Forbes | How Democrats Can Reclaim The Political Center Forbes As Democrats sip kombucha in our coastal sanctuaries, we continue to despair about the results of November's election and question how we can rebuild our party. A growing portion of liberals seem to think that the solution to our electoral woes is to ... |
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How Democrats Can Reclaim The Political Center - Forbes
Senate Democrats should use any and all means, including the filibuster, to block confirmation of President Trumps Supreme Court nominee. They will almost surely fail. But sometimes you have to lose a battle to win a war.
This is purely about politics. Republicans hold the presidency, majorities in the House and Senate, 33 governorships and control of the legislatures in 32 states. If the Democratic Party is going to become relevant again outside of its coastal redoubts, it has to start winning some elections and turning the other cheek on this court fight is not the way to begin.
Trumps pick, Judge Neil Gorsuch , has the rsum required of a Supreme Court justice. But so did Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obamas last nominee, to whom Senate Republicans would not even extend the courtesy of a hearing, let alone a vote. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) left the late Antonin Scalias seat open for nearly a year to keep Obama from filling it. That, too, was purely about politics.
Im not counseling eye-for-an-eye revenge. Im advising Democrats to consider what course of action is most likely to improve their chances of making gains in 2018, at both the state and national levels.
The partys progressive base is angry and mobilized. Many Democrats are convinced that FBI Director James B. Comey and Russian President Vladimir Putin decided the election. The very idea of a Trump presidency sparked vast, unprecedented demonstrations in Washington and other cities the day after the inauguration.
(Bastien Inzaurralde,Alice Li/The Washington Post)
In the two weeks since, Trump has only piled outrage upon outrage, as far as progressives are concerned. He took the first steps toward building his ridiculous wall along the southern border, but with U.S. taxpayers dollars, not Mexicos. He squelched government experts who work on climate change. He weakened the Affordable Care Act in the hope that it would begin to collapse, which would make it easier for Congress to kill it. He displayed comic ignorance of our history. (Somebody please tell him that Frederick Douglass has been dead since 1895.) He signed executive orders banning entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees from around the world, an action so appalling that enormous numbers of people gathered at major airports in protest.
And Trump is just getting started. Democrats cannot even limit the damage, let alone reverse it, without more power than they have now.
That is the political context into which the Gorsuch nomination arrives. From my reading of the progressive crowds that have recently taken to the streets, the Democratic base is in no mood to hear about the clubby traditions and courtesies of the Senate. The base is itching for a fight.
The way McConnell, et al. treated the Garland nomination was indeed unforgivable. Senators who fail to remember that will get an earful from their constituents and, potentially, a challenge in the next primary. More importantly, those senators will be passing up a rare political opportunity.
With just 48 votes, all Senate Democrats can do is filibuster, denying McConnell the 60 votes he needs for a final vote on the nomination. In response, McConnell could employ the nuclear option changing the Senate rules to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations. In the end, Gorsuch would be approved anyway.
But I believe Democrats should wage, and lose, this fight. The 60-vote standard looks more and more like an anachronistic holdover from the time when senators prided themselves on putting the nation ahead of ideology. These days, so many votes hew strictly to party lines that it is difficult to get anything done. The Senate is supposed to be deliberative, not paralyzed.
And I cant help thinking back to 2009. Republicans made an all-out effort to stop the Affordable Care Act. Their motives were purely political; some GOP senators railed against policies they had favored in the past. Ultimately, they failed. Obamacare became law.
(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
But this losing battle gave tremendous energy and passion to the tea party movement which propelled Republicans to a sweeping victory in the 2010 midterm election. It is hard not to see an analogous situation on the Democratic side right now.
Democrats cannot stop Gorsuch from being confirmed. But they can hearten and animate the partys base by fighting this nomination tooth and nail, even if it means giving up some of the backslapping comity of the Senate cloakroom. They can inspire grass-roots activists to fight just as hard to win back state legislatures and governorships. They can help make 2018 a Democratic year.
Read more from Eugene Robinsons archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.
