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To the editor: Lets hope Democrats listen to Jackie Calmes when she points out the rights coming under attack by conservatives that may end up before the Supreme Court. They have no reason to celebrate one progressive jurist replacing another on the bench, where conservatives regressive 6-3 majority will remain intact, likely leaving progressives outnumbered well into the 2030s.

Instead, Democrats should reflect on how the high court came to be so ideologically skewed: They, unlike Republicans, havent learned to set aside petty internal differences during presidential election years.

Such discord allowed third-party candidates to siphon off enough Democratic votes to enable Donald Trumps 2016 victory. The GOP learned its lesson in 1992, when Ross Perots Reform Party diverted conservative votes from George H.W. Bush. The Democrats failed to learn from how Ralph Naders Green Party candidacy undermined Al Gores 2000 run.

With a more united Democratic Party behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, the high court could have retained a solid progressive majority. Lesson learned, Democrats?

Devra Mindell, Santa Monica

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Letters to the Editor: Democrats, think long term about Supreme Court - Los Angeles Times

If were going to create transparently idiotic, partisan standards on the fly, they should be applied to everyone in government.

If Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has an ethical obligation to recuse himself from all cases related to the Jan. 6 riots because his wife Ginni has opinions on the matter, as most Democrats contend, its clear that President Joe Biden has a moral responsibility to step back from any more decisions concerning Ukraine and China.

Now that The New York Times and Washington Post have both authenticated the Hunter Biden e-mails a story the media and tech conglomerates suppressed on the flimsiest of pretexts to help Joe win the 2020 election its also whats right for democracy. Thats how this works, right?

The Biden case is potentially worse because Hunter, under criminal investigation, implicates his father as fiscal beneficiary in his dealings with corrupt Eastern European energy interests and the ChiComs.

Its plausible, of course, that Hunter and his business partner Tony Bobulinski might have been lying about the Big Guy. Its also true that if this story were about any Republican president, the media would be deploying squadrons of reporters to find out. After all, the president has previously said not only that he did not benefit from Hunters work but that he knew absolutely nothing about his sons influence peddling.

And yet there is much circumstantial evidence available that leads us to believe Joe could be lying. For instance:

And the biggest question the press should be asking the president is: Did Joe ever benefit financially from any of Hunters dealings?

The answer might very well still be No. There is, after all, no hard evidence to say otherwise (and, considering the lack of urgency of the institutional press to look into these matters, were probably never going to find out).

However, on a number of occasions during the past five years, I can recall reading deeply reported profiles about the business dealings of the previous presidents children. Journalists and pundits, quite understandably, wondered if the president himself had been aware of their dealings. They wondered if such relationships should be considered unethical.

Then again, even if Joe Biden were completely unaware of his sons machinations, the Clarence Thomas Standard states that it doesnt matter. Joe must recuse himself from making any foreign-policy decisions for the sake of democracy. Otherwise, he should, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez maintains, be impeached.

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Democrats have a silly double standard for Clarence Thomas and Joe Biden - New York Post

April 1, 2022

April 1, 2022

Democrats were always going to have a tough time in the 2022 midterm elections, given historic trends and the party's already extremely narrow majorities in Congress. Add in surging inflation and a brutal war being waged in Europe and things begin to look especially bleak.

But that doesn't mean all of the party's woes are circumstantial. Some are self-inflicted especially when it comes to the culture-war issues that increasingly dominate American politics.

In recent years, Republicans have become experts at leveraging their own extremism on these issues for electoral gain. The game goes like this: Stake out a right-wing position that cheers the GOP's base, thereby ensuring high turnout in the next election; count on progressive activists to respond with their own mirror-image form of left-wing maximalism and Democratic officeholders to adopt that message as their own; use those words and deeds both to justify the right's original impulse toward extremism and to portray the Republican Party as the country's sole defenders of common sense against an insidious form of progressive ideology.

Then rinse and repeat.

If Democrats want to avoid a wipeout in 2022 and perhaps in 2024 as well, they need to stop responding to the right's extremism with a counter-extremism of their own.

Take abortion. As I recently noted, Republicans in states across the country are busy passing extraordinarily restrictive laws against the reproductive rights of women and handing off enforcement powers to private individuals. These "bounty hunter" provisions, which empower people to sue those who procure (or who aid someone else in procuring) abortions, allow these states to sidestep judicial review and avoid injunctions imposed by federal courts. (If states aren't directly enforcing the statutes, no one has standing to seek relief from the penalties they impose.)

