costing the government more than $900 million last year.

DOGE terminated more than 60 Health and Human Services contracts including a clinical evaluation of an Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury drug and a study of smokers with chronic lung disease. DOGE described these as “administrative expenses.” 

An administration official said many contracts were canceled for waste, fraud and abuse. They added that DOGE’s estimations of its savings are conservative and that no funds for Alzheimer’s were canceled. 

Many of the Education Department’s canceled contracts funded research on college costs, student career paths and early childhood development. DOGE said one $1.4 million contract funded “mailing and clerical operations.” The contract was used to mail surveys to respondents participating in studies and was nearly complete when canceled, creating no savings for terminating it.

There’s much more. Here’s the NY Times on DOGE’s ballyhooed “wall of receipts” (gift link)

President Trump has been celebrating the published savings, even musing about a proposal to mail checks to all Americans to reimburse them with a “DOGE dividend.”

But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.

Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.

Do read them both. Let’s just say that if you turned in work like that anyplace that wasn’t run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk you’d be fired on the spot. To think that the sloppy little boys who produced that garbage are given license to fire professional public servants on a whim is infuriating.

I know Republicans are thrilled to see someone destroying the government since they have always said they hated it. Did they want to destroy the country right along with it? I guess they did because they know very well this is a shitshow of shitshows and they’re just going along for the ride enjoying the pain and suffering they are causing their fellow Americans.

If nothing else, I do feel vindicated in my intense, decades-long loathing of every elected official in that sick and twisted organization.

Wake Up People

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

The best thing you will hear today. Jane Fonda has been an activist almost her whole life and she knows how to talk the talk and walk the walk. Right now, Hollywood needs to take a page from her book and speak the fuck up.

It’s a wonderful speech especially at the end when she speaks out against what’s happening and inspires people to fight back, evoking the Black List and how good people in Hollywood fought back.

She was well received but you could tell that people in the audience were nervous. I suppose some of them are just getting by but most are rich and famous and can easily afford to speak out like she did. The worst that would happen to them is that they’d have to move to the south of France and live in a villa. No excuse for silence from people the MAGA brownshirts would love nothing more than to destroy.

She never mentioned Trump and Musk’s names. She didn’t have to. We all know what’s happening. It shouldn’t take an 87 year old lifetime achievement winner to be the only one to sound the alarm.

How About That Economy?

Published by digby on February 24, 2025
A Hooverville

The pessimism, wrong track numbers and general vibes on the economy are already low so I will be surprised if these layoffs don’t turbo charge the negative vibe. (I’ve been surprised by this stuff before, so don’t take my word for it…)

Anyway, here are some predictions from economists:

The job cuts could ultimately be the biggest in U.S. history. IBM’s purge of about 60,000 workers in 1993 is thought to be the largest corporate layoff.

The Trump administration’s purge of federal workers may ultimately amount to the biggest job cut in U.S. history, which is likely to have ramifications for the economy, especially at the local level, according to economists.

[…]

There were about 220,000 federal employees with less than a year of tenure as of May 2024, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Additionally, more than 75,000 federal workers have accepted a buyout offer, according to a Trump administration official. They agreed to resign but get paid through September.

The total of these two groups — nearly 300,000 workers — would make these actions amount to the “largest job cut in American history (by a mile),” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, wrote Tuesday.

That sum doesn’t include others who may be on the chopping block, such as contractors who work at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Career civil servants who got promotions in the past year are also at risk of losing their jobs, since they’re technically on probation in their new role, Jesse Rothstein, a public policy and economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, said in a podcast Thursday.

Some of them pooh-pooh the idea of a recession because of this but they all understand that massive layoffs, deportations of large numbers of workers and Trump’s tariffs are all adding up to economic turbulence.

I like to think that might be the thing that finally pressures Trump into taking a breath and stopping the shock and awe campaign. But honestly, I think he totally believes his own hype now and is pretty much impervious to public opinion. Sadly, it will probably take a major crisis — and we already know how he handles those.

Just Say No

Published by digby on February 24, 2025

Considering the carnage being inflicted upon the country by the Trump administration over the past four weeks you would think that the GOP would be the most unpopular political party in the country. After all, the polls show that the public is very unhappy with Donald Trump’s policies while the Republican elected officials appear to be in a state of suspended animation unable to exercise their own prerogatives as an equal branch of government even as the president and his henchmen usurp their power while basically laughing in their faces. Sadly, despite the fact that the GOP is extremely unpopular, the prize for most loathed political party at the moment belongs to the Democrats.