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Fighting Gorsuch is hopeless. Democrats should do it anyway. - Washington Post
Democrats in Congress are grappling with how to deal with their new reality - a Republican president, Congress, and House - while facing tough pressure from their base, eager for them to resist any proposals that President Trump puts forward.
When President Obama took office, Republicans held strong with massive opposition and faced very few consequences, a result Democrats may look to as they contemplate their current actions.
Longtime Republican consultant Mike Murphy, appearing on 1947, the Meet The Press podcast with Chuck Todd, called this strategy "a brilliant political tactic" but acknowledged that, "a strategy tends to be a longer term deal."
"You can argue that when they started using mustard gas in the western front in World War I it was a brilliant tactic because it really worked for a while, but then everybody had mustard gas," he said. "We find out that the opposition theory works great in the short term, but you also teach the other guys how to use the same weapons against you."
Looking back at this election's outcome and how the nation ended up here, Murphy noted that polling has gotten harder as it gets more difficult to reach people on the phone, and he admitted one thing that's "dangerous to say in politics" - "I think there's been an over reliance on analytical data."
The political electorate has become so polarized, he said, that politicians are so focused on turnout of their base rather than catering to new voters.
"I came up doing Republican governors in blue and purple states where we got 40% of the vote for free and we had to go and earn the other 10% wit the right issues, persuasion," he reflected.
"You're a better politician and you understand the other guy's voters because you stole some to get elected.... ultimately we need politics to effectively govern, which is the only way to run a growing, rising superpower, and I'd sure like us to be one this century."
You can download 1947: The Meet the Press Podcast in iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Mike Murphy: A Never-Trumper Offers Advice for Democrats - NBCNews.com
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If Chuck Schumer and his Senate Democrats choose a path of obstructing President Trumps agenda, they will have learned from the best.
If Chuck Schumer and his Senate Democrats choose a path of obstructing President Trumps agenda, they will have learned from the best.
by Alec MacGillis ProPublica, Feb. 3, 2017, 4 a.m.
How politics and government really work, and why they dont.
In laying the groundwork recently for President Trumps nomination for the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, had this to say: What we hope would be that our Democratic friends will treat President Trumps nominees in the same way that we treated Clinton and Obama.
McConnell was referring to his partys grudging acceptance, without resort to filibusters, of President Obamas first-term nominees to the court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. What McConnell notably neglected to mention, of course, was the very different approach he himself had taken with the open seat Trump was now on the verge of filling: refusing even to hold a confirmation hearing last year for Obamas nominee, Merrick B. Garland.
That McConnell could now blithely ask for a routine reception of a Trump nominee for the very seat that he managed to freeze unfilled for nearly a year galls Democrats to no end and demonstrates, more than ever, that its impossible to match McConnell for sheer chutzpah. But his comment also underscored the conundrum that the Democrats and their new leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, now confront in the Senate minority.
As McConnell showed in the first six years of President Obamas tenure, the Senates rules and traditions allow a determined minority to block much of a presidents agenda indeed, the Democrats 48 Senate seats are their only real leverage against President Trump. But McConnells unprecedented use of the filibuster which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get anything done and other obstructionist tactics drew loud rebukes from Democrats and traditionalists, who identified his intransigence as eroding longstanding norms and contributing greatly to voters anger over a dysfunctional Washington.
Can Democrats, who are more philosophically invested in showing that government can function, really bring themselves to replicate McConnells obstructionist methods? Would they really be willing to withhold cooperation even in areas where they and President Trump might find agreement, such as a major infrastructure package?
These questions are especially pressing for Senate Democrats because of the landscape they face next year, when 25 of their seats (including those of the two independents who caucus with them) are up for re-election, as opposed to only eight Republican ones. Those 25 include five states that Trump won handily: West Virginia, Missouri, Indiana, Montana and North Dakota. Doesnt unified opposition to the president mean risking those seats and further diminishing their minority status?