Polls consistently show that something close to 60 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That means a very solid majority should be sympathetic to a message like this: In passing laws like these, Republicans are revealing themselves to be radicals far out of step with the American mainstream. Some restrictions on abortion should be permissible, but outright bans are draconian, and efforts to skirt judicial review are un-American in intent and downright authoritarian in effect. What's next? The death penalty for women who have abortions, as some Republicans have proposed?

The point of such a response would be to portray the Democrats as the reasonable party upholding moderation and decency in the face of a lunatic assault on the rights and freedoms of the female half of the population.

Instead, in late February, 48 Democrats voted in favor of a bill the Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA) that would enshrine the right to an abortion through all nine months of pregnancy in the country as a whole and potentiallyknock down parental consent laws in 37 states. A solid majority may think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, but support for post-viability, late-term abortions is far lower, and the most recent Gallup poll to ask about parental-consent laws (from 2011) found 71 percent support for them.

That means Democrats have somehow managed to place themselves on the negative side of public opinion on an issue where they should easily be able to portray their opponents as the extremists. That might delight single-issue activists and the most ideologically progressive donors to the party, but it could well turn out to be electoral poison in November and beyond.

A similar dynamic is playing out around Florida's "Parental Rights in Education" bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)signed into law earlier this week. LGBT activists have had considerable success in persuading journalists and Democratic officeholders to label the legislation the "Don't Say Gay" bill and in describing it as motivated by anti-gay and anti-transgender animus, which could well be both true and an effective message for Democrats, at least in some parts of the country.

There is legitimate reason to worry that the law, which seems to have been written in intentionally vague language, could be interpreted to permit sweeping restrictions on what teachers of all grades can say about sexuality and gender in schools. Yet the passage of the bill that has gotten the most media attention is one that bans "classroom instruction" on "sexual orientation or gender identity" from kindergarten through the third grade. That makes it sound like Democratic opposition to the bill is motivated by the desire to teach young kids about subjects that most parents are likely to consider, quite reasonably, inappropriate for them. (Polling on the bill has been all over the map.)

How can it be that Democrats have ended up, by implication, defending the position that public schools should be free to teach children younger than 8 years old about sexual orientation and gender identity? Coming on the heels of controversy about the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools and residual animus against teacher's unions for demanding pandemic-related school closings, this stance could ultimately blow up in the face of Democrats big time.

And not without reason. Trying at the state level to regulate the details of public-school curricula and restrict what teachers can say in the classroom is a bad idea. Saying so could give Democrats leverage to oppose bills like the one DeSantis championed in Florida while rallying the American majority to their side. But only if it's paired with a defense of giving local school boards the power to make these decisions for themselves. Taking the opposite view that parents should get no say in what their kids are taught and implying that teachers and administrators should be empowered to introduce little kids to issues in sexuality and gender is a politically toxic position that could only appeal to a progressive activist.

In political terms, the culture war is a battle over definitions: Which party is narrowly extreme and sectarian? And which stands with America's conflicted majority? In repeatedly taking the Republican bait, Democrats deny themselves of the chance to prevail by refusing to confirm the right's caricature of their position. We're not the extreme ones! They are!

The only way for liberals to win the right's radicalizing culture-war game is not to play.

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Dems fall into the culture trap again - The Week

In fact, Democrats should ponder whether to seek out the Never Trumpers as dance partners at all. That movements only clear success has been to draw outsize media attention. While Trumpists are snatching up key positions in the countrys electoral mechanics, with an eye toward tilting the next presidential contest, Never Trumpers are writing op-eds, retiring from the fight, and occasionally making a complete mess of trying to help Democrats win elections.

Perhaps the most worrisome part of this partnership is the extent to which the Democrats have allowed these disaffected Republicans to colonize the Democratic Partys aesthetic. Bidens own Democratic National Convention was an often perverse display of moderate Republican courtship, with spare-no-expense production values given to Ohio Republican John Kasich to stand at a literal crossroads to make a point about a figurative crossroads, while Maines Sara Gideon was reduced to introducing a musical guest despite being in a competitive Senate race against Susan Collinsa seat that Democrats would dearly love to have now.