The numbers are very bad. According to the Quinnipiac poll, 57% of registered voters have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party. It’s the highest that’s been since they started asking the question back in 2008. By contrast only 45% of voters are unhappy with the GOP. The Democrats are at a lukewarm 31% favorability rating.

You might wonder why people would be so negative about the party that has no institutional power and has virtually no ability to stop the Trump/Musk trainwreck. But it’s not actually unusual for Democrats to turn on their own party when they lose. Unlike the Republicans who simply double down, get more extreme and gather their energies for the fight, Democrats get introspective, indulge in soul searching and self-flagellation and often end up over-compensating for their losses by making abrupt changes in policies. Sometimes they go so far in the other direction it appears that they have no values or ideology beyond what they think will “work better.” That habit can leave a bad taste in voters’ mouths.

I recall losses going back to the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone was convinced that the Republicans had an unbreakable grip on the presidency because they had held it for 12 years. The amount of navel gazing that took place in those years was epic as Democrats twisted themselves into pretzels trying to find the formula that would finally get them back into the White House. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, two Southern white men with card carrying membership in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council ended up finding it, largely by offering baby boomer identity cred in combination with pretty conservative ideology.

Everyone thought they had the formula down until Gore barely lost to George W. Bush in 2000 and the Democrats spent the next few years once again running away as fast as they could from gun control, abortion rights, affirmative action etc. and demonstrating that Democratic values were always negotiable. It wasn’t until Barack Obama came along and changed the paradigm in 2008 and winning by a big margin that they showed some confidence again.

It’s obviously important to analyze what went wrong and where better tactics and strategies could have been deployed. Understanding why the voters chose as they did is invaluable. But when you lost by only 1.4% and a couple hundred thousand votes across the battleground states as the Democrats did last November, donning a hair shirt and behaving as if the loss was a complete repudiation of everything you believed in is overkill to say the least. More importantly it validates the fantasy that Trump won some kind of a mandate for his extremist agenda which is simply not the case. Democrats do not need to reinvent the wheel this time.

Having said that, it is disheartening to see the Democrats in Washington appear to either be ineffectual or totally missing in action. (Of course the same can be said of Republicans which is even more bizarre.) There are those who are unafraid to do politics even when they are unable to do policy which is the comfort zone for most of them. People like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, D-N.Y., and Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Brain Schatz of Hawaii among others are aggressively confronting the Republicans where they can. But the Democrats in general do not have the flair for opposition and obstruction that Republicans do and it’s what their voters are yearning for.

Lately, those voters have been taking matters into their own hands and are confronting their Representatives at town hall meetings and at their offices demanding to know what in the hell they’re going to do to stop the carnage that’s taking place in DC right now. And it’s not just Democrats. Republicans and Independents are showing up as well. Perhaps this kind of politics is more potent coming from the grassroots anyway.

Soon, however, the Democrats are going to have a real chance to show what they are made of and if they play this hand well, I suspect they will win back some of the respect they’ve lost. There is one thing left in American politics that the congress has no choice but to engage and Trump and Musk have no control over and it’s funding the government. On that, despite their minority status, they have leverage and power because the Republicans can’t agree on anything.

There are just three weeks left until the continuing resolution that was punted to March 14th before Christmas runs out three weeks from now. And while the Senate and the House are dreaming about massive tax cuts and taking a machete to Medicaid, they apparently haven’t given a thought to the fact that even with all the DOGE sturm und drang the government is about to run out of money.

As we know, the Republicans in the House have a faction that will not vote for spending. They just won’t. So with their tiny majority they need Democrats to cover for their intransigence. But with Trump and Musk busily destroying the executive branch and seemingly enjoying the carnage they’re creating while doing it, Democrats understand that the Republicans are going to have to deal with their people on their own this time.

The GOP has created the politics we are all living through and they have all the institutional tools they need to pass whatever they want to pass. Unfortunately, they are completely dysfunctional and that dysfunction will likely result in a government shutdown. It could be a painful one but the government is already engulfed in Musk’s firestorm so if the congressional Republicans get in on the act too, it’s all the more clarifying. As Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Ct., the ranking minority-party member of the House Appropriations Committee told the Washington Post, “Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House. It is their responsibility to find the votes to pass the final measures.” It’s that simple.

There is every reason to believe right now that the Democrats are going to hang tough this time. They pretty much have to. With a 31% approval rating they certainly don’t have much to lose but they have a lot to gain as their voters see that they are refusing to go along with this MAGA trainwreck. Sometimes the best way to show leadership is to just say no, especially to bullies, thieves and thugs. The American people will thank them for it.

Salon