A closer look at McConnells opposition during the Obama years suggests that the choices confronting Schumer and the Democrats may not be as stark as they seem. For one thing, the McConnell approach does not preclude going through the motions of working with the president of the opposite party. Recall that in the summer of 2009 McConnell allowed three Republicans, led by Chuck Grassley of Iowa, to spend months meeting with three Democratic counterparts on health care reform. The negotiations came to naught, allowing McConnell to claim that his partys eventual monolithic vote against the Affordable Care Act came only after the Democrats refusal to move off their far left proposal.
The meetings also dragged out debate around the bill, helping sour the public on the legislation. As Robert F. Bennett, then a Utah senator and close McConnell ally, who died last year, told me of McConnell in early 2014: He said, Our strategy is to delay this sucker as long as we possibly can, and the longer we delay it the worse the president looks: Why cant he get it done? He remembered the party leaders promise to delay it, delay it, delay it as long as we can. The main lesson: Every time something would come up, he would find a way to delay it. Another lesson for Schumer and the Democrats might be that they could enter into negotiations over an infrastructure package, but insist on doing it mostly on their terms.
After the weekends chaos surrounding President Donald Trumps executive order banning refugees and visitors from seven majority Muslim countries, we received lots of questions. Here are some answers. Read the story.
Immigration lawyers are scrambling to understand the meaning of a letter first disclosed late Tuesday. Read the story.
The record of Republican intransigence in the Obama years also suggests that voters pay far less attention to the legislative process than Washington insiders would like to believe. What McConnell recognized was that a presidents party is rewarded in midterm elections if hes popular and getting things done, and punished if hes not. Grassley, for instance, mightve been tempted to help President Obama create a bipartisan health care bill since he hailed from a state, Iowa, that had embraced Obama in 2008. Instead, by withholding support, and even endorsing the death panel rhetoric around the bill, Grassley fueled the resistance to the overreaching president in 2010 and easily won re-election that year.
Similarly, Senate Democrats 2018 prospects in states that Trump won will depend more on whether hes seen as succeeding on how energized or demoralized the ends of the polarized electorate are than on whether a given senator found an issue or two of common ground with him.
All of this still leaves the basic question of whether Democrats really have it in them to slow government to a crawl as much as McConnell did. Their willingness, goaded on by an inflamed Democratic base, to force postponements of committee votes on Trump nominees suggests they just might. The biggest test still awaits: whether, in protest of the treatment of Garland, to filibuster the confirmation of Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, which could lead to Republicans eliminating the filibuster for court confirmations once and for all.
The two sides of the debate facing the Democrats have been articulated by a veteran arbiter of Washington mores, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. Shortly after the election, he urged Schumer not to mimic the obstructionist methods of McConnell. He wrote: Democrats will be tempted to adopt the Republican playbook from 2009, when Democrats controlled Washington: Vote in unison against everything, filibuster everything, even those things you like, to obstruct action and make it look ugly, allow damage to the country in the short term to reap political rewards in the next election. He thought that would be a mistake, because it would limit the ability of Democrats to do anything positive.
But Ornstein told me that he is changing his thinking on this, after witnessing initial Trump moves such as the ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries and witnessing how reluctant Republicans have been to provide a check on him. He now recommends that Democrats stall President Trumps agenda by repeatedly denying unanimous consent on the Senate floor.
This sounds similar to McConnells brand of obstruction, but Ornstein argues its not, because the opponent is different. We dont have a conventional president, he said. Were seeing behavior that could lead us right down the path to martial law or authoritarian rule. These are dangerous times, and you have to think through your strategy in that context. For Democrats, using leverage to pull us back from the brink of something that shatters our fundamental system is now in order.
Of course, McConnell had framed the context for his own obstructionism in dire terms, too, saying it was necessary to withhold bipartisan cooperation from Obama so that voters would realize just how radical his agenda really was. Now, with Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress, McConnell is calling for a new era of comity. The first thing we have to do is move beyond this us-and-them mentality that has so often characterized the last eight years, he said on the Senate floor late last month. Were all in this together. We rise and fall as one.
Alec MacGillis covers politics for ProPublica.