Writing for The New Republic, Samuel Moyn pinpointed an even more troubling aspect of this partnership: the extent to which Never Trumpism was being driven primarily by the foreign policy lifers of the Bush-Cheney era, the stalwart crew who feared that Trump threatened the Cold War national security consensus that gave rise to so much neoconservative misadventure. Its worth noting that earlier this week, Commentarys John Podhoretz crowed that neoconservatism had been vindicated, in part because hip liberals are no longer its loudest critics (instead, he argues, traditional conservatives have taken their place as the leading anti-American voices of our time).

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The Democrats Complicated Dance With Neoconservative Heiress Liz Cheney - The New Republic

San Diego

Two Democratic former city council members and a repeat but little known opponent from the political right are running in the special election to fill the 80th Assembly District seat, and the race has recently turned to finger-pointing about campaign expenditures.

The election takes place April 5, but early voting and mail ballots are available now for the districts nearly 250,000 registered voters.

On the Democratic side Georgette Gmez, an environmental advocate who served on the San Diego City Council from 2016 until 2020, is competing against David Alvarez, a former social worker who held a San Diego City Council seat from 2010 to 2018.

Also Republican Lincoln Pickard is making a fifth run at the liberal district.

The special election is to fill a vacancy for the remainder of a term that ends in December. If no candidate wins a majority of votes, the two front-runners will go to a run-off held during the June 7 primary election.

The seat opened when Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who served for nearly a decade, resigned Jan. 3 to take a job as chief executive of the California Labor Federation. California state redistricting changes had zoned her out of the 80th District, so she couldnt run for reelection without moving to a new home.

Even before she departed, Gmez and Alvarez signaled their intent to seek her seat if she did not run for reelection by posting announcements of their plans as soon as state district maps were released.

The open assembly seat represents a window of opportunity for both life-long San Diegans. Gmez and Alvarez were born and raised in the Barrio Logan area, graduated from San Diego State University and launched political careers at City Hall.

Alvarez lives in Logan Heights with his wife Xochitl and two school-aged children, while Gmez and her wife, Raquel Pacheco, are moving to Barrio Logan.

Over the past week their campaign contributions have generated more buzz than their backgrounds or policy platforms.

The two are closely matched in campaign funding. Gmez brought in $221,956 between Jan. 1 and Feb. 19 and spent $37,553, while Alvarez received $190,828 and spent $66,766. Both also have smaller campaign accounts stashed toward the November general election.

Recently political action committees and other donors have weighed in.

Alvarez received help from an independent political action committee named Keeping Californians Working, a Coalition of Educators, Insurance Agents, Technology, Energy and Healthcare Providers, which spent $70,029 on mailers to support him. In addition, a PAC called Jobspac, a bi-partisan coalition of California employers, dropped $28,707 on live calls endorsing him. Another PAC named San Diego Families Opposing Georgette Gmez, funded by a Sacramento company, Ramos Towing, spent $13,164 on mailers against his opponent.

Meanwhile, Gmez has gained labor support, as a PAC called Nurses and Educators for Georgette Gmez for Assembly 2022, sponsored by labor organizations, spent more than $200,000 on TV ads, mailers, polling and research on her behalf. Another PAC funded by the Laborers International Union of North America, Local 89, threw in more than $60,000 for mailers, polling and other services.

Gmezs campaign has criticized the third-party spending on Alvarezs behalf, arguing that big corporations are influencing his campaign. They also took aim at direct contributions to his campaign by several oil companies.

Alvarez didnt respond directly to those accusations but said he believes voters wont heed them.

I think that voters want to vote for candidates who present a positive vision of what they will do if they are elected, so I believe that Georgettes negative campaigning will backfire in the end, Alvarez said.

Gmez, 46, was born in Barrio Logan and grew up in the Logan Heights area. After being introduced to activism in high school through her older brother, she earned a bachelors degree in environmental and natural resource geography.

I wanted to do urban planning because of growing up in Barrio Logan and realizing that the community I grew up in was not built in a way that was healthy for the residents, having industry mixed in and not having the elements that one needs while growing up, with healthy foods and parks, she said.

She worked for 12 years at the Environmental Health Coalition, starting as a community organizer in Chula Vista and Barrio Logan and ending as associate director.