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Can the Democrats Be as Stubborn as Mitch McConnell? - ProPublica
THE MORNING PLUM:
President Trumps war on financial elites and his draining of the swamp will gain a burst of new momentum Friday, as Trump is set to launch his first major steps toward deregulating Wall Street.The Post reports:
President Trump plans to order a rollback Friday of regulations governing the financial services industry and Wall Street under the Dodd-Frank law and beyond, a White House source confirmed.
Gary Cohn, White House Economic Council director, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published last night that the administration would also move against a regulation designed to force retirement advisers to work in the best interest of their clients, the fiduciary rule, set to take effect in Apriland designed to eliminate conflicts-of-interests among professionals dealing with those enrolled in qualified retirement plans and IRAs.
The move, set for announcement at a White House meeting with business leaders, would be in line with Trumps campaign pledge to dismantle the Dodd-FrankAct and replace it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation.
[Did you attend a protest? Tell us what you plan to do next.]
Shockingly, the Trump White Houses version of getting tough on Wall Street is to deregulate it. As The Posts account notes, Trump will try to gut Dodd-Frank by dismantling or modifying regulations where possible through executive action. Trump may also tame Dodd-Franks Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by replacing its current head Richard Cordray with someone who is less aggressive about cracking down on big banks and corporations accused of misleading consumers.
Republicans were forced to reschedule votes for key cabinet picks after Democrats intensified their opposition to President Trump's nominations. (Alice Li,Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
All of this sets the stage for a broader legislative push by Republicans and Trump to roll back Dodd-Frank.Populist! Take that, elites!
But this also gives Democrats an opportunity: It presents a new and very specific way for them to press the case against Trump for more transparency around his own holdings and the unprecedented welter of conflicts-of-interest and possibilities for corruption they may be creating. (Trump transferred control of his holdings to his two sons, but he retained ownership, meaning he did nothing meaningful to eliminate such conflicts.)
Heres how. As ethics watchdogs have pointed out, the congressional GOP leaderships total abdication of any meaningful oversight role on Trump means individual members of Congress Democrats, or the occasional principled Republican who does want to exercise oversight need to try to mount a stand where possible. They can do this by seizing on individual initiatives to demand transparency into how Trumps holdings might be impacted by those initiatives by calling for the release of his tax returns or demanding an accounting of those holdings.
Wall Street deregulation whether via Trump executive actions right now or via the GOP legislation to come provides a good hook to do this, ethics experts told me Friday.
Norm Eisen, the chief ethics officer in the Obama White House, noted that one potential area for demanding transparency might be his debt to the banks he proposes to help. Eisen added: This effort to let big banks run wild was to be expected, given Mr. Trumps own unresolved conflicts.
[Its about time someone attacked Australia. Thank you, President Trump.]
Richard Painter, the chief ethics watchdog for President George W. Bush, noted that Fridays news provides a hook to demand more disclosure from Trump about the debt he or the corporations he controls have at the corporate level, much of which is not disclosed in financial disclosure reports.
Hes deregulating banks, he told me. Were entitled to know about his relationship with banks the very industry hes deregulating.
Painter added that these relationships might shed light on how Trumps real estate holdings might be affected by such deregulation. The deregulation of financial services will lead to more bank loans for real estate, driving up real estate prices, Painter said. Deregulation is likely to lead to a bubble in the real estate market, as it has in the past. That ups the value of his real estate holdings, which the Trump organization could then sell at the top of the market.
Now, to be clear, the point here is not that Trumps deregulatory initiatives should be judged as policy based on how they affect his holdings. They should be judged on their own merits, and I suspect that serious analysis of them will ultimately conclude that they put consumers at greater risk and make another financial crash more likely.
Rather, the point is that the public has the right to know how the presidents holdings might be affected by his policies irrespective of the merits or demerits of those policies because this goes to the question of whose interests Trump is really looking out for. Even if you believe Trump when he says hell only look out for the peoples interests, Americans still have the right to know whether his holdings are being affected, and how, in order to judge his motives for themselves.