When former San Diego City Councilmember Marti Emerald left the citys District 9 in 2016 Gmez ran for the seat and won against Emeralds chief of staff, Ricardo Flores. Later she served as council president.

She said the most important issues she tackled included affordable housing, community choice energy and police oversight, including banning police use of the chokehold restraint after the death of George Floyd.

She ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Sara Jacobs for the 53rd Congressional District in 2020.

Alvarez, 41, also was born in Barrio Logan and now lives in neighboring Logan Heights. Like Gmez, he said the decision to remain in the area and run for office was informed by a desire to fix problems he saw growing up.

In the 80s and 90s it was the epicenter of gang activity, he said. I chose to stay and invest in our community.

Alvarez earned a psychology degree from SDSU and became a social worker before joining the staff of former State Sen. Denise Ducheny. He won a seat in City Councils District 8 in 2010 and served until 2018.

In 2014 he ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Kevin Faulconer.

Alvarez said his top achievements at City Hall included replacing an aging library in San Ysidro with a modern facility, adding parks, including Cesar Solis Park near Otay Mesa, and leading efforts to update decades-old community plans.

His priorities if elected are homelessness, education and public safety, he said. Children in K-12 schools need additional learning opportunities to overcome deficits from a year of school closures and remote classes, he said.

I think we need to focus on nontraditional hours for learning: after-school learning and robust summer programs with professional educators that can help our children catch up, Alvarez said.

He added he would work to build a state university in Chula Vista, which could help students competing for limited seats at other campuses.

Alvarez said current efforts to address homelessness arent working. He said the state should revise laws to commit people with mental health or substance abuse issues to treatment centers if they dont seek help on their own.

I believe that we need to become more focused on taking people off the streets, and the current laws do not allow us to do that, he said. So we need to change the laws so that we can have individuals go to facilities where they can get care.

Alvarez said he doesnt agree with calls to defund police but supports additional spending to hire licensed clinical social workers and improve neighborhood policing.

We need to continue to establish strong relationships between our law enforcement and the community, he said.

Gmez said she would focus on issues including housing, environmental health and educational equity if she wins the 80th Assembly seat.

We need to build more housing for middle-class and low-income families, she said. We need to build more supportive housing for the mental health and homeless populations.

She said she advocates streamlining regulations to remove barriers to housing construction and calls for a uniform permitting process that would satisfy local, state and federal laws.

How do we make it easier for housing to be built so theres only one process that a developer has to go through? she asked. That can impact time and cost.

Gmez said the state has made strides toward addressing the climate crisis, but it needs to look more closely at climate impact and air pollution in underserved communities located near industrial zones, she said.

I would love to go to the state to introduce a bill that is really focused on environmental justice in the climate crisis, Gmez said.

She supports funding to increase child care access, expand free higher education and reduce the digital divide in areas without reliable internet access.

The California Democratic Party endorsed Gmez for the 80th Assembly District.

Their Republican opponent Lincoln Pickard, 80, said he is running in opposition to policies favored by the Democratic majority in Sacramento.

Because of their regulations and taxes, people are leaving by the droves, he said. Ive had several friends leave. The reason Im running is because Democrats are not treating these issues properly.

Pickard has run for the seat unsuccessfully since the 2013 special election, when he joined the ballot as a write-in independent candidate, and in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 general elections when he ran as a Republican.

He said he opposes firearm restrictions, wants to lift remaining COVID-19 restrictions and favors outlawing abortion. Pickard said he doesnt believe that human activity is causing climate change and would like to increase oil drilling in California.

He knows hes in the political minority but said a vote for him is a vote against Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Democrats.

If they elect me to this particular post in San Diego where the odds are pretty much against me, that would send a powerful message, Pickard said.

The Secretary of State did not display any campaign finance disclosures submitted by Pickard. Although he is the sole Republican in the race, he was not listed among the Republican Party of San Diegos election endorsements.

Residents in the district have until Monday to register to receive a ballot in the mail, officials said.

Otherwise they can vote in person at the Registrars office in Kearny Mesa or they can conditionally register at a vote center and vote provisionally through Election Day. Voters can vote by mail or at one of the Registrars official ballot drop box locations or at any vote center in the district. Hours of operation can be found at sdvote.com .

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Two life-long San Diegan Democrats and a Republican battle for 80th Assembly District - The San Diego Union-Tribune