Of course, Trump will probably ignore any such calls for transparency, and congressional Republicansprobably wont care in the least, because Trump is likely to deliver on the huge tax cuts and deregulation they want. But the unique challenges of this moment require Democrats and the occasional principled Republican to find new and innovative ways of waging guerrilla ethics warfare designed to chip away at the opacity of Trumps holdings, and the protective wall congressional GOP leaders have built around them, by drawing more and more public attention to this cozy little arrangement. Fridays news is one place to start.
*******************************************************************
* EUROPEAN LEADERS INCREASINGLY WORRIED ABOUT TRUMP: The New York Times surveys the view from Europe, where there is mounting anxiety over Trumps America-first-ism and seeming contempt for international institutions:
Hopes among European leaders that Mr. Trumps bombastic tone as a candidate would somehow smooth into a more temperate one as commander in chief are dissipating, replaced by a mounting sense of anxiety and puzzlement. Some European leaders are urging their counterparts to recognize that Mr. Trump may represent a truly dire challenge, one that threatens to upend not only the 70-year European project of integration and security, but just about everything they stand for, including liberal democracy itself.
Of course, this can always easily be justified by saying that 1) America will no longer be taken advantage of; and 2) Trump is being unpredictable and disruptive.
* REPUBLICANS STRUGGLE WITH OBAMACARE TALKING POINTS: The Post reports that some Republicans are increasingly inclined to say that they are going to repair Obamacare rather than repeal and replace it. And theres yet a third option:
Rep. Greg Walden, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a key architect of GOP health-care plans, has favored yet another R-word in recent days: rebuild.
Bottom line: Republicans cannot create a replacement that will make both the broader public (who wants to keep major elements of the law) and conservatives (who want to obliterate it entirely)happy at the same time.
* TRUMP APPROVAL RATING AT RECORD LOW: A new CBS News poll finds that only 40 percent of Americans approve of Trumps performance as president so far, versus 48 percent who disapprove. CBS notes that this is the lowest of any president just after his first inauguration since the Gallup Poll began taking those measures in 1953.
But Steve Bannon tells us there is a vast and overwhelming majority of Americans that is silently rooting for Trumpism to succeed.
* PUBLIC OPPOSES TRUMP IMMIGRATION MOVES: The new CBS News poll also finds that 51 percent oppose Trumps executive order temporarily banning entry by migrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, versus only 45 percent who approve. Those numbers are identical (51 disapprove; 45 approve) on Trumps temporary ban on refugees, too.
And this is a great little nugget: Only 36 percent agree that the ban on entry from majority-Muslim countries will make the U.S. safer from terrorism.
* TRUMP MAY NOT DELIVER ON BIG PROMISE TO RELIGIOUS RIGHT: Trump has been telling the religious right that hell destroy the Johnson Amendment, which prevents tax-exempt entities such as churches from engaging in politics. But McClatchy raises a good point: Its highly probable that the votes will not be there in the Senate to overcome a Democratic filibuster.
Still, hes delivering them the Supreme Court justice that they wanted, so that should do it for awhile, at least.
* TRUMP IS ODDLY QUIET ABOUT MOSQUE ATTACK: Adam Taylor points out that Trump has tweeted constantly about terrorist attacks all over the world for years, but has said little to nothing about the attack that killed six in a Quebec City mosque:
OnTrumps famed social media accounts the attack in Quebec City does not appear to have been mentioned at allTrumpoften quickly and clearly responded to terror attacks on foreign soil. In almost every case, Trump was responding to an attack claimed by a militant Islamist group. The attack in Quebec City does not appear to have been carried out by a Muslim or inspired by Islamic extremist ideology. In this case, the victims were Muslims.
Gosh, what could explain this?
* AND CONWAY INVENTS TERRORIST ATTACK TO JUSTIFY MUSLIM BAN': On MSNBC last night, Kellyanne Conway claimed that the Obama administration banned Iraqi refugees in 2011 and after there was a massacre in Bowling Green, Ky.
Zack Beauchamp sets the record straight, pointing out that, no, Obama did not ban refugees,and no, there was never a terrorist attack in Bowling Green. Other than that, though, Conways alternative facts are right on the money.
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Trump is preparing to gut Wall Street oversight. This gives Democrats a huge opportunity. - Washington Post (blog)